Do we live in a world with a god? There are many reasons to reject that idea (part 1 here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world:

11. Because God is absent from where we’d expect him

Victor Stenger makes the Argument from Absence, which observes that we don’t find God where we’d expect to. This is a direct response to a popular Christian argument that goes something like this: “You say God doesn’t exist? Well let me ask you this: have you looked everywhere in the universe? How do you know he doesn’t exist if you haven’t looked everywhere?”

This is simply the “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist” argument, which is off topic because I’m not trying to prove God doesn’t exist. However, when you look in places where you’d expect to find evidence of God, and you find none, that is evidence against God.

Stenger explores eight areas.

1. Cosmology. We should find evidence for God in cosmology, but natural laws are sufficient. We find no data that needs a miraculous violation of laws. “Well established cosmological knowledge indicates that the universe began with maximum entropy, that is, total chaos with the absence of structure. Thus the universe bears no imprint of a creator.”

2. Evolution. We should find God in the structure of living things, but evolution is sufficient. Complex organisms evolved from simpler ones in a variations-on-a-theme way. Life forms are marvelously complex, but elegance is what we’d expect to find in a designed lifeform, not mere complexity. Far from being evidence of a Creator, the junk in DNA argues for the opposite conclusion.

3. Souls. We should find evidence that God gave humans souls, but the supernatural isn’t necessary to explain consciousness, memory, or personality (more). There is no evidence that souls are anything more than wishful thinking.

4. Revelation. The Bible claims that God gives communicates through revelations, but we can’t verify this. Even many of the un-supernatural claims like the Exodus and David’s empire now appear to be false.

5. Prayers. Jesus in the Bible claimed that prayers are reliably answered (more here and here). The Bible has no qualifiers like “if you’re worthy” or “if your prayer happens to line up with God’s plan.” Christians make billions of prayers, but there is no convincing evidence that God answers any. Prayer is easy to study scientifically, but the comprehensive Templeton Study found no evidence of the value of prayer.

6. Inhospitable universe. The Bible makes clear that the universe was created with man in mind, but the vast majority of the universe (and the majority of the earth) is inhospitable to man. The universe has 200 billion galaxies, but earth was the actual purpose? Nope.

7. New information. If God communicates with people through prayer or revelation, there should be evidence of people having information they could only have gotten supernaturally. Instead, no such claim has checked out, and the Bible has no information that wouldn’t have already been available to the people who wrote it (more here and here).

8. Morality. Is God the source of morality? Given the barbaric morality God displays in the Old Testament, it’s clear that he is no moral authority. For example, God said that slavery was fine, but we say that it’s abhorrent. Both can’t both be right. Christians must pick.

This relates to Hitchens’ Moral Challenge: identify a moral action taken or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer that couldn’t be taken or uttered by an unbeliever—something that only a believer could do and an atheist couldn’t. There is nothing.

But now think of the reverse: something terrible that only a believer would do or say. Examples from the Bible easily come to mind—Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac, for example. Today, Christians justify lots of things, from Westboro Baptist Church’s “God hates fags” to any hateful or selfish conclusion justified by “because God (or the Bible) says” such as condemning homosexuality, blocking civil rights, prohibiting stem cell research, and so on.

Could God be hiding under a rock somewhere that we haven’t peeked under? Sure, but this secretive god isn’t the Christian god who’s eager for a relationship. These are eight places where we would expect a god to be, and our searches have come up empty.

12. Because physics rules out the soul or the afterlife

This is a related argument by another physicist, Sean Carroll. He notes that there is plenty of physics we don’t understand, but the physics of the everyday world is very well understood. If a soul exists, it would need to exist in particles, and it would need particles to convey it into the afterlife. No such particles exist. Unlike “Have you looked everywhere in the universe?” we have looked everywhere for particles that interact in our daily lives. We’ve found them all, and none could explain the soul.

Here’s his critique of hiding places for the soul particle(s):

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

The Christian god needs physics to build a soul, but physics isn’t cooperating. This doesn’t offer much hope for the afterlife, either. (More)

Continue with part 6.

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Image via John D, CC license

Do we live in a world with a god? There are many reasons to reject that idea (part 1 here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world:

5. Because nothing distinguishes those who follow god from everyone else

A few years ago, I visited a museum exhibit of the jewelry of Russia’s imperial family, the Romanovs. The focus was on the Faberge jewelry, with several of the famous Easter eggs as the centerpiece, but there was more. I was most taken with the Christian icons—paintings and statues of religious figures, crosses, and so on—from Tsarina Alexandra. She was extremely religious, and as Tsarina she performed daily religious rituals, humbled herself by embroidering linen for the church, read little but religious material, and consulted wandering “men of God” like Rasputin.

Her devotion did nothing to help her family, and they were murdered shortly after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

We can find many other examples where Christians took to heart Christianity’s promise of answered prayer. Christian faith was strong on both sides of the U.S. Civil War, and yet roughly 700,000 died, about as many as in all other wars involving the U.S.

Francis Galton conducted an innovative prayer experiment in 1872. Since “God save the king” (or something similar) was a frequent public prayer, members of royal families should live longer. Few will be surprised to hear that they did not.

I recently wrote of hypocrisy from a radio ministry on the question of prayer. The ministry first mocked atheists’ stupidly observing that God didn’t save the lives of Christians in a Texas church shooting, along the lines of, “Who doesn’t know that Jesus promised tribulation to his followers rather than luxury?” But six weeks later, the ministry was asking for prayers to speed the recovery of a staff member with a serious injury, insisting now that prayers do benefit believers.

If there’s a God, then they got it right once—prayers and devotion from believers should have an effect. Here again, the pro-Christian evidence you’d expect doesn’t exist.

6. Because televangelists make clear that prayer doesn’t work

Watch a televangelist show. You will see periodic appeals that first ask the audience for prayers and then for money. Sometimes you’ll see a text crawl across the bottom with the phone number euphemistically labeled “prayer request” (which sounds better than “place to give me money”).

But doesn’t that sound strange? If prayers get God to do something, then the televangelist could just pray himself. Or, if the power of prayer is proportionate to the number of voices, the televangelist could just harness the audience to turn his small voice into a holy airhorn. God’s actions make any human generosity pointless. What could money do that God couldn’t?

Televangelists make clear the uncomfortable truth: prayer doesn’t work. Money (or filthy lucre, if you prefer) does. A real god who claimed that prayers work would deliver on that promise.

7. Because Christians want help from the government

The U.S. Constitution is secular, and the separation between church and state is made mandatory with the First Amendment. Even if crossing the line weren’t unconstitutional, what would it say about the weakness of Christian claims that it needs to lean on the government to support itself?

Despite the prohibition, Christianity isn’t content to stay on its side of the back seat. Think of the accommodations it already gets: the President has been obliged to issue a proclamation declaring a National Day of Prayer since 1952, “In God We Trust” is the national motto, conservative voters punish politicians who aren’t sufficiently Christian (bypassing Article VI of the Constitution, which prohibits a religious test for public office), and the IRS has for years failed to revoke churches’ nonprofit status when they violate the Johnson amendment’s prohibition against politicking from the pulpit. Conservatives are continually pushing for Creationism and prayer in public schools, “In God We Trust” displays in government buildings, Ten Commandments monuments and manger scene displays on public property, the ability to deny service and government licenses to people their god doesn’t like, and prayer to start meetings in venues from Congress down to city councils.

Christians who value the rights that Western society grants us today—voting, no slavery, no torture, non-coercive marriage, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom of speech, fair trial, democracy, and so on—must remember that these all came from secular sources. Biblically based society would have none of these (more here and here). Don’t think that Christianity is the foundation on which is built American democracy; instead, American Christianity is permitted by the Constitution (more).

When Christian leaders push against constitutional limits on religion, they admit that Christianity’s arguments are so weak that they need to push the government to support their cause. A real God wouldn’t need such help.

Continued in part 4.

Image via roobislem, CC license

Think about someone you know well—a friend or relative, say. Now list the attributes that make them unique. You could give the physical attributes that would help me find them at the airport—gender and age, height and weight, hair color and style, and so on—but you know much more than that.

You might know how they shake hands and if they like to hug. You might know their favorite music and sports, their favorite foods and food allergies, which TV shows they like and which they hate, their annoying habits, the names of their pets, their medical issues, where they went to school and where they’ve lived, and their past jobs. You may have helped them through tough times in life or vice versa.

You recognize their voice and their laugh. You have funny stories you could tell at their birthday party and poignant stories for their funeral—or vice versa.

If you have a “personal relationship with Jesus,” can you say the same thing? Can you list attributes about Jesus? If so, do you imagine that they’re the same as those of other Christians? If not, why call this a relationship?

Christians today only know Jesus from the artwork. But give your Jesus a haircut, a shave, and modern clothes. As Richard Russell (whose essay inspired this post) observed about Jesus, “You couldn’t pick him out of a 1-person lineup.” Jesus is nothing but a costume.

The many flavors of “relationship”

Consider a sequence of relationships, ranked from strongest to weakest.

1. Start with the one described above, an intimate, long-term relationship with a family member or close friend.
2. Now we begin to degrade the relationship. Consider a less-intimate relationship with someone you’ve met face to face. This might be neighbor, co-worker, acquaintance from a party, or the parent of one of your kid’s classmates who you recognize but whose name you’ve forgotten. You have strong evidence that you met someone, though you have few intimate details.
3. This is a voice- or text-only relationship such as that with a pen pal or online friend. Though these relationships can be intimate, no one would consider them equivalent to a face-to-face relationship. They can be spoofed (I wrote about the unfortunate Manti Teʻo here).
4. Finally, drop even this channel of communication so that there is no objective evidence of any intelligence on the other end of the relationship except a mirror of yourself. You can fool yourself quite easily (and if you’re responding, “No, I can’t!” then you see how unassailable your own ideas can be). Maybe there really is an intelligence that refuses to communicate any way except this one, but this is indistinguishable from an imaginary friend or delusion.

We know what person and relationship mean. We can look them up. “Relationship” #4 is unlike any actual relationship with an actual person. What we’re seeing is an instance of Shermer’s Law: smart Christians using their substantial intellect to defend beliefs they adopted for indefensible reasons. They might be Christians who adopted that worldview from their environment, but as adults, they know that “cuz I was raised that way” is no intellectual justification for their Christian belief. They can’t admit to having an imaginary friend. Instead, they handwave that they have a relationship with an actual person, no less real than their relationships with close friends in other parts of life.

We see this definition fiddling with other positive attributes—good, just, and merciful, for example. These are great words to apply to their favorite deity, but, given some of God’s shenanigans, Christians must “improve” the definitions to address God’s hateful acts in the Old Testament. Sorry—that’s not how words are used.

Perversely, relationship #4 is the one that apologist William Lane Craig insists is the strongest and the least in need of evidence (I’ve written more here). Only in religion, where every day is Opposite Day, could a lack of evidence be heralded as a virtue.

The only reason you keep [claiming
your “deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ”]
is because it’s the slogan of the club
that some con artist or charlatan has suckered you into believing
you really want to be a member of.
— Richard S. Russell

This post was inspired by “That Deep, Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ” by Richard S. Russell.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/9/14.)

Image credit: Don Addis

What Would Jesus Do?

The WWJD acronym became popular in the nineties as a way to imagine Jesus approaching a moral problem. Would Jesus smoke that joint? Would he skip his homework? Would he stop to help that person? Many young Christians wore a WWJD bracelet to keep the question in mind.

The problem is that this question delivers contradictory answers. Ask Fred Phelps what Jesus would do, and he would’ve said with confidence that Jesus would be preaching, “God hates fags.” Ask Harold Camping, and he would’ve said that Jesus would be warning people about the coming end. Pro-lifers think that Jesus would be picketing abortion clinics. Televangelists say that Jesus would want you to give them lots of money.

Many conservative Christians think that Jesus would reduce taxes, demand Creationism in public schools and prayers in city council meetings, make same-sex marriage illegal, and deny climate change. Many liberal Christians think that he’d welcome gays to church, celebrate the scientific consensus, encourage sex education to minimize unwanted pregnancies, and help the neediest people.

Pick any contentious social issue—abortion, same-sex marriage, gun rights, euthanasia, our obligations to the needy, and so on—and you’ll have millions of thoughtful Christians taking each of the many contradictory positions.

What good is it?

WWJD is a useless slogan because it’s ambiguous. It’s a synonym for “In your most moral frame of mind, what would you do?” The Jesus of the Bible is a sock puppet who says whatever you want him to say.

BOB: Say Jesus, I was thinking of putting a little extra in the offering plate on Sunday for the food bank collection.

JESUS sock puppet (in squeaky voice): Good for you, Bob! After all, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

BOB: And speaking of church, I thought that Frank from across the street was a decent guy until I found out that he’s gay. I think I should give him the silent treatment from now on.

JESUS: You’re right there, Bob! Remember that “I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.”

The problem is pretending that Jesus really is feeding you lines. Dropping this pretense may feel like tightrope walking without a net, but “Jesus” in this case is just a synonym for “conscience.” Yes, you should pause to ask if your action is something you can be proud of, but don’t delude yourself that the source of your morals was ever anyone but you.

Two hands working
can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
— Unknown

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/2/14.)

As an homage to a powerful video from GodIsImaginary.com, I summarized five tough questions in Part 1. Here are five more of my own. I’ll give popular Christian answers for each question and then conclude with a single answer that neatly resolves all of these dilemmas.

6. Why is faith required? In John’s gospel, Thomas missed Jesus’s first appearance. He didn’t believe the others’ story that Jesus had risen and said that he needed to see the nail marks in the hands of Jesus as proof. After Jesus appeared again and satisfied Thomas, Jesus said, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me” (John 20:29). In other words, Thomas believed because he had evidence—nothing special there. But someone who can believe without that evidence? Ah, that person is blessed!

Richard Dawkins challenged Kenneth Miller on some religious matter (both men are biologists, but Miller is Catholic), and Miller replied, “There’s a reason it’s called faith!” Christianity without faith wouldn’t be Christianity. Some say that faith isn’t earned but neither is it a right. Instead, the Holy Spirit gives faith to some using some unknown algorithm.

7. Why is God hidden? Thomas had a scientific attitude. Any scientific claim must respond to the demand for evidence. For example, cold fusion would be nice, but “nice” has no currency within science. There is insufficient evidence for any mechanism of cold fusion, so it is rejected. “God exists” is another claim, and the obvious supporting evidence—God simply making his existence known—is unapologetically unavailable.

God works in mysterious ways. This is yet another test of Christians’ faith.

Mother Teresa wrote about God’s silence: “the silence and the emptiness is so great” and “I have no Faith … [the thoughts in my heart] make me suffer untold agony.” She soldiered on despite her weak faith, and she has been beatified by Rome.

8. Why are there natural disasters? Haiti and Indonesia have been devastated by tsunamis in recent years, each disaster killing about a quarter of a million people. The worst tropical cyclones have killed this many people as well. The disaster area can take years to recover, especially if it hits a third-world region. How can God allow these to happen when it would be trivial to prevent the damage?

Christians have responded that the forces of nature have a good side. Earthquakes recycle minerals, and hurricanes are a consequence of the same weather system that brings sunshine and gentle rains. Disasters test Christians and give them an opportunity to help through prayer or donations. Christians infer God’s hand in the “miracle child” that survives the disaster that killed its parents.

Then there’s the tough-love response. About the 9/11 terrorist attack, Jerry Falwell declared:

The pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

If all else fails, Christians can fall back on the idea that God is there to comfort the grieving.

9. Why does the Bible show God doing terrible things? God demands genocide, and he gives rules regulating slavery just like the rules he gives regulating commerce.

Christians often argue that genocide and slavery were accepted components of society back then. God was simply working within the system. The tribes that God demanded be destroyed must’ve been morally rotten—how could an all-good God act otherwise?—and even leaving their babies alive would risk a future for a tribe that God knew might tempt Israel in the future.

10. Why is the historical record so weak for Christianity? Outside the gospels, there are no biographies of Jesus from contemporary historians, of which there were many. There are not even any mentions of Jesus, aside from disputed passages in Josephus.

God’s plan apparently was to appear on earth in a low-profile way. A grand entrance is apparently not God’s style, and we’re just going to have to live with that.

The other way of resolving these questions

Instead of individual reasons that clumsily address these questions by assuming God’s existence, let’s again try to resolve these questions with a simple hypothesis: there is no god. This simple and obvious explanation—which Christians themselves apply to the other guy’s god—neatly cuts the Gordian Knot.

Let’s revisit those five challenges with this new response.

Why is faith required? All supernatural religious claims require faith because there is insufficient evidence to accept them otherwise. If there were evidence, you can be sure that that would be celebrated, not faith. (More on faith.)

Why is God hidden? Because he doesn’t exist (more). As for God not wanting to provide evidence, he had no problem doing so in the Old Testament.

Why are there natural disasters? We can assign “good” and “bad” labels to events according to how they affect us, but that’s not nature’s perspective. Nature has no obligation to provide a pleasing environment for anyone. We have to do “the Lord’s work” because he sure isn’t doing it.

Why does the Bible show God doing terrible things? Because “God” is just a character in a mythological tale. His imagination and morality are reflections of that of the Iron Age people who created him.

Why is the historical record so weak for Christianity? Because Christianity is a legend that began after decades of oral history. After this, dogmas like the Trinity gradually developed over the centuries, and unpopular interpretations like Gnosticism were pruned away.

Convoluted answers that demand a presupposition of the very thing in question crumble when we simply consider that the fanciful claim is just what it looks like: legend and myth.

We could list lots more questions—Why create an enormous universe if the point was just to create humans? Why does the view of God change through the Bible? If God created the universe, what created God? and so on—but they are all neatly resolved by dropping the God hypothesis.

Elbow deodorant

Elbow deodorant is a solution in search of a problem. We could imagine a society in which the elbows of any cultured person smell like flowers and only the uncouth go au naturel, but smelly elbows just aren’t a problem in our society.

Christianity is elbow deodorant. It is a solution in search of a problem. So Christian leaders invent one: they imagine a god who gets furious if you do bad stuff and will punish you forever. But if you believe certain things, you get a free pass to the Good Place when you die.

No, smelly elbows and a god that doesn’t exist aren’t worth worrying about.

Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt.
It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.
Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age
which has destroyed so many certainties
by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied.
— Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/28/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

I remember listening in amazement to a Christian podcast talking about a tragic situation made worse by Christianity. A panel of Christian pastors were responding to a dilemma raised by a father whose 20-something son had recently died. That was bad enough, but the father’s Christian belief made it worse: according to his denomination, the son was not saved and so didn’t go to heaven on his death. The father’s own belief had put the son in torment in hell. The panel had the difficult task of tap dancing around the issue, offering the father comfort while keeping to their conservative Christian dogma.

Like Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot, the simple solution is to reject the unsubstantiated claim of a hell and any god that could put anyone there.

Tough questions to the Christian

I responded to ten questions from apologist J. Warner Wallace with the post, “10 Tough Questions for the Atheist to Answer.” There’s not much to the list—it’s a collection of as-yet unanswered scientific questions and familiar deist apologetics—but it was a good exercise to address some of the best arguments claimed by the Fundamentalist worldview. With this post, I’d like to return the favor and present some of the toughest atheist challenges to the Christian.

Let’s start with five questions from an older atheist site, GodIsImaginary.com. You may have seen the video, “10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer.” This was a powerful argument when I first saw it, and it’s just as hard hitting today.

These are tough problems for the Christian to answer, but, like the problem of the dead son consigned to hell, they dissolve when looked at the right way.

1. Why won’t God heal amputees? You never see missing limbs spontaneously restored. Why is that? Surely the prayers from amputees and their loved ones are plaintive enough.

Christians might respond that God has a special, unknowable plan. They start with the presupposition that God is omnipotent and loves us, and they conclude that we simply don’t understand. (Some might say that there have indeed been reports of missing limbs restored, but I’m talking about scientifically verified healings—sorry to rain on the parade with a demand for evidence and all.)

2. Why are there so many starving people in our world? Doesn’t God answer their prayers? God has received uncountably many prayers both from the desperate people in the world and from healthy Westerners who are concerned about strangers in need. If God answers any prayers at all, why would they be for your finding a parking space over a starving person not dying?

As before, Christians might say that God has a plan—it may not make sense, but we’ll just have to trust him. Or that strangers’ suffering increases our opportunity to learn compassion or give charitably. Or that it’s all your fault due to the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But let’s not dwell on this too long, because it’s uncomfortable holding the competing ideas of a loving God vs. a god so disconnected with human problems that he allows widespread suffering.

3. Why does the Bible contain so much anti-scientific nonsense? Genesis begins with a flawed view of cosmology picked up from the Sumerians. There was no Flood and no Garden of Eden. Man came from evolution, not from dust. The Bible has no recipe for soap or basic medical advice.

Christians will say that the Bible has no intention of being a science textbook. It simply worked through the flawed worldview of the times. The Bible had no goal to improve the condition of our lives; it taught God’s rules, not health advice.

4. Why do bad things happen to good people? Shouldn’t good Christians get a break? Shouldn’t there be at least a little boost here on earth for backing the right religion? How about something tangible to prove that one’s faith is well placed?

No, God works in mysterious ways. He gives strong faith as he sees fit. Even Mother Teresa complained about the lack of evidence that undercut her faith.

5. How do we explain the fact that Jesus has never appeared to you? Jesus could appear to you, but he doesn’t. He appeared to Paul after he died, so it’s not like he hasn’t done it before. He could appear to give you advice for a tough decision, give you comfort in person like a friend would, or just assure you that he really exists. He doesn’t.

The Christian might argue that God has his reasons, one of the oddest ones being: because then there would be no need for faith. Because apparently just having faith is a noble thing.

The better way of resolving these questions

As shown above, we could cobble together individual reasons for each of these questions to support a Christian worldview. With the work of perhaps millions of determined theologians over the millennia, we have lots of material. Alternatively, we can cut the Gordian Knot with one simple, devastating hypothesis: there is no god.

Let’s run through the five problems to see how this hypothesis neatly resolves them.

Why won’t God heal amputees? Because there is no God to restore their limbs or to answer prayers. “Answered prayers” are just wishful thinking and coincidence. You can pray to God, Shiva, or a jug of milk and get equally poor results.

Why are there so many starving people in our world? Because life is sometimes difficult, nature has no desire to make people either happy or unhappy, and there is no God to magically solve the problem.

Why does the Bible contain so much anti-scientific nonsense? Because it is a product of an Iron Age culture and has no more knowledge than people of Mesopotamia had at that time.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Rain falls on good people just like bad people. There is no God to adjust the balance of luck in favor of the good ones.

How do we explain the fact that Jesus has never appeared to you? Jesus is imaginary.

Concluded in part 2.

(I stand on the shoulders of giants. This post has been an opportunity to acknowledge one of the many sources of insight that I benefitted from in my early days as a seeking atheist. Thanks, Marshall Brain, the force behind GodIsImaginary.)

Strange…a God who could make good children as easily as bad,
yet preferred to make bad ones;
who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short;
mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness
multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell;
who mouths morals to other people and has none himself;
who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all;
who created man without invitation,
then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man,
instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself;
and finally with altogether divine obtuseness,
invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
— Mark Twain

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 05/26/14.)

Image credit: Cambodia Phnom Penh, flickr, CC