The hip hop band Insane Clown Posse created an interesting meme with its 2010 song “Miracles.”
Well, not so much interesting as bizarre. Here’s a bowdlerized version of the verses in question:

Water, fire, air and dirt.
F**kin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist.
Y’all motherf**kers lying and getting me pissed.

You really want to know how magnets work? Here you go:

These are Maxwell’s equations, the foundation of our understanding of electricity and magnetism. They were published in 1865. A deep understanding would obviously take some effort, but the point is that this question is no mystery to science.
The song’s not all bad, but it wanders from justifiable wonder at nature (“Oceans spanning beyond my sight / And a million stars way above ’em at night”) to conflating wonder with ignorance.
Saturday Night Live did an excellent parody video. The lyrics in their song “Magical Mysteries” include, “Where does the sun hide at night? / Did people really used to live in black and white?” which isn’t too far from denying our knowledge about magnets.
Maybe Bill O’Reilly is a Juggalo (a fan of Insane Clown Posse) because he has sounded a lot like them. In a 2011 interview with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O’Reilly said, “I’ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam, in my opinion. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.”
(Or you could just look it up in Wikipedia.)
And were there no consequences to O’Reilly for being this confused about reality? He’s been lampooned for these statements (and a later defense, which was equally ridiculous) by people who weren’t his fans to begin with. But doesn’t his fan base care about reality? Can they possibly cheer on this willful ignorance?
Despite the contrary opinions of O’Reilly and Insane Clown Posse, learning about how things work can make them more amazing. Actually understanding how magnets work doesn’t ruin the magic trick, it turns mysterious into marvelous.
Here’s an experiment: go outside on a clear night. Hold out your hand, arm extended, and look at the nail of your little finger. That fingernail is covering a million galaxies. Not a million stars, a million galaxies. Each galaxy has roughly 100 billion stars. That’s 100,000,000,000,000,000 stars under just one fingernail. Now see how vast the sphere of space is compared to that one tiny patch.
And how does the Bible treat this inconceivable vastness? “[God] also made the stars” (Gen. 1:16). That’s it.
The god of the Old Testament is little more than a dictator with the wisdom of Solomon, the generalship of Alexander, and the physical strength of Hercules. But science gives you the vastness of the universe, the energy of a supernova, the bizarreness of quantum physics, and the complexity of the human body. The writers of the Bible were constrained by their imagination, and it shows. There is so much out there that they couldn’t begin to imagine. If you want wonder, discard the Bible and open a science book.
And this is not groundless myth, it’s science—the discipline that makes possible your reading this across the Internet, on a computer, powered by electricity (and governed by Maxwell’s equations).
Carl Sagan said, “We are star stuff” to suggest that we are literally made from the remnants of stars. Two adjoining carbon atoms in a molecule in your body might have come from different exploding stars. Science gives us this insight, not religion.
Second-century Christian author Tertullian is credited with the maxim, credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd). In other words, no one could make this stuff up.
If you believe things either in spite of evidence to the contrary or because of it, science may not for you. But if you want to understand reality to the best of humanity’s ability, rely on science. C’mon in—the water’s fine!

Science does not make it impossible to believe in God, 
but it does make it possible to not believe in God.
— Steve Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics

Photo credit: mutantMandias

You may be surprised to learn that not everyone is convinced by the arguments of New Atheism’s Four Horsemen. I certainly was surprised.
In one negative review of Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, the author said:

Hitchens claims that, “As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.”
Is he serious? I doubt that even Hitchens would find re-runs of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos “far more awe-inspiring” than Michelangelo’s vision of God creating man.

And can this author be serious? He’s saying that the awe from science is dwarfed by that from religion?
Science in Palestine
Here’s a brief caricature of what I imagine “awe” meant in the Old Testament. Imagine a Jew and a non-Jew meet 3000 years ago in Palestine. They’re comparing gods.
Jew: And strong! Let me tell you how strong Yahweh is. See that rock over there? The one as big as a house?
Not-a-Jew: Okay.
Jew: Yahweh could pick it up and throw it just like you’d throw a pebble.
NJ: Wow!
Jew: Yeah, and that mountain over there? He could pick it up and move it across the valley without even trying.
NJ: Impressive.
Jew: And did I tell you that he created everything? And I mean everything! This was thousands of years ago—he formed all the land from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia; from Egypt to Greece. He created the sun and moon. Rainbows, earthquakes—everything!
NJ: I didn’t know that …
Jew: Yeah, so don’t mess with us ’cause he’s on our side.
Yahweh was like a superhero—stronger than Hercules, with better generalship than Alexander, and wiser than Solomon. The Jews needed a big brother to help with all their difficulties with neighboring tribes and countries. It’s nice to have a superhero on your side when there are bullies around (who each have their own superhero protectors).
The imagination of a primitive desert tribe 3000 years ago wasn’t that broad, and that superhero concept of God was about as much as they could imagine.
… vs. science today
Compare that with what modern science has given us in the past couple of hundred years. Let’s ignore the advances that make our lives much more bearable (vaccines, antibiotics, anesthesia, energy, transportation, engineering, etc.) and focus on the cerebral stuff. The mind-expanding stuff. Things like the age of the earth and the universe, the huge distances between stars and galaxies, or the amount of energy stars produce.
Try this experiment: on a clear night, go look at the stars. Now extend your arm and spread your fingers. The nail of your little finger covers one million galaxies. In each galaxy are on average 100 billion stars. This gives a good perspective on the tiny space our earth occupies in the universe.
Or look at the small scale and consider the complexity of a cell. If you think evolution is counterintuitive, consider quantum physics–quantum entanglement, for example.
And notice the irony in the author’s “I doubt that even Hitchens would find re-runs of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos ‘far more awe-inspiring’ than Michelangelo’s vision of God creating man.” Yes, the Sistine Chapel fresco is marvelous, but it was created by a man! Can he be saying that a work of a man trumps nature’s marvels?
The author lists other great works inspired by religion: “Giotto, Bach and Handel, Chartres and St. Peter’s.” Art, music, and architecture—here again, these are all made by humans.
Who, exactly, do you give praise to?
I can’t resist an aside on the topic of what God does vs. what people do. You’ve probably seen the iconic woman who survived the big disaster (hurricane Katrina’s rampage through New Orleans, for example) and is now back on her feet. “Thank you Jesus!” she says. “I lost everything, but now I have clothes and an apartment and a job.”
She seems to forget that Jesus didn’t lift a finger to give her those things—she’s doing well thanks to other people. Her thanks should be aimed at the combination of government aid and charitable donations that helped her out. And while we’re talking about Jesus, he was the guy who brought the disaster in the first place. What she should have said was “Thank you America! And Jesus, we need to talk …”
Of course, this doesn’t address the “Does God exist?” question. Maybe God does exist, and he produced the amazing things we see in nature. But it’s through science that we see these awe-inspiring things, not through the Bible. This marvelous universe is not at all what the early Jews, living on their small Mesopotamian disk of a world with the sun rotating around it, imagined it to be.
The awe we get from religion can’t compare to the awe we get from science.

If God had wanted us to believe in him,
he would have existed.
— Linda Smith

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Apologist Frank Turek gives the 9/11 attack as an example of a vivid memory. Can you remember where you were and what you were doing on September 11, 2001? How about the same date a year earlier? Why is one date memorable and the other not? And what does this tell us about the accuracy of the gospel record of the remarkable life of Jesus?
Important events impress themselves on our memories, but there’s a big difference between a vivid memory and an accurate one. “This American Life” provided a great example a few weeks ago of how our memories fool us—a startling example, in fact. Let me briefly summarize it.
Emir’s story
Emir Kamenica was born in Bosnia in 1978. Yugoslavia began to unravel when he was 13. Though his father was killed, the rest of the family was lucky to get out of the war and make it as refugees to Atlanta.
Their new life was no paradise. Their apartment was dirty, and Emir made no friends. He was one of a couple of dozen white kids out of 900 in his high school. He felt the racial tension both in his neighborhood and his school. His English was terrible, and he practiced by translating passages from his favorite book, The Fortress, into English.
The one bright light in his school experience was Miss Ames, a student teacher in his English class for only a couple of weeks.
For one assignment in her class, Emir took a shortcut by submitting a translated passage from The Fortress that he found especially moving. The book was in Bosnian—who would find out? Miss Ames was impressed and said that he needed to get to a better school. By good fortune, she had a job interview at a local private school in a few days, and she took him along.
To Emir, the school was paradise. He had practiced a short line: “I’m a Bosnian refuge. My school is really bad. Please, can I go here?” For her own interview, Miss Ames had brought his essay as an example of what inspired her to be a teacher.
Though student applications were due months earlier and financial aid for that year was already arranged, the school highly valued diversity, and a Bosnia refugee would be a nice addition to the student body. Strings were pulled, and Emir made it in. After graduating there, he went on to Harvard as an undergrad. Then he earned a PhD from Harvard. And now, at 35, he’s a professor of Behavioral Economics at the University of Chicago.
This Bosnian refugee became a success all because one teacher took the time to help him out, fooled by his plagiarized essay. She mistook him for a genius and got him into a private school, which got him into Harvard, which launched a successful academic career.
This was Emir’s defining story, and he told it over and over. He contrasted it with that of his one friend from public school, a fellow Bosnian, who had no guardian angel. The friend got into trouble, spent time in jail, and went back to Bosnia.
Miss Ames didn’t get the job, and Emir never saw her again. As an adult, he tried to find her a couple of times, without success. He didn’t know her first name and wasn’t even sure of the spelling of her last name.
… the other side of the story
“This American Life” hired a private detective and found Miss Ames. Her version of the story was … different.
She had been a new teacher but wasn’t an intern. In fact, she had been Emir’s full-time teacher for an entire semester. His English was “tremendous,” and, in talking to his other teachers, Miss Ames realized that this sophomore was beyond senior level in all subjects.
She also disagreed about the character of the school. It wasn’t a ghetto school but had a great mix of students, like a teenage UN. She remembered about 20% white kids (later confirmed by fact checking).
And the essay that Emir plagiarized, the central fact to Emir’s story? She didn’t even remember it. It played no role in her decision to push him into the private school.
Emir never saw Miss Ames at the new school, not because she didn’t get the job, but because that trip had never been for a job interview. It had all been for him.
After Emir, Miss Ames’ story took a bad turn. The school administration was annoyed that she had poached their prize pupil, and they exiled her to whatever amounted to Siberia in that school district. After another year, she quit teaching.
(I’ve written more about our fallible brains here.)
The punch line of her story was that Emir had been any teacher’s once-in-a-lifetime student. He could’ve still gotten a great education if he’d stayed at that public high school, been at the top of his class at a good regional college, and then gone to Harvard for the PhD. After leaving Atlanta, she didn’t keep track of his career except by looking for his name in the Nobel Prize list every year.
For both people, but Emir in particular, these stories weren’t incidental but were important stories in their lives. His story was of plagiarism, luck, and a guardian angel. Her story was of innate gifts, inevitability, and martyrdom.
That doesn’t mean that Emir’s story wasn’t vivid–it was. It also doesn’t prove that it was false. What it proves is that at least one story was false.
A vivid memory may not be an accurate one. Remember that the next time someone points to the gospels and insists that so remarkable a story as the resurrection must’ve been remembered accurately despite the long decades from events to first writing.

A church steeple with a lightning rod on top
shows a total lack of confidence.
— Doug McLeod

Photo credit: Joaquin Villaverde