I’ve written before about the scientific consensus, arguing that we laymen are in no position to reject the scientific consensus and dismantling popular conservative arguments that encourage us to do exactly that.

The Discovery Institute, that fearless citadel against evolution, barfs on thoughtful discourse with its article, To Have a View on the Darwin Debate, Do You Need a PhD in Evolutionary Science?

Let me abstract this post by answering that question: you’re welcome to have a view, but if that view rejects the overwhelming consensus in favor of evolution then yes, you need a PhD. And to correct the title, there is no “debate” over evolution—at least not within biology, the only place where such a debate would be relevant.

The article begins with a tweeted exchange between Kevin Williamson (correspondent for the National Review) and David Klinghoffer (senior fellow at the Discovery Institute).

Kevin Williamson: Evolution, like similarly specialized fields, is not really subject to casual opinion.

David Klinghoffer: And that is why [anyone], if he’s more than a casual thinker, gives it the needed study

Kevin Williamson: ‘The needed study’ = graduate-level work in evolutionary science.

The author of the unattributed article disagrees.

Just as you don’t need a graduate degree in meteorology to understand why tornados will never turn rubble into houses and cars, you don’t need “graduate-level work in evolutionary science” to understand that unintelligent forces alone cannot cause civilizations to arise on barren planets, and for the very same reasons.

I agree that any process analogous to a tornado won’t drive an organism to change, adapt, and improve as happens on earth. But that’s not evolution. A tornado is just random, while evolution has random elements plus selection to pick the organisms that best fit their environments. (Why is this elementary error so common within Creationism/Intelligent Design proponents? Do they have no interest in understanding what they’re rejecting?)

And note that this quote says that you don’t need a graduate degree to understand much of science. Yes, that’s true, but you do need one to reject the scientific consensus.

The author moves from not-a-biologist David Klinghoffer as an authority to not-a-biologist Jay Homnick. Homnick is a commentator, humorist, and deputy editor of The American Spectator. His homey logic neatly punctures the evolution balloon:

Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident . . . you have essentially lost your mind.

That’s some tough love, folks. A not-a-biologist has used the Argument from Incredulity to cut the Gordian Knot and give us the painful truth. “That’s just crazy talk! It don’t make sense to me, so it can’t be true!”

Homnick apparently thinks that the process of evolution is nothing but accident. It’s not. (That demand for graduate-level education in biology for those who would upset conclusions about evolution is sounding better all the time.)

Back to the article:

Jay Homnick is not a scientist, but unlike Kevin Williamson, he understands that you don’t need a scientific background to realize something is terribly wrong with the scientific “consensus” on evolution.

Do you hear what you’re saying? You’re justifying someone deliberately rejecting the consensus and drawing his own conclusion about biology when that someone doesn’t understand biology!

You may need a PhD before people will listen to you as an authority, but you emphatically don’t need one to draw the correct conclusion for yourself.

But if you aren’t qualified to do the first, how are you qualified to do the second? You admit you’re not an authority, but then you grant yourself the ability to “draw the correct conclusion”? The author is saying that to convince others you’ll need credentials, but your own opinion isn’t that important, so—what the heck?—discard those experts and pick your own conclusion.

I bet the author wants a Kim Davis world where government employees use their own religious beliefs as the final guide to their official actions, and candidates for public office reject any unpleasant scientific consensus and substitute their own conclusion.

Often it seems it doesn’t matter how much evidence you present to these people, or how clearly you present it. They’ll just keep saying, “All our elite scientists reject ID, who am I to question elite scientists?”

No, the question is: “Who am I to question those people who understand the evidence, since I don’t?” Sometimes a little humility is appropriate.

Meanwhile, as the evidence piles up, those same scientists keep repeating, “Intelligent design is not science, intelligent design is not science.”

“Evidence piles up,” you say?? So you are in favor of following the evidence-driven consensus after all! If the evidence is piling up to create a sea change within evolution, then just give it time and then follow that new consensus. That the author doesn’t express it this way shows how little he thinks of this new “evidence.”

Maybe someday in the future, after a poll shows that most of our elite scientists have finally accepted the obvious, folks like Kevin Williamson will say, “Wow, imagine that . . . believing that the survival of the fittest was enough to generate human brains and human consciousness. I guess that was a pretty stupid idea after all.”

Wow, imagine that . . . the ideas at the frontier of science don’t always conform to common sense. Maybe we should listen to those smart people who bring science to us after all.

Let’s return to the question in the title: “How Do You Reject Science Without Looking Like a Troglodyte?” Answer: you can’t.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/30/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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This post wraps up our look at science in the Bible. It’s the conclusion of an analysis of Bible verses that contradict modern science (read part 1). Another recent post looked at Christian claims that the Bible actually anticipated modern science with correct statements about the world that were otherwise unknown during that time.

Let’s continue enumerating scientific errors in the Bible, moving on to cosmology and earth science.

7. The moon creates light rather than reflecting it

God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night (Genesis 1:16).

The sun and moon are said to be greater and lesser versions of the same thing with no acknowledgement that one creates light while the other only reflects it. We see the confusion more clearly in this verse:

The moon shall not cause her light to shine (Isaiah 13:10).

No, the moon doesn’t make its own light.

8. The stars are teeny light sources

The Bible dismisses the stars by imagining their creation this way:

[God] also made the stars (Genesis 1:16).

That’s it. 200 billion galaxies, each with 200 billion stars, are only worth a single Hebrew word in the original (a more literal reading is “[and] the stars”).

We see the stars according to the Sumerian cosmological model here:

God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth (Gen. 1:17).

They’re dismissed as tiny when they’re imagined to fall to earth:

The stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind (Revelation 6:13).

 9. The earth was flooded

The Bible claims that the entire earth was flooded, but the fossil evidence disagrees (long-extinct dinosaurs and modern animals living in the same habitats aren’t fossilized in the same strata).

The geological evidence also disagrees (the oceans have created many rock layers, but nothing points to a global flood).

The DNA evidence also disagrees (clues to a DNA choke point 4000 years ago when there were just two of each “kind” would be obvious in all living land animals).

More about Noah’s flood here and here.

Let’s move on to biology and health.

10. Germs? What germs?

The Bible isn’t a reliable source of health information. When the Pharisees scold Jesus for not following Jewish hand washing rules, Jesus focuses on spiritual defilement and dismisses sanitary defilement.

It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth (Matthew 15:11).

I’ll grant that washing your hands with soap (the simple recipe for which was not included in the Bible) doesn’t touch on spiritual purity, but physical health and basic hygienic precautions are not obvious and are worth a mention somewhere. How about telling us that boiling water minimizes disease? Or how to site latrines to safeguard the water supply?

Apologists have pointed to ritual washing in the Bible, but that counts for little when Jesus rejects it here. (More.)

According to the Bible, evil spirits cause disease. In the story of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, what sounds like mental illness is actually caused by demons.

[Jesus said to the sick man], “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” (Mark 5:8)

And physical infirmity can also be caused by demons:

There was a woman who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit; and she was bent double, and could not straighten up at all (Luke 13:11).

Are some categories of illness caused by demon possession? That modern medicine finds no value in this hypothesis makes clear that they aren’t.

Jesus also thinks disease can be caused by sin:

You are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you. (John 5:14)

For more on the pre-scientific approach to disease given in the New Testament, see this post. For Jesus vs. disease caused by sin and demons, go here.

11. Animals’ offspring change based on what the mother was looking at during conception

Jacob made a deal with his father-in-law Laban. Jacob promised to tend his flocks, but the spotted or black animals would be taken by Jacob as wages. The larger story of Jacob is full of tricks, and he employs one here to tip the balance in his favor.

Jacob took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted. (Genesis 30:37–9)

This superstition that what a woman sees during pregnancy can affect the baby continues as a myth today.

12. Miscellaneous errors

The Bible betrays its uninformed roots when it says that a bat is a bird (Deuteronomy 14:11–18), insects have four feet (Leviticus 11:20–23), rabbits chew their cud (Lev. 11:6), camels have hooves (Lev. 11:4), and the mustard seed is the smallest seed on earth (Matt. 13:31-32). None of that is true.

Concluding thoughts

The problem with science for many Christians is that a belief built on science must change as the science changes. This won’t satisfy someone determined to create an unchanging worldview. The result is a childish and even fearful relationship to science, embracing it when it appears to support the Christian conclusion and denigrating or ignoring it when it becomes a problem.

To illustrate the tension between religion and science, here’s what Pat Robertson observed about Christians in developing countries. They experience healing miracles far more often than Christians in the West, he says, not because they’re ignorant but because they haven’t been corrupted by education and science.

Overseas, they’re simple, humble. You tell them God loves ’em, and they say, okay, he loves me, and you say God’ll do miracles, and they say, okay, we believe him. That’s what God’s looking for; that’s why they have miracles.

So God is scared of science? He won’t answer our prayers because we’re using the brains he gave us to learn about nature?

There’s no scientific skepticism in these model Christians with their childlike faith, though why that’s a plus, I don’t know. I wonder if Robertson wrestles with the irony that the technology in his worldwide CBN television network was built exclusively on the teachings of science, not God. Be careful, Pat—God is afraid of that science-y stuff.

Let me close with a paraphrase of an idea from AronRa: When the answer is known, science knows it. But when science doesn’t know it, neither does religion.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/2/15.)

Image from Angel Visha, CC license
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I recently analyzed claims made by some Christian apologists arguing that the Bible correctly anticipated modern scientific discoveries. It becomes plain that these were simply science-y sounding verses cherry picked (after the fact) to satisfy a Christian agenda when you see that none taught us anything new about nature. Any insights came exclusively from science.

Augustine (354 – 430) rejected the quest for science in the Bible. He said, “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said, ‘I am sending you the Holy Spirit, that he may teach you about the course of the sun and the moon.’ He wished to make people Christians, not astronomers.”

But many Christians ignore Augustine, and the flurry of claims continues. The previous posts analyzed Bible verses that seemed to accurately reveal science. Let’s move on to another category, science claims within the Bible that don’t line up with what modern science tells us. Do they reveal startling insights that modern science must explore, or are they simply the superstitions of primitive pre-scientific people?

We do find startling things in the Bible, but they’re not very scientific. Let’s start with claims about cosmology and the structure of the earth.

1. The earth is immoveable

The world is firmly established, it will not be moved (Psalm 93:1; see also Ps. 96:10, 1 Chronicles 16:30).

Real science tells us that the earth is anything but fixed; it orbits the sun, the entire solar system orbits the galactic center, and the Milky Way galaxy itself moves through space.

2. The earth rests on a foundation

For the foundations of the earth are Jehovah’s; upon them he has set the world (1 Samuel 2:8; see also Ps. 102:25, Ps. 104:5, Zechariah 12:1).

We’re also told what this foundation is made of.

He shakes the earth from its place and makes its pillars tremble (Job 9:6; see also Job 26:11).

Apologists might say that “pillars” simply refers to mountains or bedrock, but a more plausible conclusion is that the literal interpretation was the intended one and that the Hebrew cosmology imagined a flat earth surrounded by or suspended on an ocean, as was popular in ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India.

3. The sky is solid

The cosmology in Genesis makes clear that the earth rests between water underneath and more water in a dome above. We see this in the Noah story when “the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened” (Genesis 7:11). For details, see my post on Noah and Hebrew cosmology here.

That dome must be solid to hold up the water. We also see this elsewhere in the Old Testament:

Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies (Ps. 148:4).

When He made firm the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed (Proverbs 8:28).

What is this dome made of? Job suggests that it’s made of metal:

Can you, with him, beat out the skies, strong as a mirror of cast bronze? (Job 37:18)

“Beat out” (“spread out” in some translations) is the verb used for hammering out metal.

We get one more clue from the equivalent Sumerian cosmology. (The Babylonian captivity from 597 – 539 BCE could be where the Hebrews picked it up, or it might have come through trade.) The dome might’ve been made of what the Sumerians called the “metal of heaven,” the metal we call tin.

4. The earth is flat

We’ve seen a flat disk of earth before.

[God] sits above the circle of the earth (Isaiah 40:22).

Our previous analysis showed that this is no reference to a spherical earth (they had another word for “ball” or “sphere”) but simply a flat disk. We also find other clues:

And there was evening, and there was morning, the third day (Gen. 1:13).

The six-day creation story assumes a flat earth because a time reference would’ve been necessary on a spherical earth. To see this, suppose God began creating the plants in the morning on Day Three based on the time in Mesopotamia. If the earth were a sphere, this would mean that God began this project in the evening of Day Two in much of the rest of the world (parts of North America, for example). Only with a time standard (“according to Mesopotamian Standard Time”) would this be unambiguous.

We also find a flat earth in the New Testament:

The devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor (Matthew 4:8).

A high spot to see all the world is possible on a flat earth but not on a spherical planet. And consider that a mountaintop from which you could see everywhere on the earth could itself be seen from everywhere on earth. So go outside and look around. It’s there—the claim that it’s on the horizon somewhere is as reliable as the Bible itself.

5. The earth is at the center of the solar system and the universe

Here’s another verse we’ve seen before that makes clear that the sun moves around the earth.

The sun rises and the sun sets; and hastening to its place it rises there again (Ecclesiastes 1:5; see also Ps. 19:6).

Two more examples are when God played games with the sun, stopping its motion for hours so Joshua could continue killing Amorites (Joshua 10:13) and then moving it backwards to give a sign to King Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:8–11). It’s one thing for God to move things across the sky over a flat earth, but it gets complicated in a heliocentric solar system when “stopping the sun” would require stopping the earth’s rotation.

Could God have used magic to stop the earth’s rotation so that its inhabitants didn’t notice the deceleration and subsequent acceleration (and report it in the biblical accounts)? Could he have maintained the earth’s protective magnetic field that would’ve been lost if the molten iron core stopped rotating? Sure, but the much simpler explanation is that the human authors of the Bible wrongly thought that the earth was at the center of the universe, just like in neighboring societies.

6. Confused creation order

According to the six-day creation story in Genesis 1, God created the earth and land plants in the first three days, but the sun wasn’t made until the fourth. Photosynthesizing plants obviously couldn’t survive without the sun.

Compare the order of creation with the order we’ve learned through science. In Genesis, it’s first earth, then land plants, sun and moon, fish, birds, land animals, and finally humans. Science instead tells us that it was the sun first, then the earth, then the moon. Single-celled organisms were the only life for several billion years. Then photosynthesizing organisms, then land plants, fish, land animals, and finally birds. The Genesis story fails. (The six-day creation story and the Garden of Eden story have many incompatibilities).

Nature is a jigsaw puzzle, and the Bible is the picture on the box top. We’ve been slowly putting the puzzle pieces together for centuries, and we now know the picture on the top is completely wrong.

Concluded in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/30/15.)

Image from Andy Murray, CC license

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Does science owe a debt to Christianity for setting down the philosophical prerequisites for scientific progress? One author seems to think so. But like retroactive quote mining to find that the Bible was actually in harmony with what we’ve learned through modern science all along (more), the argument is desperate and unconvincing. As commenter Ann Kah noted, “This is so over-the-top that it fits into the category of ‘not even wrong.’”

This post concludes our critique of this article (part 1 here).

But Christianity is more hopeful!

Next up is the obligatory claim that the Christian message is more hopeful than that of any competitors. About the previous five properties of Christianity that are supposed uniquely nurturing to science, the article warns,

Reject one or more of them, and you will end up sooner or later in a hopeless cul-de-sac.

Hmm—do I want the worldview that’s more hopeful or the one with the best evidence that it’s true?

I guess it’s an indication of the poor quality of the Christian argument that “Yeah, but our view is more hopeful!!  :-)” can be presented without embarrassment. But it seems out of place in an article written by a Christian celebrating science.

Only Christianity can save science

The article tells us that Western society is lurching toward “the death of humanity”:

Scientists are sawing off the branch on which they’re sitting.

How about that—who knew that science was on its last legs?

The article declares that scientists like Richard Dawkins reject “objective morality, free will, and the meaningfulness of life” (presumably, that’s objective meaning in life). Then it whines about how (to the atheist) religion, altruism, love, and more “must all be explained away as the purposeless side-effects of [natural selection and] mutations.”

You say that objective morality and meaning exist? Stop complaining and show us. Ball’s in your court. You’re right that evolution can explain religious belief and emotions, but let’s second-guess evolution after it stops being the scientific consensus.

At the end, the article laments about the naturalistic view:

The perception that each of us has that a proposition is provable, or an experiment is conclusive, is no guarantee of anything in external reality; instead it is the outcome of subatomic dominoes falling in random patterns. How can science continue if even scientists start to believe this about their minds? . . .

A few more decades of such irrationalism will undermine completely the foundations of research and truth-seeking in the sciences, and the West will go into the same despairing stasis that haunted ancient Egypt, India, and China. Ironically, the only hope for science now is a rebirth of faith.

“Subatomic dominoes”? Perhaps this author lies awake at night afraid, not of monsters, but quantum indeterminacy lurking under his bed. Instead of learning about whatever scientific puzzle concerns him, he’ll just label it as nonsense. Satisfying his common sense apparently outweighs the scientific consensus on quantum mechanics.

The author dismisses the civilizations of Egypt, India, and China, apparently unaware that they lasted far longer than the period of modern science we’re in at the moment in the West.

To understand where this author is coming from, imagine someone who thinks that food is made in the back room of the grocery story by some mysterious process. He can get by with this confused idea of how the modern food industry puts food on the shelves, but he would be wise to avoid critiquing a process he doesn’t understand. Our author is like this with respect to science. Next time he feels the urge to critique what he doesn’t understand, he should lie down until the feeling goes away.

A restorative from Mark Twain

To those of you who were annoyed by the brainless chum in this article, I have an antidote. Mark Twain’s 1905 reply to a patent medicine salesman nicely fits our predicament.

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand.

The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me.

A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

The last word

You’ve heard that correlation doesn’t prove causation. That’s true, but if there’s causation, there must also be correlation. The argument in this article fails by its own metric: there’s no correlation between Christianity and experimental science since Christian Europe was asleep for a thousand years after it took the baton from the Roman Empire. No correlation means no causation.

Consider a very different approach. The book Guns, Germs, and Steel also looks at relative progress between societies. It opens with a description of the 1532 meeting in Peru between Spanish conquistador Pizarro and the Inca (ruler of the Inca empire) and asks, why did Pizarro sail to Peru and capture their king and not the other way around? It explains why some parts of the world did well and others not by looking at the distribution of livestock and crops and other properties. It’s like a card game—Europe happened to have been dealt a good hand of resources, and Christianity isn’t necessary to explain its success.

European Christianity was a leg-iron to progress, not the catalyst to it. Only by moving from supernaturalism to naturalism has society progressed from pretend-answering questions about nature to really answering them.

Faith has produced zero new knowledge about reality, and science has produced libraries’ worth. I think I’ll stick with science.

Continue to #50, Argument from Biblical Consistency

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Image from Alexander Kliem, CC license
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A Christian article argues that science is built on Christianity. If we forget all the marvelous achievements of other ancient civilizations (the Romans’ roads and buildings, the Greeks’ democracy and philosophy, the Egyptians’ engineering to build the pyramids, and India and China and so on), Christian Europe looks pretty unique. (But then who doesn’t when you eliminate all the competition?)

The article tells us that for all the impressive attributes of those civilizations, only Christian society had experimental science, and the rest is history.

The argument that Christian society uniquely had experimental science is probably debatable, but let’s set that aside. More important, the argument fails because Christian society didn’t have any science to brag of for well over a thousand years after it became the ruling religion within Europe! (More.) So much for Christianity as the talisman that unlocks Nature’s secrets.

This is part two of a three-part series (part 1 here).

Here are five traits of Christianity that the article claims make it a unique incubator for science.

1. God is rational

We believe that God is rational, and that he created an orderly world which mirrors His rationality. So by testing the way the world responds to our activity—via experiments—we can gain reliable knowledge for the future.

I want to see in the Bible where God makes plain that nature was designed to be understandable. Otherwise, the argument is simply an unevidenced claim. “See all this science-y stuff that has brought such benefits to society? We’re responsible for that. You’re welcome.”

And as for an orderly, understandable world, it’s not especially understandable. Get a doctorate in biology, chemistry, or physics and you’ll see that it is anything but straightforward or intuitive. Consider chaos theory, which says that systems can be deterministic and yet inherently unpredictable. Or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that there is a limit to how much precision we can simultaneously know about the properties of elementary particles. Or quantum mechanics, which bewilders our common sense.

To make it worse, humanity will not only never know how much future knowledge about reality we will learn, we will never even know the fraction that we will never know (more). Are we capable of understanding 99 percent of the truths about nature or 1 percent? We’ll never know.

This argument is ridiculous coming from an author who is likely a Creationist but who celebrates science and urges us to conduct experiments and follow the evidence. Last time I checked, Creationists attack science (at least the science that offends their theology), and Christians never build their worldview with evidence.

2. Man mirrors God

We believe that we are images of God. Therefore the world’s rational structure is transparent to the light of our own God-given reason, such that we can gradually come to know it better than our ancestors did.

If we’re created in God’s image, why is the “God’s ways are not our ways” argument paraded out whenever God appears to be irrational or immoral (more, more)? We either reason like God or we don’t—you can’t have it both ways.

And, as seen in the previous point, the universe is hardly “transparent” to human minds that were tuned by evolution simply to survive.

The claim “the world’s rational structure is transparent to the light of our own God-given reason” is nothing more than a deepity. A deepity is a statement that, to the extent that it’s true, is trivial, and to the extent that it’s profound, is false. We understand as much of nature as we understand—that’s true but trivial. And (as the author surely intends) to the extent that this claim is profound—our complete understanding of nature makes clear that our brains were tuned by God to understand a Nature tuned by God to be understandable—it’s false.

3. Christianity provides unique insight into time

We believe that the world did not always exist, and won’t disappear then reappear in an endless loop of meaningless cosmic cycles.

This is presumably an attack on the Hindu idea of cyclic time, but I don’t know that I’d throw stones if my Bible’s idea of time were that God created everything in six days.

The well-evidenced idea that time, space, matter, and energy had a beginning 13.8 billion years ago comes from science. Science hasn’t learned anything from religious mythology. If the Bible were scientifically useful, it might’ve contained Maxwell’s equations or the statement of mass-energy equivalence. It doesn’t even have something as simple and practical as a recipe for soap.

4. Christians as stewards of the earth

We believe that the world was created “good,” is sharply distinct from God Himself, and subject to us as its “stewards.” So it is legitimate and good for us to engage it and try to improve it

Great—tell your fellow religionists to take the lead on environmental stewardship. Help get climate change and evolution viewed correctly within conservative Christianity.

5. Christians love progress

We believe in a type of (non-utopian) progress, and think that the world can and should become a more humane place, where suffering diminishes and justice prevails more widely.

You’d think that a benevolent God would want the best for his favorite creation, so why doesn’t he create that? He allows humanity to stumble forward when he could perfect conditions in an instant? In fact, since God has already created a perfect world in heaven, why bother with the crucible of earth? Alternatively, if God deliberately created this imperfect world, how can Christians be presumptuous enough to mess with it?

Ironically, Christianity is usually at the rear of the parade, complaining about social progress. Progress is progressive, but Christianity is conservative (more).

Next up: the article ends with some over-the-top claims about Christianity’s value to science.

Concluded in part 3.

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Image from Jared Tarbell, CC license
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It’s time for another episode of our favorite soap opera! For the first installment of this thrilling series of stupid Christian arguments, go here.

Today let’s explore the claim that modern science has Christianity as its foundation. And that “The New Atheists are sawing off the branch on which science is sitting.” And that “the only hope for science now is a rebirth of faith.”

Those quotes are from “Abandon God, and Science Will Die,” published at the conservative Christian ministry The Stream. Let’s consider the argument.

What those other ancient civilizations lacked

Those cultures from the ancient past—Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and more—were impressive. However:

There’s one thing that each of these [ancient] civilizations lacked, which wouldn’t make an appearance until the Christian Middle Ages: experimental science that yields a reliable understanding of the material world and hence technological advancements that better human life.

A coincidence? Nope—we’re told that it’s because Europe was Christian that modern science developed there. The author admits that Archimedes created impressive inventions and Galen made important medical discoveries but states that no one at the time followed up on those inventions.

Compare those civilizations with Christian Europe

Did God particularly favor Christianity with a blessing of scientific progress? Let’s be skeptical for a moment and consider what those other civilizations produced. Egypt developed the science and engineering to built pyramids; the 500-year-long Islamic Golden Age left a record of its achievements in our vocabulary with words like alchemy, algebra, alcohol, and most of named stars; and China developed moveable type, paper, and gunpowder. Christian Europe inherited base 10 positional notation, the numeral zero, and decimal fractions.

And look at what else can’t be credited to Christian Europe. The Roman Empire excelled at civil engineering and gave Europe roads, dams, and aqueducts. Only with the Gothic cathedrals in the 1200s did European architecture rival what Rome had done more than a millennium earlier.

Or consider Greece. The Acropolis of Athens is a building complex that was built centuries before the time of Jesus and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Their summary of the Acropolis reads in part: “On this hill were born Democracy, Philosophy, Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Speech, which provide to this day the intellectual and spiritual foundation for the contemporary world and its values.” Wow—apparently Christian Europe wasn’t uniquely favored by God.

So what’s the argument here? Merely that earlier cultures had science but not experimental science? Okay, but neither did Christian Europe for well over a thousand years! So much for Christianity providing the secret recipe to unlock the secrets of Nature.

And think about how the works of Aristotle were treated once rediscovered and popularized in Europe in the 1200s. Initially rejected by the Church, Aristotelian thinking became more mainstream with the work of Thomas Aquinas. But Aristotle’s works weren’t treated as a jumping off point to exciting new science. Because of their new connection to the church, these ideas became unchallengeable dogma, which is the opposite of experimental science.

Christians wanting to show Christianity as the catalyst for science are quick to point to colleges founded and supported by the Church. The article states, “M.I.T. and NASA were made possible on Mount Sinai.” But these medieval colleges bear little resemblance to the MIT of today. They were initially built to train clergy, and evidence-based science was not in the syllabus.

If the rate of scientific progress that we saw beginning in, say, 1800 began instead in 380 when Christianity became the Roman Empire’s state religion, this argument would have some weight. But that isn’t what history tells us, and there’s very little left of this “science was built on Christianity” argument.

But wait—there’s more!

The article reveals why Christianity is different.

What set the Christian West apart? It was the unique worldview of the Jews, implanted in the rationalism of Greece and Rome, and guaranteed by faith.

Tell me more about this guarantee. Show me that faith does anything in the real world and that “guaranteed by faith” means something. Note that you can make that kind of demand of science, and it will deliver.

Next time, we’ll look at the five traits of Christianity that (according to the article) make it a unique incubator for science.

Continued in part 2.

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Image from Stephen Bowler, CC license
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