I take it as a challenge. Every time a Christian quotes an atheist scholar, I wonder if I can spot how the quote was taken out of context or misunderstood or just mangled. Granted, the quotes are usually correct, but this blind spot for using quotes properly is a glaring weakness in many Christian articles.

Let’s continue with three more scholars (part 1).

4. Robert Jastrow, astronomer

Robert Jastrow was the director of Mount Wilson Observatory and was founder and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Here’s his quote:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (God and the Astronomers, 1978)

But what is this “bad dream”? The preceding paragraph clarifies. Science has tracked the beginning of the universe back to the Big Bang, so we want to know what caused that. It’s the next logical question, but Jastrow points to the problem:

And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion.

Jastrow isn’t saying that science, taking the difficult route of hypothesis testing and evidence following, finds that theologians discovered the same scientific truths centuries earlier. That wouldn’t make sense, because not even theologians claim that Religion taught society centuries ago about the heliocentric solar system, the 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and the Big Bang. Theologians across all of humanity’s religions have never reached a consensus on anything supernatural. They can’t even agree on the names of the god(s).

What he’s saying is that the science has reached its limit, at least on the question of the origin of the universe. Data from before has been lost, and cosmologists can make no progress. But theologians aren’t similarly constrained. They don’t use science, and they have no obligation to support their claims with evidence.

And he said that in 1978. As with Penzias, much has changed. Is the prospect of finding out the origin of the Big Bang still so bleak? Perhaps not, but that’s a tangent. By reading Jastrow in context, it’s clear that he’s not claiming that Religion can reliably answer questions within science.

Conclusion: it’s a great quote for the Christian if it’s out of context and without a common sense check. Otherwise, Jastrow isn’t saying what Christians might hope.

5. Charles Darwin, biologist

Darwin’s writing style often explored the difficulties with explaining a feature of nature by evolution … and then explained it. The temptation to extract the puzzle from the first paragraph and ignore the resolution in the second has been too great for many Christians.

One example is Darwin’s study of the evolution of the eye in On the Origin of Species. The Creationist book The Collapse of Evolution accurately quotes this:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

A frank admission by Darwin of the inadequacy of his theory? Not really. The very next sentence explains how evolution could account for it—a sentence that was not included in the Creationist book’s quote. Here’s the sentence:

If numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist … then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection … can hardly be considered real.

Creationists apparently can’t trust other Christians to provide honest quotes.

Another popular Darwin tangent is eugenics. Ben Stein’s crockumentary Expelled correctly quotes Darwin from The Descent of Man:

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Does this mean that Darwin advocated for eugenics? Nope. In the very next paragraph, curiously overlooked by Stein, Darwin rejects eugenics with an acknowledgement of our instinct for compassion.

Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

Darwin in context doesn’t make the point they want, so Expelled takes it out of context to completely misrepresent Darwin’s views.

One final misquote (actually, pure fiction) is Darwin’s supposed deathbed conversion. Lady Hope (née Elizabeth Cotton) claimed to have visited Darwin shortly before his death in 1882. More than thirty years later, she documented the supposed events of that meeting, during which Darwin, at this point an earnestly Christian, recanted his famous theory. Darwin’s surviving family rejected the story.

Conclusion: out of context quotes + lies.

See also: Who Cares About Darwin?

6. Dawkins, zoologist

Richard Dawkins was also treated unfairly in the Expelled movie. Dawkins explained that one plausible way life might have started on earth was with the seeding of something (chemicals or bacteria?) from another planet. This could have been deliberate (an experiment by advanced aliens) or accidental (rocks kicked off one planet with life can become meteorites onto another planet). This is called panspermia.

Ben Stein, the host of the movie, concluded,

So Professor Dawkins was not against Intelligent Design, just certain types of designers, such as God.

Wrong. Dawkins was very much against Intelligent Design, which imagines an intelligence that didn’t just jumpstarting life on earth but took an active, ongoing part in the development of life on earth.

There’s a big difference between the seeding of life on earth from an intelligent species and magic from the supernatural. We know about intelligent life forms, we know about space travel, and we know about biology. It’s speculative though not ridiculous to consider this. It’s a very different thing to imagine god(s) doing it, because we have zero agreed-to examples.

Conclusion: deliberate misunderstanding.

So far, Christianity’s killer quotes are turning out to be duds. We’ll wrap up this series with three final examples.

Christianity:
Because you’re so awful
you made God kill himself.
— seen on the internet

Some Christian apologists like to find a scientist or celebrity atheist who supports some bit of Christianity. They reveal this turncoat in the atheist ranks, tell us that this person is one of our own, and insist we follow their lead.

Let’s see where this gets them into trouble.

Before we go any further, let me admit that I’ve done the same thing. For example, I’ve cited Dr. Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian and well-respected biologist, in the hope he could argue some sense into evolution-denying Creationists. Collins has said, “If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.” This is the beginning of a compelling argument from someone with the necessary science credentials. Collins was the director of both the Human Genome Project and the (U. S.) National Institutes of Health.

Another example is biologist Dr. Ken Miller who is Catholic and who supported the science side of the 2005 Dover Intelligent Design case.

You get the idea. Anyone who is an expert in a scientific or scholarly field and is religious could help reach that religious community in a way that an atheist could not.

I’ll look at nine examples of Christians trying the same thing but aimed at atheists. I argue that my use of Collins and Miller is legitimate, while the Christian examples are not. See if you agree.

What launched this article was my reply to Christian Tom Gilson. Gilson quoted philosopher Tomas Nagel and biologist Richard Lewontin, showing them to be among the few atheists “honest” enough to admit to Christianity’s strength. Unfortunately for Gilson, Nagel’s quote actually didn’t support Christianity, and Lewontin’s simply explained an aspect of how science works.

What follows is nine more examples of quotes taken out of context, of misquoting, of Christians celebrating atheists they think they can manipulate, and of quotes that don’t mean what Christians think they mean. Let’s see if they provide any stronger support for Christianity.

1. Arno Penzias, physicist and astronomer

Penzias said,

My argument is that the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole. (New York Times, March 12, 1978, page 1)

That’s surprising, because I don’t remember anything like that in the Bible. Does the Bible tell you that the universe is open rather than closed (that is, that it will keep expanding)? That this expansion is accelerating? That the universe is 13.8 billion years old? That it started from a tiny point? Presumably black holes, gravitational waves, dark energy and dark matter, and more are in there as well. An eager world awaits the relevant Bible verses.

But of course we don’t get that. Penzias is simply declaring “Oh, yeah—I knew that” without evidence.

Does the Bible resolve cosmologists’ unanswered questions, too? I’m thinking of questions like what created the universe (or was it uncaused?), if there’s a multiverse, if the zero-energy universe hypothesis is correct, if string theory is correct, how to unify Relativity and quantum physics, and more.

Note also the date on that quote. He said that 44 years ago! We have learned a lot since then. Is this Penzias quote still relevant? If so, is the Bible still a cosmology textbook? How many scientific papers have cited the Bible?

Conclusion: unconvincing. If we had learned any science from the Bible, Penzias would’ve given the verses.

See also: The Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science

See also: Why Does the Bible Have No Recipe for Soap?

2. David Gelernter, computer science professor

Gelernter is a professor at Yale who is an evolution denier. He said,

Stephen Meyer’s thoughtful and meticulous Darwin’s Doubt (2013) convinced me that Darwin has failed. (“Giving Up Darwin,” 2019)

Darwin as the personification of evolution is a clue that we’ve left science and have been sucked into Intelligent Design (ID). Stephen Meyer is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, an ID thinktank. And he’s not a biologist. Neither is Gelernter. The mission statement of the Center for Science and Culture (the Discovery Institute’s Intelligent Design division) makes clear that following the evidence isn’t their goal but rather supporting their predetermined conclusion of ID.

Playing by science’s rules is hard. The nice thing about Intelligent Design is that it’s unconstrained by rules. Any puzzling observation can be dismissed with, “Well, the Designer is smarter than us, so he must’ve had his reasons.” But of course this assumes the Designer up front.

If this sounds too easy to you, like it must be cheating, you’re right.

Gelernter isn’t a biologist, and he’s enamored with the argument of someone who’s also not a biologist, which attacks the tentpole argument of biology. Why are we wasting time on this? Let’s get our evaluation of evolution from biologists (spoiler: evolution is the overwhelming consensus).

Conclusion: No one should reject the consensus view of a branch of science because of the writings of an outsider to that branch of science. This example isn’t a scientist being misquoted but a scientist being used by Christian apologists.

See also: A Response to David Gelernter’s Attack on Evolution

3. Antony Flew, philosopher

Have you heard of Nobel disease, where a giant in one scientific field runs off and says something stupid in another? Linus Pauling (Nobel in chemistry) thought that megadoses of vitamin C would cure colds and treat schizophrenia. Brian Josephson (physics) promoted homeopathy. William Shockley (physics) supported biological racism.

While Antony Flew didn’t win a Nobel (he was a philosopher), he had his own problem with legitimately-smart-person-says-something-stupid disease. Nearing the end of his life, in 2007, he published There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Even from the title you get a hint of something amiss. Referencing Flew in the third person in the subtitle is how you title a book written by one person about another. And indeed, that’s what happened. The cover of Flew’s book gives his name and that of his ghostwriter. Read the book, and it’s clear Flew wrote little or nothing new for the book. The structure is that of a book report with “Flew” quoting himself with fragments from other Flew books. Critics have questioned Flew’s state of mind, and one critic of the book said, “Far from strengthening the case for the existence of God, [the book] rather weakens the case for the existence of Antony Flew.”

The punch line is why Flew says he dropped his atheism in favor of a deist worldview. Did this great philosopher, at the end of a long career, rely on philosophy to finally fit the last pieces in place to reveal the hand of a Creator? Nope, it was “the laws of nature, life with its teleological organization, and the existence of the universe”—three scientific issues. Flew the philosopher said it was scientific inquiry that led him to his deism. But why is his conclusion interesting when he’s not a scientist?

Like David Gelernter, Christian apologists were eager to swoop in to claim him as one of their own. In Gelernter’s case, they gave him publicity, and in Flew’s, they gave him a ghostwriter to put words in his mouth.

Conclusion: Flew rejected atheism based on arguments out of his field. He was welcome to embrace any worldview he wanted, but his outsider’s opinion shouldn’t be compelling to any of us.

Bonus: the atheists who aren’t atheists

For completeness, I’ll mention several more pawns of apologists. I’ve discussed three people who claim to be atheists and yet can’t shut up about how great Christianity is. (Read my responses to John Steinrucken, Adam, and “John.”) Christian apologists unsurprisingly admired their honesty and held them up as examples for atheists to follow. I was unimpressed.

See also: The Curious Case of Atheist Philosopher Antony Flew

Continued in part 2.

It is not the things which I do not understand
in the Bible which trouble me,
but the things which I do understand.
— attributed to Mark Twain

Yes, there are a few honest atheists—not many, but a few. Christian Tom Gilson has cherry-picked a couple of these. Note, however, that “honest” is his word for “agrees with me.”

This is the conclusion of a three-part look at a recent article by Gilson (part 1). Why are atheists unreasonable? According to Gilson, they’re all about the science (and science is imperfect), and they hate being wrong (and insist that Christians have the burden of proof).

Here’s the final reason.

3. Fear that Christianity really is true

He begins his exposé with philosopher Thomas Nagel.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. (The Last Word, 1997)

Read the Old Testament—you want that guy in charge here on earth? Remember his murderous rampages (the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s children and servants, and so on). God’s support for slavery. God’s demand for human sacrifice. God’s invention of hell. The indistinguishability of God from nonexistence here on earth.

Why is this quote from Nagel here? So Nagel doesn’t want a god—who cares? Our desires don’t matter. But of course Gilson is coming from a Christian perspective, where what you want does matter. You don’t need to contort yourself to fit into a church environment; you find a church that fits who you are. Churches are like shoes, and for each of them you pick the ones that fit best.

As for smart, well-informed people being believers, this simply speaks to the tenacious grip that a child’s upbringing has on the adult. Just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they’ll discard their Christianity as adults. Many will use that powerful intellect to defend their worldview, and the more impressive the intellect, the stronger the defense (Shermer’s Law).

The divine foot in the door

Biologist Richard Lewontin is a favorite of Christian apologists for this quote:

[Scientists] are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (1997)

The first rule in making a sound argument is that a Christian is an unreliable source for quotes from their intellectual opponents (scientists, atheists, and so on). You must find the original source and be honest to its context.

Gilson has ignored this rule. Read Lewontin’s original quote and you find the next two sentences clarify Lewontin’s point in an important way. He says you can’t allow a Divine Foot in the door, not because scientists fear Christianity will explain everything, but because adding “God might’ve done that” as an axiom of the scientific method means that no measurement can be trusted. How much of that is reality and how much is God’s thumb on the scale?

Lewontin is simply explaining how science works, and if you permit more than natural explanations, it’s no longer science.

Gilson attacks because he’s too weak to defend. He never draws attention to the strength of his position. He wants your attention on some perceived shortcoming within science, but instead of the speck in his opponent’s eye, he should focus on the log in his own.

Atheism isn’t a religion.
It’s a personal relationship with reality.
— seen on the internet