Christians: Why You Need an Atheist Speaker at Your Next Conference

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I read or listen to lots of Christian apologists. Frank Turek. Norm Geisler. Dinesh D’Souza. William Lane Craig. Gary Habermas. Mike Licona. Jim Wallace. Greg Koukl. Peter Kreeft.

I went to John Warrick Montgomery’s two-week Apologetics Academy in Strasbourg, France in 2011. I want to hear the best that Christian apologetics has to offer.

The reverse is rarely true.

Christian conferences

I see the ads for Christian apologetics conferences that promise to equip dedicated Christians to win souls for Christ. Sometimes they cover arguments for a historical Jesus. Or review scientific arguments that can be used to argue for a deity behind nature. Or even role play interaction with mock atheists.

It’s not enough. They need to hear from an actual atheist. A faux atheist is no foe.

To me, their refusal to invite one means that conference organizers don’t trust their material to carry the day. They’re afraid that they’ll get embarrassed or upstaged or that the attendees would get freaked out or overwhelmed with material that’s just too real.

But then how well do they prepare attendees? If the conference must tiptoe through the material to avoid the difficult topics, how will newly minted apologists do when they get out and talk to real, live atheists? If you hope that God will give you the right words as he did with Moses, you are setting yourself up for embarrassment.

If someone wants apologetics lite, they can read a book, but a conference should ramp it up. Attendees shouldn’t be spoon-fed straw man arguments but given the real thing.

In this blog, I’ve responded to many Christian arguments—from books, interviews, articles, blog posts, podcasts, lectures, and debates. It’s one of my favorite kinds of posts because they pretty much write themselves. Christians’ arguments are easy to refute. I’ve seen enough to know that the good stuff isn’t kept secret, like magic tricks, and whispered to worthy initiates. If you’re counting on an apologetics conference to show you the landscape, you will be disappointed. I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.

My proposal

The next time you see a notice for an apologetics conference, tell the organizing team to invite me to speak, either in a debate or with a lecture.

I can educate the audience about atheism. (Yes, atheists have purpose and morality. No, atheists don’t see their worldview as empty or hopeless.) I can argue for same-sex marriage and abortion rights. I can attack intellectual arguments for Christianity, and I can provide positive arguments for atheism. And then you get the last word.

The Christian arguments will be tested in the field. Shouldn’t they be tested in the conference?

My fee: $0

Give me an audience of 50 or more, and I’ll do it for free. Just cover my expenses. I’m meeting you more than halfway—you donate expenses, and I’ll donate a day or a weekend of my time plus preparation.

Read my books and blog to see how I think. I’ll even provide my books to attendees at cost. If you want someone with a higher profile, that’s great. I’ll be happy to make suggestions.

You think that after an atheist presents the best that that worldview has to offer, you can give your audience an adequate response? Great—then an atheist would be an asset to the conference.

You know how to reach me.

“Come now, and let us reason together,” says the LORD
— Isaiah 1:18

Forget the Cambrian Explosion—Here’s a SERIOUS Biodiversity Event

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Darwin's Doubt Stephen MeyerA few months ago, I attended a lecture by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute about his new book, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.

He explains “Darwin’s doubt” in the Amazon summary:

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock.

The Cambrian explosion was the appearance of all but one of the 35 present animal phyla (body plans) in the first 20 million years of the Cambrian period.

What did Darwin say?

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote:

If [evolution is] true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Cambrian age to the present day; and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures. Here we encounter a formidable objection; for it seems doubtful whether the earth, in a fit state for the habitation of living creatures, has lasted long enough.

Darwin then notes that the best evidence available to him gives evolution 100–200 million years since the consolidation of the earth’s crust. In fact, today’s estimate is 4 billion years.

Would Darwin have still found a “formidable objection” if he had known that the earth was actually 20 to 40 times older than he thought? Perhaps Meyer is fairer in his book, but in the lecture, he did nothing to clarify the incorrect data that underlay Darwin’s conclusions.

Who cares?

More to the point, no biologist cares what Darwin thought.

Contrast Darwin with Aristotle. Europe even through the Renaissance compared new developments with Aristotle to see if the great philosopher would have agreed. From 2000 years in the past, Aristotle could frown on revolutionary new ideas. Bertrand Russell said, “almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine.”

But no biologist today cares if Darwin would approve of a new idea or not. Darwin did remarkable things for his time, but Darwin is relevant in the field History of Science, not Biology. Evolution deniers like Meyer point out where Darwin was wrong, but this is useful only in mesmerizing the public.

Is the Cambrian explosion that remarkable?

The Cambrian explosion might have been the result of a perfect storm of factors that opened the field to new innovative body plans: predators accelerated the evolution of hard body parts, a global ice age had just ended, the Hox genes that control body plans may have developed at this time, and atmospheric oxygen may have been rising. We might also have underestimated the progress in the Precambrian because those animals were tiny or soft and didn’t leave much of a fossil record.

Let’s also be clear how limited the Cambrian explosion was. It’s a quick expansion in the body plans of animals. That’s it. While it happened quickly, it still took 20 million years, and there was little filling out of these phyla with individual species. There were no land animals, and our ancestors in the phylum Chordata would’ve been no more than primitive eel-like fish at this time (see drawing above). Evolution would slowly push this phylum to produce bony fish (420 million years ago), amphibians (370 mya), reptiles (310 mya), dinosaurs (230 mya), mammals (225 mya), and birds (160 mya).

Plants also developed slowly. We find algae 1200 million years ago, photosynthetic plants 1000 mya, land plants 450 mya, flowering plants 200 mya, and grasses 40 mya. There was no Cambrian explosion here.

Getting back to basics, the remarkable development of the eukaryotic cell (the kind that animals and plants have) from the more primitive prokaryotes such as bacteria happened 2700 mya.

In short, the Cambrian is impressive when we zoom in to just the major divisions in one kingdom, but it ignores most of evolution.

Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event (GOBE)

The Cambrian explosion looks at one feature in the vast expanse of evolution. Another that is at least as remarkable is the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event. If the Cambrian created the display cases for the phyla, the GOBE filled them with species.

The Ordovician period followed the Cambrian, and it created far more genera (“genuses”) than its predecessor, as the graph below shows.

(The three kinds of fauna listed above aren’t important for this discussion.)

From the perspective of biodiversity, the Cambrian doesn’t look so innovative after all. The article that accompanies the graph states,

This boom was like nothing the world has seen since. The Ordovician is the only time in the history of animal life that huge numbers of new species appeared without a mass extinction to clear the decks beforehand.

Why does Meyer focus on the Cambrian?

Meyer must weave a simple story: evolution expects gradual change, but the Cambrian shows that change was sometimes explosive. Evolution can’t explain this, but Intelligent Design can. And they all lived happily ever after.

But reality looks a lot more complicated than “And God said, ‘let there be many animal phyla,’ and it was so.” The Cambrian explosion is just one part of a big picture. It is separate from the very different explosive growth in the GOBE and the gradual evolution of plants and chordates.

Note also that Intelligent Design advocates didn’t uncover the Cambrian explosion. Biologists did. And it hasn’t convinced them that evolution is wrong. How could it convince me?

See nature through the eyes of science, the only way we ever have learned about it.

Religion is like aspirin.
It’s okay to take a little to make yourself feel better,
but you shouldn’t take too much,
and you shouldn’t force people to take it who don’t want any.
— Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Dismantling Irreducible Complexity

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Microbiologist Michael Behe coined the term “irreducible complexity” to describe a system in which every part is mandatory. Here is his definition:

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. (Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box [Touchstone, 1996], p. 39)

Let’s look at a popular example, the remarkable bacterial flagellum. Built of several dozen different protein types, this tiny motor with a whip-like appendage can propel a bacterium 60 cell lengths per second. Compare this to the cheetah, the fastest land animal, which sprints at 25 body lengths per second. (Here’s a video showing the structure of the flagellum.)

The irreducible complexity claim is this: imagine turning the clock of evolution back. Which protein was the last to be put in place? Pick any of them—the resulting one-protein-less motor wouldn’t work. So if one step back in time from a working flagellum is something useless, no matter which protein you remove, why would evolution have created this thing? Evolution doesn’t spend effort slowly building elaborate nonfunctioning appendages on the remote chance that with a few more mutations over 100,000 generations it might get lucky and create something useful. But Intelligent Design comes to the rescue by postulating a Designer that put everything together all at once.

A parallel example

We can topple this thinking by considering an arch. Which was the last stone to be put in place in an arch? If you try to turn the clock back by removing the central keystone, the arch falls. So that couldn’t have been last. But try removing any stone from the arch and the same thing happens. This makes the arch irreducibly complex, using this Intelligent Design thinking, with a Designer levitating the stones into place all at once as the only explanation.

But of course this is nonsense. If you imagine watching a movie of the building of an arch played backwards, the first change you’d see was not a stone removed but the last piece of scaffolding put into place. Then the remainder of the scaffolding to support the stones, then the stones removed one at a time, and then the scaffolding removed.

In the same way, the step that preceded the bacterial flagellum might have been the removal of an unnecessary piece of scaffolding.

What is “the” bacterial flagellum?

Another problem with the irreducible complexity idea is that it imagines a single, beautiful design. In fact, there are many varieties, just as you’d expect with a messy process like evolution. Look in the other domains of life (Archaea and our domain of Eukarya) and you find even more variety.

Predecessors

The bacterial flagellum might have evolved from the Type III secretory system, a needle-like structure used to detect and infect other cells. For example, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague uses this mechanism to inject toxins. Look to other domains, and other predecessors are possible. These plausible stepping stones show how the flagellum might have evolved.

For a layman like me, the bottom line is that this decades-old argument has had plenty of time to be evaluated, and it hasn’t convinced biologists. Evolution stands.

Science may well have unanswered questions regarding the origin of the flagellum, but “I don’t know” is no reason to invent a Designer. And you can be sure that once the origin of the bacterial flagellum is sufficiently well understood, this argument will be discarded like a used tissue and some other complex feature of biology (and there’s always something) will be seized upon by the Intelligent Design advocate as the wooden stake that will finally destroy the monster that is evolution.

If the past is any indication, our ID friend will have a very long wait.

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.
The fact that these people think
that if they didn’t have this person watching over them
that they would go on killing, raping rampages
is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
— Penn Jillette

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/28/12.)

Photo credit: adair broughton

Morality’s Ruby Slippers

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Near the end of the movie The Wizard of Oz, after the wizard has been exposed as a fraud, he still tries to grant the requests of Dorothy and her friends. The scarecrow wanted brains, the lion courage, and the tin man a heart. To the scarecrow, the wizard gives a diploma; to the lion, a medal labeled “Courage”; and to the tin man, a pocket watch shaped like a heart. They’re delighted, but the wizard doesn’t give them what they wanted. Instead, he gives them only an acknowledgment of what they already had.

Throughout their journey these characters had already been developing the very traits that they said that they wanted most of all. Though the wizard no longer stands behind a curtain pretending to be what he isn’t, he still takes credit for giving everyone what they already had.

God as wizard

Sound like Someone we know? Christians tell us that God gives us morality, purpose, logic, and meaning, though this is the same morality, purpose, logic, and meaning that other believers get from their god(s) and that atheists get from reality.

The Christian may respond that objective or absolute version of these traits must come from a supernatural source, but until the Christian shows that there are objective versions of these traits, this is an empty claim.

No, these are traits that we have always had. They’re borrowed by Christianity, and much is made of God’s generously giving us back what we already had.

Christianity’s most generous gesture would be to drop the imaginary gatekeeper role. Draw back the curtain to show Christians that the power to improve or destroy is (and has always been) ours, not God’s. Help Christians grow and reject their dependence on the supernatural.

Want a better society? It’ll happen only as a result of our hard work. Want to improve yourself? There’s no higher power guiding your progress in AA or any other self-help program. If you went through such a program and have gotten rid of some dependence, congratulations, because it was you (with the help of supportive friends and family) that made that radical change. God did nothing.

Use your ruby slippers

At the end of the movie, it’s Dorothy’s turn. Glinda the good witch tells Dorothy that her ruby slippers can return her home. She had been able to get what she wanted all the along.

And so it is with us. Morality and meaning are to us what Dorothy’s ruby slippers were to her. We’ve always had the answer. We just need to realize it.

Dorothy: You’re a very bad man.

Wizard: Oh, no, my dear; I’m a very good man.
I’m just a very bad wizard.

Photo credit: video

Why is it Always Men Advancing the Pro-Life Position?

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Pro-life menLook at the pro-life lineup of speakers and authors, and you’ll see far more men than women. Doesn’t it seem unfair that the gender that isn’t personally inconvenienced by pregnancy is the one pushing the restrictions?

I’m not saying that men should be silent, but I would prefer to see participants in the conversation in proportion to how it impacts their lives directly. The woman who’s pregnant? Of course. The man who will help support and nurture the child? Yep. Some self-important blowhard in a pulpit or on a stage or behind a microphone a thousand miles away? Not so much.

The moral debate

I remember a podcast by a popular Christian apologist during which a woman caller asked this question. The apologist (a man) seemed annoyed. He said that murder was murder. (I disagree, but that’s a tangent.)

More to the point, he said that his moral opinion was relevant regardless of his gender. I’ll agree with that, as far as it goes. But I think that the woman had an important point that is rarely acknowledged, since only a woman can have an abortion.

Let me try to turn the tables. This apologist is of the age where he might have been in the draft pool during the Vietnam War. Let’s suppose it’s 1970, and this guy returns from a tour fighting in Vietnam. Readjusting to life in America is tough, and he has nightmares and other symptoms of what we now call PTSD. His wife is sympathetic and, after some prodding, he shares the problem with her.

“Oh, you should go see Dr. Franklin about that,” she says. “I’m part of a community of veterans’ wives, and I’ve heard all about that problem. He does wonders with returning soldiers, and he’ll fix you up in no time.”

Our hero hesitates, not comfortable discussing his demons with a stranger. “I don’t think so.”

“No, really. I’ve heard a lot about this, and that treatment should work for you.”

Tension increases as they go back and forth. Finally, he says, “Honey, I really appreciate your sympathy. I know you want to help. But you must understand that you will never, ever understand what I’ve been through. Put in 18 months in Vietnam and then we’ll have something to talk about. Until then, you don’t get it, and you never will.”

Similarly, our 60-something male apologist will never, ever completely understand what it’s like to be 15 and pregnant, faced with disapproving parents and ridicule from classmates, seeing her life plans crumbling around her, dealing with pro-lifers shouting “murder!” at the suggestion of an abortion, and wondering how she’s ever going to get her life back on track.

If the male apologist wants to comment on the topic, that’s fine, but a big dose of humility (and sympathy) would make his opinion easier to take.

The Portman Effect

About a year ago, I wrote about Republican Senator Rob Portman’s dramatic public reversal on the issue of same-sex marriage after his son came out as gay several years earlier. Bravo, Senator, for taking a politically difficult stand, but why did it take a gay son to bring about this turnaround? You couldn’t figure the issue out by thinking about other people’s gay children? You couldn’t get there by musing, “Gee … what if my son turned out to be gay?” Or even, “What if I’d been gay?”

As clever as humans are about imagining situations and learning from them, Sen. Portman’s experience says that sometimes it does take your own son being gay to make you get it.

Maybe the Portman Effect is what we’re seeing with male pro-lifers. They’re not going to get pregnant, so it’s easy to be pro-life. Any downsides from continuing an unwanted pregnancy don’t directly affect them. Like Portman, they can’t put themselves in the shoes of someone going through this unless it actually happens to them. As men, it never will.

Perhaps they would see things differently if their own 15-year-old daughter got pregnant. (That’d be a great study: look at pro-life parents of teen girls with an unwanted pregnancy and see how many insisted that the same rules applied to their kid vs. how many rationalized that an exception was necessary, just in this case.)

Until that happens, gentlemen, please show a little humility.

Related post: “20 Arguments Against Abortion, Rebutted”

Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things:
One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in Hell.
The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth
and you should save it for someone you love.  
— Butch Hancock

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/22/12.)

Interloper (Fiction)

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Happy new year! Here’s a short story that I think you’ll enjoy.

Atheist fiction“Good morning, Dr. Jones.” Oliver Jones’ secretary smiled at him from behind her desk. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you,” he said. He had no memory of ever seeing the woman before. He paused to read the label on his unfamiliar office door: “Oliver Jones PhD, Chancellor.”

This was his first day back at work after his accident. He had been out for just a few days, but it felt like nine years. His neurologist diagnosed the problem as retrograde amnesia. The nine years of memory loss could be permanent, his memory might return gradually, or it might return quite suddenly. “I’ve had patients who’ve said, ‘Oh, yeah …’ and then they can almost watch their world rebuild itself as the memories return.”

Nine years earlier, he had been a successful and ambitious college administrator and very much an atheist. Today, he was the head of Tabernacle University, perhaps America’s most aggressively Christian university.

Only his neurologist shared the secret. Jones’s public story was that he had some limited amnesia and that he needed to take things slowly. He hoped that his secretary’s prepping visitors with this vague prognosis would explain away any erratic behavior.

He looked around his big office. He saw many books on Christianity and atheism that he remembered reading. There were other familiar touches—artwork that he recognized and a few nerdy desk toys. But then there were the photos—photos of him shaking hands with televangelists, prominent religious leaders, and a presidential candidate. Who was this guy?

He looked himself up online. He had become Tabernacle’s chancellor four years earlier after some sort of religious epiphany. As a prominent and outspoken atheist, he had apparently been quite a catch for conservative Christianity.

On this first day back at work, he blundered through the day with impromptu staff meetings to update him on the latest issues. As with his first look at his secretary, each of his colleagues was a stranger.

In his house that evening—he was apparently still a single divorced man—he considered his situation. Should he come clean and quit? Find a new job? Or could he use his bully pulpit to attack Christianity from the inside?

He weighed his options as an interesting route took shape—remain as chancellor, but be a reformer. He could use his position to steer this inept leviathan onto a healthier course. The board might fire him, of course, but as an atheist who woke up at the helm of a prominent Christian institution, this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

He thought of the students. The image came to mind of a jungle explorer who slips into quicksand. He struggles but sinks deeper. Exhausted, he calls for help, but no one comes. His students were like that, living and breathing reason but imperceptibly slipping under. He could throw them a rope.

The university charter made clear that the Christian student had nothing to fear from an honest search for the truth. With this as his lodestar, Jones pushed through his reforms. He sidelined projects that had been on his desk and started with a lecture series with nationally known atheists. His students needed to see the real debate, not some neutered version. No longer could his professors set up flimsy atheist arguments but would need to respond to the best. He dropped the faith requirement for professors and created a new professorship for Atheist Studies. He charged the science department with teaching only the scientific consensus—no more Creationism or 6000-year-old earth. He launched a project to earn an honorable accreditation for the university rather than one given only to Bible colleges. Students would discover the truth, not have it imposed as dogma.

Reactions came quickly. Alumni protested, and parents demanded that the school be turned back into a safe haven for their children. The board warned that neither group could be alienated. Jones responded by pointing to the school’s confident charter. Wasn’t it still in force? He said he wanted nothing more than to honor the founders’ vision.

With a bit of breathing room, he courted the press and soon became the darling of the mainstream religious media. Each strategically timed innovation brought a new round of interviews higher profile than the last.

Tabernacle had been a stodgy refuge from reality but was evolving in the public mind into an innovator in Christian thought and higher education. The board got off his back.

At the end of the semester, Jones took stock of his work. Four months earlier, he had felt like Alice, newly through the looking glass. Now he could point to solid progress in smoothing off the sharp edges, at least for this Christian institution. For all the enemies he had made, he seemed to have even more allies. Who could say what additional improvements he might make in the years to come?

It finally felt right to make this office his own, to replace photos of that other guy with recent magazine cover stories and pictures with new friends.

He studied the old photos as he took them down. He was surprised as they brought to mind dreams he’d had recently—dreams of an unfamiliar past that now came more into focus—and he went through the photos again. Oh yeah, he thought, as memories finally trickled back to become ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle pieces. The man in the top photo, that was the outgoing chancellor. He remembered him now. And the photo with the famous preacher—he remembered when the photo was taken.

He even remembered the event that led to his being there, that low point when he got on his knees and embraced Jesus. He was getting his life back, though instead of walking into a welcoming and familiar new world, he felt that old life creeping up around him like a jungle vine, pulling him under, yanking him back to his Christian past.

He could call for help, but who would come?

Photo credit: The Atlantic