A Distillation of Crazy

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John Warwick Montgomery was the William Lane Craig of his day. According to his web site, he is “considered by many to be the foremost living apologist for biblical Christianity.” He’s quite proud of his 11 earned degrees, including three doctorates, and he likes to be introduced using the European convention, “Dr Dr Dr Montgomery.”

I attended his two-week International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France in 2011. Despite assurances to the contrary, it didn’t make me a believer.

I went to find the best apologetics arguments. Was the good stuff backstage, reserved for the serious students of the art? I wanted to see. What I found was the same tired arguments.

Dr Dr Dr Montgomery was a guest on a Christian radio show and was asked to respond to Bart Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God (2014). Here are a few excerpts that highlight the thinking of the “foremost living apologist.” I think you’ll agree that it’s a rich vein of crazy.

I suppose it’s nice that [Ehrman] wants everybody to love each other, but if there isn’t any god and there’s no last judgment, I’d like to know why anyone should bother with anybody else. I mean certainly, it would be looking out for Number One. . . . It would be a matter of feathering our own nest and certainly not paying attention to anybody else.

You don’t know why anyone should bother with anyone else? The reason isn’t hard to find—evolution selects for positive traits like trustworthiness, generosity, and self-sacrifice in social animals like apes (which includes us). We find those traits laudable because evolution has made that part of our programming. But the reason is irrelevant. We obviously don’t just look out for Number One, so Montgomery’s instincts have led him astray.

If being a Christian is what’s keeping some people from being thieves and murderers, I guess it’s good that they’re Christian.

Montgomery continues:

And all of the horrors of atheistic totalitarianisms could never be criticized; there isn’t any last judgment; Hitler and Stalin—they just die like anybody else, and they can get away with it.

(1) Show me just one person killed in the name of atheism. Can’t do it, can you? There is nothing behind atheism except for the lack of belief in gods—that’s all it is. Christianity and other religions, by contrast, have libraries of books analyzing their holy books and traditions—or criticizing the analysis or traditions of other sects of their religion.

(I respond to the “Stalin was a murderer and he was an atheist!” argument here.)

Atheism makes no moral claims or demands. It provides no moral framework. That’s not a lack; it’s just a fact. (Contrast it with the elaborate morality we find in the Bible that looks pretty shabby when examined in a modern light.)

(2) Montgomery says that the horrors of evil regimes “could never be criticized,” but of course nonbelievers criticize wrongdoing all the time. What he means, I’m sure, is that they can’t criticize while also rejecting Christianity’s objective morality. But that’s nonsense as well. There is no evidence supporting claims of objective morality. My moral relativism (morality is sourced inside people, not outside) has no problem pointing out errors. Where you and I differ on moral issues, I think you’re wrong—who does it any differently?

(3) He thinks that evil dictators have their way with the world and then just die, avoiding any punishment.

In the first place, that a worldview has a more pleasing view about something than another is no indication of the correctness of that worldview. I hope we can agree that truth is the bottom line.

In the second, yeah, bad people sometimes just get away with it. That bothers me, too, but what are you going to do about it? It’s reality. Aren’t we adults here? I can’t consider this view without imagining a furious red-faced five-year-old stamping her feet because she didn’t get her way.

In the third place, why is the Christian view of justice any more satisfying? Maybe Stalin or Hitler had deathbed conversions. They could be up in heaven right now, playing canasta with Jesus or giving him a foot massage. How is that justice for their crimes?

Once more from Montgomery:

A society without a foundation in a belief in God and in the last judgment is a society in which people will try to get away with anything they possibly can, and it’s simply an invitation to chaos, bedlam, and anarchy. Poor Ehrman is obviously entirely unaware of the consequences of the belief system that he represents.

Chaos, bedlam, and anarchy? I’ll keep that in mind if I need a name for a band. Or a blog.

Evolution nicely explains why people don’t always try to get away with murder. And history is full of non-Christian societies from around the world where people were sort of good and sort of bad, just like today—ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, for starters.

As for clueless Ehrman bumbling through life unaware of what his belief system means, I often hear this obnoxious and groundless confidence. I guess you double down on confidence when you don’t have an actual argument.

If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same infinite god,
whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?
— Robert G. Ingersoll

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/19/14.)

Wikimedia / Image public domain

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WHO Has the Basis for Morality? No, It’s Not the Christian.

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God allows suffering, but it would be morally wrong for that suffering to be justified in any way except that it benefit the sufferer. The common excuse made for God is that suffering can be for the greater good, but that kind of suffering is exploitative and immoral. That means that suffering is a good thing, and we would be immoral if we tried to stop it.

Said another way, conventional morality is possible only with atheism.

These are the surprising conclusions from the argument in “Atheism and the Basis of Morality” by Stephen Maitzen (2013). I’ve distilled the argument here.

To see how the conclusions are supported, I want to make the argument as transparent as possible, so I’ve added a bit of formality and labeled the steps.

The argument

Here are some axioms (statements taken to be true without proof) to help us start on the same page.

Axiom 1: For simplicity and to avoid disagreement, “ordinary morality” has been distilled down to “we have the moral obligation to prevent easily preventable extreme suffering by a child.” That’s it.

Now, some basic assumptions about God’s properties.

Axiom 2: God

(a) is aware of all human suffering,

(b) knows how to prevent that suffering,

(c) has the ability to prevent the suffering,

(d) can do anything logically possible (indeed, is unlimited in knowledge and power),

(e) knows if suffering is necessary for the well-being of the sufferer, and

(f) won’t do anything morally imperfect.

And here’s the moral problem we need to wrestle with. How we should respond is the focus of the argument.

Axiom 3: There is, right now, a child experiencing terrible suffering.

God knows about the suffering child (Axiom 2a); nevertheless, he’s allowing the suffering to continue. Let’s understand God’s attitude toward that suffering by considering the following supposition.

Supposition 1: God allows the suffering to continue because it will ultimately benefit the child.

If Supposition S1 is false, then it’s not the case that the suffering will ultimately benefit the child—maybe it will benefit others or maybe there’s no reason at all. I will show that S1 must be true.

Axiom 4: A morally perfect being can’t act immorally.

Corollary 4: From Axiom 4, a morally perfect being can’t have the excuse, “My action was immoral, but that’s okay because it was the lesser of two evils.” Said another way, a morally perfect being can’t face a moral dilemma.

Since God never has moral dilemmas (Corollary 4), he never says, “Gee, I hate to see that kid in pain, but it’s for the greater good.”

Therefore, God can’t exploit people (that is, use them for some purpose other than to help them).

Therefore, S1 must be true, and any suffering allowed by God must be for that person’s benefit (like the pain from a vaccination) and not justified because it’s for someone else’s benefit (for the greater good).

Objections

Let’s pause for a moment and consider a couple of objections. The first objection says that exploiting people can’t be a problem because we do it ourselves. An example would be quarantining someone with a contagious illness, where we’re making one innocent person suffer for the benefit of others.

Response: Yes, we do exploit people that way, but that’s only because we’re not omnipotent. God is (Axiom 2b). We have an excuse for exploiting people, but God doesn’t.

Here’s another objection: maybe God could compensate sufferers materially even if the suffering wasn’t required for their benefit. How many years of life in Paradise would it take to overshadow a poor life on earth, no matter how miserable?

Response: No, compensation is not justification. If I punch you but them immediately apologize and give you a million dollars, my action was still morally wrong. You’ve been amply compensated, but that doesn’t justify my action (thinking otherwise is stupid Christian argument #25a.) Remember, the kind of non-exploitative harm we’re talking about is unavoidable suffering for that person’s own benefit, like jabbing a kid with a needle (suffering) to deliver a vaccine (the justifiable good).

Conclusion

From that groundwork, we can reap a few startling conclusions.

Given that there are suffering children (A3), how do we respond? “We have the moral obligation to prevent easily preventable extreme suffering by a child” (A1). But God ensures that any suffering is neither gratuitous nor exploitative but is for that person’s benefit (S1).

Therefore, it’s bad to stop suffering (from S1).

Therefore A1 is false since it contradicts S1.

Therefore, our moral duty to help suffering children (A1) vanishes. In fact, it’s more than that: getting in the way of someone’s suffering is getting in the way of their moral medicine. Mother Teresa’s crazy medieval zealotry actually fits in fairly well with this thinking: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

We’ve seen this before. Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod was criticized for messing with the natural order. If God decided that a building needed to be struck with lightning, who was Franklin to say otherwise (more)?

Seen another way, our moral instincts are backwards: the worse the suffering, the more obvious that it’s for that person’s benefit and not just a trivial bump in the road of life, and we should leave it alone to avoid messing with God’s plan. (One wonders how it could be so easy for us to overturn God’s plan, but that’s a tangent.)

So where does this leave morality? If our most fundamental moral axiom—that we should prevent the suffering of children if easily done—is gone because suffering must be a good thing, what’s left? What sense is a prohibition against lying or theft when an intuitively more fundamental axiom is gone? Can this morality be salvaged despite its gaping hole?

But drop the theistic assumptions, and Axiom A1 is back in force, and ordinary morality works just like everyone intuitively thinks it should. Atheism, not theism, is compatible with morality.

Religion does itself no favors
by declaring itself immune from rational scrutiny.
— Dan Brown

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Image by Claudia on Unsplash
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Guest Post: Bible Quiz 2

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This Bible quiz is a guest post from long-time commenter avalon. He put together another one a few months ago here.

I got a poor score, but I learned a lot. Take the quiz and see how you do.

Questions

1. What price did David pay to marry King Saul’s daughter?

2. What is the significance of God walking between the animals that were cut in two during His covenant with Abram?

3. Why did Paul mention a rock that followed the Israelites in the desert?

[Our ancestors during the Exodus] drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. (1 Corinthians 10:4)

4. Which prophet compared the male genitals of Egyptians to donkeys and horses?

5. After Noah’s ark landed, Genesis refers to the arc of color appearing in the sky as a rain-bow. If God had a “bow,” what would his arrows be?

Continue for the answers:

Pages: 1 2

Roe Is a Mirage: Conservatives Wrongly Think No Roe Means No Abortion

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Kavanaugh SCOTUS supreme court Roe Wade abortion

Conservatives are eager to see Brett Kavanaugh placed on the Supreme Court in the hope that they can overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that made abortion legal (with restrictions) across the U.S. But Roe is a mirage, and conservatives should avoid being taken in by the deception.

Overturning Roe allows the states to regulate abortion. Red states would likely impose further restrictions on abortion or make it illegal, and blue states would keep abortion available, but that’s not the issue. There are two reasons why pro-life conservatives shouldn’t focus on Roe.

Unlike most of what I’ve written about abortion, in this post I will not be telling conservatives why they’re wrong about abortion or arguing over definitions. I want to make a simple argument that relies on non-controversial facts that should be easy to accept. Pro-life America, if abortion is your enemy, pro-choicers should be your allies, and Roe shouldn’t be your target.

1. Illegal abortion just means that abortions will be done illegally

A popular conservative Christian radio host said in 2016,

Pro-lifers would like to see abortion abolished, but the only way to really abolish abortion ultimately is to make it illegal, and then the incidence of abortion would shrink to virtually nothing.

This is completely wrong. Abortion made illegal would mean that abortions would be still be done, just illegally. The rate of abortions in pre-Roe America was roughly twice the per capita rate of today, and most of those were illegal. The international data confirms the U.S. experience: “Abortion rates are highest [in countries] where the procedure is illegal” (more here).

We also have more alternatives now than in pre-Roe America, making illegal abortion much safer and more convenient. Medicine is available for inducing therapeutic miscarriage at home, safe and effective for first- and second-trimester abortions. An unintended pregnancy can be detected with a test kit and then treated at home if done promptly.

Forcing abortion underground by making it illegal backfires on conservatives. With no need for the woman to even leave the house, crisis pregnancy clinics would be out of business. That’s an opportunity lost to argue against abortion. No abortion clinics means no pointless regulations imposed by conservative legislatures, which would have the happy consequence of allowing abortions in red states to be done sooner than they are now.

There will still be the need for the rare late-term abortion (about 0.1 percent of abortions in the U.S. are performed after 21 weeks), so there will still be demand for surgical procedures. To Christians horrified by the thought of Kermit Gosnell’s filthy illegal abortion clinic, they must keep in mind that this is what may replace Planned Parenthood’s clean, safe, and regulated clinics if abortion is driven underground.

2. Abortion isn’t the problem; unintended pregnancy is the problem

There is no path to zero abortions. People will keep having sex, accidents will happen, and no amount of Christianity, moral badgering, or puritanical laws will eliminate all abortions. But I know a way to cut it by as much as 90 percent, which is a lot more than it’ll get cut by making it illegal. Abortions are just the symptom; the actual problem is unintended pregnancy.

Valerie Tarico has outlined a plan for reducing the number of abortions dramatically over twenty years, primarily by reducing unintended pregnancy. Conservatives, do you want to do something more concrete than just voting for the anti-abortion candidate? Do you want to reduce abortions, actually do something practical to cut the number by as much as 90 percent? In brief, here is the approach you should lobby for.

  • Create programs to encourage and teach parents to overcome their discomfort with having frank and thorough discussions of sex, sexual health, sexual ethics, and contraception. The message should make clear that sexual desire is natural, not shameful.
  • Schools must also cover this material, and children must be taught before they become sexually active. The curriculum must learn from the best U.S. and international programs. For example, abstinence-only training has had its chance, and it fails. Teen pregnancy rates are roughly proportional to the local religiosity, meaning more pregnancy where Christianity is strongest. We have a lot of room for improvement: “Among the 21 countries with complete statistics, the pregnancy rate among 15- to 19-year olds was the highest in the United States (57 pregnancies per 1,000 females) and the lowest rate was in Switzerland (8).”
  • The Pill and condoms have the advantage of being familiar, but there are far more effective contraceptives today. Long-acting reversible contraceptives like IUDs and subdermal implants, once in place, require no user action. They’re also cheaper in the long run. Contraceptives should be cheap (subsidized if necessary) and easily available.
  • Unplanned children (or worse, unwanted children) put a disproportionate strain on poor women, so reproductive health care should be subsidized to make it available to everyone.
  • Financial concerns are a major factor in some women’s desire for abortion. Policies that create income equality and encourage family-friendly workplaces (with benefits like maternity leave and affordable child care) will reduce abortions due to financial need.
  • Fetal health issues are another factor driving some abortions. Reduce these by providing and promoting prenatal care.
  • Fund research for birth control for men.

(For more, read the original article here.)

Notice the emphasis with this plan: most of these points are aimed at avoiding unintended pregnancy or eliminating reasons for abortion. Conservative voters anxious about abortion should be able to get behind this plan.

I’ll add one more point: conservatives should remove virginity from its pedestal. Just because virginity was a big deal in the Old Testament doesn’t make it relevant today (the Old Testament also justified slavery and genocide, but we don’t celebrate those today). The Old Testament’s concept of virginity also wasn’t fair since it only imposed on women.

Sex isn’t like a fine wine that gets better the longer you wait for it. Sex on the wedding night is a lot more satisfying if the couple has had a chance to practice. Abstinence is fine for some, but for others, consensual premarital sex will be a part of growing up.

Conservative voters have been led around by politicians for decades, but note that these politicians aren’t motivated to get rid of abortions. If they did, how would they convince their electorate that the sky is falling and that only by voting for them can we avoid moral collapse? They need problems, and if they can’t find a real one, they’ll exaggerate a trivial one.

The pro-lifers who agree that this is the best way to reduce abortions should note an important benefit: they’re now working with pro-choice advocates. By bypassing abortion and focusing on the cause, both groups are working toward a shared goal. Once they get over the novelty and ignore calls from politicians who may prefer the impasse of the status-quo, it will be refreshing to work with an enormous new collection of allies.

Some pro-lifers won’t accept this approach because it may make premarital sex more likely, but this tips their hand. They’re not anti-abortion, they’re just advocating a prudish policy toward sex. But they can’t have it both ways. They need to pick whether they want the current approach—a high abortion rate to satisfy their instinct to be tough on sex—or a lenient policy toward premarital sex by making sex safer and far less likely to lead to unintended pregnancy.

Suppose we lived in a society where every teenager gets a car on their sixteenth birthday. You wouldn’t let kids get their own car without insisting on comprehensive driver’s education. Now return to our world, where it’s not a car that they get but a sexually mature body. We shouldn’t let kids get that adult body without comprehensive education on how it works and how to use it properly.

Pro-life America, if abortion is your enemy, pro-choicers should be your allies, and Roe shouldn’t be your target. Focus on the real problem.

More posts on abortion:

 

Have no illusions, if abortion really were murder,
it would come as an instinctive reaction from women.
It would come with such force that men would be confused
by the average woman’s revulsion towards abortion.
— commenter Chuck Wolber

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Image via Torsten Mangner, CC license
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God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship (part 6)

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Let’s steel our nerves with a bracing shot of covfefe and conclude our look at Christians’ arguments that praising and worshiping God makes sense (and doesn’t sound like what a narcissistic man-child like Trump would demand). Part 1 is here.

10. Because praise brings bling

[Praise] paves the way for God’s power to be displayed, [and] miracles ​[do] happen. People’s lives are affected and changed. (Source)

Praise discharges strength in faith, which causes God to move on our behalf. . . . God inhabits the atmosphere of praise. . . . If we want to see a clear manifestation of God’s blessings and grace, all we need to do is to praise Him with all our heart, our mind, and our soul. Source

So what happens if we praise God and nothing happens? God moves nothing on our behalf, and there are no miracles? Let me guess: you weren’t wrong, and it’s certainly not God’s fault. The blame is always on the individual Christian.

Next time, back up these bold claims of miracles with evidence.

Confirmation bias

The evidence for God is so paltry that he’s indistinguishable from a guy who doesn’t exist at all. Confirmation bias is one of Christians’ few friends supporting their belief that their praise and worship has a target that actually exists. (Confirmation bias is our tendency to accept evidence that supports our preconceived ideas and ignore evidence that goes against them.) Changing our minds is difficult and unpleasant, and confirmation bias is like air bags for the psyche.

One of our apologists shows us how it’s done:

[God provides encouragement] along the way, letting us know how He feels about us. . . . Reminders of particular lessons arrive at the moment when they’re most needed, and we become aware that God knows how we’re feeling and knows precisely what we need to hear. . . . The man who has the skills to repair our stove appears just when we need him; a job comes open at just the right time; we hear a chance word that settles the secret worry of our heart. (Source)

Only with confirmation bias could anyone make this claim. Everyone experiences odd coincidences, but they’re infrequent. The Christian who thinks that God is clearly moving the chess pieces of their life (and that any outsider would agree) is making a scientifically testable claim. They need to demonstrate this to the world through something like the JREF Challenge (now terminated).

This apologist continues with an example of Christian magic that could only be supported through confirmation bias.

My wife, for example, sees significance in colors. When God has something to say to her, she notices a particular color that stands out, and over the years she’s come to associate specific colors with specific meanings. Also, when God wants to get her attention, she loses something; she might misplace her car keys, for example, and whenever she finds them, the location where she finds them and the nature of how she misplaced them will give her insight into some problem she’s facing at the moment.

I’ll bet that’s as reliable a divination tool as picking a Bible verse blindfolded and then parsing it for God’s meaning. Why not just read animal entrails or tea leaves?

He concludes:

All of the interaction I’ve described goes on subtly, without fanfare. God is seldom ostentatious; He does what He needs to do to get His point across with a bare minimum of disturbance, and He leaves no tracks.

Which is what you’d have to say if “God” were just coincidence and wishful thinking.

Conclusion

I marvel at the god Christians have collectively created with these ten rationalizations (realizing, of course, that not every Christian would embrace them all). God becomes a Donald Trump, drunk on power and demanding that he get all the praise he’s due. On a sticky note above God’s monitor is “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” from the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

This God is no sage, determined to reduce his ego. On the contrary, his ego is as big as a Trump Baby balloon and continues to swell.

And yet these apologists must explain why this thin-skinned God is unaccountably hidden. If praise were so important, that’s all the more reason for him not to be hidden. A God unwilling to step into this spotlight of praise is as likely as Donald Trump avoiding the opportunity to be the center of attention.

We’ve looked at ten reasons Christians give to praise and worship God. Now it’s my turn.

  • Focusing on praise and worship keeps Christians compliant and submissive. They’re repeatedly shown how insignificant they are and how dependent they are on the church. This benefits those in power at the top, the priesthood and politicians.
  • Praise and worship can help the Christian feel better, like music or the grandeur of a big church. It’s comforting and infantilizing (more on how Christianity infantilizes churchgoers here).

These natural explanations are sufficient to explain why a religion might incorporate praise and worship. No gods are required. Religions evolve, and these are two of the beneficial traits that stuck around.

I cannot believe in a God
who wants to be praised all the time.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

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Image via pixabay, CC license
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5 Ways to Correct Misinformation While Minimizing the Backfire Effect

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In part 1, we explored the Backfire Effect, the surprising effect of a correction to deeply held misinformation reinforcing that misinformation.

The first lesson is that the obvious path—simply providing the new information with references—is not the best when recipients could see this as an attack on their worldview. Let’s see if we can do better.

1. Avoid reinforcing the misinformation

The Debunking Handbook is a great resource for understanding the Backfire Effect and how to minimize it. Their first tip is to focus on the facts, not the myth. Using “President Obama is a Muslim” as an example myth, the last thing that the corrector of this misinformation should do is give any more airtime to the myth. In other words, don’t title the article, “Is Obama a Muslim??”

It’s analogous to how to avoid trouble when driving. When bad things are suddenly happening around you, focus on the safe route through the chaos, not on the accident. And when correcting myths, focus on the truth, not the myth.

The article recommends sandwiching the myth in the facts.

  • The title should focus on the facts without acknowledging the myth—something like “Obama’s Christianity Is as Deep as MLK’s.”
  • Begin the article with facts: Obama’s connection to the church since his twenties, say, or his participation in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church.
  • Briefly acknowledge the myth, but clearly label it as wrong: “Some people incorrectly think that President Obama is Muslim” for example.
  • Conclude by showing how the myth is flawed. Give quotes from respected people making the point or quotes from Obama showing his publicly acknowledged faith, say. End with a quotable line that summarizes the fact.

2. Avoid overkill—less is more

There’s a debate maxim that if you’re explaining, you’re losing. That’s the genius behind the “Gish Gallop,” the technique made famous by young-earth Creationist Duane Gish. During interviews and debates, he would vomit forth a torrent of flawed but compelling challenges to evolution. Biologists interviewed with him would often take the bait and carefully explain why each was crap, but these explanations are long and boring. Gish was firing blanks, but he made a lot of noise and often made the better showing.

When correcting a myth, don’t create obstacles for your reader. A mountain of information may be too much to bother with. Make it easy to access, process, and accept. Instead of a pile of arguments, give just a few key arguments that make the point clearly and painlessly. Remember that you’re arguing against a simple, pleasing myth. Your reader doesn’t want to wrestle with a long and boring dissertation.

The basics of clear communication also apply. Use graphics when possible, use short sentences and short paragraphs, and use headings and simple language. Avoid combative language that will alienate. Be respectful and eliminate emotional language.

The journalist’s pyramid model is another useful tool. The reader might leave at any point, and you want the information to that point to be as complete as possible. Start with a broad, high-level view, and work your way down to the details.

The Debunking Handbook gives an example where three tabs on a web page allow readers to choose to read the information at a basic, intermediate, or advanced level based on their knowledge and interest.

3. Avoid attacking worldviews

Attacking someone’s worldview will likely trigger the Backfire Effect and reinforce their commitment to the misinformation, but there are a couple of tricks to Trojan horse the message past the mental barricades. First, putting people in a positive frame of mind—for example, by asking them to write a few sentences about a time they felt good after acting on an important value—makes a new idea less threatening. The article “How facts backfire” observes:

This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

Another approach is to frame a message through word choices that minimize attacks on someone’s worldview. The organizer of Seattle Skeptics once made a nice save using this approach. He was giving a talk about the 9/11 Truth movement, which argues that the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy. He expected an audience of skeptics who accepted the official explanation, but it turned out to be an audience of 9/11 Truthers, who embraced the conspiracy. He quickly reframed his message to be more acceptable by using their approach, which is to ask questions such as, “Why do they not want you to know this? What are they hiding?”

The new Truther-flavored argument went something like this: Here’s a response to one of the popular Truther arguments. Why did I have to tell you this instead of the Truther web sites? What do you suppose they’re hiding?

Does this sound like cheating? The article disagrees: “Self-affirmation and framing aren’t about manipulating people. They give the facts a fighting chance.”

A third option focuses on the source of the flawed information rather than the consumer. Make it hurt to spread misinformation. Increase its reputation cost. For example, FactCheck.org is one organization that tries to hold politicians to a high standard.

You may need to focus your message on the winnable subset of the audience. The curious, questioning, or undecideds may be reachable, while you may have to write off those who have no interest in listening to threatening new ideas.

4. Avoid leaving a mental hole

Don’t simply eliminate the myth in someone’s mind. An incomplete model—that is, a model of how things work with the myth crossed out—causes discomfort. The human mind prefers an incorrect model to an incomplete one. Quickly fill that hole with the correct facts, neatly packaged to drop in as a replacement. With a few sentences, show how this corrected model explains the facts better.

To help pry out the myth, you may want to highlight the techniques that made the myth seem plausible—perhaps they used experts who weren’t experts or cherry picked the data. Also consider exposing the agenda of whoever is pushing the myth.

5. Avoid a combative posture—be partners instead

Instead of an “I’m right and you’re wrong” approach, go into the discussion seeing it as a partnership, with both of you trying to figure out the right answer.

Am I worried that Christians will improve their arguments with information in this post? Not at all. When all communication is clearer and biases are avoided, I win. A clearer atheist position will even more strongly beat a clearer Christian position.

And that’s the point about beliefs—they don’t change facts.
Facts, if you’re rational, should change beliefs.
— Ricky Gervais (The Unbelievers movie trailer)

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Education is a condom for your brain.
— seen on the internet

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/10/14.)

Image via Wikimedia, CC license
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