Does science owe a debt to Christianity for setting down the philosophical prerequisites for scientific progress? One author seems to think so. But like retroactive quote mining to find that the Bible was actually in harmony with what we’ve learned through modern science all along (more), the argument is desperate and unconvincing. As commenter Ann Kah noted, “This is so over-the-top that it fits into the category of ‘not even wrong.’”

This post concludes our critique of this article (part 1 here).

But Christianity is more hopeful!

Next up is the obligatory claim that the Christian message is more hopeful than that of any competitors. About the previous five properties of Christianity that are supposed uniquely nurturing to science, the article warns,

Reject one or more of them, and you will end up sooner or later in a hopeless cul-de-sac.

Hmm—do I want the worldview that’s more hopeful or the one with the best evidence that it’s true?

I guess it’s an indication of the poor quality of the Christian argument that “Yeah, but our view is more hopeful!!  :-)” can be presented without embarrassment. But it seems out of place in an article written by a Christian celebrating science.

Only Christianity can save science

The article tells us that Western society is lurching toward “the death of humanity”:

Scientists are sawing off the branch on which they’re sitting.

How about that—who knew that science was on its last legs?

The article declares that scientists like Richard Dawkins reject “objective morality, free will, and the meaningfulness of life” (presumably, that’s objective meaning in life). Then it whines about how (to the atheist) religion, altruism, love, and more “must all be explained away as the purposeless side-effects of [natural selection and] mutations.”

You say that objective morality and meaning exist? Stop complaining and show us. Ball’s in your court. You’re right that evolution can explain religious belief and emotions, but let’s second-guess evolution after it stops being the scientific consensus.

At the end, the article laments about the naturalistic view:

The perception that each of us has that a proposition is provable, or an experiment is conclusive, is no guarantee of anything in external reality; instead it is the outcome of subatomic dominoes falling in random patterns. How can science continue if even scientists start to believe this about their minds? . . .

A few more decades of such irrationalism will undermine completely the foundations of research and truth-seeking in the sciences, and the West will go into the same despairing stasis that haunted ancient Egypt, India, and China. Ironically, the only hope for science now is a rebirth of faith.

“Subatomic dominoes”? Perhaps this author lies awake at night afraid, not of monsters, but quantum indeterminacy lurking under his bed. Instead of learning about whatever scientific puzzle concerns him, he’ll just label it as nonsense. Satisfying his common sense apparently outweighs the scientific consensus on quantum mechanics.

The author dismisses the civilizations of Egypt, India, and China, apparently unaware that they lasted far longer than the period of modern science we’re in at the moment in the West.

To understand where this author is coming from, imagine someone who thinks that food is made in the back room of the grocery story by some mysterious process. He can get by with this confused idea of how the modern food industry puts food on the shelves, but he would be wise to avoid critiquing a process he doesn’t understand. Our author is like this with respect to science. Next time he feels the urge to critique what he doesn’t understand, he should lie down until the feeling goes away.

A restorative from Mark Twain

To those of you who were annoyed by the brainless chum in this article, I have an antidote. Mark Twain’s 1905 reply to a patent medicine salesman nicely fits our predicament.

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand.

The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me.

A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

The last word

You’ve heard that correlation doesn’t prove causation. That’s true, but if there’s causation, there must also be correlation. The argument in this article fails by its own metric: there’s no correlation between Christianity and experimental science since Christian Europe was asleep for a thousand years after it took the baton from the Roman Empire. No correlation means no causation.

Consider a very different approach. The book Guns, Germs, and Steel also looks at relative progress between societies. It opens with a description of the 1532 meeting in Peru between Spanish conquistador Pizarro and the Inca (ruler of the Inca empire) and asks, why did Pizarro sail to Peru and capture their king and not the other way around? It explains why some parts of the world did well and others not by looking at the distribution of livestock and crops and other properties. It’s like a card game—Europe happened to have been dealt a good hand of resources, and Christianity isn’t necessary to explain its success.

European Christianity was a leg-iron to progress, not the catalyst to it. Only by moving from supernaturalism to naturalism has society progressed from pretend-answering questions about nature to really answering them.

Faith has produced zero new knowledge about reality, and science has produced libraries’ worth. I think I’ll stick with science.

Continue to #50, Argument from Biblical Consistency

.

Image from Alexander Kliem, CC license
.

A Christian article argues that science is built on Christianity. If we forget all the marvelous achievements of other ancient civilizations (the Romans’ roads and buildings, the Greeks’ democracy and philosophy, the Egyptians’ engineering to build the pyramids, and India and China and so on), Christian Europe looks pretty unique. (But then who doesn’t when you eliminate all the competition?)

The article tells us that for all the impressive attributes of those civilizations, only Christian society had experimental science, and the rest is history.

The argument that Christian society uniquely had experimental science is probably debatable, but let’s set that aside. More important, the argument fails because Christian society didn’t have any science to brag of for well over a thousand years after it became the ruling religion within Europe! (More.) So much for Christianity as the talisman that unlocks Nature’s secrets.

This is part two of a three-part series (part 1 here).

Here are five traits of Christianity that the article claims make it a unique incubator for science.

1. God is rational

We believe that God is rational, and that he created an orderly world which mirrors His rationality. So by testing the way the world responds to our activity—via experiments—we can gain reliable knowledge for the future.

I want to see in the Bible where God makes plain that nature was designed to be understandable. Otherwise, the argument is simply an unevidenced claim. “See all this science-y stuff that has brought such benefits to society? We’re responsible for that. You’re welcome.”

And as for an orderly, understandable world, it’s not especially understandable. Get a doctorate in biology, chemistry, or physics and you’ll see that it is anything but straightforward or intuitive. Consider chaos theory, which says that systems can be deterministic and yet inherently unpredictable. Or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that there is a limit to how much precision we can simultaneously know about the properties of elementary particles. Or quantum mechanics, which bewilders our common sense.

To make it worse, humanity will not only never know how much future knowledge about reality we will learn, we will never even know the fraction that we will never know (more). Are we capable of understanding 99 percent of the truths about nature or 1 percent? We’ll never know.

This argument is ridiculous coming from an author who is likely a Creationist but who celebrates science and urges us to conduct experiments and follow the evidence. Last time I checked, Creationists attack science (at least the science that offends their theology), and Christians never build their worldview with evidence.

2. Man mirrors God

We believe that we are images of God. Therefore the world’s rational structure is transparent to the light of our own God-given reason, such that we can gradually come to know it better than our ancestors did.

If we’re created in God’s image, why is the “God’s ways are not our ways” argument paraded out whenever God appears to be irrational or immoral (more, more)? We either reason like God or we don’t—you can’t have it both ways.

And, as seen in the previous point, the universe is hardly “transparent” to human minds that were tuned by evolution simply to survive.

The claim “the world’s rational structure is transparent to the light of our own God-given reason” is nothing more than a deepity. A deepity is a statement that, to the extent that it’s true, is trivial, and to the extent that it’s profound, is false. We understand as much of nature as we understand—that’s true but trivial. And (as the author surely intends) to the extent that this claim is profound—our complete understanding of nature makes clear that our brains were tuned by God to understand a Nature tuned by God to be understandable—it’s false.

3. Christianity provides unique insight into time

We believe that the world did not always exist, and won’t disappear then reappear in an endless loop of meaningless cosmic cycles.

This is presumably an attack on the Hindu idea of cyclic time, but I don’t know that I’d throw stones if my Bible’s idea of time were that God created everything in six days.

The well-evidenced idea that time, space, matter, and energy had a beginning 13.8 billion years ago comes from science. Science hasn’t learned anything from religious mythology. If the Bible were scientifically useful, it might’ve contained Maxwell’s equations or the statement of mass-energy equivalence. It doesn’t even have something as simple and practical as a recipe for soap.

4. Christians as stewards of the earth

We believe that the world was created “good,” is sharply distinct from God Himself, and subject to us as its “stewards.” So it is legitimate and good for us to engage it and try to improve it

Great—tell your fellow religionists to take the lead on environmental stewardship. Help get climate change and evolution viewed correctly within conservative Christianity.

5. Christians love progress

We believe in a type of (non-utopian) progress, and think that the world can and should become a more humane place, where suffering diminishes and justice prevails more widely.

You’d think that a benevolent God would want the best for his favorite creation, so why doesn’t he create that? He allows humanity to stumble forward when he could perfect conditions in an instant? In fact, since God has already created a perfect world in heaven, why bother with the crucible of earth? Alternatively, if God deliberately created this imperfect world, how can Christians be presumptuous enough to mess with it?

Ironically, Christianity is usually at the rear of the parade, complaining about social progress. Progress is progressive, but Christianity is conservative (more).

Next up: the article ends with some over-the-top claims about Christianity’s value to science.

Concluded in part 3.

.

Image from Jared Tarbell, CC license
.

It’s time for another episode of our favorite soap opera! For the first installment of this thrilling series of stupid Christian arguments, go here.

Today let’s explore the claim that modern science has Christianity as its foundation. And that “The New Atheists are sawing off the branch on which science is sitting.” And that “the only hope for science now is a rebirth of faith.”

Those quotes are from “Abandon God, and Science Will Die,” published at the conservative Christian ministry The Stream. Let’s consider the argument.

What those other ancient civilizations lacked

Those cultures from the ancient past—Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and more—were impressive. However:

There’s one thing that each of these [ancient] civilizations lacked, which wouldn’t make an appearance until the Christian Middle Ages: experimental science that yields a reliable understanding of the material world and hence technological advancements that better human life.

A coincidence? Nope—we’re told that it’s because Europe was Christian that modern science developed there. The author admits that Archimedes created impressive inventions and Galen made important medical discoveries but states that no one at the time followed up on those inventions.

Compare those civilizations with Christian Europe

Did God particularly favor Christianity with a blessing of scientific progress? Let’s be skeptical for a moment and consider what those other civilizations produced. Egypt developed the science and engineering to built pyramids; the 500-year-long Islamic Golden Age left a record of its achievements in our vocabulary with words like alchemy, algebra, alcohol, and most of named stars; and China developed moveable type, paper, and gunpowder. Christian Europe inherited base 10 positional notation, the numeral zero, and decimal fractions.

And look at what else can’t be credited to Christian Europe. The Roman Empire excelled at civil engineering and gave Europe roads, dams, and aqueducts. Only with the Gothic cathedrals in the 1200s did European architecture rival what Rome had done more than a millennium earlier.

Or consider Greece. The Acropolis of Athens is a building complex that was built centuries before the time of Jesus and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Their summary of the Acropolis reads in part: “On this hill were born Democracy, Philosophy, Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Speech, which provide to this day the intellectual and spiritual foundation for the contemporary world and its values.” Wow—apparently Christian Europe wasn’t uniquely favored by God.

So what’s the argument here? Merely that earlier cultures had science but not experimental science? Okay, but neither did Christian Europe for well over a thousand years! So much for Christianity providing the secret recipe to unlock the secrets of Nature.

And think about how the works of Aristotle were treated once rediscovered and popularized in Europe in the 1200s. Initially rejected by the Church, Aristotelian thinking became more mainstream with the work of Thomas Aquinas. But Aristotle’s works weren’t treated as a jumping off point to exciting new science. Because of their new connection to the church, these ideas became unchallengeable dogma, which is the opposite of experimental science.

Christians wanting to show Christianity as the catalyst for science are quick to point to colleges founded and supported by the Church. The article states, “M.I.T. and NASA were made possible on Mount Sinai.” But these medieval colleges bear little resemblance to the MIT of today. They were initially built to train clergy, and evidence-based science was not in the syllabus.

If the rate of scientific progress that we saw beginning in, say, 1800 began instead in 380 when Christianity became the Roman Empire’s state religion, this argument would have some weight. But that isn’t what history tells us, and there’s very little left of this “science was built on Christianity” argument.

But wait—there’s more!

The article reveals why Christianity is different.

What set the Christian West apart? It was the unique worldview of the Jews, implanted in the rationalism of Greece and Rome, and guaranteed by faith.

Tell me more about this guarantee. Show me that faith does anything in the real world and that “guaranteed by faith” means something. Note that you can make that kind of demand of science, and it will deliver.

Next time, we’ll look at the five traits of Christianity that (according to the article) make it a unique incubator for science.

Continued in part 2.

.

Image from Stephen Bowler, CC license
.

Let’s look at more Christian claims that much of what modern science has given us was in the Bible all along. Part 1 rebutted these claims about cosmology and how the earth works. We’ll conclude by looking at claims in a few more categories. Up first, claims about health.

7. The Bible knew all about disease.

• The Bible says that unclean land animals such as rabbits, pigs, horses, and bear are not only unclean to eat but also to touch. If you touch the carcass of one of these, you are unclean until evening. (Leviticus 11:28)
• If you touch a dead person, you’re unclean for a week and must go through ritual purification (Numbers 19:11–12).
• A man who has a nocturnal emission is unclean. Seven days after his last emission he must bathe in running water (Lev. 15:13). The rules are the same for a menstruating woman (Lev. 15:28).
• Cover your poop because it grosses God out (Deuteronomy 23:13–14).
• Take seriously the appearance of leprosy. Anyone found to be a leper must be shunned.(Lev. 13).

Don’t touch dead bodies? Bury your poop? Yes, that’s good advice, but who needs to be told this by God? The Bible is hardly a medical authority and couldn’t even provide the simple recipe for soap. The healings of Jesus the Great Physician teach us that illness can be caused by evil spirits or sin (here, here), despite what modern medicine says.

The prudish attitude about bodily functions does little to improve health, and the recommended bathing is just a ritual cleansing. Without soap, it doesn’t do much more to get rid of germs than the required sacrifice of two birds. There’s also no caution against polluting water for those downstream.

Concerns about leprosy are valid, though this shows no knowledge beyond the common sense of the time.

8. Kosher laws actually make good health sense.

The Bible has an entire chapter to outline rules about what can and can’t be eaten. For example, shellfish are forbidden:

But whatever is in the seas and in the rivers that does not have fins and scales among all the teeming life of the water, and among all the living creatures that are in the water, they are detestable things to you (Leviticus 11:10).

There is a logic to these seemingly arbitrary food laws, but health was not the point. Eating improperly cooked mackerel or mutton (ritually clean) is no wiser than eating improperly cooked shrimp or pork (ritually unclean).

Let’s move on to claims about physics.

9. The Bible informs us that matter is made of atoms.

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible (Hebrews 11:3).

Apologists may imagine that this says that matter is made from particles too small to see, but this chapter is about faith, not physics. The NET Bible gives another interpretation of the bolded phrase: “the visible has its origin in the invisible.” The verse isn’t saying that matter is made of atoms but that the visible world was created by invisible God.

The ancients did propose the idea of matter being composed of indivisible particles, but that was centuries before the book of Hebrews and not in Palestine.

10. The Bible teaches that light moves.

Where is the way to the dwelling of light? And darkness, where is its place? (Job 38:19)

(Some of these examples are so poor that I wonder if those who propose them honestly find them compelling.)

This verse only says that light and darkness reside somewhere. Perhaps motion is implied because light and darkness must get out of the house sometime.

But no, darkness isn’t a thing—it’s just an absence of light—and neither light nor darkness are stored anywhere.

11. We learn from the Bible that air has weight.

[God] imparted weight to the wind and meted out the waters by measure (Job 28:25).

Wind pushes on you. If that is wind’s “weight,” then even children know that. A childlike view of the world can imagine that the properties of nature are assigned and maintained by God, but that’s not what science tells us. Instead of common sense observations of nature, the Bible could’ve given us some of the basics laws of physics (better: the basics of disease prevention).

12. The Bible knows about thermodynamics and talks about moving from order to disorder.

The Bible has several verses (Isaiah 51:6, Hebrews 1:10–11, Psalms 102:26) that use the simile that the earth will wear out like a garment.

Lift up your eyes to the sky, then look to the earth beneath; for the sky will vanish like smoke, and the earth will wear out like a garment and its inhabitants will die in like manner; but My salvation will be forever, and My righteousness will not wane. (Isaiah 51:6)

The ancient authors saw that living things die and human constructions deteriorate—nothing remarkable here. From that they extrapolated that the earth itself is temporary as an excuse to celebrate God’s permanence. This isn’t science; it’s a literary motif.

Next up: biology.

13. The Bible knows about dinosaurs—read about Leviathan in Job 41.

God is humiliating Job in this chapter. Job thinks he has the balls to question God? Then perhaps he can share how well he’d do fighting Leviathan, a sea monster that laughs at human weapons and “regards iron as straw, bronze as rotten wood.”

Christian commentators try to shoehorn the long description into that of a crocodile, whale, or dinosaur, but this fails because Leviathan breathes fire (41:18–21). The attempt also fails because there were thousands of dinosaur species, not just a single fierce, fire-breathing monster. This description of a single creature sounds nothing like a survey of dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs were long extinct before humans appeared. There would be no point in God spending an entire chapter talking about how he’s so tough that he can conquer a dinosaur if Job doesn’t know what dinosaurs are.

Let’s stop there at thirteen examples, an unlucky number for the Christian eager to imagine that the Bible educates us about science.

Wrap up

Remember the Argument from Accurate Place Names? Christians point to names in the Bible that are later verified by archaeology as powerful evidence. If the Bible has this correct, they argue, the rest must surely also be correct! But of course being right about the basic facts of your place in history only gets you to the starting line.

The Argument from Accurate Science analyzed in this post makes a bolder claim: if the Bible is accurate about things that were not common knowledge, that points to a supernatural source, which grounds the Bible’s miracle claims. Unfortunately for the apologists, that argument fails.

If God put important and surprising new science (Big Bang, Second Law of Thermodynamics, geocentric solar system, and so on) into the Bible for our benefit, we should be able to point to the Bible as the source of this knowledge. That it’s always the other way around—that apologists take modern scientific knowledge and mine the Bible for vague parallels—reveals their agenda.

But there’s more! Consider another aspect of the Bible and science here.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/25/15.)

Image from Stephen Morris, CC license
.

Christian apologists are eager to tell us that scientists didn’t inform us of many of the facts about modern cosmology, physics, and biology. No, they were in the Good Book all along if we just had the faith to trust it!

One supportive source they often cite was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Arno Penzias. He said in 1978:

The best data we have (concerning the Big Bang) are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.

Really? From the Old Testament you get at 13.8-billion-year-old universe? Expansion from a singularity? A beginning to time? A universe that’s not only expanding but whose expansion is accelerating? Dark matter and dark energy?

If it’s all there in the Bible, tell us the rest: what caused the Big Bang, if anything? Is there a multiverse? How are Relativity and quantum physics unified? While you’re at it, tell us if string theory and the zero-energy universe hypothesis are correct.

It seems to me that the Bible is as useful at informing us of scientific realities as The Bible Code is for predicting the future (and for exactly the same reasons), but let’s consider some of the Bible verses that apologists think are so clairvoyant and see if the wild claims hold up.

First up are claims about cosmology.

1. The Bible says that the earth is a sphere.

[God] sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers (Isaiah 40:22).

Well, we’re actually looking for the earth as a sphere, but that does sound intriguing. First, though, consider another verse in the same book of the Bible:

[God] will wind you up tightly into a ball and throw you into a wide, open land. There you will die. (Isaiah 22:18)

These are two different words—chuwg (circle, compass) and duwr (ball). The first word means typically circle in the sense of a perimeter—think of a guard walking the perimeter of a camp. The second verse shows that Hebrew had a word for sphere, and if the author wanted to identify the earth as a sphere, the correct word would’ve been used. Notice also that this verse isn’t written as if it’s passing on scientific knowledge. It mentions the earth as a flat disk only in passing.

2. The Bible knows that the earth is in empty space.

He stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing (Job 26:7).

This is scientifically vague and gives no clear description of our solar system. The earth isn’t just there; it moves around the sun. If you’re hoping that Job had a planetary model in mind, just four verses later we read about the “pillars of heaven.”

3. The Bible knows that the number of stars is uncountable.

Therefore there was born [of Abraham] as many descendants as the stars of heaven in number, and innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore (Hebrews 11:12).

How many descendants did Abraham have when this book was written in the first century? A million people? Whatever it was, “As many descendants as stars in the sky” is hyperbole. The author can’t have meant that there were then 10²¹ Jews in the world (which is roughly the number of stars). Again, the Bible is saying nothing remarkable.

If the point of any of these verses were to give new, surprising scientific knowledge, they would make that clear. Each reads as if it’s just using ideas accessible by the people of the time.

These passages have been picked by modern Christians because they vaguely sound like information that science has taught us. But that’s backwards. Instead, imagine giving each passage to an unbiased reader of that time. Would they derive the science that these apologists imagine? Would they deduce a heliocentric solar system, for example? The apologists need to show that these facts came from biblical insights rather than modern science, but they can’t.

Let’s move on to earth science.

4. The Bible knows about the water cycle.

Many verses are cited to argue that the Bible understood the water cycle where water evaporates from the ocean, condenses into clouds, falls as rain, and flows back to the ocean.

He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; who makes lightnings for the rain, who brings forth the wind from His treasuries (Psalms 135:7).

For he draws up the drops of water, they distill rain from the mist, which the clouds pour down (Job 36:27–28).

All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, there they flow again (Ecclesiastes 1:7).

This shows nothing that anyone from Old Testament times wouldn’t have noticed. Water left in a pot will gradually vanish into the air. Rain comes from clouds. The sea doesn’t get deeper even though rivers keep flowing in, and so on.

And the primitive understanding of meteorology is evident when these passages are taken at face value. God is given credit for water turning to vapor and falling as rain, but we know that physics is sufficient. Imagining storehouses for the wind (from the first verse) would be cute coming from a child, but this is not wisdom from the omniscient creator of the universe.

Or take the third passage above. Just two verses earlier we see the geocentric solar system of the time:

The sun rises and the sun sets; and hastening to its place it rises there again (Ecc. 1:5).

5. The Bible knows that wind circulates as cyclones.

Blowing toward the south, then turning toward the north, the wind continues swirling along; and on its circular courses the wind returns (Ecc. 1:6).

Here’s a visualization of a month of the jet stream’s movements over North America. Sometimes the wind flows in a circle, though usually not.

Yes, wind comes from different directions. This verse gives us no new insights.

6. The Bible knows about ocean currents and undersea mountains.

The Bible tells us of “the springs of the sea” (Job 38:16). It also talks about birds and fish traveling “the paths of the seas” (Psalm 8:8), whatever that means. David imagines God blowing away the water to reveal “the channels of the sea” (2 Samuel 22:16), and Jonah, thrown into the ocean, imagines descending to “the roots of the mountains” (Jonah 2:6).

Why is this impressive? Fishermen of the time surely observed that the ocean has currents, and swimmers and sailors would have noticed that some parts of the Mediterranean dropped steeply, just like on land.

The Bible could’ve told us something new. Science has only recently revealed the deep sea geothermal vents and the ecosystems that live there, which is a candidate for the first life on earth. Also, the deep trenches created by tectonic forces at plate boundaries. Also, the magma flow that drives oceanic spreading at mid-oceanic ridges. If God were determined to pass along science through the Bible, why not this?

Every example they have is backwards, going from verified science to a related Bible verse. The claim that the Bible delivered important science to humans is easily refuted by asking, “Like what?” Modern science learned nothing from the Bible.

But there’s more! Concluded in part 2.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/23/15.)

Image from NASA, CC license
.