When I was a kid, I liked to read puzzle books and try to figure out the answers without looking in the back. I do remember one puzzle, though, that I couldn’t understand even after I read the answer.

Here’s a variant of that puzzle. See if you do any better.

The puzzle of the hidden dots

The abbot at the Logical Monastery was retiring. He had submitted logical tests and puzzles to the monks to find the most worthy successor. With three candidates remaining, he presented his final problem.

He arranged them in a circle facing each other. “Close your eyes,” the abbot said. “I will put on your forehead a dot of paint, either red or blue.”

The abbot put a red dot on each monk’s forehead. “Now open your eyes, and raise your hand if you see at least one red dot.”

Each monk raised his hand.

“The first one to identify the color of his dot, with the correct reasoning, will take my place as head of this monastery.”

Finally, one monk said, “My dot is red, and I know why.”

What was his reasoning?

If this puzzle is new to you, you may want to work on it before reading the answer below.

God belief as a logic puzzle

Some Christians have little use for evidence and arguments and are content to accept a remarkable claim from an authority such as a parent or a priest. But for those who need reasons to support their beliefs, however, this logic puzzle is analogous to what some apologists say God has set before us. You must read books. You must study philosophy. You must listen to lectures and watch debates. You must wrestle with and overcome your doubts. You must learn obtuse arguments like the Transcendental Argument or the Ontological Argument, and you must defeat challenges like the Problem of Evil or the Problem of Divine Hiddenness.

Apologists imagine God belief as this kind of obtuse puzzle, not because the evidence points that way but because they’re forced to. They have no choice, since the simpler and more desirable option—that God’s existence is as obvious as the existence of the next person you walk past in the street—is clearly not available to them. Unwilling to give up their beliefs or to admit that they’ve been wrong, they assume God, double down on faith, and invent these bizarre rationalizations.

Find the simpler explanation. A loving creator god who desired a relationship with his creation would just make himself known. We have insufficient evidence to overcome the default hypothesis, that God is yet another made-up supernatural being.

If you’re just going to go with “well, his ideas lived on,”
I’ll put Jesus behind Archimedes, Socrates, Euclid, Galileo, Newton,
Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein, Fleming, and Bohr in that regard.
All of their ideas are current today and of great value in modern society,
whereas Jesus espoused monarchy, slavery, and 2nd-class status for women.
— commenter Richard S. Russell

Photo credit: David Singleton

Appendix: The reasoning of the logical monk

I suppose the test should be equally hard for each participant. I see two red dots, and for us to have the same puzzle, symmetry would demand that we all see two red dots. But I can’t be sure that we were each given the same puzzle, so that assumption may be a trap.

Let me start with the facts: I see two red dots, and the options are (1) I have a blue dot and (2) I have a red dot.

Consider option 1 first. How would the other monks reason if I had blue? Since they each have red, they would see Red Guy and Blue Guy. They would think, “Suppose I had blue. Red Guy would see two blues—me and Blue Guy. He wouldn’t have raised his hand to say that he saw at least one red. But he did! So therefore the hypothesis ‘I have blue’ is false. So therefore I must have red!”

This is simple reasoning, and they would have given the answer within seconds. But that didn’t happen. Therefore option 1—that I have a blue dot—must be false.

Therefore, option 2 is true, and I have a red dot.

Let’s continue with our exploration of stupid arguments Christians shouldn’t use (Part 1 here).

Stupid Argument #20a: Science can’t explain everything; therefore, God. The origin of life? Of consciousness? Of the universe? If you don’t have an answer, I do—God did it!

Science doesn’t have answers to some questions, and we’ll have to be patient. But some apologists seem desperate and insistent in their search for answers to life’s riddles. This is because they already have an answer. They started their investigation with an answer.

“Time’s up!” they say. “Pass your tests to the front.”

This apparent eagerness to understand reality is simply a smokescreen. They want to shoehorn in their answer for all puzzles, and science’s answers are irrelevant. If science did come up with a consensus view of a Christian’s puzzle du jour, our Christian would simply drop the resolved issue and find a new one.

Don’t tell me an issue is a big deal to you if it’s not. If your faith is built on science not having an answer to abiogenesis, say, then let’s talk about it. But if you have no skin in the game and you’re simply going to move the goalposts when you lose, it’s a waste of time.

Science is the only discipline that tells us new things about reality. As just one example of well-founded science, consider that we’re communicating with computers over the internet.

Stupid Argument #20b: Science has been wrong; therefore, God. What about Piltdown Man? The steady-state universe? The origin of the moon? Science changes its mind all the time! What kind of a reliable foundation is this?

Remember what it was that uncovered the Piltdown Man hoax, discovered that the universe is expanding, and improved our understanding of the origin of the solar system—it was science every time, not the Bible and not theologians or philosophers. Science is imperfect but self-correcting. Science delivers.

Stupid Argument #21a: Scientific illiteracy. “Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.” — Bill O’Reilly

Actually, Bill, the big kids have understood for centuries how earth’s rotation and the gravitational effects of the sun and moon cause tides.

Another example of scientific cluelessness is Ray Comfort’s famous video where he holds up a banana and declares, “Behold the atheist’s nightmare!” No, Ray, the banana that God gave us was small, tasteless, and full of seeds. The sweet Cavendish banana that you held up is the result of thousands of years of human cultivation.

Ray’s “crocoduck” (his conclusion that since we don’t see a crocodile/duck hybrid, evolution is crap) gets an honorable mention.

We all have to start somewhere. If you’re scientifically or mathematically undereducated, compensate with an open mind. Too often what I see instead is scientific illiteracy combined, not with open-mindedness, but with hubris. If your education came from the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, or the Creation Research Institute, you’ve been poorly educated. Your confidence is misplaced.

Stupid Argument #21b: Mathematical illiteracy. The life of Jesus fulfilled 300 prophecies! The probability of just eight of these coming true randomly—that is, without him being the real deal—is 1 in 10¹⁷. Cover the state of Texas in silver dollars two feet deep and find a particular one, blindfolded, by dumb luck—that’s the equivalent probability.

Whatcha gonna say against probability, right? Actually, a fair amount: I dismantle that ridiculous argument here.

We humans have a surprisingly poor native grasp of probability. Another helpful puzzle is the Monty Hall problem. Give it a try and see how you do.

Stupid Argument #22: Relying on the ignorance of your audience. Put a single cell in a normal saline solution, and poke it with a needle. You’ve got all the elements of life, and yet you’ll never get life. Don’t tell me that evolution works!

I heard this while speaking to Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan Wells at a Discovery Institute book release event. I forgot what I asked to get this response, but it stopped me. I’d never heard this puzzle before and didn’t have anything to say in response.

But I do now. No biologist says that this was the step prior to this cell on its evolutionary progression, so the puzzle is meaningless. He’s right that you’ll never get life from that mixture, but no one said that you would. That cell came from another living cell and so on back through much speciation to the beginning of life on earth.

But, having a doctorate in molecular and cellular biology, Wells knew this. Why then pose this challenge? Why take advantage of my ignorance?

Here’s another example. I attended a presentation by Andrew Snelling (PhD in geology) of the Institute for Creation Research on radioisotope dating of Grand Canyon rocks (summary here). He collected a number of samples of amphibolite. They were from a single layer and so were all the same age. He sent them to two laboratories for four kinds of radioisotope dating. The date results were all over the map. Conclusion: radioisotope dating is unreliable.

Only after I did some research did I discover that amphibolite is metamorphic rock and that only igneous rock can be reliably radioisotope dated.

So a geologist (who knows that radioisotope dating isn’t reliable on metamorphic rocks) gets some metamorphic rocks, has them dated, and then is shocked—shocked!—when the dates aren’t reliable. A “devastating failure for long-age geology,” as the subtitle suggests? Not quite.

Snelling counted on the ignorance of his audience, and he fooled me—at least until he could get out of the auditorium. I was not amused, and this did nothing to build support for his position.

Continue with Part 7.

I conclude [that this fallacious reasoning]
must be a product of a brain unsatisfied with doubt;
as nature abhors a vacuum,
so, too, does the brain abhor no explanation.
It therefore fills in one, no matter how unlikely.
— Michael Shermer

Photo credit: Eric Petruno

This is a guest post from Stephen Gray, a modified excerpt from his upcoming book.

Stephen Gray has a degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, with graduate work in physics from Harvard. He has been studying science and its relationship to religion for years. He is the author of Christianity in Ruins: Refuting the Faith, which is expected to be released in a few weeks. 

Here’s his list of God’s blunders.

1. The perfect God created an imperfect universe. That was his first lapse.
2. God is merciful, just, perfect, moral, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnifree, transcendent, genderless, beginningless, causeless, infinite, spaceless, and timeless or eternal. He could easily provide evidence for these properties but doesn’t. Big error.
3. God created the world and a man and woman. He liked his creation. Adam and Eve were given free will, allowing them to disobey God’s orders. God made another blunder.
4. Adam and Eve manifested a program bug called “original sin.” That made God place an evil spell on all of humanity forever. That was extremely immoral and comprised one of his worst misdeeds.
5. God intended the Bible to be a guide to morality and to show his love for humanity, but the older part is full of things like genocides, cannibalism, murder, and blood sacrifices, all done or ordered by God himself. The contrast between what God says and what he does defines hypocrisy.
6. God had the Bible written to explain his rules and to teach us about Jesus. But the book contains contradictions, ambiguities, ridiculous science, incorrect history, pointless trivia, poor continuity, duplications, inaccurate arithmetic, wrong geography, imitations of older myths, impossible miracles, and plentiful immorality. It deserves a grade of F–, but God shows no remorse.
7. God could have made our self-control stronger without limiting free will. Not doing this was another bungle.
8. God, finding his work to be terrible, started over. He killed everything, even flowers, birds, trees, kittens, babies, and fetuses, making him the most prolific abortionist and animal killer of all time. The deaths did not help, so his mass murder was an inexcusable foulup.
9. God showed extreme sadism by telling Abraham to kill his son but stopped him at the last second. God also had Satan torture Job and kill his ten children. God never apologized or explained. These acts were unusually evil even for God.
10. God later created a “son,” who both was born at a specific time and existed eternally. This issue will remain a baffling puzzle until all theologians get fired for pointless speculation. Then we can declare it nonsense and forget about it.
11. Jesus descended from King David in two different ways, but the actual father was the Holy Spirit. Was the son descended from David or not? Confusing.
12. The son is identical to God and part of him, so he is his own father and his own son. Objective observers see that this is nuts.
13. The third part of God is identical to but separate from the first two. Its first act was to impregnate Jesus’ mother. It is not known whether this thing is a person, part of one, or something else. The parts of God are called the Trinity, but a Binity might be slightly less ridiculous.
14. How God’s third ingredient impregnated the virgin is obscure. He, she, or it may have used Joseph’s semen and, having no need to do anything the normal way, entered Mary through her ear. This avoids the problem of Mary’s vagina.
15. There are more supernatural entities in this monotheistic religion. He is called Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, etc. He practices deception and tempts humans to sin, quite superfluous given our curse of original sin. God is unable to kill him even though Satan is outnumbered three to one by the Trinity—or not.
16. The Bible explains how to be saved from Hell, but there are many different ways, each one necessary and sufficient. That is logically impossible, so believers have every right to be confused. Leaving salvation unclear is a major blunder.
17. By painfully killing his son, God punished himself or part of himself in a 1/3 suicide that lasted only a day and a half, so his self-punishment was insincere. Given his record of mistakes, he should have voluntarily disappeared.
18. The son, Jesus—that is, God, part of God, or something—was dead but is now alive and with his father, that is, himself, so the sacrifice did and did not occur. That is evidence of God’s inability to think. He needs a brain transplant.
19. The son was supposed to come back in the 1st century, but he’s been absent for 2000 years. A psychiatrist would label this extreme passive-aggressiveness, but the only word doctors have for being that late is dead.
20. God said that the postmortem life will occur in Heaven, whatever that is. There is no coherent account of what happens there, but many people are eager to go anyway. God might make a good salesman for house plots in a swamp.
21. In the second part of the book, God orders eternal roasting as punishment for disbelief, even if a person sincerely tries to believe but cannot. Giving us the ability to reason but punishing us for using it is a horrible, evil crime. God should commit suicide or permanently confine himself to a padded cell.
22. God wants humans to freely love him but issues hideous threats if we don’t. One cannot love while being threatened. Major mistake.
23. God persists in permanently hiding, perhaps out of shame for his extreme incompetence. His hiddenness makes it almost impossible for a rational person to believe in him, indicating a self-defeating personality. His failure to get help for this problem is a major offense.
24. One of God’s worst errors was creating millions of people who believe in him despite the lack of evidence and the presence of so many mistakes in his book. This proves that the human brain is defective, so its designer is also defective.
25. God let his favorite religion split into hundreds of branches. The Old Testament God has been properly called the nastiest character in all fiction. His sick behavior and failure to get it treated is negligent.

This particular God could not run a taco stand, let alone a universe.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
— Richard Dawkins

We’ve recently seen that God has a hard time following his own Ten Commandments, but he has other moral lapses that aren’t covered by that list.

Slavery

Slavery is first on the bonus list of God’s immorality. I’ve written a lot on this issue already, so let’s keep this brief. I’ll summarize by saying that Old Testament slavery of foreigners was just like American slavery of Africans (more here and here).

Rape

God also has no problem with rape (Deut. 22:28–9), sexual slavery (Numbers 31:18), or forced marriage (Judges 21:11–12). The Bible has a long list of odd ideas about marriage and sex.

Homosexuality

God is on the wrong side of this issue, too.

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads. (Leviticus 20:13)

(More here, here, and here.)

A better source of morals than the Bible

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. Consider some highlights to see if mere humans can do a better job than God’s holy book.

• Article 2: These rights apply to everyone
• Article 3: No genocide
• Article 4. No slavery
• Article 5. No torture
• Article 16. Marriage allowed regardless of race, nationality, or religion. Both spouses must consent. Divorce is allowed.
• Article 18. Freedom to reject one’s religion

We can thank Western society for these principles, not the Bible.

Not only is the Bible on the wrong side of these moral issues, it also shows its early Iron Age origin on political issues. Again, some highlights from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

• Article 10. Fair trial
• Article 11. The accused is innocent until proven guilty
• Article 19. Freedom of speech
• Article 20. Freedom of assembly
• Article 21. Universal suffrage
• Article 26. Right to education
• Article 29: Democracy.

None of these come from the Bible. (I’ve written more on the Bible vs. the U.S. Constitution here.)

God creates evil

When bad things happen, where was God? Was he not paying attention? Was he powerless against the intrigues of Satan? No—the Bible makes clear that God creates the evil himself.

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, Jehovah, do all these things (Isaiah 45:7).

Is it not from the mouth of El Elyon that both calamities and good things come? (Lamentations 3:38)

When disaster comes to a city, has not Jehovah caused it? (Amos 3:6)

Of course, there’s always a Christian apologist eager to show how this is actually a good thing. Megachurch pastor John Piper says:

God is more glorious for having conceived and created and governed a world like this with all its evil.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. … Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives?¹

With a god like this, who needs Satan?! And in times of trouble, you’re supposed to turn to the guy who brought you the calamity in the first place? Talk about an abusive relationship!

God is like the guy who sets a fire in the basement of an apartment building and then plays the hero as he sounds the alarm and rescues people.

The ultimate unfalsifiable hypothesis?

What could God do and not be moral? Not killing, lying, and causing evil—he’s already done all these things. Not genocide, slavery, stealing, and rape—he’s already advocated these.

It’s an odd dictionary that has an exception to allow anyone to do these things and still be called “moral.”

God is like a petulant and pampered heir who’s always gotten his way and careens through life, oblivious to the harm he causes, with a train of Daddy’s minions to clean up the damage. In God’s case, it’s Christians who clean up after him, assuring everyone that whatever happens—from suicide for anti-gay bullying, to slavery and genocide in the Bible, to natural disasters—God gets only credit and never blame.

God is good; evil exists; God is all-powerful—
pick any two.
— Anon.

¹ quoted by Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God (2011), 65.

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 a tough patch in life or vice versa.

You recognize their voice and their laugh. You have funny stories you could tell at their retirement 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, starting with the strongest.

• 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 just 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 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 flawed 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. My guess is that we’re seeing what has been called 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 relationship with buddies at the gym or book club.

We see this definition fiddling with other positive words—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. 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.

Image credit: Don Addis

Christians are modern people, about as intelligent as any other group, and yet they jump into a world of ancient mythology and act like it’s real. They’re like trekkers who dress up as Vulcans or Klingons at a Star Trek convention. Or as Imperial Storm Troopers or Wolverine at Comicon or Dragon*con.

The difference, of course, is that faux Vulcans or Klingons know that it’s just for fun. They might spend lots of time and money on their costumes. They might learn to speak Vulcan or Klingon. But at the end of the conference, they put conventional clothes back on and reenter conventional society. They realize it’s pretend.

In a similar way, Christians leave church and reenter conventional society. Some know (or suspect) that the mythology isn’t real, like a trekker who’s in it for the pageantry and camaraderie, but many Christians do live the mythology.

Wisdom from M*A*S*H

This reminds me of the M*A*S*H television episode where Radar O’Reilly tells Sidney the psychiatrist that he has a teddy bear and wonders if he’s crazy.

“Me and my teddy bear are very close,” Radar said. “I mean … sometimes I talk to it.”

“Does it ever talk back?” Sidney asked.

“No!”

“You know how many people write letters to Romeo and Juliet and think that ‘I Love Lucy’ is real?” Sidney said. “Those people are living nice, safe lives, with towels and sheets. They’re not up to their ankles in mud, blood, and death the way you are.”

Sidney predicts that Radar probably won’t need the teddy bear once he leaves Korea. In Radar’s last episode, this prophecy is fulfilled.

You can get through life thinking that “I Love Lucy” or some other TV sitcom is real, or that food is produced at the grocery store, or that electricity is made somewhere on the other side of the electric plug but with no idea of how. You can imagine that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, that the Apollo moon landing was a hoax, that homeopathy works, or that we live in the end times.

Or that God exists.

Society’s increasing complexity insulates us from unpleasant reality

During medieval times and before, people did know where food came from (and horseshoes and wagons and cathedrals and any other element of their lives) because if they didn’t participate in that industry personally, they’d at least have seen how it was done.

Though they had a thorough grasp of the simple technology of their world, they also believed lots of nutty stuff, religion included. But, of course, they didn’t have an alternative. They didn’t have modern science to explain away the superstition and poorly evidenced explanations.

Medieval society was harsh and unforgiving, but modern life coddles people. It’s society with air bags and training wheels. Though they have little excuse, people can hold their unsupportable beliefs with little penalty. You want to imagine that that illness can be cured with prayer? Go for it—society will be here to catch you if you fall.

They can see science and technology deliver nine times but still doubt it the tenth time, and they can see religion fail nine times but still expect it to succeed the tenth time.

Society insulates Christians from reality as if they were Klingons at a convention. I just wish that, like the Klingons, they realized that it’s all just pretend.

God is really just the manager of a call center
with shitty customer service.
— hector jones, commenter

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/29/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia