Category Archives: Uncategorized

Clueless John the Baptist

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John the Baptist was in prison when he heard the marvelous stories about Jesus, and he sent his disciples to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:2–3).

Whaaa … ? This is a remarkable question! John the Baptist doesn’t know whether Jesus is the Messiah or not?

John was pretty clear about who Jesus was when he baptized him. Not only did he recognize Jesus’s priority and ask that Jesus baptize him (Matt. 3:14), but he heard a voice from heaven proclaiming Jesus as God’s son. His conclusion at the time: “I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One” (John 1:34).

John’s very purpose was to be the messenger who would prepare the way (Matt. 11:10). How could he not know?

The familiarity probably went back even further, since John and Jesus were related. Their mothers were cousins (or “relatives”—see Luke 1:36), and Jesus’s mother Mary stayed with John’s mother Elizabeth for the last trimester of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Heck, the boys might have played together.

And John has to ask who Jesus is?

We find more confusion in the John the Baptist story when we try to figure out who John really is. Jesus cites an Old Testament prophecy that says that the messenger who will prepare the way for the Messiah would be the prophet Elijah. Jesus then makes clear that John the Baptist is this reincarnation of Elijah (Matt. 11:14).

But wait a minute—in another gospel, John makes clear he’s not Elijah (John 1:21).

This is the problem with harmonizing the gospels: they don’t harmonize. We shouldn’t treat them as history but the end product of a long and harrowing journey during which much was probably lost, added, and changed, but we don’t know what.

As Randel Helms in Gospel Fictions puts it, the gospels were intended “less to describe the past than to affect the present.” Let’s treat them for what they were meant to be, documents making a theological point rather than history.

When I was a child, 
I spoke as a child,
I understood as a child, 
I thought as a child, 
but when I became a man, 
I put away childish things.
— 1 Cor. 13:11

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/27/12.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Something Better than “In God We Trust”

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About a month ago, I attended a public meeting in Vancouver, Washington. The Clark County Board of Councilors had decided that, among their many pressing matters of business, priority should be given to the question of whether “In God We Trust” should go up on the wall in their public hearing room. Public testimony took half a day.

The motion didn’t pass that day, but it was raised again and passed later that month (at a meeting with fewer citizens and less press, I’m guessing). One local paper said that hundreds of staff hours were also consumed by this project.

You might say that it’s not my business to criticize the wishes of the good people of Clark County, but that’s not who was behind this. This proposal wasn’t in response to a groundswell of public demand. Rather, one council member thought that it made sense to push this motion—whether for the good of the county or as his own personal posturing I can’t say.

I won’t go into details of this process since it has been nicely handled by the Ask an Atheist podcast and the Friendly Atheist blog (1, 2, 3). Instead, I’d like to summarize a few problems with this popular initiative and suggest a better way out.

Why “In God We Trust” in public buildings is a stupid idea

The public meetings made clear why this was a bad idea. Emotions ran high, with citizen speakers on both sides drawing applause from their partisans. This is a divisive issue.

In God We Trust-America, the California organization that is pushing for “In God We Trust” displays in local government buildings nationwide, says that this is “To promote patriotism.” What then are they saying about people who dislike “In God We Trust” glaring down at them from the wall behind their elected representatives? Apparently, those citizens aren’t patriotic. In Clark County, only Christians and perhaps Jews can be patriotic. And does “In God We Trust” behind the Board of Councilors mean that the Christian god is the final arbiter for all their decisions?

More than just atheists are left out. The baggage behind this slogan makes clear that this “God” is the Christian god—so too bad for believers of other faiths—and many Christians are outraged at this kind of hijacking of their religion by politicians.

I would’ve thought that the Board would want every citizen to feel included. Not a high priority, I guess.

You just gotta put something patriotic up on the wall? Here’s a better idea.

If you’re going to do anything in this department, put up the previous motto, E Pluribus Unum. “In God We Trust” is a shapeless religious platitude that could fit 50 countries, but E Pluribus Unum—that is, “Out of Many, One”—captures the essence of the people of the United States coming from all parts of the globe to forge a single great country.

E Pluribus Unum is precisely the opposite of an exclusionary slogan, and the Seattle Chapter of the Satanic Temple has a nice way to showcase the plurality and the unity. Click their proposed image below to read more on their Facebook page.

pluribus

You have confused a War on Religion
with not getting everything you want.
— Jon Stewart

Image credit: Wikipedia

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Are the Stupid Too Stupid to Realize They’re Stupid?

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Has it ever seemed to you that less competent people rate their competence higher than it actually is, while more competent people humbly rate theirs lower?

It’s not just your imagination. This is a genuine cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning-Kruger experiments behind the research focused on cognitive tasks (logic, grammar, and evaluating humor), but similar disparities exist in other areas. In self-assessment of IQ, below-average people overestimated their score and those above average underestimated.

Studies of healthy and unhealthy behaviors are handicapped when they rely on self-reporting because test subjects tend to improve their evaluation. In self-evaluations of driving ability, job performance, and even immunity to bias, we tend to polish our image.

This is called the Lake Wobegone Effect, named after the town where “all the children are above average.”

Notice that there are two different categories of error:

(1) the error where there is a preferred answer and most people are biased toward giving that answer (“How much snack food do you eat?” or “How popular would you say you are?” or “How good a driver are you?”), and

(2) the error where bias changes depending on actual competence, with the less and more competent groups rating themselves too high and too low, respectively.

Let’s look at the second category, where the two extremes make opposite errors. The Dunning-Kruger research hypothesizes that the competent overestimate others’ skill levels. But the error is more complicated for the incompetent—they overestimate their own skill level and they lack the metacognition to realize their error. In other words, they were too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. Improving their metacognitive skills drove down their self-assessment scores as they became better evaluators of their own limitations.

The original paper was titled, “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” for which the authors won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.

The trouble with the world
is that the stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are full of doubt.
— Bertrand Russell

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/25/12.)

Photo credit:  Robert Orr, flickr, CC

Did You Hear? North Korea’s “Brilliant Comrade” Got a Haircut!

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kim jong un haircut north koreaThe Hermit Kingdom’s Brilliant Comrade, Kim Jong Un, is rocking a new hairstyle that is big news. One source critiqued it this way: “The style is a variation on Kim’s signature shaved sides, but with the top now sculpted into a high, wedge-shaped pompadour that sits atop Kim’s head like a hat, or perhaps a small, dormant woodland creature.”

Some speculate that he’s trying to look more like his grandfather, the founder of North Korea and still its “Eternal President.” Grandfather Kim was a revolutionary hero, and Li’l Kim may be using his new hairdo to declare that he’s maturing into that role.

Why so much excitement over a haircut? Because North Korea is a dangerous and unstable enemy, and there’s so little information that even something this trivial is parsed for clues.

Remind you of Someone?

And that’s also the Christian’s task. They have their own unpredictable Great Leader whose intentions they must infer from minimal clues. Christians become pigeons in a B.F. Skinner experiment, where intermittent reinforcement produced better results than continuous reinforcement. The dribbles of approval they infer falling from God’s table are enough to keep them eager for more.

Kim’s uncle was executed a year ago, presumably with Kim’s approval. Similarly, God is also dangerous, and Christians unashamedly admit that he’s killed millions. But, like the North Koreans who wept genuine tears at the death of the previous leader in 2011, Christians are quick to justify God’s actions. Someone’s child dies? Their faith is strengthened. The Canaanite genocide? Those bastards had plenty of chances. The Flood? They deserved what they got. In fact, God’s actions are good by definition.

I wonder if they say that about Kim in North Korea.

North Korea is officially the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” but how can a dictatorship be democratic? I suppose in the same way that Yahweh the genocidal murderer is “all loving.”

Don’t we have better, more tangible things to talk about in North Korea than a haircut? Instead of the hair, we could ask about the quality of life of North Koreans. And instead of God worship, we could focus on helping his children.

God knows he’s not doing it.

Choose faith in spite of the facts.
— Rev. Joel Osteen

Image credit: Vox

Who Cares About Charles Darwin?

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Tomorrow is the birthday of Charles Darwin, so it’s a good time to ask the blasphemous question: Who cares about Darwin? More precisely: Who cares about what Darwin wrote?

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species revolutionized biology. In the history of science, he’s a god, but in biology today, Darwin’s writings don’t count for anything. No one checks their results against Darwin’s thinking. No biologist says, “That’s an interesting hypothesis, Chuzzlewaite, but let’s compare it against the Great Darwin to see if it holds up.”

By contrast, consider how Aristotle was elevated during the medieval period. What Aristotle said, not what experiment showed, determined science.

Aristotle’s views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. (Source)

Liars for Christ

Creationists want to put Darwin into the Infallible Sage bin along with Aristotle, and they love to quote him as if biology today were constrained by what he said. What Darwin wrote about evolution is important today only for the history of science, not biology. Even if they could make him look bad (and they don’t), so what? That would have nothing to do with the validity of the theory of evolution.

A popular Creationist tactic is to twist Darwin’s The Descent of Man to argue that he supported eugenics. Ben Stein’s 2008 “crockumentary” Expelled accurately quotes Darwin:

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Ah, so Darwin was rabidly in support of eugenics, right? Nope. The very next paragraph clarifies. He talks about our instincts for compassion and says,

Nor could we check our sympathy [for the weakest], even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

Unsurprisingly, Expelled just quote-mines the first passage out of context to deliberately misrepresent Darwin’s views.

Here’s another excerpt popular among Creationists, this time from On the Origin of Species.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

A frank admission by Darwin of the inadequacy of his theory? Not really. As you might guess, the very next sentence explains how evolution could account for it.

If numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist … then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection … can hardly be considered real.

Creationists out there, do your research into what Darwin actually said, and don’t quote him out of context. It makes you look like a liar. And, of course, misrepresenting Darwin as an evil person does nothing to respond to the argument for evolution. It remains the best explanation that we have for why life is the way it is.

Doth humor have charms to soothe the savage breast?

In the hope that humor can make the point where reason can’t, let me modify a popular Christian joke. Here’s the Christian version: A flood drives a devout man onto the roof of his house. A boat comes to take him away, but he says, “No—God will provide.” The water level keeps rising. Then another boat comes, and then a helicopter, but the man sends them all away. The flood water continues to rise, and he’s swept away and drowns.

He goes to heaven and he’s furious at God. “Why didn’t you save me?” he says.

“What did you want?” God says. “I sent two boats and a helicopter!”

Now: imagine a fundamentalist in heaven. With his new heavenly wisdom, he realizes that science was right all along, and his literalist take of the Bible was laughably wrong.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demands of God.

“What did you want?” God says. “I sent Charles Darwin and 100,000 evolutionary biologists!”

It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly)
that direct arguments against Christianity and theism
produce hardly any effect on the public;
and freedom of thought is best promoted
by the gradual illumination of men’s minds
which follows from the advance of science.
— Charles Darwin

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/20/12.)

Photo credit:Wikipedia

A Crazy Natural Explanation Or a Supernatural One: Which One Wins?

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Christian podcaster Jason Rennie, in an interview with John Loftus, gives an example that he hopes will stretch the natural vs. supernatural distinction to the breaking point. Just how long will atheists cling to the natural explanation?

It’s all the fault of Elvis

He proposes a deliberately ridiculous natural explanation for the gospel story: time-traveling insurance salesmen led by a clone of Elvis go back in time to manufacture the idea of Jesus to get the concept of “Act of God” into insurance law. He asks whether this is more improbable than the gospels being true. It’s natural, but does that mean that it beats the supernatural explanation?

Rennie touches on an important point—the distinction between the rule of thumb “a plausible natural explanation beats a supernatural explanation” and “any natural explanation beats a supernatural explanation.”

The first statement is enough for me. We don’t always have natural explanations—science has many unanswered questions, for example—but where we do, the natural explanations that dismiss the supernatural explanations are all plausible. There’s no need to support a crazy natural explanation simply because it’s natural. We have quite plausible natural alternatives to the gospel story and needn’t imagine time-traveling clones of Elvis.

But ignore that for now. Let’s actually compare these two alternatives.

Introducing the “Like what?” test

Consider the pieces of this proposal one at a time—first, the clone of Elvis. With the “Like what?” test, we ask, “So you propose a clone of Elvis? Like what? What precedents do we have that would make such a thing possible?”

In this case, we have quite a lot of precedent. We’ve already cloned two dozen species of animals.

Next: insurance salesmen eager to improve their business. There’s no problem finding precedents to this.

Time travel? This one is quite far-fetched, but it’s simply technology, and we understand technology. We’ve seen almost unbelievable progress in technology in the last 200 years. No one today can even sketch out how time travel might work—indeed, it may be impossible—but 10,000 more years of technology might well deliver this.

Note that this isn’t about time traveling wizards. We have no precedent for that. Everything here is natural.

How crazy is the Elvis story, anyway?

In summary, the explanation has:

  • A clone of Elvis, like clones of sheep and dogs that we’ve already made.
  • Cost-cutting insurance salesmen, like insurance executives today.
  • Time travel, like the technology today that would seem miraculous to people just 50 years ago.

That hardly means that this ridiculous explanation is the best one—while it’s possible, it fails because of Occam’s Razor. It brings no evidence to support it over likelier explanations. But we have precedents for all major components of the story.

Consider the other explanation in play

Now apply the “Like what?” test to the supernatural explanation, that the Jesus miracles happened pretty much as claimed in the Bible. Like what?

Here, we have no universally-accepted supernatural explanations. Christians don’t accept the supernatural stories of Hinduism, Muslims don’t accept those of Christianity, not everyone accepts ghosts or other paranormal phenomena, and so on.

The only prior examples on which there is universal agreement is that there are false supernatural claims. Consider supernatural claims about the sun, for example: the Greeks explained it as Apollo in his chariot, the Mesoamericans said that Quetzalcoatl created the current sun (the previous four having been destroyed by disasters), and the Salish said that the raven brought the sun to mankind. All nonsense, we agree.

Present a universally-accepted prior example of the supernatural—like clones, salesmen, and technology in the Elvis story—and the gospel story has some standing. As it is, it doesn’t even leave the gate. The Christian position is trounced even by this deliberately ridiculous example.

Any sufficiently advanced technology 
is indistinguishable from magic
— Arthur C. Clarke

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/15/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia