Christians who attack atheists need to know their opponent. Sometimes, though, it’s clear they haven’t been paying attention.

I’ve written several posts (here and here) about supposed atheists who want the atheist community to acknowledge the benefits Christianity has provided to society and the powerful arguments in favor of Christianity. I won’t revisit those arguments (read the posts if you want my response), but this category of atheist argument is interesting. Let’s look at another example, this time from an atheist attacking the consequences of the atheist worldview.

There are dozens of Christian articles gushing about this atheist attacking atheism, but the first was “The Inevitable Consequence of An Atheistic Worldview” (2014) at the Cold-Case Christianity blog. I’ll first respond to the atheist’s points and then consider Christian apologists’ reactions.

The atheist speaks

I’ll use a masculine pronoun for this anonymous atheist because he was dubbed “John” in the original article. He begins by stating the atheist’s position, with a goal of showing that we’re all alone.

We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself.

Not exactly. It’s an accident in that there’s no evidence for it being intentional, but there are scientific laws which govern the formation of universes and the creation and evolution of life. That’s a lot more than “random chance.”

While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, [and] civility seem to exist, we know they do not.

Someone needs a dictionary. These words are clearly defined, and, as defined, they exist. What I think he means is that there are no objective or transcendental forms of these traits, just the human-created ones.

This error is widespread among Christians, but et tu, Brute? Sure, atheists aren’t necessarily any wiser or smarter than Christians, but it’s hard to imagine an experienced atheist not seeing this error from the Christian side.

But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it.

I imagine John Nihilist sitting alone in a corner of a café, wearing a beret and a black turtleneck sweater, reading Sartre or maybe Nietzsche, and smoking cigarettes as he sips coffee and muses about the utter meaninglessness of it all. It’s a shame that only objective meaning would satisfy him, because the regular kind works well for the rest of us.

One could wonder if this is a parody (and it gets worse), but since the Christian community has taken it as an honest statement, I’ll interpret it that way, too.

See also: Does This Atheist Have a Point? Or Is This a Sycophantic Poe?

John describes those “dreams, loves, opinions, and desires” as “fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses . . . that’s it.” Humans nurture children, create, and build only because out genes tell us to. We’re just bags of DNA. “Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.”

He says this as if it’s a dark, embarrassing truth, but he’s simply approaching the effect at the wrong level. Let me illustrate with another example. You could talk about love at the chemical level or worse, at the quantum level, but why would you? Not much poetry about love is written at this low level—you should focus instead at the personal level. We don’t disprove that love exists when we can explain the biology behind it.

Are you marveling about the importance of love, or are you interested in neurobiology? Pick one.

Or another example: you can talk about how evolution works with the different species as game pieces that mindless Evolution pushes around like pebbles pushed by mindless waves, but there is no human emotion or meaning at that level. Return to the level of the individual if you want to talk about laws, civility, and morals.

And back to John’s approach: yes, you can look under the hood to see how synapses, genes, and DNA work, but why then add dreams, love, creativity, and family to the same sentence? It’s like a magic show: you can enjoy the show in the audience, or you can peek behind the curtain to see how it all works, but these two approaches don’t mix.

This reminds me of Christian apologist William Lane Craig in anguish when, as a child, he learned that we all die. Yes, Dr. Craig, we all die, but that provides no evidence for Christianity. And yes, John, we can focus on synapses and DNA, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also focus on love, meaning, and morality.

John really jumps the shark when he moves on to morality.

Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

Nothing in your world stops you from raping and murdering? There is in mine. Penn Jillette has already slapped this one down:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

Humans are social animals, and evolution has favored pro-social behavior—trust, empathy, compassion, and so on. According to John, however, atheists like me who don’t ’fess up as sociopaths are “inferior” and “just a little bit less evolved.”

He’s so out of touch that I do wonder if this guy’s for real, but let’s set that aside. What’s more interesting is how he’s been received within the Christian community.

Continued in part 2.

Study one religion, and you’ll be hooked for life.
Study two religions, and you’re done in an hour.
— Anon.

Image credit: Paul Harbath, flickr, CC

This is part 9 of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.

Chapter 9. The Peculiar Case of the Postmodern Penguin

In today’s opening episode, our hero dreams that he’s wandering through a penguin colony. He muses that penguins have meaningless lives, but one penguin speaks up and says that, on the contrary, his life has plenty of meaning. He makes his own meaning. And then he gets eaten by a sea lion. (Which don’t eat penguins, but then we were told that it was a dream.)

Is it possible for life to have meaning if God doesn’t exist?

If humans are just the result of happenstance, isn’t life meaningless? If we protest otherwise, aren’t we just like the penguin? Bannister says that creating meaningful lives for ourselves without God is like a child squashing arbitrary jigsaw puzzle pieces to fit—yes they’ll fit, sort of, but you ignore how they’re intended to go together.

But without God, there is no supernatural intention. There is no Grand Plan, and his problem vanishes.

Bannister says that imagining that we create our own meaning “assumes that the universe cares.” Within the universe, we are insignificant. We can declare that we’ve created meaning, but that has created in the universe no sense of obligation.

Uh, yeah. We obviously are insignificant to the universe, God or no God. We’re stuck on an unimportant dust speck in a corner of one galaxy, one of 200 billion galaxies. The universe doesn’t care; it can’t care.

Bannister continues: “Why should we imagine that the universe owes us something?” (We shouldn’t.) Bannister says that if we’re just the result of physics, “then life doesn’t suddenly acquire meaning just because I say it does.”

Why is this hard? I say that my life has meaning, and that’s it. That’s not a grand platform, but it’s all I’ve got. And it’s all I need. I make no claim for absolute or objective meaning, just my own meaning. Like so many before him, Bannister seems to think that the only meaning is an objective meaning. For this, I point him to the definition of “meaning” in a dictionary.

Next, he considers the fate of the penguin—eaten just as he was pontificating about the meaning he had for his life.

Yeah. Shit happens. It could’ve been our hero who got eaten instead. What’s your point?

He blunders on, promising to point out the “many further problems with the idea that we can mold our own meaning.”

Further problems? I’ve yet to see one. He’s simply observing that living on a planet with scarcity and unfairness means that we will sometimes step on each other’s toes. Sometimes life is a zero-sum game, where for me to win, you must lose. (I can imagine his first day as a legislator. “You mean we have to compromise?!”)

For one of his “problems,” he contrasts meaning in a book, where we can ask the author to resolve differences in interpretation, with an authorless universe where we’re on our own for finding meaning. “Claiming that we have found the meaning is utter nonsense.”

Right—that’s not my claim. But Bannister is living in a glass house. He does claim to know the meaning of life, but his source is the Bible, a book for which there is no the meaning because Christians themselves can’t interpret it unambiguously. Christianity has 45,000 denominations worldwide, increasing at the rate of two per day. The only thing theists in general seem to agree on is that the other guy is wrong. (Read what the map of world religions tells us here.)

In an unguarded moment, I flatter myself that if I could’ve caught Bannister early in this chapter, he would’ve realized that his hysterical rending of garments was based on nothing, but of course that’s naïve. He is like a sleepwalker—it’s not that you shouldn’t wake him up but that you can’t.

But he has more.

“If atheism is true . . . what awaits us—our civilization, our race, our planet, indeed the universe as a whole—is destruction and extinction, no matter what we do.” Obviously. This is news?

“Atheists have a problem: namely that we cannot live as if life is meaningless.” It’s not meaningless, you simpleton! And if the only meaning is objective meaning, show us that it exists. Life as objectively meaningless isn’t depressing; what’s depressing is the hours I’ve spent reading and responding to your pathetic existential handwringing. Jesus Christ—grow a pair and quit whining! Yes, in trillions of years, the universe will eventually grow cold. Deal with it and move on.

“If your life is of the same value to the universe as that of a gnat . . .” You don’t like reality, so you retreat into the bosom of the Christian god? Your problems only multiply. Now you’ve got to explain the Problem of Evil, Problem of Divine Hiddenness, and God’s Old Testament tantrums and support for slavery and genocide. How is this better?

The Christian hard sell

After making his non-arguments, Bannister must think that the customer is softened up for the close. “I believe passionately that Christianity answers those questions better than any other world view I have investigated, not least atheism, which scarcely gets off the starting blocks.”

Sure, you can answer questions, and so can anyone, but is there any reason to believe your answers? Any evidence? You haven’t given me any reason to move Christianity out of the Just Pretend bin.

Bannister gives some questions that he thinks make his case.

• Who am I? You aren’t an accident but were fashioned by God. I was fashioned by God to burn forever in hell? That’s what your book says is the fate of most of us. Jesus said, “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:14). Thanks, God.
• Do I matter? “God was willing to pay an incredible price for each one of us.” An incredible price? Nonsense. Jesus popped back into existence a day and a half after “dying.” The sacrifice narrative is incoherent and embarrassing (more here and here).
• Why am I here? Our purpose “is to know God and enjoy him forever.” Seriously? Yeah, that’s a purpose that will put a spring in my step. Not to help other people, not to make the world a better place, not to eliminate smallpox, but to enjoy God, who won’t get off the couch to make his mere existence obvious.
• Can I make a difference? We can be part of God’s greater purpose. That atheism thing is sounding better all the time. Instead of brainlessly showing up to get an assignment from the foreman, we’re on our own. We are empowered to find our purpose rather than have it forced upon us. Yes, that can be daunting. Yes, we might get halfway through life and realize that we’d squandered much of it. But the upsides are so much greater because there’s a downside. Because we can screw up, it makes the successes that much more significant. And we have ourselves to congratulate for our success.

Bannister moves on to an observation that, from him, is shocking: “I can hear some protest that this all sounds very lovely, but it doesn’t make it true.” Finally! Are we now to get the evidence?

Of course not. Citing his oft-mentioned but ill-supported claim that the only meaning is objective meaning, he calls atheism, not cake, but “the soggy digestive biscuit of grim nihilistic despair.”

Wrong again. You can try to find someone to impose this on, but that’s not me. Ah, well—so much for the possibility of evidence.

And he wraps up the chapter wondering about the consequences of atheism not being true. Because humans desire absolute meaning, purpose, and value “this would make us fundamentally irrational—poor, mad, deluded creatures” and blah, blah, blah. There is no acknowledgement that holding beliefs that conform to the evidence may be the best route to mental health.

Huh?

It’s like Bannister has just reached some major age milestone and has suddenly realized that his generation is now in charge. No longer can he look to his parents’ generation to protect him from reality. But instead of manning up and facing the challenge of making things work best for society, he wants to crawl back under the covers with his footie pajamas and blankie.

Maybe this topic was weaker than most or maybe I’m just getting fatigued by the weight of chapter after chapter of slobber, but I wonder at the praise at the front of the book. For example, “This is a lovely book, which draws deeply on high-quality philosophical, historical, and scientific thinking.” And, “The book is remarkably free of smugness and self-congratulation.” Did we read the same book?

Seeing what passes for meaningful intellectual contribution within Christian circles, I despair of crossing the gulf separating Christians from skeptics.

Continue with part 10.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable
in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
— H. L. Mencken

Image credit: pixabay, CC

This is part 8 of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.

(There are three more chapters after this one. I’ve been hoping that a thorough critique of this book would be an opportunity to respond to good apologetics arguments—or what passes for them. I don’t completely fault the author, as this may be about as good as they get. Though the quality of arguments has been poor, I think that this comprehensive survey has been useful. I hope it continues to be for you.)

Chapter 8. Humpty Dumpty and the Vegan

In today’s opening episode, Fred has become a vegan to satisfy his girlfriend. They’re at a vegan restaurant, and our hero isn’t happy with his unappetizing vegan pizza. He’s shocked when Fred sprinkles tuna on his half. “It’s not meat if it lives in the water,” Fred says. Ducks live in water, so they’re on the menu as well. And cows live near water, so they’re also kosher. He justifies his lax attitude as a “progressive” approach to a vegan diet, though our hero wonders if one can define words according to convenience.

Can words mean whatever you want them to?

Atheists make a big deal about morality—violence and intolerance are bad, while humanism and science are good. Atheists think “that atheists are, in fact, better than religious people, because atheists do good for no ulterior motive.” But is morality a win for atheists, Bannister asks? He gives Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass as an example of someone who defines words however he wants.

I agree that changing definitions to suit your whim is a bad idea, but Bannister might want to get his own house in order first. “Faith” is an important concept that has two incompatible definitions, and many Christians switch between them as convenient to make their argument (more here). Another slippery area for many Christians is morality. They imagine that any moral statement must be a claim to objective morality, even though that’s not how morality is defined (more here).

Bannister demands, “Who gets to define what the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’ mean?”

Uh . . . humans? The definitions are in the dictionary. But if he’s asking how we put moral actions into the Good bin or the Evil bin, we do it with the imperfect sense of right and wrong that we got from evolution and society (more here and here). If he wants to carve out a spot for God and show that only with godly insight can we have morality, he’s done nothing to argue for that.

He notes that as long as two people with very different views on things “can agree not to try to suggest that the other one is wrong, everybody can get along famously.”

But of course, we often correct each other’s morality. We talk it over. We debate. We argue. Can he have never seen how humans try to resolve disagreements? It’s not always pretty, and minds often don’t change. But no supernatural is required to explain morality, as he wants to imagine.

Tough love time!

Bannister makes clear our error:

Quite frankly, my first reaction, when I meet anybody who tells me that they sincerely believe that we decide what is ‘good’ and ‘evil’ based on our preferences or our feelings is to lean over and steal something from them. When they protest (“Give me back my seal-skin gloves!”), I simply say, innocently and sweetly: ‘But I thought you said “good” and “evil” were just questions of personal preference. Well, my preference is that I’m smitten with your mittens.’ That usually changes the conversation quite rapidly.

Does he really want to steal my stuff? If that doesn’t fit with my plans, then I have society and the law to back me up. Theft where I come from is illegal. But if he’s just making a point, what’s the point? That people can steal things? Yes, they can—is that a revelation? We live in an imperfect society with many moral disagreements. If harm is involved, that’s usually central to society’s resolution of the problem.

Maybe he’s saying that his stealing something will snap me out of my simplistic reverie and return me to the real world. But what insights does he imagine he’s given me—that people don’t like being stolen from? That we share morals? We already know that. None of this argues for objective morality.

Next, Bannister moves on to fret if might makes right.

Yeah—sometimes it does. The Allies defeated Germany, so guess whose laws were used during the Nuremburg Trials. A German concentration camp commandant might have honestly thought that he was carrying out a noble mission, that he was right. However, the Allies disagreed, and since they won the war, they decide the standard of “right” used in the court.

In the West today, criminal defendants sometimes say that they were unjustly convicted. Is it right that they be punished? Not objectively so, but there’s no reason to imagine objective morals. Appeals may overturn a conviction, but until that point, might will prevail. It’s the best approximation to right that we have.

Consequences of the secular viewpoint

Bannister moves on to highlight some of the problems with human morality, and I largely agree with his concerns. What he wants to imagine is that he can solve these problems with a godly morality. And maybe he could, if such a morality existed, but he never gets beyond the, “Wouldn’t this be nice?” phase.

Challenge 1: If we go back to the 1950s and tell people that in 2017 we’re largely pleased that same-sex marriage is finally legal, most people would be horrified. Now imagine that the tables are turned so that we are the horrified, regressive people compared to people in society fifty or a hundred years in our future. What society declares as “good” changes with time.

Response: Obviously. Morality changes, and each society thinks that it has things largely figured out, though there are moral dissidents in each society, some longing for the morality of the Good Old Days and some pushing new attitudes that will gradually become accepted.

This causes no problem for my position, but I’m not the one who needs to justify the Bronze Age morality in the Old Testament.

Challenge 2: Without God, you can (1) let everyone decide good and evil for themselves. Or (2) the state decides, but then might makes right. With (1) morality is impossible, and with (2) morality is meaningless. In both cases, you have no absolute authority with which to overrule another person or state. But there is a solution: “If goodness were something bigger than us, something outside us. Only then could ethics, morality, and law actually work.”

Response: You know what it’s like to tell a joke and have it fall flat? That’s like Bannister’s Hail Mary suggestion that ethics, morality, and law might actually work if God were behind it. He supports this claim with nothing. He imagines that God is the authority that will resolve moral dilemmas, but how is that possible when you can find Christians today on every side of every moral issue?

Challenge 3: Sam Harris wants to use science to find morality. “I do give Harris credit for at least realizing something that many other atheist writers have failed to grasp—that atheism has a major problem when it comes to the question of goodness.”

Response: Atheism says nothing about goodness. That’s not a problem, just like it’s not a problem in chemistry or geology. It’s not supposed to—atheism is simply a lack of belief in god(s).

There are more, but you get the idea. He imagines that atheists are made uncomfortable by his tough hypotheticals. If his questions are uncomfortable, that’s only because they make me reach for a barf bag. They’re not driven by evidence. They’re forced. That reminds me of Christopher Hitchens charging a Christian with “trying to slip God through customs without declaring him.”

With Bannister’s argument, we never discover God waiting inevitably at the terminus of a logical sequence of evidence; rather God is shoehorned in. It might sound cute coming from a five-year-old, but it’s obnoxious coming from an adult. “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a god to put things right for us?” Maybe, but why bring it up? Wouldn’t you like a unicorn, a submarine, and a ham sandwich? Maybe, but how does that fit into the conversation?

Bannister asks us where morality comes from, and he desperately wants us to pick God. Sorry—natural explanations are sufficient.

Continue with part 9.

Any God who would grant prayers for football championships
while doling out cancer and car accidents to little boys and girls
is unworthy of our devotion.
— Sam Harris,

Image credit: Wikipedia

Read part 1 of this series on an American Atheist monument installed on public property in Florida as a protest against a Ten Commandments monument.

The left side of the monument contains this statement from the Treaty of Tripoli (1797), a treaty between the United States and the Muslim state that controlled the coast of what is now Libya:

The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.

That’s pretty straightforward. The young United States wanted to make clear that it had no religious motives for antagonism with any Muslim countries.

Benjamin Wiker, the Christian whose article I’ve been critiquing, doesn’t want to accept the obvious conclusion that the United States was not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. He raises two points.

WWFFD? (What Would the Founding Fathers Do?)

There are hundreds of other quotes [besides this treaty] from the Founders that show a Christian, or at least a Deist, grounding of their views.

Okay, so what?

Maybe in addition to supporting Christianity, some of the founders also liked fishing. Maybe they also believed in astrology. Maybe they also ate meat. Do we conclude then that the United States was founded for the benefit of fishermen or astrologers or carnivores? That it gives those people some sort of advantage over their fellow citizens? That the Constitution was inspired by the lore or wisdom from those activities?

Of course not. If the founding fathers wanted to institutionalize the eating of meat, for example, they had their chance. They could’ve put it in the Constitution, but they didn’t. The same is true for Christianity: if the founding fathers wanted Christianity to have some sort of advantage or cherished place or even acknowledgement within society, the Constitution would say so. It doesn’t.

Maybe Wiker is saying something else. Maybe he’s saying that Christianity is the origin of some of the ideas that are so foundational to American society and that the founders borrowed from Christianity.

If that’s the point, it’s a ridiculous one. Not only did democracy, limited government, freedom of religion and speech, the right to a jury trial, and prohibition against slavery not come from the Bible, most of these principles conflict with the Bible. How do we know? Because when Christianity was in charge in Europe a thousand years ago, those principles weren’t in effect!

If the Constitution is inconvenient, try elsewhere

Next, Wiker points to the Declaration of Independence,

which claims that the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” are the proper foundation of a nation, and that human beings “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” which must be respected by any government.

Whoa—you don’t want to go there. “Nature’s God” was understood as a deist reference at that time. This is not the Christian god.

And let’s see who’s in charge. The Declaration of Independence says that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” No, government doesn’t turn to God for its authority but to the people.

And what do you do when government becomes abusive? Do you appeal to God then? Nope. The Declaration says:

Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The government rules at the pleasure of the people, not God.

Wiker wants to trump the Treaty of Tripoli with the Declaration of Independence, but neither is law. The Constitution is, and it creates a secular government.

Radical secular atheism?

His knockout blow to the idea that the Treaty of Tripoli is relevant is:

we do not find support for the American Atheist’s notion that America should be grounded in a secular atheist government that is as radically opposed to Deism as it is to Christianity.

I don’t know what he’s talking about. The Constitution demands a secular government with no favors given or constraints imposed on Christian belief or unbelief. In a public school, the Christian can’t say a public prayer, and the atheist can’t explain why the Christian god doesn’t exist. If Wiker is worried about a government that imposes atheism (and therefore makes things difficult for Christians and other believers) then I’m on his side, but I’m pretty sure that American Atheists’ goal of imposing this on America is just his fantasy.

After all this, perhaps I should’ve cut to the chase earlier: I never point to the Treaty of Tripoli in my discussions with Christians. Wiker doesn’t want me using it, and I don’t want to. It is tempting, given that it so clearly faces the question, but it’s an obscure treaty that’s no longer in effect. I see why atheists find it attractive, but I think that it’s too complex to make an effective argument.

What I do instead is point to the Constitution. If the founding fathers had wanted this to be a Christian country, that’s where they would’ve said so. They didn’t.

Continue here

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,
because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
— Susan B. Anthony

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/11/13.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

This is the conclusion of a response to Andy Bannister’s attack on the atheist argument, “Science can explain everything.” (Part 1 here.) You may be saying that atheists and in particular scientists don’t make that argument. I agree. Someone needs to tell Bannister that.

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 Bannister had put up the subtitle of this 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 us reliable new information (say, philosophy recommending ethical standards for a new technology or economists understanding how people respond to incentives) that doesn’t use evidence and hypothesis testing—that is, scientific thinking.

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 the result of 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.

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 dun 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 new thing that can be verified.

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 hypothetical. 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 isn’t ours and is therefore completely irrelevant to me. (More on the Hypothetical God Fallacy here.)

I marvel that any Christian can casually drop in that phrase, oblivious to how bold a speculation it is. This progression might help: think of something incredible (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.

Continued to part 8.

Faith is a process substitute
the way margarine is a dairy product.
— commenter Greg G.

Image credit: Hey Paul, flickr, CC

This is part 7 of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.

Chapter 7. The Lunatic in the Louvre

In today’s opening episode, Fred takes our hero to the Louvre but then drugs him in the cafeteria. When he awakes that night, he first thinks that Fred plans to steal the Mona Lisa, but no, he just wants a paint sample to test. Why can’t Fred just find what he wants on Wikipedia? Because he’s a scientist and insists on doing his own research.

To attempt to tie this to reality, Bannister quotes Nobel Prize winner Harry Kroto, “Science is the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any degree of reliability.” But just two sentences later, Bannister bungles that into, “Science can answer any and all questions.” Yes, that is quoted accurately. And no, that’s not even close to what the scientist said.

In previous chapter critiques, I’ve defended the atheist argument against Bannister’s attacks. But I don’t defend this argument because no one makes it. No one makes it, that is, except theists who seem to be drawn to strawman arguments like flies to garbage.

Can science answer ethical questions?

Back to Bannister. “If the scientist in question is opining . . . that Science Can Explain Everything, well we need to point a few things out.”

Oh, good. We’re about to get schooled by a guy who can’t correctly paraphrase a simple idea.

Bannister challenges us: “What is the value of a human life?” How would atheists answer this with science alone? A chemist might tally the value of the salvageable chemicals inside a human body. An economist could look at the net contribution to the economy of each person. But surely humans have an intrinsic value that science can’t tell you.

How do we compute the value a human life?

We all know how a human life can be given a financial value when you look at how life insurance works. Or we can weigh the cost of an improvement in food or road safety, for example, against the number of lives it will save. This computation isn’t horrifying; it’s something we’re familiar with.

But Bannister probably wants a more intangible or intuitive approach. He’d probably say that we all feel that one human life is worth more than one animal life. Or do we? When Harambe, a lowland gorilla (which, as a species, is critically endangered), was killed in 2016 to protect a four-year-old boy who had fallen into his zoo enclosure, many criticized the zoo for its actions, and the boy’s mother received torrents of online outrage for her supposed negligence.

Your life is more valuable than the life of a slug or a rat, but would it be more valuable than the last breeding pair of bald eagles? What’s more valuable—the life of a random stranger you will never meet or your beloved pet? Is a human life so precious that capital punishment is immoral?

Another example is Peter Singer’s drowning child experiment: you pass a pond with a child drowning. There are no difficulties stopping you from wading out and rescuing the child except that you would ruin your $500 shoes. Would that stop you? Of course not—anyone would sacrifice an expensive pair of shoes to save a child’s life. But that means that saving a life is worth $500 to you. Now suppose a nonprofit organization that provides bed nets to protect children from malaria-carrying mosquitoes (or some similar project) shows you how a $500 donation would save one life or more. Most people would discard this appeal after a few seconds’ consideration, including those who would have sacrificed their shoes.

Using science to uncover and explain moral conclusions

That was a detour, but I think it was relevant to Bannister’s challenge that we find the value of human life without appealing to something outside science. My point is first that we can indeed put a crass monetary value on human life. We do it all the time. And second, Bannister’s unstated supernatural valuation of human life is probably a cheery declaration that God made Man the pinnacle of his creation, QED, and yet it’s more complicated than that.

Let me now directly respond to his challenge. Our moral programming tells us (in general) to value human life over other kinds of life. Why is this? It’s a product of our evolutionary path, which is explained by science. When legislators evaluate a proposed improvement to a dangerous intersection, they uncover and follow evidence and test hypotheses to make their decisions—and that’s the scientific method. What’s unexplained?

Bannister reminds me of the child who mindlessly asks “Why?” in response to every statement. He asks, “Why is the pursuit of knowledge a good thing?” and “Why is it wrong [for a scientist] to lie about [experimental] results?”

Well, little Andy, lying slows down knowledge finding, and knowledge is good because sometimes we can use it to improve life—eliminate a disease or improve food production, for example. Why is that good, you ask? Because we seek happier, healthier lives—that’s just how we’re programmed. “Good” in this case is defined by our programming, put there by evolution. There’s no need to appeal to the supernatural to explain this.

Continue to part 7b.

If science can’t detect your God,
your priests can’t either.
— commenter Pofarmer

Image credit: Wikimedia