Category Archives: Deep Dive>Religion

Is God of the Gaps a valid atheist argument?

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“God of the gaps” is a Christian response to the march of science. God had been used to explain many things—lightning, disease, earthquakes, and so on—but as science explained more, less remained for God to explain. God was forced to live in the gaps where questions remain, between blocks of well-established scientific knowledge.

Christians often still use it as an attack, demanding, “How did the first life come to be?” or some similar unanswered scientific question. Their conclusion: “You’ve got no answer; therefore, God did it.” Science will always have a long list of important unanswered questions, so this argument is endlessly reusable.

The atheist response

The problem is that as those gaps in scientific knowledge are filled in, fertile ground for God belief shrinks. The image that comes to mind for me is God sitting forlornly on an iceberg that is gradually melting. The Christian who builds his faith on a foundation of science risks that faith when the science shifts.

The second problem is that it assumes too much. Sure, Christianity can answer questions that science can’t, but are those answers worth listening to? “I don’t know how this works; therefore, God did it” is no solid foundation on which to build a worldview. There’s no more evidence that “God did it” than that the Flying Spaghetti Monster did it. And “God did it” is a claim, not a conclusion. It’s not supported by evidence.

The Christian response

Christians have several responses. Here’s a snarky Christian characterization of the atheist position:

But now, in the fullness of time, we have seen a great light … and this light has chased God out into the shadows. To this day, science continues to replace God-filled gaps in our understanding with all-natural ingredients. And since we don’t need God to explain the existence of the nature of the universe, we don’t need God, period. (@34:00)

Another version:

[The god-of-the-gaps] objection is rooted in the idea that because a number of things throughout human history have been wrongly attributed to the supernatural activity of God or gods, we can now safely dismiss God as a cause behind anything else we observe.

In other words, these mocking characterizations imagine that science doesn’t have all the answers yet, but it will! This is the science-of-the-gaps fallacy, also called the Argument from the Future (because the future will resolve the problems we can’t today). This has been cleverly distilled into, “I don’t know, therefore not God.”

Whatever you call this argument, I don’t make it. I don’t say that God couldn’t be the explanation for anything within nature, just that that’s where the evidence points (or lack of evidence).

A counterexample?

One Christian response gives the search for extraterrestrial life to argue against God-of-the-gaps thinking. So far, it’s turned up nothing, but the search continues. If atheists reject the possibility of God, why not reject the possibility of extraterrestrials with the same logic?

First, I don’t reject the possibility of God. And second, “the supernatural” has never been shown to be an explanation for anything. The search for the supernatural is not at all parallel to the search for extraterrestrials, which is simply a search for life (which we know exists) that uses technology (ditto).

Christians point to something, not nothing?

Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason pushed back against the god-of-the-gaps charge. Taking just the Intelligent Design argument, he says it doesn’t point to a lack of evidence and then imagine a Designer; rather, it is an argument itself. And when there’s some unanswered question about evolution, each side—both ID and evolution—must fill that gap.

He tells his evolution opponent,

When you get [an answer] in the future, you can stick it in the gap…. But in the meantime, reason and rationality require that we go with the odds-on favorite given the evidence that we have right now. (@24:29)

The what? The “odds-on favorite”?? Someone’s not paying attention. No supernatural explanation has ever successfully explained anything. “Supernatural Explanation” has come in dead last in every race it’s run. No, it’s not the favorite.

And note that the naturalistic answer would depend on what the question is; that’s why the answers are hard to come up with. The ID answer is always the same—God (or “a Creator,” if you prefer) did it, breaking unknown laws in unknown ways. They’ve got a one-size-fits-all answer that’s ungrounded from reality and answers nothing.

Use science correctly

Christians, either use science or don’t. If you don’t, that’s fine, but then tell us you simply believe by faith rather than evidence. And if you do claim science is on your side, then man up and take a stand on the scientific issue that you raise. Tell us that your faith is built on there being no scientific explanation for abiogenesis (or whatever the question is), and if one is found, your faith ends.

The alternative (which I’m sure you’ll choose) is that you’re simply parroting the Unanswered Scientific Question du jour. When it gets answered by science, you’ll pick a new one and hope we don’t notice. You’re always retreating, always moving the goalposts, never taking a stand. Your argument then is nothing more than “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, God.”

Science will always have a long list of important unanswered questions, so this argument is endlessly reusable.

Imagine if Isaac Newton had taken that approach: “Apples fall to earth and planets orbit the sun because of God. Praise the Lord!” Answering every question with “God” dismantles science.

These Christians are abusing science, not using it. It’s not just that they pick and choose scientific facts to support the conclusion they’ve already chosen (rather than following the evidence), but they dishonestly imagine science’s questions are evidence against science.

An article from the Discovery Institute is an example. It begins,

It looks like 2017 could become some kind of genuine annus horribilis [horrible year] for the established scientific consensus on human evolution. It all began with five discoveries that made worldwide headlines earlier this year.

So what are you saying? That evolution is now on the ropes? Or are you just spinning interesting questions (and biologists delight in finding new puzzles to work on) to be knockout punches, knowing that they are nothing of the kind?

When the dust settles, we still have the popular Christian argument: “How do you explain abiogenesis?” or “What came before the Big Bang?” or whatever. They’re valid scientific questions, but Christianity provides no answer.

It’s like these Christians are reading a long book about science. They are impatient with the slow progress, so they turn to the back and find that the last pages are blank. Unable to stand the tension, they pencil in “God did it.”

That works, if you don’t care about being right.

Related posts:

[Do you] mean, if you don’t understand something,
and the community of physicists don’t understand it,
that means God did it?
Is that how you want to play this game?
… Then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance
that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.
— Neil DeGrasse-Tyson

Christian thinking is like flat earth thinking

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Is the earth a flat disk? I hope we can agree that it’s not, that the earth is a sphere, and that flat earth thinking is bullshit. My last article was a dialogue with an imaginary flat earther, and while I tried to give as strong an account as possible, I hope it was obvious that my feet are firmly planted on a round earth.

With few exceptions, atheists and Christians are on the same page with respect to flat earth thinking. It’s a nice change to be starting with a point of agreement. Sadly, this beautiful concord is not to last, because I think Christianity is little more than flat earth thinking with centuries of patina.

There are surprisingly many parallels between flat earth thinking and Christianity. As you analyzed the argument from our mythical flat earth (FE) proponent, I hope you regularly got the sense of, “Hmm—that feels familiar.” That feeling probably pointed you to either Creationism or Christianity, and often both. Let’s look for those parallels.

1. Sufficient evidence

Who is the audience for the argument? Not a scientist, if the argument is coming from a flat earther or a Creationist*. If Creationists were trying to do real science, they’d be going to conferences and writing papers for secular journals, like the real scientists.

If you donate to a Creationist organization, will that fund scientific research? Of course not—it will be used to convince lay Christians that they’ve backed the right horse and to appeal for more donations.

The standard of evidence for the FE proponent, Creationist, or Christian is low. They want the available evidence to be sufficient, and they’re convinced before the argument begins.

2. Misdirection by focusing on minutia

The FE proponent had lots of odd arguments. While they might have been confusing, which could have been their purpose, they were trivial. For example, our FE proponent was all over the literal map with questions about long-distance flight routes in the southern hemisphere.

The same is true for Christians and their complicated claims like the Fine Tuning argument or Ontological argument. This is what you lead with? If there were an omniscient and omnipotent god who wanted to be known, he’d be known! The very need for apologetics proves that such a god doesn’t exist.

In Christian parlance, they focus on the gnat but ignore the camel.

3. Gish gallop

The Gish gallop is a technique named after Creationist debater Duane Gish. His style was to pile many quick attacks onto his debating opponent while ignoring attacks to his own position. Even if his opponent were familiar with each attack and had a rebuttal, to thoroughly respond would mean descending into long, tedious explanations that would bore the audience and wouldn’t fit into a formal debate.

We see this in the FE argument. It contained rapid-fire arguments about the amount of sun in Arctic, why the moon doesn’t rotate, flat map projections, gyroscopes, and so on. This focus on quantity over quality takes advantage of the typical person’s scientific ignorance.

You see this in the Christian domain when they talk about a cumulative case. That is, any one argument may not be sufficient, but look how many there are! But consider this when applied to pseudo-sciences like astrology or Bigfoot. Crappy arguments don’t turn to gold just because you have a pile of them.

And, as with Gish, a debate or article with a pile-up of one terse argument after another is still popular among Creationists.

4. Errors and lies

My goal in writing the FE position was a compelling argument, not a factual one. For a few points, I tossed out a claim that either I didn’t know was true or knew was false. I suspect this approach is common within FE arguments. If not that, then I can only conclude careless scholarship is the cause of the many errors.

I wonder how many times the typical FE proponent has been corrected. And I wonder how many corrections lead to that flawed argument never being used by that person again. In my case it takes just one such correction.

In the Creationist camp, Ray Comfort (to take one well-known example) has been schooled many times how evolution doesn’t predict a crocoduck. My guess is that he values the useful argument more than he is repelled by the broken one.

5. Always attack

The FE argument is a stringing together of arguments of the form, “Didya ever wonder about natural feature X? A round earth model is supposed to explain that? That’s crazy!”

It’s easier to attack a scientific model than to defend one when the audience is poorly educated in science. FE (and Creationist) arguments try to keep the opponent off balance, always on the defensive.

If they throw ten punches, only two of which land with any impact, that’s two more than they started with. A layperson poorly educated in the material and predisposed to root for the anti-science argument might give the decision to the attacker.

With an argument that intends to be scientific, the opposite is true, and a new theory is explained, supported with evidence, and defended. Not only should it explain what the old theory explains well (and a round earth and evolution explain a lot), it must explain additional puzzles that tripped up the old theory.

The Creationist hopes that no one notices their Achilles’ heel. An attack on evolution does nothing to build up any competing theory of their own.

6. Burden of proof

The FE proponent explicitly rejected the burden of proof, saying that they had common sense on their side. But no one would accept this. They ignored the Sagan standard, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and rejecting centuries of scientific consensus is the extraordinary position.

It’s also in vogue for Christians to insist that both parties in its debates—the Christian and the atheist—are making claims, and so both must defend their positions. But while the atheist has the option to defend “There is no God” or “There is no supernatural,” that’s not necessary. Either of these could be the default position, leaving the burden of proof solely on the Christian.

I find it amazing that Christians will, without embarrassment, insist on this concession—aren’t they eager to share the Good News without prerequisite?—but here again, they know it’s easier for them to attack than defend.

If there were an omniscient and omnipotent god who wanted to be known, he’d be known!

7. Circular reasoning

The proponent of any theory could show how, starting with a set of widely accepted initial assumptions, an unbiased observer can follow the evidence and conclude with their theory. For example, think of a university course in physics where the professor starts with basic facts that everyone shares and uses evidence to gradually build from there.

FE believers and Christians often follow that approach backwards. They assume their theory and then show how their worldview is consistent with the facts of the world. The best they can do is show that their worldview isn’t falsified by reality and insist that the burden of proof is actually shouldered by their opponent. This is circular reasoning.

8. Appeal to common sense

The FE argument want you to use your eyes and trust your senses. Look at the horizon—it’s flat! Climb a mountain or look over the ocean, and the horizon is still flat. “If flat earth theory is wrong, it’s got to be the rightest wrong theory ever.”

The Creationist equivalent is to say that humans and worms and even bacteria are so complicated that they certain look designed. A Christian example is the Kalam Cosmological Argument, where the first premise has a twist on the common sense idea that everything must have a cause.

No, common sense isn’t reliable at the frontier of science. If it were simply a matter of following one’s common sense, someone like Isaac Newton would’ve resolved all of science’s loose ends centuries ago. Or even Aristotle, millennia ago. “Life is complicated—it must be designed” is common sensical but wrong. The same is likely true for the insistence that everything in nature had a cause.

Conclude with 7 more similarities between flat earth thinking and Christianity.

I was a flat earther for 3 years.
Then I turned 4.
— Broski Toski, YouTube commenter

*I lump Intelligent Design proponents in with Creationists for this article.

Christians weaponizing scholars’ quotes: Sherwin-White, Russell, and Vilenkin

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Let’s take back some atheists’ quotes that have been misinterpreted by Christian apologists. In this final segment, we look at a historian, a philosopher, and a cosmologist (part 1 here).

7. A. N. Sherwin-White, historian

The gospels were written roughly 40 to 60 years after the events they supposedly describe. Christian apologist William Lane Craig has cited Sherwin-White to argue that legendary additions to oral history happen slowly enough that the gospels are still reliable despite that long gap. This is Craig:

According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be “unbelievable.” More generations would be needed. (Source)

Lots of problems here.

  • Misquote: Sherwin-White never said “unbelievable” in this context. But it sounds so much better when Craig says it, so (in a curious bit of evolutionary survival of the fittest), his quote is always cited by subsequent apologists rather than Sherwin-White’s original.
  • Wrong interpretation: Craig interprets the passage to say that myth never prevails over historic truth within two generations. What Sherwin-White actually claims is that myth doesn’t always prevail over historic truth.
  • Overselling: Sherwin-White was not proposing a law that governs legendary accretion and offered no algorithm that would winnow out the legendary chaff from a historical account.
  • Delicate balance: Craig is defending the extraordinary claims of the supernatural, and he needs extraordinary evidence. He wants legendary development to be slow to argue for the gospels’ accuracy, but it must be quick so that the many second-century noncanonical gospels couldn’t arguably be historically reliable as well.

More here: Oral Tradition and the Game of Telephone: A. N. Sherwin-White’s Famous Quote

8. Bertrand Russell, philosopher

Russell wrestled with religion and how we should see the world in “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903). The paragraph that Christian apologists always quote begins with a ponderous 134-word sentence in which he gives us some existential tough love. Not only will we all die, he reminds us, but all that we strive for and care about will be dust eventually. The sentence ends with the warning, “No philosophy which rejects [these facts] can hope to stand.” And then, the bombshell:

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul’s habitation be safely built.

Christians have interpreted this to mean that the atheist outlook is despair. That atheists should be suicidal, with their worldview to blame.

That’s not what it means. If I say, “I despair of winning this game,” I’ve fully accepted the fact that I won’t win. The matter is hopeless, but only in that I have fully accepted the facts and hold no hope that they will be overturned. It doesn’t mean that I’m sobbing with grief.

“Unyielding despair” means that you must accept Russell’s list without caveat. You should despair of finding a loophole like a god who has created an afterlife for you. Russell is saying we can’t look away from the facts: we’re just animals that happened to evolve on one ordinary, insignificant dust speck in a universe that has trillions of such dust specks. We’re not immortal, we’re not even special, and Mankind is just temporary.

It’s a discouraging, even depressing existential fact that we’re going to die and our achievements will eventually be forgotten, but that’s life. Few of us let it get in the way of making the most of our limited time on earth. Russell’s point is that we can’t sidestep this but must face it. If we hold out that we are special, we will be held back—that was what he meant by “no philosophy which rejects [these facts] can hope to stand.”

And even if you think atheism is depressing, this does nothing to say that atheism is wrong. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson offers some lighthearted clarity: “If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.”

Conclusion: Russell makes a reasonable point that only seems like an attack on atheism.

[William Lane Craig] wants legendary development to be slow to argue for the gospels’ accuracy, but not so slow that the many second-century noncanonical gospels could arguably be historically reliable as well.

9. Alexander Vilenkin, cosmologist

Apologist William Lane Craig often cites the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which concludes (given certain assumptions) that the universe can’t be infinite in duration. Here he quotes Vilenkin’s Many Worlds in One:

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. (Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One [2007], p. 176)

What Craig missed is this on the very next page:

Theologians have often welcomed any evidence for the beginning of the universe, regarding it as evidence for the existence of God…. So what do we make of a proof that the beginning is unavoidable? Is it a proof of the existence of God? This view would be far too simplistic. Anyone who attempts to understand the origin of the universe should be prepared to address its logical paradoxes. In this regard, the theorem that I proved with my colleagues does not give much of an advantage to the theologian over the scientist.

Apparently, taking the first quote out of context made for a stronger story than acknowledging the second quote and addressing the tension between them.

Conclusion: quote taken out of context.

But am I consistent?

Let’s return to the challenge I set for myself in the first article in this series, that I must quote Christians like Francis Collins correctly while avoiding the problems I highlighted in the nine examples that followed.

Christians quoting atheists can be legitimately done. They just need to follow the basic rules of research that one might learn in eight grade: a quote can be used only if it’s accurately quoted, correctly understood, excerpted in its context, and cited accurately.

You’re welcome to hold me to these standards, because you know I will be doing that to the Christian apologists.

Never rely on a priest
to provide objective analysis
of his theological product.
He always has a used car to sell.
— David Madison

Christians weaponizing scholars’ quotes: Jastrow, Darwin, and Dawkins

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I take it as a challenge. Every time a Christian quotes an atheist scholar, I wonder if I can spot how the quote was taken out of context or misunderstood or just mangled. Granted, the quotes are usually correct, but this blind spot for using quotes properly is a glaring weakness in many Christian articles.

Let’s continue with three more scholars (part 1).

4. Robert Jastrow, astronomer

Robert Jastrow was the director of Mount Wilson Observatory and was founder and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Here’s his quote:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (God and the Astronomers, 1978)

But what is this “bad dream”? The preceding paragraph clarifies. Science has tracked the beginning of the universe back to the Big Bang, so we want to know what caused that. It’s the next logical question, but Jastrow points to the problem:

And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion.

Jastrow isn’t saying that science, taking the difficult route of hypothesis testing and evidence following, finds that theologians discovered the same scientific truths centuries earlier. That wouldn’t make sense, because not even theologians claim that Religion taught society centuries ago about the heliocentric solar system, the 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and the Big Bang. Theologians across all of humanity’s religions have never reached a consensus on anything supernatural. They can’t even agree on the names of the god(s).

What he’s saying is that the science has reached its limit, at least on the question of the origin of the universe. Data from before has been lost, and cosmologists can make no progress. But theologians aren’t similarly constrained. They don’t use science, and they have no obligation to support their claims with evidence.

And he said that in 1978. As with Penzias, much has changed. Is the prospect of finding out the origin of the Big Bang still so bleak? Perhaps not, but that’s a tangent. By reading Jastrow in context, it’s clear that he’s not claiming that Religion can reliably answer questions within science.

Conclusion: it’s a great quote for the Christian if it’s out of context and without a common sense check. Otherwise, Jastrow isn’t saying what Christians might hope.

5. Charles Darwin, biologist

Darwin’s writing style often explored the difficulties with explaining a feature of nature by evolution … and then explained it. The temptation to extract the puzzle from the first paragraph and ignore the resolution in the second has been too great for many Christians.

One example is Darwin’s study of the evolution of the eye in On the Origin of Species. The Creationist book The Collapse of Evolution accurately quotes this:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

A frank admission by Darwin of the inadequacy of his theory? Not really. The very next sentence explains how evolution could account for it—a sentence that was not included in the Creationist book’s quote. Here’s the sentence:

If numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist … then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection … can hardly be considered real.

Creationists apparently can’t trust other Christians to provide honest quotes.

Another popular Darwin tangent is eugenics. Ben Stein’s crockumentary Expelled correctly quotes Darwin from The Descent of Man:

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Does this mean that Darwin advocated for eugenics? Nope. In the very next paragraph, curiously overlooked by Stein, Darwin rejects eugenics with an acknowledgement of our instinct for compassion.

Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

Darwin in context doesn’t make the point they want, so Expelled takes it out of context to completely misrepresent Darwin’s views.

One final misquote (actually, pure fiction) is Darwin’s supposed deathbed conversion. Lady Hope (née Elizabeth Cotton) claimed to have visited Darwin shortly before his death in 1882. More than thirty years later, she documented the supposed events of that meeting, during which Darwin, at this point an earnestly Christian, recanted his famous theory. Darwin’s surviving family rejected the story.

Conclusion: out of context quotes + lies.

See also: Who Cares About Darwin?

Theologians across all of humanity’s religions have never reached a consensus on anything supernatural. They can’t even agree on the names of the god(s).

6. Dawkins, zoologist

Richard Dawkins was also treated unfairly in the Expelled movie. Dawkins explained that one plausible way life might have started on earth was with the seeding of something (chemicals or bacteria?) from another planet. This could have been deliberate (an experiment by advanced aliens) or accidental (rocks kicked off one planet with life can become meteorites onto another planet). This is called panspermia.

Ben Stein, the host of the movie, concluded,

So Professor Dawkins was not against Intelligent Design, just certain types of designers, such as God.

Wrong. Dawkins was very much against Intelligent Design, which imagines an intelligence that didn’t just jumpstarting life on earth but took an active, ongoing part in the development of life on earth.

There’s a big difference between the seeding of life on earth from an intelligent species and magic from the supernatural. We know about intelligent life forms, we know about space travel, and we know about biology. It’s speculative though not ridiculous to consider this. It’s a very different thing to imagine god(s) doing it, because we have zero agreed-to examples.

Conclusion: deliberate misunderstanding.

So far, Christianity’s killer quotes are turning out to be duds. We’ll wrap up this series with three final examples.

Christianity:
Because you’re so awful
you made God kill himself.
— seen on the internet

Christians weaponizing scholars’ quotes: 9 examples

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Some Christian apologists like to find a scientist or celebrity atheist who supports some bit of Christianity. They reveal this turncoat in the atheist ranks, tell us that this person is one of our own, and insist we follow their lead.

Let’s see where this gets them into trouble.

Before we go any further, let me admit that I’ve done the same thing. For example, I’ve cited Dr. Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian and well-respected biologist, in the hope he could argue some sense into evolution-denying Creationists. Collins has said, “If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.” This is the beginning of a compelling argument from someone with the necessary science credentials. Collins was the director of both the Human Genome Project and the (U. S.) National Institutes of Health.

Another example is biologist Dr. Ken Miller who is Catholic and who supported the science side of the 2005 Dover Intelligent Design case.

You get the idea. Anyone who is an expert in a scientific or scholarly field and is religious could help reach that religious community in a way that an atheist could not.

I’ll look at nine examples of Christians trying the same thing but aimed at atheists. I argue that my use of Collins and Miller is legitimate, while the Christian examples are not. See if you agree.

What launched this article was my reply to Christian Tom Gilson. Gilson quoted philosopher Tomas Nagel and biologist Richard Lewontin, showing them to be among the few atheists “honest” enough to admit to Christianity’s strength. Unfortunately for Gilson, Nagel’s quote actually didn’t support Christianity, and Lewontin’s simply explained an aspect of how science works.

What follows is nine more examples of quotes taken out of context, of misquoting, of Christians celebrating atheists they think they can manipulate, and of quotes that don’t mean what Christians think they mean. Let’s see if they provide any stronger support for Christianity.

1. Arno Penzias, physicist and astronomer

Penzias said,

My argument is that the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole. (New York Times, March 12, 1978, page 1)

That’s surprising, because I don’t remember anything like that in the Bible. Does the Bible tell you that the universe is open rather than closed (that is, that it will keep expanding)? That this expansion is accelerating? That the universe is 13.8 billion years old? That it started from a tiny point? Presumably black holes, gravitational waves, dark energy and dark matter, and more are in there as well. An eager world awaits the relevant Bible verses.

But of course we don’t get that. Penzias is simply declaring “Oh, yeah—I knew that” without evidence.

Does the Bible resolve cosmologists’ unanswered questions, too? I’m thinking of questions like what created the universe (or was it uncaused?), if there’s a multiverse, if the zero-energy universe hypothesis is correct, if string theory is correct, how to unify Relativity and quantum physics, and more.

Note also the date on that quote. He said that 44 years ago! We have learned a lot since then. Is this Penzias quote still relevant? If so, is the Bible still a cosmology textbook? How many scientific papers have cited the Bible?

Conclusion: unconvincing. If we had learned any science from the Bible, Penzias would’ve given the verses.

See also: The Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science

See also: Why Does the Bible Have No Recipe for Soap?

2. David Gelernter, computer science professor

Gelernter is a professor at Yale who is an evolution denier. He said,

Stephen Meyer’s thoughtful and meticulous Darwin’s Doubt (2013) convinced me that Darwin has failed. (“Giving Up Darwin,” 2019)

Darwin as the personification of evolution is a clue that we’ve left science and have been sucked into Intelligent Design (ID). Stephen Meyer is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, an ID thinktank. And he’s not a biologist. Neither is Gelernter. The mission statement of the Center for Science and Culture (the Discovery Institute’s Intelligent Design division) makes clear that following the evidence isn’t their goal but rather supporting their predetermined conclusion of ID.

Playing by science’s rules is hard. The nice thing about Intelligent Design is that it’s unconstrained by rules. Any puzzling observation can be dismissed with, “Well, the Designer is smarter than us, so he must’ve had his reasons.” But of course this assumes the Designer up front.

If this sounds too easy to you, like it must be cheating, you’re right.

Gelernter isn’t a biologist, and he’s enamored with the argument of someone who’s also not a biologist, which attacks the tentpole argument of biology. Why are we wasting time on this? Let’s get our evaluation of evolution from biologists (spoiler: evolution is the overwhelming consensus).

Conclusion: No one should reject the consensus view of a branch of science because of the writings of an outsider to that branch of science. This example isn’t a scientist being misquoted but a scientist being used by Christian apologists.

See also: A Response to David Gelernter’s Attack on Evolution

Is the Bible [a] cosmology textbook? How many scientific papers have cited the Bible?

3. Antony Flew, philosopher

Have you heard of Nobel disease, where a giant in one scientific field runs off and says something stupid in another? Linus Pauling (Nobel in chemistry) thought that megadoses of vitamin C would cure colds and treat schizophrenia. Brian Josephson (physics) promoted homeopathy. William Shockley (physics) supported biological racism.

While Antony Flew didn’t win a Nobel (he was a philosopher), he had his own problem with legitimately-smart-person-says-something-stupid disease. Nearing the end of his life, in 2007, he published There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Even from the title you get a hint of something amiss. Referencing Flew in the third person in the subtitle is how you title a book written by one person about another. And indeed, that’s what happened. The cover of Flew’s book gives his name and that of his ghostwriter. Read the book, and it’s clear Flew wrote little or nothing new for the book. The structure is that of a book report with “Flew” quoting himself with fragments from other Flew books. Critics have questioned Flew’s state of mind, and one critic of the book said, “Far from strengthening the case for the existence of God, [the book] rather weakens the case for the existence of Antony Flew.”

The punch line is why Flew says he dropped his atheism in favor of a deist worldview. Did this great philosopher, at the end of a long career, rely on philosophy to finally fit the last pieces in place to reveal the hand of a Creator? Nope, it was “the laws of nature, life with its teleological organization, and the existence of the universe”—three scientific issues. Flew the philosopher said it was scientific inquiry that led him to his deism. But why is his conclusion interesting when he’s not a scientist?

Like David Gelernter, Christian apologists were eager to swoop in to claim him as one of their own. In Gelernter’s case, they gave him publicity, and in Flew’s, they gave him a ghostwriter to put words in his mouth.

Conclusion: Flew rejected atheism based on arguments out of his field. He was welcome to embrace any worldview he wanted, but his outsider’s opinion shouldn’t be compelling to any of us.

Bonus: the atheists who aren’t atheists

For completeness, I’ll mention several more pawns of apologists. I’ve discussed three people who claim to be atheists and yet can’t shut up about how great Christianity is. (Read my responses to John Steinrucken, Adam, and “John.”) Christian apologists unsurprisingly admired their honesty and held them up as examples for atheists to follow. I was unimpressed.

See also: The Curious Case of Atheist Philosopher Antony Flew

Continued in part 2.

It is not the things which I do not understand
in the Bible which trouble me,
but the things which I do understand.
— attributed to Mark Twain

‘Honest’ atheists

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Yes, there are a few honest atheists—not many, but a few. Christian Tom Gilson has cherry-picked a couple of these. Note, however, that “honest” is his word for “agrees with me.”

This is the conclusion of a three-part look at a recent article by Gilson (part 1). Why are atheists unreasonable? According to Gilson, they’re all about the science (and science is imperfect), and they hate being wrong (and insist that Christians have the burden of proof).

Gilson attacks because he’s too weak to defend.

Here’s the final reason.

3. Fear that Christianity really is true

He begins his exposé with philosopher Thomas Nagel.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. (The Last Word, 1997)

Read the Old Testament—you want that guy in charge here on earth? Remember his murderous rampages (the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s children and servants, and so on). God’s support for slavery. God’s demand for human sacrifice. God’s invention of hell. The indistinguishability of God from nonexistence here on earth.

Why is this quote from Nagel here? So Nagel doesn’t want a god—who cares? Our desires don’t matter. But of course Gilson is coming from a Christian perspective, where what you want does matter. You don’t need to contort yourself to fit into a church environment; you find a church that fits who you are. Churches are like shoes, and for each of them you pick the ones that fit best.

As for smart, well-informed people being believers, this simply speaks to the tenacious grip that a child’s upbringing has on the adult. Just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they’ll discard their Christianity as adults. Many will use that powerful intellect to defend their worldview, and the more impressive the intellect, the stronger the defense (Shermer’s Law).

The divine foot in the door

Biologist Richard Lewontin is a favorite of Christian apologists for this quote:

[Scientists] are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (1997)

The first rule in making a sound argument is that a Christian is an unreliable source for quotes from their intellectual opponents (scientists, atheists, and so on). You must find the original source and be honest to its context.

Gilson has ignored this rule. Read Lewontin’s original quote and you find the next two sentences clarify Lewontin’s point in an important way. He says you can’t allow a Divine Foot in the door, not because scientists fear Christianity will explain everything, but because adding “God might’ve done that” as an axiom of the scientific method means that no measurement can be trusted. How much of that is reality and how much is God’s thumb on the scale?

Lewontin is simply explaining how science works, and if you permit more than natural explanations, it’s no longer science.

Gilson attacks because he’s too weak to defend. He never draws attention to the strength of his position. He wants your attention on some perceived shortcoming within science, but instead of the speck in his opponent’s eye, he should focus on the log in his own.

Atheism isn’t a religion.
It’s a personal relationship with reality.
— seen on the internet