My Son's Baptism

On Sunday, July 12, my oldest (13-year-old) son was baptized in a swimming pool. My other son (11) and daughter (9) had already been baptized at a Bible church two years ago while my oldest son was away on a Boy Scout campout. I wasn’t sure whether he would ever choose to be baptized: he has (understandably) expressed confusion to me about what to believe, and he doesn’t like to be in the public spotlight.

Though I continued attending an evangelical church with my family for four years following my deconversion, I dropped out in 2004. The rest of the family attends a local Bible church on most Sundays, but about once a month they meet at a “home church” with some friends in the neighborhood. Though I don’t attend the services, I do join the group for the Sunday noon meal afterward. It was at this home church that a spontaneous offer went out for anyone to be baptized at a nearby pool. I learned at the meal that my son had assented to be baptized (though I have reason to believe it was more out of social pressure than conviction). He expressed concern to me about the kind of questions he would be asked. I really didn’t feel like I could say much, so I told him it was up to him.

We all took off to the pool after the meal. There, the leader of the home church baptized a younger boy and then my son. The only question asked was, “Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died for your sins?”, to which my son somewhat replied “Yes,” then received a dunking.

Afterward the leader (who knows what I believe) told me “Thanks,” to which I (as one who generally likes to be nice to others) instinctively replied, “Thank you.” Later I wondered if I had performed an initiation rite to another religion (or to atheism) for one of his sons, would he have said, “Thank you”? I doubt I was bothered as much by the situation as he would have been bothered by the converse. My own baptism at age 12 didn’t prevent me from leaving the fold later in life, nor does this recent event in itself mystically lock my son into anything irrevocable. Perhaps also I’m cognizant of the fact that I started out my marriage and family as a believer, so I don’t feel as peeved about it as if I had been a skeptic all along and my son had been pulled into fundamentalism out of the blue. Still, it’s a reminder of the fact that religion is relentlessly striving to claim as many as possible of its own, and that someday my son will be forced to make a decision about his direction. If I sit idly by, he will likely take the path of least resistance under this pressure, even if he remains inwardly confused about what to believe.

Even so, I’m not super worried: I was able to find my way out of faith without the support of either parent; at least my children have my example. And if they never see things my way, I can’t say that’s the outcome I desire, but I’ll love them all the same.

I’m sure I’ll hear from some who think I should take a harder line. It’s difficult to say what’s best, but one thing is sure: I love my wife and kids and don’t want anything to jeopardize our union. I will not hesitate to continue gently presenting my views to my children, but I will not force the issue to the detriment of our relationship. That’s the difference between my approach and that of Jesus, who said,

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household’ (Matthew 10:34-36).

An Email About the Paranormal

I received this email and not being an expert on this subject thought I'd listen to the collective wisdom of people who are. What do you think?

I have seen that much of the articles and commentaries in many of the atheist blogs relate to religion as it's practiced in America now. I have a few questions and I hope someone can help me out here.

I am currently a pentecostal from South India (Kerala) but since last year I have been very critical of Christianity. Pentecostal christianity in India is slightly different from the American version. They forbid jewelery, movies, secular songs etc etc (I know there are branches of Christianity in America that practise this too) and there is a lot of 'miracle work', personal prophecy and revelations and steer quite a lot towards personal piety. However, reading the bible and really thinking about it, the whole thing brings forward way too many holes for christianity to be a one stop shop for truth. I have slowly started to move away from christian beliefs and have been inching my way towards atheism. And in most areas I have started to find answers that gives me some clarification.

However there is one aspect that stumps me and I have not been able to find any solid articles regarding it. It's about prophecies. And by prophecies I mean the ability of some pastors to know secrets of a particular person. We have quite a lot of that in India. Predicting the future is nothing big, cause I have read about self fulfilling prophecies and such. But the following has me researching online frantically but not finding anything yet. There's quite a lot of 'supernatural' prophecy phenomenon and miracles (mostly unverified and quite a lot of them involves doctors just doing their job) in South India.

1. I recently had an interesting conversation with my sister and she told me about a pastor who visited her college and revealed things about her that he couldn't possibly have known ever. He did this again with her friends who weren't Christians that turned out to be true. These are things their friends didn't know but he was able to reveal it to the person privately and sort of 'call them to action'. For example, he told a Hindu friend that she has a weak heart and that she should consider surgery. No one except my sister and another friend knew about this. And it seems unlikely that someone else told him about her. (Again, this is what the hindu friend told my sister after the so called consultation, it's not likely again that she should have to lie about it).


2. She again tells me of a couple of students from a college prayer group who meet with a pastor they never knew at a church meeting. The pastor tells them that there is one student in the prayer group who cries out at night. It turns out that a student was going through quite a lot of personal problems and he used to cry at night after prayers. This student accepted christ eventually and was worried about his brothers who weren't saved. He prayed quite a lot and one day saw a vision of a large book and he sees the names of his brothers in the book. The next day he gets a call from his brother and the brother tells him that he accepted Christ last night (the night the student saw that vision). This is what the student told my sister and I have no way of verifying whether he exaggerated or just plain lied.

3. A girl was pondering over questions of God's existence over several months almost tiring herself out. One morning she goes to a church with my sister and friends and the preacher speaks exactly 'what she needed to hear'. After the service, the preacher comes over to the group and suddenly points to her and says 'today's message was directed to you'. No one had told him anything about her.(Incidentally, this pastor's father is thought of as a false prophet by quite a number of people that I know personally)

4. I personally have had prophecies told about me. Most of them were predictions of my future which I could point out as self fulfilling and I could argue against it.

These are unverified but these are testimonies from my sister, who has no reason to lie because she herself is a bit of skeptic, although not as much as me. She does believe the 'holy spirit' reveals things but I definitely can't believe that unless it's verifiable. And there are just too many holes in Christianity to reconcile it with this apparently supernatural phenomenon. I do think this is an area that needs some serious scientific research. If it's being done already please point me to articles regarding this.

Is it the unknown power of the mind? Would anyone at DC know anything in-depth about this? Have you gone through this experience?

Do you think young people are vulnerable enough for people to look into their minds easily?

The Evangelical Philosophical Society Has a Blog

Link.

Robert M. Price Interviewed About His Newest Book, Top Secret.

Link, then scroll down below his picture to listen. He's also speaking in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, if you're nearby. I'll be there as well.

William Lane Craig debates John Shook in Canada, 2008

I've personally skipped most of Craig's opening statement (since I've heard it before) to "Part 3" where John Shook starts at 2:10. Here is the link

Is I Corinthians 15:3-8 ‘Too Early’ to Be Legend?

Dawson Betrhick of the Incinerating Presuppositionalism blog posted an excellent essay on the alleged post resurrection appearances listed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. Mr. Bethrick's style make his critique worthwhile reading. Here is the link to Is I Corinthians 15:3-8 ‘Too Early’ to Be Legend?

Here is the link to Is I Corinthians 15:3-8 ‘Too Early’ to Be Legend?

What Would It Take to Convince an Atheist?

What's Your Favorite Atheist Quote?

Dinesh D'Souza v. Dan Barker Debate

Adam and Eve Didn't Exist -- The Molecules Tell Us Why

Students of biology know with as near a certainty as knowledge is capable of that all organisms on earth are related. All use DNA or RNA as their genetic code. The code for turning DNA into protein is hugely similar in all cases and identical in most cases, and the records of fossils leave no doubt that the timespan involved in the creation of modern multicellular life has been about 3.5 billion years, most of which was spent with only unicellular creatures inhabiting the earth.

If humans are descended from a non-human ancestor, which biology shows definitively, then the story of Adam and Eve is wrong in its particulars without question. It is not even a valuable metaphor for people who don't accept it as true, because it suggests that humans have some special status beyond that of other creatures. Additionally, it suggests that we have "dominion" over the earth, which is a terrible idea that has created a very dangerous mindset in many human beings.

What is the evidence then, for common descent?

In a word, it's overwhelming. We'll look at it in greater detail now.

The most important evidence for common descent can be appreciated by anyone who does a broad survey of the existing kinds of life on earth. What we see are gradations of forms with variations on various types. This is what we would expect if the process of speciation were of a branching nature, with new forms coming from established ones.

However, there are molecular evidences that are real "smoking guns". This happens when an animal has a functioning gene that becomes inactivated. The animal will sometimes die, but occasionally environmental factors allow it to survive with the gene no longer active. When this happens, all the descendants of that animal will carry a "pseudogene" on their genetic code that looks very much like an active ancestral form but no longer functions. We'll focus on the most important one that establishes without question that humans are descended from other primates.

Simians and anthropoids (including chimps, orangs, baboons, gorillas and humans) are unable to make their own vitamin C (ascorbic acid). The reason for this is that the normal mammalian enzyme that makes vitamin C (called gulonolactone oxidase) is impaired from functioning properly in these animals. There was a deletion mutation and multiple point mutations that keep it from being functional.

Interestingly, the other wet-nosed primate groups, lemurs, monkeys etc., do indeed make their own vitamin C and they are capable of surviving without this as a portion of their diet.

Here's where the story becomes interesting. The mutations that create the inactive enzyme in humans are nearly identical with those of the simian apes. We can see minor variations but the main sequence remains amazingly similar. However there are other mammals that also don't make vitamin C. These include bats and also guinea pigs.

This seems like a monkey wrench in the system. Are we suggesting that these other mammals also descended from prosimians? A closer look reveals the answer. When we examine the actual sequences of the genes of mammals for gulonolactone oxidase we see a clear pattern. Humans, chimps and orangs have nearly identical sequences. Guinea pigs have very different sequences however. Don't take my word for it, scroll down on this page and look at them yourself.

This is exactly the pattern we would expect if it happened by adaptive radiation from a common ancestor. If we assume that the common ancestor of all prosimians ate a diet high in fruits and other foods high in ascorbic acid, the mutation would not have been limiting to life in that ecology. However, we must also assume that for most animals living on a diet that did NOT include ascorbic acid, the mutation would be lethal.

Thus, all the mammals that exist with a mutation in gulonolactone oxidase eat foods high in ascorbic acid, or they die. However, they do not have the same mutations unless they are otherwise closely related. Thus, the mutations in guinea pigs are the same as other guinea pigs. The mutations in apes and anthropoids are the same as other prosimian descendants. Although I am not aware of bats having gulonolcatone oxidase sequencing done at this time, we can assume pending the results that the same pattern will appear.

Scurvy is a horrible disease and has been a great plague to man whenever he takes long trips through hostile territory. Many humans have died for lack of ascorbic acid.

Therefore, the idea of a loving God, who made Adam and Eve with his hands is defied by the simple fact that monkeys could seafare easily on a diet of fish and clams, but we cannot. We must have vitamin C. Yet it would have been trivial for God to give us back the enzyme that makes vitamin C for us.

You can believe many different things, but to believe God exists, and he created Adam and Eve and all their descendants lovingly, you also have to believe he created them in a way that would make them horribly sick if they went without ascorbic acid for a period of time. To me this makes him seem a monster. A much simpler and more rational explanation is that there was no Adam and Eve and that our ancestors were a population of fruit-eating mammals who lost an important enzyme.

Genesis 2:21-25: Woman From Rib and Mother Goddesses of Near Eastern Myths

This Article shows that in the second creation story in genesis the concept of woman made from bone, earth and antler pre-existed the writing of Genesis, spanned cultures and geographical boundaries and that Eve shares aspects of Goddesses in Ancient Near Eastern Mythology.

* This article and its predecessors in the series listed below are a collection of notes put together from sources that are represented by quick reference links to similar web pages to make it easy to get more information as quickly as possible. The original sources are listed at the end.

A LIST OF PREMISES AS ARTICLES REFUTING GENESIS 1-11 AND ROMANS 5 SO FAR
P1. The Interconnectedness of The Ancients - Demonstrates the robust ancient civilizations at the time and that Canaan, Israel and Judah were central to them. Discusses trade routes, seafaring, the link between whales and the Leviathans of Mythology and how long it would take to get from one civilization to another by sea.
P2. Genesis 1:1-25 Is An Amalgam of Near Eastern Creation Myths. Demonstrates the prior existence of key elements of the story of the creation of the Universe that appears in Genesis.
P3. Genesis 1:26-1:27, Creation of Humans in Near Eastern Myths And The Paleolithic Era. Demonstrates that the physical evidence contradicts the story of the making of the first humans in Genesis.
P4. GENESIS 1:28-2:4a, Be Fruitful And Multiply, Founder Effect and Genetic Diversity. This Article shows that even if the physical evidence didn't refute the special creation of the first humans, Adam and Eve, in Genesis 1:27, the problem of Genetic Diversity known as the "Founder Effect" would eventually lead to crippling genetic mutations or extinction.
P5.Genesis 2:4b-20 Man Made From Earth Is Folklore, Conflated River Elements and the Myth of Adapa. This Article shows that the concept of man made from earth spans cultures and geographical boundaries, the rivers are confused between geographical areas and has many elements from pre-existing Near Eastern Myths such as "The Myth of Adapa.
P6.Genesis 2:21-25: Woman From Rib and Mother Goddesses of Near Eastern Myths. This Article shows that in the second creation story in genesis the concept of woman made from bone, earth and antler pre-existed the writing of Genesis, spanned cultures and geographical boundaries and that Eve shares aspects of Goddesses in Ancient Near Eastern Mythology.

The criteria for Folklore as described in Alan Dundees book "Holy Writ as Oral Lit" are "multiple existence and variation" of a story.

In Genesis, there are two versions of the creation of Man and Woman. In the first story, the man and woman are created together, but in the second story, the male is created first, with the female made later from his rib.

Making women out of bone and other materials was common in prehistoric times. They are called "Venus Figurines"(1). The theory is that they were used in the practice of sympathetic magic(2) to influence the fertility of the earth.

Sympathetic magic is the practice of trying to influence outcomes using objects or techniques that have only an apparent similarity in appearance or relationship and is not based on any causal link at all. Examples of this can be seen throughout history with the possible inclusion of cave paintings as far back as 32,000 years ago, to belief that behavior of groups or individuals influence nature, to (though not exclusive to) pre-game rituals of modern day athletes. At its core it is a common fallacious reasoning scheme known as "confusion of correlation and cause". One relevant example of sympathetic magic is the Venus Figurine.

Venus Figurines are representation of women with large breasts and bottoms carved in bone, antler, stone or molded of clay(3). Coincidentally, tools in the prehistoric era were made of bone, antler and stone(4). Both were used to help bring about successful outcomes. Examples of them are on display in various museums around the world, but the earliest reside at The Hermitage Museum(3) in Russia.

Theoretically, over time, the concept behind the Venus Figurine came to represent a Mother Goddess(5), which later became represented in various near eastern mythologies as can be seen by the Ashera in the Bible. Similarly, the concept of a God fashioning a woman from bone or some other material has parallels in the East.

Humans originated in sub-sahara Africa(6). They migrated out and began to compensate for their environment and situations. This led to the making of tools, higher order organization, planning, development of agriculture and the establishments of settlements that developed into cities, populated regions and civilizations. The Near East was at the center of trade and conflict between established and robust civilizations all within 1000 miles or about two months march of each other. Egypt and Sumeria developed more or less simultaneously fighting and trading all the while. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle credit Egyptian thought as the foundation of Ancient Greek thought, so even the all-mighty ancient Greeks didn't live in a bubble and it explains their love for the culture.

GENESIS 2:21- 22

21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh.

22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

WOMAN FROM RIB FOLKLORE
The following is a list of cultures where there exists a parallel story of woman being made from bone or some other material and is compiled from Sir James G. Frazer's book "Folklore In The Old Testament".

Origins of the people are ~60,000 BC or earlier
* Karens of Burma, pg 10.
* Bedel Tartars of Siberia,pg 11.

Origins of the people are ~18,000 BC or earlier
* Diegueno Indias Kawakipais, south-western California, pg 25.

The following list represent examples where Frazer believes that cultures have been influenced by Christian missionaries because of the similarity of the word for woman and rib, and some cases where the tribes trace their ancestry to Adam. The influence of missionaries does not necessarily mean that the whole concept of woman being made from a rib came from them but it is sufficient to add details to an existing myth.

* Tahiti - Taaroa the god, pg 9.
* Fakaofo Bowditch Island - Man made from stone, pg 10.
* Ghaikos Karens, trace their genealogy to Adam, pg 11.

GENESIS 23 - 25

23 The man said,
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman,
for she was taken out of man."

24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

For the following discussion I used Tim Callahan's Secret Origins of the Bible(8) pages 40 - 49 as a quick reference because it is a convenient "Handbook" collection of relevant information that I've found in other reference material and in lecture courses. This book has hundreds of references listed and I highly recommend it for anyone attempting a serious study of the origin of the bible.

RATIONALE FOR MAKING EVE COME FROM ADAMS RIB
- In Gen 3:20 Eve given the name "Mother of All Living". This is the concept of the mother goddess.
- Like the bible states that the Jews were trying to get rid of the Ashera, the story of Eve serves as a demotion of the Mother God, and a conflation of concepts and ideas circulating at the time.

SYMBOLISM OF EVE
- Reducing the Mother Goddess
- She was derived from Adam, therefore reduced in status, she was supposed to help him.
- From his side, she was equal to him, or supposed to be his partner

LINGUISTIC
- The fact that ancient languages omitted the vowels creates a potential for creativity and relationships between concepts. In Hebrew, the reference to the first woman was written as HWH. HWH when pronounced is similar to Hebe, the greek goddess of youth, guardian of the cups and fruits of immortality. The sound and the ideas are similar to the Hurrian Goddess Hiba, Hebat, Hebatu, Hepatu and Khepat. The Hurrians were referred to in the Bible as the Horats, Hivites and Hittites (even though they preceded the Hittites). She was the consort of the Storm God Teshub. Teshub, like Yahweh and Zeus was associated with Bulls.

EVES DIVINE ORIGIN, PARALLELS BETWEEN GODESSES
- In Sumeria and Babylonia Ashratum wife of Anu
- In West Semitic Ahserah wife of El
- The iconography (ancient picture representations) are essentially the same.
- El had a consort and when Yahweh succeeded him in folklore he kept Asherah as a consort. Subsequently the Hebrews tried to get rid of the Ashera from the pre-exile Jerusalem temple.
- Mother of all living associated with Hebat, Ashtart and/or Asherah
- in the Enuma Elish the goddess Ninti is created to heal the rib of Enki who has violated a taboo on eating forbidden herbs and has been punished. Nin-ti means "Lady of the Rib". In some variations of the story, Nin-ti is created from Enki's rib.

From Wikipedia
Cuneiform TI or TÌL (Borger 2003 nr.) has the main meaning of "life" when used ideographically.

With the determinative UZU "flesh, meat", UZUTI, it means "rib". This homophony is exploited in the myth of Ninti ( NIN.TI "lady of life" or "lady of the rib"), created by Ninhursag to cure the ailing Enki. Since Eve is called "mother of life" in Genesis, together with her being taken from Adam's "tsela"` (side, rib), the story of Adam and Eve has been taken to derive from that of Ninti.

In Akkadian orthography, the sign has the syllabic values di or ṭi, in Hittite ti, di or te.

Continuing From Callahan
- Athena breathed life into the clay men created by Prometheus, and she popped out of the Head of Zeus when he was in pain with a headache.
- In the creation myths in Atrahasis and Enuma Elish their respecitve Mother Godesses mold primordial beings (called the Lullu) out of clay under the supervision of a male deity. This is more relevant compared to Gen. 4:1b, Eve says "I have gotten a manchild with the help of the lord". This verse is evidently abmiguous and could be translated as "I, as well as God have created a man" or "I have gotten a man by the lord" meaning the lord was the father of Cain instead of Adam.
- In Gilgamesh, Aruru (a female deity) makes Enkidu out of clay to defeat Gilgamesh.
- A female Deity has sex with Enkidu to help him become more civilized, to help make him more like a civilized adult man.

---------------------------------------
Quick References

1. Venus Figurines
2. Sympathetic Magic
3. The Hermitage Museum
4. Prehistoric Bone Tools
5. Mother Goddess
6. The Genographic Project
7. Folklore in the Old Testament, Vol. 1 Online
8. Secret Origins of The Bible, Tim Callahan

----------------------------------------
Other Quick References
1. Creation Myths
2. Enuma Elish Text online
3. Prometheus
4. The Myth of Adapa

----------------------------------------
Further Study

ORIGINS OF YAHWEH
* Early History of God, Mark Smith

VENUS FIGURINES
* Archeology.about.com
* Magdalenian excavation
* Minnesota State University E-Museum

SYMPATHETIC MAGIC
* Anthropology of Religion

NEAR EASTERN MYTHS
* Sumerian Myths, Grand Valley State University

-----------------------------------------
SOURCES
1. Human Prehistory and First Civilizations, The Teaching Company
2. Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World, The Teaching Company
3. The Book of Genesis, The Teaching Company
4. Great Figures of the Old Testament, The Teaching Company, (Discontinued)
5. Alan Dundees Holy writ as oral lit
6. Folklore in the Old Testament, Vol. 1 Online, Sir James G. Frazer
7. Ancient Near East Mythology, The Teaching Company, (Discontinued)
8. Classical Mythology, The Teaching Company
9. Great Battles of the Ancient World, The Teaching Company
10. Great World Religions: Judaism (2nd Ed.), The Teaching Company
11. Introduction to Judaism, The Teaching Company
12. History of Ancient Egypt, The Teaching Company
13. Between the Rivers: The History of Ancient Mesopotamia, The Teaching Company
14. Great Ancient Civilzations of Asia Minor, The Teaching Company

How an Atheist Justifies the Use of Logic

Recently a theist asked how an atheist justifies the use of logic. (The following discussion is primarily drawn from strongatheism.net.)

The context of the question carries a large number of spurious presuppositions that have origin in a broad scoped fallacy not unique to theism. This fallacy is called the epistemological reversal of the subject-object of thought reversal. (Objectivism defines and discusses this fallacy at length.) Theists imagine a strawman that logic and what is fallaciously identified as the “laws of nature” are “an effect of random molecules and chemical reactions that can never give nor validate anything whatsoever.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Logic arises from material existence and is necessary for human understanding. Logic is ultimately derived from the Law of Identity, A=A. The nature of physical material existence is that every thing that exists has a specific set of characteristics. [*]

Logic (nor the uniformity of nature) transcend existence, for existence is all that exists. Consider the following syllogism.

a. Logic is necessary for human understanding.
b. If theism is true, then divine creation obtains.
c. If divine creation is true, then all in existence is contingent to God’s act of creation, and nothing in existence is necessary.
d. If theism is true, then logic cannot be necessary. (from b and c)
e. Theism is false. (from a and d)

Theists attack premise c by declaring that if logic is part of God’s nature, then its existence is a necessary consequence of divine causation. They may think this an easy escape from the problem, since they imagine God is a necessary entity from a theological standpoint, but it suffers from several unresolvable problems.

1. Theists often assert that non-believers borrow logic from the Christian worldview. This is absolutely irrelevant to the issue at hand, for it does not address the fact that logic becomes subjective if a consciousness creates it. The theist is only specifying the nature of that subjectivity. By so doing he is in fact supporting the argument above. Asserting logic is part of God’s nature does not change the fact that by so doing is to declare it originates from a consciousness, not from objective existence – which is the very definition of subjective. (This is an example of the subject-object reversal. Reality is objective. The imagination is subjective. By claiming logic is subjective, the theist reverses the epistemic priority of objective reality over subjective imagination.)

2. Theistic believers often discuss the nature of their imagined ruling consciousness, but they have absolutely no grounds for discussing the specifics of God’s nature for two reasons.

First, by acceptance of a fantasy God as Sovereign and Creator, the believer cannot assume anything about its properties any more than we can posit “complete entropy” of a system and then try to define physical properties thereof. The theist cannot refute the possibility that a fantasy of an infinite god or a malevolent spirit being is deluding her into believing the statement “God’s nature is logical. Under theism a person can no longer refute arguments based on extreme skepticism. The theist can only refute the idea of an invisible magic entity manipulating their mind, or being the victim of mental illness if her worldview entails self-contained existence.

Second, to discuss what she thinks is God’s nature, she must presume to have knowledge of that nature. Knowledge, however, is rooted in reality and is held in conceptual form.

“To form a concept, one mentally isolates a group of concretes (of distinct perceptual units), on the basis of observed similarities which distinguish them from all other known concretes (similarity is “the relationship between two or more existents which possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree”); then, by a process of omitting the particular measurements of these concretes, one integrates them into a single new mental unit: the concept, which subsumes all concretes of this kind (a potentially unlimited number). The integration is completed and retained by the selection of a perceptual symbol (a word) to designate it. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.” - Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy”, “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, 131.

The only way to have perceptual knowledge is via our sensory experience. “Man’s senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science.” – (Ayn Rand, "Kant Versus Sullivan", "Philosophy: Who Needs It", 90.) Since theism’s fantasy of a God cannot be detected by any means of sensory experience or instrumentation, it is impossible for any religious mystic to have perceptual information that can be used as isolated distinct perceptual units that can be the basis of a concept of God. Thus theism’s claim to have knowledge of the nature of God is patently false.

3. The theistic point that “logic is rooted in the nature of God” is a complete ad hoc rationalization: nothing about the notion of a god indicates that it must be necessarily logical or rational. Humans are capable of being both logical and illogical, it is clearly impossible for a more powerful being to not be able to do such a simple thing as make an illogical proposition.

4. Even if it was the case that a God actually existed and its nature was logical, there would be no necessary (in the sense of system K modal logic meaning it is not possibly false) relation between God’s inherent properties and its creation. A burden of proof is upon the God believers to prove their assertion that it necessarily is the case that a relation between what they imagine as God and objective reality obtains such that the basal attributes of their God transfer to objective reality by virtue of a creative action. Without such evidence sufficient to establish the thing as true, the assertion that “logic is rooted in the nature of God” cannot have any weight. The believers would need to prove that powerful beings are restricted in their creations to transferring their basal attributes to that which is created. Were the theist successful in such an endeavor, the religious house of cards would fall to the old rejoinder that a perfect creator cannot create an imperfect creation.

5. It is impossible to make sense of the proposition that “logic is part of God’s nature”. That this is so can be observed by taking note of the Transcendent Argument for God. TAG proposes that “logic is both dependent on God and necessary. ….. If logic is dependent on God it must be contingent. If logic is contingent then it is not a necessary part of human understanding. But logic is a necessary part of human understanding. Thus logic cannot be dependent on God since there is nothing inconsistent about denying the existence of God but there is in denying the principles of logic.” – (Michael Martin: “Butler's Defense of TAG and Critique of Tang” - http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/butler.html). Logic cannot both be an intrinsic part of God’s actions and created by God.

6. Theism’s assertions are self-defeating. If logic existed first as a property of God, then it is a non-material principle, and divine causation is not necessary for its transference at all. All it would prove, at best, is that a non-material principle is involved, but there is a definite lack of specificity in theism’s claim. How is it that some properties of God’s nature are transferred to reality, but others are not? Theism’s claim that “our belief in logic is rooted in the nature of God and evidenced in creation itself” implies that it is logically necessary for one property of the nature of the alleged God to transfer to reality but that other predicated properties do not transfer. Why is that? The theist bears a burden of proof here to show why their case for logic transference does not also entail that their God’s alleged goodness, intelligence, order, morality, self-knowledge, sovereignty, power, justice, etc are also transferred by the creative act. In no sense is the burden of proof fulfilled by simply asserting the contrary position as a mystery.

7. Theism presumes that it makes sense to speak of logic as a non-material entity, which indicates a commitment to idealism. From my perspective, logic is an axiomatic fact of reality, and arises because of the fundamental nature of the material world. It makes no sense to speak of logic dissociated from the material world, any more than it makes sense to speak of immaterial consciousness.

[*] This is a consequence of spontaneous symmetry breaking form Gauge Invariance that occurred during or just prior to the inflationary epoch and cosmic reheating – The Conversion of Inflationary Potential Energy Into Matter. These were random processes as is readily seen from observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background – Blackbody Radiation.

The blackbody CMB and the acceleration of Universal Expansion means that the Big Bang was very much like a black hole singularity in that it was “maximally chaotic involving complete entropy. It implies that the big bang singularity behaves in a completely unpredictable manner in the sense that no physical laws govern its behavior. The unpredictability that pertains to Hawking's principle of ignorance is an unpredictability that is a consequence of lawlessness, not of human inability to know the laws. There is no law, not even a probabilistic law, governing the singularity that places restrictions on what it can emit.
Hawking writes that

A singularity can be regarded as a place where there is a breakdown of the classical concept of space-time as a manifold with a pseudo-Reimannian metric. Because all known laws of physics are formulated on a classical space-time background, they will all break down at a singularity. This is a great crisis for physics because it means that one cannot predict the future. One does not know what will come out of a singularity. – [S. W. Hawking, Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse,' Physical Review D, 14 (1976), 2460.]

Deterministic or even probabilistic laws cannot obtain on the quantum level in the singularity, since there is no quantum level in the singularity; the space-time manifold that quantum processes presuppose has broken down. The singularity is a violent, terrifying caldron of lawlessness.” – “A Big Bang Cosmological Argument For God's Nonexistence” (1992) Quentin Smith; http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/quentin_smith/bigbang.html

(This also means that no ordering was applied to existence from outside of existence in the time after the Big Bang. But such ordering is required for the theist to assert the anthropic coincidences are evidence of an intelligent creator/designer. Classic hot big bang cosmology was, therefore, the death knell for theism.)

A Bad Taste!

I'm redating this from exbeliever, a former contributor [John].

The Psalmist writes, "Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him." (Psalm 34:8). For a long time, I was an ardent admirer of Dr. John Piper. In fact, his mentor, Dan Fuller, was my mentor in seminary as well. [Coincidentally, Dr. Fuller lives on Mentor Street in Pasadena, CA. Behind the gruff, crotchety exterior is a very nice man who will spend hours talking to you in his living room and whose wife will bring you cookies on a platter. :-) pleasant memories]

I remember a sermon or Advent poem of Dr. Piper's in which he described God as a flowing fountain of delight. He said that we would praise a fountain, not by standing passively by, but by sticking our faces deep inside it to take in its wonderful refreshment. We would stand up and shout, "This is the best water I've ever tasted; come and have some with me!"

In the context of that metaphor, he referred to the passage I quoted above. He invited others to taste and see God's goodness.

But what about those of us who have left the fountain with a horrible taste in our mouths? We came to the fountain and drank as deeply as we could and, for a while, could not get enough of it. We loved reading the Bible and being instructed by it. We believed that it made us wiser than our counselors. We made our bodies our slaves so that they would honor God. We prayed without ceasing. We sought first the kingdom of God. We confessed our sins and believed that God was faithful and just to forgive us our sins. We did not forsake meeting together (in church) as some were in the habit of doing. We encouraged one another. We preached "the Word" in season and out. We attempted to study to show ourselves approved. We fed God's sheep. We realized that "we" couldn't do anything at all, that only God could work through us.

But, then, something happened. The fountain became foul to us. We tried to ignore the taste. We went back to it again and again hoping something would change. We opened the Bible and, instead of finding wisdom, we found violence and justification of immoral acts. We found anti-intellectualism and backwards thinking. We found oppression. Our prayers returned to us void. They bounced off of the ceiling. We prayed harder and felt dumber for it. While we could still enjoy the fellowship of Christian people, we discovered that what we liked about them had nothing to do with their Christianity, but rather with their humanity. We found that we simply liked the people for who they were, not because they believed something about a religion.

We weren't trying to "leave the faith," the faith was leaving us. We tried to hold on to the fountain, but something had changed. It wasn't the fountain, it was our taste for it. We realized that the fountain wasn't a being, it was a religion. It was just dogma. It is like we had been drinking from it with our eyes closed and noses plugged. Somehow, though, we opened our eyes and unplugged our noses and discovered that we had been enjoying filth. The fountain was a fountain of blood and other foul things. We realized that we had spent most of our lives consuming a vile concoction.

We would have been happy to have simply left, but we couldn't help but want to pull others away from such a cesspool. We wanted to help them open their eyes and see what we saw. We wanted them to see the trouble the fountain was causing in the world. Quickly, however, we ran into opposition. We found that those still slurping away at the fountain with eyes closed and noses plugged resisted. They said that we were lying about the taste of the fountain or that we had never drunk from it in the first place. We told them to open their eyes, but they responded that the eyes cannot be trusted. We described the filth to them, but even when they accepted that the fountain contained blood and other "foul" things, they insisted that those things were really "good."

So, here we stand beside a fountain of filth hoping that we can convince others to open their eyes and see what they are drinking. We are watching with horror as more and more people are closing their eyes and drinking in all of the vileness in front of them.

What is it that we see that we want to alert you to?

. . . we see the teaching that a "benevolent" god cannot control his temper so something must die in order for that god's anger to be satisfied.

. . . we see a religion based on death and the spilling of blood.

. . . we see teaching that a god will say in anger, "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air." Genesis 6:7

. . . we see teaching that a god considers the smell of burning, sacrificed animals to be a "pleasing aroma." Genesis 7

. . . we see teaching that a god uses people as pawns, hardening their hearts to do something he doesn't want them to do so that he can punish them for doing it (Exodus 4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:8; 14:4).

. . . we see teaching that a god orders disobedient children to be killed (Exodus 21:15, 17).

. . . we see teaching that a god is so insecure that he orders the death of everyone who does not follow his religion (no, he doesn't try to convince them that he is better than the other gods, he commands that they be put to death) (Exodus 22:20).

. . . we see teaching that a god cares so much about what two men do with their genitals that those two men should bekilledd (Leviticus 20:13).

. . . we see teaching that a god cares so little for the sick that he commands that they be put outside of the camp and left to die (Numbers 5:1-4).

. . . we see teaching that a god orders the earth to swallow 250 people and then kills 14,700 more people who think that was too violent (Numbers 16).

. . . we see teaching that a god uses another king as his pawn ("For the LORD your God had made his spirit stubborn and his heart obstinate in order to give him into your hands, as he has now done.") to do something that god doesn't want him to do so that the god can then completely destroy all the "men, women and children" of several towns (Deuteronomy 2:32).

. . . we see teaching that a god orders people to kill all family members who hold to a different faith (Deuteronomy 13:6-10).

. . . we see teaching that a god tells his invading army that they can take women and children as "plunder" (Deuteronomy 20:14).

. . . we see teaching that a god tells his invading army to kill "anything that breathes" in other cities (Deuteronomy 20:16).

. . . we see teaching that this can be said of a god, "For it was of the Lord to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel in battle, that he might destroy them utterly." A god who sets people up, just so that he can destroy them. (Joshua 11:20)

. . . we see teaching that a god can send an evil spirit to people so that they will dealtreacherouslyy with their leader (Judges 9).

. . . we see teaching that the "spirit of the Lord" is so violent that every time it enters Samson, he kills something (Judges 14-16).

. . . we see teaching that a god orders his invading army to attack a people and to "totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." (1 Samuel 15:3)

. . . we see teaching that a god kills a man who tries to keep one of his relics from hitting the ground (2 Samuel 6).

. . . we see teaching that a god kills a woman's son for an evil deed her husband did (2 Samuel 12).

. . . we see teaching that a god will kill people and then let dogs desecrate their bodies (1 Kings 14).

. . . we see teaching that a god kills a man who is brave enough to say, "No," to god's command to kill another person (1 Kings 20).

. . . we see teaching that a god kills 42 children for making fun of a guy's bald head (2 Kings 2).

. . . we see teaching that a god orders an invading army to raise the land they destroy by cutting down all of the trees and spoiling all of the wells (2 Kings 3).

. . . we see teaching that a god will send a whole land into years of famine and death when he is angry (2 Kings 8).

. . . we see teaching that a god will kill 70,000 people because another person (who god does not kill) disobeyed him and took a census of the people (1 Chronicles 21).

. . . we see teaching that a god allows a man to be tortured just to prove a point (Job).

. . . we see teaching that it is praise-worthy of a god that it is "he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks."

. . . we see teaching that a god will stir up an army who "will strike down the young men . . . [and] will have no mercy on infants nor will they look with compassion on children . . . Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished." (Isaiah 13:18,15,16)

. . . we see teaching that a god does not reason with people who leave his religion to follow others, but rather kills them and puts their bones in front of their other gods (Ezekiel 6:5).

. . . we see teaching that a god says, "Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears." (Joel 3:10)

. . . we see teaching that a god comes in human flesh so that he can be killed to appease his own anger.

. . . we see teaching that a god comes in human flesh and introduces the concept of hell to his followers so that they can not only fear being killed at one time, but can be tortured eternally.

. . . we see teaching that a god comes in human flesh and instead of casting out demons into the abyss, instead puts them into innocent animals who subsequently jump off of a cliff (Matthew 8).

. . . we see teaching that a god comes in human flesh and promises to send angels to throw people into a burning fire for eternal torment (Matthew 13).

We could go on and on.

This is what we are watching you drink and enjoy. This is what we see you offering to others.

We point these things out and you become angry at us. Instead of addressing these immoral acts, you ask, "By what standard is all of this stuff evil?" You have so blinded yourself that you are unwilling to call rape, torture, infanticide, etc. evil. You question us for calling it evil!

Open your eyes! Really taste and see if what you are drinking is "good." Don't be so quick to swallow what you cannot see.

Mechanism Behind Mind-body Connection Discovered

"The study reveals how stress makes people more susceptible to illness." Science Daily Article.
This is a datum to support my assertion that the hypothesis that the "Problem of Evil/Suffering is a Test" is demonstrably false.

Every cell contains a tiny clock called a telomere, which shortens each time the cell divides. Short telomeres are linked to a range of human diseases, including HIV, osteoporosis, heart disease and aging. Previous studies show that an enzyme within the cell, called telomerase, keeps immune cells young by preserving their telomere length and ability to continue dividing.
...
UCLA scientists found that the stress hormone cortisol suppresses immune cells' ability to activate their telomerase.
...
The study reveals how stress makes people more susceptible to illness.

If the problem of Evil/Suffering is a test then it is a test that degrades the performance of the participant resulting in a negative feedback loop where the participants ability to cope is degraded as the test proceeds. If we are to be judged on our ability to cope with hardships, and our ability to cope with hardships is demonstrably decreased over time under the influence, and no two people have the same hardships, then there can be no consistent standard to judge by. This is not consistent with sound testing methods.

If the participant can only think and make decisions with the biological material they have at hand, namely their brain, and their brain is susceptible to degradation as is the rest of the body, then the problem of Evil/Suffering as a test is not as much a test of spirit as it is a test of biological integrity.

If however the spirit is a separate entity and is not susceptible to degradation, then while this may be a hypothesis, it is not consistent with any known observations and is only supported by anecdote and writings, some of which are of unknown origin. However, the degradation of spirit during hardship over time has been observed so much that it has become an expected outcome of hardship. Notable exceptions to this outcome are not limited to Christians and should not be used as a datum to support the Christian view of "The problem of Evil/Suffering as a test". Therefore it is a dubious hypothesis, if it can be considered a hypothesis at all.

Pascal's Wager Revisited

To people who are familiar with Pascal's Wager I won't repeat it. Those who are unfamiliar with it can read up about it here. I want to share three of the main criticisms of it in what follows.

There is the evidential objection, the many gods objection, and the gambler’s objection.

The evidential objection concerns how much evidence Christianity should have before I must take seriously the claims of Christianity. Keep in mind that the only brands of Christianity that make the wager a strong argument are the ones that promise an everlasting conscious torment in a fiery hell. Other brands of Christianity don't even apply, those affirming annihilation, or universal salvation, since there is not much to fear if one is wrong. In any case, I judge that conservative Christianity has about a .00001% probability of being correct, or 1 in 100,000. This is something I think one can conclude from the arguments in my book. Given that I might be wrong in this judgment, since I've been wrong before, I'll up it to a .0001% probability, or 1 in 10,000. This probability has nothing to do with how many other religions and gods there are. It's a probability based solely on the merits of the evidence and arguments themselves.

Keep in mind what this means. It means unless there is a religion with a greater amount of probability then there is a .0001% chance this life is all there is. It means that there is a 99.999% probability that Christianity is delusional and that Pascal’s Wager is an argument akin to someone crying "wolf," or someone else yelling "the sky is falling." Why should I place that bet even if the payout is an infinite amount? If the bet was some money, wouldn't I be throwing money away? Sure, people are not being unreasonable by placing a bet on these odds, but what reason would we say that a non-gambler should bet based on these odds?

And what are we to bet? According to the Christian faith I must bet it all, my whole life. I must die daily. I must take up my cross and follow Jesus. I must be totally committed and have total faith. That’s what I’m called upon to do, daily, even to the point of guarding my very thoughts. I must sacrifice that which I think about and I should not lust, hate, covet, nor entertain any doubts.

I can understand betting a few dollars to win the lottery even though there is a 1 in 80 million chance to win. But I would never consider betting everything I own based on those odds, even if the payout was 800 trillion dollars, nor would I want to bet my whole life on a 1 to 10,000 chance of eternal bliss.

Still, I'll admit Pascal's wager has a good deal of force, the evidential objection alone notwithstanding, since the payout is an infinite amount with an eternal bliss if correct.

The many gods objection almost eliminates the force of Pascal's wager, I think, since now we have many religions and many gods all clamoring for our obedience; Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on, and so forth. One religion claims that if you don't follow its god you will fry in hell, while another one makes the same claim. Since many gods are threatening us with hell if we don't believe, then Pascal's Wager cannot help us to decide between them. All of them offer an infinite payout, too. All of them demand belief and obedience. Whom should we believe? Whom should we obey? Pascal’s Wager does not answer this objection on its own terms. We still must judge which religious viewpoint has the most probability and such judgments are based on the accidents of birth, as I’ve argued.

The third objection is what I call the the gambler’s objection. Anyone who plays the very popular poker game called Texas Hold'em , for instance, knows what I’m talking about when I say there is a distinction to be made between the actual odds and the pot odds. Actual odds are the mathematical odds of our hand winning the pot. Pot odds concern the relationship of the money in the pot to the actual odds of our having the winning hand. If, say, in order to bet on our hand we only need to bet $5 more to win a pot of $200 (or a ratio of 1:40, which is known as the pot odds), then that’s a good bet even if the actual mathematical odds of winning the hand are not that great. If, on the other hand, we must place a bet of $50 to win the same pot of $200 (or a ratio of 1:4 pot odds) the bet is a bad one unless the actual odds of winning the hand are much greater.

Let’s say you need a particular winning card to be drawn, which could be a spade (for a flush), or an Ace, or a King, and you calculate the odds of one of those cards being drawn are about 1 in 3. Let’s say there are five players and you must decide whether or not to bet $4 on a pot that has $36 in it. That’s 36 divided by 4 equals 9; or 9 to 1 pot odds. At that point you must ask yourself whether you should place that $4 bet. The actual odds are against you 1 to 3, but the pot odds are in your favor 9 to 1. Because of the pot odds you should bet the $4, and here’s why: If you faced this same situation seventy-five times and bet $4 each time for a total of $300, and you won one time out of three bets (the actual odds), your gain would be about $900 because of the pot odds.

Now let’s consider the actual odds and the pot odds when it comes to Pascal’s Wager. The actual odds for the Christian faith, as I calculate them, are 1 in 10,000, being generous. The payout is an infinite amount; an eternal bliss (the pot odds). With the pot odds so extremely high I should always make the bet, it’s argued. But here’s the problem. Pot odds only come into play if the gambler plays a certain number of hands. If the actual odds for a winning hand in Texas Hold’em are 1 in 3, it does not matter what the pot odds are if he must bet everything he has, and if this is his last hand! Pot odds only matter when the gambler can play a number of hands and when he’s not betting it all. It’s the number of hands along with the size of the bet that make the pot odds what they are.

How many times can a gambling religious seeker go “all in” on a bet that has a chance of winning the eternal bliss pot, when the odds are 1 in 10,000? He can only do this one time! There are no second chances. The poker game will be over for him no matter what the result is. The actual odds are extremely low for his bet. With those odds he will undoubtedly lose everything he has on this one bet! It’s only if this religious gambler can make 10,000 lifetime wagers and that he has something leftover to bet each time that would make the pot odds worth the bet!

Given the actual odds as I calculate them, I would have to sacrifice 10,000 lifetimes for the pot odds of an infinite bliss in heaven to be worth the bet. Not just one life. 10,000 lifetimes. But I will not have 10,000 lifetimes to make that bet worth it! So I must bet on the actual odds, and I do.

For this reason gamblers who play Texas Hold’em do not bet everything they’ve got unless they are pretty sure they have a winning hand, with the actual odds being over 50% or more, preferably 60% to 90%, depending on several other factors. Since I calculate the odds at much less than this and because I must bet on the actual odds, going "all in" on a bet like this is simply a bad bet.

Hence Pascal’s wager fails…badly.

Dinesh D'Souza and Modesty

Dinesh D'Souza reports that Michael Shermer recommended his book What's So Great About Christianity, using these words: "Whatever your beliefs, you should read Dinesh's book...It is the best defense of Christianity that has ever been published."

Hmmm. Isn't that interesting? I wonder what the criteria was for Shermer to say that, since there have been some historically great defenses of Christianity down through the ages?

Anyway, D'Souza is trying to maintain some modesty, and he wrote about this struggle here.

In reporting on how most people thought he won his debate with Christopher Hitchens, D'Souza wrote:

Atheists like to think of themselves as akin to champions of the round earth, confronted by religious ignoramuses who keep insisting that the earth is flat. But is it even conceivable that a round-earth advocate should lose a debate to a flat-earth advocate? To put the question differently, if atheists are truly the party of reason, and believers like me are truly the party of "blind faith," how come reason keeps getting its butt kicked?

So, in order to help D'Souza maintain some modesty let me make a few comments about this.

For one thing, D'Souza hasn't debated people like Hector Avalos, John Beversluis, Keith Parsons, or me yet ;-)! D'Souza is planning on debating some of the top skeptics and saving them in an archive for future prosperity, so maybe he will! Besides, as far as I know people didn't conclude D'Souza decisively won his debates with Michael Shermer.

Debates do not decide the truth anyway. Few people are convinced because of watching a debate one way or another. They are entertaining and educational. They are a sparring match between two people, and that's it. Someone on one side can legitimately say the debater on the other side won the debate and still think his position is wrong for other reasons not stated by the person representing his side.

Anyway, I've read D'Souza's book and I must say it's premised to a very large extent on one big non-sequitur, and it's very interesting if he doesn't see it. He argues that Christianity has been good for western society; that it is growing in numbers in today's world; that it produced modern science; ended things like slavery; and was the foundation of limited government. He argues that atheism has been bad for society and that the Christian past isn't as bad as the atheist past.

Little of D'Souza's argument defends the claims of the Christian faith over against the claims of atheism, although he does argue that the supposed design in the world points to a creator.

The fact is that even if I grant him that Christianity has been good for western society in contrast to atheism (and I don't, not by a long shot), it does not follow from what he says that Christianity is true. Maybe true ideas produce bad results? Maybe delusionary beliefs produce good results? His is largely a pragmatic argument which first demands a defense of the Pragmatic theory of truth, and with it a denial of the Correspondence and Coherence theories of truth, something I think that as a Christian he wouldn't want to do, but of this I don't know.

I have challenged him to debate me. Maybe he won't do it. If not, I'd understand, after all, why would he risk losing a debate now? ;-)

Hi Dinesh!

Dr. Avalos v. Triablogue: Moses is a Basket Case of Bad History

Dr. Hector Avalos responds:

In their supposed "debunking” of my critique of their position on the legend of Sargon, the Triablogue authors simply show how woefully unprepared they are to discuss this issue.

Read more »

"At Least We're Not As Bad As the Muslims!"

Christians in Prakasam, Srikakulam, Vijayawada, Nizamabad and other towns in India stormed and ransacked multiple offices of a local daily newspaper, Sakshi, destroying furniture, tossing computers to the ground and smashing them, and in the meantime smashing windows in a nearby public bus. What terrible offense triggered this attack by the Christian community? The newspaper had printed a picture of Jesus with a beer and a cigarette. .

Sound eerily familiar? Does anyone here remember Christians claiming that such things were unique to Islam and other "barbaric" religions, and that Christianity was much more tolerant? I do. Does anyone here remember people demanding that every Muslim everywhere immediately and unconditionally denounce these actions, or stand accused themselves? I do. Yet here we have a picture that was only mildly sacreligious, was apparently published by mistake (they were looking for a generic picture of Jesus from the Internet, and didn't check it closely enough), and an apology quickly followed. Yet the apology wasn't fast enough to stave off the violence from the followers of Christ. Christian extremists have joined Muslim extremists in threatening free speech. Do those Christians who bleated loudest at the Muslim outrages over the Danish cartoons now retreat in quiet humility and introspection to determine what went wrong in their religious community, or do they bleat louder that this is somehow different? Or, do they ignore it and hope it goes away? My money is on option (C).

Here is a copy of the offending picture.

Self-help for religious damage, with check-list

In this excerpt from my book, “Leaving the Fold,” I've listed some phases of recovery and major issues. See how much you can relate to.

Religion is supposed to be good for you. Yet people get hurt in religious systems, sometimes seriously. I used to think that although damage was done by so-called cults, most religion is essentially benign. It could give you some comfort as a child and teach you some values, but then you grew up and away from it. It wasn’t until I looked back on my struggle to grow free of my own indoctrination, and heard the stories of others, that I realized that this kind of emotional and mental damage can be profound.

In conservative, fundamentaist Christianity you are told you are unacceptable. You are judged with regard to your relationship to God. Thus you can only be loved positionally, not essentially. And, contrary to any assumed ideal of Christian love, you cannot love others for their essence either. This is the horrible cost of the doctrine of original sin. Recovering from this unloving assumption is perhaps the core task when you leave the fold. It is also a discovery of great joy – to permit unconditional love for yourself and others.

The problem of religious damage has not received much attention in our society, perhaps because Christianity is so much a part of our culture and real criticism is taboo. Just consider what we have done to so-called heretics throughout history. Religious damage may also seem less serious than other recovery issues such a alcoholism or child abuse. And since faith is thought of as a good thing in a world brimming with materialism, selfishness, and violence, many feel strange when complaining of church attendance or growing up in a religious home.

But leaving your faith is not like no longer believing in Santa Claus. It can be shattering to realize that your religion is creating problems in your life. Whether you leave abruptly or drift away over a long period of time, you may experience profound sadness and confusion about what to do, think, and believe. You may also feel the rage of betrayal or struggle with persistent depression.

Many people are reluctant to talk about this subject for fear of hurting loved ones, of alienating others, of appearing foolish and self-centered. They sometimes fear divine retribution. I have known therapists who were afraid to work openly with people on these issues because they were concerned they might be labeled anti-religious or anti-God. However, more often, therapists who have not been through the experience themselves do not understand the difficulty of recovering from an authoritarian religion.

But breaking away from a restrictive, controlling religion can be a wrenching, profound experience. You may be feeling confused, guilty, empty, or bitter. You may be depressed about life or scared of the future. Perhaps you have trouble connecting with other people and life "in the world."

You are not alone in your experience. Many, many others have been through this and gone on to reconstruct their lives in meaningful and satisfying ways. While the experience of losing your religion is often painful and confusing at first, there is much to be learned and ultimately a profound maturity to be gained. This book can provide some assistance in your recovery by clarifying the issues involved, offering ideas for healing, and suggesting directions for further growth.

In general, leaving a cherished faith is much like the end of a marriage. The symptoms of separation are quite similar-grief, anger, guilt, depression, lowered self-esteem, and social isolation. But whereas help for divorced people is readily available, little if any assistance is available to help you to leave your religion. The familiar sources of church support are no longer there, and family members still in the fold may actually shun you. Secular friends and even therapists may not understand what you have been through. Part of the difficulty is the anxiety, the terror you may feel about having to go it alone. After having been born again, leaving your faith can feel like being lost again.

There are many issues to work through-thoughts and feelings to process, new friends to make, new beliefs to nurture, and new ways to live. Because your religion took care of so much, defining and dictating reality in so many ways, you are now faced with largely reconstructing your life. Recovery begins with deciding to take that responsibility. This may seem overwhelming, but the benefits are indisputable. You get your life back on your terms. Indeed, the journey out can be thrilling as old fears and doubts give way to new and healthy possibilities.

Phases of Recovery

People seem to go through phases in their recovery from rigid religion, just as other life changes have typical sequences. This particular change goes deeper than many others and touches on all aspects of a person’s life. The following sections offer a very general outline of the recovery pattern that I have observed and facilitated in clients:

1. Separation
2. Confusion
3. Avoidance
4. Feeling
5. Rebuilding

These are not discrete stages in the formal sense. There is considerable overlap between them and a person may be in more than one phase at a time. However, the overall pattern may help you understand where you have been, where you are now, and what you can expect in the future.
(Details are in my book).

Issues in Recovery

"I feel like a scared, lonely, abandoned little kid that just can't get it right and who must be a real "bad boy." I have a large sense of not deserving anything that finally I am not important. This is connected to my "nothingness in the eyes of God," which was taught very early. My mother dedicated me to God when I was an infant. God is what is important, not me. Am I worth taking care of?"
—Daryl

From what I have learned in my work with formerly religious people and from my own experience, certain issues of healing and growth appear to be common to the process of breaking away. Some areas of personal development continue to be important for many years. The areas of impact described here are typical consequences of leaving a conservative, fundamentalist church. They also apply in various ways to leaving other groups. The intensity of impact can range from simple life limiting to extreme harm.

1. Recovering a sense of self
2. Working through emotions of anger, guilt, anxiety, & loneliness
3. Learning how to be in “the world”
4. Accepting self-responsibility
5. Creating meaning and personal spirituality

(These will be explored in my next post and can be found in my book, as well as online for free at www.marlenewinell.net. They will also be covered at retreat weekends).

Here is an inventory you can use to assess how you are doing on these issues:

Issues Checklist
Directions: For each item, mark the number that best reflects the impact that issue or feeling has on your daily life. For example, mark 1 if the issue is mildly bothersome to you, 3 if it is moderately troubling, and 5 if it is severely disturbing. Mark 2 or 4 if the issue falls somewhere between.

Issue/Feeling Severity

Confusion 1 2 3 4 5

Anxiety or fear 1 2 3 4 5

Lack of clear identity and personal values 1 2 3 4 5

Negative sense of self 1 2 3 4 5

Emptiness, as if you have no core 1 2 3 4 5

Negative image of your body 1 2 3 4 5
and discomfort with sexuality

Lack of meaning or purpose in life 1 2 3 4 5

Anger and bitterness 1 2 3 4 5

Loneliness 1 2 3 4 5

Loss and grief 1 2 3 4 5

Depression 1 2 3 4 5

Persistent guilt 1 2 3 4 5

Difficulty enjoying daily pleasures 1 2 3 4 5

Unreasonably high expectations, perfectionism 1 2 3 4 5

Trouble appreciating people 1 2 3 4 5

Difficulty with self-responsibility 1 2 3 4 5

Lack of deep self-love and skills for self-care 1 2 3 4 5

Trouble thinking for yourself 1 2 3 4 5

Difficulty feeling and expressing emotion 1 2 3 4 5

External focus for satisfaction 1 2 3 4 5

The Deadliest Monster, by J.F. Baldwin

My wife is attending a new Sunday School class on worldviews. I was curious when she brought home a book entitled The Deadliest Monster by J.F. Baldwin. The premise of the book is that we all, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide, are depraved by nature and are powerless to save ourselves. As G.K. Chesterton famously maintained, human depravity is the only truly empirically attested doctrine of Christianity.

Baldwin asserts that Christianity is validated by the fact that it is the only worldview that teaches the reality of inherent human sinfulness. He runs through the list of ten "major" worldviews (interestingly, even Jehovah's Witnesses make it on the list) and shows how they downplay human depravity and make ourselves the focus of our salvation. Atheists, too, are all painted with the same broad brush: we believe humans are inherently good and that we can achieve utiopia ("salvation") by reforming society, by improving our environment in such away that the goodness of all can flower.

But this is not all. Since it is an empirical fact that our nature is depraved, we need a Savior, the Son of God, to die on the cross to save us from ourselves and our sin. As it happens, Christianity provides just such a solution! If this is not a non sequitur, what qualifies? Here is the logic: 1) we have a problem; 2) a particular worldview has a suggested solution; 3) that worldview must correspond to reality!

Baldwin then goes on to extend similar logic to the problem of suffering: 1) we all suffer; 2) no worldview both takes suffering seriously and makes sense out of it (i.e., redeems it, turns it into good, as God did for Joseph when his brothers sent him into slavery); 3) therefore, Christianity must be true. What if a child whose parents never gave her ice cream reasoned like this: 1) I like and want ice cream, but my parents don't give me any; 2) my friend Susie's parents give her ice cream; 3) therefore, Susie's parents are my parents (or at least, they must be better parents than mine).

Beyond these obvious non sequiturs, the premise of his main argument is flawed. It would be news to MIT cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker that all atheists deny the anti-social tendencies of human nature or believe in the inherent goodness and perfectivitily of humanity. Perhaps Marxism fits the bill, but certainly far from all atheists are Marxists. In his book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker recounts how as a youth living in Montreal he came to lose faith in the inherent goodness of humanity. As a result of the widespread mayhem, rioting and looting that ensued in the wake of the Montreal police department strike on October 17,1969, he abandoned his idealistic anarchist political views (Pinker 2002, 331). We witnessed a similar surfacing of human selfishness in the looting that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2004.

The solution to the problem? Find the first worldview that recognizes human depravity and proposes a solution, i.e., Christianity? No! How about this: insofar as possible, ensure that adequate societal guardrails are erected to prevent this sort of behavior from happening.

Let me do a one-up on Baldwin. Let me say that his brand of Christianity actually fails to take human depravity seriously enough. What I mean is that the doctrine of total depravity is too often applied to the unregenerate, to those outside the household of faith, without recognizing the extent to which human nature remains in effect for the redeemed (to his credit, Baldwin does offer a nod to the fact that Christians continue to sin, but he clearly believes the Holy Spirit confers some objective moral advantage to believers). The moral fall of a pastor is almost always greeted initially with disbelief, as are allegations of child abuse on the part of missionaries or church leaders. Such abuse is by no means limited to the Catholic Church, as this article from Christianity Today attests concerning the evangelical Mamou Alliance Academy in Guinea, operated by The Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA):

Darr and at least 30 other children at the West African boarding school suffered a more harrowing form of alienation. From 1950 to 1971, children were beaten with belts, forced to eat their own vomit, punched and slapped in the face, coerced into performing oral sex, required to sit in their own feces, fondled, and beaten with a strap to the point of bleeding. Not until 1995, after persistent complaints by a group of adults who had been Mamou students, did the C&MA impanel a commission to investigate.The panel’s 95-page report, filed after 18 months of research and interviews, identifies nine offenders; four are retired, three are dead, and two are no longer affiliated with the C&MA. Two individuals who refused to cooperate with the panel have been convicted at denominational disciplinary hearings. The commission faulted the denomination for improper training, poor oversight, and negligence. The Mamou staff, rather than being loving surrogate parents, punished too frequently and affirmed too little, the report indicates. Richard W. Bailey, chair of the C&MA’s board of managers, sent a letter expressing regret to Mamou alumni in January. “Please accept our heartfelt apology for our inadequate supervision and understanding of the happenings at Mamou Academy, while you were a student.” (“Missions: From Trauma to Truth.” Christianity Today: April 27, 1998. http://ctlibrary.com/1384.)

The above incident is only the best reported of many such heartbreaking stories of abuse in missionary boarding schools around the world. Is it possible that an incomplete acceptance of human depravity led to the lack of supervision that permitted the Mamou tragedy? Did the abusers take advantage of the trust of their fellow missionaries in the goodness of redeemed human nature, failing to implement safeguards to restrain the base impulses of their co-laborers in Christ?

If I acknowledge human depravity, does that mean my inspiration has to come from Christianity, the supposed origin of that doctrine? Hardly! Should we not expect as a consequence of our cutthroat evolutionary heritage a bent toward aggression, violence and selfishness?

I realize I don't represent the views of all atheists on this matter (perhaps many on this blog will disagree with my assessment of human nature), but I do wish to admonish Balwin against the use of any phrase beginning with "Atheists believe..." (with the exception of the tautology "Atheists believe in no gods").

So is my worldview inherently pessimisitic, recognizing human depravity without offering solutions? Perhaps, but only if you believe that anything short of a perfect solution is no solution at all. Can human society be improved over time? Yes--for example, in Western societies, homicide rates have declined tenfold to a hundredfold in the past millennium, from a time when religious belief was virtually unchallenged (Pinker 2002, 330). Slavery is outlawed in the West. We have relative freedom in the West to adhere to whatever worldview we choose. Women have a voice. Can we eliminate all vestiges of human depravity and eliminate murder altogether? No. Unlike Baldwin, who sees the matter in all-or-nothing terms, I am prepared to recognize both the good and the bad in human nature, the noble and the selfish. We are not totally depraved, even if we are flawed. We can improve society, even if we cannot perfect it.

Rabbis and Christians on the Exodus

Rabbi David Wolpe shocked the Jewish world when he gave a Passover sermon that suggested that the Exodus as described in the Torah never took place. He has surveyed the available evidence from the Torah, the archeological record from the Sinai, and the archeological record from the Levant and concluded that the story of the Exodus is impossible. Rabbi Wolpe is not an atheist. In fact he has debated Sam Harris, a prominent atheist, yet he is convinced the Exodus is a fable.

Rabbi Wolpe is still a believing Jew who thinks that the story of Exodus has great power to inspire people today. However, he believes that power is in the metaphor of the story and does not require it to be literally true.

Yet some of Rabbi Wolpe's colleagues excoriated him in public, saying that he was simply wrong. Yet in private one of them told him, "Of course what you say is true, but we should not say it publicly."

Rabbi Wolpe believes that Jews should examine the Exodus account for three main reasons. The first, that historical claims must be evaluated historically, the second, that the truth should never be frightening to believers, and the third, that believers should still have the same relationship to God, even if the account is not true.

Rabbi Wolpe believes God inspired the Bible, but does not believe the Bible is literally true. Personally, I believe this is a muddled way of thinking. I believe it is much more realistic to imagine that the Bible was written by men and is no more and no less inspired than any other work of literature. I think however, that if Rabbi Wolpe said that, he'd be even more likely to lose his job than he is already. So one can easily understand his reticence.

Why is this important? Christians continue to believe things that literally can't be true. A majority of US Christians believe the Torah was written by Moses, a mythical figure. A majority of US Christians refuse to accept the scientific account of the origins of the universe and of life.

Certainly liberal Christians also doubt the literal truth of the Exodus. Christianity Today says:

The fact is that not one shred of direct archaeological evidence has been found for Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob or the 400-plus years the children of Israel sojourned in Egypt. The same is true for their miraculous exodus from slavery.

Even some biblical "maximalist" scholars, such as William Dever (a graduate of Christian Theological Seminary), do not believe the Exodus occurred. In his book, "Who Were the Israelites and Where Did They Come From?" he only gives credence to the idea that they arose within Palestine.

Dever says on page 1:

"Finally, many of the biblical stories are legend-like and abound with miraculous and fantastic elements that strain the credulity of almost any modern reader of almost any religious persuasion. All these factors have contributed to the rise of doubts about the Bible's trustworthiness."

Ultimately, the only thing you need to know to debunk the Bible is what the adherents of the religions based on it think of it. That more than does the job.

Dr. Avalos Responds to Triablogue on the Sargon Legend!

Hector Avalos wrote: Unfortunately, I don’t see any evidence that the authors of Triablogue are familiar with cuneiform literature, or can verify any information for themselves outside of secondary sources such as those found in Hoffmeier, Hess, and other conservative scholars. I know the work of these conservative scholars well.

Read more »

Ten Atheistic Arguments by Dr. Ted Drange

Definitions of "God"

Before getting to the arguments, it is important to present the various definitions of "God" that they employ:

D1: God is the eternal, all-powerful, personal being who created and rules the universe. (Being eternal, God cannot come into or go out of existence. Being all-powerful, he can perform any action that is logically possible to perform. Being personal, he has some characteristics in common with humans, such as thinking, feeling emotions, and performing actions. The universe is understood to consist of all the space, time, matter, and energy that has ever existed.)

D2: God is the eternal, very powerful, personal being who rules the universe, loves humanity, and gave humanity its moral conscience.

D3: God is the eternal, very powerful, personal being who rules the universe, loves humanity, and strongly desires that that love be reciprocated.

D4: God is that being which is self-existent, that is, which contains the explanation for its own existence within itself.

D5: God is that being which is (objectively) perfect in every way. (The term "perfect" is here understood in an objective sense, as opposed to a subjective sense relative to individual values, so the term may be used in public reasoning.)

D6: God is the deity described in the Bible as interpreted by evangelical Christianity.

It will be indicated for each argument which of the above definitions of "God" it employs.


Arguments Against God's Existence

1. The Anti-creation Argument (D1, D6):


(a) If X creates Y, then X must exist temporally prior to Y.

(b) But nothing could possibly exist temporally prior to time itself (for that would involve existing at a time when there was no time, which is a contradiction).

(c) Thus, it is impossible for time to have been created.

(d) Time is an essential component of the universe.


(e) Therefore, it is impossible for the universe to have been created.


(f) It follows that God, as defined by D1 and D6, cannot exist.

Discussion: A similar argument might possibly be constructed with regard to the other components of the universe as well: space, matter, and energy. It is very hard to comprehend how a being could have created the universe without existing within space and without any involvement with matter or energy.

- The God of evangelical Christianity (defined by D6) is included here (and for argument #2, below) because of the first sentence in the Bible, which evangelicals take to refer to the entire universe.


2. The Transcendent-Personal Argument (D1, D6):


(a) In order for God to have created the universe, he must have been transcendent, that is, he must have existed outside space and time.

(b) But to be personal implies (among other things) being within space and time.


(c) Therefore, it is logically impossible for God, as defined by D1 or D6, to exist.

Discussion:


It might be suggested that God has a part that is outside space and time and another part that is inside space and time and that it is the latter part, not the former part, which is personal in nature. But the idea of a being which is partly personal and partly transcendent is incomprehensible. Furthermore, definition D1 implies that God, as a personal being, existed prior to the universe, and it is incomprehensible how a personal being could do so.

- Aside from conceptual considerations that have to do with the very concept of "being personal," there are empirical considerations relevant to premise (b). It might be argued that to be personal requires having thoughts and that science has very strongly confirmed that having thoughts is dependent on having a physical brain. For example, since brain damage has always been found to delete, or at least disrupt, thoughts, it can be extrapolated that there can be no thoughts at all in the total absence of a brain. Although the empirical support for premise (b) is very strong, that may not be a factor that would impress people who are not "scientifically oriented" to begin with.


3. The Incoherence-of-Omnipotence Argument (D1, D6):

(a) If God as defined by D1 or D6 were to exist, then he would be omnipotent (i.e., able to do anything that is logically possible).

(b) But the idea of such a being is incoherent.


(c) Hence, such a being cannot possibly exist.

Discussion: Definition D6 is included here because evangelical Christians maintain that the biblical description of God as "Almighty" is accurate. The issue of whether or not premise (b) is true is complicated. Some writers claim that the idea of omnipotence in itself is inconsistent. Also, some writers claim that being omnipotent is incompatible with possessing certain other properties. (For example, an omnipotent being could commit suicide, since to do so is logically possible, but an eternal being, by definition, could not. Hence, the idea of the deity defined by D1 or D6 is incoherent.) Whether or not the given claim is true is here left open. See comments on the concept of "incoherence" made in connection with argument #7, below. (For further material on arguments similar to #3, see Everitt, 2004, Martin, 1990, and Martin and Monnier, 2003, in the bibliography below.)

- The divine attribute of omniscience gives rise to similar considerations, and there is an Incoherence-of-Omniscience Argument that could be raised. (For material on it, see the references above.) That argument, which is omitted here to save space, also has a premise (b) (worded as in argument #3), which introduces issues that are exceedingly complicated and controversial.

4. The Lack-of-evidence Argument (D1, D2, D3, D6):

(a) If God as defined by any of the four definitions in question were to exist, then he would have to be deeply involved in the affairs of humanity and there would be good objective evidence of his existence.

(b) But there is no good objective evidence for the existence of a deity thus defined.
(c) Therefore, God, as defined by D1, D2, D3, or D6, does not exist.

Discussion: The rationale behind premise (a) is that the sort of deity in question, a personal being who rules the universe or who loves humanity (and perhaps wants that love reciprocated), would need to become involved in the affairs of humans and thereby reveal his existence overtly. It might be claimed that God has achieved such involvement just by means of subjective religious experiences, without providing humanity with any good objective evidence of his existence. This assertion could be attacked on the ground that people who claim to have had such experiences are mistaken about the nature and cause of them. It might also be reasonably argued that religious experiences would be insufficient for the given divine purposes, and only good objective (publicly testable) evidence of some sort would do. Argument #4 is a versatile argument that can be widely used by atheists to attack God's existence, given many different definitions of "God."

Another argument similar to #4, sometimes put forward by scientifically oriented atheists, is the Argument from Metaphysical Naturalism, according to which all phenomena ever observed are best explained by appeal to natural causes (Carrier, 2005). Since that premise is a reason to accept naturalism, it provides an evidential argument against God's existence. However, the given premise is an extremely sweeping one and for that reason alone argument #4 would be preferable.

5. The Argument from Evil (D2, D3, D6):

(a) If there were to exist a very powerful, personal being who rules the universe and loves humanity, then there would not occur as much evil (i.e., suffering and premature death) as there does.

(b) But there does occur that much evil.

(c) Therefore, there does not exist such a being.

(d) Hence, God, as defined by D2, D3 or D6, does not exist.

Discussion: This formulation of the argument is a version of what is called "The Logical Argument from Evil." If the word "probably" were to be inserted into steps (a), (c), and (d), then it would be a version of what is called "The Evidential Argument from Evil." Similar considerations arise in connection with the different versions. According to the Free-will Defense, premise (a) is false because God wants people to have free will and that requires that they be able to create evil. The evil that actually occurs in our world is mankind's fault, not God's. Thus, God can still love humanity and be perfectly good despite all the evil that occurs. There are many objections to this defense. One of them is that much of the suffering and premature death that occurs in our world is due to natural causes rather than human choices, and the Free-will Defense would be totally irrelevant to that form of evil. (Drange, 1998.)

6. The Argument from Nonbelief (D3, D6):

(a) If there were to exist a very powerful, personal being who rules the universe, loves humanity, and who strongly desires that his love for humanity be reciprocated, then there would not exist as much nonbelief in the existence of such a being as there does.

(b) But there does exist that much nonbelief.

(c) Therefore, there does not exist such a being.

(d) Hence, God, as defined by D3 or D6, does not exist.

Discussion: As with the Argument from Evil, an "evidential" version of this argument could be constructed by inserting the word "probably" into steps (a), (c), and (d). Similar considerations arise for all the various versions. The argument is directed against the deity defined by D6, as well as the one defined by D3, because evangelical Christians take God to have all the properties mentioned in D3. (For a discussion of the Argument from Nonbelief framed on the basis of definition D6, see Drange, 1993.) Possibly the argument might also be directed against the deity defined by D2, and something like that is attempted in Schellenberg, 1993, though there it would not be quite so forceful.

The rationale behind premise (a) is that nonbelief in God is an impediment to loving him, so a deity as described by definition D3 or D6 would remove that impediment if he were to exist. Defenses similar to those in the case of the Argument from Evil could be raised, and similar objections to them could be presented. (Drange, 1998.)

7. Arguments from Incoherence (D4, D5, D6):

(a) In order for X to explain Y, not only must Y be derivable from X, but the derivation needs to be in some way illuminating.

(b) If X is derived from itself, then the derivation is in no way illuminating.

(c) Thus, it is impossible for anything to explain itself.

(d) God as defined by D4 is supposed to explain itself.

(e) It follows that the idea of "God" as defined by D4 is incoherent.

(f) Furthermore, perfection is relative, and so, the concept of "objectively perfect," as a concept employed in public reasoning, makes no sense.

(g) Hence, the idea of "God" as defined by D5 is also incoherent.

(h) In addition, the Bible contains descriptions of God that are incoherent (e.g., implying both that Jesus is God and that Jesus is God's son, that God is spirit or a spirit and that God is love).

(i) Evangelical Christians interpret those descriptions literally.

(j) Therefore, it might be argued that the idea of "God" as defined by D6 is also incoherent.

Discussion: Unlike the other arguments in this section, these arguments do not aim to prove God's nonexistence, but rather, the incoherence of God-talk when "God" is defined in certain ways. The point is not that theists who employ such God-talk are mistaken about the world, but that they are confused in their language.

The idea of "incoherence" is also sometimes applied to contradictions or other sorts of conceptual incompatibility. For example, arguments #2 & #3, above, could each be regarded as a kind of "argument from incoherence," for they appeal to conceptual incompatibilities between pairs of divine attributes. [This point might also be applicable to definition D5 if theists were to try to combine it with other definitions. For example, if a theist were to claim that God is both perfect (as given in D5) and the creator of the universe (as given in D1), then it might be argued that such a notion is incoherent, since a perfect being can have no wants, whereas a creator must have some wants. Or if a theist were to claim that God is perfect and also loves humanity (as given in D2 & D3), then it might be argued that such a notion is incoherent, since a perfect being can feel no disappointment, whereas a being who loves humanity must feel some disappointment.] However, this notion of "incoherence" is different from that appealed to in the Arguments from Incoherence, for if incompatible properties are ascribed, at least there is a conjunction of propositions there, even if it is a contradictory pair. In that case, it would still make sense to say that the sentence "God exists" expresses a (necessarily) false proposition. But with the sort of "incoherence" appealed to in the Arguments from Incoherence there is no proposition expressed at all, whether true or false. (For more on incompatible-properties arguments against God's existence, see Martin and Monnier, 2003.)

8. The Argument from Confusion (D6):

(a) If the deity described in the Bible as interpreted by evangelical Christianity were to exist, then there would not exist as much confusion and conflictedness among Christians as there does, particularly with regard to important doctrinal issues such as God's laws and the requirements for salvation.

(b) But there does exist that much. (Christians disagree widely among themselves on such issues, as shown, among other things, by the great number of different Christian denominations and sects that exist.)

(c) Therefore, that deity does not exist.

(d) Hence God as defined by D6 does not exist.

Discussion: The rationale behind premise (a) is that the God of evangelical Christianity is a deity who places great emphasis upon awareness of the truth, especially with regard to important doctrinal issues. It is expected, then, that if such a deity were to exist, he would place a high priority upon the elimination of confusion and conflictedness among his own followers with regard to important doctrinal issues. Because of the great abundance of Christian confusion of the relevant sort, this argument is a very forceful one.

9. The Argument from Biblical Defects (D6):

(a) If the deity described in the Bible as interpreted by evangelical Christianity were to exist, then the Bible itself would not have the defects that it has. That is, it would not contain textual errors, interpolations, contradictions, factual errors (including false prophecies), and ethical defects. Also, the canon would have been assembled with less political involvement and would not have original manuscripts or parts missing.

(b) But the Bible does contain those defects.

(c) Therefore, that deity, which is God as defined by D6, does not exist.

Discussion: Premise (a) is based on the point that evangelical Christians regard the Bible to be God's main form of revelation to humanity. So, given that their God exists, it would be expected that the Bible would possess features implied by the motivations which they ascribe to him. Premise (a) follows quite naturally. (For examples of the Bible's defects, see appendix D of Drange, 1998, and Mattill, 1995. For more on arguments #8 & #9, see Drange, "The Arguments from Confusion and Biblical Defects" in the forthcoming Martin and Monnier, 2006.)

10. The Argument from Human Insignificance (D6):

(a) If the deity described in the Bible as interpreted by evangelical Christianity were to exist, then it would be expected that humans occupy some significant place in the universe.

(b) But, both from the standpoint of space (the size of the universe in relation to the size of the earth) and from the standpoint of time (the length of time in which the universe has existed in relation to the length of time in which humans have existed), humans do not occupy any significant place in the universe.

(c) Hence, God, as defined by D6, probably does not exist.

Discussion: The idea behind the first premise here is that the Bible describes God as having a very special interest in humans. Since humans are so important, they should naturally occupy some significant place in space and time. To reject that idea is to reject the evangelical Christian outlook on the nature of reality. (A slightly different version of this argument is referred to as "The Argument from Scale" in Everitt, 2004.)

- There are many other arguments against God's existence. Some are inductive in form (Martin, 1990). Some make appeal to cosmological assumptions (Craig and Smith, 1993). I have here picked just those that I regard to be the main ones.

Summary

The various arguments can be matched up with the six definitions of "God" as follows:

DEFINITION
ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD

D1
#1-4

D2
#4, #5 (+ possibly #6)

D3
#4-6

D4
#7

D5
#7

D6
#1-10

All theistic arguments for God's existence can be refuted by at least one objection, and all of the definitions of "God" considered here permit God's nonexistence to be established (or else God-talk to be shown incoherent) by at least one argument. Other definitions of "God" are used in ordinary language, but all of them permit God's nonexistence to be established by appeal to similar or analogous considerations. There is much more to be said about the various arguments. The bibliography below supplies some of that and also supplies further references.

Bibliography

Carrier, Richard. Sense & Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005.

Craig, William Lane and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Craig, William Lane and Quentin Smith. Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Drange, Theodore. "The Argument from Non-belief." Religious Studies 29, 1993.

Drange, Theodore. Nonbelief & Evil: Two Arguments for the Nonexistence of God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.

Drange, Theodore. "The Fine-tuning Argument Revisited." Philo vol. 3, no. 2, 2000.

Everitt, Nicholas. The Non-existence of God. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Le Poidevin, Robin. Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Martin, Michael. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Martin, Michael and Ricki Monnier, eds. The Impossibility of God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.

Martin, Michael and Ricki Monnier, eds. The Improbability of God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005.

Mattill, A. J., Jr. The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs. Gordo, AL: The Flatwoods Free Press, 1995.

Schellenberg, J.L. Divine Hiddeness and Human Reason. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Sobel, Jordan Howard. Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Stenger, Victor J. Has Science Found God? Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.

-- Ted Drange

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Used by permission of Reggie at The Infidel Guy Show, who also has this posted.