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Debate Aftermath

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debate christian atheistI participated in a formal debate (20-minute opening statements, followed by rebuttals, close, and Q&A with the audience) a couple of weeks ago. The topic was “Is it Reasonable to Believe in God?” and I summarized the details here. The organizers have now supplied the video, which I include below. I think there were more than 100 people in the audience (mostly Christians, I’m sure).
Everyone treated me with respect, and I had a great time. Watch the video and tell me what you thought (the quality of the video looks to me to be excellent).
Opposing arguments
My opponent was Rob van de Weghe, and he opened with four arguments.

  1. Cosmological Argument. The universe began to exist; therefore, there must be a creator. A sub-argument was that entropy is increasing, so things must be winding down from a creation event.
  2. Fine Tuning Argument. The universe is delicately tuned for life.
  3. Design Argument. Life is complex, which points to a designer. A sub-argument was: where did life come from? God answers this question nicely.
  4. Moral Argument. Each of us is wired with a standard of moral values—where did this standard come from except from God?

My thorough responses will be found in blog posts (search and ye shall find), or you can watch the video below to see my very abbreviated response.
Debate strategy and my opening arguments
It’s important to think out one’s goals. In a public debate like this, a technical win isn’t much of a goal in my opinion. If there were judges critiquing the arguments, I would be careful to respond thoroughly to every argument, defend any attacks on my own arguments, and make clear how I thought I was doing (“I notice that my opponent has said very little about my third argument, so I must conclude that he is conceding that point …”) to help the judges see how thoroughly I was winning.
But of course there was no formal judging. Instead, my Christian opponent provided a Christian audience for me to lecture to, and my primary goal was to give them some ideas they hadn’t considered. If they heard a few simple, memorable puzzles to which they had no snappy answers, that might get them thinking. This means that standard arguments (such as, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”) were out, since those in the audience would likely have heard rationalizations already. And I had to do all this while coming across as polite, thoughtful, and intelligent.
Here are my opening arguments (I’ve written about each one in the blog):

  1. Historians Reject the Bible Story
  2. Mormonism Beats Christianity
  3. Because There’s a Map of World Religions
  4. Christianity Relies on Indoctrination
  5. The Natural Explanation Resolves the Puzzles Confronting Christians
  6. All the Other Religions Are Nonsense
  7. Jesus Is Just One More Dying and Rising God
  8. Christianity Is Unfalsifiable
  9. God Has No Impact on Reality

My debate goal was primarily to overwhelm my opponent with the quantity of arguments as well as mix up the list to add a few that I hadn’t used in prior debates so that simply watching previous debate videos wouldn’t give all my secrets. I read Rob’s book beforehand, and I assumed he’d done some preparation on me as well.
Rebuttals
Problem 1 would be being blindsided by a good argument that I’d never heard of before. Problem 2 would be getting an argument that I was familiar with and had even blogged about but for which I couldn’t remember the best points.
I’d almost welcome a bit of Problem 1, just to make life interesting and to give me something substantial to blog about later, but this didn’t happen. To avoid Problem 2, I went into the debate with printed summaries of about forty issues, distilled down from my blog posts, anticipating what might come up. Rob’s arguments were on any apologist’s top-ten list, so I was able to pull out a summary sheet for each one and circle the points that I wanted to make in my rebuttal. This made my life much easier, and it is quite satisfying to be able to say something like, “Rob quoted cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, but let me point out something else that Vilenkin said, and I quote …”
I’d like to thank the atheist friends who made the long trip to see the proceedings!
Feedback is welcome. Let me know what you think I need to work on—presentation, arguments, attitude, whatever.

To conceal a want of real ideas,
many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words,
intricate flourishes and phrases … new and unheard-of expressions,
all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned.
Yet with all this they say—just nothing.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

Image credit: Steve Maw, flickr, CC

Movie Review: “God’s Still Not Dead: You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down”

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Christian film cinema movieWho enjoyed “God’s Not Dead”? If you want to relive that unrealistic bit of Christian persecution porn, read my review.
Who wants a sequel? Me neither, but journalistic integrity forces me to give you a review. I made it out of the experience intact thanks to some local atheist friends, so let’s get into “God’s Not Dead 2.”
Variety predicts a successful opening despite its harsh review: “The franchise’s disciples will surely fill its collection plate as full as 2014’s $60-million-grossing original, but this paranoid persecution-complex fantasy is unlikely to win many converts.”
Plot with spoilers
Here’s the unsurprising plot. Grace is a kind-hearted high school teacher who takes good care of her live-in grandfather (played by Pat Boone). Brooke is a student in her AP History class whose callous freethinking parents quickly got over their son’s accidental death, leaving Brooke feeling empty and alone. In a class discussion about Martin Luther King and Gandhi, Brooke asks a question about the relevance of Jesus as a peacekeeper, and Grace replies with a relevant Bible quote. Another student complains, but he’s told that the mention of Jesus, including quotes from the Bible, are not amiss in public schools, assuming that the material is stated in the context of teaching rather than proselytization, which this clearly was. The End.
Kidding! Of course, the movie lives in Everyone Is Mean to Christians and the Sky Is Falling Land, and the school board gets involved. Then the ACLU (hiss!) files a lawsuit, and the lead lawyer isn’t shy about their agenda: “We’re going to prove once and for all that God is dead.” After a little prayer in the darkest hour of the courtroom proceedings, our heroine is acquitted, and once again we’re told that God’s not dead. (And asked to tweet that to all our friends.)
Sadly, there was no April Fool’s Day gotcha at the end. Since Jesus promised persecution, maybe Christians think they’re doing it wrong if there isn’t any. (And in the U.S., there isn’t.)

GND: the franchise
The amount of continuity between the two God’s Not Dead movies surprised me. Martin the Asian student makes a return appearance. In GND1, a Muslim student was disowned by her father, but Martin takes that role in the sequel when his father disowns him for his faith. Pastors Dave and Jude are back. The atheist-now-Christian reporter who got a cancer diagnosis in GND1 has a miraculous remission. Duck Dynasty is given as an answer to “What’s your favorite TV show?” in jury selection, and the daughter of the two Duck Dynasty characters who made cameos in GND1 plays a small part. And there’s a Newsboys concert at the end.
Who’s eager for God’s Not Dead 3?
What about all those court cases showing Christian persecution?
As with the GND1, this movie ends with a handful of court cases that it claims illustrate “the very real threats to religious liberty that occur daily in the public square.” These all had the Alliance Defending Freedom on the Christian side, and the ADF web site is crowing about the release of GND2 which they say was “inspired by ADF cases.”
They may not be that good an ally when the Human Rights Campaign labeled them as “one of the nation’s most dangerous organizations working to prevent equality for LGBT people.” They seem to take a zero-sum approach to the public square, removing others’ rights to enlarge their own.
The Supreme Court’s tests for religion in public schools are clear (see my summary of the Lemon test for violations of the First Amendment’s Establishment clause and the Sherbert test for violations of the Free Exercise clause).
Is the ACLU really that evil?
The American Civil Liberties Union is a popular bad guy in conservatives’ imagination, though its mission in the religion domain seems easy to accept: “The ACLU strives to safeguard the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty by ensuring that laws and governmental practices neither promote religion nor interfere with its free exercise.”
They might talk a good story, but let’s check the evidence. In front of a list of 166 cases going back thirteen years, they say:

The ACLU vigorously defends the rights of all Americans to practice their religion. But because the ACLU is often better known for its work preventing the government from promoting and funding selected religious activities, it is sometimes wrongly assumed that the ACLU does not zealously defend the rights of all religious believers to practice their faith. The actions described below – over half of which were brought on behalf of self-identified Christians, with the remaining cases defending the rights of a wide range of minority faiths – reveal just how mistaken such assumptions are.

Random observations
I won’t do a thorough takedown of the movie, but let me touch on a few points that are too good to miss.

  • Product-Placement Santa came early for several apologists brought in as witnesses for the defense, playing themselves. Lee Strobel mentioned his Case for Christ, and J. Warner Wallace was asked for both the title (Cold-Case Christianity) and then the subtitle (A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels) of his book. And the defense lawyer is given Man, Myth, Messiah by Rice Broocks, the apologetics consultant for the movie.
  • Amy is the reporter who unexplainably recovered from cancer. Someone responded with something to the effect of, “But isn’t that what you prayed for?” Though she didn’t say this, she might as well have replied, “Well, yeah, but everyone knows it doesn’t work like that!”
  • Pat Boone the grandfather said, “Atheism doesn’t take away the pain, it just takes away the hope.”
  • The ACLU lawyer (think of him as Satan) and his team meet Brooke’s parents and say that being part of an important lawsuit would bring publicity and a financial settlement that would help Brooke get into Stanford. The scene ended with dad signing a contract—basically, a deal with the devil. (Positive publicity? Perhaps Satan forgot Jessica Ahlquist from Rhode Island who participated in a 2012 lawsuit to remove an overtly Christian prayer in her high school. She was publicly called “an evil little thing” by a state representative, and she received hate mail and death threats. No, you don’t get just accolades when you push back against Christian privilege.)
  • The case gets local publicity, and protesters from both sides are on the steps of the courthouse. The Christians are sitting silently and peacefully with their signs, and the atheists, every one of them, are facing them and shouting. Wow—I didn’t realize atheists were so universally hateful.
  • Mike Huckabee interviews yet another actual apologist (I wonder if he was able to slip in one of his books, too) and concludes that Christians will soon have to pick the law of Man or the law of God. This was echoed by a Ratio Christi promo: “If Christians don’t take a stand today, will we even have a choice tomorrow?” (In the first place, your “law of God” is legal here thanks exclusively to the U.S. Constitution. You should at least have a little appreciation as well as some knowledge of civics. In the second, atheists want only to remove excesses that favor Christianity over other worldviews. That’s it.)
  • The argument from the defense was that Grace made a justifiable secular statement in a public school classroom. But once they win, the secular pretense is out the window and everybody is chanting, “God’s not dead, he’s surely alive,” a line from a Newsboys song.

Role reversal
In the courtroom, Satan inverts the case for the jury’s benefit. Suppose that, instead of a Christian quoting from the Bible, we had a Muslim quoting from the Qur’an? Wouldn’t that clearly be proselytization? (Hardly—I can quote the Bible better than most Christians. When I do so, I most certainly am not proselytizing.)
But let’s take this further. Suppose the movie were actually changed in this way, with a Muslim teacher giving a relevant, non-proselytizing quote from the Qur’an about Mohammed in a public school history class. What would the Christian supporters of the movie say then?
The atheists would be unchanged. It wasn’t a problem with the Christian, and it’s not a problem with the Muslim. How about it, Christians? This would make your case stronger, because your support for the Muslim teacher would show that this wasn’t simply an attempt to get favors just for your religion—which, I must confess, is pretty much what it looks like. (h/t to my atheist posse)
God’s Not Dead 3?
Let me bring this too-long post to a close. I need to respond to the post-credits scene where Pastor Dave is hauled off in handcuffs, setting up the to-be-thrilling sequel.
Earlier in the movie, a group of local pastors had been told that the last four months of their sermons were being subpoenaed. No reason is given; this is just a demand from out of the blue.
The script had a 2014 Houston case in mind, and one character even alluded to it, but that was a very different case. Instead of some government body demanding pastors’ sermons for no stated reason, the Houston case started with a lawsuit from conservative groups against the city of Houston against new provisions to provide trans access to bathrooms matching gender identity. In response, the city subpoenaed five local conservative pastors to find statements they’d made relevant to the case.
The city quickly reversed itself, and even atheists pushed back against the logic of the request. Eager to crank up the hysteria dial, however, the movie turned a response to a conservative lawsuit into an unprovoked attack on Christian liberty.
 
Maybe my shock at the ridiculousness of the movie is off base. Perhaps everyone already knows that this is just persecution porn and, like a romance novel that must have a happy ending, this is just a genre thing. Staying in close contact with reality isn’t the way it works here. If so, perhaps I’m the one fooled with this April Fool’s Day movie.
(And BTW, if you’re looking for hilarious takedowns of Christian movies, I recommend my new favorite podcast, God Awful Movies. I can’t wait to hear what they do to this one.)
Review of GND3 here.

I sneezed and no one said, “Bless you.”
Will the persecution never stop??
— Friendly Atheist commenter Robert Douglas,
on a possible plot summary of God’s Not Dead 3

Image credit: PUREFLIX

Slavery Back as a Discussion Topic? Thanks, Trump.

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On many occasions I’ve engaged with Christians on some aspect of morality—God’s actions in the Old Testament, say, or biblical morality—and I’ve assumed that we agree that slavery is wrong and proceeded from that point of agreement.
Turns out, I was wrong. The moral error of slavery isn’t the universal in the United States that I’d assumed, and Donald Trump’s candidacy is providing cover for racism that had been hidden.
An Economist/YouGov poll in January of likely voters asked about the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln’s executive order that freed the slaves. Did they approve? 53% strongly approved and 17% approved somewhat. Surprisingly, 5% strongly disapproved and 8% disapproved somewhat. And 17% were unsure.
How is this possible? 13% disapproved of the end of slavery, either somewhat or strongly? Barely half strongly approved? And 17% had no opinion? In the United States, in 2016?
Caveats …
Polls can be misleading in lots of ways, and I don’t want to take from this more than is there. Small changes in the phrasing of a poll question can change the answers. The question about slavery was, “Do you approve or disapprove of the executive order which freed all slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the federal government?”
Could respondents have quibbled with the “states that were in rebellion” part and wished that the Emancipation Proclamation simply applied to all states?
Though Trump supporters disapproved of the Emancipation Proclamation most strongly, maybe it’s election year recklessness more than Trump’s I-can-say-whatever-I-want attitude that is bringing this out.
Likelier, respondents had a problem with executive orders—perhaps they were against slavery but wanted it abolished through a Constitutional amendment or a law from Congress.
Nevertheless, those poll results seem to be saying something. In 2016, that troublesome political correctness that kept racists in the closet may be more easily shirked, putting racist ideas back on the menu. And Trump may be most responsible for opening this Pandora’s box. According to a top strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, “Trump’s rhetoric is ‘almost verbatim’ what segregationist George Wallace was saying in his third-party 1968 presidential campaign.” (Source)
Piling on
Trump isn’t alone. The Bible gives full support for the kind of slavery we had in the United States, but Christians had at least been hypocritical enough to pretend it didn’t. But not always.

  • Pastor Steven Anderson directly rebuts my complacent assumption that everyone agrees that slavery is wrong:

People will try to come at us—usually atheists or people like that—they’ll come at us and say, “Well, the Bible is wrong because the Bible condones slavery.” We’ve all heard that before, right?
But here’s the thing about that, is that if the Bible condones slavery, then I condone slavery. Because the Bible’s always right about every subject.

  • Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said that biblical slavery would be better than jail for nonviolent crimes.
  • Christian Doug Wilson wrote Southern Slavery as it Was, a defense of American slavery (more).
  • Arkansas State Representative Jon Hubbard said that slavery “may actually have been a blessing in disguise” because slaves were eventually “rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.”
  • History revisionist David Barton also weighs in on the slavery issue. From one analyst:

[Barton] actually said that race relations were better when whites owned black slaves because the whites treated them like members of the family. And whites don’t get enough credit for ending slavery!

  • In a recent Public Policy Polling study, South Carolina voters were asked if whites are a superior race. 10% said yes, and 11% weren’t sure. Trump was again the Republican overachiever, and thirty percent of his supporters either said yes or were undecided.
  • And gay bashing is back. On pastor James Manning’s church billboard: “Jesus would stone homos. Stoning is still the law.” And pastor David Berzinsis also eager to stone gays to death.

The Overton window
To see how Trump providing cover for racist ideas is relevant, let’s look at the Overton window. This is a concept that can help visualize public acceptance of political options that are on the table.
Imagine a bell curve. Along the left side is public acceptance—the ideas in the middle of the curve have the highest acceptance, and those progressively farther out on either side are less acceptable to the public. The bottom axis is government intervention—no government intervention at one end and very high intervention at the other.
Suppose we’re looking at education. At one end is “no government schools,” and at the other, “mandatory indoctrination in government schools.” Along this spectrum (from less intervention to more) might be parents pay for schooling, tuition vouchers, state mandated curriculum, and home schooling illegal.
We can add to this bottom axis labels that describe the ideas along this spectrum. In the center of the curve, with the highest acceptance, is Policy. On either side of that are ideas that aren’t policy but have a decent chance of becoming so—these are labeled Popular. Continue going out from the center, on both sides, with slices of the bell curve labeled Sensible, Acceptable, Radical, and Unthinkable.
Pick a domain of government intervention—civil rights, intervention in a war, gun control, schools—and you have a particular bell curve. The curve for one domain might be quite different—narrower or wider, on the left side or on the right side—than another.
Greta Christina gives gay rights as an example of how conversation has changed. In 1969, with the Stonewall riots, same-sex marriage wasn’t even on the radar. The homosexual movement was focused instead on getting discriminatory policies and anti-sodomy laws overturned. Today, the window has shifted so that all three went from Radical or Unthinkable to Policy.
And that’s the problem with Donald Trump’s “Look at me—I’m so rich, I can say whatever I want!” attitude. He can move or broaden the window. Radical or Unthinkable ideas like whites being superior to other races or slavery being in any way tolerable in twenty-first century America can become Acceptable.
Thanks, Trump.
(For more on the Overton window, Patheos atheist blogger James Croft cautions that it has limitations.)

Why would people in America
want to embrace the religion of the slavers?
— Pat Robertson
(incredibly, he was not referring to African Americans but Muslims)

Image credit: Peter Shanks, flickr, CC

Upcoming Debate 3/19/16: “Is it Reasonable to Believe in God?”

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I will be participating in a public debate on the question “Is it reasonable to believe in God?” this Saturday (March 19, 2016) at 6:30 pm near Port Townsend, Washington. I’ll be debating local a Christian apologist, and I will obviously be arguing for the negative side of the question.
Opponent
Rob van de Weghe has a similar background to my own. He has a Masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science (1982) from a university in the Netherlands. His investigation of Christianity began after his retirement in 1999, and it led to his book Prepared to Answer: A Guide to Christian Evidence (DeWard, 2010). There’s more background at the event’s Facebook page.
I finished reading Rob’s book a couple of months ago in preparation for this debate. I liked the style—it’s well written with lots of footnotes—though the arguments were neither new nor convincing. Perhaps I’ll sift through for interesting arguments to showcase and critique in future posts. Unfortunately, while responding to the arguments in writing should be straightforward, responding on my feet with a time limit is more difficult.
Though I won’t give my opening presentation here, of course, the arguments that I’ll be using are all ones that I’ve written about in this blog. I will plan on Rob having read them.
Debate format
The debate format will be the typical 20-minute opening statement, 10-minute rebuttal, and 5-minute close. Rob will speak first. Following that will be audience Q&A, with a 2-minute answer from the person addressed, followed by a 1-minute rebuttal from the other debater.
Rob has requested that we focus on being informative rather than competitive. That’s a little hard to do in a debate, but I’ll do my best to match his demeanor.
Location and time
Date and time: Saturday, March 19, 2016 from 6:30 – 9:00 pm
Location: Chimacum High School Auditorium, 91 W Valley Road, Chimacum, WA 98325 (map)
 
This is a free event, and if you can make it, I’d love to see you there. If you’re a regular here at the Cross Examined blog, be sure to say hello. It will be recorded, and I’ll make a link available as soon as possible.
(And happy pi day! Using American calendar notation, today is 3/14/16, which is π rounded to five significant digits.)

If placing holy words next to people turned them from sinners to saints,
the mere presence of Gideon Bibles in motel nightstands
would have terminated adultery by now.
— Barry Lynn, God and Government
(referring to the value of placing the 10 Commandments in public view)

Image credit: Leo Reynolds, flickr, CC

Why Can’t God Follow the Lesson in the Prodigal Son Story Himself?

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Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11–32. We’re all familiar with it—a son demands his share of his inheritance and then runs off to some foreign land and wastes it. Destitute, he finally sees the error of his ways and decides to return. He throws himself on his father’s mercy, but the father forgives him in an instant and celebrates his return.
I’m against much of what the Bible says, but here’s a story that has real value. It has become a universally understood metaphor in Western civilization, but the Bible is an odd place to find it. Perhaps God might do well by reading it and resetting his own moral compass by its wisdom.
By contrast, the Old Testament has many one-strike-and-you’re-out stories about God. For example, Uzzah touched the Ark of the Covenant to steady it when the oxen stumbled, but God zapped him dead (1 Chronicles 13:9–10). There’s Onan, who didn’t want to impregnate his sister-in-law and “spilled his seed” (Genesis 38:8-10). Don’t forget that poor schlub who picked up sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32–6). And, of course, Adam and Eve when they ate the forbidden fruit.
This isn’t the “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love” God that other parts of the Bible imagine (Psalm 103:8). God has a short fuse and isn’t at all forgiving, quite the opposite of the father in the parable.
If the moral of the parable is that we need to forgive, even after we’ve been grossly wronged, why can’t God set the example? Is he drunk with power, a deity who can do whatever the heck he likes? That’s the message from Job.
Some apologists will argue that it’s ridiculous to try to understand God’s actions with our puny minds. So what if God’s approach makes no sense? God is inscrutable and we should just assume that whatever God does is good and right by definition. The first problem is that this presupposes God and interprets the facts to fit. The second is that Christians who opt for this route must avoid labels for God that pretend that they do understand his actions, like “just” or “good.”
Imagine a Christian responding to something bad happening by saying that we simple humans can’t understand God’s reasoning. But when something good happens, of course, that same Christian is certain that he understands God’s thought process. I got the new job; the Americans conquer Iraq; a single baby is found alive in a crashed airplane—God’s generosity is boundless and his purpose is clear!
Use the “God can’t be understood” defense if you want, but be consistent. If we can’t understand why God allowed the Holocaust, then we can’t understand why he allowed the survivor in the plane crash.
But to get back to the point, why does God not follow the example of the father in the Prodigal Son parable? If we’ve wronged God, why can’t he just forgive us with no strings attached?
In fact, he does! God says of the people of Israel, “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). He says something almost identical in Isaiah 43:25. One wonders then why the song and dance about Jesus dying for our sins.
Incredibly, I’ve heard apologists try to justify the Prodigal Son story by saying that the moral of the story isn’t that generous forgiveness is a good thing. No, the point of the story is that you must ask for forgiveness (like Christians must ask God). They sacrifice a noble story to try to salvage the logic of their religion. Sad.
During the upcoming Easter season, why imagine that a human sacrifice must be given to appease a savage Bronze Age deity? Let’s see the Prodigal Son story as a far more healthy response to being wronged.

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. 
An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. 
An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. 
He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
— Madalyn Murray O’Hair

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/1/13.)
Image credit: Way of Mercy Icons, flickr, CC

Jesus Magic? Not Impressive Compared to What Technology Gives Us.

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In the New Testament, Jesus does lots of impressive miracles.
More precisely, they were impressive for the time. Today we surpass them with technology so regularly that we often don’t notice. Let’s compare the miracles of Jesus with what modern technology can do.
Jesus walked on water. We can’t walk on water, but we can travel on the water in a vast array of boats, both large and small, powered and wind driven. For example, an aircraft carrier can carry 5000 people, sail at 30+ knots, and operate for 20 years without refueling. We can travel under the water with submarines. We can fly above the water with airplanes. We have even gone to the moon.
Feeding of the 5000. We can’t feed people with magic, but we can still feed lots of people. Norman Borlaug has saved perhaps one billion lives from starvation because of improved strains of wheat, for which he won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. The Haber process, which turns nitrogen into ammonia, produces fertilizer that is estimated “to be responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth’s population.”
Cursing the fig tree. Jesus was hungry, but it wasn’t the season for figs. Nevertheless, Jesus cursed a fig tree, and it withered. While we can’t destroy trees with magic, we’ve got the destruction thing figured out. We have herbicide that kills plants. We have chain saws and bulldozers. We have dynamite and hydrogen bombs.
Water to wine. If the point here is wine as a safe drink (ground water can be polluted, and the alcohol in wine reduces the chance of bacterial contamination), modern societies provide safe water and sewers for waste.
Miraculous catch of fish. We can’t catch fish with magic, but modern fishing trawlers do a good job at catching lots of fish. They do perhaps too good a job, and aquaculture now produces as much tonnage as wild capture to reduce humanity’s footprint.
Calming the storm. We can’t stop storms, but we have gotten pretty good at prediction. We’re able to minimize the loss of life from disasters like the 1900 Galveston hurricane. Technology can also warn of tornadoes and tsunamis.
Prophecies. Jesus predicted his death and his second coming, but pause for a moment to consider this quote from Shakespeare:

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Jesus made prophecies, and so can any man, but do they actually come true? His predictions of a second coming within the lifetimes of some witnesses didn’t come to pass. His prediction of his death is part of a story that we have little reason to see as history.
Healing miracles. Jesus did many of these (I explored the healing miracles here). For example, he healed lepers. We don’t heal lepers with magic but with antibiotics. Leprosy is no longer much of a problem, as is the case for smallpox, bubonic plague, and polio.
Jesus cast out demons. We don’t, because we know they don’t cause disease. We can’t cure all illnesses, but we do a better job now that we’re focused on the actual causes.
Jesus restored sight and hearing. Here again, we can’t prevent all such cases or cure all that occur, but medicine has made remarkable improvements in health.
Jesus raised the dead. We don’t use magic, but modern medicine has returned thousands from conditions that just a century ago would be considered “dead.”
What Jesus didn’t do. Jesus didn’t do any miracles against which we can parallel civil engineering such as roads, bridges, and buildings. Or communication—telephones and the internet. Or the textile industry or the energy industry or the chemical industry or the transportation industry.
What Jesus did was party stunts. From helping God create the universe, he was reduced to doing magic for small audiences and today just appears in toast. Many of his tricks weren’t even all that new. For example, Greek mythology had the Oenotropae who could change water into wine. If Jesus were the real thing, unlike the claims of other religions, he could’ve created a supernova or terraformed Israel to replace deserts with farmland. Or maybe something that would’ve left a record that we could see today.
Some Christians will agree and say that Jesus didn’t come to improve the lot of people on earth but simply to spread his message.

Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father. (John 10:37–8)

Okay, we can’t duplicate what Jesus did by magic. But everything that has been improved for humanity has been improved by humanity. Even granting for the sake of argument that they happened, technology puts the claimed miracles of Jesus in perspective.

Religion may not be dying just yet, 
but it’s sure getting feeble in this age of reason.
— comment at WWJTD blog

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/25/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia