What would the world look like if theism or Christianity were true? And what would it look like if naturalism were true—that is, that nature alone explains what we see?
We’re comparing these two worldviews to see which one matches reality best. (Part 1 here.)
Morality
Theism predicts that religion’s moral teachings would be timeless and progressive. The wisdom of heaven might appear crazy to us simple humans, but time after time we’d follow it and discover that it did indeed improve society.
The Bible declares that Christians don’t sin: “No one who is born of God practices sin” (1 John 3:9; see also 3:6, 5:18). With the Christian church run mostly by sinless Christians, the Church’s morality should likewise far outshine that of other institutions.
In fact, Christianity is conservative, not progressive. It is always late to the party, following society after it embraces a new moral outlook. Christianity must be conservative because it is built on the premise that it’s already got things figured out. New ideas—abolition of slavery, democracy, civil rights for all—catch the church off guard. Sometimes the church is mobilized on some of these issues (William Wilberforce against slavery or Martin Luther King for civil rights, for example), but why are these positions not plainly in the Bible? Why did it take close to 2000 years to get on the right side of change? In these examples, the church was merely a tool used by change makers, not the instigator of change.
Christians were on both sides of these moral issues, as is true for any modern moral issue such as same-sex marriage, gay rights, abortion, or euthanasia. Pick the right Bible verses, and God can be used like a puppet and made to support either position. Pick other verses, and God admits to a long list of moral crimes.
As for the church clearly being a morally superior institution, the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal is merely the most recent moral lapse. You can make the bad-apples argument to sacrifice the individuals for the benefit of the institution, but that simply makes a lie of Bible’s claim that Christians don’t sin. The church becomes yet another large club that occasionally abuses power with no special claims of moral superiority over any other—so much for the guiding hand of God.
The Bible has a lot to answer for. The Old Testament in particular supports moral positions—genocide, slavery, polygamy, and human sacrifice, for starters—that modern society has long rejected. No, not all moral positions in the Bible are timeless.
Christianity declares that morality is grounded exclusively in its god, but then it has a hard time explaining why other cultures without Christian dominance, both current and historical, seem to understand morality just fine. The Problem of Evil—the existence of gratuitous evil despite God taking a loving hand in our lives—also argues against Christianity.
Mind
Theism predicts a mind independent of the body that persists as a soul after the body dies.
In fact, “mind” is just what brains do. The mind’s capability is tied to the capabilities of the brain, and that changes as someone grows from child to mature adult to elderly adult. That capability changes due to physical causes such as being tired, sleepy, stressed, hungry, drunk, or drugged. Damage the brain with dementia or physical injury and you damage the mind, as the story of Phineas Gage illustrates. The fortunes of the mind parallel those of the brain, and no evidence supports an unembodied mind.
Not only do we have a natural explanation for the mind, but physics shows that there is no room for a supernatural soul. There is yet more physics to learn, but we know enough about the physics of our world to know that no as-yet-to-be-found quantum particles could hold or convey the soul.
Growth of religion
Theism predicts that heaven would favor the correct religion.
Christianity did thrive, but that wasn’t because of God’s beneficence but Rome’s. Christianity was just one religion among many until the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 CE made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.
Naturalism predicts that religions struggle, rise, and fall and that none will have any supernatural success.
More
If Christianity were true, a single set of moral truths would be held universally, rather than morality being a cultural phenomenon.
If Christianity were true, believers wouldn’t use evidence-based reasoning everywhere in life but then switch to faith for evaluating the claims of their religion.
If Christianity were true, faith healers would go to hospitals and reliably produce healings that science verifies.
If Christianity were true, televangelists wouldn’t waste time asking for money from viewers but would get their expenses covered by praying to God themselves.
If Christianity were true, Christian’s testable prophecies about our imminent end wouldn’t invariably be wrong. (Hilariously bad examples: John Hagee and Harold Camping.)
If Christianity were true, its Bible wouldn’t have contradictions, claims of prophecy wouldn’t suck, and it wouldn’t be wrong about the power of prayer.
If Christianity were true, we wouldn’t see in it mythological themes shared by other contemporary religions of that part of the world like the Combat Myth, virgin birth stories, and dying and rising gods.
If Christianity were true, everyone would understand the same simple and unambiguous message from God.
Christian response
The typical Christian response is, “But God could have perfectly good reasons that make sense to him that you simply can’t imagine!” And that’s true. This tsunami of examples in which the naturalistic explanation beats theism and Christianity doesn’t prove that Christianity is false; it simply concludes that that’s the way to bet. This argument fails by making the Hypothetical God Fallacy.
Cosmologist Sean Carroll in his debate against William Lane Craig said, “It’s not hard to come up with ex post facto justifications for why God would’ve done it that way. Why is it not hard? Because theism is not well defined.”
A couple of days ago, Christian blogger John Mark Reynolds wrote about a time when life was discouraging. After prayer, he saw a rainbow over his house. He said, “Was it chance? It was not. It was God. Would that convince an atheist? Of course it would not, but then it was not a sign for the atheist. God was speaking through nature to me.”
Nope. If it wouldn’t convince an atheist, it shouldn’t convince you. If evidence were important, this being nothing more than a nice coincidence according to anyone outside your religion is the clue that you’ve deluded yourself. And that you dismiss that and embrace your interpretation as reality makes clear that you don’t care about evidence to support your belief.
This is the sign of an invented worldview.

Science doesn’t know everything.
Religion doesn’t know anything.
— Aron Ra

Image credit: Christine Schmidt, flickr, CC

This is a continuation of a critique of Frank Turek’s arguments in favor of Christianity made in his latest book. See the beginning of the discussion here.
The I in CRIMES is Information
Turek said, “Darwinists say we all evolved from a one-celled amoeba.”
If by “Darwinists,” he means “biologists,” I’m pretty sure that biologists say that we share a common ancestor with amoebas.
Turek likes to pick and choose his science. When it pleases him (the Big Bang, for example), he’ll point to the scientific consensus. When it doesn’t (evolution), he points to what he wishes were true, hoping that you won’t notice the contradiction. Frank: is science a reliable tool or not?
There is no pushback against evolution within the biological community, but not to worry. He has a scathing schoolyard taunt: that evolution means “from the goo to you via the zoo.” (Here, he relies on the well-known rule, “if it rhymes, it must be true.” Or something.) Somehow, “goo” is supposed to be derogatory, but Turek has no problem with making Man out of dirt, as God did in Genesis 2:7.
The choice of the amoeba is the absolute worst category of animal Turek could’ve chosen to make his point. Protozoa, which includes amoebas, have DNA that ranges in size over five orders of magnitude—from 3 million to almost 1 trillion base pairs—broader than any other category of animal.
Let’s pause for a moment to consider this animal that Turek thinks shows the hand of an all-wise Designer. The animal with the longest DNA isn’t Homo sapiens. Salamander DNA can be ten times longer, but it’s not salamanders, either. How about fish, with DNA up to forty times longer? Wrong again. No, it’s the amoeba species Amoeba dubia, which has DNA 200 times longer than human DNA. Can this amoeba possibly need all that information, or is most of it (dare I say it?) junk?
DNA—no evidence for a Designer
The marvelous DNA that Creationists so often point to is a Rube Goldberg machine riddled with sloppiness. I discuss that more here. Here is a summary.

• You know how humans get scurvy if we don’t get enough vitamin C? Almost all other mammals can synthesize their own vitamin C. We also have the gene that does that … except that it’s broken. Every cell of your body carries the DNA encoding of this broken, useless gene. That’s just one of 20,000 pseudogenes (broken genes) in human DNA.
• You know how viruses can’t copy their own DNA but must force cells to do it for them? If the infected cell is a sperm or egg cell, that snippet of viral DNA gets passed on to children. It’s happened so often that 8% of our DNA is now inactivated viral DNA.
• You know how the human appendix is vestigial (no longer used for its original purpose)? Other animals have vestigial structures, too—the pelvis in whales or eyes in blind cave fish. What’s really spooky are atavisms—archaic structures that get inadvertently switched on. Examples are humans with tails, dolphins with hind limbs, chickens with teeth, and snakes with legs.

Design Hypothesis
The Design Hypothesis argues that nature looks as if it were designed by an all-powerful Designer. How would we tell whether something is designed or not? We’d look for evidence of the principles followed by the designers that we know of, human designers. For example, designers might want to balance cost, strength, durability, beauty, and so on. But designers never put junk in their designs. The excess length of the protozoa DNA, pseudogenes, viral DNA, vestigial structures, and atavisms are traits that no designer would put in DNA. (I explore this more here.)
This doesn’t mean that God couldn’t do his work in ways that we don’t understand, but the Design Hypothesis—life shows the hand of an all-wise Creator—is now defeated.
Messages and minds
Turek gives an example of information. Suppose you saw on the kitchen table Alpha Bits cereal spelling out “Take out the garbage, Mom.” Clearly this was intelligent design, he says, and I agree. We’ve seen people compose text just like this countless times.
“Messages come from minds,” Turek says. “Where I come from, codes always come from coders.”
And where I come from, minds are housed in brains. Is this true for God’s mind as well?
Text made with cereal is just one of many similar examples. But where are the examples of people sending messages with coded chemicals (besides doing it in DNA)? Where’s the proof that this can’t come from nature? Turek merely been provocative and has dodged the hard questions.
Turek wraps up: “To believe that [the amoeba’s DNA] resulted by natural forces is like believing that the Library of Congress resulted from an explosion in a printing shop. I don’t have enough faith to believe that.” Snap! Respond to that, atheists!
But anyone who’s studied evolution knows that it proceeds by mutation (which is random) and natural selection (which is not). An explosion in a printing shop is only random, and Turek’s analogy fails completely.
I want to interpret Turek’s points charitably, but I can’t believe that he hasn’t been corrected on this point already, probably many times. I’m guessing he deliberately prefers the useful to the accurate. Accurately characterizing evolution doesn’t suit his purpose, so he mischaracterizes it. It’d be refreshing if he would take his medicine and drop these flawed arguments.
Continue on to M = Morality.

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure
that we can comprehend only very imperfectly,
and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of “humility.”
This is a genuinely religious feeling
that has nothing to do with mysticism.
— Albert Einstein

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/7/13.)
Photo credit: J.K. Califf, flickr, CC

Let’s conduct an experiment to find the better of two alternate worldviews. First is Christianity/theism. Opposing that is naturalism, the belief that natural explanations are sufficient to explain the world we see.
Each worldview makes predictions about how our world should look. We’ll consider those predictions and compare them against the evidence from reality to see which worldview does the better job.
God’s hiddenness
Theism, by the definition that I’m using, proposes supernatural deit(ies) that engage with humanity. (Contrast that with deism, in which a deity could’ve started up the universe and then walked away.)
Our example of theism is Christianity, which tells us that God should be obvious: “God’s invisible qualities … have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). It makes the same claim when it says that God is anxious to have a relationship with us, since understanding God’s plan and putting our faith in Jesus is mandatory for us to escape hell.
God should be obvious, and his message to us should be unambiguous. But when we look around, there is no good evidence for God, just as naturalism predicts. (I discuss this Problem of Divine Hiddenness in detail here.)
Fragmentation into sects
Even if humans invent religions, theism predicts that clear evidence for the one correct religion would outshine all the rest. Invented religions might always be background noise in the religious environment, but the correct religion—the only one actually supported by evidence of real god(s)—would quickly spread from its introduction thousands of years ago to become and remain the biggest religion by far. There would be no contest to any unbiased observer which religion was correct (more here).
That’s not what the evidence shows. For all of human existence, the majority of people at any moment have always had the bad fortune to not believe in the one correct religion (assuming there is one). Religion is a cultural phenomenon. Christianity is the largest religion at the moment, though it might not be in fifty years when Islam is expected to become number one. Christianity is not the oldest religion, it didn’t become largest until centuries after its founding, and it’s never held the majority of the world’s people.
A single, unambiguous message doesn’t exist even within Christianity. There are 45,000 Christian denominations, a number that is growing rapidly.
The Bible itself documents how God’s fundamental properties have evolved.

• God was initially just a guy who walked in the Garden to chat with Adam and Eve, but later he said, “No one may see my face and live” (Exodus 33:20).
• God had to send out agents to get intelligence about Sodom and Gomorrah, but ask Christians now, and they’ll say that he’s omniscient (“New and improved God 2.0—now with 10²⁰ times more omniscience!”).
• God was initially part of a pantheon, and only later do we get a clear statement of monotheism (Isaiah 43:10, for example).
• God was initially merely powerful, and he had limitations. Now we hear he’s invulnerable.

The map of world religions shows that religious belief doesn’t change with evidence like science does. Instead, it’s part of culture.
Relationship to science
Theism predicts that sacred texts would be useful in the real world. They wouldn’t be full of just-trust-me-on-this demands. Instead, they would be grounded in the real world so that we could see that their claims are both surprising (far beyond what was known in that society at the time) and reliable. We wouldn’t need faith to accept the supernatural; it would be obvious that this wisdom didn’t come from any human society.
Christianity is again a counterexample. Any scientific statement within the Bible that’s true was known by the culture that produced that part of the Bible, and all other scientific claims within the Bible are false. Mining the Bible to find verses that vaguely anticipate modern scientific discoveries is a popular hobby, but science has learned nothing about reality from the Bible.
You’d think that the Bible would at least have room for simple science that would greatly benefit people. For example, how about a recipe for soap plus basic hygiene rules? It would only take a paragraph, but we find nothing. Even Jesus’s healing miracles are just superstitions of the time.
In the competition between science and religion, “God did it” was the answer for famine, plague, drought, disease, and even war in centuries past. Dogma rather than evidence pointed to God, and science has steadily produced reliable answers to replace God for countless scientific puzzles. The reverse has never happened. Shoehorning God into the remaining puzzles makes him a “god of the gaps,” a pitiful rearguard action that makes a joke of the all-powerful Creator of the Universe.
At best, apologists can say, “Well, science hasn’t answered this question,” unconcerned that Christianity hasn’t answered any question. Yes, science does have unanswered questions on its to-do list—that’s how science works. These aren’t questions that theologians have pointed out but are mostly obtuse questions that only science could raise.
Life
Theism predicts that life is designed and that life is the purpose of the universe.
Neither is true. A Rube Goldberg machine and a Swiss watch are both complicated but in different ways. Cells are complicated, but they’re more like the redundant and inefficient Rube Goldberg machine than the elegant watch. Designer-less evolution is sufficient to explain why life looks the way it does.
DNA is often cited as being so software-like that it must have come from a mind, but I argue that the sloppiness in DNA alone is enough to defeat the Design Hypothesis (the argument that life must’ve been designed).
The theist will say that software invariably comes from minds, but they forget that minds invariably come from brains. So where is the brain that houses God’s mind? And, no, software doesn’t invariably come from minds. Software can be evolved in a computer where it is randomly changed and tested for fitness, analogous to what happens in the real world to DNA.
The theist must look at the hundred billion galaxies in the universe, each with a hundred billion stars, and say that all of that is there because of humans on one planet in an insignificant backwater of one galaxy. Naturalism gets it right when it predicts no design and sees life as just something that happens now and then.
We’ll conclude this worldview comparison in part 2.

We can’t observe quarks or black holes, 
but we should see their effects. 
We do. 
We can’t observe the Christian God, 
but we should see his effects. 
We don’t. 
— Victor Stenger, “Faith in Anything is Unreasonable”

Image credit: Image Catalog, flickr, CC

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is a favorite of many Christian apologists. Here it is:

1: Whatever begins to exist had a cause
2: The universe began to exist
3: Therefore, the universe had a cause

And from this conclusion, they’ll move on to argue that the cause was God. I’ve replied to that argument here, finding numerous problems with both the first and second premises.
One frustration in this business is critiquing an argument and getting no response. It’s like hitting a tennis ball back over the net with no one to return it.
But the Force is with us today. “11 Objections to the Kalam Cosmological Argument” by Randy Everist is a recent Christian response to objections to the KCA. He says, “I believe each objection can be satisfactorily answered so that one is justified in accepting the KCA.”
Let’s take a look to see if the KCA has been made any stronger and how much of my argument is left standing. (I’ll give the objection to the KCA in bold and then the Christian rebuttal to that objection in italics.)
“1. ‘Something cannot come from nothing’ is disproved by quantum mechanics.” Premise 1 is “Whatever begins to exist had a cause.” This is often misunderstood as “something can’t come from nothing,” and then this is refuted with quantum mechanics. In the first place, that’s not premise 1, and in the second, while virtual particles do come into existence, they came from vacuum energy, not nothing.
There’s no need to misunderstand premise 1, because it’s nicely refuted by stating it correctly. “Whatever begins to exist had a cause” is refuted by quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation of QM says that many quantum events can be described statistically but don’t have causes—the decay of a nucleus or the creation of an electron, for example.
“2. Truth cannot be discovered wholly from reason. It’s true that one needs some level of empiricism in order to judge many things. However, one absolutely needs reason to judge all things.” The KCA, by its nature, is an argument that can be reasoned out.
(These eleven arguments aren’t mine, and some don’t deserve much attention, such as this one.)
Since we’re talking about the origin of the universe, experimentation is essential. Since the KCA is a logical argument, reason is essential. While I don’t know where the objection is headed, I guess we agree.
“3. Some truths are counterintuitive, and therefore intuition cannot be a guide to truth. This is a classic non-sequitur, on par with ‘some people have incorrect thoughts, therefore thoughts cannot be a reliable guide for truth.’ The point is this: why should I doubt my intuition because someone else got theirs wrong?”
Other people’s intuition sometimes leads them astray, and you’re wondering what relevance that has for your use of intuition? I’m puzzled that this needs to be explained, but very well: while this doesn’t prove your intuition wrong, it means that your intuition is unreliable.
As for the claim you’re attacking—“intuition can’t be a guide to truth”—yes, that’s wrong. One that I would support: Intuition is a poor guide at the frontier of science. If common sense unlocked the puzzles, scientists wouldn’t still be puzzling over it.
Quantum mechanics is an example—quantum entanglement, quantum tunneling, virtual particles popping into existence, a single particle taking two paths to different destinations at once—it’s a crazy violation of common sense. It also happens to be true, thoroughly verified by experiment.
(This objection reminds me of William Lane Craig’s nutty claim that his personal experience of the Holy Spirit was reliable evidence. What do you do when someone from another religion has a contradicting religious experience? Since each party appeals to the supernatural, how do you judge which, if either, is correct? Craig says, “Why should I be robbed of my joy and assurance of salvation simply because someone else falsely pretends, sincerely or insincerely, to the [Holy] Spirit’s witness?” That’s right, he just assumes the other guy is wrong so that he can dismiss the claim. Problem solved.)
“4. Since science is not itself a metaphysical enterprise, the arguer cannot apply science to a metaphysical argument.” Yes, science isn’t metaphysical, but science can still be a tool to study a metaphysical claim.
The KCA is a metaphysical argument? I don’t see how. It makes a claim about the universe, which is squarely in the domain of science. And when it’s tested by science, it fails.
Continued in part 2.

My own suspicion is that
the universe is not only queerer than we suppose,
but queerer than we can suppose.
— J. B. S. Haldane

Image credit: NASA