The Burned-Over District was the name given to the western part of New York state. From this region in the early- to mid-1800s came much of the energy for the Second Great Awakening. From here came Mormonism; the Millerites and their descendants, the Adventists; the Fox sisters, key to the Spiritualism movement; the Shakers; and the Oneida utopian community. It was named the Burned-Over District to suggest that it had had so many revivals and religious movements that no fuel remained for any more.

One additional product of this region was the Cardiff Giant, which has a surprising religious connection.

A giant man discovered

In 1869, workmen digging a well in Cardiff, NY, near Syracuse, uncovered what appeared to be a petrified man. It was a giant over ten feet tall. William Newell the landowner charged visitors 25 cents to see the marvel. Two days later, with huge crowds, he doubled the fee. Some religious groups saw the man as archeological proof of the Genesis story of the giant Nephilim—“there were giants in the earth in those days,” as the King James Bible put it (Genesis 6:4).

With interest in the giant still strong, Newell sold the giant to a Syracuse group for the equivalent of half a million dollars today.

The story comes apart

Archeologists soon declared the giant a fake, and George Hull, cousin of the landowner, admitted he was behind the hoax. The giant had been carved from gypsum, stained to simulate age, and then shipped to Cardiff so that Newell could bury it and then, a year later, order the well dug so that workmen could stumble across the find.

Incredibly, even after this admission, the stone giant continued to be a moneymaker, and showman P.T. Barnum offered a fortune to buy it. When the Syracuse syndicate refused to sell, Barnum made a copy, displayed it in his New York City museum, and claimed that his was the real fake, while the Syracuse giant was a fake fake. In response to the idea of people paying to see a fake fake, one of the new owners of the Syracuse giant observed, “I guess there’s a sucker born every minute” (falsely attributed to Barnum).

Barnum’s observation was also penetrating: “The American people love to be humbugged.”

Another humbug

L. Frank Baum was 13 years old and living in a suburb of Syracuse as the Cardiff giant hoax unfolded. He learned of Barnum’s observation and, decades later, merged it into his The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. At the end of that book, Dorothy and her friends discover that the wizard is a humbug but that the citizens of Oz had participated in the deception. Evan Schwartz in Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story said:

In telling the story of the real fake and the fake fake, Frank Baum would never forget this powerful lesson: Americans not only don’t mind being fooled, or humbugged, but they desperately want to be taken for a ride—and the greater the number of people who are strung along by a great humbug, the more others want to be in on it, too.

The real story

While cashing in on Americans’ gullibility (or delight at being duped) might have been a motivation, George Hull’s real drive was to prove how easy religious Americans were to fool. Hull was an atheist, and the idea for the hoax came from an argument with a preacher who took the Genesis giant story as history. (Clearly, frustration at Christianity’s hold on Americans dates to long before blogging.)

As with the Cardiff giant, American Christians easily accept remarkable and unsubstantiated religious claims. In a couple of recent posts (here and here), I’ve explored the surprisingly frank admission of how, for Christian apologist William Lane Craig, reason takes a back seat to faith. How can his flock keep following him when he admits that reason isn’t what supports the edifice?

Perhaps Americans’ gullible acceptance of the Cardiff giant hoax gives some insight.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/23/14.)

Image public domain

Here’s another excerpt from my book, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey.

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, and they’re in Jim’s house.

Paul came into the kitchen. “You said that Reverend Hargrove and you had worked together, and I mentioned this to Reverend Hargrove.”

“What did he say?”

“That you and he debated a lot. He said that that’s where his passion for apologetics came from.”

“We did debate a lot. Sam liked to win. I took that as a challenge and learned more about apologetics to present the atheist counterpoint. Perhaps I played the role of the freethinker a little too energetically—I like to win as well.”

“But you were a believer then.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t argue from the opponent’s side. You must know his position. Until you do, you don’t completely understand your own.” Jim dried his hands on a towel. “I met a woman in Boston once. The conversation turned to travel, and I asked her where she liked to go. She said, ‘Why should I travel? I’m already there!’ Extraordinary—and yet that’s the way many Christians think. ‘Why should I critique my position or evaluate someone else’s? I’m already there!’ ”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about my own position. It’s hard to admit this, but I’ve been having some doubts.” Paul looked at the floor as he smacked his fist against his thigh. “Just a little.” He looked hard at Jim. “As an atheist, I guess that must please you.”

“Not really.” Jim set the kettle on the stove to boil and walked past Paul to the living room. “I care about the truth.” Jim sat and motioned Paul into his chair. “If you think you have it, I want you to argue as convincingly as you know how. On the other hand, if you find my opinions convincing, you’re welcome to them—they’re free. And if neither of us changes but we can live in a civil manner with each other, then that works as well. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ ”

Jim walked to a bookshelf and pulled off his Bible. He returned to the sofa, set the Bible on the center table, and slowly flipped through the pages so Paul could see. “This was my approach to truth.” There didn’t seem to be a single page without a handwritten mark. Some notes were small and dense while others were scrawled in large block letters. Some notes were in pencil while others were in various and seemingly arbitrary colors of ink. Some pages had margins full of comments with more on scraps of paper.

“Wait—what did that page say?” Paul pointed at a page.

Jim leafed back, page by page.

“There!” Paul said. In the outside margin of the page, with a dark pen and in capital letters, was written the word “Nonsense.”

“Oh, that,” Jim said. “That’s the book of Job.”

What was next—shopping lists? Drinking songs? Bawdy limericks? “Why would you deface a book of Scripture? And why Job? It’s the book where we see God’s consistent love during hardship.”

“Indeed? Then let me suggest you read that book more closely. God says that he ruined Job without reason—took away his health and money and killed his family. Why? Because he could. That’s not a very helpful book if you’re trying to find God’s love.”

“That’s not what I remember from the book.”

“Sermons rarely tell the complete story of Job. Read it and decide for yourself.”

Paul resolved to do exactly that, but there was a more immediate problem. “I must say, you seem to have treated your Bible rather harshly.”

“I critique what I read, and whether something is wicked or noble, I write what I think.”

“But you can’t treat the Bible that way. It’s a holy book.”

“Who cares? If it’s the truth, then surely it isn’t so fragile that it can be damaged by a nasty comment in the margin. The truth can take whatever punishment I give it. If it can’t, then it’s not worth my regret—or yours.”

“It just seems disrespectful.”

“I treat the claims of Christianity as if they can be tested against logic and reason. I can’t give a philosophy any more respect than that.”

The kettle whistled, and Jim went to the kitchen. He returned with the tea tray and set it on the center table.

“Tell me about your change—how you became a freethinker,” Paul said.

Jim eased back into the sofa. “I left the church in about 1885.”

“Why did you leave?”

“There was a falling out in the church. I wound up on the losing end, and Sam was part of the group that forced me out.”

“That must have been devastating.”

“I felt betrayed, but that’s another story. A few years later, Vive died—it’s been over twenty years now. I was still a Christian then, but struggling. How could God have taken Vive from me? Every Christian who endures the death of a loved one asks the same questions, of course, but it was especially tough since I didn’t have the church community for comfort. I felt very alone.

“Then I began noticing natural disasters that God apparently felt were necessary to impose on his favorite creation. One year, a blizzard in the Midwest killed hundreds of people, many of them children. It was called the Schoolhouse Blizzard. There was one Nebraska school—when the stove ran out of wood, the teacher led her students to another building less than a hundred yards away. The blowing snow made visibility so poor that they didn’t make it, and all the children froze to death.” Jim swallowed hard and faltered.

Jim ticked off other disasters that had made an impression, making clear that this wasn’t a period of unusual tragedy, just unusual awareness on his part. “These disasters prodded me. What explained natural evil? I called out to God and got no answer—as if there was no one on the other end of the telephone—and that was when I made those notes in my Bible. I felt abandoned, in agony.”

Paul often felt privileged when parishioners confided their difficulties in him, but he had rarely heard so personal a story.

“Then I began to take seriously the objections from the atheist side,” Jim said. “I knew them well, but I had always assumed that they were wrong. I had never given them a chance. But when I did, I noticed something surprising. The difficult questions in Christianity fell away when approached from the atheist viewpoint. Why do natural disasters happen? Because they just do—there is no conscious cause, no particular message behind them. Why does God answer my prayers but let millions of people die every year from malnutrition or disease? Because there is no God, just an unfeeling and indifferent Nature in which people are hurt sometimes. Why does God answer some of my prayers but not others, even the unselfish ones? Because there is no God to answer prayers, and I just imagined answers. Why is there support for slavery and barbarism in the Bible? Because it was written by ordinary men thousands of years ago and is a reflection of their primitive attitudes, nothing more.”

Jim set the cups on their saucers and swirled the tea in the pot. “It was a revelation—all the convoluted and flimsy rationalization that had been necessary before just vanished. My God hypothesis was a poor explanation of reality, and when I no longer insisted that it was correct and simply followed reality where it led me, things made vastly more sense.”

Continued in part 2.

Do we live in a world with a god? There are many reasons to reject that idea (part 1 here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world:

11. Because God is absent from where we’d expect him

Victor Stenger makes the Argument from Absence, which observes that we don’t find God where we’d expect to. This is a direct response to a popular Christian argument that goes something like this: “You say God doesn’t exist? Well let me ask you this: have you looked everywhere in the universe? How do you know he doesn’t exist if you haven’t looked everywhere?”

This is simply the “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist” argument, which is off topic because I’m not trying to prove God doesn’t exist. However, when you look in places where you’d expect to find evidence of God, and you find none, that is evidence against God.

Stenger explores eight areas.

1. Cosmology. We should find evidence for God in cosmology, but natural laws are sufficient. We find no data that needs a miraculous violation of laws. “Well established cosmological knowledge indicates that the universe began with maximum entropy, that is, total chaos with the absence of structure. Thus the universe bears no imprint of a creator.”

2. Evolution. We should find God in the structure of living things, but evolution is sufficient. Complex organisms evolved from simpler ones in a variations-on-a-theme way. Life forms are marvelously complex, but elegance is what we’d expect to find in a designed lifeform, not mere complexity. Far from being evidence of a Creator, the junk in DNA argues for the opposite conclusion.

3. Souls. We should find evidence that God gave humans souls, but the supernatural isn’t necessary to explain consciousness, memory, or personality (more). There is no evidence that souls are anything more than wishful thinking.

4. Revelation. The Bible claims that God gives communicates through revelations, but we can’t verify this. Even many of the un-supernatural claims like the Exodus and David’s empire now appear to be false.

5. Prayers. Jesus in the Bible claimed that prayers are reliably answered (more here and here). The Bible has no qualifiers like “if you’re worthy” or “if your prayer happens to line up with God’s plan.” Christians make billions of prayers, but there is no convincing evidence that God answers any. Prayer is easy to study scientifically, but the comprehensive Templeton Study found no evidence of the value of prayer.

6. Inhospitable universe. The Bible makes clear that the universe was created with man in mind, but the vast majority of the universe (and the majority of the earth) is inhospitable to man. The universe has 200 billion galaxies, but earth was the actual purpose? Nope.

7. New information. If God communicates with people through prayer or revelation, there should be evidence of people having information they could only have gotten supernaturally. Instead, no such claim has checked out, and the Bible has no information that wouldn’t have already been available to the people who wrote it (more here and here).

8. Morality. Is God the source of morality? Given the barbaric morality God displays in the Old Testament, it’s clear that he is no moral authority. For example, God said that slavery was fine, but we say that it’s abhorrent. Both can’t both be right. Christians must pick.

This relates to Hitchens’ Moral Challenge: identify a moral action taken or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer that couldn’t be taken or uttered by an unbeliever—something that only a believer could do and an atheist couldn’t. There is nothing.

But now think of the reverse: something terrible that only a believer would do or say. Examples from the Bible easily come to mind—Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac, for example. Today, Christians justify lots of things, from Westboro Baptist Church’s “God hates fags” to any hateful or selfish conclusion justified by “because God (or the Bible) says” such as condemning homosexuality, blocking civil rights, prohibiting stem cell research, and so on.

Could God be hiding under a rock somewhere that we haven’t peeked under? Sure, but this secretive god isn’t the Christian god who’s eager for a relationship. These are eight places where we would expect a god to be, and our searches have come up empty.

12. Because physics rules out the soul or the afterlife

This is a related argument by another physicist, Sean Carroll. He notes that there is plenty of physics we don’t understand, but the physics of the everyday world is very well understood. If a soul exists, it would need to exist in particles, and it would need particles to convey it into the afterlife. No such particles exist. Unlike “Have you looked everywhere in the universe?” we have looked everywhere for particles that interact in our daily lives. We’ve found them all, and none could explain the soul.

Here’s his critique of hiding places for the soul particle(s):

Could new particles hide from our view? Sure, but only if they were (1) very weakly interacting or (2) too heavy to create or (3) too short-lived to detect. In any of those cases, the new particle would be irrelevant to our everyday lives. (Source)

The Christian god needs physics to build a soul, but physics isn’t cooperating. This doesn’t offer much hope for the afterlife, either. (More)

Continue with part 6.

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Image via John D, CC license

Do we live in a world with a god? There are many reasons to reject that idea (part 1 here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world:

5. Because nothing distinguishes those who follow god from everyone else

A few years ago, I visited a museum exhibit of the jewelry of Russia’s imperial family, the Romanovs. The focus was on the Faberge jewelry, with several of the famous Easter eggs as the centerpiece, but there was more. I was most taken with the Christian icons—paintings and statues of religious figures, crosses, and so on—from Tsarina Alexandra. She was extremely religious, and as Tsarina she performed daily religious rituals, humbled herself by embroidering linen for the church, read little but religious material, and consulted wandering “men of God” like Rasputin.

Her devotion did nothing to help her family, and they were murdered shortly after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

We can find many other examples where Christians took to heart Christianity’s promise of answered prayer. Christian faith was strong on both sides of the U.S. Civil War, and yet roughly 700,000 died, about as many as in all other wars involving the U.S.

Francis Galton conducted an innovative prayer experiment in 1872. Since “God save the king” (or something similar) was a frequent public prayer, members of royal families should live longer. Few will be surprised to hear that they did not.

I recently wrote of hypocrisy from a radio ministry on the question of prayer. The ministry first mocked atheists’ stupidly observing that God didn’t save the lives of Christians in a Texas church shooting, along the lines of, “Who doesn’t know that Jesus promised tribulation to his followers rather than luxury?” But six weeks later, the ministry was asking for prayers to speed the recovery of a staff member with a serious injury, insisting now that prayers do benefit believers.

If there’s a God, then they got it right once—prayers and devotion from believers should have an effect. Here again, the pro-Christian evidence you’d expect doesn’t exist.

6. Because televangelists make clear that prayer doesn’t work

Watch a televangelist show. You will see periodic appeals that first ask the audience for prayers and then for money. Sometimes you’ll see a text crawl across the bottom with the phone number euphemistically labeled “prayer request” (which sounds better than “place to give me money”).

But doesn’t that sound strange? If prayers get God to do something, then the televangelist could just pray himself. Or, if the power of prayer is proportionate to the number of voices, the televangelist could just harness the audience to turn his small voice into a holy airhorn. God’s actions make any human generosity pointless. What could money do that God couldn’t?

Televangelists make clear the uncomfortable truth: prayer doesn’t work. Money (or filthy lucre, if you prefer) does. A real god who claimed that prayers work would deliver on that promise.

7. Because Christians want help from the government

The U.S. Constitution is secular, and the separation between church and state is made mandatory with the First Amendment. Even if crossing the line weren’t unconstitutional, what would it say about the weakness of Christian claims that it needs to lean on the government to support itself?

Despite the prohibition, Christianity isn’t content to stay on its side of the back seat. Think of the accommodations it already gets: the President has been obliged to issue a proclamation declaring a National Day of Prayer since 1952, “In God We Trust” is the national motto, conservative voters punish politicians who aren’t sufficiently Christian (bypassing Article VI of the Constitution, which prohibits a religious test for public office), and the IRS has for years failed to revoke churches’ nonprofit status when they violate the Johnson amendment’s prohibition against politicking from the pulpit. Conservatives are continually pushing for Creationism and prayer in public schools, “In God We Trust” displays in government buildings, Ten Commandments monuments and manger scene displays on public property, the ability to deny service and government licenses to people their god doesn’t like, and prayer to start meetings in venues from Congress down to city councils.

Christians who value the rights that Western society grants us today—voting, no slavery, no torture, non-coercive marriage, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom of speech, fair trial, democracy, and so on—must remember that these all came from secular sources. Biblically based society would have none of these (more here and here). Don’t think that Christianity is the foundation on which is built American democracy; instead, American Christianity is permitted by the Constitution (more).

When Christian leaders push against constitutional limits on religion, they admit that Christianity’s arguments are so weak that they need to push the government to support their cause. A real God wouldn’t need such help.

Continued in part 4.

Image via roobislem, CC license