Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

I'm an atheist, and I like to discuss Christian apologetics.

World Premiere: The Magician’s Twin

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I attended the premiere of the Discovery Institute’s video The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society. It’s the first of an anticipated 3-part video series on C. S. Lewis and science.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Discovery Institute, they’re a Seattle-based think tank whose Center for Science and Culture (CSC) is dedicated to undermining public support for evolution. Though evolution wasn’t a main theme for this video, rejection of evolution will be the theme of video #2 and a positive case for Intelligent Design in video #3.
Before I review the film, about which I have some good things to say, take a look at the organization that created it. The budget of the CSC is reportedly $4 million per year. The agendas of foundations and wealthy individuals who contribute include the goal of “total integration of biblical law into our lives” and commitment to “the infallibility of the Scripture”—acceptable goals in a free society but incompatible with the scientific goal of following the facts where they lead without crippling it with an agenda.
In a reasonable world, an organization dedicated to exposing the weaknesses of biology would be staffed with, y’know, biologists—people who actually understand the science and who are capable of evaluating it. But, unsurprising to any observer of Creationism and related fields, there are very few here. There are lots of doctorates among their 40-odd fellows, but as for relevant ones, I could only find these two:

  • Michael Behe has a doctorate in biochemistry. Though he proposed the clever concept of irreducible complexity, he accepts common descent (the idea that all life has a common ancestor), a view rejected by most in the Creationism/Intelligent Design movement.
  • Jonathan Wells has a doctorate in molecular and cell biology, but Wells has made clear his agenda: “[The words of Rev. Sun Myung Moon], my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism.” (While this agenda is at odds with science, I do applaud his honesty.)

The approach of the Creationism industry is similar to what, in the computer industry, was called Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Back in the mainframe computer days, IBM’s product was more expensive. IBM salesmen were said to soften up reluctant customers with, “Keep in mind that no one was ever fired for buying IBM.” In other words: you pay a little more and you get a reliable product, but you cut corners and you may find yourself out of a job.
The Creationist version is to acknowledge the fruits of science but then mention hoaxes (Piltdown man, the Cardiff giant) or errors (ether, geocentrism) or dangers (radioactivity, surveillance) or embarrassments (eugenics, Tuskegee syphilis experiment). Are you really sure about this whole science thing?
Creationism saying that science is valuable is a bit like Mark Antony saying, “Brutus is an honorable man.”
And that approach colored The Magician’s Twin. It was a mixture of sensible cautions against a thoughtless acceptance of all things scientific—“if it comes from science, it must be worth adopting,” or “if science says so, it must be true”—and a subtle undercutting of the credibility of science.
The word scientism was used often. I’d heard it defined as the universal application of the scientific approach to inquiry, the claim that only evidence-based knowledge has value, and/or the use of science in areas where it doesn’t apply. However, the word was expanded (beyond its normal definition, I thought) to include the demand that morals must come from or be filtered through science.
Lewis felt that science and magic are twins in three ways.
1. Science as religion. Consider the crowd of atheists that attended the national Reason Rally, science giving meaning to people’s lives, and Darwin Day celebrations.
Is that all religion is? Community, meaning, celebration? That supernatural thing seems important—no, fundamental—to religion. Indeed, this caricature of religion seems insulting to believers.
I attended the Reason Rally, and yes, that sort of community is a valuable thing. Religious people and atheists find value in community, meaning, and celebration, but they don’t share belief in the supernatural. Science is quite plainly not religion.
2. Science as credulity. Science discourages skepticism and encourages gullibility. And what is it built on? C.S. Lewis said, “If my own mind is a product of the irrational, how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about evolution?”
If evolution were true and your mind were honed by natural selection (those minds that understood reality well being more likely to survive than those that didn’t), we’d expect it to give you a fairly trustworthy account of reality.
As for skepticism and gullibility, I’ll grant that public science education is poor, science is dangerously misunderstood within society, and some politicians fall over themselves to dismiss the scientific consensus when unpleasant. Let’s work together to fix these problems, but don’t pretend that religion is on the right side of this issue.
3. Science as power. Much of science is devoted to power over nature. Unlike magic, you actually can control people with science. Eugenics, drone aircraft, bar codes, transhumanism, and surveillance cameras are some of the many technologies that have downsides.
Does science have downsides? You bet. But let’s first get clear on who does what. Science does its best to tell us what is true about nature, and policy decides what to do with this information. You don’t like eugenics? Fine, but don’t blame science for it. “We should sterilize population category X” is a policy statement, not a scientific statement. “Here’s how optics work so that a video camera will work” is from science; “We should install surveillance cameras in public places to reduce crime” is from politics.
In the Q&A afterwards, the video’s director raised concerns about groupthink within biology. Something to avoid, to be sure, but is this really a major problem? It reminded me of a powerful story Richard Dawkins told in The God Delusion about a senior lecturer in the Oxford zoology department. The professor believed that one feature of the cell was an artifact and didn’t actually exist. One day a visiting American lecturer presented evidence powerful enough to convince even this skeptic.

At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said—with passion—“My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red.

Wow—talk about a teachable moment.
The video does raise appropriate cautions about science. But how do we constrain science as a force for good without taking the nonsensical path of encouraging citizens to decide their scientific truth for themselves? My suggestions:

  • Don’t confuse the debate of scientific ideas within Science with the debate within the public. We laypeople can debate what we think of science, but we don’t decide scientific truth. Science is not a democracy, and we’re stuck with the scientific consensus. Skepticism doesn’t mean, “I get to decide my own scientific truth.”
  • Don’t confuse science (a decent approximation of what is true) with policy (what to do about it). Science is the domain of scientists; policy is the domain of politicians and the society to which they answer.
  • Understand that science can get it wrong and that its pronouncements are always provisional. Science can get railroaded by powerful interests with an agenda–corporations, grant makers, or politicians for example. To minimize this, let’s encourage transparency and motivate science in the direction that’s best for society. When a study of the safety of phosphorescent zucchini is funded by the company that wants to sell this new vegetable, that doesn’t invalidate the research, but make this funding known.
  • Demand public scrutiny of policies with downsides. The European Union puts the burden of proof that a new policy is not harmful on the proponent of that policy. This is the Precautionary Principle. Do we need to go this far? I don’t think so, but we must have our own standards that find the right balance between reckless application of new science and immobility.
  • Demand strong science education in schools and ridicule politicians who reject the scientific consensus when it is uncomfortable—for national competitiveness if not for self-respect.

Yes, it is rare that one disputant in an argument convinces another. 
Thomas Jefferson said he had never seen it happen,
but that seems too harsh. 
It happens in science all the time.
— Carl Sagan

Photo credit: Wikipedia
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Dr Johnson: Abiogenesis and Panspermia

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Abiogenesis is the process by which nonliving matter turns into living matter—that is, something that natural selection can work with. This is thought to be how life on earth originated, though there is no consensus on how this happened. Evolution then shaped that early life into what we see today.
But there is another hypothesis.
Asteroids that hit the earth are mostly bits of rock that formed from the early accretions of and collisions with material in the early solar system. Sometimes, however, big asteroid impacts can eject material from a planet, and this new material itself can become asteroids. If this planet had life, the new asteroids might be contaminated with bacteria that, if they fell on another planet with the right conditions, could seed an otherwise barren planet with life.
This is the idea behind panspermia. It bypasses the problem of a planet having the right conditions for sustaining life but not the right conditions for creating it.
A variation is directed panspermia, the idea of panspermia being not accidental but deliberate. Imagine an advanced civilization deliberately sending out durable primitive life on rocks or satellites to infect sterile planets.
But does panspermia simply move the problem rather than solving it? The buck has to stop somewhere; how does panspermia help?
This was the reaction by some Creationists to Richard Dawkins’ interview with Ben Stein for the movie Expelled (video, go to 4:00). Dawkins was caricatured as saying, “How do we explain how life started on earth? Imagine that it was put here by aliens. Problem solved!”
But a few minutes’ thought shows that panspermia doesn’t just pass the buck but does indeed change things.
The early earth had a certain set of initial conditions—amount of water, a particular gas mixture in the atmosphere, available chemicals, temperature, range of salinity and alkalinity, amount of sunshine, and so on. What if those initial conditions could never allow abiogenesis but the different conditions on another planet could? Panspermia is the mechanism in which the otherwise-barren planet could be seeded with life. Panspermia in effect expands the initial conditions.
Of course, that may not please the Creationists as much as the caricature, but that’s the lot of science.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
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Who Would Die for a Lie? (2 of 2)

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The “Who would die for a lie?” apologetic lies in tatters at our feet. The claim that almost all of the apostles died as martyrs is too weakly attested in history to support much of anything. Not only can no historical consensus emerge from the blizzard of contradicting claims about how they died, we have scant evidence—even if the apostles were executed or murdered—that these were martyrdoms. (See Part 1 for more.)
And on this, apologists want to support what may be the biggest claim possible: that the universe has a supernatural creator, and he came to earth 2000 years ago.
Let’s move on to pursue a few other aspects of this argument. A story could be a lie in two ways. (1) It could be a false story that was either false from the start or (more likely) grew with time. The adherents wouldn’t know that it was false. Most of us would put the 9/11 hijackers in this category—their views of afterlife were wrong, but they honestly believed them. Or those who drank the Kool-Aid in Jonestown. Or who burned to death with David Koresh.
We must distinguish between two categories of disciples. Those mentioned in the Bible and in the summary of Hippolytus are legendary. We can say nothing with confidence of their work; we can’t even say for certain if any were historical figures. The second category includes those disciples who actually did the work to proselytize early Christianity. Someone helped spread the word, so we can be sure that they existed. They would likely have been, like the 9/11 hijackers, true believers who believed a story but didn’t witness the history claimed to back it up.
Now consider (2) the other way a story could be a lie. Can someone die for something that they know is false? Sure—consider captured soldiers or spies who maintain a false story to their deaths.
Robert Price gives the example of the second-century philosopher Proteus Peregrinus, “a charlatan prophet, [who] immolated himself because he could not resist such a grandstanding opportunity.”
The 19th-century Millerites, while not faced with loss of life, were faced with their own difficult challenge. They were a Christian sect that predicted the end of the world on a particular day in 1844. Many made themselves right with God by selling all their possessions. When Jesus didn’t show up as expected, this became known as the Great Disappointment. So the thousands of members of this sect who had very clearly backed the wrong horse walked away poorer but wiser, right? Of course not—some couldn’t admit the lie to themselves and doubled down on prophetic religion, and the Seventh-Day Adventist church was one result. Though no one died for a lie, they drastically rearranged their lives for what they had been given ample evidence was a lie.
The most significant example of someone who died for a lie might be Joseph Smith. Not surprisingly, I don’t accept the Mormon claim that the angel Moroni showed Smith a set of golden plates that he translated from “reformed Egyptian” into English using a seer stone. Rather, I think he was a treasure hunter and con man who either took advantage of or was caught up in the Second Great Awakening and created a new religion.
Mormonism was the invention of one man, and that man died for it. Of course, it’s possible that Joseph Smith gradually came to believe his own PR. But either way, he died for a lie, exactly what Christians deny is possible.
Compare Joseph Smith with the supposedly martyred apostles. Apologists would have us believe that the apostles (1) saw the earliest days of the Christian church and so were in a position to know whether the gospel story was correct or not, (2) were killed because of their faith, and (3) never recanted.
Bingo—that’s Joseph Smith. He (1) knew all details of the founding of the Mormon religion, (2) was killed in the middle of religious controversies brought on by his faith, and (3) never recanted.
Does Joseph Smith’s death show that Mormonism is correct? If not, then why is the equivalent argument trotted out to show that Christianity is?
And note how much stronger the Mormon case is. The gospels are simply snapshots of the Jesus story at different places and times. They are the result of decades of oral history that evolved within a credulous prescientific culture. They are legends. But there are no decades of oral history in the Mormon case. No one argues that Joseph Smith didn’t exist or that his story grew with the retelling because he wrote the story himself.
One final problem with the “die for a lie” argument is that it suggests the ridiculous notion that a doomed man could recant his beliefs and be set free. This kind of exchange comes to mind:
Judge: “You have been found guilty of sedition and are sentenced to die by stoning. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Condemned Man: “Okay, okay—I’ll admit it! That whole Jesus thing—it was just made up!”
Judge: “Well, that wasn’t so hard now, was it? You could’ve saved us all a lot of bother by admitting that earlier. Very well—case dismissed.”
From what capital charges are you released by admitting that Jesus isn’t divine? Sedition? Incitement to riot? Treason? Offending a powerful person? General rabble rousing?
“Why would they die for a lie?” fails because it pretends that rejecting Jesus would have gotten the apostles released from capital charges, because we have negligible evidence that they were martyred, because there’s little reason to suppose that the stories of the original apostles are more than legend, and because the earliest actual missionaries were probably just like today’s—earnest believers who were converted by a community rather than by being eyewitnesses to history.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty
— Will Durant, historian

Photo credit: Entertainment Weekly
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Related links:

  • Taylor Carr, “Did the Disciples Die For a Lie?” Godless Haven, 5/15/11.
  • “Would Joseph Smith ‘Die for a Lie’?” Skeptical Monkey.
  • SmartLX, “Would the apostles have died for a lie?” Ask the Atheist, 9/14/08.

Who Would Die for a Lie? (1 of 2)

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Almost all of the original apostles that surrounded Jesus died martyr’s deaths. If they knew that he was just a regular guy and that the resurrection story was fiction, why would they go to their deaths supporting it? Lee Strobel said that though people may die defending their beliefs, “People will not die for their religious beliefs if they know that their religious beliefs are false.”
While people have died for lies—the 9/11 hijackers, for example, or the Heaven’s Gate cult—they didn’t know it was a lie. That the apostles were in a position to know and still died defending it is strong evidence that the Jesus story is accurate.
Or, at least this is the story Christians tell themselves.
There are several issues here, but let’s focus first on the big one: how do we know how the apostles died? Since their dying as martyrs is key to this apologetic, you’d think that this was well established in history. But sometimes Christian historical claims have a very weak pedigree.
Our one-stop shopping source for this question is historian Hippolytus of Rome (170–235) in his “On the Twelve Apostles.” At best, this is an early third century work written close to 150 years after the facts it claims to document. At worst, it was written even later by an unknown author (called “Pseudo-Hippolytus” by historians) and inadvertently or deliberately compiled with the writings of Hippolytus.
Here’s the summary:

  • 4 apostles were crucified: Andrew, Bartholomew, Peter, and Philip (the last three upside down).
  • 3 were killed in some other way: James the son of Alpheus was stoned, James the son of Zebedee was killed with a sword (presumably decapitated), and Thomas was killed by spear.
  • 5 died natural deaths: John, Matthew, Matthias (the new twelfth disciple added after Judas left the group), Simon the Zealot, and Judas the son of James (Thaddeus).

Another popular source for this information is John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563 and in many later editions. Its late age, 1500 years after the events, is enough to disqualify it since we have the earlier account, but its popularity makes it an important source. To a large extent Foxe was simply a mouthpiece for the anti-Catholic sentiment in England at the time, and many sources dismiss its accuracy (Wikipedia, 1911 Britannica, Catholic Encyclopedia).
Foxe largely agrees with Hippolytus on the deaths of the apostles except for the ones that Hippolytus says died natural deaths, giving that fate only to John. He says that Matthew was “slain with a halberd” in Ethiopia, Matthias was stoned in Jerusalem and beheaded, Simon the Zealot was crucified in Britain, and Judas the son of James was crucified in what is now eastern Turkey.
James the son of Zebedee seems to have the oldest martyrdom story. Hippolytus probably got his account from Acts 12:2, written in the latter half of the first century, which says that Herod Agrippa (grandson of Herod the Great) killed him “with the sword.”
For most of the other apostles, however, contradictory stories cloud the issue. For example, Bartholomew’s death is documented in a number of contradictory ways. One account says that he was beaten and then drowned. The Martyrdom of Bartholomew (c. 500) says that he was beaten and then beheaded. The most popular, perhaps because it’s the most gruesome, is that he was skinned alive and then crucified (or perhaps beheaded).
Various sources add to the story of Matthias. He was crucified in Ethiopia. Or he was blinded by cannibals but rescued by Andrew. Or he died a natural death in Georgia on the coast of the Black Sea.
Simon the Zealot might have been sawn in half in Persia. Or crucified in Samaria. Or martyred in Georgia.
Add to this:

  • the many additional contradictory stories about other apostles not included in this brief list,
  • the decades-long period of oral history from event to writing, and
  • the time span, usually centuries-long, between the original manuscripts documenting the martyrdom stories and our oldest copies that make those copies suspect.

What can we conclude given this evidential house of cards? Only that “most apostles were martyred for their faith” is historically almost indefensible.
And it’s not just that the claim for any particular martyrdom story is flimsy; it’s that we can be certain that many of them are false because they contradict each other.
Let’s pause for a moment to savor this lesson. “Tradition holds that” or “The Church tells us that” is never enough—be sure to look behind the curtain to see what evidence actually supports a historic claim.
“Who would die for a lie?” I dunno—let’s first establish that someone died at all.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity,
never of the correctness, of a belief.
— Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)

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Post #1

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I’ve been a fan of some of the Patheos blogs for awhile and am delighted to be part of this diverse group!
This blog is a civil but energetic critique of Christianity from an atheist viewpoint, and I write about Christian apologetics, atheism, and the impact of Christianity on society.
I’ve been blogging for over a year at the Cross Examined and Galileo Unchained blogs and will be focusing just on Cross Examined here at Patheos.  I’ll be gradually reposting some of my old material to this new audience.
My journey to atheism was uneventful.  I was raised Presbyterian.  Christianity never did much for me, so I fell away from religious practice in college.  Years later, a long email debate with a young-earth Creationist got me thinking, and I just couldn’t stop.  He changed me from an apatheist (“Who cares whether there’s a god or not?”) into an atheist—probably not what he intended.
I’ve written a book about Christian apologetics, perhaps the first novel to explore the arguments for and against Christianity.  You can find Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey at Amazon.
I look forward to your comments. Any suggestions for new topics—things about Christianity or atheism that bug you or questions you have—would also be much appreciated. Find my contact information on the About page.
Bob Seidensticker

Some believers accuse skeptics
of having nothing left but a dull, cold, scientific world.
I am left with only art, music, literature, theatre,
the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit,
sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination,
dreams, oceans, mountains, love, and the wonder of birth.
That’ll do for me.
— Lynne Kelly

God’s Diminishing Power

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In the beginning … God walked in the Garden of Eden like an ordinary supernatural Joe. He dropped by Abraham’s for a cup of coffee and a chat. He didn’t know what was up in Sodom and Gomorrah and had to send out angelic scouts for reconnaissance: “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me” (Gen. 18:20–21).
But, like Stalin gradually collecting titles, God has now become omniscient and omnipotent. He’s gone from needing six days to shape a world from Play-Doh and sprinkle tiny stars in the dome of heaven to creating 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars.
That’s 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg of universe.
And yet, oddly, his biblical demonstrations of power faded with time. From creating the universe, he’s weakened such that appearing in a grilled cheese sandwich is about as much as he can pull off today. He has the fiery reputation of the Wizard of Oz but is now just the man behind the curtain.
Even God’s punishments became wimpier. A global flood, with millions dead is pretty badass. Personally smiting Sodom and Gomorrah is impressive, though that’s a big step down in magnitude.
And it’s downhill from there—God simply orders the destruction of Canaanite cities, and to punish Israel and Judah, he allows Assyria and then Babylon to invade. As Jesus, he doesn’t kick much more butt than cursing a fig tree, and today he simply stands by to let bad things happen.
Maybe God’s power diminishes as the universe’s dark energy increases?
Photo credit: Why There is no God