National Day of Prayer Wasting Time

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national day of prayerBrethren, I will speak today on the gospel of John, the sixteenth chapter, verse 24. Jesus said, “Ask and you will receive.” As the National Day of Prayer approaches (May 5, 2016), this verse is both relevant and unambiguous.
But perhaps it’s too unambiguous. Apologists like to water down this verse (and others that declare prayer’s effectiveness) to say that they don’t mean what they obviously mean, so let’s be sure we have this right. Here is this verse in context. Jesus said,

I tell you the truth, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete (John 16:23–4).

A few verses later, we read,

Then Jesus’s disciples said, “Now you are speaking clearly and without figures of speech” (16:29).

Clearly, we are given no choice but to consider it at face value. “Ask and you will receive” means just what you’d think it means.
National Day of Prayer
The National Day of Prayer task force (“Transforming our Nation Through Prayer!”) is eager to harness this power. It says

[The 2016 National Day of Prayer] is an unprecedented opportunity to see the Lord’s healing and renewing power made manifest as we call on citizens to humbly come before His throne.

Is this just feel-good handwaving, or are you making specific, testable predictions?

This recitation will create a huge wave of prayer, flowing from one coast to the other, illustrating the unity of God’s people and acknowledging His dominion over the circumstances facing us. Source

I’ve always wondered why many prayers are more powerful than one or why we even need to pray at all. Doesn’t God understand the problems and the best solutions already? Or is he not paying attention? Is he deaf?
What specifically does the task force imagine will happen with the Day of Prayer (besides strengthening the Christian brand, I mean)? I understand that there may be a benefit to the person praying. Prayer can be beneficial in the same way that meditation can. But when you’re praying for someone else, that’s not the point. The idea behind person A praying for person B isn’t for person A to feel better, it’s for something specific to happen to person B! Give me evidence that this happens.

At this crucial time for our nation, we can do nothing more important than pray.

Did prayer gives us cell phones, GPS, or the internet? Antibiotics, anesthesia, or vaccines? Modern farming techniques? Did it eliminate smallpox or predict hurricanes? Maybe they’re thinking of science and technology. Prayer is easy, quick, free, and lets you pretend that you did something useful. But if you actually want to improve society, you need to stand on your own two feet and do something about it. God obviously won’t.
Last year’s message had an obligatory but meaningless applause line:

[We emphasize] the need for individuals, corporately and individually, to place their faith in the unfailing character of their Creator, who is sovereign over all governments, authorities, and men.

Not in the U.S., pal. Religion operates as it does because, and only because, it is permitted to by the Constitution. You can pretend to elevate your deity above government, but let’s be clear that it’s the Constitution, not the Bible, that actually governs this country.
This year’s national prayer also makes some factual blunders.

The very ideals upon which this country was founded were based on biblical truths, no matter how some try to rewrite history to deny that very fact today.

Wrong again. Read the U.S. Constitution—it’s one hundred percent secular. And that’s a good thing, since fallible Man has created far more moral institutions than the barbaric attempts by the god of the Old Testament.
In America, the buck stops with the Constitution, not the Bible. Why is this hard to understand? It’s simply unpatriotic to push society in a way prohibited by the Constitution (more here and here).
The prayer also gives a nice hug to God, who’s apparently going through a rough time:

Our hearts are … broken over how You continue to be marginalized and dismissed by both our people and our institutions.

Poor baby! Yahweh is able to create all matter and space, but he just can’t seem to make friends. I picture him standing alone in the playground while the other kids call him names like “Yah-wimp.” Maybe it would help if he actually existed and didn’t need apologists like this group standing up for him.

[Help us] publicly declare and live out Your truth in a spirit of love so that You feel welcome in our country once again.

Who knew humans could be so powerful? We couldn’t hurt Superman, but we can shut out the omnipotent creator of the universe.
I can’t leave this topic without pointing out one conspicuous contradiction. At the National Day of Prayer’s web site, they give its history:

The National Day of Prayer is an annual observance held on the first Thursday of May [since 1952], inviting people of all faiths to pray for our nation.

People of all faiths? That sounds pretty inclusive. But poke around a bit, and it’s clear that this is an exclusively Christian event, from Bible verses to voter registration appeals aimed exclusively at Christians.
Does prayer work?
In Matthew, Jesus says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” In Mark, Jesus says, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” In John, Jesus says, “He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do.”
The New Testament unambiguously claims that prayer works, but we all know that that’s wrong, or, said charitably, prayer doesn’t work that way. Apologists handwave that prayer works … for the person doing the praying. Or we’re told that prayers are always answered, but “not yet” or “maybe” are valid answers. This reinterpretation of reality is worthy of North Korea or Animal Farm.
It’s like Harriett Hall’s Blue Dot cure, where the doctor paints a blue dot on the patient’s nose. Suppose the patient gets better. Great—the blue dot worked! Or suppose the patient gets worse. Ah, the doctor says, you should’ve come to me sooner. Or suppose the condition is unchanged. The doctor recommends continued treatment (and it’s lucky we caught it when we did)!
No outcome will make this imaginary doctor reconsider the treatment. Reality is redefined so that the doctor is immune to evidence that shakes his preconception that the cure works.
If the roles were reversed and it was Christians critiquing the supernatural claim of someone else’s religion, I imagine they’d be as skeptical as me. The simple explanation is that there is no God to answer (or not) your prayers. Prayer is simply talking to yourself. There’s no one on the other end of the phone. (More on prayer here and here.)
I’ll close with the wisdom of Mr. Deity:

Mr. Deity: Prayer is not for me, okay? I mean, I like it and everything, I think it’s sweet that people think of me, but I’ve got a plan, and I’m staying the course. But it’s great for them, it gets them focused on what’s important, it’s meditative, I hear it does wonders for the blood pressure. Plus it’s a chance to connect to me. How’s that not going to be good? You should know.
Jesus: Oh yeah, yeah. So what you’re saying here, sir, is that you never answer any prayers?
Mr. Deity: Not really, no. There’s just no incentive. I mean, look—if somebody prays to me and things go well, who gets the credit? Me, right? But if they pray to me and things don’t go well, who gets the blame? Not me! So it’s all good. I’m going to mess with that by stepping in? Putting my nose where it doesn’t belong?

Thus endeth the lesson for today.
See also: “National Day of Actually DOING Something” 

Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day; 
give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish. 
— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/1/13.)
Image credit: Wikimedia

God ♥ Genocide

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The nation of Israel when it left Egypt was enormous, if the Bible is to be believed. There were 600,000 men—that is, potential soldiers—which suggest close to two million in the entire company (Exodus 12:37).
The Sinai peninsula, in which the Israelites spent forty years of exile, is a hundred miles wide. To get an idea of how big a group this supposedly was, the Israelites could have held hands to make a human chain to cross the Sinai ten times.
The Exodus and genocide
No archeological evidence has been found for the Exodus. Yes, it happened a long time ago, but deserts preserve things such as buried bodies. God declared that all the adults would die in the desert and be denied access to the Promised Land (Numbers 14:30). Since the Israelites didn’t cremate their dead, that’s over a million bodies that should be in the Sinai but, despite our searching, aren’t.
This population count leads to a appalling conclusion. Let’s assume flat population growth so that the Israelites entered Palestine with two million people. Moses said,

When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites [map here], seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally (Deut. 7:1–2).

Seven nations, each bigger than the two-million-strong Israelites? Seven nations to be destroyed totally? Do the math—that eclipses the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Of course, you could do what I do and conclude that the Holocaust is history and the Old Testament stories of the exodus and conquest of Canaan are just stories. That removes the moral cloud, but it turns the Bible into just another book of religious fiction, a buffet at which Christians can take or leave according to their fancy.
What Would William Lane Craig Do?
I always like to get an analysis of a cloudy biblical issue from philosopher William Lane Craig. Here’s what he says about God’s genocide.

I think it’s just dishonest when people like Richard Dawkins portray Yahweh … as this moral monster. These highly singular commands [to commit genocide] need to be read against the background of the whole of the Old Testament, which includes the great moral law that is given by God, which is head and shoulders above other ancient near eastern moral or legal codes like the Code of Hammurabi and so forth. It’s against the backdrop of the prophets, which explain god’s compassion for the poor and the oppressed and the orphans and the widows. (Source: “Richard Dawkins and Driving Out the Canaanites” @ 4:00)

Dishonest? Let’s see who’s dishonest. Consider fun Bible quotes like this one:

So Joshua subdued the whole region. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD had commanded (see Joshua 10:28–40).

The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, written around 1772 BCE, probably preceded the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Mosaic law by centuries. In fact, many scholars think that the Code inspired some of the Mosaic law. For example, the Bible’s “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” is found there. However, it has nothing like the Bible’s genocide.
Craig will respond that this is cherry picking and that the Old Testament offsets the genocide and slavery with compassionate demands like, “Love your neighbor as yourself” from Leviticus 19:18. (Nope—”neighbor” here means “fellow Jew.”) But I’ll grant that looking only at the Bible’s savage side doesn’t give a complete picture. The problem is that Craig wants to cherry pick in the other direction. A balanced look shows the Bible to be what you’d expect from the blog of an ancient tribe. It reflects the morality of the time. There’s no need to imagine a supernatural source.
And why is a balanced look at the Bible the correct approach when God himself doesn’t do that? One error and God sends you to hell. The godly approach would be to find one moral error in the Bible and reject any claims for supernatural inspiration.
This entire interview with Craig is a rich vein of crazy, but let me give just a few highlights.

These Israeli soldiers would be prosecuted for war crimes if this [Canaanite genocide] were to occur today. (5:40)

Yes they would, and what does that tell you? Are you a moral relativist, where you say that genocide is reprehensible from our standpoint but wasn’t from the different perspective back then? Or are you an objectivist who says that genocide is always wrong? In that case, tell me whether our rejection of genocide is wrong today or Israel’s God-given approach was wrong back then.
Craig tries to minimize the damage

If [this] is a good objection, what does it prove? What it would prove would be that the Bible has an error in it, that biblical inerrancy isn’t right, and that would force us to adjust our doctrine of inspiration, but it wouldn’t prove that God didn’t exist, it wouldn’t prove that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead (7:48).

He’s trying to sacrifice the pawn of biblical inerrancy in this chess game to preserve the queen of God’s existence. Great—let’s take that pawn. But no one thought that the queen was under attack. This is clumsy misdirection on Craig’s part. What’s under attack is the bishop of God as a morally perfect being. Craig’s own book tells us that God orders genocide, which makes clear that he’s not. Let’s take that bishop as well.
About God ordering the death of everyone, including the children, Craig says:

God, as the author and giver of life has the authority to give and take life as he chooses (11:10).

So God has no obligation to the people he created, and he can do with them whatever he wants without moral obligation? A human life is then to God what a sand castle is to us, and each of us can destroy our creations without moral error.
Incredible! This is what religion does to good people. It forces them to justify insanity. Like the defense lawyer for a Mafia boss, Craig spins every bit of evidence to fit his presupposition. He removes himself as a credible critic.
Richard Swinburne also plays God’s jester when he said that the Holocaust gave Jews the opportunity to be courageous and noble. He said that one fewer Hiroshima victims would mean “less opportunity for courage and sympathy.”
I’ll take his analysis seriously when he takes his own medicine.
I can destroy my sand castle because I built it and because it’s not alive. That Christians cede to God the right to capriciously kill humans for no better reason than that he made them is damning evidence against that worldview. The elementary moral truth that every child knows but that Craig’s religion has forced him to suppress is that there’s a difference between living things (like people) and nonliving things (like sand castles).
Craig has said, “If there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless.” But wait a minute—if God can destroy us like I destroy my sand castle, simply because he made us, then life with God is meaningless!
Craig could respond that God’s ways are not our ways. That may be, but first we need to conclude that God exists. Given the information that we have, the God of the Old Testament is, like Dawkins says, a capriciously malevolent bully.
(h/t commenter Rain)

Ladies and gentleman, beware of these scamsters—
especially scamsters in religious garb—
quoting the Bible. I mean, run from them. 
They are all over the place. 
— Pat Robertson

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/24/13.)
Image credit: Evonne, flickr, CC

Will No One Hold John Hagee to Account? The Bible Says, “That Prophet Shall Die.”

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bible prophecyJohn Hagee is that car crash you know you should turn away from but still find fascinating. It’s been half a year since his vacuous claims about the invented concept of the four blood moons. Hagee said, without evidence, “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon,’ ” and “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”
And yet we’re still here, with the earth spinning pretty much like it did before the dreaded blood moons. Unsurprisingly, no world-shaking event happened. I’m not surprised that Hagee didn’t have the courage to admit his error. What did surprise me, though, is that he didn’t simply ignore reality and declare victory. That’s what the Seventh-day Adventist Church did when it formed out of the ashes of the Millerite movement and its embarrassing prediction of the end of the world in 1844. That’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses did after the failure of their prediction that the world as we knew it would end in 1914.
Instead, Hagee is just proceeding as if nothing happened, as if milking this two-year prediction to its decrepit close and then moving on is simply what a televangelist does.
And perhaps he’s right. (Background on Hagee’s “prophecy” here, here, and here.)
Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi
Let’s compare Hagee with another famous prophet. The Oracle of Delphi, just one of many oracles in Ancient Greece, was an institution for over a thousand years. The priestess holding the position “was without doubt the most powerful woman of the classical world” (Wikipedia).
When Athens saw the mighty Persian army advancing in 480 BCE, held only briefly at Thermopylae, the Oracle famously told Athens that a “wooden wall” would save them. But what did that mean? A literal wooden wall? A forest? They decided instead that it meant their fleet of wooden triremes, and their naval action was indeed key to turning back the Persians.
About sixty years earlier, King Croesus of Lydia also sought advice from the Oracle. His question was about the wisdom of attacking Persia. The response: “If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed.” Thinking that the great empire to be destroyed was Persia, he attacked. Unfortunately, the great empire that was destroyed was his own.
The wisdom at the time declared that the Oracle might be ambiguous but was never wrong. If something bad happened, the fault was your own for misunderstanding. And that’s what we see from Christians: the Bible and God are never wrong, and if something bad happens, the fault was yours.
At worst, the prophet takes the blame and the Bible that he pointed to as his source is untouched. And yet when does a modern prophet ever take any blame?
Contemporary “prophets”
Jim Bakker has also been riding the blood-moon gravy train. Ten weeks after the fourth moon fizzle, he said, “People, it’s all happening, but we’re not looking.” He needs to keep the flock in fear so that they keep buying his buckets of end times provisions.
Another prophet gobbling up scraps from the blood moons flop is Jonathan Cahn. His angle was that the last year in the seven-year Jewish cycle, the Shemitah year, ended near the fourth blood moon (more or less), and that this presaged a financial collapse. But Cahn can’t say those three little words that are difficult for so many men, “I was wrong,” and he doubled down on his claim in the aftermath. He declared victory by arguing that worldwide financial markets in 2015 had the worst performance … since 2008.
That’s it? That’s his world-ending event that God is eager to tell us about?
Revisiting Hagee
What’s up with Hagee? At his web site, there is nothing about picking up the pieces after the chaos from the blood moon or even reading the entrails to see what God was trying to tell us. We find no declaration of victory, no admission that he was wrong, or (and this is the really surprising one) any offer to compensate people who bought his book, sat through his movie, or made any financial donation due to the blood moons hysteria. Immediately after the final blood moon, he tried to change the subject by flogging a new book.
John Hagee, Inc. is back to normal, and all we find at the site are upcoming conferences, rallies, and tours; invitations to prayer requests; pleas for money; and encouragement to shop at the online store.
Hagee has lost all credibility to any thoughtful person. You don’t get more than one chance. Even the Bible agrees:

The prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. (Deuteronomy 18:20)

But Hagee is simply un-embarrassable. The true tragedy is that the rubes in his flock let him get away with it.
One silver lining of the prophecy insanity is watching the various end times prophets go at each other. Jennifer LeClaire, senior editor of Charisma magazine, sees the lack of accountability as in Hagee’s case with about as much disdain as I do. Though she might then turn around and play up some other groundless prophecy herself, on this point she’s on target.
I’ll celebrate this rare moment of concord by giving her the last word—remember, this is from the Christian editor of a magazine devoted to Christian prophecy:

Why do we make excuses for these prophets? Why is there no repentance? No apology? No accountability? …
Where is the repentance in the prophetic ministry? Why is it OK to get up on a megaplatform and prophesy things with specific date with no way of escape and move on to the next megaplatform (or Internet platform) without ever looking back at the mess you left behind? Why is it OK to charge for personal prophesy at the altar? Why is it OK to scare people half to death in the name of Jesus?

Why indeed?

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off
as if nothing had happened.
— Winston Churchill

Image credit: Marcel André Briefs, flickr, CC
 

How Christianity Retarded Modern Society by 1500 Years

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industrial revolutionIn the first century CE, Hero of Alexandria described the aeolipile (pronounced “ee-oh’-la-pile”), the device shown in the drawing above. A fire below heats water in a boiler. Steam from the boiler enters the hollow ball through the two horizontal pipes that form the ball’s axle. The steam exits the ball through two jets and makes it spin.
We have no evidence that this was more than a curiosity, which, when you think about it, is remarkable. The Roman Empire (of which Alexandria was one of its biggest cities) built roads, bridges, coliseums and temples, and aqueducts that weren’t surpassed for many centuries. If they had applied their engineering genius, could the Romans have launched the Industrial Revolution 1700 years before it actually happened?
The Industrial Revolution
That would seem possible since the Industrial Revolution began in England with a far more mundane invention, the flying shuttle (1733). This increased weaving speeds by a factor of four. The spinners who made the thread now became the bottleneck, but the invention of the spinning jenny a few decades later made them more productive. To spin a pound of cotton had taken five hundred hours by hand. Machines reduced this to twenty hours by 1780 and just three hours a few decades later.
The weavers in this arms race shot back with the water-powered loom in 1785 and later, steam-powered looms. Cotton suppliers became a bottleneck, and the cotton gin (1793) boosted their productivity. By 1830, England had perhaps ten million spindles for spinning thread and over 100,000 looms, most powered by steam. One worker had become as productive as several hundred with manual equipment. The mills in Lowell, Massachusetts at this time were producing a hundred miles of cloth per day.
Like the trickle over an earthen dam that becomes a torrent, the change spread and grew. The equipment that worked so well with cotton was applied to silk, flax, and wool. The Jacquard loom wove elaborate designs with punch cards.
The innovation spread to other industries. The manufacture of glass and pottery were automated. More demand for steam power meant more demand for coal, so coal mining ramped up in response. Tin, copper, and lead mining also expanded. Thousands of miles of canals, followed by tens of thousands of miles of railway as well as steamship routes, connected mines to factories to markets.
England had gone in a few generations from a country like every other to a country like no other.
(Much of this is taken from my book, Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change.)
A Roman Empire without labor-saving equipment
The problem for the Roman Empire was slavery. Labor-saving machinery was the last thing needed by a society built on slaves doing manual labor.
The article “An Apologia for Anarchism” points out the problems. There is no incentive to find a quicker way to complete a manual task—manual labor is a good thing, because idle slaves are a problem. Slaves aren’t consumers. And slaveholders will use their slaves first rather than hire workers, which creates a discouraged class of unemployed free men.
Enter Christianity
Would Christianity be the answer? Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity in 313, and it became the state religion in 380. Many Christian apologists today insist that not only does their religion hate slavery but that we have Christianity to thank for abolishing it in Europe and the United States the early 1800s. They also tell us that not only does Christianity embrace science but that the Old Testament contains clues to scientific truths that preceded modern science by millennia.
With the Christianization of the Empire in the fourth century, Christians seem to be saying that society was fertile ground for the labor-magnifying ideas of the Industrial Revolution. Christianity obviously can drive innovation as we see with the remarkable period of cathedral building beginning in the twelfth century and the commissioned artwork from the Renaissance. Was the aeolipile too distant to be an inspiration in fifth-century Christian Europe? Did the flying shuttle (or any other invention that might drive innovation in an industry) simply not occur to anyone?
Those are possibilities, but the bigger problem is that Christianity’s claims about slavery and science are false. While the Catholic Church did disavow slavery, that wasn’t until 1965. The Old Testament didn’t reject the institution but instead managed it by imposing rules. Old Testament slavery was basically identical to slavery in America. Similarly, the New Testament tells slaves to obey their masters.
Christian claims that the Bible anticipated modern scientific discoveries are also wrong. In fact, such claims are inept post-hoc attempts to imagine farsighted scientific observations in verses that said nothing of the kind, and the Bible makes plenty of false claims about science.
Christian Europe didn’t nurture innovation. Yes, there was some during the medieval period (eyeglasses, water wheels, the stirrup, metal armor, gunpowder weapons, castles, improved plows, crop rotation, and others), but that was in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
Christianity has had a chance to improve the lot of its flock. It was largely in charge from the medieval period through the Renaissance, but there is little to show for it. Modern apologists struggle to point to fruits of Europe’s Christian period, like universities and hospitals, though these examples crumble on inspection. Christian Europe was ruled by superstition, not reason.
Science, not religion, has ushered in the health and prosperity that we have today. Keep that in mind during the ongoing U.S. presidential campaign.
See also:

If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow,
there would be no doctors but witch doctors,
no transport faster than horses,
no computers, no printed books,
no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming.
If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow,
would anyone notice the smallest difference?
— Richard Dawkins,
Free Inquiry, 2004 Feb./March. p. 11

Image credit: Wikimedia

Do Atheists Borrow From the Christian Worldview? A Parable.

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Consider this parable:
A certain mathematician, in a philosophical mood one day, wondered what grounded his mathematics. The math works, of course, but he wonders if he’s missing something foundational.
He consults a friend of his, a theologian. The theologian knows almost nothing about mathematics, but he knows his Christianity.
The mathematician says, “Mathematics is like an inverted triangle with the most advanced math along the wide top edge. The top layer is grounded on the math below it, which is grounded on what is below, and so on through the layers, down to arithmetic and logic at the point at the bottom. And that’s where it stops.”
The theologian nodded his head wisely. “I see the problem—what does the bottom rest on?”
The mathematician was silent.
“In your view, it rests on nothing,” said the theologian. “It just sits there in midair. But the problem is easily resolved—mathematics and logic comes from God. There’s your grounding.”
“Are you saying that I need to convert to Christianity to be a mathematician?”
“No, just realize that you are borrowing from the Christian worldview every time you make a computation or write an equation.”
Satisfied that this nagging problem has been resolved, the mathematician returns to his work and thinks no more of it.
The End.
So, is the mathematician any better off? Is he faster or more accurate or more creative? Do his proofs work now where they hadn’t before? In short, did he get anything of value from the whole episode? Not at all.
And note, of course, that the axioms at the bottom of the triangle aren’t taken on faith, they’re continually tested. “1 + 1 = 2” has worked on everything so far, but we’ll take notice if we find a situation where it doesn’t. Some mathematical claims are proven and some are tested, but each is reliable.
I’ve heard this “grounding” or “atheists borrow from the Christian worldview” idea many times, but I’ve yet to discover what this missing thing is that is being borrowed. And suppose the theologian friend had been a Hindu or Buddhist and gave a claim of grounding from that perspective. Would that answer be any less plausible than the Christian one? If they conflict, doesn’t that cast doubt on both of them?
(The Transcendental Argument is the usual form of this argument, and I respond to it here.)
If we imagine that 1 + 1 equals 2 only because God says so, that means that a universe is possible where 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2. That’s a remarkable claim, and I’d like to see it supported by the theologian rather than simply asserted without evidence.
“God did it” is nothing more than a restatement of the problem. “God did it” is precisely as useful as “logic and arithmetic are simply properties of our reality” or “that’s just the way it is” or even “I don’t know.” An interesting question has been suppressed, not resolved. In fact, by the theologian’s own logic, his answer rests in midair because he provides no reason to conclude that God exists. His claim is no more believable than that of any other religion—that is, not at all. Worse, he proposes to replace the axioms at the lowest level—which continually provide evidence that they are valid—with a supernatural claim without evidence.
The person who stops at “God did it” has stated an opinion only—an opinion with no evidence to back it up. It doesn’t advance the cause of truth one bit.
Mathematics is tested, and it works. Scratch your head about what grounds it if you want, but God is an unnecessary and unedifying addition to the mix.

God is an ever-receding pocket
of scientific ignorance.
— Neil DeGrasse-Tyson

(This is an update of a post originally published 11/25/11.)

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