Monthly Archives: July 2020

How Useful is the Bacterial Flagellum for the Creationist?

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creationism intelligent design

How do we distinguish things that are here solely due to the action of natural laws from those designed by an intelligence? Christian apologist Jim Wallace has created a checklist for this purpose (the list is summarized in part 1 of this series and critiqued in part 2).

We left off considering the final test, irreducible complexity. Something is irreducibly complex if every component is essential. In other words, if the thing will break if you remove any piece. He proposes the bacterial flagellum motor (a motor made of protein that spins a long thin tail in some bacteria) as irreducibly complex. The idea is that if removing any piece of this motor resulted in a broken motor, none of these configurations could be a prior step for the evolution of the motor.

Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe said about this situation, “[The argument against flagella coming from evolution] is that such interactive systems resist explanation by the tiny steps that a Darwinian path would be expected to take.”

Consider, if you will, an arch . . .

But perhaps there are more precursors than he imagines.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine that I have a stone wall with a doorway, and I build a stone arch over the doorway. The arch is composed of ten voussoirs (the wedge-shaped stones), five on each side, with a keystone in the center at the top.

I show you the finished arch and ask you to guess how I built it. You think that maybe the keystone was the final piece installed. But, no, that’s not possible, because you know that I built it solo, and the remaining ten voussoirs would’ve been too heavy for me to hold in place as I dropped in the keystone. You mentally consider each of the other stones as the final one, but similar reasoning rules them out. You finally declare that all the stones must’ve been levitated into place.

Luckily, I recorded the project, and I play the video backwards. First you see the final arch, and then you see the last piece of scaffolding being put in place. Then the rest of the scaffolding installed so that it supported the stones, then the stones taken down one by one (keystone first), and then the scaffolding taken down until we’re back to the original stone wall with a doorway. In other words, the precursor to the finished arch was the finished arch with some random piece of scaffolding. It could’ve been any of a number of uninteresting pieces at the base of the scaffolding, far from the arch itself.

Returning to the flagellum, the precursor state to the working motor could’ve been the working motor with a random, unused protein that neither got in the way nor contributed anything. So, no, irreducible complexity is no problem for evolution because scaffolding could’ve transitioned the motor from something prior.

The checklist is finally used on what it was designed for

Wallace has been working up to this: testing the bacterial flagellum motor against his eight-test checklist.

For this list, I’ll give the title in italics and the argument for the motor in ordinary text, [and my comments will be in brackets]. Wallace thinks that each test in the checklist argues that the motor is designed.

1a. Unlikely from chance. “Chance alone seems an unlikely explanation” for the flagellum.

[Right—the flagellum was the result of evolution, and evolution is a lot more than chance.]

1b. Unexplainable naturally. “The limited laws of physics and chemistry might explain simpler relationships between molecules, but they fail to account for the complexity and purposeful relationships we see in molecular machines like the flagellum.”

[Or not. Biologists are satisfied that evolution is our best explanation. Evolution does the hard work of actually explaining things. Intelligent Design doesn’t explain anything with “It came from some intelligence” but simply invites more questions.

[Bacterial flagella evolved from the type III secretion system.]

2. Similar to known designed objects. “The bacterial flagellum we’ve been describing bears a striking resemblance to the rotary motors created by intelligent designers.”

[Somewhat. The flagellar motor is similar to manmade motors in function only. They’re very different in design. The flagellar motor uses a flow of protons (not electricity), is made of proteins (not metal), and uses no magnets or metal wires. Though scientists now understand this motor, there is no motivation to switch our electrical infrastructure to a superior design.

[And why the fascination with motors? We’ve known for centuries that the heart is a pump, and arteries and veins are pipes. Why, aside from a lack of novelty, is this comparison not just as compelling? Or the brain as a computer, with the nerves as wires. Or the stomach and intestines as a chemical factory. In fact, a century ago, when the chemical industry was young, this last comparison was made in a drawing. The human digestive system modeled as a chemical factory seems a mundane observation today, and perhaps in a century the flagellar motor will also seem ordinary.]

3. Sophisticated and intricate. “The intricacy and interactive complexity of a flagellum is mind boggling. Over forty different specifically shaped proteins are precisely employed to create the structure of the rotary motor.”

[Let me take a tangent and point out that there is no single bacteria flagellum motor. Remember this when someone refers to “the bacteria flagellum.” This paper gives microphotographs that show the different motor construction in eleven different bacteria species. This paper studied 41 species with flagella and attempted to explain their evolution. This paper speculates that there may be millions of varieties of bacterial flagella.

[And this is just within bacteria. Within archaea, a separate domain from bacteria, flagella exist, but these are thought to be the result of convergent evolution. That is, bacteria and archaea evolved flagella independently. Eukaryotes, the domain of animals, use flagella designs that are also quite different.

[Wallace understands that there is no single design, but it’s important that we’re all on the same page about this important point. This shows that there is a lot more flexibility here than one might imagine.]

4. Information based. DNA is information, and DNA defines how the motor is created; therefore the motor is information based.

[And yet when scientists look at DNA, they don’t conclude that it came from a cosmic Designer.]

5a. Goal directed. “The flagellum [was] crafted in an intentional, purposeful sequence.” The pieces of the motor are built and installed in a particular, specific order.

[A wing was built for flying and yet it was neither designed nor built stepwise over millions of years with flying as an ultimate goal. And don’t think “built for” means design—once gliding or flying was something that proto-wings could usefully do (even if only clumsily), natural selection could use “serves the purpose of flying” as a selection criterion.]

5b. A choice between alternatives. “The specific use of one kind of motor in a cellular organism, rather than another, is best explained by intelligent selection.”

[Nope. Natural selection is sufficient, and it doesn’t have the unevidenced baggage of a mysterious Designer.]

6. Irreducibly complex. Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe again: “Design is positively apprehended in the purposeful arrangement of parts. Looked at this way, irreducible complex systems such as flagella serve both as negative arguments against gradualistic explanation like Darwin’s and as positive arguments for design.”

[The arch example above shows that the previous evolutionary state of the motor doesn’t have to have one fewer parts. You could call it irreducibly complex, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have come from evolution.]

He gives the flagellum a score of 8 out of 8.

My turn

I give it 5 out of 8, and some of those need qualifiers:

  • ✓ Unlikely from chance. Agreed. Creationists often equate evolution with chance, but evolution is a lot more than chance.
  • ✗ Unexplainable naturally. Evolution explains it, and evolution is natural.
  • ✓ Similar to known designed objects. Agreed. It’s radically different from manmade motors, but that’s what you’d expect at this nanoscopic scale and as the result of evolution.
  • ✓ Sophisticated and intricate. Sounds right to me, but that means nothing until we have objective definitions for these words.
  • ✓ Information based. Yes, the motor is built with instructions in DNA, and let’s call DNA information (even though this must be defined as well). This test sounds contrived just to give the flagellum an easy win.
  • ✗ Goal directed. We don’t need to explain why “propel a bacteria” was a goal when it wasn’t. Evolution doesn’t do goals.
  • ✗ A choice between alternatives. No need to imagine an intelligent choice when evolution is sufficient.
  • ✓ Irreducibly complex. By this definition, yes, but so what? This isn’t the slam-dunk win for Creationism that they want.

No, the flagellum doesn’t look designed, but I’ll tell you what does: this list. It seems to me that a Christian apologist looked at the flagellum, listed its interesting characteristics, and made a list from that. It’s no wonder that Wallace scores it 8 out of 8; since that was by design.

Note that I’m simply using the list as given. In previous posts, I’ve pointed out that this checklist of 8 tests needs some work. To be reliable and free from charges of bias, it must come from an unbiased source, be objective (so that anyone would come to a similar conclusion), and be tested with many examples of designed and natural things.

Why focus on the flagellum?

The reason the flagellar motor is so attractive is that by focusing on a single fascinating element, it ignores the rest of nature. But in so doing, it highlights the parts of reality that don’t look particularly designed.

This was the problem in William Paley’s 1802 pocket watch argument. He imagined walking on a path and contrasting finding a stone in the path with finding a pocket watch. The watch stands out, especially when he opens it and sees the intricate mechanism. This complicated mechanism was clearly designed, and by analogy, so was all of nature.

But the argument fails. If the watch stands out as looking designed, that which it stands out from (nature) must not look designed! He can’t have the watch stand out from nature and yet put them both in the same category.

And that is the problem with highlighting the flagellar motor. Why highlight anything? Does nature look designed or not? If the motor does stand out, then what it stands out from—the vestigial pelvis in a whale that doesn’t have legs, say, or cancer—should presumably be in a different bin.

This is just the Argument from Incredulity (“Golly, but look how marvelously complex this thing is! That’s gotta be the hand of God.”).

We shouldn’t be looking for complexity from an omniscient Designer. What we should expect is elegance.

Continue with Test Yourself: Sifting Natural from Designed Is Harder than You Might Think

Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity
has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers
and has been rejected by the scientific community at large.
— from the ruling of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial

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Acknowledgements: thanks to the commenters who have added to the discussion and helped me understand the issues better. In particular, the insights and links of Ann Kah, WCB-2, and Jim Jones have been helpful.

Image from Wikipedia, public domain
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Critiquing the Christian Design Checklist

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Christian apologist Jim Wallace has created an eight-point checklist for sorting things in our world into natural things and designed things. With it, he hopes to show design all around us and thereby overturn evolution.

Part 1 summarized the list. Let’s investigate it in more detail. The first two tests are:

1a. Unlikely from chance + 1b. Unexplainable naturally

If we’re looking for designed things, we must eliminate those caused by nature such as ripples in the sand at the beach or a rainbow after a storm. Science has figured these out, but the problem is when we don’t already know. What do we do with something in the gray area that we encounter for the first time?

For example, the Giant’s Causeway is an area of huge, mostly hexagonal basalt columns on the coast of Northern Ireland. It was explained in legend as a road built by a giant determined to fight his rival across the North Channel in Scotland. Now, we have a much better explanation from geology.

Or take a more recent example. In 1967, flashes of radio waves about once every second were detected coming from one point in the sky. The period of the pulses was precise to thirteen digits. No known astronomical phenomena was known to cause such a thing, but now we know these as pulsars.

What can be explained naturally changes with time, which limits the authority of these two tests.

2. Similar to known designed objects

Tests 1a and 1b were the quick filter for known natural things. This test is the quick filter for known designed things.

We’ve spent our lives creating and perfecting bins labeled “hardback book,” “propeller-driven airplane,” “horror movie,” and countless more designed things. We also have bins for natural things—“green crystal,” “odd-shaped cloud,” or “pretty rock.” This is the principle of analogy, and if an object fits nicely into one of these bins, we can assume that it’s designed or natural according to how we’ve assigned the other members of the bin.

(Aside: it’s odd to see the principle of analogy in a list made by a Christian, when it devastates Christianity by showing how analogous it is to other manmade religions.)

But this is the easy part. The key to making this eight-point list a valuable tool would be for it to accurately differentiate things that fail both the “it looks natural” test (1a or 1b) and the “it looks designed” test (2).

In the previous post, Wallace used a garotte as an example, but this already gets an emphatic Yes on test 2. Later, he tossed out another example: a bird’s nest. Yet again, we know that nests are designed. The list must perform well on the hard cases—those things that look neither like a known natural thing or a known designed thing.

3. Sophisticated and intricate

What do these words mean, exactly? We need an objective definition so that any unbiased person can reach roughly the same conclusion.

Here’s a test. Below are two objects; one is designed (made by a human artist), and one is natural. Give a “sophisticated and intricate” score to each, and decide which one was designed.

Answer below.*

4. Information based

“Information” is a magic word within the Creationist community, because they say that information implies intelligence and DNA uses information, so therefore DNA comes from intelligence. As part of a general list created to separate designed from natural, however, it doesn’t really belong. The bird nest doesn’t use information, nor would a mortar and pestle or a mud sculpture.

As with the previous test, we need clear definitions. What counts as information? The CPU that runs your computer contains microcode, so that would presumably count. There is actual information in the CPU. But it’s not clear what other examples would count. Even if DNA counts as information based (or the bacteria flagellar motor, which is built using DNA), DNA is clearly not the product of a perfect Designer (about which, more later).

5a. Goal directed + 5b. A choice between alternatives

If the universe were designed by God, then everything we see came from a Designer (even if indirectly). But if these tests are to be useful at all, they must reject a reasonable number of candidates. So 5a is useless if it means, “It pleased God for X to exist, so therefore it does,” regardless of what X is.

Evolution doesn’t have goals, but we can still say that wings are for flying. Does that mean that wings are goal directed? The earth’s geology doesn’t have goals, but even here we can say that, from the standpoint of understanding plate tectonics, the role of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is to separate tectonic plates on the west from those in the east. Does that mean that this ridge is goal directed?

These two tests need a clearer definition.

6. Irreducibly complex

Creationists love, love, lu-u-uv this one. The punch line of Wallace’s overall argument is, “and that’s why the bacteria flagellar motor must be designed; therefore, evolution can’t explain it; therefore, evolution fails and Intelligent Design wins.” And why must the flagellar motor be designed? Because it’s irreducibly complex, which means that if you remove any single protein from it, it fails. In other words, since evolution makes progress through mutations that make small steps, there is no possible prior step for the motor since each of these potential precursors is broken.

Next time, we’ll continue our discussion of the flagellum and respond to the claim that it must’ve popped into existence fully formed.

Overall comments

I applaud the general goal. An unbiased tool that would be more reliable than just one’s gut feeling in separating natural from designed is an interesting project. But to do that, the checklist needs to be reliable. It needs to be road tested with long lists of things known to be natural and things known to be designed. It should be quantitative, with a numeric score for each attribute, and it must be objective, with each step unambiguous, so that different people will reach roughly the same conclusion. Most importantly, it must be tested with things in the gray area—things that are known to be designed but look rather natural and vice versa, and even things people can’t agree on. As far as I can tell, Wallace has done none of this. This is just a back-of-the-envelope list.

____________

* I lied—both of these examples are natural. In fact, they’re both crystals—pure bismuth on the left and staurolite (“fairy stone”) on the right.

I’d call the bismuth crystal highly sophisticated and intricate (I’d score it 7 out of 10) and the staurolite less so (4 out of 10), but feel free to argue for other scores. The point is that not only are these terms imprecisely defined, but natural and designed objects will overlap on this metric. For example, I’d give manmade (that is, designed) objects like a handmade mortar and pestle or a sculpture made from mud a much lower score than the bismuth or other intricate crystal.

Continue with: How Useful is the Bacterial Flagellum for the Creationist?

It takes a certain maturity of mind
to accept that nature works as steadily in rust
as in rose petals.
— Esther Warner Dendel

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Image from Wikimedia, (CC)
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Nice Try: the Christian Design Checklist

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A scene near the beginning of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey shows astronauts on the moon investigating a mysterious box-shaped monolith about four meters tall. The edges appear to be perfectly square, and the surface is uniformly black. Imagine coming across this for the first time. Is this natural or made by an intelligence?

Further study shows the proportions to be precisely 1:4:9 (1 unit deep, 4 units wide, and 9 units tall), but these numbers are all squares. That is, 1:4:9 = 12:22:32. What do you think now—is it natural or artificial?

In general, how do you differentiate things made as the result of simple natural laws from those made by an intelligence of some kind—from insects to humans to super-smart aliens?

A Christian offers 8 attributes of design

Christian apologist Jim Wallace in God’s Crime Scene tackles this problem by listing eight attributes of design. His eventual goal is to use these attributes to evaluate the motor that drives the bacterial flagellum (the spinning tail that some bacteria use to travel) and, with a little luck, find that it must have been designed, thereby overturning evolution.

He demonstrates the method using a bloody garotte found at the scene of an actual murder (he picks examples like this because he was a police detective). A garotte is a simple weapon—a wire with wooden handles at each end, used to strangle a victim—and so might be simple enough to land in between obviously undesigned things (rocks, rivers, sand dunes) and obviously designed things (cars, computers, pocket watches). The idea is that the more of these attributes that apply to something, the more likely it was designed.

The original list was created to make the acronym DESIGNED, but I’ve ignored this because by shoehorning the list into an acronym, it sacrificed understandability. I’ve rewritten the titles, grouped a few together, and changed the order, but I’ve hopefully summarize each attribute fairly.

1a. Unlikely from chance

Designed things aren’t explainable by chance, and two pegs attached to a wire aren’t likely to have come together by chance.

1b. Unexplainable naturally

Nothing in the natural laws of chemistry and physics alone would have led to the existence of this device.

2. Similar to known designed objects

Does the object in question fit into a known bin? In this case, the two pegs and a wire, covered in blood, obviously falls into the “garotte” category. Wallace even noted that the police officer who discovered it was not only familiar with the weapon as you might imagine any police officer would be but had seen it used in the movie The Godfather. We’re going into this analysis with no doubt what the object is and that it was designed.

3. Sophisticated and intricate

A garotte is sophisticated compared to (say) a vine. The handles were identical in shape and dimension, and the wire was attached to each with the same knot.

4. Information based

The murderer used information (in this case, written instructions) to guide the creation of the weapon.

5a. Goal directed

Similar devices are used to cut clay or cheese, but the larger size of this one made it not optimal for those purposes. However, that did make it suitable for the goal of strangling someone.

5b. A choice between alternatives

The murderer could’ve evaluated a number of potential weapons in planning the crime: a gun (efficient but noisy), a crossbow (quiet but hard to come by), poison (efficient and quiet but probably detectable), and so on. The garotte came out on top after his evaluation.

6. Irreducibly complex

Something is irreducibly complex if it couldn’t be any simpler. That is, it would fail if any piece were removed. Each of the pieces of the garotte are required, and none could be merged or discarded for the device to perform its function.

A nice try

I have a nagging feeling that this list came from someone looking at the bacteria flagellar motor (which I will discuss in more detail in future posts), listing the reasons it looks designed, and using that as the universal sieve for deciding designed vs. undesigned objects. I’d prefer to see the list come from an unbiased organization based in science, not religion.

But ignoring that, the question of how we can tell designed from not designed is a worthwhile challenge. At the very least, it’s a fascinating science fiction thought experiment. For example, in Contact, an alien intelligence contacted the earth. What simple technique could they use to say, “We are intelligent, and this message can’t be explained naturally”? They used pulses of prime numbers.

Or turn this around: how would we communicate with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? We’ve sent spacecraft beyond the solar system. That alone said that we’re intelligent, but we’ve done more. Pioneer 10 and 11 (launched in 1972 and ’73) held a plaque, and the two Voyager spacecraft (1977) had phonograph records. In 1974, we sent a message, a 73 × 23 pixel bitmap, from the Arecibo radio telescope.

We’ll revisit that list and see how objective a filter it is next time.

The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer.
He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution.
He’d be out of business if there was any competition.
— Carl Sagan, Contact

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Image from Wikimedia, CC license
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Captain America vs. Thor: Science vs. Supernatural

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captain america thor

Have you wondered how Captain America’s shield always comes back to him? (Captain America is the Marvel superhero with the round shield with the American flag motif.) He uses his shield as a weapon, throwing it so that it bounces off a wall, takes out a bad guy, and returns so he can grab it and throw it again.

According to the story, the super soldier serum that turned him from a wimp into Captain America gave him, not only strength and agility, but also the mental acuity to judge how to ricochet the shield so that it comes back. In other words, it’s just ballistics plus superhuman marksmanship. What might look like remarkable luck when seen once is something he can do on demand.

Of course, willing suspension of disbelief is still required, but comics and movies usually come up with some kind of plausible explanation for things that are new to us.

Captain America vs. Thor

What about Thor? He throws his hammer (Mjölnir) and it also comes back. What’s its secret? This time, it’s magic. That’s it—magic, end of story. There’s no attempt to align Thor with reality.

Compare this with the logic behind Captain America’s shield. We already know of medicine that can improve the human body and mind. The science of nootropics (smart drugs) is in its infancy, but some products can improve concentration and memory. The Captain America story simply asks us to imagine this actual field of research extended further, which will certainly happen.

The shield itself has special properties. It’s made of a new metal, which again is plausible as science continues to create new manufacturing techniques or materials with new properties. Science continues to startle us with new developments.

Here’s an example. If you’re unaware of Vantablack and related products, this is a startling development from left field. It’s a coating that acts like black paint, except that it is so black that it makes things look like a hole in the universe (video).

I give this only as an example of a product, the lack of which didn’t cause you to lose any sleep, but which is pretty cool now that it’s presented to you. The story behind Captain America’s shield is arguably in this category of startling yet semi-plausible things.

Thor’s Mjölnir

Back to Thor’s hammer. Odin cast a spell, the hammer became magic, and there’s nothing more to it. Once the drawbridge of your mind lowers to accept the supernatural, a magic hammer can come in unchallenged.

Sometimes the supernatural claim needs to know the password. Maybe only Norse mythology gets to come in. Or dogma from some other religion. But once a category gets a pass, the BS detector is switched off for its claims. Walked on water? Cured disease? Virgin birth? Raised from the dead? Made of three parts while still being one? Creationism? C’mon in! It’s not like we’re going to demand that it be plausible.

We usually lump all these movie superheroes into the same “it’d be cool to be able to do that, but that ain’t gonna happen” bin. But look closer, and notice the difference. Some stories are built on plausible science and others on mythological make-believe. That distinction exists in real life, too.

After seeing half a country actively reject
wearing a mask during a pandemic,
I would like to apologize to the filmmakers
of every horror movie ever made
for calling their characters unbelievably dumb
for going into the murder basement.
— seen on the internet

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Image from Wikipedia, public domain
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A Simple Thought Experiment Defeats Claim that Bible Is Accurate

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Christian apologists are eager to argue that the gospel story is historically accurate. They point to the large number of New Testament manuscripts. They point to the shortness of the oral history period compared to other documents of the time. They claim that our oldest copies are remarkably close to the originals. I’ve made clear why those claims do little to argue for the historicity of the Jesus story (here, here, and here, respectively), but let me try to illustrate how weak this claim is. “Our copy of the New Testament is negligibly different from the original” is not defensible.

A thought experiment

Imagine this experiment. I tell you that in the New Testament there is one specific verse that I have in mind. A few decades after the original was written, a variant tradition was created by a scribe who changed the text of the verse. It doesn’t matter how the error got in there—maybe he misread the original or omitted something or tried to correct what he honestly thought was an error or tried to “improve” the reading of the text to make it better align with what his spiritual leader had taught. All that matters is that we have a fork in the road, after which point we have two textual traditions for this verse.

Let’s further imagine that this is a significant change, not a trivial spelling mistake.

Here’s the twist: one of these traditions is lost to history. I won’t tell you which one. This is almost surely true. (Indeed, how could you possibly prove that it wasn’t true that there had been two versions of one New Testament verse, that this change wasn’t trivial, and that one version was lost?)

I hand you a Bible and tell you:

  1. Find the verse.
  2. Tell me if that verse is the variant or the original.
  3. If it’s the incorrect version, tell me the correct reading.

You’d say that that’s an impossible challenge. Yes it is, and that’s the point. In our Bible, for how many verses is it true that there was a variant tradition, the change was significant (not just a spelling error or synonymous phrasing), and one of the traditions (maybe the original or maybe the erroneous one—you don’t know) has been lost? Zero verses? A thousand? We simply don’t know.

An example

Here’s a rare example where historians think they know about a manuscript that was changed. It’s not in the Bible but rather in Antiquities of the Jews, written in about 93 CE by Jewish historian Josephus. Its most famous passage is the Testimonium Flavianum, a passage praising Jesus and celebrating his resurrection. Historians reject this as original because Josephus, a Jew, would never make such a pro-Christian statement. Also, the early church fathers knew about Josephus’s writings but never quoted this passage in support of their position.

It’s very unusual to be able to detect the change when you don’t have a second tradition to highlight the problem.

Can scholars pull out the original document?

Apologists will point to the impressive work New Testament scholars perform in weighing several variants and judging which one is likelier the more authentic. But what do they do when there were several variants but history gives us copies of only one?

Weigh the magnitude of the the challenge by considering some of the earliest fragments of the New Testament. Papyrus P75 has some fragments of Luke from around 200 CE. Papyrus P46, from about the same date, has some of Paul’s writings. These are our earliest copies of those books, and yet they’re separated from the originals by well over a century. How do we know that they made it through that dark period—during much of which those books were considered by Christians to be merely important works, not sacred or inspired scripture—without significant change? Our best recreation of the New Testament has those books fitting together fairly well, but maybe this is because theirs is the viewpoint that survived. Maybe competing viewpoints were ignored or changed or even deliberately destroyed.

The apologists will say that there is no proof of this. True, our version of the New Testament could be identical to the original, but why imagine this? The evidence is not there, and apologists are left with just “Our version of the Bible might be accurate.” This is a meager foundation on which to build a supernatural claim.

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth
is not worth many regrets.
— Arthur C. Clarke

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/18/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license
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When Christians Treat God Like a Baby

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My oldest granddaughter is now four years old, and I remember playing with her in her first year. I found myself treating her like I did my dog. Neither understood English very well, but they could understand tone. She grabs her toy? “What a smart girl!” She rolls over? “What a clever girl!” She bites Piglet’s nose? “What a talented girl!” She burped, she pooped, she has a wet diaper? “What a good girl!”

This is surprisingly analogous to how many Christians treat God. You get what you wanted in prayer? “Thank you, God!” You didn’t get what you wanted in prayer? “Thank you, God!” God is too emotionally fragile to handle constructive feedback. Christians aren’t supposed to say, “God, the next time you think it’d be instructive to give a five-year-old leukemia, get back on your meds and think again.” God is (supposedly) omni-everything and so could achieve any goal without the human cost. God’s actions are assumed to be good at the outset, and any negative reaction is your fault for not seeing the hidden good.

God is either giving you great stuff or teaching you important lessons, and no matter what happens, God gets the credit. God is praised, regardless—whether you got the perfect parking space when you were late or God dealt some tough love by not giving you that promotion, he can’t lose. When bad things happen, God is never blamed. That’s man’s fault. Even natural disasters are recast as part of God’s marvelous, inscrutable plan. And when bad things happen to someone, they endured the ordeal only with God’s support.

Empty and groundless platitudes like “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” or “God must’ve needed another angel” or “Everything happens for a reason” litter the internet. Doubt is discouraged, and faith (in the sense of belief despite poor evidence) is put forward as a great virtue.

God is always perfect and infallible, especially when you conclude that before you start. There is even the scholarly discipline of theodicy to add somber scholarly support to this claim. Christians give all the other supernatural beliefs (unicorns, Xenu, Zeus) the critique of a skeptical adult, but their god can only handle baby food. And just like a baby, he’s never called to account, never has to clean up his messes, never has to explain himself or follow adult rules. God doesn’t even need good evidence that he exists.

Related: God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship

Religion is the diaper of humanity’s childhood;
It’s OK to grow out of it.
— PZ Myers

 

Gods are children’s blankets
that get carried over into adulthood.
— James Randi

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/7/16.)

Image from Christian Haugen, CC license

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