Let’s look at more Christian claims that much of what modern science has given us was in the Bible all along. Part 1 rebutted these claims about cosmology and how the earth works. We’ll conclude by looking at claims in a few more categories. Up first, claims about health.

7. The Bible knew all about disease.

• The Bible says that unclean land animals such as rabbits, pigs, horses, and bear are not only unclean to eat but also to touch. If you touch the carcass of one of these, you are unclean until evening. (Leviticus 11:28)
• If you touch a dead person, you’re unclean for a week and must go through ritual purification (Numbers 19:11–12).
• A man who has a nocturnal emission is unclean. Seven days after his last emission he must bathe in running water (Lev. 15:13). The rules are the same for a menstruating woman (Lev. 15:28).
• Cover your poop because it grosses God out (Deuteronomy 23:13–14).
• Take seriously the appearance of leprosy. Anyone found to be a leper must be shunned.(Lev. 13).

Don’t touch dead bodies? Bury your poop? Yes, that’s good advice, but who needs to be told this by God? The Bible is hardly a medical authority and couldn’t even provide the simple recipe for soap. The healings of Jesus the Great Physician teach us that illness can be caused by evil spirits or sin (here, here), despite what modern medicine says.

The prudish attitude about bodily functions does little to improve health, and the recommended bathing is just a ritual cleansing. Without soap, it doesn’t do much more to get rid of germs than the required sacrifice of two birds. There’s also no caution against polluting water for those downstream.

Concerns about leprosy are valid, though this shows no knowledge beyond the common sense of the time.

8. Kosher laws actually make good health sense.

The Bible has an entire chapter to outline rules about what can and can’t be eaten. For example, shellfish are forbidden:

But whatever is in the seas and in the rivers that does not have fins and scales among all the teeming life of the water, and among all the living creatures that are in the water, they are detestable things to you (Leviticus 11:10).

There is a logic to these seemingly arbitrary food laws, but health was not the point. Eating improperly cooked mackerel or mutton (ritually clean) is no wiser than eating improperly cooked shrimp or pork (ritually unclean).

Let’s move on to claims about physics.

9. The Bible informs us that matter is made of atoms.

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible (Hebrews 11:3).

Apologists may imagine that this says that matter is made from particles too small to see, but this chapter is about faith, not physics. The NET Bible gives another interpretation of the bolded phrase: “the visible has its origin in the invisible.” The verse isn’t saying that matter is made of atoms but that the visible world was created by invisible God.

The ancients did propose the idea of matter being composed of indivisible particles, but that was centuries before the book of Hebrews and not in Palestine.

10. The Bible teaches that light moves.

Where is the way to the dwelling of light? And darkness, where is its place? (Job 38:19)

(Some of these examples are so poor that I wonder if those who propose them honestly find them compelling.)

This verse only says that light and darkness reside somewhere. Perhaps motion is implied because light and darkness must get out of the house sometime.

But no, darkness isn’t a thing—it’s just an absence of light—and neither light nor darkness are stored anywhere.

11. We learn from the Bible that air has weight.

[God] imparted weight to the wind and meted out the waters by measure (Job 28:25).

Wind pushes on you. If that is wind’s “weight,” then even children know that. A childlike view of the world can imagine that the properties of nature are assigned and maintained by God, but that’s not what science tells us. Instead of common sense observations of nature, the Bible could’ve given us some of the basics laws of physics (better: the basics of disease prevention).

12. The Bible knows about thermodynamics and talks about moving from order to disorder.

The Bible has several verses (Isaiah 51:6, Hebrews 1:10–11, Psalms 102:26) that use the simile that the earth will wear out like a garment.

Lift up your eyes to the sky, then look to the earth beneath; for the sky will vanish like smoke, and the earth will wear out like a garment and its inhabitants will die in like manner; but My salvation will be forever, and My righteousness will not wane. (Isaiah 51:6)

The ancient authors saw that living things die and human constructions deteriorate—nothing remarkable here. From that they extrapolated that the earth itself is temporary as an excuse to celebrate God’s permanence. This isn’t science; it’s a literary motif.

Next up: biology.

13. The Bible knows about dinosaurs—read about Leviathan in Job 41.

God is humiliating Job in this chapter. Job thinks he has the balls to question God? Then perhaps he can share how well he’d do fighting Leviathan, a sea monster that laughs at human weapons and “regards iron as straw, bronze as rotten wood.”

Christian commentators try to shoehorn the long description into that of a crocodile, whale, or dinosaur, but this fails because Leviathan breathes fire (41:18–21). The attempt also fails because there were thousands of dinosaur species, not just a single fierce, fire-breathing monster. This description of a single creature sounds nothing like a survey of dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs were long extinct before humans appeared. There would be no point in God spending an entire chapter talking about how he’s so tough that he can conquer a dinosaur if Job doesn’t know what dinosaurs are.

Let’s stop there at thirteen examples, an unlucky number for the Christian eager to imagine that the Bible educates us about science.

Wrap up

Remember the Argument from Accurate Place Names? Christians point to names in the Bible that are later verified by archaeology as powerful evidence. If the Bible has this correct, they argue, the rest must surely also be correct! But of course being right about the basic facts of your place in history only gets you to the starting line.

The Argument from Accurate Science analyzed in this post makes a bolder claim: if the Bible is accurate about things that were not common knowledge, that points to a supernatural source, which grounds the Bible’s miracle claims. Unfortunately for the apologists, that argument fails.

If God put important and surprising new science (Big Bang, Second Law of Thermodynamics, geocentric solar system, and so on) into the Bible for our benefit, we should be able to point to the Bible as the source of this knowledge. That it’s always the other way around—that apologists take modern scientific knowledge and mine the Bible for vague parallels—reveals their agenda.

But there’s more! Consider another aspect of the Bible and science here.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/25/15.)

Image from Stephen Morris, CC license
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Christian apologists are eager to tell us that scientists didn’t inform us of many of the facts about modern cosmology, physics, and biology. No, they were in the Good Book all along if we just had the faith to trust it!

One supportive source they often cite was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Arno Penzias. He said in 1978:

The best data we have (concerning the Big Bang) are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.

Really? From the Old Testament you get at 13.8-billion-year-old universe? Expansion from a singularity? A beginning to time? A universe that’s not only expanding but whose expansion is accelerating? Dark matter and dark energy?

If it’s all there in the Bible, tell us the rest: what caused the Big Bang, if anything? Is there a multiverse? How are Relativity and quantum physics unified? While you’re at it, tell us if string theory and the zero-energy universe hypothesis are correct.

It seems to me that the Bible is as useful at informing us of scientific realities as The Bible Code is for predicting the future (and for exactly the same reasons), but let’s consider some of the Bible verses that apologists think are so clairvoyant and see if the wild claims hold up.

First up are claims about cosmology.

1. The Bible says that the earth is a sphere.

[God] sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers (Isaiah 40:22).

Well, we’re actually looking for the earth as a sphere, but that does sound intriguing. First, though, consider another verse in the same book of the Bible:

[God] will wind you up tightly into a ball and throw you into a wide, open land. There you will die. (Isaiah 22:18)

These are two different words—chuwg (circle, compass) and duwr (ball). The first word means typically circle in the sense of a perimeter—think of a guard walking the perimeter of a camp. The second verse shows that Hebrew had a word for sphere, and if the author wanted to identify the earth as a sphere, the correct word would’ve been used. Notice also that this verse isn’t written as if it’s passing on scientific knowledge. It mentions the earth as a flat disk only in passing.

2. The Bible knows that the earth is in empty space.

He stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing (Job 26:7).

This is scientifically vague and gives no clear description of our solar system. The earth isn’t just there; it moves around the sun. If you’re hoping that Job had a planetary model in mind, just four verses later we read about the “pillars of heaven.”

3. The Bible knows that the number of stars is uncountable.

Therefore there was born [of Abraham] as many descendants as the stars of heaven in number, and innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore (Hebrews 11:12).

How many descendants did Abraham have when this book was written in the first century? A million people? Whatever it was, “As many descendants as stars in the sky” is hyperbole. The author can’t have meant that there were then 10²¹ Jews in the world (which is roughly the number of stars). Again, the Bible is saying nothing remarkable.

If the point of any of these verses were to give new, surprising scientific knowledge, they would make that clear. Each reads as if it’s just using ideas accessible by the people of the time.

These passages have been picked by modern Christians because they vaguely sound like information that science has taught us. But that’s backwards. Instead, imagine giving each passage to an unbiased reader of that time. Would they derive the science that these apologists imagine? Would they deduce a heliocentric solar system, for example? The apologists need to show that these facts came from biblical insights rather than modern science, but they can’t.

Let’s move on to earth science.

4. The Bible knows about the water cycle.

Many verses are cited to argue that the Bible understood the water cycle where water evaporates from the ocean, condenses into clouds, falls as rain, and flows back to the ocean.

He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; who makes lightnings for the rain, who brings forth the wind from His treasuries (Psalms 135:7).

For he draws up the drops of water, they distill rain from the mist, which the clouds pour down (Job 36:27–28).

All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, there they flow again (Ecclesiastes 1:7).

This shows nothing that anyone from Old Testament times wouldn’t have noticed. Water left in a pot will gradually vanish into the air. Rain comes from clouds. The sea doesn’t get deeper even though rivers keep flowing in, and so on.

And the primitive understanding of meteorology is evident when these passages are taken at face value. God is given credit for water turning to vapor and falling as rain, but we know that physics is sufficient. Imagining storehouses for the wind (from the first verse) would be cute coming from a child, but this is not wisdom from the omniscient creator of the universe.

Or take the third passage above. Just two verses earlier we see the geocentric solar system of the time:

The sun rises and the sun sets; and hastening to its place it rises there again (Ecc. 1:5).

5. The Bible knows that wind circulates as cyclones.

Blowing toward the south, then turning toward the north, the wind continues swirling along; and on its circular courses the wind returns (Ecc. 1:6).

Here’s a visualization of a month of the jet stream’s movements over North America. Sometimes the wind flows in a circle, though usually not.

Yes, wind comes from different directions. This verse gives us no new insights.

6. The Bible knows about ocean currents and undersea mountains.

The Bible tells us of “the springs of the sea” (Job 38:16). It also talks about birds and fish traveling “the paths of the seas” (Psalm 8:8), whatever that means. David imagines God blowing away the water to reveal “the channels of the sea” (2 Samuel 22:16), and Jonah, thrown into the ocean, imagines descending to “the roots of the mountains” (Jonah 2:6).

Why is this impressive? Fishermen of the time surely observed that the ocean has currents, and swimmers and sailors would have noticed that some parts of the Mediterranean dropped steeply, just like on land.

The Bible could’ve told us something new. Science has only recently revealed the deep sea geothermal vents and the ecosystems that live there, which is a candidate for the first life on earth. Also, the deep trenches created by tectonic forces at plate boundaries. Also, the magma flow that drives oceanic spreading at mid-oceanic ridges. If God were determined to pass along science through the Bible, why not this?

Every example they have is backwards, going from verified science to a related Bible verse. The claim that the Bible delivered important science to humans is easily refuted by asking, “Like what?” Modern science learned nothing from the Bible.

But there’s more! Concluded in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/23/15.)

Image from NASA, CC license
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Jesus cured disease with exorcisms. But if demons really are a cause of disease, why isn’t exorcism a part of medical practice today?

The Bible records Jesus performing seven distinct exorcisms (sometimes repeated between the gospels). The most famous may be the Gerasene demoniac, a man possessed by many demons. Jesus cured him by expelling the demons into pigs, which then drowned.

Where does disease come from?

Some of the sick people in these exorcism stories had what we would probably diagnose as mental illness, but some illnesses were physical. For example, Jesus healed a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute (Matthew 12:22–32).

The medical picture gets more complicated. Though Jesus spoke to dispel demons in some cases, not all exorcisms were performed this way. For example, the demon possessed child (Mark 7:24–30) was cured remotely without Jesus addressing the demon, and a woman “crippled by a spirit for eighteen years” was cured after a touch (Luke 13:10–13).

What about physical illness? Though Jesus touched people to cure physical illness in some cases (for example, the blind men in Matt. 9:27–30 and the leper in Luke 5:12–16), not all such cures were performed this way. He healed the Centurion’s servant remotely (Matt. 8:5–13), he healed the man with the withered hand in person but without touching (Matt. 12:9–14), he rebuked a fever (Luke 4:38–9), and the bleeding woman was cured after she touched Jesus (Matt. 9:19–20).

To make the picture more complicated still, one final category of illness is that caused by sin. Jesus cured the invalid at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1–16) and cautioned him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” Sin and illness are also connected in the story of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof (Mark 2:1–12) and when Jesus’s disciples asked about a blind man, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:1–7).

This sin/disease connection comes from the Old Testament. In the book of Job, Job’s friends assured him that his difficult situation must’ve been caused by his own sin, since God wouldn’t inflict this without cause. Moses lectured Israel that they’d better follow all of God’s commands. Of the many curses they would receive if they didn’t, “The LORD will plague you with diseases” (Deuteronomy 28:15–22). And Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden was supposedly the original sin, the cause of all illness today.

A significant fraction of Jesus’s healings are of illnesses caused by demons or sin, but where are these illnesses today? Are doctors today ill-prepared if they treat demon- or sin-caused illnesses as if they had organic causes?

I see three explanations.

1. Demons/sin caused disease in the time of Jesus but not today

The Christian might argue that the Bible is accurate and that some diseases were caused by demons and others by sin. However, it doesn’t work that way today, and now all illness has an organic cause.

This, of course, is stated without evidence. The Bible doesn’t say this. The naturalistic explanation, as usual, is sufficient: we have categories labeled Pseudoscience and Mythology for stories like these.

2. Demons/sin caused disease 2000 years ago, and that’s still true today

This is what faith healers like Benny Hinn would tell us. I’d be more convinced by his claims if he weren’t taking money from desperate people who have exhausted conventional medicine or if he were magically curing people in hospitals or if he convinced skeptics like James Randi. (A hilarious video game fight between Benny Hinn and the demons is here.)

Christian apologist Greg Koukl has an interesting angle. He said that demon-possessed people today aren’t morally responsible for their crimes (podcast @12:45). You know—the devil made them do it. One wonders what Koukl is doing to get this important correction made to the law. I’ll be particularly interested in seeing how he determines which people are demon possessed.

3. Demons/sin never caused disease, and the gospels are simply the product of a prescientific time

Different New Testament authors handled exorcisms and cures differently. The gospel of John had plenty of miracles but no exorcisms. Paul has no mention of healings; in fact, Paul mentions no Jesus miracles of any sort. Different authors had different agendas, which explains why some made a big deal of healings and some seem not to have known about them.

The Bible Odyssey blog fits Jesus alongside other exorcists of his time, between “the charismatic magicians and the charismatics of a slightly later period, making him the first of the charismatic exorcists.” As with Jesus’s supernatural birth and resurrection from death, Jesus’s exorcisms aren’t unique. Jesus looks like just another figure from mythology.

The Bible says that demons and sin cause disease, but modern medicine has found no category of disease for which faith healings or exorcisms provide cures. The naturalistic explanation works best. There’s no reason to believe that the stories of Jesus’s healing miracles are accurate and every reason to conclude that they’re simply legend.

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Image from Chris Hobcroft, CC license
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Imagine this problem: you’re a layperson, and you dislike the scientific consensus on some issue. I’ve argued that laypeople have no grounds by which to reject a scientific consensus. How could they when they’re outsiders to that discipline? But if you’re part of a vocal minority on the political Right, you just declare the consensus stupid and substitute your own.

Those who give themselves veto power over science sometimes argue that smart people (and who wouldn’t put themselves in that category?) are perfectly able to come to their own conclusions. Or they might poke around the internet to find conclusions they like better and point to those arguments, unconcerned that these are fringe opinions, already evaluated and rejected by the relevant scientists.

Let’s take an example. Dennis Chamberland is not a climate scientist, but he’s good and mad at the current consensus within that discipline that climate change is happening and that it’s primarily caused by human activity (“The Tyranny of Consensus”). That’s not going to stop him from finding more pleasing conclusions on the internet and adopting those.

The dark cause behind all this

He begins by rooting out the underlying cause.

[Infecting science with politics] was accomplished for a reason, of course: specifically so that billions of dollars in global taxes may be levied at the point of a gun against the specter of anthropogenic climate change.

What’s next—black helicopters? The United Nations as world government? Reptoid shape-shifters controlling Congress? The Antichrist? And why would any government be eager to dump billions into a boondoggle?

There seem to be lots of dog-whistle terms in this article to wake up the faithful. If I were in this community, I’d probably understand what he’s trying to say. I suppose that for those people, this vague claim works, but let’s move on to the more interesting point, Chamberland’s attack on the use of the scientific consensus.

Government’s conflict of interest?

Science struggles to do the right thing, but we’re told that government isn’t helping.

The task is made even more difficult by an across-the-board failure of ethics within the profession [of science], created by the billions of research dollars poured into anthropogenic climate change [by government].

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Government money with an agenda bothers you, when on the opposing side is the energy industry? I’ll see your billions of dollars and raise you the many trillions of dollars of market capitalization of those companies.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the publicly traded energy companies Exxon Mobile, Petro China, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, and British Petroleum. They have a market capitalization of close to $1.5 trillion. Then there’s the world’s largest company, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco, which is valued at $2 trillion. Don’t forget the enormous state-owned oil companies in Mexico, Venezuela, Kuwait, Malaysia, Algeria, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, and other countries.

The fossil fuel industry is enormous and powerful, and they like the status quo just as it is, thank you very much. They’re not particularly motivated to study climate change, so if we are to understand this issue, government-funded science is the obvious route.

The “follow the money” strategy has now turned on and bitten the author. But that’s okay, as he hurries on to concern about the Dark Forces:

[The government is] entirely biased against any approach, study or theory except the one championed and paid for, solely reflecting the government’s predetermined, ethically conflicted, politically and economically motivated, self-serving theories.

Again, I’m missing the big conspiracy (and more importantly, what would drive it), so let’s set that aside. Was research on GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) burdened by some demand for a government-imposed conclusion? Smallpox vaccine? Internet? Cancer research? Or if they’re too goal-driven, consider work on the Large Hadron Collider to find the Higgs boson or the Cassini spacecraft’s visit to Saturn. Science often just follows the evidence.

Evil consensus

This has been somewhat tangential to the main point, the attacks on the scientific consensus when it is unwanted. Nevertheless this has illustrated the kinds of games that can be played to defend an anti-consensus position.

As an example of the misuse of consensus, Chamberland gives the book A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, published in German in 1931 as a criticism of Relativity. His conclusion:

This consensus-based, adolescent pile-on of Einstein historically backfired in a rather spectacular way, as all consensus schemes are wont to do.

Let’s consider this example. Suppose that

• There were just 101 physicists in the world, Einstein and 100 others who wrote this book.
• Einstein proposed Theory X.
• The other 100 all thoroughly understood Theory X and Einstein’s reasoning.
• The other 100 all rejected it.

Given that the relevance of a consensus is its value for outsiders like us rather than the practitioners, what do we conclude? Of course, we conclude that Theory X is not ready for prime time. What else could we conclude? Maybe the theory will mature to sway the other physicists, but we go with the consensus. When the consensus changes, so must our opinion.

Chamberland might handwave, “But Einstein was right with Relativity!” I agree, but how do we know? Because, and only because, it’s now the consensus! When it’s Einstein vs. the Hundred, it’s not like there’s an arbiter who can settle the argument. Consensus as our arbiter is imperfect, but it’s the best we have.

Let’s return to A Hundred Authors Against Einstein. It was a useful example to explore the issue, but in fact it doesn’t even make Chamberland’s point because it wasn’t the clean thought experiment I’ve just outlined. By the publication date of this book, Relativity was already well accepted within the scientific community, and the consensus was on Einstein’s side. More important, there was only a single physicist in the list! This wasn’t even an attempt at a scientific consensus.

This is like the Disco Institute’s inept attack on evolution, “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” In it, roughly a thousand scientists, doctors, and engineers skeptical of evolution have added their names, but how many are active biologists whose critique of evolution would be relevant? As with the Relativity attack, few have credentials relevant to the issue at hand.

How does Chamberland expect we laypeople to respond to the scientific consensus? Maybe he likes the Kim Davis approach where every elected official makes their own conscience the ultimate arbiter for any action. “Sure, I’ll follow the law,” she says, “as long as it satisfies my morality.” A Kim Davis world would have county clerks deciding who can get married, Jehovah’s Witness doctors avoiding blood transfusions, Christian Science business owners refusing to provide health insurance, Muslim police officers arresting women dressing immodestly, pharmacists filling only those prescriptions that seem moral, and racist judges deciding cases based on white supremacist principles (for which they find support in the Bible).

Chamberland analogously imagines each of us deciding things on first principles. “Sure, I’ll accept germ theory” (or quantum theory or evolution), Chamberland says, “once I see that it feels right.” Nothing is settled for us, and a 6000-year-old earth is no less an option than one 4.5 billion years old. Creationism, phlogiston, ether, bodily humors, astrology, alchemy, flat earth—they are all in play if there is no consensus. In fact, this is playing out right now as an Ohio bill would require that religious answers (rather than, y’know, accurate answers) on public school tests be acceptable.

In his next tirade, I recommend that Chamberland acknowledge the elephant in the room, that he accepts scientific theories based on whether he likes the conclusion or not.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/9/15.)

Image from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC license

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It’s been a while since I’ve run any excerpts from my 2012 book, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey. These are a bit longer than the usual post, but I think the fiction format is an interesting way to explore apologetics arguments.

A bit of background: Jim is a wealthy, housebound, and somewhat obnoxious atheist, and Paul is the young acolyte of Rev. Samuel Hargrove, a famous pastor. Paul is doing his best to evangelize Jim, though Paul’s faith is now wavering. It’s 1906 in Los Angeles, shortly after the San Francisco earthquake, and they’re in Jim’s house.

Paul was eager to get to business. “I’d like to talk about evidence of God’s hand in the design of the world.”

“Okay, but I’ve already told you what I think of it.” A tea kettle whistled. Jim walked into the kitchen, and returned with a tea tray and set it on the center table.

“The world has some marvelous things in it,” Paul said. “Rainbows and sunsets, laughing children, spring flowers, warm beaches, love. It’s a beautiful world.”

“True. But the world also has some terrible things in it. Earthquakes, droughts, famines, parasites. Take Guinea worm—it’s a parasite that’s common in Africa. It grows in people up to three feet long, eventually living just under the skin. When the mature worm is ready to lay eggs, it burns its way through the skin. Very painful, I hear. To extract the worm, it’s wound up on a stick, which is also a painful process. It takes days. In fact, you’ve already seen this. You know the doctor symbol, the snake twisted around a pole? That symbol came from this remedy.”

Paul grimaced and pushed himself back into his chair. “How do you get infected?”

“By drinking contaminated water. Nature has many kinds of diseases—some that kill you, and some that just make you wish you were dead. For every laughing child, I could find a child who no longer laughs, dying of dysentery or smallpox or even measles. Or an old man slowly dying of cancer. Or. . . .” Jim inhaled noisily as if he were coming up for air. “Or a young mother dying in childbirth.”

Jim cleared his throat as he stood and walked to the wall opposite the window. At the bureau, he paused before a large framed portrait of a young woman. As Jim leafed through a drawer, Paul thought of the needlepoint pillows and framed samplers. The vacancy left by a woman was now obvious. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed before.

“How old are you?” Jim asked.

“I’m twenty-five.”

Jim returned to the sofa holding a newspaper clipping. “This is a list of major natural disasters from recent history. We can date them by your life. The earthquake in the Himalayas last year was much deadlier than the one we just had in San Francisco—20,000 people died. When you were twenty-one, a volcano in Martinique killed 29,000, and when you were two, Krakatau killed even more. A cyclone in Bengal killed 150,000 people when you were sixteen, and one in Vietnam killed twice that in the year you were born. When you were six, a flood in China killed as many as 2,000,000. And years of drought in India caused a famine that killed 10,000,000 when you were about twenty.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of some of those.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of pain and suffering in the world to go along with the good things.”

“Perhaps God has a reason.”

“To teach us to be humble? To count our blessings? To not get cocky? Those are some heavy-handed lessons. Let me propose this explanation: there is no reason at all. Our earth looks just as it would if there were no purpose, no design, and no wise designer.”

This was another Jim onslaught to which Paul had no rebuttal. “Well, let’s approach this from another angle,” Paul said. “You’re familiar with the Paley pocket watch example?”

Jim dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “That argument has been around since Cicero. What’s amusing about Paley’s watch argument is that it defeats itself. Let’s imagine his original situation. He’s walking in a field and discovers the watch. It looks out of place, different from the plants and rocks. But if it looks different from nature because it looks designed, then nature must not look designed. You can’t argue on the one hand that the watch looks remarkable and stands out from the natural background, and on the other that the watch looks similar to nature, so both must be designed.”

“But nature does look designed. I’ve seen close-up photographs of insects like fleas. If God puts this amazing detail into insects, He must care far more for humans.”

“We marvel at God’s handiwork only after we know that he exists.” Jim leaned forward. “The design argument simply takes a childish view of the world. Does the world look designed by an omniscient and benevolent god? Go to the freak show at the circus—it’s a museum of nature’s poor design. Siamese twins, two-headed pigs, bearded ladies, the Lizard Man, hermaphrodites, dwarves, giants. Monsters like the Elephant Man and unfortunates with all manner of birth defects. Deformed babies floating in formaldehyde. Is this the best that God can do?”

“Maybe birth defects are meant to test us, to teach us to be better people.”

“That’s quite a barbaric test. Isn’t it ironic to imagine God teaching us to be kind with the cruelest test imaginable? Think of the parents every day who are told that their newborn has some hideous defect and will live a short, painful life. And why are there birth defects in animals? Do they need testing too? A natural explanation works best. ‘God is testing us’ is not where the evidence points.”

Jim poured tea from the pot into two delicate white china cups on saucers and pushed one toward Paul. “And there are examples of inept designs. One of the best examples is in a whale—I saw a few whale skeletons when I lived in Boston. Many species have small bones as remnants of their nonexistent rear legs, and their flippers have all the joints of a land animal’s hand but no reason for that flexibility—very different from a fish’s fin. If the whale had been designed, it would have been tailored to life in the ocean with no wasted bones.”

Paul set his Bible on his knee and opened it to a bookmark. “When Job questions God, God replies, ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.’ Maybe it’s presumptuous of us to judge God.”

“Once again, that assumes God, the very thing we’re trying to establish. Maybe I’ll avoid judging God once I know that he exists. Let’s approach it this way: if you were God, would you design the earth with volcanoes and hurricanes, plagues and famines?”

“Maybe those are necessary features of the earth,” Paul said. “Maybe hurricanes distribute rain or heat; maybe volcanoes relieve pressure underground. We just don’t know.”

Jim reached for his tea cup. “You’re God, infinitely smarter than the smartest human, and that’s the best you can do? ‘Sorry about the volcano—I had to relieve some pressure.’ You can’t argue strong evidence for design at one moment, but plead ignorance at another when it suits you. Take your pick: does the earth look designed or not? It could indeed have been designed, but it’s not designed in a way that any human designer would have used. A loving and omniscient human designer wouldn’t have created earthquakes, plagues, legs for whales, and Guinea worm. Therefore, the design metaphor, which says the earth looks as it would if designed by a human with the ability, fails.”

“Well, maybe ‘designer’ isn’t the best metaphor,” Paul said. “Maybe God is best thought of as an artist, and we see his artistic license. This acknowledges that our human knowledge is insufficient to judge God.”

“Call him an artist then, not a designer.”

“Maybe God didn’t want a perfect design,” Paul said. “Genesis says that Creation was perfect, but it is now imperfect because of the Fall—the sin of the apple.”

“If we live in a fallen world, then don’t argue that it looks perfectly designed. You can’t argue for an imperfect fallen world and a perfectly designed world at the same time.”

Paul took stock of his position. His argument was eroding, but this didn’t feel like earlier conversations. It wasn’t really his argument, and he could view its strengths and weaknesses dispassionately. This objectivity was the new piece to the puzzle that he was trying out. “I’m trying to be open minded about this, but I still think that the earth and life on it look designed. Think of the complexity. Don’t you see that, too?”

“Many undesigned things have interesting properties. Snowflakes are complex, crystals have order, rainbows are beautiful. By contrast, many things that we know were designed don’t have these properties.”

“But a snowflake is hardly as complex as, say, a flea. When you get to a human, the complexity is overwhelming.”

“Complexity is weak evidence for design. A clumsy sock puppet or a childish clay sculpture are designed, and an intricate crystal or snowflake with trillions of precisely placed atoms is not. Which one is more complex? Mere complexity is deceiving. Atoms obey simple rules as they lock into place, one by one. From simple natural rules can come complexity.”

Jim drank from his teacup. “But the Design Argument forces you to come at this from the other direction since designers are always more complex than what they design. If a complex world must have been created by an even-more-complex God, then what created God?”

“Yes, I see that, but I think the argument makes an exception for God.”

“So ‘simple things must come from complex things . . . except for God’ is your argument.”

“Well, it’s not necessarily my argument.”

“Ah—good to see that distinction.”

And that distinction was quite plain to Paul, too. Samuel’s arguments had been a part of him like a suit of clothes, and critiquing them was like judging his appearance without a mirror. For the first time he could see this argument separate from himself, as if displayed on a mannequin. Looking at it objectively, he had lost faith that its strengths outweighed its weaknesses.

“You know of things that might look designed but aren’t,” Jim said. “The English language, for example. It’s very complex, but it wasn’t designed—it just happened. Or Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ that controls the marketplace.”

Jim set his cup on the table with a clack. “Even if I found the Design Argument compelling, this mysterious Designer is unidentified. Is it the God of Christianity? Or is it Allah or Osiris or Zeus or some other god? And it doesn’t explain anything. ‘God did it’ simply replaces a mystery with another mystery. Who is this God? Where did he come from, how did he do his designing, and what natural laws did he break? A true scientific explanation is quite different—it adds to our knowledge. No scientist, deciphering some puzzling aspect of nature, would ever say, ‘God did it, you say? Well then, nothing left for me to do here—I’ll just go home.’ ”

Paul had never been a tea drinker. Without sugar the tea was harsh, but it had a kind of intriguing charm. “I’m beginning to see your point, but science doesn’t answer everything,” he said.

“True. I don’t suppose it ever will. But adding God to the explanation doesn’t help, it just complicates. Believers tie themselves in knots trying to rationalize why God allows bad things to happen and why he doesn’t provide the relief himself. The convoluted rationalization vanishes when you simply realize that you have no need of the God hypothesis.”

“You use the word ‘rationalize’ as if it’s a bad thing.”

“Not all rationalization is bad. If you knew for a fact that God existed, then you would want to rationalize or justify any apparent contradiction with that fact—to reinterpret new clues to fit the known facts. But God’s existence is exactly what we’re trying to establish. Rationalization parries an attack, nothing more. It is very different from giving evidence to support a position.”

That made sense to Paul. “Giving evidence strengthens your position, and rationalizing avoids the weakening of your position,” Paul said. “They’re almost opposites.”

“Exactly. Rationalization starts with God’s existence: given Christianity, how can I square it with the facts? Reason starts with the facts and follows them where they lead.”

Related post: Argument from Design BUSTED!