Nice Try: the Christian Design Checklist

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design creationism

A scene near the beginning of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey shows astronauts on the moon investigating a mysterious box-shaped monolith about four meters tall. The edges appear to be perfectly square, and the surface is uniformly black. Imagine coming across this for the first time. Is this natural or made by an intelligence?

Further study shows the proportions to be precisely 1:4:9 (1 unit deep, 4 units wide, and 9 units tall), but these numbers are all squares. That is, 1:4:9 = 12:22:32. What do you think now—is it natural or artificial?

In general, how do you differentiate things made as the result of simple natural laws from those made by an intelligence of some kind—from insects to humans to super-smart aliens?

A Christian offers 8 attributes of design

Christian apologist Jim Wallace in God’s Crime Scene tackles this problem by listing eight attributes of design. His eventual goal is to use these attributes to evaluate the motor that drives the bacterial flagellum (the spinning tail that some bacteria use to travel) and, with a little luck, find that it must have been designed, thereby overturning evolution.

He demonstrates the method using a bloody garotte found at the scene of an actual murder (he picks examples like this because he was a police detective). A garotte is a simple weapon—a wire with wooden handles at each end, used to strangle a victim—and so might be simple enough to land in between obviously undesigned things (rocks, rivers, sand dunes) and obviously designed things (cars, computers, pocket watches). The idea is that the more of these attributes that apply to something, the more likely it was designed.

The original list was created to make the acronym DESIGNED, but I’ve ignored this because by shoehorning the list into an acronym, it sacrificed understandability. I’ve rewritten the titles, grouped a few together, and changed the order, but I’ve hopefully summarize each attribute fairly.

1a. Unlikely from chance

Designed things aren’t explainable by chance, and two pegs attached to a wire aren’t likely to have come together by chance.

1b. Unexplainable naturally

Nothing in the natural laws of chemistry and physics alone would have led to the existence of this device.

2. Similar to known designed objects

Does the object in question fit into a known bin? In this case, the two pegs and a wire, covered in blood, obviously falls into the “garotte” category. Wallace even noted that the police officer who discovered it was not only familiar with the weapon as you might imagine any police officer would be but had seen it used in the movie The Godfather. We’re going into this analysis with no doubt what the object is and that it was designed.

3. Sophisticated and intricate

A garotte is sophisticated compared to (say) a vine. The handles were identical in shape and dimension, and the wire was attached to each with the same knot.

4. Information based

The murderer used information (in this case, written instructions) to guide the creation of the weapon.

5a. Goal directed

Similar devices are used to cut clay or cheese, but the larger size of this one made it not optimal for those purposes. However, that did make it suitable for the goal of strangling someone.

5b. A choice between alternatives

The murderer could’ve evaluated a number of potential weapons in planning the crime: a gun (efficient but noisy), a crossbow (quiet but hard to come by), poison (efficient and quiet but probably detectable), and so on. The garotte came out on top after his evaluation.

6. Irreducibly complex

Something is irreducibly complex if it couldn’t be any simpler. That is, it would fail if any piece were removed. Each of the pieces of the garotte are required, and none could be merged or discarded for the device to perform its function.

A nice try

I have a nagging feeling that this list came from someone looking at the bacteria flagellar motor (which I will discuss in more detail in future posts), listing the reasons it looks designed, and using that as the universal sieve for deciding designed vs. undesigned objects. I’d prefer to see the list come from an unbiased organization based in science, not religion.

But ignoring that, the question of how we can tell designed from not designed is a worthwhile challenge. At the very least, it’s a fascinating science fiction thought experiment. For example, in Contact, an alien intelligence contacted the earth. What simple technique could they use to say, “We are intelligent, and this message can’t be explained naturally”? They used pulses of prime numbers.

Or turn this around: how would we communicate with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? We’ve sent spacecraft beyond the solar system. That alone said that we’re intelligent, but we’ve done more. Pioneer 10 and 11 (launched in 1972 and ’73) held a plaque, and the two Voyager spacecraft (1977) had phonograph records. In 1974, we sent a message, a 73 × 23 pixel bitmap, from the Arecibo radio telescope.

We’ll revisit that list and see how objective a filter it is next time.

The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer.
He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution.
He’d be out of business if there was any competition.
— Carl Sagan, Contact

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Image from Wikimedia, CC license
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Captain America vs. Thor: Science vs. Supernatural

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captain america thor

Have you wondered how Captain America’s shield always comes back to him? (Captain America is the Marvel superhero with the round shield with the American flag motif.) He uses his shield as a weapon, throwing it so that it bounces off a wall, takes out a bad guy, and returns so he can grab it and throw it again.

According to the story, the super soldier serum that turned him from a wimp into Captain America gave him, not only strength and agility, but also the mental acuity to judge how to ricochet the shield so that it comes back. In other words, it’s just ballistics plus superhuman marksmanship. What might look like remarkable luck when seen once is something he can do on demand.

Of course, willing suspension of disbelief is still required, but comics and movies usually come up with some kind of plausible explanation for things that are new to us.

Captain America vs. Thor

What about Thor? He throws his hammer (Mjölnir) and it also comes back. What’s its secret? This time, it’s magic. That’s it—magic, end of story. There’s no attempt to align Thor with reality.

Compare this with the logic behind Captain America’s shield. We already know of medicine that can improve the human body and mind. The science of nootropics (smart drugs) is in its infancy, but some products can improve concentration and memory. The Captain America story simply asks us to imagine this actual field of research extended further, which will certainly happen.

The shield itself has special properties. It’s made of a new metal, which again is plausible as science continues to create new manufacturing techniques or materials with new properties. Science continues to startle us with new developments.

Here’s an example. If you’re unaware of Vantablack and related products, this is a startling development from left field. It’s a coating that acts like black paint, except that it is so black that it makes things look like a hole in the universe (video).

I give this only as an example of a product, the lack of which didn’t cause you to lose any sleep, but which is pretty cool now that it’s presented to you. The story behind Captain America’s shield is arguably in this category of startling yet semi-plausible things.

Thor’s Mjölnir

Back to Thor’s hammer. Odin cast a spell, the hammer became magic, and there’s nothing more to it. Once the drawbridge of your mind lowers to accept the supernatural, a magic hammer can come in unchallenged.

Sometimes the supernatural claim needs to know the password. Maybe only Norse mythology gets to come in. Or dogma from some other religion. But once a category gets a pass, the BS detector is switched off for its claims. Walked on water? Cured disease? Virgin birth? Raised from the dead? Made of three parts while still being one? Creationism? C’mon in! It’s not like we’re going to demand that it be plausible.

We usually lump all these movie superheroes into the same “it’d be cool to be able to do that, but that ain’t gonna happen” bin. But look closer, and notice the difference. Some stories are built on plausible science and others on mythological make-believe. That distinction exists in real life, too.

After seeing half a country actively reject
wearing a mask during a pandemic,
I would like to apologize to the filmmakers
of every horror movie ever made
for calling their characters unbelievably dumb
for going into the murder basement.
— seen on the internet

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Image from Wikipedia, public domain
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A Simple Thought Experiment Defeats Claim that Bible Is Accurate

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Christian apologists are eager to argue that the gospel story is historically accurate. They point to the large number of New Testament manuscripts. They point to the shortness of the oral history period compared to other documents of the time. They claim that our oldest copies are remarkably close to the originals. I’ve made clear why those claims do little to argue for the historicity of the Jesus story (here, here, and here, respectively), but let me try to illustrate how weak this claim is. “Our copy of the New Testament is negligibly different from the original” is not defensible.

A thought experiment

Imagine this experiment. I tell you that in the New Testament there is one specific verse that I have in mind. A few decades after the original was written, a variant tradition was created by a scribe who changed the text of the verse. It doesn’t matter how the error got in there—maybe he misread the original or omitted something or tried to correct what he honestly thought was an error or tried to “improve” the reading of the text to make it better align with what his spiritual leader had taught. All that matters is that we have a fork in the road, after which point we have two textual traditions for this verse.

Let’s further imagine that this is a significant change, not a trivial spelling mistake.

Here’s the twist: one of these traditions is lost to history. I won’t tell you which one. This is almost surely true. (Indeed, how could you possibly prove that it wasn’t true that there had been two versions of one New Testament verse, that this change wasn’t trivial, and that one version was lost?)

I hand you a Bible and tell you:

  1. Find the verse.
  2. Tell me if that verse is the variant or the original.
  3. If it’s the incorrect version, tell me the correct reading.

You’d say that that’s an impossible challenge. Yes it is, and that’s the point. In our Bible, for how many verses is it true that there was a variant tradition, the change was significant (not just a spelling error or synonymous phrasing), and one of the traditions (maybe the original or maybe the erroneous one—you don’t know) has been lost? Zero verses? A thousand? We simply don’t know.

An example

Here’s a rare example where historians think they know about a manuscript that was changed. It’s not in the Bible but rather in Antiquities of the Jews, written in about 93 CE by Jewish historian Josephus. Its most famous passage is the Testimonium Flavianum, a passage praising Jesus and celebrating his resurrection. Historians reject this as original because Josephus, a Jew, would never make such a pro-Christian statement. Also, the early church fathers knew about Josephus’s writings but never quoted this passage in support of their position.

It’s very unusual to be able to detect the change when you don’t have a second tradition to highlight the problem.

Can scholars pull out the original document?

Apologists will point to the impressive work New Testament scholars perform in weighing several variants and judging which one is likelier the more authentic. But what do they do when there were several variants but history gives us copies of only one?

Weigh the magnitude of the the challenge by considering some of the earliest fragments of the New Testament. Papyrus P75 has some fragments of Luke from around 200 CE. Papyrus P46, from about the same date, has some of Paul’s writings. These are our earliest copies of those books, and yet they’re separated from the originals by well over a century. How do we know that they made it through that dark period—during much of which those books were considered by Christians to be merely important works, not sacred or inspired scripture—without significant change? Our best recreation of the New Testament has those books fitting together fairly well, but maybe this is because theirs is the viewpoint that survived. Maybe competing viewpoints were ignored or changed or even deliberately destroyed.

The apologists will say that there is no proof of this. True, our version of the New Testament could be identical to the original, but why imagine this? The evidence is not there, and apologists are left with just “Our version of the Bible might be accurate.” This is a meager foundation on which to build a supernatural claim.

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth
is not worth many regrets.
— Arthur C. Clarke

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/18/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license
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When Christians Treat God Like a Baby

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My oldest granddaughter is now four years old, and I remember playing with her in her first year. I found myself treating her like I did my dog. Neither understood English very well, but they could understand tone. She grabs her toy? “What a smart girl!” She rolls over? “What a clever girl!” She bites Piglet’s nose? “What a talented girl!” She burped, she pooped, she has a wet diaper? “What a good girl!”

This is surprisingly analogous to how many Christians treat God. You get what you wanted in prayer? “Thank you, God!” You didn’t get what you wanted in prayer? “Thank you, God!” God is too emotionally fragile to handle constructive feedback. Christians aren’t supposed to say, “God, the next time you think it’d be instructive to give a five-year-old leukemia, get back on your meds and think again.” God is (supposedly) omni-everything and so could achieve any goal without the human cost. God’s actions are assumed to be good at the outset, and any negative reaction is your fault for not seeing the hidden good.

God is either giving you great stuff or teaching you important lessons, and no matter what happens, God gets the credit. God is praised, regardless—whether you got the perfect parking space when you were late or God dealt some tough love by not giving you that promotion, he can’t lose. When bad things happen, God is never blamed. That’s man’s fault. Even natural disasters are recast as part of God’s marvelous, inscrutable plan. And when bad things happen to someone, they endured the ordeal only with God’s support.

Empty and groundless platitudes like “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” or “God must’ve needed another angel” or “Everything happens for a reason” litter the internet. Doubt is discouraged, and faith (in the sense of belief despite poor evidence) is put forward as a great virtue.

God is always perfect and infallible, especially when you conclude that before you start. There is even the scholarly discipline of theodicy to add somber scholarly support to this claim. Christians give all the other supernatural beliefs (unicorns, Xenu, Zeus) the critique of a skeptical adult, but their god can only handle baby food. And just like a baby, he’s never called to account, never has to clean up his messes, never has to explain himself or follow adult rules. God doesn’t even need good evidence that he exists.

Related: God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship

Religion is the diaper of humanity’s childhood;
It’s OK to grow out of it.
— PZ Myers

 

Gods are children’s blankets
that get carried over into adulthood.
— James Randi

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/7/16.)

Image from Christian Haugen, CC license

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Christianity, Because How the Heck Do You Explain the Resurrection Otherwise? (2 of 2)

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Christian apologist Jim Wallace thinks that explaining the Resurrection is easy—God was behind it all. Drop the God explanation, and atheists come up short explaining the facts: Jesus was a historical person, the gospels report that the tomb was empty and that Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples were willing to die to defend the Jesus claims, and there was little chance for legend to creep in to the story. I dismantle these “facts” in part 1.

Let’s move on to the atheist response. Wallace imagines theories such as that the disciples stole the body, the women went to the wrong tomb, Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, or that the risen Jesus was simply hallucinated.

Considering this, Wallace wonders “why there are 6 or 7 non-Christian theories and then the one Christian theory.”

Let’s start with a joke

I personally have little interest in these particular theories. But before I get to the one that I prefer, did you hear the one about the man walking along a street at night? He came across another guy bent over, slowly walking around at the edge of a parking lot, obviously looking for something.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for my keys. I lost them over there.” He points to a distant part of the parking lot.

“Then why are you looking for them here??”

“The light’s better here.”

Similarly, why do apologists spend so much time lovingly attacking arguments like “wrong tomb” or “swoon theory”? Because the light’s better here. These they think they can knock over.

And let’s sidestep their insistence that we pick up the story at a certain point and explain things naturally. I have no obligation to explain the resurrection given the empty tomb just like I have no obligation to explain the yellow brick road given Oz. The ball’s in the apologist’s court to show that it’s history.

As for Wallace’s puzzlement about why there are a bunch of non-Christian theories, there aren’t. There is no miscellany of arguments that must all harmonize somehow. You bring out your “God did it,” and I’d prefer any one of these naturalistic theories instead.

How the heck do you explain the Resurrection? The Jesus story was legend.

My preferred explanation (which gets insufficient consideration from the apologists) is that the gospel story is legend. There was something in the beginning—during a period of turmoil within Judaism, a charismatic teacher created a small movement—and legendary accretion over the decades did the rest. Ideas like gods impregnating humans and gods resurrecting worthy people were familiar elements of other religions, and these got attached to the Jesus story with the retelling.

“Wait—you say this Jesus guy was executed by the authorities, and that’s it? Not very impressive. I worship Dionysus, and he was raised from the dead by Zeus.” How many times would this happen before the Jesus story added the Resurrection? (I give this as simply a possible legendary addition. The Resurrection could’ve become part of the gospel story in other ways.)

A related theory, championed at this blog in particular by Greg G. (one of our most eloquent commenters), discards even that small historical core. The stories and ideas in Mark, the first gospel, can all be traced back to precedents in earlier literature—Jewish scripture and Hellenistic books of history or fiction available at the time. In other words, the first gospel was deliberate fiction from the start. This parsimonious theory, then, doesn’t assume any historical origin.

(This is my paraphrasing, so I invite those who’ve thought about it more to correct me as necessary. This is the Christ Myth theory, but I didn’t introduce it as such because it emphasizes the “Jesus didn’t exist” part, when the “Mark was fiction” part is more interesting and relevant for this post. Perhaps this alternative angle into the same theory could be called the Pious Fraud theory.)

Christian unity

As for Wallace’s “one Christian theory,” let’s not overemphasize Christian unity. Christians disagree on many important issues, such as Arminian vs. Calvinist thinking, Trinitarian vs. Arian (and Unitarian, Binitarian, and other beliefs) thinking, plus lots of other conflicts over the centuries where the losing philosophy was declared heretical. Christian big-tent thinking is roughly, “Ignoring the areas where Christians don’t speak with one voice . . . Christians speak with one voice.” And now Christians look like just another manmade religion, with factions bickering over who’s right.

The ineffectiveness of “God did it”

Finally, consider the conclusion Christians are so eager for us to reach, “God did it.” It’s a powerful explanation, though a little too powerful. It can explain anything and, in so doing, it explains nothing. It can’t be falsified, and if I say, “God did X,” you can’t prove me wrong because God could do anything. If you say that X isn’t something God would do, I could either say that God moves in mysterious ways (too grand for your mortal thinking) or dismiss your poor understanding of how God thinks.

More practically, “God did it” is just a repackaging of the unknowns and so explains nothing. We’ve answered, “How did Jesus get resurrected?” by replacing it with, “Who is God, and why is there suffering, and why is God hidden?” (and so on). Introduce the Bible into the conversation, and that just introduces more problems—“Why are there so many unanswered questions, and why did Jesus leave so much dogma undecided, and why is it contradictory?” (and so on).

Declare victory and go home

You can always just say that the atheist is cheating. If those atheists were honest in their evaluation of your argument, they’d be on their knees, sobbing out the Sinner’s Prayer. Here, Wallace thinks he’s found the problem.

The better , and the only reason why you don’t like the Christian theory, is because you don’t think a miracle is reasonable. You have a presuppositional bias against the miraculous.

And you don’t?? I suspect we’re equally skeptical about supernatural claims . . . except when it comes to Christian claims. You give them a pass, while I do my best to insist on evidence in proportion to the extraordinary character of the claim, regardless of whether they support my worldview or not.

Looks like that makes me the one who treats things without unfair bias. More here.

No, Mssr. Atheist, you can’t use science

Wallace concludes with a Molotov cocktail from a new quarter.

So you think that everything in your world can be explained by natural causes and natural forces; you think that everything in your environment, [the entire history of] the universe can be explained by nothing more than space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry? How do you explain the beginning of the universe (which you cannot explain using space, time, matter, physics, or chemistry, because none of those things are available to you)? We know from the science that everything comes into existence, not from some other form of space, but from nothing.

There’s lots I could say here, but I’ll cut it short and simply note (1) I have no obligation to answer any scientific question to make an atheist argument, and (2) this challenge is about cosmology, while our topic is Christianity’s unbelievable explanation for the Resurrection. If you think you’ve got a showstopper of an argument (or simply want the best answer from a scientific field that you’re a novice in), go talk to a relevant scientist.

I’m sure that no scientific question you could pose would surprise scientists or shake their confidence in the science. More to the point, none would convert to Christianity as a result. What does that tell you about the power of this question about the origin of the universe?

As usual, the supernatural is unnecessary in explaining the objective facts surrounding the Resurrection. As the French mathematician Laplace is reported to have said two centuries ago about the absence of God in his book on celestial mechanics, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

People don’t disagree over the force of gravity.
Why not? Because it’s evidential.
Religious beliefs are not evidential and, therefore,
can only be defended emotionally—
hence the escalation to argument.
— John Richards, Secular World blog

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Image from Francisco Delgado, CC license
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Christianity, Because How the Heck Do You Explain the Resurrection Otherwise?

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Christian apologist Jim Wallace has an explanation for the Resurrection story. He gives his winning argument in a recent video, “Why Naturalistic Explanations for the Resurrection Are… Lame.” Here is his challenge to the skeptic:

What is it that’s keeping you from thinking that [the Christian explanation for the Resurrection] is a reasonable inference?

His argument gives a bunch of facts and demands an explanation. He has his explanation—God did it. Well, Mssr./Mme Atheist? Find a better explanation than that.

4 facts about the Resurrection

Let’s examine the facts that he offers.

1. Jesus was a real person. “It’s ludicrous to think that Jesus never lived.”

Nope—hardly ludicrous. Some religions were started by a real, historical person, such as Joseph Smith (LDS),  Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science), and L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology). And others have a named figure at their beginning who might not have been historical.

Was there a real Mohammed (Islam)? Buddha (Buddhism)? Zarathushtra (Zoroastrianism)? Probably.

Was there a real Moses (Judaism)? Laotzi (Taoism)? John Frum (Vanuatu cargo cult)? Probably not.

I reject option 1, the gospel account of the supernatural Jesus, but that still leaves two more options: (2) Christianity was created with a real man at the beginning and morphed into the gospel story, or (3) it started without a real man. The scholarly consensus rejects 3, but it’s not a ludicrous option. It’s possible.

2. “The tomb [was] empty . . . [and they] claimed that he rose from the dead, . . . [and] there was apparently no body that was ever recovered.”

These aren’t objective, historical facts. They’re just claims made in a story, so let’s not give them more credibility than they deserve. More here.

3. “People were willing to die for their [claims about Jesus]”

You don’t even have a story about disciples being willing to die to defend the Christian claims about Jesus, let alone history.

Start with the story of Jesus himself. He was said to be the Jewish king, and he was killed. That makes sense—set yourself up as a rival to the king installed by the Romans, and they get cranky. That’s sedition, a capital offense. They will kill you for that. That doesn’t mean that the Jesus crucifixion story is history, of course, just that this part of the story hangs together.

Where’s the equivalent for the disciples? Were they executed by the authorities or murdered by a mob? What were their crimes? The earliest record dates from close to two centuries after the death of Jesus and it only gives method and place of death. And if, like Jesus, they were killed by authorities for sedition or some similar crime, then they didn’t die defending claims about Jesus. More here.

4. Scripture was written very early. There was little chance for legend to creep in.

The gospels were written decades after the death of Jesus, which isn’t “very early.” Apologists usually make relative claims here, comparing the statistics of the New Testament to those of other writings of the time, but these comparisons are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether this or that New Testament book has more manuscript copies, was written closer to the events it claims to record, or has a shorter gap from originals to our best copies compared to other ancient writings. We don’t care whether it’s the best on any of these metrics; we care that it’s reliable enough to support Christianity’s remarkable supernatural claims. It’s not.

Would you accept a miracle claim from a religious tradition not yours if you read it in today’s newspaper? If not then you see the problem.

These “facts” don’t amount to much, leaving nothing that’s puzzling to explain. This is what’s left:

  1. The entirety of the Jesus story might be legend, in which case there was no historical Jesus at the beginning.
  2. The gospels make lots of claims, but they’re just stories.
  3. “No one would die for a lie” is no argument since we have no reliable documentation saying that any disciple died to support the gospel claims.
  4. The New Testament documentation isn’t reliable enough to support its supernatural claims. (Could any document be?)

Comparing the Christian and skeptical positions

Those are the unimpressive facts that Wallace wants to start with. He sees God’s hand behind all this.

How do skeptics respond? How do they explain the Resurrection naturalistically? Though Wallace doesn’t explicitly enumerate them, he is apparently thinking of explanations like these.

  1. The disciples stole the body to make it look like a miraculous resurrection.
  2. The women went to an empty tomb, but it was the wrong tomb.
  3. Jesus wasn’t quite dead when he was removed from the cross. In the tomb, he revived (swoon theory).
  4. The distraught disciples imagined or hallucinated the risen Jesus.

And there are more.

Wallace wonders “why there are 6 or 7 non-Christian theories and then the one Christian theory” to explain the Resurrection. He says:

Why do you have [6 or 7]? Why not just 1? Because those don’t work, and you know they don’t work. The guy who invented #6 doesn’t think excuse #5 works, and the guy who invented #4 does not think 5 or 6 work. All these guys don’t agree with each other, they’ve got their own theory and think the other guy’s theories are lame. I agree with you there—they’re all lame.

Let me approvingly quote from a source Wallace should find credible, Gary Habermas and Mike Licona in The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus: “When it comes to reports of miracles, the historian must seek a natural explanation before considering a supernatural one.” The supernatural alternative is so incredible and without precedent that any of these naturalistic explanations is more plausible than “God did it.” And for every instance where you’re tempted to point to a Bible verse that weakens one of these theories, remember another naturalistic argument, that the Bible is an unreliable source for potentially many reasons (deliberate change by a copyist, that verse is contradicted by another elsewhere in the Bible, it’s a story, this thought experiment, and so on).

You want one theory? Okay, here it is: simple, natural explanations are sufficient to explain the facts surrounding the claims for the Resurrection. The supernatural is an unnecessary addition.

Concluded in part 2 with my preferred explanation, plus a critique of the Christian explanation.

As science has become better
at answering questions and healing people,
religion has gotten better at making excuses.
— seen on the internet

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Image from Raychan, CC license

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