Stupid arguments Christians should avoid #43: the Little People + religion is useful

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This is yet one more stupid argument Christians should avoid (with a bonus argument). The list begins here.

Stupid argument #43: For the benefit of the Little People, don’t take away their God

This isn’t an argument that Christians make but I think it’s worth highlighting. The Little People Argument is made by atheists and agnostics against fellow atheists. These more generous atheists scold the cranky atheists for taking God away from ordinary people. They don’t need God themselves, they assure us, but we mustn’t ruin things for the people who aren’t as smart or stable as we are.

They say that there’s more to a religious claim than just its truth. If believers get benefits from their belief, and their belief is grounded on the (false) claim that it’s true, why rock their boat?

Christianity’s reckless activity within society is why. Remember the problems listed in argument #42—Christians pushing for Creationism in schools and prayer in public meetings, Christianity softening one’s inherent skepticism for nutty ideas so that QAnon and other conspiracy theories can come aboard, and so on.

Politicians sometimes abduct Christian thinking for their own purposes, demanding that good Christians must vote for them to end the godless scourge of abortion, vaccines, girls kissing girls, or whatever is causing the sky to fall today. For giving these “Baby Jesus will cry” arguments power, Christianity takes the blame.

One variant on the argument is to demand that you not undercut Christianity without something to replace it. Sure, if a philosophy group or lecture series satisfies an intellectual hunger that before had to put up with the thin soup of a sermon, that’s great. But such a replacement isn’t mandatory. Jerry Coyne, whose article was my inspiration for this argument, gives a counterexample: did the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s offer something to replace the idea that whites were superior to blacks? Nope. If the realization that they weren’t inherently superior to someone else caused someone existential heartburn, they had to get over it. Nothing replaced the false belief. Northern Europe is far ahead of us in sidelining Christianity, and they seem to have muddled through just fine.

Another example: when you’re cured of cancer or malaria, doctors don’t replace that disease with something else; they make you well and send you on your way.

I’ll end with a caveat. I have little enthusiasm for debunking the supernatural beliefs of someone whose awful life is made a little easier with those beliefs. Perhaps they’re abused, starving, or dying, and (false) beliefs help them get through the day. The good might outweigh the bad in these cases. For the rest of humanity, let’s believe as many true things and reject as many false things as possible.

And now, it’s time for a bonus argument! Let’s call the previous argument #43a so that this related argument can be called:

Stupid argument #43b: Religion is useful

Yes, religion can be useful. In placebo fashion, it might help people kick bad habits like addiction. It might encourage people to act better because they imagine God is taking notes. It might push people to donate time or money to good works.

And of course I’m happy to see Christianity’s benefits extracted from its many false claims. Community, charity, and an interest in morality are great, and they needn’t be encumbered with Christianity’s baggage.

Note, though, that this does nothing to show that religions’ fundamental supernatural claims are true. Truth is the bottom line at this blog, and failing at that is what makes this a stupid argument.

Returning to “religion is useful,” here’s a thought experiment: suppose religion were so useful that it was a net positive. That is, the upsides (hope for heaven, the belief that God’s plan is all for the best, and related beliefs) outweighed the downsides (the harm caused by those beliefs being false plus other negatives, discussed in argument #42). Should we reject religion then?

I’ll let you answer that one for yourself. As for me, the downsides of religion far outweigh the upsides, so the question is academic.

Is there any way to get to a harmless Christianity? Consider that there are secular Jews who self-identify as Jews. There are atheist Jews who attend synagogue. They see themselves as cultural Jews. Imagine the Christian equivalent—a community of cultural Christians who might have supernatural beliefs (or might not) and are brought together for community and doing good within their society. I think of this as Christianity 2.0, and it might be Christianity’s soft landing option.

I don’t agree with C. S. Lewis on much, but he had a good point when he said,

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

If religion is useful, let’s acknowledge that and try to understand why. But that shouldn’t hamper efforts to get everyone to agree on what’s true.

Don’t touch the fruit of the tree of historical knowledge
lest it open your eyes to the hooey that the Church professes.
— commenter Sophia Sadek


(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/12/17.)

Image from Edwin Andrade (free-use license)

Stupid arguments Christians should avoid #42: Don’t worry about a god you don’t think exists

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It’s time once again to put on our neoprene waders and gas mask and step in, looking for the stupidest arguments by which Christians embarrass themselves.

The list begins here. We’re well past the original target of 25 and still going.

Stupid argument #42: Why do atheists worry about someone they don’t think exists?

One Christian source expressed it this way:

How can you hate someone you don’t believe in? Why the hostility? If God does not exist, shouldn’t atheists just relax and seek a good time before they become plant food? Why should it matter if people believe in God?

We don’t care about gods; we care about their followers. Gods don’t cause problems within society, but people who think they’re carrying out the will of gods do.

This argument seems to presume that Christianity is about nothing more than good works, community, mutual support, and other worthy aspects that no one would object to. It presumes that nothing bad comes from believing false things. They imagine that Christianity has no more destructive impact on society than knitting, but Christianity in America does quite a bit more than just good works. Christians (not all, of course, but many) love to meddle. They:

  • push for Creationism in public schools,
  • demand prayers at government meetings,
  • stand in the way of same-sex marriage and find other ways to make life miserable for queer people,
  • block the use of fetal stem cells used for research,
  • vote for politicians that they admit are terrible people simply because they’re against abortion,
  • make other attacks on the separation of church and state,

and more. And that’s just their attacks on society—within their own communities, people can be ostracized for thinking the wrong things or traumatized as children with talk of hell and demons.

Stepping back from this, we see a larger problem in that religion encourages people to accept things as true without sufficient evidence. They convince themselves that Jesus walks with them in adversity and that God advises them when at a crossroads, but this is just comforting self-talk.

When the mind’s drawbridge of skepticism is let down for Jesus, other ideas can come through with minimal scrutiny like QAnon and other conspiracy theories, evolution and climate change denial, vaccine phobia, and so on. Christianity is more than just a sweet old lady walking down the block to church on a warm Sunday in June or people donating to good works. It can be the gateway drug to sloppy thinking that’s much more dangerous.

Atheism makes sense as an organized movement

A variant of this argument wonders why we don’t see a parallel to atheism (an organized movement against something) with, say, stamp collecting. If it makes sense for atheists to get together under the shared belief in no gods, why aren’t there organizations, blogs, and lectures for non-stamp-collecting?

That sounds like a good question until you think about it. The comparison doesn’t work, so let’s fix it.

  • Make stamp collecting in the U. S. an industry with revenue of $100 billion per year, all of which is tax deductible, but make that revenue secret. That is, require all nonprofits in the country to open their financial records to show that they are worthy of nonprofit status, except for stamp-collecting organizations (more here).
  • Have the leadership of the stamp collecting industry meddle in public affairs (or get in bed with politicians who will do it) and have them complain when stamp collectors’ perks are attacked.
  • Have politicians allied with the industry play Chicken Little, pointing at teh Gayz or abortion or vaccines and insisting that the sky is falling. Only by electing them can society be put right.
  • Have the stamp-collecting leaders declare their organization to be supernaturally moral despite being riddled with financial and sexual scandals.
  • Amend Article VI of the U.S. Constitution to forbid any public stamp-collecting test of political candidates but make it a de facto test anyway.

Now that’s an organization that could easily have organized opposition. Perhaps now it’s clear why atheism exists as a movement.

This is related to Stupid Argument #24: You really believe in God, where we discover that atheists must believe in God because we talk about him so much.

Dear God,
Protect me from your followers.
— seen on a bumper sticker


(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/12/17.)

Image from h gruber (license CC BY 2.0)

Lee Strobel’s “Case for Christ”: the movie

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The story of award-winning, legally trained journalist Lee Strobel as told in the book The Case for Christ has become a series of books, which have together sold millions of copies. It also became a movie (2017), about which Lee Strobel said, “It’s been an incredible journey, not only to go from atheism to faith, but to see the raw reality of our lives played out on film. In the end, it’s our hope that everyone who sees it will take their own faith journey.”

If you’re a Christian who wants a pat on the head, and you don’t need to think too hard about the arguments given, that might work. For everyone else, it’s an unsurprising journey from lack of God belief to Christian faith with a greatest hits collection of weak apologetics. It would’ve been a lot more engaging if they’d handed out Bingo cards of ridiculous Christian arguments.

Lee Strobel, award-winning journalist

The movie opens at the Chicago Tribune with Strobel getting an award for investigative journalism into questions about the safety of the Ford Pinto. We learn the kind of guy he is when he says, “The only way to truth is through facts.”

His family life is blissful, but then at a restaurant, his little daughter chokes on a gumball. A nurse at the restaurant saves her. Afterwards, the nurse tells the wife that Jesus told her to be there that night. At home in bed, the daughter asks about Jesus, and we learn that the parents are atheists.

This event plants a seed in the wife’s mind. She later visits the nurse, and they talk about God. They go to a church service together, and the pastor says that we must listen for God’s whisper. He says, “Open your heart and take a chance.”

Which is what you’d say if there were no good evidence for your supernatural claims. I wonder if the pastor has this leap-before-looking approach with Scientology or Mormonism. Clearly, not all the arguments are of the “just the facts” type.

After more church and a bit of praying, the wife admits to Strobel that she’s now drawn to the Jesus thing. He gets offended and goes out for a drinking binge. Is his marriage at a crossroads?

The quest

Strobel has two older mentors at the newspaper, an atheist and a Christian, and he discusses his concerns with each. The Christian mentor challenges Strobel to investigate the Jesus story and points to a banner on the newsroom wall: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” He visits Christian scholar Gary Habermas, and we get the first of more than a dozen weak Christian apologetic arguments. I’ll summarize each argument that I noticed for completeness and for your amusement, but I won’t spend much time rebutting them. (I’ll put brief comments in italics after each one.)

☢ Atheist Gerd Lüdemann says that Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15 passage was written just three years after the event. (That’s debatable, but even so, it doesn’t mean much. It could be three days and you would dismiss a miraculous account if it came from a religion not your own. More here.)

☢ Paul claims that 500 eyewitnesses saw the risen Christ. (Is that compelling evidence? Then why didn’t the gospels include it, too? More here.)

☢ There are nine sources for the crucifixion, some of them outside the Bible. (I haven’t studied this one enough to comment.)

Strobel gave people drinking poison Kool-Aid at Jonestown in 1978 as an example of people laying down their lives for stupid reasons. ☢ Habermas responded that those people didn’t drink poison for something they knew was a lie or hoax (That’s true, but very few atheists argue that the resurrection was a lie or a hoax! They argue that it was a legend. More here and here.)

Strobel sets up an unused storeroom in the newspaper’s basement to organize his research into Jesus, like in a murder case. As he revisits it in subsequent scenes, we see the white board filling with claims and photos.

The plot thickens

And now, a subplot: a Chicago cop is shot, and a man named Hicks is charged with the crime. Strobel investigates, and all the evidence points to Hicks . . . though it’s clear to us in the audience that there’s more to this story.

Strobel interviews another Jesus expert, a priest this time, and we get more arguments.

☢ Historians have 5800 copies of Greek New Testament manuscripts, three times more than second-place Homer. The priest shows an illuminated page from Homer that was written 800 years after the original. (I wonder why the priest doesn’t make clear that 800 years is better than 90 percent of those Greek New Testament manuscripts. More here.)

☢ The priest also has a facsimile of P52, a papyrus scrap of John, which may have been copied just 30 years after the original. (Be consistent: if you actually care about textual criticism, you’ll find that Mormonism has far better evidence than Christianity. More here.)

☢ Finally, there’s the photo negative of the Shroud of Turin hung on the wall of the church. (You like old evidence? Then you’ll be interested to hear that the oldest well-documented reference to this shroud—which is just one of dozens from a time when relics were valuable properties—states that it is a forgery. More here.)

Strobel is back in his underground lair to organize all this data. We increasingly see Strobel’s quest in parallel with his wife studying the Bible. Back at home, he gets drunk. Tensions flare, and she asks Jesus for help.

Time to speak to a world-famous apologist

And now, a phone call with William Lane Craig and more evidence.

☢ Maybe the disciples went to the wrong tomb? (Not an argument that I make.)

☢ Strobel notes that women weren’t reliable witnesses in Jewish culture. Craig responds with the Criterion of Embarrassment: why would you put in something awkward like that unless it were true? This is evidence that they weren’t making up the story. (Here again, the only one proposing that the story was made up is you. Anyway, women at the tomb makes perfect sense. More here.)

☢ What about the contradictions in the accounts? Craig says that if there weren’t some contradictions, you’d suspect collusion and challenges him: “When is enough evidence enough evidence?” (Does nothing count as poor evidence? Are you this generous with evidence for other religions?! I discuss contradictions in the resurrection accounts here.)

Strobel’s questions are those of an amateur. We all have to start somewhere, and he comes up with some good ones, but the Church has had 2000 years to paper over its embarrassing problems, so their riposte is often compelling. Where’s the atheist expert to interview? That expert would give Strobel good responses to the Christian arguments and give him more questions to ask. The average atheist blogger would make quick work of the Christian position given in this movie.

Strobel finds new data in the cop shooter case and writes a front page story that puts Hicks away for a long time. Clearly he’s a great investigator! It’s good we have him on our team to check out the Jesus story.

He placates his wife by going to church once, ☢ where the pastor talks about people turning away from the church simply because of bad experiences with the church, not because it’s not true. (Not an argument I make.)

Trouble at home

Strobel’s parents show up to see their new baby, and we discover that Strobel has issues with his distant father.

Things are also going poorly on the marriage front. He confronts his wife: wouldn’t you want to know if Christianity isn’t true? She throws it back at him: Wouldn’t you want to know if it is?

Her nurse friend later references a verse from Ezekiel: “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” Dear Jesus, when are you going to make that conversion on Strobel??

Back on the hunt, Strobel visits a famous nonbelieving psychologist. He asks if the disciples could’ve been deluded by a group hallucination. ☢ Nope—she declares that group hallucinations don’t happen. (Not an argument that I make. And anyway, wouldn’t something like the dancing sun at Fatima count? It was seen by 30,000 people. [h/t commenter Pofarmer])

She asks about Strobel’s father, and we learn more about that bad relationship. ☢ She ticks off famous atheists, all of whom had distant or abusive fathers. (This is Paul Vitz’s flabby argument, which simply cherry picks the data to come to a predetermined conclusion. For example, I wonder why she didn’t list C. S. Lewis, a famous Christian who had a bad relationship with his father. More here.)

We again see Strobel’s quest paralleled with the wife’s journey through the Bible and pray that this movie is stumbling to a close.

Tying up the loose ends

Stop the presses! Strobel uncovers new evidence in Hicks case: the cop actually shot himself by accident with an illegal pen gun. It wasn’t Hicks! Shortly after, Hicks gets beaten up in prison (guards don’t do much to protect cop shooters), and Strobel visits him in the hospital. Strobel tells him that he didn’t see the truth. Hicks replies, “You didn’t want to see the truth.” Take that, atheists!

In what mercifully turns out to be his last interview, Strobel asks a doctor about the swoon theory—that Jesus didn’t actually die but that he just fainted on the cross and revived in the tomb. ☢ Wrong again, the doctor tells him. The Roman executioners were very good at making sure the convicts were dead, and we get the obligatory journey through the agony of Jesus’s last day. (I never argue the swoon theory. I try to slap some sense into the resurrection story here and here.)

Remember that atheists-are-atheists-because-of-bad-father-figures hypothesis? We get closure on that one after Strobel’s father dies. Strobel discovers that the old man wasn’t so bad after all—he just had a hard time expressing his affection. Could Strobel’s stoney heart be softening?

Strobel’s at the end of his investigation, but what to do with it all? His atheist friend tells him that ☢ it’s a leap of faith either way. (Uh, no—it’s a leap of faith if you’re making a conclusion without evidence; more here. You should believe things only if there’s good evidence to do so. You don’t believe in unicorns, leprechauns, and fairies because there’s insufficient evidence, so why not follow the same approach for something far more important like God?)

Inexplicably, ☢ Pascal’s Wager pops up in this conversation; that is, a bet on God is a huge win if you’re right and not a big deal if you’re wrong. (I rebut that here.)

And Strobel is left to decide. Back in his man cave, he remembers what the priest had said: Jesus is love. This is the last straw, and he concludes, “All right, God—you win.”

He reconciles with his wife and says, “The evidence for your faith is more overwhelming than I could ever imagine.” They kneel, and he says the sinner’s prayer.

Three months later, justice has been done for Hicks. Strobel pitches his conversion story to his editor: one man’s journey from skepticism to faith. The editor turns it down, but then his wife suggests that he write a book. In the final scene, Strobel rolls paper into his typewriter and pecks out the words, “The Case for Christ.”

The End. Thank God.

See also: Response to Lee Strobel’s “Five E’s of Evidence”

Here you are, a shitty teenage father
who’s not even good at this,
and there is nothing this little girl
could ever do to you in her entire life
that would make you want to kill her, let alone burn her forever,
and you’re worshipping a god who will burn your child forever
because she doesn’t get his name right
or thinks he has six arms
or doesn’t believe in him?
You have to be kidding me.
— Frank Shaeffer (Point of Inquiry 3/24/14 @ 30:40)

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/8/17.)
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God’s life is hell

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I first heard this story about thirty years ago.

One day, a man wakes up on a couch in a field. The setting is new and strange, but he feels at peace. He has a vague memory of some sort of accident. Is this the afterlife?

A man with the formal demeanor of a butler comes over and asks if he’d like anything.

“Maybe some food?”

The butler indicates a table just behind the couch full of exotic snacks.

He asks for something to drink and gets all that he could want. He asks for other people and finds himself in a party.

Days pass—or so it seems, because there are no obvious indications of time, and sleep is no longer necessary—and the man finds every pleasure he could want. Food and drink, art and music, theater and sports, community and solitude. The mood is always upbeat and cheerful.

Finally, he realizes that his brain is idle and needs something to chew on, so asks his butler for a problem to solve. Just a little obstacle to make life interesting.

“I’m sorry,” the butler says, “but problems are the one thing from your old life that we don’t have here.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” the man says. “It was just a whim.”

Life rolls on as his moods demand, with formal dinners and casual picnics, sparkling literary conversation and bawdy drinking games. But the absence of problems wears on him. He asks repeatedly and is told, always politely, that problems don’t exist.

Finally, after what seems like years or even decades have passed, the man snaps. “I can’t take it anymore! Life is too easy here, and humans need problems! If I can’t have any here, I’ll go to the other place. Send me to hell!”

The butler, who had always shown an expressionless face, smiles slightly for the first time. “And just where do you think you are?”

(This is the rough plot for the 1960 Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place to Visit”; h/t commenter Ben Yandell.)

Limitations to omniscience

That’s a taste of God’s life. We see problems as bad things because most of us have too many, but what if you have none? That’s the problem for the guy in the story and for God. God could never be perplexed by anything, and there’s nothing to exercise creativity on. There’s no pleasure in solving a problem, no thrill of an Aha! insight.

Not only does God have no problems, he doesn’t even have surprises. No matter what it is, he saw it coming. No matter what it is, the correct response is not only obvious but foreseen billions of years earlier. Not only can’t God wrestle with a problem, he can’t think a new thought or plan or regret or be surprised or get a joke or make a decision. Omniscience can be a bitch, and God’s ways are a heckuva lot more unlike our ways that you may have thought.

But God’s calendar is packed, right? He’s granting prayers, weighing the consequences of people’s actions, satisfy his agenda by performing undetectable miracles, tweaking evolution so it goes in the right direction, and so on. Think of Jim Carrey standing in for God in Bruce Almighty.

Nope. God’s omniscience has consequences, and the God Christians have invented is as personable as a machine. He knows every request and every human problem, now and in the future. Knowing the future, God could list his every action like this: “At time T1, do action A1; at T2, do A2,” and so on. God is nothing more than that. Not only could he mindlessly carry out these actions, but God could be replaced by a universal wish-granting machine. He’s an automaton.

We can imagine a conversation with God, but he couldn’t see it like we do. A conversation for him would be like stating lines in a play, all of which he’s memorized.

It’s true that God in the Old Testament has original conversations, gets surprised (example: he regretted making humanity before the flood), gets angry (such as his response to the golden calf), and so on, all of which makes sense only if he’s not omniscient. But how is this possible? God would’ve seen it all coming for 13.7 billion years. God’s properties in the Bible are contradictory.

Timelessness

Christians have changed the properties of their unchanging God.

What did God do all day before he created the universe? If he created the universe, that admits that things weren’t perfect beforehand—if they were, changing things would make them less perfect. And if things were perfect after creating the universe, why wait so long for creating it? (And who would say that this mess of a world is perfect?)

Fourth-century church father Augustine told of someone who was asked what God was doing before he created the universe. The answer: “He was preparing hell for those prying into such deep subjects.”

But pry we must. A popular Christian answer is to say that the Big Bang theory has a beginning for the universe (more precisely, this theory says that there’s a point in time before which science can’t take us yet). Therefore, God lived timelessly before he created the universe.

No, a timelessness God doesn’t solve anything. How could God create the universe if he’s outside time? How could anyone create anything if you’re outside of time?! Creation is a process that can only operate within time. That’s also true for the decision to create. A timeless god is a frozen, unchanging, and inert god. He makes no decisions, sees nothing, decides nothing, initiates nothing, and loves nothing. Once frozen in time, he doesn’t have time by which to take the action to unfreeze himself.

Christians have created a God who’s inert (when outside of time) and a soul-less robot whose hands are tied by his own omniscience (when time is proceeding). Christians should rethink the properties they invent for God.

Can you imagine anything more absurd
than an infinite intelligence in infinite nothing
wasting an eternity?
— Robert Ingersoll

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/3/17.)

Image from Ted Van Pelt (license CC BY 2.0)

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The Argument from Results (a new atheist argument)

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Here’s a new argument for atheism. I call it the Argument from Results.

  1. People invent gods
  2. This looks like a world in which all gods are manmade
  3. Conclusion: probably, all gods are manmade

Note that because of the qualifier “this looks like” (rather than “this is”) in proposition 2, the conclusion must itself be qualified with “probably.” Nevertheless, “probably, all gods are manmade” is a powerful conclusion.

I think we can agree that step 3 is a reasonable conclusion that follows from 1 and 2 (that is, the argument is valid), so let’s consider those premises one at a time.

Premise 1: People invent gods

Sometimes the invention of the supernatural is deliberate. Joseph Smith created the Mormon religion. His story claims that he received golden plates from an angel and translated them into King James English. The story doesn’t hold up, and the skeptical view is that he invented it.

Sathya Sai Baba (d. 2011) was an Indian guru who demonstrated his divinity with clairvoyance, resurrection, healings, materializing small objects, and more. Skeptics say that these were at best magic tricks.

L. Ron Hubbard was quoted as saying in 1948, “If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.” And so he did, with Scientology.

These men seem to have deliberately created false stories, but sometimes the invention is inadvertent. One explanation for the gospels is that individual authors documented their Jesus story as their local church believed it. Oral tradition gradually changed the story, and in different places and different times, the story was different.

(Just for completeness, I’ll note that Robert G. Price argues that that everything in the gospels comes from previous writings—Paul’s epistles or the Jewish Scripture. With this view, the gospels are also deliberately invented. For more, see Price’s comment here.)

Shiva, Quetzalcoatl, Odin, Amun-Ra—mankind has invented thousands of great and lesser gods. On a smaller scale, Christianity has 45,000 denominations with many significant differences in the properties of their gods.

Almost all Christians will happily agree that some gods in the world’s religions aren’t real but were invented by people. Therefore, the premise “People invent gods” is sound.

Premise 2: This looks like a world in which all gods are manmade

Not only do people invent gods, they invent all gods, including the Christian god. Said another way, Christianity isn’t an exception to the “people invent gods” premise.

  • Compare how ideas work within religions vs. science. A new scientific idea gets a hearing, and it becomes accepted (and possibly improved) or rejected. While this process can take years or even decades, compare this with religion, where “Here’s a new idea that better explains the facts!” counts for nothing. New religions come into existence, but it’s not because they explain the evidence better. And religions go extinct but not because their claims weren’t backed up with sufficient evidence or their predictions didn’t come true. (More: Why Map of World Religions but not World Science?.)
  • The Christian message looks manmade. Christianity is far too complicated to be the message from an omniscient god. Seen another way, an omniscient god who wanted to interact with us would give us a simple, clear, and unambiguous message. To take a quantitative example, the Christian site GotQuestions.org currently brags, “497,388 Bible Questions Answered!” No omniscient god would be proud of that mess. (More: Argument from Simplicity.)
  • Christians claim that God loves us and passionately wants a relationship with us. That is contradicted by his hiddenness. (More here, here.)
  • Even if believers say that religious truth isn’t clearly perceived but only dimly so (one wonders why god(s) couldn’t clearly convey the message, but ignore that for now), shouldn’t religions be converging? In this scenario, religions worldwide would be sifting clues for evidence of the supernatural. Bits of evidence from religious seekers worldwide could gradually be collected, like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Religions would converge. But, of course, that’s not at all what we see. Christianity alone creates denominations at a rate of two per day, and we see that fertility across religions worldwide, illustrated in the tree of world religions.
  • The tree of world religions is like a family tree of world languages. Languages are put close to other languages that they’re related to by history, geography, and linguistic similarities. Similarly, religions can be arranged in a family tree by how they’re related to others by history, geography, and dogmatic similarities. But, like languages, these religions are all manmade. For Christianity to be radically different, as the only one based on a real god, it wouldn’t fit into the tree at all. Nevertheless, ancient Yahweh worship fits in nicely with other Canaanite religions of 3000 years ago, with Christianity as an unsurprising offshoot. (More here.)
  • There are lots more reasons here: 25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God.

In all these examples, Christianity doesn’t stand out from the other, manmade gods. It’s the biggest, and that’s about it.

Conclusion: Probably, all gods are manmade

Nevertheless, God might still exist despite the strong evidence for these two premises. God might be deliberately invisible. He could be the Gnostic Demiurge, the builder of the Earth who’s not perfectly good and not all that interested in a relationship. He could be shy or deceitful or evil. He might be a deist god—a clockmaker who wound up the universe and then walked away. For the Christian to carve out a spot for God with any of these attributes, however, is to abandon the Christian conception of God.

A popular Christian response is to flip the argument: “You haven’t proven that God doesn’t exist!” That’s true, but the wise person doesn’t hold beliefs because they haven’t been proven wrong; they hold them because there’s good evidence that they’re right.

World-famous apologist William Lane Craig makes a lot of flimsy arguments, and he’d like the bar set low to make his arguments more credible. All right—let’s lower the bar for this Argument from Results using his logic. Craig advises:

The premises surely don’t need to be known to be true with certainty (we know almost nothing to be true with certainty!). Perhaps we should say that for an argument to be a good one the premises need to be probably true in light of the evidence. . . . Another way of putting this [is:] you should compare the premise and its negation and believe whichever one is more plausibly true in light of the evidence.

Premise 1 is, “People invent gods.” I think most Christians would agree that that’s likelier than “People don’t invent gods.”

Premise 2 is, “This looks like a world in which all gods are manmade.” Is that likelier than its converse, “This looks like a world in which one or more god(s) is real”? I argue that an honest following of the evidence points to the original premise as more likely.

In other words, don’t tell me that you believe the Christian god exists. The question is, what does this world look like? It looks like a world full of made-up gods.

Christians agree that people invent religions. That’s how they explain all those other religions. But in explaining away these other religions, they’ve explained away their own. Christianity looks like just one more manmade religion.

When I do good, I feel good;
when I do bad, I feel bad.
That’s my religion.
— Abraham Lincoln

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/29/17.)

Image from Brad Higham (license CC BY 2.0)

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Responding to “DNA is a Program, and Programs Demand a Programmer”

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One popular science-y argument for God is that DNA is information. In fact, it’s not only information, it’s a software program. Programs require programmers, and for DNA, this programmer must be God.

For example, Scott Minnich, an associate professor of microbiology and a fellow at the Discovery Institute, said during the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, “The sophistication of the information storage system in nucleic acids of RNA and DNA [have] been likened to digital code that surpasses anything that a software engineer at Microsoft at this point can produce.” Stephen Meyer, also of the Discovery Institute, said, “DNA functions like a software program. We know from experience that software comes from programmers.”

Man/machine parallels

But how does DNA brings anything new to the conversation? The idea that the human body is like a designed machine has been in vogue ever since modern machines. The heart is like a pump, nerves are like wires, arteries are like pipes, the digestive system is like a chemical factory, eyes and ears are like cameras and microphones, and so on. We don’t hear, “Animals’ arteries and veins are like the water and drain pipes in a house, so there must be a celestial Plumber!”

I don’t find the celestial Programmer claim much more compelling, but let’s push on and respond to the apologist’s claim that programs (in the form of DNA) require programmers.

Nature vs. machine

As a brief detour, notice how we tell natural and manmade things apart. Nature and human designers typically do things very differently. This excerpt from my book Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change explores the issue:

By the 1880s, first generation mechanical typesetters were in use. Mark Twain was interested in new technology and invested in the Paige typesetter, backing it against its primary competitor, the Mergenthaler Linotype machine. The Paige was faster and had more capabilities. However, the complicated machine contained 18,000 parts and weighed three tons, making it more expensive and less reliable. As the market battle wore on, Twain sunk more and more money into the project, but it eventually failed in 1894. It did so largely because the machine deliberately mimicked how human typesetters worked instead of taking advantage of the unique ways machines can operate. For example, the Paige machine re-sorted the type from completed print jobs back into bins to be reused. This impressive ability made it compatible with the manual process but very complex. The Linotype neatly cut the Gordian knot by simply melting old type and recasting it. . . .

As with typesetting machines, airplanes also flirted with animal inspiration in their early years. But flapping-wing airplane failures soon yielded to propeller-driven successes. The most efficient machines usually don’t mimic how humans or animals work. Airplanes don’t fly like birds, and submarines don’t swim like fish. Wagons roll rather than walk, and a recorded voice isn’t replayed through an artificial mouth. A washing machine doesn’t use a washboard, and a dishwasher moves the water and not the dishes.

DNA doesn’t look like software

With DNA, we again see the natural vs. manmade distinction. It looks like the kind of good-enough compromise that evolution would create, not like manmade computer software. The cell has no CPU, the part of a computer that executes instructions. Also, engineers have created genetic software that changes and improves in an evolutionary fashion. This software can be used for limited problems, but it must be treated as a black box.

The same is true for a neural network used for artificial intelligence. It can be trained to recognize something, but that set of interconnections looks nothing like the understandable, maintainable software that humans create.

As another illustration of the how DNA is unlike software, the length of an organism’s DNA is not especially proportionate to its complexity. This is the c-value enigma, illustrated with a chart that compares DNA length for many animals here.

We actually have created DNA like a human programmer would create it, at least short segments of it. In 2010, the Craig Venter Institute encoded four text messages into synthetic DNA that was then used to create a living, replicating cell. That’s what a creator who wants to be known does. Natural DNA looks . . . natural. It looks sloppy. It’s complex without being elegant. (See more on the broken stuff in human DNA here and how this defeats the Design Hypothesis here.)

How Would God Program?

If God designed software, we’d expect it to look like elegant, minimalistic, people-designed software, not the Rube Goldberg mess that we see in DNA. Apologists might wonder how we know that this isn’t the way God would do it. Yes, God could have his own way of programming that looks foreign to us, but then the “DNA looks like God’s software” argument fails.

Consider more broadly this supposed analogy between human design and biological systems.

  • Human designs have parts purposely put together. We know they are designed because we see the designers and understand how they work.
  • Biological systems live and reproduce, and they evolve based on mutation and natural selection.

But these traits of human designs don’t apply to biological systems, and vice versa. So where is the analogy? The only thing they share is complexity, which means that the argument becomes the naïve conclusion, “Golly, biological systems are quite complicated; I guess they must be designed.” This is no evidence for a designer, just an unsupported claim that complexity demands one. And why think complexity is the hallmark of design? Shouldn’t we be looking for elegance instead?

The software analogy leads to uncomfortable conclusions

The DNA = software analogy brings along baggage that the Christian apologist won’t like. The apologist demands, “DNA is information! Show me a single example of information not coming from intelligence!”

This makes them vulnerable to a straightforward retort: Show me a single example of intelligence that’s not natural. Show me a single example of intelligence not coming from a physical brain. These apologists are living in a glass house when appealing to things that have no precedent (and far too comfortable with things that have no evidence, like the supernatural).

Does the Christian imagine multiple Designers of DNA? Because most human designs come from teams. Are those Designers finite? Are they fallible? Were they born? Because these are the properties of human designers (h/t commenter Loren Petrich).

Christians will respond by pointing to the imagined properties of the Christian God, but this is the fallacy of special pleading. They pick the parts of the God/designer analogy they like and dismiss the ones they don’t. This might make it an illustration of God’s properties, but by selecting the parts they like based on their agenda, they make clear that it’s not an argument.

Actually, we find information in lots of nonliving natural things. The frequency components of starlight encodes information about that star’s composition and speed. Tree rings tell us about past precipitation and carbon-14 fluctuation. Ice cores and varves (annual sediment layers in a pond) also reveal details of climate. Smell can tell us that food has gone bad or if a dead animal is nearby. Snowflakes record the atmospheric conditions that created them.

Commenter NS Alito observed:

In my sedimentary geology classes, we used various rock deposition construction patterns to determine the environment in which it was formed, such as preserved ripple structures, proportions of sand vs. clay, silica concretions in sandstone, etc. The various “programmers” of this information were wave energy, upstream eroded material, water chemistry and other natural physical processes.

The popular DNA = software analogy should be discarded for lack of evidence.

To ask an atheist what evidence would change their mind
is to admit we’re in a naturalistic universe
and thus make the question void.
— commenter primenumbers

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/18/17.)

Image from AndreaLaurel (license CC BY 2.0)
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