The Childish Faith of John Lennox

Posted on by

Not a great defense of Christianity (apologetics)Childish? Childlike? You tell me.
I’ll admit to being a bit awed by an Oxford mathematics professor weighing in on Christianity. John Lennox makes a good impression. He’s a clean-shaven Irish Santa Claus with three doctorates. A nice guy with a formidable intellect and much practice as a public speaker—that’s an impressive package.
I heard him speak in Seattle a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I wasn’t much impressed then … but perhaps I missed something. I recently listened to an hour-long interview, mostly on the Problem of Evil, which only solidified my unfavorable opinion.
I summarize his argument in bold below. Let me encourage both Christian and atheist readers to pause with each salvo to see what they think. Is the Christian point a strong one? What is the best atheist response? Is there something missing from either side here?
Atheists whine about the Crusades and the Inquisition, but why don’t they take seriously the violence and harm caused by atheist regimes like those of Stalin and Mao?
Because the atheism was a consequence of the actual problem, that these regimes were dictatorships. Stalin was an atheist because he was a dictator. He wasn’t a dictator because he was an atheist!
Atheism was central to the Soviet Union’s policy. After all, Marx said that religion was the opium of the people.  
Sure, atheism was central. Churches had to be shut down because they competed for power. Atheism was simply a consequence of the dictatorship; Stalin didn’t do damage in the name of atheism.
As for “religion is the opium of the people,” that was a compliment! Opium is medicine, remember? Here is Marx in context:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Marx wasn’t saying that religion dulled the senses of people; rather, he was saying that in a society with terrible conditions, it provides solace. His complaint was simply that religion could do no more than address a symptom, leaving the underlying problem untouched.
Atheists complain about the evil that God allows, but by what standard do they judge something as evil? If there is no god, good and evil are just a matter of opinion. There’s no rational justification for moral concepts if you abolish God.
I don’t reject the idea of morality and evil; I reject the idea of absolute morality or evil. Look in the dictionary—the definitions don’t assume absolute or objective grounding. Imagine that morality is absolute if you want, but don’t pretend that the dictionary backs you up.
We all believe in absolute values; we all acknowledge a standard outside ourselves. Atheists prove this when they argue for right and wrong. For example, we all agree that baby torture is wrong.
We don’t have absolute values; we have shared values. That’s not surprising since we’re all the same species. We agree that baby torture is wrong because we have the same moral instinct.
Atheists can be moral, but they can’t justify morality.
The natural explanation explains what we see without relying on anything supernatural. Morality has an instinctive part (from evolution) and a social part (from society).
The instinctive part explains the certainty we have about fundamental moral rights and wrongs and explains why these are shared across societies. We even see elements of morality in other primates.
The social part changes with time and place. For example, slavery is obviously wrong in the West now, but it wasn’t a problem in centuries past. Some aspects of morality vary greatly by society—honor, for example.
Atheists can’t explain where absolute morals come from.
Agreed. Neither can you. I keep hearing this confusion of shared morals with absolute morals. And I keep seeing no evidence for the remarkable claim that morality is grounded outside humans.
By rejecting God, in what sense has the atheist solved the Problem of Evil?
Do you not know what the Problem of Evil is? It asks: How can an all-good God allow evil? Drop the idea of a god, and the problem vanishes. Completely.
But evil and pain haven’t gone away.
Yes, that’s true. You’ve got a fundamental contradiction with the Problem of Evil that attacks the very foundation of your religion, but from an atheist standpoint, there is no problem.
Note that you’ve also gotten rid of all hope.
How childish are you? You care about solace but not truth? I don’t know about you, but I’m looking for the truth. The pleasantness of a doctrine doesn’t change how I evaluate its truth. “The simple believe anything, but the prudent give thought to their steps” (Proverbs 14:15). Don’t we want to be prudent?
Sure, God could’ve made us so we wouldn’t do bad things, but we’d be robots without free will.
So you think God is a champion of free will? When victims of murder or rape have their free will violated, God doesn’t step in to do anything about it. Why then imagine that he’s deliberately not acting so that the free will of the criminal is allowed?
Is there free will in heaven? There must be if free will is so important. Then why isn’t heaven full of evil just like the earth is? Perhaps the beings in heaven are enlightened, and they know how to use free will properly. They would simply not be tempted to do bad things.
If this enlightenment is the instruction manual to make free will work, why didn’t God give it to us?
(Read part 2 here.)

The universe we observe has
precisely the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
— Richard Dawkins

Photo credit: JohnLennox.org

Quest for the Simplest Explanation

Posted on by

The history of the abolition movement in the West isn’t complete without William Wilberforce. His drive was instrumental in abolishing in Britain the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery itself in 1833. There’s much more to the story than just Wilberforce, of course, but the story wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging his work.
Martin Luther King has a similar position within the U.S. civil rights movement. The story doesn’t begin and end with him, of course, but the story wouldn’t be complete without noting his substantial contribution.
Or Gutenberg in publishing. Or Einstein in physics. Or Shakespeare in English literature. Or Charlemagne in the history of Europe. Perhaps their fields would now look to us roughly the same without them; perhaps others would’ve stepped in. No matter—these great leaders were central figures in their fields. You can’t explain the facts of the history of their fields without them. A history book without these figures would have holes, like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing.
Wait—how did the Slave Trade Act get through Parliament with so much opposition? Who gave the “I have a dream” speech? Who developed the theory of relativity? Did the printing press just poof into existence?
There aren’t partisans here, with some historians of science acknowledging Einstein (or Darwin or Newton) and others saying that these figures never existed. Historians might rate their importance differently, but that they were important isn’t questioned.
Now that we know what a central figure looks like, consider God, the central figure in reality. He’s behind life, the universe, and everything. No historical figure so dominates their field as God dominates reality—or so we’re told.
Imagine God removed from reality, like the story of abolition without Wilberforce, or an Einstein-less history of physics. Beyond a superficial summary, we simply can’t explain abolition without Wilberforce or the history of physics without Einstein. So what of reality can no longer be explained without God?
Nothing!
Admittedly, we have riddles at the frontier of science. How did abiogenesis happen? What caused the Big Bang? What causes consciousness? But surely the Christian’s argument is more than, “Science doesn’t have all the answers, therefore God.” And, of course, Christianity doesn’t have any better answers. It can repackage a scientific puzzle with “God did it,” but that explains nothing. Science continues to deliver while Christianity continues to not deliver, but even if science delivered no more, that would say nothing about God’s existence.
Have you heard about the recipe for making boiling water? First put a pot of water on a hot stove, then stir with a magic spoon (just once, clockwise), and then wait for the water to boil.
God is the magic spoon. He’s not necessary. He only complicates the explanation.
Invoke Occam’s Razor and drop both the magic spoon and God.

The problem with quotes on the internet
is that it is hard to verify their authenticity.
— Abraham Lincoln

Photo credit: Will Culpepper

How Religious are Americans? Not as Much as You Think.

Posted on by

Americans are famously religious compared to other countries in the West. But revealing studies have peeked behind the curtain to determine how religious Americans really are.
Turns out: not so much.

Rather than ask people how often they attend church, the better studies measure what people actually do. The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.

The question “How often do you go to church?” confronts Americans in ways that it doesn’t elsewhere in the West. Americans tend to see it as a question with a correct answer, and this has skewed poll results.
What else does this need to give the “correct” answer hide? If Americans fib when reporting their church attendance, might they be doing the same when answering questions about their own belief? Perhaps this explains the dramatic rise in the number of “Nones” (those who check “None of the Above” on religious surveys). We may not be seeing a loss of faith but an increase in honesty. And maybe my hopeless dream of a secular Christianity (or at least a secular-friendly Christianity) may not be so hopeless after all.
Clues to this mismatch between poll results and reality have been glaring for a while.

Even as pundits theorized about why Americans were so much more religious than Europeans, quiet voices on the ground asked how, if so many Americans were attending services, the pews of so many churches could be deserted.

In fact, actual church attendance is about half what people report.
We may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of, “Why are Americans so much more religious?” the more pointed question may be, “Why are Americans so much more compelled to portray themselves as religious?” If we can tear down some of the barriers to honesty, helping them feel comfortable being open about their disbelief, religious Americans might be able to be open about their true beliefs. Or lack thereof.

Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves.
It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking
we have all the answers for everybody else.
A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
— Archibald Macleish

(This is a modified version of an article originally posted 10/19/11.)

Photo credit: Mark Bridge

A Biblical Foundation for American Freedoms?

Posted on by


I have no problem with someone admiring the Ten Commandments from a Christian standpoint. It’s an important part of the Old Testament story. The problem is when that admiration moves the Ten Commandments from holding sway in the religious domain to being relevant in society, public policy, laws, and the like. Consider this critique for example: “Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?” (I respond here.)
The Ten Commandments and biblical governance in general are at odds with the things that Americans value about America.
What do the Ten Commandments say?
Let’s ignore the confusion about what the Ten Commandments say and use the Exodus 20 version. The first four commandments (no other gods, no blasphemy, no artwork, keep the Sabbath holy) are in violation of our freedom of religion (or atheism) and our freedom of speech. God punishes “the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation”—also unthinkable in modern secular society.
Commandments 6, 8, and 9 (no murder, no stealing, no lying) are indeed laws in America, though we never needed the Ten Commandments to inform us of the importance of such laws. Indeed, the Egyptian Papyrus of Ani (1250 BCE) and the Code of Hammurabi (1772 BCE) show that biblical morality didn’t break much new ground.
Commandments 5 and 10 (honor your parents, no coveting) can be great advice. But surely we wouldn’t demand a blanket respect of abusive parents who didn’t deserve the honor. And where is the boundary between corrosive coveting and capitalism?
Another difference with the Constitution is that the penalty for breaking the Ten Commandments is death—not just for murder but also for worshiping another god or blasphemy. And this isn’t something that the Christian can dismiss as no longer relevant: “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever” (1 Peter 1:24–5).
What does the Constitution say?
Contrast biblical law with the rights given to us by the U.S. Constitution. As you read the highlights below, consider how most of these vital elements of government and society are either opposed to what the Bible says or uninteresting from the Bible’s standpoint.

  • The Constitution gives us democracy and representative government, separation of powers, and a limited executive branch.
  • The First Amendment: freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, and the right to petition.
  • Fourth Amendment: protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
  • Fifth: right of due process, protection from self-incrimination and double jeopardy, limits on eminent domain.
  • Sixth: speedy and public trial, impartial jury, rights to confront witnesses and to counsel.
  • Seventh: trial by jury.
  • Eighth: prohibition of excessive bail or cruel and unusual punishment.
  • Thirteenth: slavery prohibited.
  • Fourteenth: equal protection.

Historical revisionists enjoy assigning credit for some of these constitutional ideas to the Bible. Can they be serious?
Democracy, limited government, freedom of religion and speech, right to a jury trial, prohibition against slavery—not only did these not come from the Bible, but most of them conflict with the Bible. In fact, the very reason that the Ten Commandments (and any other religious document) are welcome in the United States is because of the Constitution’s protection of religion.
How do we know that these fundamental rights didn’t come from Christianity? Because when Christianity was in charge, society didn’t have them! Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Bible’s definition of a working society was wrong, just that it’s different from that defined by the Constitution (history revisionists like David Barton, take note).
Those who laud the Ten Commandments as the most sublime wisdom ever written must keep in mind that the U.S. Constitution takes us in a very different direction. An incompatible direction. And, I submit, a far better direction.

Science doesn’t know everything.
Religion doesn’t know anything.
— Aron Ra

Photo credit: Dana Simpson

How to Invent a Plausible God

Posted on by

Aaron turned his staff into a snake in front of Pharaoh to show that he and Moses were God’s representatives (Exodus 7). What better way to demonstrate that you’re channeling God’s power today? Pastor Yaw Saul from central Ghana promised to replicate that show of power, but it didn’t turn out as planned. After hours of effort in the market square, the public lost patience. Perhaps inspired by the command in Deuteronomy (“a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded … is to be put to death”), they drove him away by throwing fruit and water bottles.
Balancing act
You must promise, but not too much. That’s the challenge with religion. Promise too little and there’s no attraction. What’s the point in following a god who promises nothing more than an improved complexion and twenty percent fewer weeds in your yard?
But promise too much—that is, make promises that can actually be tested—and you risk getting found out. That was Pastor Saul’s error.
William Miller made the same mistake. He predicted the end of the world on October 22, 1844. When the next day dawned uneventfully, this became known as the Millerites’ Great Disappointment. More recently, Harold Camping predicted the Rapture™ on May 21, 2011 and the end of the world five months later. Too specific—oops.
Almanacs and fortune tellers are in the same boat. If they promise too little, what’s the point? “The winter will be cold” or “This time next year, you will be older” doesn’t attract many fans. But too specific a prediction and you rack up a list of errors that even the faithful can’t ignore.
One way to avoid this problem is to be ambiguous. The predictions of Nostradamus are famously hammered to fit this or that event from history. (Curiously, no one ever uses these “prophecies” to predict the future. Isn’t that what prophecies are for?)
And, of course, the Bible is ambiguous and even contradictory. Exodus has two conflicting sets of Ten Commandments. Whether you want to show God as loving and merciful or savage and unforgiving, there are plenty of verses to help you out. Jesus can appear and vanish after his resurrection as if he had a spirit body, but then he eats fish as if he doesn’t. Jesus can be the Prince of Peace but then say, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
How can such a religion survive? Wouldn’t its contradictions make it clear to everyone that it was just a collection of writings without divine inspiration?
Contradiction as an asset
Let’s skip over the Bible’s consolidation phase that ended in roughly 400CE. The hodge-podge of books chosen from a large set of possibilities was accepted as Christian canon, and we can debate about what sorts of compromises or rationales were behind the final list. But the odd amalgam that resulted has a silver lining: a contradictory Bible can make Christianity stronger. Because it contains both answers to some questions, it is able to adapt to new and unexpected challenges.
Take slavery during the U.S. Civil War. From one pre-war book published in the South:

If we prove that domestic slavery is, in the general, a natural and necessary institution, we remove the greatest stumbling block to belief in the Bible; for whilst texts, detached and torn from their context, may be found for any other purpose, none can be found that even militates against slavery. The distorted and forced construction of certain passages, for this purpose, by abolitionists, if employed as a common rule of construction, would reduce the Bible to a mere allegory, to be interpreted to suit every vicious taste and wicked purpose.

And, of course, others used the very same Bible to make the opposite argument.
Rev. Martin Luther King used the Bible to support his argument for civil rights, and Rev. Fred Phelps uses the same Bible to argue that “God hates fags.” I’m sure that as same-sex marriage becomes accepted within America over the upcoming decades, loving passages will be highlighted to show that God was on board with this project all along.
The Bible hasn’t changed; what’s changed is people’s reading of it. The Bible’s contradictory nature allows it to adapt like a chameleon. Play up one part and downplay another, and you adapt to yet another social change.
Contradiction as a strength—who knew?

Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself.
Basically, it’s made up of two separate words—“mank” and “ind.”
What do these words mean? It’s a mystery, and that’s why so is mankind.
— Jack Handey, Deeper Thoughts (1993)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Why Pretend That There Is a Soul?

Posted on by

Neuroscience, brain, mind, and soulHave you heard of Phineas Gage? He was a railroad worker who, in 1848, was tamping down black powder with an iron rod when the powder blew up and shot the rod through his head, coming in under his left cheekbone and out the top. This picture shows him with the rod, his “constant companion.” (To see his skull and a recreation of where the rod went, go here.)
Mind/brain connection
So what happens when much of the left frontal lobe of a person’s brain is destroyed? His case was one of the first examples that modern medicine had to see how cognition and personality—what we think of as the mind—are connected to the physical brain. Accounts differ as to how severe and how prolonged Gage’s personality change was, but it does seem to have been substantial, at least temporarily.
Modern science has continued to find the connection between various parts of the brain and different functions so that the mind is often defined as simply what the brain does. For example, Henry Molaison had part of his brain surgically removed in 1953 to treat epilepsy. An unintended consequence of the surgery was a type of amnesia in which he could remember (with some loss) events before the operation, but he couldn’t form new memories. He could update old memories and he could learn new motor skills, but he couldn’t remember learning them. He was studied by scientists until his death in 2008.
Another example is Clive Wearing, a British musicologist who got amnesia because of encephalitis in 1985. His long term memory is poor, and he can’t remember new events for more than 30 seconds. He feels like he is continually waking up. He can still play the piano, though he has no recollection of ever being taught.
Then there’s Klüver-Bucy Syndrome, the rare result of some kinds of brain damage from surgery or disease. Its symptoms include hypersexuality, even in children. Or aphasia, the loss of the ability to speak, which usually comes from strokes. Or the kinds of personality and memory loss caused by Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia. Or even prions, the misshapen proteins that cause BSE (“mad cow disease”) in cattle and similar degenerative brain diseases in humans and are thought to be transmitted through food.
The more unusual of these are the fascinating kinds of stories that neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other popular books. Indeed, Sacks himself has an interesting disorder, prosopamnesia, the inability to recognize faces.
The “mind” is a useful idea, but this close connection between the brain and mental function leaves no room for the mind—as something separate from the brain—to hide. The same is true for the soul. As a term for someone’s essence or moral character, it’s a useful word, but there is no evidence that the soul exists as anything more than an abstract concept.
The brain behaves exactly as if it’s all that there is, not that it is simply the shoebox in which the soul is stored. How could an injury to the shoebox affect its contents, when the soul is immutable and will be good as new in heaven?
What does physics say?
Physics isn’t a field that usually has much to say about the soul, but a video by physicist Sean Carroll of CalTech makes the intriguing argument that physics shows not only that souls don’t exist but that nothing supernatural exists.
There’s plenty of physics that we don’t yet understand, he says, but the physics of our Newtonian world is all understood. For example, you don’t need to understand string theory to work in chemistry. Any physics that operates in our world would be known to us by now, which leaves no room for the supernatural.

Could new particles hide from our view? Sure, but only if they were (1) very weakly interacting or (2) too heavy to create or (3) too short-lived to detect. In any of those cases, the new particle would be irrelevant to our everyday lives. (@ 4:20)

Everyday physics is understood. We are done. It’s nothing more than

electrons and quarks, with mass from the Higgs field, interacting via gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces. That’s the everyday world. (@ 6:15)

The physics that remains are non-everyday physics (dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity, origin of the universe, etc.) and complicated systems that are the result of the understood physics (superconductivity, turbulence, cancer, consciousness, etc.).
Compare physics with chess. Knowing the rules of chess doesn’t make you a grandmaster, but it does constrain the kinds of games you can play. Any games in which the pawn moves like a queen, for example, can be simply ruled out.
In physics, we know the rules of the everyday world, and this constrains the kinds of things that make sense. We know enough to simply rule out astrology, claims of clairvoyance, ESP, life after death, homeopathy, and other supernatural claims. If these claims were true, we would know that already.

If you believe in life after death, tell me what particles contain the information that moves your soul from place to place. (@ 9:30)

The ideas that the soul actually exists and that the mind is separate from the brain belong back to the time when demons were said to cause mental illness.

What is freedom of expression?
Without the freedom to offend,
it ceases to exist.
— Salman Rushdie

Photo credit: Wikipedia