Is it really true that “In God We Trust”? With what do we trust him? It might indeed make Christians feel warm and fuzzy to see that motto on U.S. currency, but do they actually believe it?
Using prayer as a little extra insurance when times are tough is one thing. But who would pray instead of using evidence-based means? Who would pray for safe passage across a busy street rather than looking and using good judgment? Who would pray that God would fix a car rather than a mechanic? Who would pray for healing rather than use a cure proven effective by modern medicine?
That is, who would actually trust that God will take care of important things without some sort of safety net?
Indeed, the government has made clear that that’s not the way things work. In response to preventable deaths among minors within the Followers of Christ church, Oregon recently removed laws protecting parents who rejected medical care for their children in favor of faith healing.
As noted in the excellent American Humanist article “In God We (Do Not) Trust,”
It is tantamount to the state saying, “Sure, it looks great on a coin, but come on you idiot, it’s not as though this god stuff actually works.”
For atheists, “In God We Trust” on currency and as the official motto of the United States is one of those pick-your-battles things. It’s in blatant violation of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …”), but issues such as injury from faith healing are more important and deserve more attention.
But let’s look for a moment at what we discarded to make room for this motto. E Pluribus Unum (Latin for “Out of many, one”) was the de facto motto before the adoption of “In God We Trust” in 1956. That certainly showed those atheist commies which side of the theological fence we were on, but this came at a price.
One trait that is special about America is that we’re composed of people who came from all over the world to pull in the same direction to make a great country.
Out of Many, One. Which country would this motto fit better than America? Out of Many, One—a custom-made inspirational reminder of who we are and where we came from.
And we flushed it down the toilet in favor of “In God We Trust,” a one-size-fits-all poncho that could be worn by a hundred countries. (This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/23/11.) Photo credit:kevindooley
I’ve been a fan of some of the Patheos blogs for awhile and am delighted to be part of this diverse group!
This blog is a civil but energetic critique of Christianity from an atheist viewpoint, and I write about Christian apologetics, atheism, and the impact of Christianity on society.
I’ve been blogging for over a year at the Cross Examined and Galileo Unchained blogs and will be focusing just on Cross Examined here at Patheos. I’ll be gradually reposting some of my old material to this new audience.
My journey to atheism was uneventful. I was raised Presbyterian. Christianity never did much for me, so I fell away from religious practice in college. Years later, a long email debate with a young-earth Creationist got me thinking, and I just couldn’t stop. He changed me from an apatheist (“Who cares whether there’s a god or not?”) into an atheist—probably not what he intended.
I’ve written a book about Christian apologetics, perhaps the first novel to explore the arguments for and against Christianity. You can find Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey at Amazon.
I look forward to your comments. Any suggestions for new topics—things about Christianity or atheism that bug you or questions you have—would also be much appreciated. Find my contact information on the About page.
Bob Seidensticker
Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left but a dull, cold, scientific world. I am left with only art, music, literature, theatre, the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit, sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination, dreams, oceans, mountains, love, and the wonder of birth. That’ll do for me.
— Lynne Kelly
Pascal’s Wager imagines belief in God as a wager. Suppose you bet that the Christian god exists and act accordingly. If you win, you hit the jackpot by going to heaven, and if you lose, you won’t have lost much. But if you bet that God doesn’t exist, if you win, you get nothing and if you lose, you go to hell. Conclusion: you should bet that God exists.
A thorough critique of the many failings of this argument will have to wait for another post. But this argument is easily turned around to make the Atheist’s Wager. If God exists and is a decent and fair being, he would respect those who used their God-given brains for critical thinking. He would applaud those who followed the evidence where it led. Since God’s existence is hardly obvious, he would reward thoughtful atheists with heaven after death.
But God would be annoyed at those who adopted a belief because it felt good rather than because it was well-grounded with evidence, and he would send to hell those who misused his gift of intelligence.
Here it is formulated as a syllogism:
God treats people fairly and will send honest, truth-seeking people to heaven and everyone else to hell.
God set up the world without substantial evidence of his existence.
Therefore, God will send only atheists to heaven.
The Atheist’s Wager can be different than Pascal’s Wager in that Pascal is assuming the Christian god, while the Atheist’s Wager can imagine a benevolent god. The difference is that the actions of the benevolent god can be evaluated with ordinary human ideas of right and wrong, while Christians often must play the “God’s ways are not our ways” card to explain away God’s occasional insanity as recorded in the Bible. For example, no benevolent god would send one of his creations to rot in hell forever. Or support slavery. Or demand genocide.
Of course, if a non-benevolent god exists, and the Christians stumbled upon the correct way to placate him, then the atheist is indeed screwed. But then we’re back to the fundamental question: why believe this? Photo credit:maorix
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I recently returned from the Orange County Freethought Alliance conference. Though a local conference, it had an impressive lineup. Of course, they had an advantage with some well-known Los Angeles-area speakers: Michael Shermer (Skeptic magazine), Phil Zuckerman, Jim Underdown, Brian Dunning, Mr. Deity (Brian Dalton), Eddie Tabash, and Heina Dadabhoy (Muslim blogger at Skepchick.org). But they also had some great out-of-towners: Robert Price, Aron Ra, Richard Carrier, Barbara Forrest (expert witness in Kitzmiller v. Dover), David Silverman, and Dan Barker (FFRF).
I’ll give some (probably disjointed) highlights.
David Silverman, president of American Atheists, said that the next Reason Rally is scheduled for 2016 (location unknown). He also said that Fox News has reported that they will become more centrist.
Lawyer Eddie Tabash emphasized that the next president will almost surely pick a Supreme Court justice to replace Justice Ginsberg (now 79 years old) at least. He spoke about being at the recent $15 million Obama fundraiser hosted by George Clooney. When he got his two minutes with Obama, Tabash quipped, “I am the first atheist in history to be in the presence of his savior.”
To emphasize the judicial predicament that thoughtful Americans are in, he gave this fun quote:
Disfavoring practicing homosexuals in custody matters promotes the general welfare of the people of our State. … The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle… Homosexual behavior is a ground for divorce, an act of sexual misconduct punishable as a crime in Alabama, a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.
That’s Alabama Supreme Court judge Roy Moore referring to a 2002 custody case involving a lesbian mother. He was later removed from office after refusing to remove a stone monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse. (Perhaps that humiliation is a selling point to some voters since he’s the favorite to regain his former job this November.)
In June 2005, Justice Antonin Scalia stated that
The [First Amendment’s] Establishment Clause … permits the disregard of devout atheists.
And Clarence Thomas has said that the Establishment Clause limits only the federal government, not state governments. That is, in his mind state governments aren’t bound by the constraint to “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Sounds more like April Fool’s Day than that these are the considered opinions of state and federal Supreme Court justices.
On a lighter note, Brian Dunning (Skeptoid podcast) gave a puzzle. The full moon is the same size as what held at arm’s length? Is it a ball bearing, a pea, a dime, a nickel, a quarter, a silver dollar, a plum, or a baseball? (The answer is below.) This was an especially apt puzzle since we had a spectacular partial (80%) solar eclipse at the end of the conference.
Dunning gave himself as an example of how tenacious false beliefs can be. After he concluded that vitamin C had no effect on colds, it took a year to wean himself off of it. This is like Greta Christina’s gradual acceptance of the lack of evidence for glucosamine as joint medicine or Sam Harris’s Fireplace Delusion. It helps to understand our own blind spots when we try to understand those of other people.
Richard Carrier, newly famous because of his online argument with Bart Ehrman about the Jesus Myth theory, talked about the fine-tuning argument. It was a good talk and especially helpful because I’d read Vic Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning and hadn’t gotten the concise summary that I was hoping for. I’ll leave a more detailed summary of this talk for later.
Michael Shermer talked about “The Moral Arc of Reason.” He noted that asking, “Why should we be good without God?” is like asking “Why should we be hungry (or jealous or happy or any other human feeling) without God?” These are all natural feelings with plausible natural causes.
He used graphs and statistics to argue that things are getting better within society (wars, income, and other social metrics), much like Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. But why is this not simply an aberration? Why imagine that this is a legitimate trend within society and not cherry picking of the data? Shermer argued for a moral equivalent of the Flynn Effect, the startling effect that has caused an increase in average IQ scores of about three points per decade, perhaps for as long as a century. The Flynn Effect has been (tentatively) explained with the hypothesis that modern society has trained us to be better in abstract reasoning (mentally moving 3D shapes, for example). Perhaps there is a moral equivalent at work as well, that modern society has given us a new appreciation for peace and harmony.
I have long been fascinated with the work of Phil Zuckerman, who (along with Gregory Paul) has shown the far better social metrics of less-religious countries compared to the religious U.S. Zuckerman talked about the new Secular Studies major he developed at Pitzer.
Barbara Forrest of SE Louisiana University, an expert witness in the Dover trial, says that “critical analysis of evolution” and “academic freedom” are some of the new creationist code words.
Jim Underdown is a paranormal investigator who will be on Dr. Phil debunking psychics this week (“Inside the Other Side,” 5/25/12). He noted that the Bible’s miracle claims are similar to today’s paranormal claims, which have been tested and debunked. The one million dollar JREF prize for a successful paranormal demonstration remains unclaimed, for example.
The answer to Brian Dunning’s puzzle: the full moon is the same size as a pea held at arm’s length. My guess was a dime, so I need to try this myself to verify it.
Played at the conference, here’s Jesus singing “I will survive” (a must-see if you haven’t watched this before).
I’m off to the Freethought Alliance Conference in Irvine, CA this weekend, so I’ll be a little slow with blog posts for a few days.
This should be an interesting event, with a Who’s Who of atheist speakers—Michael Shermer, Robert Price, Phil Zuckerman, Aron Ra, Richard Carrier, Brian Dunning, Mr. Deity, Dan Barker, Eddie Tabash, and others. I’d like to put copies of my book into the hands of some of these speakers. I’m sure that most won’t read it, but I want to add to my collection of positive reviews and hope that this increases the chance that someone will open doors for the book.
As an aside, has anyone noticed that there are more atheist/freethought conferences lately? I’m fairly new to this game—the first conference that I attended in this category was The Amazing Meeting 2 in 2004. But this could simply be my being more aware of them. Let me know if you sense that conferences have changed in the last decade, either on the freethought side or the Christian side. Photo credit:Wikipedia
“Does God Exist?” This was the topic at a public debate I attended on Monday. Here’s a brief summary. See how you would respond to the points that were raised.
The moderator started with Ian Barbour’s four criteria for assessing hypotheses:
1. Agreement with Data. We never have proof (outside of mathematics and logic), but we can provisionally accept the hypothesis that fits best with the data.
2. Coherence. A new hypothesis should be consistent with and support already-accepted theories. If not, it had better be a pretty compelling hypothesis. Simpler is better.
3. Scope. Broader is better.
4. Fertility. What new things can this hypothesis tell us? What predictions can it make? What new questions does it invite?
The two speakers were Lutheran pastor Gary Jensen (also a member of Reasons to Believe, an old-earth Creationist organization) and humanist and lawyer Jim Corbett.
I felt that Corbett won the event. Call me biased, but his arguments were much more concrete. Rev. Jensen was comfortable speaking to the crowd of roughly 200 people, but his arguments were shallow. I’ll do my best to give highlights of each speaker’s points. For Rev. Jensen, I’ll add occasional comments.
Jensen spent much of his opening statement speaking in what (to my mind) were tangential generalities: quoting famous people, asserting that we must follow the evidence wherever it leads (Socrates? Sartre?), showing how the Bible encourages a sensible interaction with nature, giving a summary of the progress of the modern cosmological view, and so on. He said that the Bible is the only religious story with a cosmic beginning. (Huh?)
He got to his first claim with a reference to the fine tuning argument, but he simply pointed to Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees. (Okay, that’s a data point, but it’s hardly an argument.)
In talking about cosmology, he threw in the term “Darwinism.” (Ouch—that may due to too much hanging out with the Reasons to Believe guys.)
He talked about God as a given and made a mistake that I see frequently—confusing statements about his beliefs (which he made) with an apologetic argument (which he didn’t).
He cited Sir William Ramsay’s argument that Paul’s journeys documented in Acts are accurately described and therefore the gospel story is likely also accurate. (No: that the names and places Paul documents are the least we’d expect of a book that claims to be historical. This is no argument that the supernatural claims are accurate. The Harry Potter books accurately refer to London, but that is no evidence that the supernatural elements are accurate.)
He cited Antony Flew’s There is a God as evidence of a smart person who changed his mind. (This was a mistake. I’ve read the book. First, it was ghost-written, and second, the arguments that supposedly turned Flew into a deist are scientific arguments. The critique by a non-scientist of scientific arguments is uninteresting to me.)
Modern science was hatched in a Christian culture. (Okay, and it was a carnivorous culture as well. So what? I see no cause and effect here. To argue that a Christian culture was necessary to birth Science, you must provide evidence.)
Jensen made a vague reference to professors “kicked out” for being Creationists and gave Guillermo Gonzalez as an example. (I wonder if he’s read the other side of the story. That there is another side doesn’t make Jensen’s claim wrong, but it is mandatory that he at least be aware of it.)
He says that he encourages free inquiry but that scientists who reject the supernatural are therefore closed-minded.
He referred to information in DNA (that some protozoa have 200 times the DNA that humans do shows that DNA isn’t “designed” as we use the term) and absolute morality (that we see considerable social evolution from biblical morality to today’s morality overturns this notion).
Corbett had some interesting points (any transcription errors are my fault):
We have a moral responsibility to treat supernatural claims with skepticism. Otherwise we open ourselves to every snake oil salesman.
Religion is the only impediment to science education in America, and science education is tied to national security.
We’ve found clues of python worship in Botswana from 70,000 years ago, our earliest evidence of God of the Gaps thinking—that is, God lives in the gaps where science says, “we don’t know.” In this pre-scientific world, this was understandable and even laudable. But in the 21st century, it’s inexcusable.
Lawrence Krauss called God of the Gaps thinking “cowardly.”
When Christianity was in charge, we called that the Dark Ages.
One imam helped stifle the Islamic Golden Age, and we’re seeing the same thing in America.
Corbett concluded with an interesting parallel. It took about 300 years from Christianity to go from having negligible impact (at the death of Jesus) to being the official religion of the Roman empire (by the Council of Nicaea). If you count Darwin’s Origin of Species as the beginning of modern atheism in the West, we’re halfway through our 300-year transition period. Polls indicate that religion is declining, new knowledge explains away God, and God of the Gaps thinking is no longer necessary.
I’m not sure if that should be seen as optimistic (we’re making good progress) or pessimistic (we have a long way to go) or even unrealistic (Christianity has weathered storms before and we mustn’t count it out), but it’s an interesting parallel. Photo credit:YouTube
Related posts:
Is it really true that “In God We Trust”? With what do we trust him? It might indeed make Christians feel warm and fuzzy to see that motto on U.S. currency, but do they actually believe it?
I’ve been a fan of some of the Patheos blogs for awhile and am delighted to be part of this diverse group!
Pascal’s Wager imagines belief in God as a wager. Suppose you bet that the Christian god exists and act accordingly. If you win, you hit the jackpot by going to heaven, and if you lose, you won’t have lost much. But if you bet that God doesn’t exist, if you win, you get nothing and if you lose, you go to hell. Conclusion: you should bet that God exists.
I recently returned from the 
I’m off to the 
