How Much Faith to Be an Atheist? Geisler and Turek’s Moral Argument (Part 2).

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This is a continuation of my response to the popular Christian apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Begin with part 1 here. For part 1 of the critique of the moral argument, go here.

I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist by Geisler and TurekFundamental problems with the Moral Law argument

Geisler and Turek (GT) formulate their moral argument as follows: 1. Every law has a law giver; 2. There is a Moral Law; 3. Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver. What they don’t mention is that every law giver referred to in point 1 is a material being, but then they switch to an immaterial law giver in point 3. They do nothing to address or even acknowledge the fact that their argument can’t explain the change (thanks to commenter MNb for this insight). The problem with the argument becomes obvious when this is made explicit:

1. Every law has a material law giver.

2. There is a Moral Law.

3. Therefore, there is an immaterial Moral Law giver.

Here’s another variant that also skewers GT’s flabby argument from commenter primenumbers:

1. Moral values come from a mind.

2. Objectivity means independence of a mind.

3. Therefore, objective moral values don’t exist.

And are we even using the same definition of “law”? Yes, morality is related to human laws, which are to some extent codified morality, but while laws are arbitrary (rather than objective), some aspects of morality are innate and (from the standpoint of humans) unchangeable. The Golden Rule or a prohibition against killing without proper justification might be examples. Human laws have law givers, but morality is, in part, programmed and unchangeable.

The analogy and therefore the foundation of the argument fails, but let’s set that aside and see what else GT have up their sleeves.

One of the problems so far has been to nail down what this Moral Law actually is. They imagine objective moral laws, but what does that mean? Starting with objective morality as a morality grounded outside humanity—rules valid regardless of whether anyone believes in them—the definition changed to the morality that we feel. Then, they back away from the idea that we can reliably access this morality, so it becomes morality that we only dimly feel. Expect more reversals as their moral theory chafes against reality.

Let’s return to GT’s moral argument.

We can’t not know, for example, that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings for no reason. Some people may deny it and commit murder anyway, but deep in their hearts they know murder is wrong. (page 172)

Uh, yeah—murder is wrong by definition. The natural hypothesis (see part 1 for the natural morality hypothesis that I defend) is sufficient to explain our revulsion at killing innocent people.

Relativists make two primary truth claims: 1) there is no absolute truth; and 2) there are no absolute moral values. (172)

I make neither claim.

“1 + 1 = 2” may be an absolute truth. As for absolute moral values, I’ve simply seen no evidence to overturn the natural explanation of morality. I await with ill-concealed impatience any evidence for objective morality.

GT uses “relative morality” in opposition to objective morality, but because the term has been so clumsily defined by apologists, I prefer to state my position as “not objective morality.” For simplicity in this post, though, I’ll stick with GT’s “relativists” and “relative morality.”

Relativists are absolutely sure that there are no absolutes. (173)

Nope. I’m just pretty sure there are no moral absolutes. I keep doggedly asking for evidence, though I get nothing in response.

Relative morality fails?

GT relate the anecdote of a paper written by an atheist student. The student argued, “All morals are relative; there is no absolute standard of justice or rightness,” and the professor gave it an F because of the color of the folder it was delivered in. When the student protested that the reason wasn’t fair, the professor asked, “But didn’t you argue in your paper that there is no such thing?” At that point, the student “realized he really did believe in moral absolutes.”

I don’t, and I doubt any student in that situation would. There are absolute morals, and then there are the ordinary kind as defined in the dictionary. The student appealed to the natural morality he shared with the professor.

This is the Assumed Objectivity Fallacy. GT assumes that everyone knows and accepts objective morality. We’ll be seeing more of this.

The moral of the story [about the paper graded F] is that there are absolute morals. And if you really want to get relativists to admit it, all you need to do is treat them unfairly. (173)

Treat relativists unfairly, and they’ll appeal to shared, natural morality just like the student.

People may claim they are relativists, but they don’t want their spouses, for example, to live like sexual relativists. (173)

So you think relative morality is no morality? Your “moral relativists” have morals; they just don’t pretend that the morals are grounded outside humanity.

Actually, I’m happy for my spouse to use relative morality for all aspects of her life, both because I know of nothing else and because the natural morality that we all use works pretty well.

This reminds me of a quote from Penn Jillette: “The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.” Natural morality—it’s not perfect, but it serves us pretty well.

GT moves on to the visceral horror we felt from 9/11.

Our reaction reinforced the truth that the act was absolutely wrong. (175)

Another redefinition! We’ve switched to emotional gut feelings, and objective morality is now strongly felt morality.

GT go on to admit that we often betray our moral sense with our actions (the bad things we do), but they claim that the Moral Law is “revealed in our reactions.” Our sense of the Moral Law isn’t good enough to keep us firmly on the right track, but the truth comes out when we react. So now—redefinition!—objective morality is instinctive morality.

GT’s sloppy thinking may work with the flock, but it has consequences. One Amazon reviewer of this book titled his comment, “I don’t have enough intellectual dishonesty to be a Christian.”

Continue with part 3.

Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on;
by a simple and natural process
this will make you believe, and will dull you—
will quiet your proudly critical intellect.
— Blaise Pascal

Image credit: Megan Studdenfadden, flickr, CC

Christian Claims: Beyond Extraordinary

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Historian Richard Carrier nicely illustrates the magnitude of Christian claims by showing its place in a series of exponentially increasing claims. I’ll summarize my interpretation here, but for his version see Why I Am Not a Christian (35–9).

It’s one thing to have each step in a series exceed its predecessor simply in degree. For example, “I have a yellow car” is a narrower (and more surprising) claim than “I have a car.” It is different in degree simply because there are fewer yellow cars than cars of any color. Let’s call this a linear progression.

More interesting are steps that are different in kind, an exponential progression. This is admittedly a sloppy use of “linear” and “exponential,” but I think it suggests the magnitude of difference between changes in degree and the more dramatic changes in kind.

Here are five steps in an exponential progression. Claims at each step become increasingly unlikely.

1. Claims that are common such as, “I own a car.” In parts of the world where car ownership is common, this is not a surprising claim.

2. Claims that are uncommon such as, “I own a third-century Christian manuscript.” This is very uncommon—there might be just dozens of individuals who can make this claim rather than the hundreds of millions who could claim car ownership—but it’s plausible.

3. Claims that are unprecedented such as, “I own a 400-foot-long nuclear-powered submarine.” Such submarines do exist and no new science would be needed for this to be a true statement. Nevertheless, the facts that there is no record of a person owning such a thing, they are very difficult to steal, and they are enormously expensive to build makes this claim very implausible.

4. Claims that are inconceivable today (but perhaps reasonable tomorrow) such as, “I own a time machine.” These machines do not exist today. New science and technology would be needed to build one, if it could be built at all. On the optimistic side, humanity continues to uncover new science and invent new technology, so a claim in this category might become possible in the future.

5. Claims without precedent such as, “A supernatural being created everything and interacts with humans on earth today.” This claim is popular, but it is built on nothing. There is no objective evidence of any supernatural being, let alone one that created the universe.

Big submarines do exist, so someone might own one someday. Technology does exist, so time machines might be built in the future, and then someone might own one. But science recognizes no supernatural claims, and there’s no reason to imagine that they will become more plausible in the future. Before modern science, religion “explained” much about our world simply because it was the only option, but the continued success of science in explaining reality gives no reason to imagine a change in favor of religion. No future developments in science or technology will help God make himself more available.

We can imagine someone building a time machine (Wells’ The Time Machine, 1895 or Back to the Future, 1985), and we can imagine God revealing himself to an ordinary man (The Shack, 2007 or Genesis, first millennium BCE). These imaginings may be desirable, but they are fiction.

Of course, billions of people today believe in some variation of this supernatural claim, but because these many claims are mutually contradictory they do more to argue that humans invent religions than that god(s) exist. The Christian who eagerly points to the billions who believe in a supernatural something will also be quick to undercut this popularity by rejecting an all-roads-lead-to-God attitude.

Christian apologists advance “God did it!” in response to a scientific impasse such as “How did life originate?” or “What came before the Big Bang?” but they ignore how far-fetched the supernatural claim is. They confuse familiarity with plausibility, and on this exponential scale, God isn’t remotely plausible.

When deciding between two competing theories, 
always go with the one that doesn’t involve a magic spell.
— Emo Philips

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

Photo credit: Kevin Dooley, flickr, CC

The Kim Davis Discussion Must Include JFK

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Kim Davis is the county clerk in Kentucky who prohibited her office from issuing any marriage licenses because, “To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage [that is, straight marriage], with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience.”

That seems odd, because as a candidate she never admitted that she’d pick and choose the laws she’d follow. In fact, she promised to “follow the statutes of this office to the letter.”

Davis justified her reversal by arguing that the “So help me, God” tacked on to her oath of office meant that acting on her Christian beliefs was obligatory and trumped the laws she was promising to uphold. There are two small problems with this: that phrase is not part of the official oath (nor is the Bible you might put your hand on), and if she swore to God to uphold the law, she’s now breaking that oath. (A thoughtful analysis of this is by Noah Feldman.)

An easy solution leaps to mind: if you can no longer perform your job, quit. You could even make a bold statement by saying that a government job that pays $80,000 per year isn’t worth compromising one’s principles. But no, she wants it both ways. She imagines that she gets to apply her personal interpretation of Christianity to her job. So presumably every other government official gets to apply their individual religious interpretations to their jobs?

At least Sharia law isn’t quite so chaotic.

I wonder how deeply Davis has thought this through. The Bible says all sorts of crazy stuff in favor of slavery, genocide, and polygamy. Since she picks and chooses which secular laws to follow, I suppose she feels comfortable doing the same with God’s laws. Jesus himself said, “Whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 5:32). Before her current grandstanding, did she enforce that rule, too?

Davis began her job in January, 2015, when she knew that same-sex marriage might become legal within months, but she swore her oath of office anyway. She’s like the pacifist who willingly joins the infantry, knowing that killing the enemy was a possibility. And now that her unit has been deployed to a war zone, this pacifist decides that she won’t do her job.

(Davis had been in jail for contempt, but she was released 9/8/15 with the constraint that she can’t interfere in her deputy clerks’ jobs of issuing marriage licenses.)

We’ve seen this before with JFK

John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960. Some Americans were concerned that JFK, as a Catholic, would answer to the pope if elected president rather than the Constitution or the American people. One radio evangelist of the time said, “Each person has the right to their own religious belief [but] the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical system demands the first allegiance of every true member and says in a conflict between church and state, the church must prevail.”

In other words, how do we know that JFK won’t do a Kim Davis?

JFK famous responded:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; [and] where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials. …

I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

JFK explicitly rejected what Kim Davis has embraced.

The U.S. Constitution calls the tune

Here’s the bottom line. God isn’t the chief executive—the president of the United States is. The Bible isn’t the supreme law of the land—the Constitution is.

Be not confused: the United States doesn’t exist and run because God said so; instead, Christians can preach and worship because the Constitution says so. If the law offends you, you can argue that it’s unjust, you can work to have it changed, or you can leave. We have a 100% secular constitution that defines a 100% secular means for making, changing, and upholding laws.

I hear Pakistan puts God first in their law—maybe you’d like that better.

“The sky is falling!”

Conservatives are quick to tell us that this incident is the beginning of overt Christian persecution. A Christian Post columnist said, “For years now I and others have been warning that committed Christians could soon face jail time in America for holding to our convictions.”

Not really. Christian county clerks can object to same-sex marriages, Christian pharmacists can object to emergency contraceptives, Muslim flight attendants can object to serving alcohol, Christian bakers and photographers can object to same-sex weddings, but do your job. Don’t sign up and then imagine oppression. If you discover a moral dilemma down the road, quit.

To anticipate some jobs that a devout Christian might belatedly realize conflict with biblical principles, HuffPo has a list of jobs to avoid. You wouldn’t want to be a clerk selling mixed fabrics (prohibited), fishing for shellfish (prohibited), or teaching as a woman (prohibited). Are these examples ridiculous? Then ditto a clerk who objects to same-sex marriage (not explicitly prohibited) but has no problem with marrying divorced people (prohibited).

Another Christian Post columnist said, “Every serious biblical Christian will have to consider what to do now—whether a baker being asked to provide a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage against her conscience, a county clerk faced with issuing a marriage license to a homosexual couple, or a pastor being requested to perform a wedding between two women or two men.” Let me answer that for you: the baker is obliged to follow public accommodation laws that prohibit discrimination, county clerks must do their jobs, and the U.S. has laws protecting pastors.

This last one is always on the list, even though pastors are protected, both by the First Amendment and by Supreme Court precedent. Remember Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that made mixed-race marriage legal? That is binding only on governments, not pastors. Pastors can and do refuse to perform mixed-race marriages. The same is true for same-sex marriages. Even the Family Research Council (a Christian organization) agrees. Hysteria about constraints on the clergy is popular because it rallies the troops, not because it’s realistic.

This reminds me of Glenn Beck’s hysteria on the eve of the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. He declared that there were upwards of 10,000 pastors “that I think will walk through a wall of fire, you know, and possible death.”

Who did he imagine on the other side with the flaming torches?

Kim Davis: another Rosa Parks?

Rosa Parks was the African-American woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus in 1955. One of Kim Davis’s supporters finds much similarity between the two women. If Rosa Parks shouldn’t have to get off the bus, why should Kim Davis? He asks, “Will Kim Davis be the Rosa Parks of the movement?”

The difference, of course, is that Rosa Parks had her civil rights infringed upon, while Kim Davis is trying to infringe on the civil rights of others. If Kim Davis feels that the Bible has something to say about Obergefell, she can express that view, and every atheist I can think of will support her right to free speech. What she can’t do is impose that outside the law.

Will Kim Davis be the Rosa Parks of the conservative anti-same-sex marriage movement? A three-times-divorced person setting herself up as the arbiter of marriage might indeed be an appropriate saint for this ridiculous up-is-down and Ignorance-is-Strength movement.

Related post: “Being on the Wrong Side of History on Same-Sex Marriage? Worse than You Think.”

If you have to explain,
“I’m doing this out of love,”
it ain’t love.
— seen on the internet

Image credit: Wikimedia

How Reliable is Apostle Paul When He Knew Very Little About Jesus?

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What Did Paul Know About Jesus?For being the founder of Christianity, Paul knew surprisingly little about Christ.

Paul is our first and, for that reason, potentially our most reliable source of information on the life of Jesus. Let’s sift Paul’s writings for information about Jesus. Using the gospels as a guide, we’ll find that Paul is a shallow source of information.

If we were to extract biographical information from the gospels, we’d have a long list—the story of Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water, raising Lazarus, the Prodigal Son story, curing blindness with spit, odd events like his cursing the fig tree, and so on. But what information about Jesus do we get from Paul?

Paul’s famous passage

We’ll start with the well-known passage from 1 Corinthians 15.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Cor. 15:3–8)

This tells us that

1. Jesus died “for our sins.”

2. Jesus was buried.

3. Jesus was resurrected from the dead three days later, in fulfillment of prophecy.

4. Jesus made many post-resurrection appearances.

Though 1 Corinthians was written perhaps twenty years after the death of Jesus, some scholars argue that this three-sentence passage was written with a different style and so is an early creed that preceded Paul’s writing, taking us back closer to the earliest disciples. But others use the same logic to argue the opposite conclusion, that it was a later insertion. (Our oldest copy of this passage comes from papyrus manuscript P46, written around 200. That’s close to two centuries where we can’t be sure what changes might’ve been made.)

Let’s first sift through Paul’s epistles for confirmation of these first claims.

1. Confirmed—Paul writes elsewhere that Jesus was a sacrifice (see Romans 3:25, 5:6–8, 8:3; 1 Cor. 5:7; and more). The passage above does not contain the word “Jesus,” but many other Pauline verses combine “Jesus” and “Christ.”

2. Confirmed: “We have been buried with [Jesus] through baptism into death” (Rom. 6:4).

3. Confirmed: many verses report that Jesus was raised from the dead (see 1 Cor. 15:20; Rom. 1:4, 4:24; 2 Cor. 4:14; and more). Note, however, that there is no confirmation of the three days or the scriptural prophecy.

4. Not confirmed: There is no confirmation of the post-resurrection appearances in Paul’s epistles.

The rest of Paul’s Jesus

Here are the additional biographical details we find in Paul’s letters.

5. He was a descendant of David: “his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David” (Rom. 1:3).

6. He had brothers: “Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (1 Cor. 9:5; also Gal. 1:19). (“Brothers of the Lord” can’t mean just spiritual brothers because Cephas [that is, Peter] is excluded, and he would obviously be a spiritual brother.)

7. He was poor: “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor” (2 Cor. 8:9).

8. He was meek and gentle: “the meekness and gentleness of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:1).

9. He was selfless “do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others; [this attitude] was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:4–7).

10. He was crucified: “we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23; also 1 Cor. 2:2, Galatians 3:1, 2 Cor. 13:4, and more).

11. He was betrayed: “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23; also 2 Timothy 2:8).

12. He asked that his followers eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of him (1 Cor. 11:23–6). (However, the Vridar blog argues that this is an interpolation.)

13. He was a Jew: “God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal. 4:4; also Gal. 3:16).

14. His mission was to both Jews (“Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God …,” Rom. 15:8) and Gentiles (“… and for the Gentiles to glorify God for His mercy,” Rom. 15:9).

15. Jesus was killed by Jews: “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 2:14–15)

We could go further afield, into books that are almost universally rejected as authored by Paul. For example, 1 Tim. 6:13 places the trial of Jesus during the rule of Pontius Pilate, and Hebrews 5:5 gives an Adoptionist view of Jesus (that is, Jesus was a man adopted by God).

But if we stick to just the reliably Pauline works, assume the authenticity of 1 Cor. 15, and ignore that our copies are far removed from the originals and therefore suspect, here is the Gospel of Paul:

Jesus died for our sins by crucifixion, was buried, and was then raised from the dead three days later, according to prophecy. He was seen by many after the resurrection. He was a Jew, had brothers, and was a descendant of David. He was poor, meek, gentle, and selfless, and his mission was to both Jew and Gentile. He was betrayed, he defined a bread and wine ritual for his followers, and the Jews killed him.

The End.

What’s missing?

The Gospel of Paul is one brief paragraph. It arguably has the most important element—death as a sacrifice for our sins and resurrection—but very little else.

No parables of the sheep and the goats, or the prodigal son, or the rich man and Lazarus, or the lost sheep, or the good Samaritan. In fact, no Jesus as teacher at all.

No driving out evil spirits, or healing the invalid at Bethesda, or cleansing the lepers, or raising Lazarus, or other healing miracles. As far as Paul tells us, Jesus performed no miracles at all.

No virgin birth, no Sermon on the Mount, no feeding the 5000, no public ministry, no women followers, no John the Baptist, no cleansing the temple, no final words, no Trinity, no hell, no Judas as betrayer (he mentions “the twelve”), and no Great Commission. Paul doesn’t even place Jesus within history—there’s nothing to connect Jesus with historical figures like Caesar Augustus, King Herod, or Pontius Pilate.

Perhaps everyone to whom Paul wrote his letters knew all this already? Okay, but presumably they already knew about the crucifixion, and Paul mentions that 13 times. And the resurrection, which Paul mentions 14 times.

Christians may say that Paul knew the biographical details of Jesus but simply didn’t have occasion to write of them, but this route must not be taken lightly. When the issue of the dating of New Testament books comes up, those Christians will want to take the opposite approach. The lack of certain historical events in the gospels or Acts (death of Paul, destruction of the Temple) must mean that the author didn’t know of them. As a result, they’ll say, we must date these books before those historical events.

So which is it—does a notable omission mean that the author didn’t know that fact or simply didn’t bother relating it?

Paul indirectly admits that he knew of no Jesus miracles:

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor. 1:22–3)

Why “a stumbling block”? Jesus did lots of miraculous “signs”—why didn’t Paul convince the Jews with these? Paul apparently didn’t know any. The Jesus of Paul is not the miracle worker that we see in the Jesus of the gospels.

But suppose the problem is Jews demanding actual miracles performed in front of them, not merely stories of miracles. That shouldn’t be a problem either. Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (John 14:12). And, indeed, the book of Acts reports that this happened. Peter healed a lame man (Acts 3:1–8) and raised a woman from the dead (Acts 9:36–42), Philip exorcised demons to heal people (Acts 8:5–8), and “the apostles performed many signs and wonders” (Acts 5:12).

So then who was Paul referring to?

The Jesus of Paul isn’t the Jesus of the gospels. Robert Price questions whether Paul even imagined an earthly Jesus (Bible Geek podcast for 10/3/12 @ 1:15:10). Where did the Jesus in Paul’s mind come from, if not history? Perhaps from the Scriptures. Commenter Greg G. lists Paul’s traits of Jesus and shows where in the Old Testament he could have gotten them. (I’ve written more about the evolution of the Jesus story here.)

What would Paul have said about the philosophical issues that divided the church for centuries? These don’t mean much to most of us today because they’ve long been decided, but they were divisive in their day—whether Jesus was subordinate to God or not, whether Jesus had a human body or not, whether he had a human nature or not, whether he had two wills or not, whether the Holy Spirit was part of the Godhead, and so on. No one knows how Paul would have resolved them or even if they crossed his mind.

The Gospel of Paul is more evidence that the Jesus story is just a legend that grew with time.

Good sources for more information:

Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. 
Faith must trample underfoot 
all reason, sense, and understanding.
— Martin Luther

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/17/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

How Much Faith to Be an Atheist? (A Response to Geisler and Turek, Part 4)

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This is a continuation of my response to the Christian apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Read part 1 here.

I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist Norm Geisler Frank TurekDesign Argument

Geisler and Turek (“GT”) tell us that DNA is complex, and complexity points to a designer.

You don’t need anyone to tell you that something beautifully designed requires a designer. (page 111)

Beautifully designed? Like what? Like parasites, bacteria, and viruses? Like birth defects, cancer, and Alzheimer’s? Most of earth and pretty much all of the universe are inhospitable for humans without technology. I don’t see the hand of a particularly benevolent designer. The Design Argument fails.

And if something is beautiful, why must it be designed? Simple rules of physics give us beautiful crystals, delicate snowflakes, and stunning sunsets, for example.

Francis Collins, evangelical Christian, biologist, and head of the National Institutes of Health, says that DNA evidence for evolution is stronger even than that from fossils. Nevertheless, many apologists push DNA as exhibit A. They’ll say that DNA is information, and information means intelligence. They’ll demand that we show them a single example of information not coming from intelligence. In response, I ask for a single example of intelligence not coming from a physical brain.

My argument reaches the opposite conclusion from theirs: I say that DNA alone makes a clear rebuttal against the Design Argument. My full argument is here, but let me summarize. First, think of the attributes that all designers use. They might want to make something durable or economical or strong or beautiful or lightweight, for example, but no designer will add junk. But when we examine DNA, we find:

  • pseudogenes (broken genes, like the broken gene for making vitamin C in every cell of your body),
  • fragments of endogenous retroviruses (8% of human DNA are these bits of virus),
  • vestigial structures such as nonfunctioning eyes in cave fish and a pelvis in whales, and
  • atavisms (archaic DNA that occasionally gets switched back on such as legs on snakes and teeth in chickens).

DNA length is also not proportional to the complexity of the animal, and lots of species have far more DNA than humans, including salamanders, fish, amoeba, and even the onion. Can GT be saying that the onion really needs five times more DNA than humans?

This kind of sloppy DNA is not something a designer would create. That doesn’t prove that God didn’t create DNA, just that the Design Argument fails. And don’t tell me that God’s ways are greater than ours, and we aren’t in a position to judge him. We don’t start with the God hypothesis; rather, we follow the evidence, and this DNA mess doesn’t point to God.

The Christian response is often to handwave that the DNA got corrupted over time. Yes, it’s adulterated today, they’ll admit, but that’s just a product of living in a corrupt world.

Let’s think about this remarkable, evidence-less claim. Presumably this means that, going back in time, we would find progressively cleaner DNA until, at some time, the DNA was perfect. Was human DNA perfect 3000 years ago when the stories that became our Bible began to be collected? Was it perfect six million years ago when we had our last common ancestor with chimpanzees? Was it perfect four billion years ago in the first life form? And whatever your answer, where’s the evidence? Evolution is the scientific consensus, and it doesn’t support this claim.

Thermodynamics revisited

GT put on a lab coat again to give us a lecture about thermodynamics.

How did life arise from nonliving chemicals, without intelligent intervention, when nonliving chemicals are susceptible to the Second Law? Darwinists have no answer, only faith. (p. 125)

Here again is that denigration of faith that seems ill-advised in a Christian apologetics book.

High school students who’ve been paying attention in class know how this complaint fails: the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy (“winding down” or disorder) in any system is increasing overall, but that doesn’t mean that it’s increasing everywhere. When a seed turns into a tree, that’s an decrease in entropy (because it’s an increase in order), but overall entropy in the earth/sun system is still increasing.

What makes this more entertaining is that other Creationists make clear that this appeal to thermodynamics is embarrassing. Answers in Genesis (“an apologetics ministry dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith”) says that the argument should be avoided. Creation Ministries International (motto: “Proclaiming the truth and authority of the Bible”) says the same.

I do enjoy some good Creationist-on-Creationist action.

Abiogenesis

If we ignore the unhelpful appeal to thermodynamics, we could distill this down to a question about how abiogenesis (the step before evolution) happened. That’s a valid question, and science doesn’t know.

Science has lots of unanswered questions. GT’s only argument here could be, “Science doesn’t know; therefore, God,” which is no argument.

GT use science when it suits them (thermodynamics, Big Bang cosmology) and reject it when it doesn’t (evolution, abiogenesis). One wonders who died to leave them the Judges of All Science. One also wonders what they think of their readership that none will care enough about science to be offended at their arrogance.

In several places (pages 115 and 120), the book uses the term “spontaneous generation,” an idea discredited almost two centuries ago. That they use it as a synonym for abiogenesis shows again their disdain for science. For them, it’s a tool to be used or discarded as suits their agenda.

Evolution

Hatred of evolution colors much of Frank Turek’s work in particular (I’ve responded to his musings on evolution before). In this book, chapter 6 is titled, “New Life Forms: From the Goo to You via the Zoo?” This presumably means that evolution can’t be true because it’s yucky (“People came from pond scum? Eww!”), as if yucky has any bearing on truth. These are often the same people who believe God made Adam from dirt.

It’s telling that they must stoop to schoolyard taunts to make their case.

GT make many more flabby denunciations of evolution, but I’ll save them for another post on evolution vs. Creationism.

Continue with the Moral Argument in Part 5.

Creationists are like the undead.
They can’t see themselves in mirrors.
— commenter Greg G.

Image credit: Wikimedia

How Much Faith to Be an Atheist? (A Response to Geisler and Turek, Part 3)

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This is a continuation of my response to the Christian apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Read part 1 here.

I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist Norm Geisler Frank TurekFine Tuning Argument (the Anthropic Principle)

Geisler and Turek (I’ll refer to the book as GT) make the typical fine-tuning argument.

If the gravitational force were altered by 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent, our sun would not exist, and, therefore, neither would we. Talk about precision! (p. 102)

Science uncovers puzzles, and it tends to resolve them. Let’s give it time.

If we reran the Big Bang over again to get another universe with the same fundamental constants, humans wouldn’t exist. A universe with humans is like being dealt a particular hand of cards, and if the deck were reshuffled and dealt again, we’d get a different hand. We care that we exist, but nature doesn’t. The only interesting question is whether life (or intelligent life) would exist in a different universe.

The most effective arguments from the Christian side are obtuse ones like this fine-tuning argument, and that shows the weakness of their position. Instead of obvious evidence for God (we’re told God deeply wants us to know him, so why isn’t his existence indisputable?), Christians must point to some oddity within nature as a clue. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, God has (for these apologists) devolved into “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

GT next rambles on about the fine tuning of the Earth’s conditions, but I wonder, what fine tuning? Over the Earth’s 4.6 billion-year life, conditions have changed dramatically. For example, the oxygen level in the atmosphere is now 21%, but it’s varied wildly over the last 600 million years. Initially 0%, it has risen to over 30% for two long periods. The temperature has also changed, and the Snowball Earth hypothesis speculates that most or all of the water on earth may have been frozen in one or more periods before 650 million years ago. If life can thrive during these chaotic conditions, perhaps it’s a lot more robust than we imagine.

The Multiverse hypothesis—that our universe is just one of uncountably many other universes governed by different constants—is a corollary of well-established science (cosmic inflation) and nicely rebuts the challenge of fine tuning. To avoid repeating additional responses I’ve made before, I’ll just provide links: Sean M. Carroll’s response to fine tuning, some other innovative responses, and my response to a previous Frank Turek argument for fine tuning.

Problem of Divine Hiddenness

GT parrots the free-will argument given by C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters:

The Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of [God’s] scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. (p. 31)

Oh, please. God is forbidden from making his presence known because then we’d know for sure that he exists? Adam, Eve, Abraham, Moses, and the others in the Old Testament had direct experience of God, and they didn’t complain. A stranger doesn’t impose on my free will when he comes into my sight. This childish argument is what you’d fall back on if there were no god.

This is Stupid Argument #19a, “God’s making himself plainly known would impose on your free will.”

The Road Runner Tactic

This is GT’s name for the trick of exposing a self-refuting statement, of turning a sweeping generalization back on itself. For example, if someone said, “There is no truth,” GT would ask in response, “Is that statement true?” to show that the statement refutes itself (p. 38). Or to “All truth is relative,” ask, “Is that a relative truth?”

If we supposed that GT encourages us to use precise language, this observation about self-refuting statements is helpful, but that’s not their goal. GT is more interested in sidestepping tough questions. Many of these self-refuting statements are simply poorly worded and can be easily salvaged into an incisive challenge. For example:

Bob the Atheist: “There is no absolute truth.”

Christian apologist: “That sounds like a pretty absolute statement to me, smart guy—you’ve undercut your own statement!”

Bob the Atheist: “Okay, fair point. Let me rephrase: I see no evidence for absolute moral truth. If you claim otherwise, provide the evidence.”

And then the conversation proceeds beyond this little roadblock. More.

Awe

We’re all subject to powerful feelings like awe, and GT imagine this as a point in their favor.

A recitation of [some scientific theory] certainly wouldn’t have expressed the awe the astronauts were experiencing [when they saw the Earth rise over the Moon]. (p. 111)

And analyzing love or courage or selflessness through brain chemistry might also be a bland explanation, but it could still be correct. Scientific theories don’t give awe, but science certainly does. Let’s remember that we got to the moon using science! The Bible’s insight about the moon is to describe it as “the lesser light to govern the night.” Uh huh—awe inspiring.

Genesis gives the uninformed speculations of a primitive desert tribe from 3000 years ago. If you want awe, use science. Try this experiment: go outside on a clear night. Hold out your hand, arm extended, and look at the nail of your little finger. That fingernail covers a million galaxies, and each galaxy has roughly 100 billion stars. Look at how vast the sky is compared to that one tiny patch. And how does the Bible treat this inconceivable vastness? “[God] also made the stars” (Gen. 1:16). Yawn. I get my awe from science, not from the Bible.

Science gives you the vastness of the universe, the energy of a supernova, the bizarreness of quantum physics, and the complexity of the human body. The writers of the Bible were constrained by their imagination, and there is so much out there that they couldn’t begin to imagine.

Continued in part 4.

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side?
And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Image credit: Gisela Giardino, flickr, CC