In the U.S. food industry in the late 1800s, dairy producers sometimes cut costs by diluting milk with water mixed with chalk or plaster. Pepper was sometimes cut with charred rope or dirt. Formaldehyde and borax were food preservatives. Some food dyes contained lead or arsenic. The food industry was constrained by few laws, and they encouraged politicians to keep it that way.

With the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, there was a new sheriff in town. Adulterating or mislabeling food and drugs had become a crime. The food industry and politicians, who would theoretically be responsible for identifying and solving the problem, were the problem. The industry couldn’t be trusted to police itself. The problem was addressed only after citizens woke up to the problem and demanded change.

History repeats

We find a rough parallel with an ongoing problem today, church scandals like the recent financial and sexual scandal at Hillsong church. Before that, there were scandals involving Harvest Bible Chapel, Ravi Zacharias, and Mars Hill Church. Before that, Ted Haggard, Kent Hovind, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker. It’s a long list.

Many of these scandals are financial—embezzlement, payment of hush money, and so on—and there is a simple and effective way to give the public a glimpse into church finances to spot small problems before they become large scandals. It’s the IRS 990 form.

Churches granted nonprofit status should be more financially transparent than the Mafia.

Nonprofit organizations in the U.S. make a contract: society allows donations to be tax-deductible, and in return those organizations make a summary of their financial records public to show that they used that income wisely. Every nonprofit submits an annual IRS 990 to make its cash flow public—every nonprofit, that is, except churches.

In the same way that the food industry was in bed with politicians in the late 1800s, church leaders are in bed with politicians today. The disclosures in 990s might be embarrassing for churches, so politicians make sure that the exemption stays in place for their friends.

Today, a researcher can use sites like Foundation Center, Charity Navigator, or the IRS itself to bring up financial data on any nonprofit in seconds. For example, we can look up the latest 990 for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Income, expenses, assets, and the salaries of the key employees—it’s all there. In 2019, it had $290 million in total revenue and $147 million in total assets, and Pat Robertson’s salary was $578,464.

It’s ridiculous to imagine that all church financial scandals are behind us. Fortunately, we have a simple solution: the IRS 990 form has been around for 75 years, it’s tuned for large and small nonprofits, and filing one annually should be mandatory for all of them.

Not only is this exemption unfair, it makes churches look like they have something to hide. Given past financial scandals, some do, but this secrecy makes most churches look undeservedly bad. Christians should demand that this exemption be removed. This change would improve the reputation of American churches at a time when a little reputation polishing would be welcome.

11 reasons to remove the church exemption for filing the IRS 990

Transparency can also shield a church from a scandal in another church. Rather than get tarred with the same brush, a church with good stewardship can point to the data showing that they’re more wisely managed.

Seeing the other side of the issue

Now consider arguments for the opposite side of the issue. I don’t think these criticisms hold.

1. Churches are trustworthy. This was the logic behind the church exemption when it was put in place in 1943, but the steady flow of church scandals shows that that assumption was overly optimistic. We’re no longer surprised to read that Ken and Gloria Copeland live tax-free in a $6.3 million “parsonage,” and that Mark Driscoll spent $210,000 of tax-exempt church income to buy his way onto the New York Times bestseller list.

2. Let the churches decide if they want to disclose. In one list of America’s biggest evangelists, seven are religious nonprofits, and they all file 990s as required. The remaining 23 are churches, and none file 990s. 250,000 churches are registered with the IRS, and only two percent file 990s. Churches have been allowed to decide, and they decided to keep their records secret.

3. Mandatory disclosure violates the First Amendment. The First Amendment violation is actually in the other direction. The IRS’s 501(c)(3) category was created to encourage organizations, including churches, to do good within society. Giving churches an exemption from the reporting requirement is the violation. Churches aren’t a law unto themselves, and they must obey laws just like any other organization—laws about building codes, public safety, employee rights, and so on.

4. Filing a 990 is burdensome. Over a million nonprofits already fill out the 990 without complaint.

The 990 has been around for almost eighty years, and it’s evolved. The four-page 990-EZ is for nonprofits with less than $200,000 in revenue and the 990-N, basically a postcard, is for nonprofits with less than $50,000 in revenue.

5. The 990 is unnecessary, because our church provides information to our members. This doesn’t help the ordinary taxpayers filling in for lost tax revenue. In many congregations, access is provided only by request, but anonymous access to public records would be much easier.

If God sees the finances, why not all of us?

6. The 990 is unnecessary because of the ECFA. The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability was created in 1979. Member organizations make a limited financial disclosure to the ECFA (not to the public), and ECFA membership provides a public seal of approval.

Problem 1: Fewer than one church in a thousand belongs to the ECFA. Problem 2: We already have the 990, so why invent something new? The unsurprising answer is that the ECFA reveals less information. The ECFA is transparency with training wheels, not a preventative to scandals.

7. It’s not the government’s job to snoop into churches’ conduct. One defender of the status quo said, “Government should not be determining if a minister is living too lavishly. It’s not for the government to determine if someone really needs an airplane for their ministry. That’s just not something government should be getting into.”

But that’s never been the point of the 990. The 990 could allow the public to decide if a minister is living too lavishly (or if a church is otherwise spending its money foolishly).

Oversight of nonprofits is already crowdsourced to the public with mandatory 990 filings, a nice application of the “sunlight is the best disinfectant” principle. Extending this to include churches adds no bureaucracy. Just take IRS document “Instructions for Form 990” and remove the section titled “Certain religious organizations” from the list of exemptions. Easy.

8. Disclosure would embarrass some churches. Few megachurch leaders would admit this, but this is likely the real reason.

Conventional nonprofits file 990s, and publicly traded corporations file disclosures mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. These disclosures may invite uncomfortable questions, but openness is for the best. If a few churches need to scramble to clean up their acts before their finances become public, that’s a good thing.

Conclusion

Trusting churches to police themselves hasn’t worked, and change hasn’t come through church leadership, who have let politicians know that touching the exemption is a political third rail.

Change will come after citizens become frustrated with the problem and demand change. Better: Christians, we need you to see the problem and demand change. Ordinary Christians would be the biggest winners from removing this suspicious-looking exemption, and they have the political power to make it happen.

My Christian friends, raise this topic with others in your congregation. Forward them this article. Write a letter to the editor. Complain to your congressperson. Do something. Don’t look to church leadership to do it for you. This is your opportunity to change things for the better.

I am ready to meet my Maker.
Whether my Maker is prepared
for the great ordeal of meeting me
is another matter.
— Winston Churchill, on his 75th birthday

Acknowledgment: I found a law journal article helpful, both for the authority of its comments on constitutionality and its extensive research: “The Law and Financial Transparency in Churches: Reconsidering the Form 990 Exemption” by John Montague.

Here’s a new argument for atheism. I call it the Argument from Results.

1. People invent gods
2. This looks like a world in which all gods are manmade
3. Conclusion: probably, all gods are manmade

Note that because of the qualifier “this looks like” (rather than “this is”) in proposition 2, the conclusion must itself be qualified with “probably.” Nevertheless, “probably, all gods are manmade” is a powerful conclusion.

I think we can agree that step 3 is a reasonable conclusion that follows from 1 and 2 (that is, the argument is valid), so let’s consider those premises one at a time.

Premise 1: People invent gods

Sometimes the invention of the supernatural is deliberate. Joseph Smith created the Mormon religion. His story claims that he received golden plates from an angel and translated them into King James English. The story doesn’t hold up, and the skeptical view is that he invented it.

Sathya Sai Baba (d. 2011) was an Indian guru who demonstrated his divinity with clairvoyance, resurrection, healings, materializing small objects, and more. Skeptics say that these were at best magic tricks.

L. Ron Hubbard was quoted as saying in 1948, “If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.” And so he did, with Scientology.

These men seem to have deliberately created false stories, but sometimes the invention is inadvertent. One explanation for the gospels is that individual authors documented their Jesus story as their local church believed it. Oral tradition gradually changed the story, and in different places and different times, the story was different.

(Just for completeness, I’ll note that Robert G. Price argues that that everything in the gospels comes from previous writings—Paul’s epistles or the Jewish Scripture. With this view, the gospels are also deliberately invented. For more, see Price’s comment here.)

Shiva, Quetzalcoatl, Odin, Amun-Ra—mankind has invented thousands of great and lesser gods. On a smaller scale, Christianity has 45,000 denominations with many significant differences in the properties of their gods.

Almost all Christians will happily agree that some gods in the world’s religions aren’t real but were invented by people. Therefore, the premise “People invent gods” is sound.

Premise 2: This looks like a world in which all gods are manmade

Not only do people invent gods, they invent all gods, including the Christian god. Said another way, Christianity isn’t an exception to the “people invent gods” premise.

• Compare how ideas work within religions vs. science. A new scientific idea gets a hearing, and it becomes accepted (and possibly improved) or rejected. While this process can take years or even decades, compare this with religion, where “Here’s a new idea that better explains the facts!” counts for nothing. New religions come into existence, but it’s not because they explain the evidence better. And religions go extinct but not because their claims weren’t backed up with sufficient evidence or their predictions didn’t come true. (More: Why Map of World Religions but not World Science?.)
• The Christian message looks manmade. Christianity is far too complicated to be the message from an omniscient god. Seen another way, an omniscient god who wanted to interact with us would give us a simple, clear, and unambiguous message. To take a quantitative example, the Christian site GotQuestions.org currently brags, “497,388 Bible Questions Answered!” No omniscient god would be proud of that mess. (More: Argument from Simplicity.)
• Christians claim that God loves us and passionately wants a relationship with us. That is contradicted by his hiddenness. (More here, here.)
• Even if believers say that religious truth isn’t clearly perceived but only dimly so (one wonders why god(s) couldn’t clearly convey the message, but ignore that for now), shouldn’t religions be converging? In this scenario, religions worldwide would be sifting clues for evidence of the supernatural. Bits of evidence from religious seekers worldwide could gradually be collected, like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Religions would converge. But, of course, that’s not at all what we see. Christianity alone creates denominations at a rate of two per day, and we see that fertility across religions worldwide, illustrated in the tree of world religions.
• The tree of world religions is like a family tree of world languages. Languages are put close to other languages that they’re related to by history, geography, and linguistic similarities. Similarly, religions can be arranged in a family tree by how they’re related to others by history, geography, and dogmatic similarities. But, like languages, these religions are all manmade. For Christianity to be radically different, as the only one based on a real god, it wouldn’t fit into the tree at all. Nevertheless, ancient Yahweh worship fits in nicely with other Canaanite religions of 3000 years ago, with Christianity as an unsurprising offshoot. (More here.)
• There are lots more reasons here: 25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God.

In all these examples, Christianity doesn’t stand out from the other, manmade gods. It’s the biggest, and that’s about it.

Conclusion: Probably, all gods are manmade

Nevertheless, God might still exist despite the strong evidence for these two premises. God might be deliberately invisible. He could be the Gnostic Demiurge, the builder of the Earth who’s not perfectly good and not all that interested in a relationship. He could be shy or deceitful or evil. He might be a deist god—a clockmaker who wound up the universe and then walked away. For the Christian to carve out a spot for God with any of these attributes, however, is to abandon the Christian conception of God.

A popular Christian response is to flip the argument: “You haven’t proven that God doesn’t exist!” That’s true, but the wise person doesn’t hold beliefs because they haven’t been proven wrong; they hold them because there’s good evidence that they’re right.

World-famous apologist William Lane Craig makes a lot of flimsy arguments, and he’d like the bar set low to make his arguments more credible. All right—let’s lower the bar for this Argument from Results using his logic. Craig advises:

The premises surely don’t need to be known to be true with certainty (we know almost nothing to be true with certainty!). Perhaps we should say that for an argument to be a good one the premises need to be probably true in light of the evidence. . . . Another way of putting this [is:] you should compare the premise and its negation and believe whichever one is more plausibly true in light of the evidence.

Premise 1 is, “People invent gods.” I think most Christians would agree that that’s likelier than “People don’t invent gods.”

Premise 2 is, “This looks like a world in which all gods are manmade.” Is that likelier than its converse, “This looks like a world in which one or more god(s) is real”? I argue that an honest following of the evidence points to the original premise as more likely.

In other words, don’t tell me that you believe the Christian god exists. The question is, what does this world look like? It looks like a world full of made-up gods.

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

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/29/17.)

Image from Brad Higham (license CC BY 2.0)

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In our final thrilling episode with the author and his friend Fred, they are in a natural history museum. Fred wonders if he’s Alexander the Great’s chief eunuch. More precisely, how can he prove that he’s not? He then wonders if history in general is reliable. With forgeries, mistakes, interpretation, and conspiracy, how can we trust any of it?

This is the last post in our series on The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist by Andy Bannister (part 1), which critiques a number of atheist arguments.

So how can we trust history?

Bannister begins with an anecdote. He’s careful to avoid a reasonable question—something like, “Given that we only see Jesus through 2000 years of history and legend, how certain can we be of the Christian story?” No, he tells of someone proposing to dismiss all history as completely unreliable. Bannister explains in careful detail how he publicly humiliated his antagonist.

Bannister tells us that Jesus is a problem for atheists. “Of all the major world faiths, it is really only Christianity that is a ‘historical’ religion, in the sense that history matters to it.” He doesn’t make clear why history matters more to Christianity than, say, Islam.

His complain about Islam is different: “Muslim theology is exceedingly clear that Muhammed was just an ordinary human being.” Yeah, and Mark, the first gospel, makes clear that Jesus was, too. It opens with Jesus being baptized. There’s nothing about Jesus being part of the Trinity or having existed forever. Avoid the Christian dogma, and a plain reading of Mark likewise tells of Jesus as an ordinary human being.

Bannister declares that to defeat Christianity, you must address Jesus and his claims. Of course, we don’t have any claims of Jesus; we have gospels saying he made claims. How reliable is that record? And if history is that big a deal, you must acknowledge that historians scrub out the supernatural. No, historians aren’t the apologist’s friend.

Dawkins uses the game of telephone (“Chinese whispers” in British parlance) to show how the Jesus story is unreliable, but Bannister isn’t buying it. He mocks this approach:

We mustn’t think of Thucydides, or Josephus, or Tacitus, or St Luke as carefully interviewing eyewitnesses, reading sources, and weighing the evidence—goodness, no, they were ignorant ancient yokels, relying on what they half-heard, whispered into their ears, after the stories had made their way through a long line of pre-school children, high on sugar and gullibility.

Where do you start with someone so afraid of honest skepticism that he hides behind straw man arguments like this? Josephus said nothing about Jesus, and Tacitus wrote in the early second century. Thucydides died in about 400 BCE and so is irrelevant; presumably, Bannister uses him to say that the period produced well-respected historians. So therefore all ancient documents are reliable? Nope, that doesn’t follow.

Let’s review some of the historical weaknesses of the Jesus story that follow from Dawkins’ example of the game of telephone.

• There were decades of oral history from event to documentation in the gospels.
• There is a centuries-long period of Dark Ages from the New Testament originals to our best copies (more here and here). We can’t be certain what was modified during that period.
• Much of Christianity comes from Paul, who never saw Jesus in person (more).
• We don’t even know who wrote the gospels (more), which undercuts any claims that those authors were eyewitnesses.
• The gospel of Luke promises that the author is giving a good historical analysis, but why is that believable? You wouldn’t believe an earnest supernatural account from me, so why is it more believable if it’s clouded by the passage of 2000 years?
• Matthew and Luke copy much of Mark, something that an eyewitness would never do.

These are some of the actual problems with the Christian story. For Bannister’s next book, I encourage him to respond to them directly rather than laugh nervously and hope that he can misdirect us elsewhere.

Bannister continues: “If Dawkins is right, then all history is bunk.”

Who’s surprised that that is a mischaracterization of what Dawkins said?

“Historical skepticism is a universal acid, destroying everything it touches.”

If you’re a Bannister fan like me, you’ll remember the “universal acid” argument from earlier in the book. Historians do indeed reject the  supernatural. Universally. And yet history continues along just fine, with skepticism an important tool that is used judiciously.

He declares that the gospels are biographies. Wrong again—they’re better described as ancient biography, which is a quite different genre. An ancient biography isn’t overly concerned about giving accurate facts but with making a point. (For more, see Charles Talbert, What is a Gospel? p. 93–98.)

I’ll distill some of the highlights from the remaining blather.

• Jesus really existed; don’t believe Jesus mythicists! I don’t make the Jesus-was-a-myth argument, and I don’t care whether he was a myth or not. My point is that you have no reason to accept the supernatural claims in the gospels.
• The gospel story isn’t fiction. If it were fiction, why invent these impossible-to-follow moral rules like looking at someone with lust equals adultery? Right—I never said the gospels were fiction. (Though fiction is still more plausible than the supernatural.)
• The gospels weren’t myth. Right—they’re closer to legend. (Jesus probably a legend here; the differences between myth and legend here.)
• He says that the gospels have lots of place names with details about each, which refutes their being fiction. Right—I don’t say that they’re fiction. This is the Argument from Accurate Place Names fallacy.
• He marvels at the fluency of Jesus’s rebuttals to the bad guys. What’s surprising? The Jesus story was honed over decades—I should hope that some compelling anecdotes would come out the other end. The stories that flopped didn’t make the cut.
• He appeals to the Criterion of Embarrassment (the more embarrassing a story, the likelier it’s true) and gives as an example a passage from Mark in which a man calls Jesus “good teacher.” Jesus responds, “Why do you call me good?” Yeah, that’s indeed embarrassing, and you’ve undercut your claims of deity. How does this give me confidence in the supernatural parts? Bannister notes that Jesus died when he should’ve been a conquering hero. So much for him fulfilling the prophecy of the Messiah, eh?
• “If we were dealing with theological fiction, one would expect the edges to be straighter, the language more doctrinally polished.” More to the point, we’d expect that if we were dealing with the words of the omniscient creator of the universe. You’ve nicely shown that it doesn’t hang together and could never have been inspired by a perfect being.
• He gives Lewis’s (false) trilemma—the only possible bins to put Jesus in are Liar, Lunatic, or Lord. Wrong again. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t address the obvious genre: not fiction but legend.

Come to Jesus!

Unsurprisingly, he ends the book with an altar call.

The God of Christianity, the God of the Bible, the God seen in Jesus is a God who isn’t willing to lurk in the shadows, but one who, the Gospels claim, has stepped into space-time and walked into history, who has his nose up against the window and is tapping loudly on the glass, demanding our attention.

Could you get him to tap any louder?

This is the Problem of Divine Hiddenness, which to my mind is the biggest obstacle to Christian belief. How can a god who desperately wants a relationship with us not make that happen? How can he not make his mere existence plain to us? He is omnipotent, right?

Bannister characterizes the tough spot the atheist is in: “Arguments are thus needed, any arguments, no matter how bad, provided we can hammer them like planks across any possible opening [through which God might enter].” We all, deep down, fear that “we are more broken and messed-up than we realize.” But don’t worry, kids! “All is not acidic skepticism, or unyielding despair, or hopeless lostness, or the utter blackness of the void, but that everything that is broken can be mended.”

I know of no atheist suffering from hopeless lostness. Christianity is the solution to a problem that Christianity invented. I think I’ll just discard both problem and solution since I’ve been given evidence for neither. And with it, that condescending characterization of atheists’ desperate position.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/27/17.)

Image from Forsaken Fotos (license CC BY 2.0)

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In today’s episode, our hero is about to enjoy a quiet lunch when he spots Fred, who looks shockingly thin. When offered some lunch, Fred not only rejects the idea but knocks our hero’s sandwich onto the ground. “Haven’t you heard of the Panini poisoner of Pimlico?” Fred asks. It turns out that Fred is now terrified of eating a randomly poisoned sandwich. He refuses to put his faith in the government’s health and safety agency and won’t eat anything without certainty that it’s not poisoned, though by playing it safe, he’s starving himself.

This continues our review of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist by Andy Bannister (part 1), which critiques a number of atheist arguments. This is mercifully the last chapter where he does his childish best to attack atheist arguments. (There’s one final one where he works on the case for Christianity.)

What use do atheists have for faith?

Many atheists say that there is no room for faith in modern society. Bannister gives Sam Harris as an example: “Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse—constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor.” Richard Dawkins says that faith is belief “in the very teeth of the evidence.”

Bannister then mocked the 2012 Reason Rally (which I attended) as an event where “20,000 people rallied for a noun.” You mean a noun like “justice”? Would that be worth rallying for? What about love or peace? Those are nouns—would they get you off the couch? If so, what’s wrong with a rally for “reason”? (And is this what passes for intellectual critique?)

In his typical long-winded style, he imagined an atheist attending the Reason Rally who wondered, How do I know that these other atheists really exist? He mulls over implausible explanations—he could be imagining them, or they could be robots. Could he prove these other “atheists” were who they appeared to be? And then, another question comes to mind: How do I know that any of this is real? He could be a brain in a jar, or he could be hallucinating. Then more questions: How do I know the world is ancient? How do I know hackers aren’t emptying my bank account right now? How do I know my return flight will go safely? How could he be certain? (To give an idea of Bannister’s style, he stretched the story in this paragraph to fill four pages.)

Bannister says that indeed we can’t know for sure, and that’s the role of faith.

“Faith is the opposite of reason!” may make a great bumper sticker or tweetable moment, but when it bangs into reality—the small matter of how each and every one of us lives, every day, in the real world—it fails spectacularly. Try if you wish to live a totally faith-free existence, but that will require doing nothing, going nowhere, and trusting no one. . . . Faith is part of the bedrock of human experience and one on which we rely in a million different ways every day.

Predictably, he’s determined to obfuscate the word “faith.” In fact, it can mean two different things:

• Faith can be belief that follows from the evidence. This belief would change if presented with compelling contrary evidence, and it is often called “trust.”
• Or, faith can be belief not held primarily because of evidence and little shaken in the face of contrary evidence; that is, belief neither supported nor undercut by evidence. “Blind faith” is in this category, though it needn’t be as extreme as that.

(I explore the definitions of “faith” and how they are deliberately misused here).

Acknowledging these two categories, assigning different words to them (may I suggest “trust” and “faith,” respectively?), and exploring the different areas where humans use them isn’t where apologists want to go. In my experience, they benefit from the confusion. They want to say that faith can be misused, but we’re stuck with it, which allows them to bolster the reputation of faith while it opens the door to the supernatural.

Let’s return to the atheist fretting about the safety of his return flight. Bannister wants to compare how we approach those worries—you will never be certain about the safety, but near certainty should be enough—with worries about God’s existence. However, he ignores the fundamental differences between airline flights and God. On one hand we have pilots, planes, mechanical failure, the science of aerodynamics, weather, and so on, and on the other, the supernatural. Not only do theists disagree about the supernatural such that they can’t all agree how many gods there are, every single trait about it could be made up.

See also: How Reliable Is a Bridge Built on Faith?

Putting your faith into practice

Bannister moves on to Christian applications of faith. He imagines falling down a cliff and reaching for a branch to save himself. “What I know [about trees] can’t save me; rather, I have to put my facts to the test and exercise my faith. Now what goes for the tree goes for everything else in life. Facts without faith are causally effete, simply trivia, mere intellectual stamp-collecting.”*

Here again, the comparison fails. Botanists are in agreement on the basic facts about trees, but not even Christians agree among themselves about the basic facts about God. First let’s get a reasonably objective factual foundation for your hypothesis and then we can worry about accepting it. You haven’t gotten off the ground.

With his definition (of the moment) of faith as a quest for evidence, Bannister encourages us to think about some tough questions, questions that he thinks he can answer best. But no, these are not much trouble.

• Why is there something rather than nothing? I’ve responded here.
• What about fine tuning? I’ve responded here and here.
• What holds up the laws of nature? I’ve responded here and here.
• Why does mathematics work? I’ve responded here.
• Where did beauty, meaning, and purpose come from? We can’t be like Douglas Adams’ puddle that marveled that its hole was perfectly tuned to fit it. We adapted to the conditions of our environment; it wasn’t tuned for our benefit or pleasure.

Making a list of God evidence

Bannister proposes that we consider different factors to see if they argue for God, against God, or neither. He gets us started with a few examples.

• Evolution. He uses the Hypothetical God Fallacy (let’s assume God first and select facts to support this conclusion) to say that this fits in the Neither bin (that is, it’s neither pro- nor con-God). Who’s to say that God couldn’t use evolution? Nope: evolution doesn’t prove God, but it explains a tough puzzle, why life is the way it is. And it does it with a natural explanation. This is a vote against God.
• Evil. He concedes that this may be a vote against God, though he falls back on the “How can an atheist say anything is objectively wrong?” fallacy. Atheists don’t make that claim. Atheists are waiting impatiently for evidence that objective morality exists (see here and here).
• Reason. How can there be reason without God?? This is a vote for God. Nope. Reason is an emergent phenomenon. If you’re saying that science has unanswered questions about how human consciousness works (say), that’s true, but Christianity doesn’t win by default. Christianity has never answered any scientific question, so there’s no reason to imagine it will this time. This topic is related to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, to which I responded here.

Bannister concludes: “Do you see how this works?”

Sure, I see how this works: you put your thumb on the scale to get what you want.

“As I fill in these three columns, where does the growing weight of evidence gather?”

You’re 0 for 3 so far. Are you sure you want to continue? Only your cherry picking of the evidence helps support your presupposition.

And then, a page from the chapter’s end, he agrees that, yes, faith can be dangerous, too. But how is this possible, when he’s made clear that it’s how anyone knows anything, from that it’s safe to cross the street to that God exists?

This is the problem he makes for himself when he refuses to make the obvious distinction between belief well-grounded on evidence and not. He doesn’t like this dichotomy because God belief would largely be lumped into the same category as “I just know I’m going to win the lottery this time!”

I’ll wrap up with a comment he made as he encouraged all of us to read or listen to people outside our comfort zone. I agree, of course; I read his book. He says he values Dawkins and the New Atheists “for forcing me to think.”

And I wish he’d force me to think a little more.

See also: Top 10 Most Common Atheist Arguments—Do They Fail?

Final post in this series: Bad atheist arguments: “History is unreliable”.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/23/17.)

Image from flickr (license CC BY 2.0)

*Completely off topic: here’s a clever xkcd cartoon that picks up on that.

You may be saying that atheists and in particular scientists don’t claim that science can explain everything. I agree. Someone needs to tell Bannister that, since he spent a chapter heroically punching at this strawman.

This post will conclude my response (part 1 here.)

You know how authors sometimes put a slogan somewhere on their desk to focus their attention on the core idea of their project? If only Andy Bannister had put up the subtitle of his own book, “The dreadful consequences of bad arguments,” perhaps he would’ve caught a few of his stupid blunders.

The limitations of science

Bannister tells us that science is a great tool, but it’s only a tool. You can’t paint a portrait with a shovel—each tool has limitations. “We need more tools in our philosophical toolkit than just science if we’re going to answer all the wonderfully rich and varied questions that are out there to be explored.”

What do you have in mind? Of course, I agree that physics, chemistry, and geology have limits, but show me a discipline that gives reliable new information that doesn’t use evidence and hypothesis testing—that is, scientific thinking.

As an example of a discipline that’s not strictly science using scientific thinking, consider history weighing the clues for the dating of a particular document. Or philosophy recommending ethical constraints on a new technology. Or economists learning how people respond to incentives. Can disciplines that aren’t science teach us new, correct things? Of course! But they use scientific thinking to get there.

Atheist scientists admit their bias?

To support his position, he quotes geneticist Richard Lewontin who states that scientists “have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. . . . Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Aha! Have the scientists finally admitted their biases? Not at all, if we read what comes next (which Bannister omitted):

. . . we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Lewontin wasn’t saying that we must conclude beforehand that the supernatural isn’t possible but rather that using science with a God option is like blowing up a balloon with a hole in it. You can’t get anywhere since everything must have a God caveat. It’s “F = ma, God willing” or “PV = nRT, if it pleases God.” When you make a measurement in a world where God messes with reality (that is, you “allow a Divine Foot in the door”), what part of that measurement is explained by scientific laws and what part was added by some godly hanky panky?

Where does science fit in?

Bannister wants us to know that he’s a reasonable guy. He doesn’t hate science—far from it.

I’m simply arguing for “science and”—science and the humanities; science and philosophy; science and art; science and history; science and theology. . . . Why can’t we throw open the shutters, fling wide the doors, and embrace a world of knowledge that is vastly bigger and more glorious than just the physical sciences?

That sounds fine, but let’s stick with the scientific method. Andy “Mr. Reasonable” Bannister doesn’t look so reasonable when you notice that he slipped Theology in, hoping we weren’t paying attention. Theology doesn’t use the scientific method, and it’s completely unreliable as a result.

Tell you what, Andy: when Theology can get its own story straight, get back to me and we can reconsider if this discipline actually has anything worth telling us. At the moment, it can’t even figure out how many gods there are or what their names are (more).

In one final attempt to show those smug scientists the limitations of science, he asks about the origin of the universe. He ticks off a few options—it came uncaused from nothing, there’s a multiverse, and the obligatory “God did it.” What’s common about these, he says, is that “each one takes us outside science. . . . [Science] is entirely the wrong tool . . . to explain how we got stuff in the first place.” A hammer is good for hitting nails but bad for telling us where nails came from.

But what tool do we have to study this question besides science?? Bannister wants to drop science, the discipline that has actually told us uncountably many new things about reality, in favor of theology, the discipline that uses faith rather than evidence and has never taught us a single verifiably correct new thing. We know for certain that theology doesn’t work for teaching us new things because it has been tried, and it fails. And if he can’t sleep at night for lack of an explanation for our universe, “God did it” doesn’t help. God becomes just one more thing that needs an explanation.

The obligatory Hypothetical God Fallacy

Bannister wraps up with an appeal to God.

[And if there is a god,] we need to ask the next question: is there more that can be discovered about God than simply what we can discern about him from his handiwork as revealed in the structure of the universe? Is it possible to learn about the artist himself, not just his works?

When I read, “If there is a god,” I might as well have read, “If unicorns exist.” Unicorns don’t exist, so what follows must be unconstrained by reality. And gods don’t exist—certainly not as far as Bannister has convinced us—so what follows can only be speculation about a world that we don’t live in and is therefore completely irrelevant to me. (More on the Hypothetical God Fallacy here.)

I marvel that any Christian can casually drop “If there is a god,” oblivious to how astonishing that speculation is. This progression might help: think of something incredible (say, a unicorn). Now, make it more incredible (a thousand unicorns). Now make it more incredible (a thousand unicorns that grant wishes and cure disease). Keep going with this, and you get to the Christian claim: a god created everything, knows everything, can do everything, is everywhere, cares about you, and will do what you ask him to. It’s the biggest possible claim. Don’t make it without evidence to back it up.

Continue with “Morality doesn’t come from God”

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/18/17.)

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Image from Hey Paul (license CC BY 2.0)

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In today’s opening story, Sven comes downstairs one morning and finds that all the kitchen appliances don’t work. Hmm—he wants to be scientific about this. What do all the failed appliances have in common? They’re white—that must be the problem! So he paints everything and is surprised to find that they still don’t work. When our hero suggests the circuit breaker box, Sven wants to paint that, too.

This continues our review of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist by Andy Bannister (part 1), which critiques a number of atheist arguments.

What causes what?

Sven has confused correlation and causation. Yes, whiteness does correlate to the failed appliances, but was that the cause of the problem? Bannister wants to imagine that this confusion applies to today’s atheists as well. The argument in the hot seat today is the subtitle of Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: “How Religion Poisons Everything.”

Almost everyone is familiar with John Lennon’s “Imagine” (“Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us, only sky”). Bannister says in response:

What I really wanted to question . . . is that quaint suggestion that, if you simply remove religion from the equation, everybody will automatically begin living their lives in peace. Seriously? Is the suggestion really that if we waggled our magic wand . . . and made religion disappear, then instantly we would have brought about universal peace and harmony?

No, most atheists wouldn’t say that. Even Hitchens doesn’t say that. I wouldn’t want to defend “religion poisons everything” myself, but it’s quite different from “religion is the sole cause of all problems,” which Bannister apparently wants to set up as a strawman.

He gives as examples of atheist dystopias the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s China. I agree that even in the absence of religion, conditions can be bad. I think we’re on the same page.

What about “Religion poisons most things”?

Bannister argues that most wars weren’t caused by religion and indirectly cites the Encyclopedia of Wars, which concludes that just seven percent of their catalog of nearly 2000 wars through all of history were religious.

Huh? This is coming from an apologist? “Well, religion didn’t cause most wars!” isn’t much to brag about.

Think of what religion poisons: love and sex will always be tricky to navigate, but religion makes that worse; we’ll always have wars, but religion makes it worse; science isn’t perfect, but religion makes it worse; and so on (h/t commenter Otto).

Bannister wonders, “If it were possible to magically remove all religion from the Middle East, do you imagine that all the competing land claims would instantly vanish?”

Trying to untangle the various religious and political positions in the Middle East is an interesting puzzle, but it’s academic since today’s positions of the various parties happened in part because of religion. How many illegal Israeli squatters in the West Bank justify their position in part because God gave the land to them? How many Muslim suicide bombers were motivated by religious beliefs?

Bannister is again asking if conditions would be blissful without religion. No, they wouldn’t, but Hitchens didn’t say that, and neither would I.

He runs through other categories that can cause problems such as access to scarce water, politics, and business. “The basic problem with ‘religion poisons everything’ is that it’s woefully simplistic and naïve. For sure, religion can sometimes be poisonous, but so can many other things.”

But not really in the same way. Everyone seems to hate politics (at least now and then), and yet it may be a necessary evil. We have to make laws and engage with other countries somehow. Capitalism does a lot of good—it drives the innovation that gave us electronics, transportation, food, and so on—even though greed can get in the way.

What good within religion can’t come from elsewhere?

He wants to imagine that religion is like this—an imperfect product that is a net good. But what good within religion can’t be provided elsewhere? Community, philanthropy, self-improvement, working to improve the lives of the less fortunate—these are human activities. Religion can encourage them, but religion isn’t necessary.

The biggest example in favor of religion for me is groundless hope. When life sucks—I’m talking about Third World, “I’m starving while living in the middle of an interminable civil war” suckage—what keeps you going? Mother Teresa had an answer: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

Teresa’s embrace of suffering is contemptible. But would we want to reproduce groundless hope with secular means? I don’t think so. Instead of the dead end “Just trust God—this is all part of his plan,” shouldn’t we focus on solving the problem? This was what Marx meant when he said that religion is the opium of the people. Marx agreed that religion helped, but only in the same way that opium does—it reduces pain. Let’s concentrate instead on solving the problem rather than merely reducing the pain.

The positive side of the ledger

Bannister says,

Despite all of Hitchens’s flustered fulminations, religion has done some good things, too. Do a little historical delving and you’ll discover from where we got the idea for one or two important things such as universities, hospitals, the modern scientific method, and human rights.

And where was that? Modern universities, hospitals, science, and attitudes toward human rights didn’t come from either the Bible or Judeo-Christian society. They’re the result of thousands of years of tinkering by society. The most generous spin I can think of is that Christianity gave us the germ that became modern universities and hospitals, it didn’t stand in the way of science much, and the Bible can be cherry picked to support modern ideas about human rights.

So where should we put the blame?

Bannister wants to replace “religion poisons everything” with the idea that imperfect humans are the common thread (the word he uses is “fallen”). Solzhenitsyn said, “The line between good and evil passes . . . through the middle of every human heart,” and Christianity is quick with an explanation: original sin.

This Iron Age just-so story, that two people with zero moral understanding disobeyed a moral command that condemned all future generations, does nothing to inform society today because first, it didn’t really happen, and second, it condemns God (more).

Let’s respond to one concluding zinger. Bannister says that, if atheism is true,

Religion simply shows, on your view of the world, just how utterly irrational humans can be: in which case, could you perchance explain precisely why we should trust you and the rest of the New Atheist Illuminati to run the world on enlightened secular principles?

Enlightened secular principles? You mean like those defined in the completely secular U.S. Constitution? This idea of a secular government, the world’s first, is one of the greatest examples the U.S. has set for the world. Its very clear church/state separation is the ally of both the atheist and the believer. Another example: the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). What alternative could Bannister possibly have in mind? You don’t have to ask atheists why enlightened secular principles are wise; just look in every Western constitution.

Continue with “Science can explain everything”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/10/17.)

Image from Konga Access (license CC BY 2.0)

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