Mormonism Beats Christianity—Or Does It? (2 of 2)

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In part 1, we saw that Mormonism spanks Christianity in the evidence department. It has far more voluminous, recent, and reliable information. The Christian apologists’ arguments work against them since they apply even more strongly to Mormonism.
The other side of the story
Still, I’m not quite ready to convert. Mormonism has its own problems.

  • The populating of America. The Book of Mormon (BoM) says that the Americas were populated by immigrants from the Ancient Near East, beginning in about 2500 BCE, in the aftermath of the Tower of Babel. Anthropologists say that, no, the first immigrants actually came from Siberia at least 10,000 years ago.
  • Connection between early Americans and ANE? If modern American Indians were the descendants of these immigrants, we should see a genetic and (to a lesser extent) a linguistic connection between American Indians and cultures of the ancient Near East. We don’t.
  • Anachronisms. The BoM refers to things that didn’t exist in the Americas at that time. For example: “They became exceedingly rich—having all manner of fruit, and of grain, and of silks, and of fine linen, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious things; and also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and of sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man. And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants.” (Ether 9:16–19). The italicized items were not present in the Americas at this time. Other anachronisms include barley, wheat, steel, chariots, the compass, and glass windows.
  • Plagiarism. The BoM appears to have been plagiarized in part from several contemporary books, the King James Bible, and the Apocrypha. The idea that God would choose to give his message to founder Joseph Smith in King James English rather than contemporary English also suggests that the story is fiction.
  • Bogus translation. The Book of Abraham, a “translation” from an Egyptian papyrus, has been shown by modern experts to be fraudulent. Though historians don’t have the golden plates, they do have much of the original papyrus, and it’s not at all what Smith claimed it to be.

It gets worse
Using “seer stones,” magical stones that would become transparent to reveal some truth, to find treasure was popular in his day, and Smith was an enthusiastic participant. He used seer stones in a hat to find treasure, the same technique he would later use to translate the BoM. For this, he was brought into court at age 20 (it’s unclear whether the charge was divination or fraud).
Close to 4000 changes have been made to the BoM since its original publication in 1830. Many are trivial, but some change the theology. For example, the original BoM used the phrase “white and delightsome” to refer to the skin of good people and said that God darkened the skin of bad people (see 2 Nephi 5:21 and 30:6). When that was no longer PC, the language was softened.
When the church’s teaching of polygamy became an obstacle to statehood, the church president received a “divine revelation” that declared that their unchanging god had changed his mind. That’s quite a comedown for a book that Joseph Smith declared to be “the most correct of any book on earth.”
The obvious explanation besides the official Mormon one is that Joseph Smith was a treasure hunter caught up in the religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening. He applied his interest in divination to his interest in Christianity, and a new religion was born. In those fervent times, his religion found fertile soil.
What have we learned from Mormonism? Rule #1.
If you want to start a new religion, the basics apply. Don’t tell your friends, as L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, did: “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.” Don’t publicly use a particular divination technique, as Joseph Smith did, and then later say that an angel told you how to learn divine information … coincidentally using your favorite technique.
Rule #2
I’ve already written about the surprising benefits of ambiguity to a religion’s longevity (“How to Invent a Plausible God”).
Rule #3
Finally, let’s return to the observation we began with: that predicting the end of the world precisely and unambiguously is embarrassing when that date passes without catastrophe. Conclusion: don’t be precise.
That’s the problem with the elaborate history of Mormonism. It makes too many specific claims. Joseph Smith was able to get away with most of them, but references to steel, silk, horses, and other anachronisms make the church’s history easily debunked.
(Do Mormon apologists have snappy answers for most of these? Sure, but they don’t convince non-Mormons. Similarly, Christian apologists have elaborate arguments and snappy rebuttals of their own, but they also don’t convince skeptics. New Christians rarely convert because of good intellectual arguments.)
Note how much better Christianity does. It wins because it’s vague and untestable. Its lack of evidence becomes an advantage.
Mormon claims can be tested (and they’re found wanting), but Christianity’s claims can’t even be tested. Neither is a solid basis for a belief system.

The book [of Mormon] is a curiosity to me.
It is such a pretentious affair and yet so slow, so sleepy,
such an insipid mess of inspiration.
It is chloroform in print.
— Mark Twain

Photo credit: Wikipedia

It’s Funny Until Someone Gets Hurt, then it’s Hilarious

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I’ve been amazed at the popularity of Creationism/Intelligent Design among Christian pundits.
Old-earth Creationism accepts the consensus within the field of cosmology about the Big Bang and the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago but rejects evolution. Young-earth Creationism also rejects evolution and argues that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. This view is predominant among evangelical pastors.
Dr. Karl Giberson pointed out an interesting downside of this mindless rejection of science. He begins by citing a Barna survey that lists six reasons why most evangelical Christians disconnect from the church, at least temporarily, after age 15. The most interesting reason: “Churches come across as antagonistic to science.”
Of the young adults surveyed,

  • 23% say they had “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate”
  • 25% say “Christianity is anti-science”
  • 29% say “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in”
  • 35% say “Christians are too confident they know all the answers”

Ken Ham vs. science
As an example of this rejection of science, Giberson points to the technique recommended to schoolchildren by Creation Museum founder Ken Ham. Ham encourages students to ask, “Were you there?” when the biology teacher says that life on earth appeared roughly 4 billion years ago or the physics teacher says that the Big Bang gave us the universe in its present form 13.7 billion years ago.
Ham proudly blogged about nine-year-old Emma B., who wrote to tell Ham how she attacked a curator’s statement that a moon rock was 3.75 billion years old with “Were you there?”
Biologist PZ Myers nicely deflated Ham’s anti-science question with a gentle reply to Emma B. Myers recommends using instead “How do you know that?” which is a question from which you can actually learn something.
Contrast that with Ham’s “Were you there?” which is designed simply to shut down discussion and to which you already know the answer.
“Were you there?” is a subset of the more general question, “Did you experience this with your own senses?” To Science, this question lost significance hundreds of years ago. The days when Isaac Newton used taste as a tool to understand new chemicals are long gone. Modern science relies heavily on instruments to reliably provide information about nature—from simple ones like compasses, voltmeters, and pH meters to complex ones like the Mars rovers, Hubble space telescope, and Large Hadron Collider.
Personal observation is often necessary (finding new animal species, for example), but this is no longer a requirement for obtaining credible scientific evidence.
William Lane Craig as Hanes Inspector #12
From the standpoint of mainstream Christianity, Ham’s position as a young-earth Creationist and Bible literalist is a bit extreme, but higher profile figures like William Lane Craig also grant themselves the privilege of picking and choosing their science. Craig uses science a lot—at least, when it suits his purposes. The Big Bang suggests a beginning for the universe, so he takes that. Evolution suggests that life on earth didn’t need God, so he rejects that bit.
He imagines that he’s Hanes Inspector Number 12: “It’s not science until I say it’s science.” It may be fun to pretend that, but what could possibly make you think that’s justifiable?
That reminds me of a joke

Scientists figure out how to duplicate abiogenesis (the process by which molecules became something that could evolve). They are so excited that they email God to say they want to show him. So God clears some time on his calendar and has them in.
“Sounds like you’ve been busy,” God said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
“Okay—first you take some dirt,” said one of the scientists.
“Hold on,” God said. “Get your own dirt.”

And to William Lane Craig’s pontificating about science, I say, “Hold on—get your own science.”
As a layman, you either play by the rules of science and accept the scientific consensus whether it’s compatible with your preconceptions or not, or you sit at the children’s table. If you want to hang out with the adults, you can’t invent reasons to rationalize why this science is valid and that is not.
There are consequences
Evangelicals may want to rethink this picking and choosing of science. Giberson ends his article:

The dismissive and even hostile approach to science taken by evangelical leaders like Ken Ham accounts for the Barna finding above. In the name of protecting Christianity from a secularism perceived as corrosive to the faith, the creationists are unwittingly driving the best and brightest evangelicals out of the church. … What remains after their exodus is an even more intellectually impoverished parallel culture, with even fewer resources to think about complex issues.

Perhaps I should be more welcoming to Christian anti-science in the future.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says;
he is always convinced that it says what he means.
— George Bernard Shaw

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 2/22/12.)
Photo credit: williac

F-ing Magnets—How do THEY Work?

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The hip hop band Insane Clown Posse created an interesting meme with its 2010 song “Miracles.”
Well, not so much interesting as bizarre. Here’s a bowdlerized version of the verses in question:

Water, fire, air and dirt.
F**kin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist.
Y’all motherf**kers lying and getting me pissed.

You really want to know how magnets work? Here you go:

These are Maxwell’s equations, the foundation of our understanding of electricity and magnetism. They were published in 1865. A deep understanding would obviously take some effort, but the point is that this question is no mystery to science.
The song’s not all bad, but it wanders from justifiable wonder at nature (“Oceans spanning beyond my sight / And a million stars way above ’em at night”) to conflating wonder with ignorance.
Saturday Night Live did an excellent parody video. The lyrics in their song “Magical Mysteries” include, “Where does the sun hide at night? / Did people really used to live in black and white?” which isn’t too far from denying our knowledge about magnets.
Maybe Bill O’Reilly is a Juggalo (a fan of Insane Clown Posse) because he has sounded a lot like them. In a 2011 interview with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O’Reilly said, “I’ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam, in my opinion. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.”
(Or you could just look it up in Wikipedia.)
And were there no consequences to O’Reilly for being this confused about reality? He’s been lampooned for these statements (and a later defense, which was equally ridiculous) by people who weren’t his fans to begin with. But doesn’t his fan base care about reality? Can they possibly cheer on this willful ignorance?
Despite the contrary opinions of O’Reilly and Insane Clown Posse, learning about how things work can make them more amazing. Actually understanding how magnets work doesn’t ruin the magic trick, it turns mysterious into marvelous.
Here’s an experiment: go outside on a clear night. Hold out your hand, arm extended, and look at the nail of your little finger. That fingernail is covering a million galaxies. Not a million stars, a million galaxies. Each galaxy has roughly 100 billion stars. That’s 100,000,000,000,000,000 stars under just one fingernail. Now see how vast the sphere of space is compared to that one tiny patch.
And how does the Bible treat this inconceivable vastness? “[God] also made the stars” (Gen. 1:16). That’s it.
The god of the Old Testament is little more than a dictator with the wisdom of Solomon, the generalship of Alexander, and the physical strength of Hercules. But 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 it shows. There is so much out there that they couldn’t begin to imagine. If you want wonder, discard the Bible and open a science book.
And this is not groundless myth, it’s science—the discipline that makes possible your reading this across the Internet, on a computer, powered by electricity (and governed by Maxwell’s equations).
Carl Sagan said, “We are star stuff” to suggest that we are literally made from the remnants of stars. Two adjoining carbon atoms in a molecule in your body might have come from different exploding stars. Science gives us this insight, not religion.
Second-century Christian author Tertullian is credited with the maxim, credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd). In other words, no one could make this stuff up.
If you believe things either in spite of evidence to the contrary or because of it, science may not for you. But if you want to understand reality to the best of humanity’s ability, rely on science. C’mon in—the water’s fine!

Science does not make it impossible to believe in God, 
but it does make it possible to not believe in God.
— Steve Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics

Photo credit: mutantMandias

The Declaration of Independence—A Christian Document?

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Is America a Christian nation? Some Christians eagerly point to the word “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence (1776) as evidence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Who is this “Creator”? Is it Yahweh, the Christian god? Is it a placeholder into which you can imagine any god so that Muslims can imagine Allah or Hindus can imagine Brahma?
No—the opening sentence clarifies: it’s not Yahweh but “Nature’s God.” At the time, this phrase was understood as the deist god of Enlightenment philosophers like Spinoza and Voltaire. Deism was popular in Revolutionary America, and Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and other founding fathers were either deists or inspired by the movement. Deism imagines a hands-off god, a creator who, once the clock is built and wound up, leaves it to tick by itself.
The role of this “Creator” is clarified in the Declaration:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

In other words, the Creator has no role in government. We’ve turned our back on the divine right of kings, where the king was God’s representative who served at God’s pleasure. God isn’t the foundation on which authority rests. No—it’s the consent of the governed. The buck stops here, which is very empowering.
Remember that the purpose of the Declaration was to inform Britain that the colonies wanted to become independent. When government becomes abusive, the recourse isn’t to appeal to God:

Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Again, we see that the government rules at the pleasure of the people, not God.
While the Declaration of Independence doesn’t give Christians what they may imagine it does—an acknowledgement of the existence of the Christian god and his sovereignty over this country—this exercise is largely irrelevant. The Declaration isn’t the supreme law of the United States. That’s the Constitution, and it’s secular. Like the Declaration, it makes clear where the buck stops. In huge letters, it begins, We the People.
Watch out for Christian revisionist historians bringing up the Declaration. They’d bring up the Constitution, the document that actually matters, if they could. But they know they can’t, and that’s the white flag of surrender.

I think of myself as a militant agnostic:
I don’t know, and you don’t either.
— Michael Shermer

(This is a modified version of a post that originally appeared 2/10/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Awe: Which Has More, Science or Christianity?

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You may be surprised to learn that not everyone is convinced by the arguments of New Atheism’s Four Horsemen. I certainly was surprised.
In one negative review of Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, the author said:

Hitchens claims that, “As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.”
Is he serious? I doubt that even Hitchens would find re-runs of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos “far more awe-inspiring” than Michelangelo’s vision of God creating man.

And can this author be serious? He’s saying that the awe from science is dwarfed by that from religion?
Science in Palestine
Here’s a brief caricature of what I imagine “awe” meant in the Old Testament. Imagine a Jew and a non-Jew meet 3000 years ago in Palestine. They’re comparing gods.
Jew: And strong! Let me tell you how strong Yahweh is. See that rock over there? The one as big as a house?
Not-a-Jew: Okay.
Jew: Yahweh could pick it up and throw it just like you’d throw a pebble.
NJ: Wow!
Jew: Yeah, and that mountain over there? He could pick it up and move it across the valley without even trying.
NJ: Impressive.
Jew: And did I tell you that he created everything? And I mean everything! This was thousands of years ago—he formed all the land from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia; from Egypt to Greece. He created the sun and moon. Rainbows, earthquakes—everything!
NJ: I didn’t know that …
Jew: Yeah, so don’t mess with us ’cause he’s on our side.
Yahweh was like a superhero—stronger than Hercules, with better generalship than Alexander, and wiser than Solomon. The Jews needed a big brother to help with all their difficulties with neighboring tribes and countries. It’s nice to have a superhero on your side when there are bullies around (who each have their own superhero protectors).
The imagination of a primitive desert tribe 3000 years ago wasn’t that broad, and that superhero concept of God was about as much as they could imagine.
… vs. science today
Compare that with what modern science has given us in the past couple of hundred years. Let’s ignore the advances that make our lives much more bearable (vaccines, antibiotics, anesthesia, energy, transportation, engineering, etc.) and focus on the cerebral stuff. The mind-expanding stuff. Things like the age of the earth and the universe, the huge distances between stars and galaxies, or the amount of energy stars produce.
Try this experiment: on a clear night, go look at the stars. Now extend your arm and spread your fingers. The nail of your little finger covers one million galaxies. In each galaxy are on average 100 billion stars. This gives a good perspective on the tiny space our earth occupies in the universe.
Or look at the small scale and consider the complexity of a cell. If you think evolution is counterintuitive, consider quantum physics–quantum entanglement, for example.
And notice the irony in the author’s “I doubt that even Hitchens would find re-runs of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos ‘far more awe-inspiring’ than Michelangelo’s vision of God creating man.” Yes, the Sistine Chapel fresco is marvelous, but it was created by a man! Can he be saying that a work of a man trumps nature’s marvels?
The author lists other great works inspired by religion: “Giotto, Bach and Handel, Chartres and St. Peter’s.” Art, music, and architecture—here again, these are all made by humans.
Who, exactly, do you give praise to?
I can’t resist an aside on the topic of what God does vs. what people do. You’ve probably seen the iconic woman who survived the big disaster (hurricane Katrina’s rampage through New Orleans, for example) and is now back on her feet. “Thank you Jesus!” she says. “I lost everything, but now I have clothes and an apartment and a job.”
She seems to forget that Jesus didn’t lift a finger to give her those things—she’s doing well thanks to other people. Her thanks should be aimed at the combination of government aid and charitable donations that helped her out. And while we’re talking about Jesus, he was the guy who brought the disaster in the first place. What she should have said was “Thank you America! And Jesus, we need to talk …”
Of course, this doesn’t address the “Does God exist?” question. Maybe God does exist, and he produced the amazing things we see in nature. But it’s through science that we see these awe-inspiring things, not through the Bible. This marvelous universe is not at all what the early Jews, living on their small Mesopotamian disk of a world with the sun rotating around it, imagined it to be.
The awe we get from religion can’t compare to the awe we get from science.

If God had wanted us to believe in him,
he would have existed.
— Linda Smith

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Bloggers: Want a Free Review Copy of My New Book?

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(Update: I don’t need any more reviewers for Christmas 2013!)
My new book will be released on November 25, but I’d like to get review copies to bloggers, journalists, or anyone else who might be able to give the book a good word.
A Modern Christmas Carol is an homage to the Dickens classic in which a modern televangelist gets the Scrooge treatment. He’s visited first by his long-dead partner, and then three ghostly guides. During his journey, he’s forced to question his faith and witness the impact of his uncompromising message on viewers. Back home on Christmas Day, he makes amends with far-reaching consequences.
Many Christians and atheists might enjoy seeing a televangelist get his comeuppance, but the book is more than that. There is a challenge here that will attract thoughtful readers who enjoyed the intellectual workout of books such as C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity or Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
It’s a novella like the original, so it’s a quick read. Though it’s not quite Christmas season, I wanted to give any reviewers time to read it.
Are you interested in Christianity’s role in society or in the debate between Christians and atheists? Would you be able to read the book and write a review? Is so, I want to mail you a free copy. I’m hoping to get any reviews published around Thanksgiving. Short blurbs (in which I could acknowledge and link to your blog or book) would also be very welcome.
If you’re not able to publish a review, I’d appreciate your passing this link along to someone who could. Can you think of anyone with a blog, a newspaper column, or similar standing who might be interested? The offer of a free review copy extends to them as well.
Thanks!