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Atheist Monument Critique: Founding Father Freethinkers

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Read part 1 of this series on an American Atheist monument installed on public property in Florida as a protest against a Ten Commandments monument.

The back of the monument contains quotes by some founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Wiker (the Christian whose article I’ve been critiquing) responds:

The problem with the American Atheists using these quotes is that, while Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin were certainly Americans, they were certainly not atheists.

That’s debatable, but let’s let that go. Wiker continues:

They warmly approved of the moral doctrines that arose from Christianity. These moral doctrines were understood, by all three, to be essential to forming the character of the citizens for free government.

What moral doctrines are exclusively from Christianity? Good principles like “don’t murder” or “don’t steal” are hardly unique to Christianity or even to religion. (Admittedly, neither are stupid principles like Christianity’s support for slavery or genocide.) And basic principles that today we think are obvious like no slavery, no torture, non-coercive marriage, freedom from religion, democracy, and others that are listed in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not from the Bible (more here).

Moral principles come from people and society. We don’t need to imagine the supernatural to explain them.

Thomas Jefferson

Here’s the first quote:

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”
— Thomas Jefferson

Wiker tries to handwave a response:

The first quote shows a confidence by Jefferson that the foundation of belief in God is rational, not that reason leads to atheism.

Wrong again. Why would Jefferson demand that we question the existence of God if he meant that belief in God is rational? How stupid does Wiker hope we are?

John Adams

He has no rebuttal to the Adams quote:

“It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [writing the Constitution] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”
— John Adams

Benjamin Franklin

Here’s the final atheist quote:

“When religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
— Benjamin Franklin

Wiker responds:

[This] is spoken against having an established church (as England had its own established church).

I’d say, “Nice try” except that this is quite a pathetic try. No, that’s not what Franklin is saying. He’s saying that any god so ephemeral that he won’t support his own religion isn’t much of a god.

But that does not prove that secular atheism invented the separation of church and state. . . . The separation of church and state is (like hospitals and universities) the invention of Christianity.

The Church must’ve forgotten its embrace of church/state separation during the period when the Pope had his own country, ordered Crusades, crowned emperors, and in general meddled in the political affairs of Europe. Or when kings imagined a divine right to rule. Or when Henry VIII took the role of head of the Church of England. The church was up to its well-appointed elbows in politics. (And Wiker claims too much when he declares that Christianity invented universities and hospitals.)

True, “atheism” didn’t invent separation of church and state, but let’s not pretend that Christianity did, either. Martin Luther’s doctrine of two kingdoms, for example, is hardly the First Amendment.

But focus on the positive. Wiker is so adamant that church/state separation a good thing that he wants to take credit for it. His claim of invention is wrong, but let’s instead focus on his celebration of church/state separation.

Not only are we on the same page, we’ve come full circle. The initial news story was of a county in Florida giving exclusive use of their property for a Christian message. Wiker’s support for church/state separation makes clear he would stand alongside American Atheists in demanding either no religious messages or free access for all.

Concluded here.

We do not err because truth is difficult to see.
It is visible at a glance.
We err because this is more comfortable.
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/16/13.)

Image credit: Dave Muscato, CC

 

Church/State Separation—Where Is the Line?

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starke floridaWhat is the fascination with putting Christian propaganda on public property? Is it a Tourette’s kind of thing, where some people just can’t avoid crossing the “Do Not Cross” line?

Another Christian display on public land

In 2012, a private Christian group erected a Ten Commandments monument on courthouse property in Starke, Florida. American Atheists fought to have the monument removed. They lost that fight, but they did force the county to create a “free speech zone” to permit monuments with other views, and a year later they erected their own atheist monument. To no one’s surprise, some Christians were displeased.

In “Atheists Flood the Public Square,” Benjamin Wiker sounds the alarm to concerned Christians*. This article came from tothesource, a site with the slogan, “Challenging hardcore secularism with principled pluralism.” (You mean like the hardcore secularism that’s defined in the U.S. Constitution?).

This year (2017) may be one where Christians are eager to let us know how oppressed they feel, so this Florida case is worth exploring.

Wiker imagines an elaborate game of chess (or chicken) where the atheists exploit loopholes in the system to frustrate honest, hardworking Christians who want nothing more than to exercise their freedom of religion. With luck, these atheists figure, they can so burden Christians that defending their God-given rights becomes too difficult and they retreat.

The strategy is to flood the monument market until Christians simply give up, give in, and move out.

I have no interest in taking rights away from Christians. I don’t think I’ve met an atheist who does. The problem may be that we disagree on the rights the Constitution gives to Christians.

Let’s be clear: the Constitution calls the shots. In the United States, the Constitution grounds our rights, not Christianity or the Bible. Religion is protected within American society because, and only because, the Constitution says so. That haven doesn’t come from God or the supernatural. It’s not part of some “natural law” outside humanity that everyone can sense.

If your attitude is that the Bible is your Constitution, don’t expect any respect for that opinion in a courtroom. In fact, the U.S. Constitution was the world’s first explicitly neutral constitution and its protections make it the Christian’s best friend.

I don’t get why this author is so agitated in the first place. Christianity doesn’t already have enough public displays of its message? Or is Christianity’s hold on its adherents so fragile that it needs to pull the government into proclaiming its message as well?

Ah, but atheism is a religion!

The game atheists play, according to Wiker, is to “flood the public square with monuments” to drive away the Christian ones. Eventually, we’ll have the atheists’ goal, the “naked public square.”

If we’re talking about the literal public square, then Wiker’s hysteria is off target. Again, no atheists are talking about removing free speech, religion included, from the public square. On the other hand, if we’re talking about the state-supported public square—schools, courthouses, and government buildings—then he’s exactly right. Atheists demand no religion or, failing that, equal access for all worldviews.

But don’t pretend that this is fair, Wiker tells us.

The truth is secular liberalism isn’t what you get when you subtract all religions. What you get when you subtract religion is another religion, secular liberalism, an entirely secular worldview dominated by materialism and hedonism and exceedingly intolerant of all other religions, especially Christianity.

Again, who wants this? I see the problem with materialism and hedonism. I see the problem with religious intolerance. What imaginary world of persecution has this guy created for himself?

But approach this from another angle. See him as Chicken Little, spreading alarm to rally the faithful, and his rant begins to make sense. Whipping up support through hysteria seems to be the goal, not honesty.

Christians, you’re on your own!

Christians can’t expect the government to protect Christianity; Wiker says they must do it themselves.

Face it, we Christians have become slothful. We wanted the government to ensure that we could enjoy all the benefits of living in a Christianized culture, without any of the work or sacrifice on our part—a kind of welfare mentality in regard to the faith.

As before (with the use of “public square”), he’s using words with several meanings. What’s a “Christianized culture”? If it’s a culture in which religion is protected, that’s something that I want as well. Dr. Wiker, show me where in America the right of Christianity to exist or Christians to profess their beliefs in the (literal) public square is under threat, and I’ll publicly express my support for your cause. The Constitution that doesn’t protect the Christian won’t protect the atheist either.

But if “Christianized culture” means a culture suffused with Christianity (“Merry Christmas” during the holidays, churches on every other corner, overwhelming church attendance), you’re on your own. Look to the market to support this. Don’t expect the government to help you out or even to care.

[Our mistake is that] we want the federal government to ensure that our faith is displayed publicly, even though we have done precious little to evangelize the public, so that more and more of the public is less and less Christian.

Who could possibly expect the federal government to display Christianity publicly? Only someone who hasn’t read the Constitution. The only reference to religion in the Constitution is to prohibit any religious test for public office, and the First Amendment says, “Government shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Just how weak is your faith that you would ever expect government help?

Continued with Wiker’s critique of the atheist monument here.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a religion.
— Robert M. Pirsig

*This article is no longer available from tothesource.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/4/13.)

Image credit: Wikimedia

 

’Tis the Season!

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Happy holidays, everyone! This is the 900th post for this blog.
Christmas presents atheismAs we near the solstice, one’s thoughts turn to topics of the season. If you’re looking for holiday gift ideas, let me suggest my two books. The apologetic argument becomes something of an additional character in Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey. It’s the story of a young man torn between two mentors, struggling to make the Christian case in the aftermath of the 1906 Azusa Street Revival.
A Modern Christmas Carol is a reworking of Dickens’ classic, in which a shrewdly successful televangelist receives unexpected Christmas visitors: first, his long-dead partner, and then three ghostly guides. Finally able to acknowledge the shallowness of his message and doubts he has long suppressed, he makes amends with far-reaching consequences.
Here are a few Christmas-y posts:

  • The virgin birth story is a popular one in the list of supposed fulfilled biblical prophecies. When you actually read it, however, it’s startling how many ways this claim falls apart.
  • The War on Christmas™ is a perennial favorite. Some Christians seem to enjoy being offended, and the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue is a professional at it. Literally—it’s his job. In one end-of-the-year survey, he thought he found a juicy factoid with which to attack the atheists, but it blew up in his face.
  • Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt demolished a pop Christmas song and taught an important lesson about how God doesn’t work: “How Christianity Infantilizes Adults.”
  • A parable about two kids arguing about evidence for Santa has interesting parallels with evidence for Jesus. Be careful about dismissing the existence of Santa, because that reasoning may demand that you dismiss Jesus as well.
  • In 2013, in what must have been a War-on-Christmas miracle, I was given a copy of Sarah Palin’s newly released Good Tidings and Great Joy to review. I had a few thoughts. Here’s the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of that book.

And finally, here’s a Christmas present from a reader of this blog, a skeptical update on the song “Mary Did You Know?”

We cannot know that Santa definitely doesn’t exist. 
This is technically true. 
But what’s your best guess? 
Go on. Be bold. 
— Ricky Gervais

Image credit: Donnie Ray Jones, flickr, CC
 

Simplicity: the Trait Missing from Christianity

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Ficus treeThe Bible in English has nearly a million words. Have you ever stopped to marvel at that? Why did God need so much space?
Let’s explore the idea that not only is this a surprisingly large number of words, but it’s a clue that Christianity is false. Why would a perfect god need a million words? Couldn’t he have gotten his message across at least as clearly (or more clearly) with a tenth as many words? Or even a thousandth as many?
Just a page or two of instructions would be enough to teach you how to be a vegan. That’s a lifestyle with strict rules—why would it be any more difficult for a perfect god to convey its message in the same space?
For comparison, the U. S. Constitution was written by humans and has defined the government for several centuries. It has just 4500 words. The U. N. Declaration of Human Rights has less than 1800 words. The Humanist Manifesto, 800.

The constitution of a god

Pare away the fluff and think about what a perfect god’s constitution might convey.

  • Personal details about the supernatural: the number of gods, name(s), and relationship to each other if more than one.
  • The fundamentals of non-obvious morality: slavery is good/bad, abortion is okay/forbidden, vegetarianism is mandatory/optional, and so on
  • The afterlife: what happens, if anything, when people die? If there’s a supernatural realm that we should know about, how does it fit with and interact with our own?
  • The god(s) purpose for each person. What, if anything, should we be doing to satisfy them?
  • What, if anything, we should know about the future

This addresses world religions’ primary concerns—morality, purpose, how to please the god(s), and the afterlife—though this is obviously just a guess. A real god might have a different list.
One additional point is why you should believe. This must be somewhere, and it might be conveyed through personal appearances or demonstrations. Could the evidence be included in this constitution? Before you say that it’s impossible to put something convincing in so short a document, don’t underestimate the capabilities of a god a trillion times smarter than any person.
Regardless of how it does it, this religion must have a mechanism for convincing everyone with evidence and argument that it is correct, unlike the myriad manmade ones.

Compare to the Bible

Categorize every verse in the Bible, and then sieve out everything that wouldn’t fit into the categories above. What would be lost?

  • The history of the Israelites and then the Jews and then the Christians. This does nothing to help understand god’s constitution.
  • Examples of God’s actions. With many questions raised but not answered by the Bible, believers scour every verse for clues.
  • Just so stories. For example: did you ever wonder why we hate the Moabites and Ammonites? Because they’re the result of Lot having sex with his own daughters—yuck! Or: ever wonder why this place is named this? Here’s the story behind that name.
  • Ideas borrowed from other cultures. For example: the Sumerian cosmology of water above and below the earth, a world-destroying flood, and a dying-and-rising god.
  • Contradictions. When not guided by a perfect hand, the more you write about your religion, the more contradictions you introduce.
  • An evolving message. Changes to the message from a god who doesn’t change can be embarrassing. For example: we used to sacrifice animals but not anymore; we used to have a works-based view of God but now it’s faith based; Jesus didn’t exist before, but now he’s mandatory.


See also: Christians’ Damning Refuge in “Difficult Verses”

The Bible is just a rambling story that goes on and on. It was written by people and looks like it. There’s no hint of any supernatural guidance.
Take the book of Revelation as an example, a psychotic, Dalí-esque horror show. There are 24 elders around the throne of God, with the four living creatures. There’s a scroll with seven seals and different events with the breaking of each. There’s the seven trumpets and different disasters with the sounding of each. There’s the seven bowls with different disasters with the pouring of each. There are four horsemen and seven spiritual figures including a dragon and the Beast. Each punishment is lovingly detailed, as the novella drones on and on.
Or look at the practice of Christianity today. Why is there a Bible Answer Man—shouldn’t God’s message be so clear that there would be no questions to answer? Why are there 45,000 denominations of Christianity today, and why were there radically different versions of Christianity such as the Marcionites and Gnostics in the early days? Why did Paul have to create Christianity—shouldn’t Jesus have done that? Jesus wrote nothing.
The more involved the story, the more you need to explain. Did Jesus have a human body or a spirit body? Why does God do immoral things in the Old Testament? Why isn’t God’s existence obvious? Why does God care just about the Israelites but later decide to embrace the whole world? Why doesn’t the world look like it was created by an omniscient and loving god? And what the heck is the Trinity?
The church convened 21 ecumenical councils to try to make sense of this. The discipline of systematic theology tries to tie up all the loose ends, but why would the study of a perfect god need this?

Rebuttal

The Christian rebuttal is obvious, and I’ve already gotten a lot of this in response to a recent post: How do you know that this is what a god would do? How do you know that a perfect god would even want us to clearly understand his plan?
This is true and irrelevant. I’m given the claim that the Christian god exists, and I must evaluate it. I can’t peek at the answer in the back of the book, and I can’t give up and get the answer. The buck stops here. It seems to me that a god that chose to make itself known would do so simply and unambiguously. There would be a clear statement of his plan, like the constitution above. Contrast that with the Bible—the entire story about all the stuff God did and how he got angry and then the Israelites did something stupid and then Jesus saved the day is unnecessary. Maybe it’s inspiring and maybe it’s great literature, but the entire Israelite blog is not needed to serve a perfect god’s goal.
Another possible response: But the core of Christianity can be distilled into a tract! If you insist on a brief version, there it is.
But this merely hides the problems. The Bible is still there, and it being a composite of manmade books, picked from an even larger set of candidates, means that the contradictions, tangential history, and unanswered questions remain.
I’m arguing for a different genre. A perfect god would itself give us a simple, unambiguous constitution. We have instead a book written by and focused on the people rather than the god, which is strong evidence that there is no actual god behind it.
See also: The Bible Story Reboots: Have You Noticed?

Living forever with God is the endgame,
so what’s the point of creating this elaborate,
blink-of-an-eye, soul-filtering machine called Planet Earth,
where beings have temporary bodies made of meat?
WTF?! Just create everyone in “Heaven” to begin with,
and none of the rest of this horror-show ever has to happen.
— commenter Kingasaurus

Inspiration: John de Lancie at the 2016 Reason Rally said that religion for him fails the KISS test, which inspired this post.
Image credit: olivier bareau, flickr, CC

Frank Turek’s Criminally Bad C.R.I.M.E.S. Argument: Fine Tuning

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fine tuning frank turekThis is a continuation of a critique of Frank Turek’s arguments in favor of Christianity from his book Stealing from God. See the beginning of the discussion here.
Let’s conclude the critique of Turek’s first argument, Cosmos.
Fine tuning of the universe
Turek says that if the expansion rate from the Big Bang were different by 10–15, the universe would have either collapsed or never developed galaxies. What explains this fine tuning?
Good question. Why does the universe look finely tuned? This is a scientific question, not incontrovertible evidence of the hand of God. Replacing “Science doesn’t know” with “Well, if you don’t, I do—it was God!” doesn’t help. Advancing a god as the cause of the universe simply moves the question back one level: if we assume that a deity did it, where did it come from? How did it create the universe out of nothing? What laws of nature did it break, and what as-yet-undiscovered laws did it use? We’ve resolved nothing. It is merely one more supernatural claim that science must set aside on its way to finding the truth.
And what is the universe finely tuned for? There is life on earth, a tiny speck in an inhospitable and inconceivably vast sea of space. Most of the mass in the universe isn’t ordinary matter, and almost all of that isn’t part of a habitable world. It’s hard to call the harsh wasteland that is the universe “tuned for life,” so why imagine that life was what it was finely tuned for? There are probably trillions of black holes in the universe—you could more logically say that it was fine tuned for them.
Turek argues that we have two possibilities: (1) that our universe just got really lucky with its constants or (2) a supernatural being created it. He concludes: (1) is really improbable, so therefore (2). But what is the probability of (2)?? How can we compare these two options when we haven’t even analyzed one of them? He doesn’t even acknowledge the problem.
Multiverse
Of course, the in-your-face response to the fine tuning argument sidesteps the question of whether the universe was finely tuned by arguing for a multiverse—uncountably many universes with varying cosmic constants, of which ours is just one. A very unlikely universe will pop up eventually if you have enough of them. In fact, Alexander Vilenkin, the cosmologist that Turek praised earlier, makes clear his view on the multiverse question in an article titled, “The Case for Parallel Universes: Why the multiverse, crazy as it sounds, is a solid scientific idea.”
(Does Turek still want to cite Vilenkin as a reliable source?)
Just to hit this a little harder, Jerry Coyne wrote a post subtitled with the very question that I had been asking: “Is the multiverse a Hail Mary pass by godless physicists?” No, the multiverse is not just a “well, it’s possible” gambit for which atheists admit they have no evidence for but which they toss out simply to annoy apologists. He quotes physicist Sean Carroll, who makes clear that the multiverse is a prediction made by other well-accepted theories. It wasn’t pulled out of a hat; it is a consequence of accepted physics.
(I discuss the related Kalam Cosmological Argument here and here.)
Cause and causelessness
Turek says, “If the universe had a beginning, it must’ve had a Beginner.” Does everything have a cause? When an electron comes out of a decaying nucleus or a photon comes out of an electron dropping to a lower energy level, what was the cause? Nothing. Quantum events (like the Big Bang presumably was) don’t necessarily need causes. “Everything has a cause” sounds right coming from our experience, but common sense isn’t a reliable tool at the edge of science.
Turek has one final salvo for this argument: “Either no one created something out of nothing or someone created something out of nothing.” Huh? So we’ve already established that the universe came from nothing? That’s possible, but there is no consensus. Why imagine that nothing was more likely before the Big Bang than something?
Lacking evidence but not confidence, Turek picks the latter option, as if it makes more sense that someone created something out of nothing. But how does anyone make something out of nothing? Turek falls back on an uncaused god, without evidence.
And even if we grant fine tuning, a supernatural agent creating the universe is just one of lots of explanations. Maybe our universe was created by powerful but limited aliens. We could be in the Matrix of a computer designed by an alien race. And so on. No need to imagine an unlimited god.
Unless there’s evidence, of course.
I’ve written more about the fine-tuning argument here and here.
Continue with the discussion of R = Reason.

“In God We Trust.” 
I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true. 
— Mark Twain

There’s a phrase we live by in America: “In God We Trust.”
It’s right there where Jesus would want it: on our money. 
— Bill Maher

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/1/13.)
Image credit: Seigner, CC
 

Revisiting the Kalam Cosmological Argument (3 of 3)

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Here is the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA):

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

This post is the conclusion of a three-part series responding to a Christian defense of the KCA. Part 1 here.
Below, the skeptical argument is shown in bold and the Christian response in italics.
“8. There are non-theistic explanations that remain live possibilities.” Even if the universe has a beginning, there are possibilities besides God. If you’re thinking of aliens or the multiverse, that just pushes the problem back a step.
What is it with this obsession for an immediate answer? Can’t we just say, “I don’t know”? That approach has done well for science, because it puts the spotlight on interesting questions, which then tend to get answered.
Of course, it’s clear why apologists demand an answer right now. They know that science regularly replaces supernatural explanation with evidence-based explanations. Their time window is brief, and they want to score some points for “God did it!” before they have to move on to another unanswered scientific question and hope that everyone forgets the last one they embraced.
Some have argued that a computer simulation like the Matrix will eventually be no more difficult than a homework assignment. Given that, is it likelier that we’re in a simulation or reality? (I don’t know what I think of this option, but I wanted to throw it out there as yet another non-God alternative.)
The multiverse would indeed demand an explanation, but why imagine that God is it? God has never been the answer to anything. If God is the explanation, show that he exists first and then infer that he created the universe/multiverse. The Christian god who loves us and desires a relationship would be obvious, and the obtuse KCA wouldn’t be a way to find him. Every clue points to naturalism as the explanation for this and other unknown puzzles.
“9. Popular-level science teaches the universe had a beginning, but someone says the real science shows it doesn’t. We aren’t given any argument as to why it’s really the case that a potentially-successful model for the beginning of the universe shows no finite beginning. We’re simply to take someone’s word for it, when we actually have physicists and scientists admitting these theories don’t work.”
There’s not much to respond to here, but I include it for completeness. I’ll just note that cosmologist Sean Carroll’s list of proposed models for the universe (there are many) includes a beginning-less universe (more).
“10. The KCA relies entirely on current science, and science can change.” “First, simply because some claim remains open to change does not mean that claim cannot be accepted as true…. Of course we can claim it is true!”
As long as we remember that science can change (and overturn a previously held conclusion), I’m fine with science being used in an argument to support the KCA.
“Second, the KCA does not rely entirely on science. In fact, the second premise (“the universe began to exist”) can be defended solely on rational argumentation.”
I think we’ve found your problem: thinking that “rational argumentation” (can I call this “common sense”?) is reliable at the frontiers of physics (see claim #3 above). The origin of the universe is within the domain of quantum mechanics, remember? You check your common sense at the door.
QM has already defeated the first premise, “whatever begins to exist had a cause” (see claim #1 above).
11. Your first cause falls to the infinite regress problem. If God is your first cause, what created God? God didn’t begin to exist. The First Cause must logically precede all else. There simply can’t be, by definition, anything that came before.
Be cautious when a definition brings something into existence. Like the Ontological Argument, which just thinks God into existence, that may be too good to be true.
You didn’t say this, but let me just add the caution that apologists shouldn’t respond to a scientific question with a theological claim. “My religion says that God was uncreated” is no answer in the real world.
You say that God didn’t have a cause … just because? That’s magic, and I need evidence. Why does God not need a cause if everything else does? Why is God eternal, but nothing else is? How did God create something out of nothing? How can he create the universe when he was outside of time—doesn’t deciding and acting require time?
The most charitable view is that you’ve resolved “What caused the universe?” with God, but you now have these new questions about God. You’ve simply repackaged the question, not answered it.
And if God can exist eternally, maybe that’s true for the universe (or the multiverse).
Conclusion
The author concludes:

Each objection has been dealt with by providing an answer. This means that each Christian, and each person, is rationally justified in accepting the KCA. If that is true, then it seems that the KCA’s truth implies God–not just any God, but the God of the Bible!

Nope. My original post is intact. I leveled five attacks on the first premise and three on the second. None of those were addressed in this article. No, rational people are not justified in accepting the Kalam Kosmological Argument.
You’ve probably seen the famous Sidney Harris cartoon where one scientist points to an involved equation on the blackboard and says to his colleague, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two,” where step two says, “Then a miracle occurs.” God is the step two—the implausible savior of Christians’ apologetic arguments.

The universe that we observe
has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose,
no evil, and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
— Richard Dawkins

I feel like I’m diagonally parked
in a parallel universe.
— seen on the internet

Image credit: NASA