Review of Guy Harrison's "50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God"

Following is a slightly revised copy of a review I recently posted on Amazon.com for Guy P. Harrison's 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God.

I eventually intend to read and review Loftus' book also, but I've had a backlog of books in my queue and haven't yet gotten around to John's. I see value in both Loftus' and Harrison's approaches, the former being directed at a more sophisticated, apologetics-oriented audience and the latter at more of a popular, uninitiated audience.

Without further ado, here's my review of Harrison's book:

Reading Harrison's book was like a breath of fresh air--courteous and accessible yet effective and to the point. I appreciate his ability to level the playing field of all religions by referring to the "gods" of each using the same terms: Jesus, Allah, Shiva and Zeus are all "gods" worshipped by people in various cultures. Though apologists and sophisticated believers would likely look down on his non-scholarly style, it's a book I could give to my Christian friends and family without having to worry about their ability to process the theological jargon common to many works of this nature.

That's the upside. The downside of treating all religions as equals in the same book is that for certain believers (I think of my Christian friends who are well-versed in apologetics), the meager attention given to biblical prophecies and the Resurrection of Jesus will give them reason to dismiss the book as uninformed about a number of important reasons for believing. For example, Harrison discounts fulfilled biblical prophecies by saying the fulfillments are found in the same book (i.e., the Bible) as the prophecies, implying that same authors wrote both. Now, like Harrison, I do not accept the supernatural nature of biblical prophecies. However, it should be acknowledged that the Bible is not one but many books written over a period of many centuries. All scholars recognize that the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament were written centuries before Jesus' birth, so these prophecies cannot be dismissed using Harrison's approach. It's more likely that the New Testament authors invented details (or passed on details that developed through oral tradition) that made the events of Jesus' life appear to fulfill certain prophecies of the Old Testament.

Left out altogether was any mention of the events surrounding Jesus' Resurrection that convince millions of faithful Christians that something supernatural happened on Easter Sunday morning. This is a cornerstone of Christian apologetics for authors like William Lane Craig, N. T. Wright, and Frank Morrison. I understand it was probably left out because the book attempts to address all religions equally, but this omission will be perceived as a major oversight by many Christian readers.

One of the most powerful of Guy's arguments is his exposition of the well-documented inverse relationship between religiosity and societal health (measured by homicide rates, number of abortions, quality of healthcare, and prosperity) throughout the world. This revelation must be profoundly unsettling for believers who are convinced that the god of their religion is the wellspring of virtue. On the basis of my discussion with believers, the moral argument is appealed to perhaps more than any other to support religion. If this is taken away, it represents a major setback to the legitimacy of religious belief. Unfortunately many believers will respond, "Well, if you look at people who believe and practice their faith just like I do (e.g., those who read the Bible and pray daily with their family), you will find that divorce and crime rates are much lower than average for the population at large. Others may say they're Christians, but their failure to practice it like I do means they cannot be thrown into the same statistical pot as true believers." Much could be said to counter this sort of special pleading, but it's simply hard to pin down anyone with arguments like these. We can always hope that some proportion of Harrison's thoughtful religious readers will take his engaging arguments to heart without persistently exempting themselves from their force.

Don't let my small criticisms of the book discourage you from reading it. It deserves to be read by every believer of every stripe. It will serve as a gentle "jolt" to everyone who believes their religion is special.  

Lee's Plausibility Heuristic

I think I've come up with a weighted ranking scale heuristic for scoring the plausibility of claims derived from government, business and theoretical criteria and I'd like to put it out here for critique. This weighted ranking scale could be used for the bible, literature, science, history, news articles etc... and we could compare them.
I suspect that the score for a history text book would be much higher than the bible, the average historical fiction would be somewhat higher, and your average folklore tale would be about the same as the bible.

here's how it goes.
the number by the metric is its relative value.

0. an unsupported claim.
1. a claim has witness testimony
2. a claim that has a verifiable precedent
2. a claim has support of physical evidence
2. a claim that can be reproduced

for example lets take the simple claim that
"Yesterday, the ice in Jans drink melted before she finished it"
- I have seen this happen
- I can put ice in a drink and let it set till it all melts, therefore it has a verifiable precedent, it has support of physical evidence, and it can be reproduced.
So it gets a score of 7.

Now lets take the claim
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
- I have not seen this happen
- there is no physical evidence that this happened.
- There is no evidence that this has ever been reproduced
- there is a witness
therefore it gets a score of 1.

Therefore the more plausible claim of these two is that Jans Ice Melted.

Here are some more examples to test the heuristic with thanks to Jeff Carter over in the comments section at Exploring Our Matrix.

1. Mary loves me
2. John is thinking of the theory of relativity
3. James is happy or sad or afraid
4. David has faith in me
5. Greg wants to go to the store

"1. Mary loves me"
assuming the claim has a one to one relationship to a real world event ....

1. are there witnesses?
yes
2. a claim has a verifiable precedent?
people have reported feelings of love, I have experienced love and people that love each other, yes
2. a claim has support of physical evidence?
Love's all in the brain: fMRI study shows strong, lateralized reward, not sex, drive, maybe some other outward signs, rapid heartbeat, flushing skin, fast breathing, yes
2. is it a claim that can be reproduced?
does it happen to her again? yes

I give it a 7

"2. John is thinking of the theory of relativity"
assuming the claim has a one to one relationship to a real world event ....

1. are there witnesses?
maybe not
2. a claim has a verifiable precedent?
someone thought up the theory of relativity, yes
2. a claim has support of physical evidence?
when asked to explain it, he does, yes
2. is it a claim that can be reproduced?
when asked to explain it again, he does, yes

I give it a 6

"3. James is happy or sad or afraid"
assuming the claim has a one to one relationship to a real world event ....

1. are there witnesses?
yes
2. a claim has a verifiable precedent?
self-evident, yes
2. a claim has support of physical evidence?
Implicit perception of fear signals: An fMRI investigation of PTSD. The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry,5, 135 and if there are outward signs , yes
2. is it a claim that can be reproduced?
when given the same stimulus it happens again, yes

I give it a 7

"4. David has faith in me"
assuming the claim has a one to one relationship to a real world event ....

1. are there witnesses?
have people observed that his behavior is consistent with having faith in you? yes
2. a claim has a verifiable precedent?
self-evident, yes
2. a claim has support of physical evidence?
if there are outward signs, when asked he says yes, so yes
2. is it a claim that can be reproduced?
the behavior is independently verified on some other occasion, yes

I give it a 7

"5. Greg wants to go to the store"
assuming the claim has a one to one relationship to a real world event ....

1. are there witnesses?
maybe not
2. a claim has a verifiable precedent?
self-evident, "the store" implies that the identity of the store is understood further implying that Greg has been there before, and also other people want to go to the store otherwise the store would be unsustainable, so yes
2. a claim has support of physical evidence?
if there are outward signs, when asked he says yes, so yes
2. is it a claim that can be reproduced?
the behavior is independently verified on some other occasion, yes

I give it a 6, stipulating that the data recorder does not count as a witness

I think the real stickler here, would be quality of evidence. I think a quality heuristic for evidence is needed and possibly exists.

In any case, plausibility is not certainty, and since sometimes decisions need to be made using plausibility as a consideration (for example legislation related to womens rights, civil rights, Invitro fertilization, cloning, homosexuality, stem cell research, abortion, participating in war, etc) a plausibility ranking would come in handy.

I Reviewed Dan Barker's New Book Godless

Amazon Godless Review.

What Happens When You See Jesus?

There is a population of people in all cultures throughout history who hear voices that aren't there and see things that don't exist to other people. Modern American society labels these beliefs the product of a mental illness and it is given several different names. Most patients with severe, persisting delusions are schizophrenic, a disorder that can be treated with medication, but at the moment is incurable. One of the most common types of delusions seen in schizophrenics is that of religious figures appearing to them or speaking to them.

A study done in 2002 in the UK compared patients who had religious delusions with those who did not have religious themes as part of their delusion. I'll get to the findings in a bit but first, a bit about schizophrenic delusions.

Patients with schizophrenia can be very convincing. Most people who work with the mentally ill have at one time or another had a twinge of concern that perhaps the person they were evaluating might really be being persecuted. They have extremely good logical skills and can generally answer any objection to their overarching theory with a detailed explanation of why they are correct.

For example, some people imagine that celebrities are secretly in love with them. Some people imagine that various government agencies have listening devices located in unusual places and are closely monitoring their activities. Some people believe that the people around them are being replaced with impostors. Still others believer that angels and devils appear to them. Some even have Jesus or the angel Gabriel appear to them.

Now I want to be clear here. If someone you know is seeing Jesus appear to them, please get them to see a mental health professional as soon as possible. There is almost no chance Jesus is actually appearing to them, regardless of what they tell you, and there is a very high chance they are severely mentally ill and in need of medication and therapy.

What's worse, in the study done in the UK, the patients with religious delusions had much worse overall pathology and were harder to treat.

Now -- the hard part for me to understand is this. From my point of view, the present is the key to the past. It is likely that processes that are going on now on earth are the same ones as have taken place for the bulk of our history as a species, especially as it concerns mental functioning.

So if someone today has Jesus appear to him, we don't listen to what he says Jesus told him. We get him to a psychiatrist and medicate him. Rarely, we don't, and the results are usually quite predictable.

So it is odd, given the facts that we have today, that Christians find the appearances of Jesus to Paul to be evidence of God acting in history, yet they don't find the same analogous actions occurring today to be the same phenomenon. Surely Christians believe that Jesus, being omnipotent, could appear should he choose to. In fact, most believe he will appear at some time in the near future.

So I ask again to all my Christian friends:

Let me know what you would think if three of your friends came to tell you about one of them having an appearance from Jesus, and two of them seeing a light and hearing a voice. Assume Jesus instructed your friend he appeared to that all Christians should run daily marathons and become vegans.

Is this something you would consider authoritative? If not, why not, and by what method do you differentiate between ancient appearances, for which we only have textual evidence and modern appearances, for which we have live witnesses whom we can interrogate to determine the veracity of their claim?

Dr. James F. McGrath on the Evidence of History for Faith

I've been defending the idea that historical studies are a slender reed to hang a faith like Christianity on. McGrath shows us what this means when it comes to the burial of Jesus in his new book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. From what he wrote on his blog here, and then again here, I think there would be much I can agree with him about.

Is Catholicism Any Better Than Evangelicalism?

Here is a discussion I had with a Catholic about my book. See what you think.

A Review of John Haught's Book, "God and the New Atheism," Part 2

The following is a continuation of a review I started here about John F. Haught’s new book, God and the New Atheism. If you want to read something more about his views on religion Dr. Haught just recently wrote on the question, Is religion the root of all evil?, for the Secular Philosophy Blog, which, when it comes to his definition of religion I’ll get to that in a later post. [What I wrote in answer to that same question will be posted there next week].

In his “Introduction” Haught previously mentioned two "new" aspects to the new atheism: 1) “Faith in God is the cause of innumerable evils and should be rejected on moral grounds;” and 2) “Morality does not require belief in God, and people behave better without faith than with it.” (p. xiv) Whether these things are indeed "new" to atheists I very much doubt. Nonetheless in chapter one (pp. 1-14) he discusses the first "new" aspect of the new atheism.

Haught outlines the views of the new atheists with regard to faith. Their argument is based on “four evident truths.” The first one is that “many people in the world are living needlessly miserable lives.” The second is that “the cause of so much unnecessary distress is faith, particularly in the form of belief in God.” Faith for Harris, as but one example, is “belief without evidence” (The End of Faith, pp. 58-73, 85). Third, “the way to avoid unnecessary human suffering today is to abolish faith from the face of the earth.” And the fourth is that “the way to eliminate faith, and hence to get rid of suffering, is to follow the hallowed path of the scientific method.”

As a theologian and philosopher of science, Dr. Haught effectively dismantles what I consider to be a few naïve understandings of the new atheists regarding faith and the scientific method. It’s a common mistake that applied and theoretical scientists unaccustomed to understanding the philosophy of science make. Is faith a belief without evidence? No. Do scientists come to their conclusions based solely on the evidence? No.

I don’t want to be too harsh on the new atheists, since I truly appreciate the impact they have had in raising the level of awareness for skeptics, but Haught is correct here, if in fact that's what they think. Anyone who has seriously looked into the philosophy of science and read Thomas Kuhn, Michael Polanyi, Ian Barbour, Frederick Suppe, Paul Feyerabend, and even Karl Popper knows that science is not completely objective, that facts are theory laden, and that certainty as a goal is impossible to achieve, which leaves room for faith. Popper, for instance, talked of science progressing by “conjectures and guesses.” Feyerabend even argued that there is no such thing as the scientific method! Scientists themselves are people with passions, prior commitments, and/or control beliefs. In fact, there are many beliefs we have for which we have no evidence, as Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued--such things as I’m not dreaming right now, that I've existed for longer than 24 hours, that I am not merely a brain in a mad scientist's vat which is being caused to remember the events of today in the year 2030, or that we're not all living in something depicted by the movie the Matrix.

Haught argues that “there is no way, without circular thinking, to set up a scientific experiment to demonstrate that every true proposition must be based in empirical evidence rather than faith. The censuring of every instance of faith, in the narrow new atheist sense of the term (i.e. according to Haught as an "intellectual and propositional sense," rather than a "vulnerable heart"), would have to include the supposition of scientism also." Why? Because Haught argues, faith "is essential to ground the work of science itself.” (p. 11).

Here is where I think Haught is confused. Evidence stands in a dialectic tension with the faith of the scientist in that the scientist’s faith directs his conjectures and guesses, and in turn the evidence corrects these guesses by refuting ill informed ones. Faith and evidence stand in a dialectic tension with each other in this manner. So it would be completely non-scientific of Haught to say that the faith of a scientist should ever take precedence over the evidence itself. The faith of the scientist is one that should never be against the evidence, and THAT is surely what the new atheists are arguing for, irrespective of whether they have ever studied the philosophy of science or not! And the faith of a scientist (qua scientist) does not, and should not be, as Haught describes faith, "a commitment of one's whole being to God." (p. 5) Rather, it's a faith that believes a certain experiment will produce fruitful results prior to doing the experiment, or that spending a great deal of time trying to solve an equation will be worth the effort, or at a more fundamental level that his senses adequately reflect the world. The claim of the new atheists is that the evidence does not support the faith of a believer in God, and they are right. Haught disagrees, but how does he propose to show them they are wrong apart from the evidence?

Haught merely claims there is no way without circular reasoning to establish that every true proposition must be based in empirical evidence. His argument is that if this is the case it leaves room for faith, since science cannot be proved based upon a scientific experiment. So what? What method does he propose to investigate our experience in this world other than science and the evidence? Mysticism? Intuition? What kind of methods are those? And how would someone go about establishing them as methods without reasoning in a circle? What is the exact content to these methods since those who adhere to them come away with different and mutually contradictory understandings of their experiences?

I have argued at length in my book on behalf of methodological naturalism, which was first suggested by the ancient Greek philosopher/scientist Thales. He proposed a natural answer to the question of "what is the source of all things?" Thales claimed the source of all things was water. The method he used in coming to this conclusion eschewed references to the gods and goddesses of his day and merely looked for a natural answer to the question. This method is the one that has been the most fruitful in history, bar none. That method is all we have. So it’s reasonable to think as Barbara Forrest has argued, that since this method has worked so well that philosophical (or ontological) naturalism is a reasonable conclusion to come to, even if we cannot prove such a conclusion by a scientific experiment itself!

So while Haught is right about a few things, he’s dead wrong about other more important things.

How Accurate Is The Bible?

Accuracy is verifiable, quantifiable and measurable.How much inaccuracy are you willing to invest in? 0%? 10%? 25%? 50%? How accurate do you want your road map? How accurate do you want your Scripture? All Christian Arguments can be reduced to the dependence on the presumption that the Bible is accurate to some degree. Accuracy is verifiable, quantifiable and measurable.

A Map is a model of the real world.
It is made to represent the world to some degree of accuracy decided upon before it was ever made. We can make value judgments about the map using whatever criteria are important to us. One criteria that should be important (because it is the purpose for the map) is how accurate it represents whatever it is that it is supposed to represent.

If we have to go somewhere and we are uncertain about how to get there, we can use a map. A map eliminates uncertainty to a degree because it represents a model of the world that we can use for planning. It gives us the ability to make choices and decisions that not only translate into success, but how comfortable it is to get there. We can see where the towns are in relation to one another, make rough guesses about the best route at a glance, make decisions about time and resources based on what resources are found along the path, we can make value judgments about those resources ahead of time. All in all it gives us the ability to form a strategy for the trip that probably has a high degree of likelihood for success. So a successful outcome for the trip really does reduce to the degree of accuracy of how well the map models the real world, and to what degree we are willing to tolerate and overcome whatever inaccuracies there are in the map.

The Bible is like a map.
Jesus describes himself as "the way" and goes on to further describe himself as a kind of "Model" to show what God is like.

John 14:6-11
6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.
7 "If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him."
8 Philip said to Him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us."
9 Jesus said to him, "Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, 'Show us the Father'?
10 "Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.
11 "Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves.

Jesus confirmed the Old Testament was the word of God by referring to it as such and referring back it frequently.

- Matthew 1-1:21, judgment of Tyre and Sidon
- Matthew 5:18, validates scripture
- Matthew 12:3, verifies Davids actions
- Matthew 12:39ff, verifies Jonah and the whale
- Matthew 15:3, validates scripture
- Matthew 15:6, validates scripture
- Matthew 15:7-9 He refers to the first part of Isaiah's work (Isaiah 6:9), verifies only one Isaiah
- Matthew 19:1-6, verifes Adam and Eve
- Matthew 19:8, 9, Moses wrote the Pentateuch
- Matthew 21:16, validates scripture by citing Psalm 8:2
- Matthew 22:31, validates scripture
- Matthew 24:15, verifies Daniel was a prophet
- Matthew 24:37, verifes Noah and the Global Flood

- Luke 4:17-21, He cites Isaiah 61:1, 2, verifies only one Isaiah
- Luke 11:51, the murder of Abel by his brother Cain
- Luke 17:29, 32, the destruction of Sodom and the death of Lot's wife

- Mark 12:26, calling Moses
- Mark 12:29-31, Moses wrote the Pentateuch

- John 6:31-51, manna in the wilderness
- John 7:19, Moses wrote the Pentateuch
- John 10:35, validates scripture

So how accurate should we expect the Word of God to be?
If we use a weighted raking we can get a rough idea. God is perfect, and man is not. So we can expect that man will be less accurate than God, but if God is helping man, then man should be more accurate that if he were working alone.

1. God is more accurate than man
2. Man is less accurate than God but more accurate with help from God
3. Man alone is less accurate

That should serve as a rough guideline and the first metric in an attempt to quantify the accuracy of the Bible.

Jesus intended us to use himself and, by extension, scripture as a model or a map for how to live our lives.
He intended it to reduce uncertainty about how to live a righteous life. Scripture was intended to eliminate uncertainty to a degree because it represents a model of the world that can be used for planning. It was intended to give us the ability to make choices and decisions that not only translate into success, but how comfortable it is to live with them. We can see where our goals are in relation to one another, make rough guesses about the best choices at a glance, make decisions about how to spend our time and resources based on what resources are found around us, we can make value judgments about those resources ahead of time. All in all it gives us the ability to form a strategy for our lives that probably has a high degree of likelihood for success. So a successful outcome for life really does reduce to the degree of accuracy of how well scripture models the real world, and to what degree we are willing to tolerate and overcome whatever inaccuracies there are in scripture.

Accuracy is verifiable, quantifiable and measurable.
How much inaccuracy are you willing to invest in? 0%? 10%? 25%? 50%? How accurate do you want your road map? How accurate do you want your Scripture? All Christian Arguments can be reduced to the dependence on the presumption that the Bible is accurate to some degree. Therefore, the probability of the likelihood that their conclusions are correct depend directly on the degree of accuracy of The Bible as a representation (or model) of events in the world past and present.

Paul Manata is Not a Serious Thinker!

A serious thinker does not try to misrepresent the views of his opponents. If he does this on a regular basis, even if he seems to be intelligent, it will reveal him for what he is, a hack. That's what Paul Manata's latest post does. Here is my response...

Paul Manata tries to drive a wedge between my views about history and fellow Blogger and Biblical Scholar Dr. Hector Avolas, who has soundly refuted the arguments of the Triablogers on the Sargon Legend here and again here.

Manata makes his point in these words:

What is Loftus’s attitude toward history?...What is the position of the book Avalos offers “praise” for, and the leader of the blog he signed up to be a part of regarding matters historical? Simply put, says Loftus, “Historical evidence is poor evidence” (Loftus, 181). Citing Bebbington he claims, “The historian’s history is molded by his values, his outlook, and his worldview. It is never the evidence alone that dictates what was written” (Loftus, 183). He doesn’t “see any problem in claiming that there is room for doubting many if not most historical claims…” (Loftus, 192, emphasis mine, he adds the qualifier “especially claims about the miraculous,” but that is irrelevant for my purposes here).

What should be understood from my chapter on history is that when it comes to establishing the Christian view of history with its claims about the miraculous, historical evidence is poor evidence when compared to personal experience or the findings of science or logic itself. So it is not irrelevant that I added the qualifier Manata dismisses so easily as "irrelevant" for his purposes. That's the whole context for my argument in that chapter. Manata should also understand that D.W. Bebbington, whom I quoted from, is defending a Christian view of history. He earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge and at the time of his book he was the professor of history at the University of Stirling in Scotland. His book was published by InterVarsity Press, a conservative Christian publishing house. So if Manata wants to take issue with me then let him take issue with Bebbington himself. In my book I repeatedly quote from Christian authors to show that these are not just my claims as an atheist. I repeatedly use Christian authors to establish my case in many areas.

Manata again:

So is all of the “massive historical evidence” Avalos brought to bear on us, “poor evidence?”

Yes, it's poor evidence if one wants to establish the Christian worldview, which is what he is not doing. Anyone who actually takes the time to read my whole chapter on the subject of history will see quite clearly that Manata misrepresented me. What I'm wondering is how his credibility will suffer because of what he wrote. I never said I couldn't come to reasonable conclusions about history. In fact I said I could. And while there is always the possibility I'm wrong about any conclusions I arrive at, it would be a slender reed for someone to hang his faith on, as I said. The very fact that historians dispute what happened in history proves my point, since no one can dispute scientific findings in the same way. And Manata has still given us no reason to accept his Christian view of history, as I argued in that chapter, since his view of history is not something that can be shown to be true via philosophy (who, for instance, would argue on behalf of the virgin birth of Jesus based on any philosophical reasoning?). To presuppose the Christian worldview, as Manata does, would mean to presuppose the conclusions of a massive amount of historical investigations, which, as I said, leave plenty of room for doubt. For instance, he must presuppose a certain view of the of the Trinity, a particular view of the Genesis accounts of creation, that the stories in the Bible were not borrowed to any significant degree by pagan sources, that the canonical books were correctly chosen, that the OT prophecies about Jesus were actually prophecies and that they refer to him alone, that Jesus was born of a virgin in Bethlehem, that he can make sense of the Incarnation, that he can make sense of the supposed atonement, that he can defend the historicity of the supposed bodily resurrection of Jesus, that he can defend the notion of the parousia he's adopted, that a proper understanding of the Bible leads him to Calvinism, and so forth. Any specific conclusion of which, if wrong, defeats his faith! Because the larger the claim is, the more likely that claim is false since more evidence is needed to support it.

Paul promised a reply to what I just wrote earlier today. I haven't seen him respond. Maybe he will. But I do not expect him to be honest with what I said. Shame really. It'll show him to be the hack that he really is. Not to be taken seriously.

Paul, if you want to be taken seriously then you must deal honestly about what someone like me writes. Anyone who reads my book will see that you have not done so. Can you? If you continue to misrepresent your opponents you will continue to lose credibility in the eyes of people who have actually read through my book. That's the bottom line. They will see that you are not being honest as a serious thinker. Now I understand you don't think I deserve any honesty, since you believe God may have created me for hell. But by not being honest about the arguments of another person it will reveal that you are not interested in the truth. Whether or not you are, cannot be seen by your readers. And unless you do, your arguments will not help those who read my book who are looking for good solid Christian responses to what I've written. In my book I try as best as I can NOT to misrepresent my intellectual opponents, and I would gladly accept any criticism from anyone who can show that I did. That's why I AM considered a serious thinker and you are not, even if you think I'm dead wrong.

A Stone-Cold Liar

That's me, according to Phil Johnson over at TeamPyro. He's decided that my rejection of Christianity is to be explained by calling me a liar. No time for any extended look at Phil's post here just now, and I'm not sure what there is to say in response to someone who dismisses all you say as lies, anyway. Here's the comment I left for Phil on his blog earlier. It's not likely to show up in the comment stream there.

Hey Phil,

If you have the courage of your convictions in saying what you do here, I encourage you hear from my friends and family, who remain devout Christians, about my commitment, and more importantly the "fruit" I was known by as a Christian. I'm happy to make it convenient for you to hear from them if you are willing to report back here what testimony you receive from them.

I totally understand that no evidence presented will prevent you from leaning farther the way you already incline -- away from anything that's problematic for your worldview; you can dismiss all that just as easily as lies on their part or a decades long conspiracy on my part to "walk the walk" just to... well, just because of demons I guess you might conclude.

In any case, I bet my wife, former pastors and others would be willing to spare a few minutes to share their understanding of my beliefs and commitments when I was a Christian, even as they might commiserate with you about my rejection of the faith; for them, having real world evidence to deal with -- a relationship with me over time in the real world -- it's not so neat and convenient as the position you've helped yourself to here.

I don't expect that to change your view, but I do think it would commit you to a more honest appraisal of the evidence, having to call me a liar over against the real experiences of those who know me best. I'm sure you can and will maintain your conclusion, because if your blog shows anything about you, it's that certitude and a priori conclusions are what's really divine to you.

But readers would have some background information to contrast your claims with. Even if they agree, they will have had more to work with in judging.

It's convenient to say "I'm too busy" to have a phone call that takes a fraction of the time it took to write your post. It's tempting, I'm sure, to just assume that anyone around me is also under my amazing powers of deception, and therefore of little value in understanding what background is here. But I'm offering, all the same, just because getting an honest view of the situation, any situation, is a good ingredient in making judgments. It's a hassle for me, too, to set that up, especially given the futility it represents in changing anything for you. But I'm willing, just in the interests of doing better than just carving the reality out we like best with our keyboards, and offering soothing and self-medicating rationalizations for our readers.

Let me know if you want to take me up on the offer, and I will put you in contact with people who can speak to the evidence and experience they have of me as a committed, engaged, fruit-bearing Christian. An honest look at the reports of those who know me best won't fit nicely into your narrative here, I anticipate, but that's the thing with being honest: sometimes the pieces don't fit as neatly as you'd like, and sometimes it leads to dissonance, contradiction, and yes, bane of all things Pyro, uncertainty.

-TS

If Phil wants to look honestly at the subject he's addressing, I'm willing to support some further analysis. Does his claim fit with the views of my family, friends, and colleagues, that I'm a liar or a generaly dishonest person? I'm all for looking at the evidence, evidence which should support Phil's allegations if they are true, right? As above, once Phil's convinced of a conspiracy theory, there's no talking him out of it, as the talking just becomes part of the conspiracy in his view. But just for the record, if Phil wants to make personal contact with the people who've known me best, I'm fine with that -- let the evidence show what it shows.

In any case, in the words of a friend who emailed to alert me to Phil's post this morning: "you should have seen this coming... this is what they do."

Fine.

If the retort is nothing more than just to dismiss everything I've said as a lie, and focus on discrediting me and my integrity personally, that's just more evidence against Phil's brand of Christianity as a credible, defensible set of ideas. When you have to resort to dismissing your critics and ideological opponents as liars who can't be even given credit for meaning what they say, there's not much poorer you can get in terms of argument and apology.

Bring The Hate!

My earliest memories out at grandma and grandpa’s ranch are quite pleasant. With miles and miles of country around us, and long, lazy summer breaks, enabling us to spend weeks with two elderly loved ones who were intent on spoiling us through-and-through, all was good. Dad’s dad (or “Gran,” as we called him) was quite a character. You could spot him a clear mile away, wearing that same pen-striped blue-and-white factory work shirt and those dark-blue uniform pants with an always-oversized cowboy hat atop his head on that anorexically skinny body. He had about 15 pairs of the same uniform hanging in his closet, and I never saw him wear anything else a single day in his life. But hey, grandparents need not be stylish! That ought to be a written law somewhere!

Gran had an incredible level of charisma. He could be charming with an amazing sense of humor. We always thought he’d have been great as a stand-up comic. Gran was “the life of the party,” as they say, and a fundamentally good man. But good a man as he was, he had a problem—he loved his booze! Daily, he sat out on the front porch, on that same rusty, white lawn chair with the paint still chipping off it and became inebriated. This would bring out the demons from his painful past.

He would wake up in the morning and his words would be so clear, so well spoken. But as the day would progress, he would lose himself in his great escape of Schlitz beer. Then the demons would take control: “Them damn Japs. They need to be strangled with a god-damn guitar string, all of them!” Gran was in the Navy during World War II and was on one of the ships hit by the Japanese while escorting the USS Hornet. He couldn’t talk about it while sober, but in varying levels of buzz-ed-ness, he let out that he had seen his friends blown to bits. Those images stayed with him forever. His injured, severely hunched-over back, still containing bits of exploded boilers and random shards of metal from the ship, was a testament to the hell he had lived through. He survived over a day out in shark-infested waters until he was rescued. The guilt he felt for being a survivor was crushing. He had quite a few stories to tell.

And we kids never quit hearing those colorfully endowed, flaming stories over and over again! So after carrying on a great while about how worthy the Japanese were of being strangled, stabbed, and machine-gunned to death, he would go to one of those dusty shelves just above his garage icebox and show us the same picture he had shown us a thousand times before. The picture was of a dead Japanese soldier lying facedown next to a creek. “The only good Jap is a dead Jap!” he would declare. Then, he would continue the tirade with enough loudly yelled curse words to send an eleven-year-old me and my younger brother and cousins into fits of rolling laughter and incited thoughts of bloody vengeance against “our great enemies,” the Japanese.

Grandma would sometimes have to come out on the porch and settle him down because he would get so worked up and belligerent that he would lose himself and lash out at us. It only happened a few times, but we dared not defend the Japanese or say that the war was over (believe me, I learned the hard way!) In times like these, grandma would have to send us away to play while she quieted him: “Ssssssssshhhh! They’re just little kids! You ain’t supposed to cuss too much around little kids. Don’t yell at them! You are gonna ruin them.” Neither grandma nor grandpa was educated, and both grew up fighting extreme poverty. They didn’t have the opportunities we had, and yet they lived through hard times and survived to keep the line going.

Today, Gran is no longer around—hasn’t been for over a decade. I was close to him, and the things brought to light thus far were said to make a point, and not to cast aspersions on my grandfather or put stink on his memory. It pains me to share some of these things, but there is good and bad in all of us, and important lessons should be learned from the good and the bad in the legacies we leave behind. I’m sure a sober Gran would agree.

So let us suppose, of all the things I could glean and carry on of my grandfather’s ways, that I chose to embrace the bitter hatred he had for the Japanese. Suppose I were to carry on the anger and resentment generated from malicious memories of the past. Would that be right? Certainly that would be a big mistake. But what if my culture’s beloved holy book told me to hold people accountable for the sins of their fathers, because of wrongdoings of bygone times? Would that be right?

One of the most head-shaking evils of the Bible is that it is a book that has for so long taught and encouraged hatred and malice. Its yellowed pages have encouraged centuries of violence. And while the Old Testament is much more openly vile and less evolved than the New Testament, both sets of oracles have reddened the ground of every country in the world. The Bible teaches that God hates sinners unto the third and fourth generations…

“…for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;” (Exodus 20:5)

When I read these words, I can’t help but wonder how many have been stoned, stabbed, or burned alive for age-old wrongs that one’s ancestors were only guilty of. How many innocent voices have hollered out for mercy, squealing to be delivered from slaughter because of a father’s crimes? How many times have the words “no” and “please” been used in the same exclamatory sentences as one pleads for his or her life to be spared? It is chilling to think about.

And it is important to remember that the God of the Old Testament never made distinctions between “the consequences of sin” verses “the guilt of sin” like modern apologists do in trying to justify biblical massacres. The eternal hate and livid rage that flowed out from the thrown of the gods was unearthly in its intensity. The rage that the gods felt when sinned against could last anywhere from a single light punishment of one person (Genesis 49:4) all the way to eternal torture of a soul (Luke 16:19-31). So as it wasn’t to many of the other gods, generational guilt was no big thing to the God of the Bible either…

“the LORD hath sworn that the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” (Exodus 17:16)

“17. Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; 18. How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God. 19. Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.” (Deuteronomy 24:17-19)

It is manifestly unjust – in principle and in practice – to hold someone accountable for the crimes committed by another. But the gods don’t think so (at least, not very often). If you were an Amalekite, there was no such thing as mercy from God for you. In similar fashion, the paganized Christian concept of vicarious atonement in the form of a savior dying for our sins is as unjust as is generational hatred. It is only horse sense that the word “justice” cannot apply to an innocent party bearing the guilt and punishment of a guilty party. And in at least one place, even the Bible says so…

“The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” (Ezekiel 18:20)

We are each responsible for our own wrongs committed—so much for the idea of a savior dying for my sins! We have here one of the few just and right moral principles in the Bible, but we cannot praise this precept because it is common sense and only creates a hopeless contradiction between the other verses mentioned.

The entire idea of original sin is also an injustice of universal proportion. I cannot be “born sinful,” bearing the guilt of Adam and Eve’s transgressions, and yet so many Christians have no problem assigning us our portion in the lake of fire because of this very crooked-but-accepted line of thinking. All Christians who accept this doctrine should be checked for sanity, or else admit from the outset that they are patently irrational and led by a lord-loving lunacy. But even those who reject the doctrine of depravity are themselves unable to justify barbaric Yahweh’s condemnation and slaughter of Amalek and all other Bible atrocities.

The all-too-human tendency of mankind to hate his fellow man over petty differences is the central danger, but religion is still a detriment. Hatred is the invading germ and religion is the host to carry it unchecked into the mind of the human being. It is the bringing over of bitterness from the past that causes so much bloodshed, and religion is often the vessel for how this hatred is justified and brought in. No one ever hated his fellow man so much as when God told him to. Nothing is more historically vindicated than this fact: those who love God most are out to love men least!

And just as with dear old Gran, I can forgive Christians for past wrongs and overlook the negative things that their belief systems have caused and instead judge them to be good people in spite of the shortcomings of their faith. But this only shows us that the ability to love and forgive, and the ability to refrain from judging a man because of what his ancestors did, is an evolved trait, a thing found in morally superior people and societies, and not biblically observant ones. Worshippers of the gods have always made up the status quo, and their members hold the chief percentage of rioters and lawbreakers of every type. A crimson earth is a territorial mark of the devoutly religious. Look long enough and you’ll find the blood; it is sung about in their hymns, talked about in their preaching, consumed in their communion services, and spilt onto the ground in preservation of their dogmas.

If ever we are to evolve as a society and become better, less hateful, less judgmental people, we must continue to grow away from our vile religious heritages. There have been improvements in religion as there have been in secular thinking. So yes, mankind is getting better (however slowly). But if both the secular and religious worlds are becoming kinder and more civilized and learning not to retain the barbaric and hatemongering ways of tribal war gods like Yahweh, then that means that the gods have had nothing to do with our improved senses of compassion and accountability—not one iota! We should look to ourselves for change and for the betterment of mankind, not to the gods.

(JH)

Tony Alamo: Christian Fundamentalism, Tarentino-style

Tony Alamo's compound in Fouke, Arkansas got raided by law enforcement officials over the weekend, the culmination of a two year investigation of allegations of child abuse, child pornography and polygamy in the compound.

Six girls were placed in state custody, as they were "in harm's way or in imminent danger", according to Arkansas Department of Human Services spokeswoman Julie Munsell.

As despicable a prospect as that development is (presup-Calvinists, insert dubious reactions to atheist making moral judgments here!), what's really astonishing is reading about the illustrious career of this evangelist, founder and head of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. It reads like a screenplay for a Tarentino movie, one he turned down.

Alamo is a "Damascus Road" Christian, apparently eschewing evidential approaches to theism in favor of more direct revelation. Before his conversion, he was quite the mover and shaker:

I went from being a big band crooner to being an executive in the health club business. I was the executive vice-president of the world’s largest health club chain. We had seventy-five health clubs in the United States, several in Canada, and several in the United Kingdom. I ducked in and out of the motion picture and music industry through the years, cutting my own records to fit whatever the current trend of music was. I put together “Oldie but Goodie” albums, bought radio and television time, and made a fortune out of the albums. I managed the careers of top motion picture stars and recording artists. I also took unknowns and developed them into stars in the movies, in television, and in the recording industry.

Later, when I became popular at this, I was asked by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, P.J. Proby, Pete Best, the original drummer with the Beatles, and many other solo singers and groups if I would manage them. Later, after I was saved, I was asked to engineer Eddie Fisher, Lena Horn, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme back into popularity, not to mention hundreds of others.

Jimmy Bowen, from Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, asked Billy Strange, one of Frank Sinatra’s music arrangers and the head of the Frank and Nancy Sinatra Publishing Company, if I would do the promotions for Jim Ed Brown, Helen Cornelius, and an entire host of other country/western singers produced by Billy Strange. But I’m no longer available for such things. I’m a pastor, an evangelist and a scribe in the full-time gospel field. However, I do record gospel music.

Clearly, Alamo was destined for greatness, one way or another. But God had other plans for him than managing the Beatles, the Doors, or the Rolling Stones:

I was driving around town in a chauffeur-driven limousine with a police escort and an entourage of seventeen people, putting the world on a trip. I had a barber, a bodyguard, a nurse, and all sorts of “yes” men. If I went to a hot dog stand or a motion picture premiere, I went with the limousines, chauffeurs, cops, and the whole regalia. The bodyguard would open the door, throw down a big velvet pillow; we would step into the velvet pillow. The barber would comb our hair, the nurse take our pulse. One of the fellows would spray us with cologne, another strew flowers in our path, and the cops would stand at attention. Where did I get the cops, the chauffeurs and the limousines? I rented them from a funeral parlor for a hundred bucks a day.

I had spent so much money on promotional ads and on keeping the entourage of seventeen people that my expenses were running into thousands of dollars a day, and I needed money. My attorney told me some of the superstars had invested money in a holding firm and they were interested in investing money in my campaign. Would I meet with them and their attorneys? At first I said, “No. I have a hit record, the record distributors owe me money. Within thirty to forty-five days I will have all the money I need.” My attorney said, “Tony, the way you spend money, there is no way you can survive thirty to forty-five days.” I ranted and raved. “Sure they will put up the dough. I have the star made. I’ve done all the work. Why wouldn’t they take the frosted cake for a million bucks?” “Well, Tony,” he reasoned, “don’t sell half of him.” I agreed to see them and offer five percent for fifty thousand. Little did I know what was waiting for me that day.

The black limousines lined up, the police escort went into formation, and we cruised down the streets with motorists and pedestrians gaping, wondering who the dignitaries were. We cruised over to the attorney’s office. The police lined up the limousines, the chauffeurs opened the doors, and we got out of the limos and went up one flight of stairs to the attorney’s offices in Beverly Hills. The offices were packed. The motion picture stars were there, their attorneys and, of course, my seventeen people.

The attorney representing the investment firm was a little Jewish man. He came forward rubbing his hands and smiling. “Tony Alamo,” he said, “I have been wanting to meet you. This is the greatest promotion I have ever seen in all my years in the industry. It is an extravaganza,” he exclaimed, sweeping the wall with a gesture, and I saw he had the whole promotion laid out on his wall, still rubbing his hands and smiling as we sat down. “Now,” he said, “I understand you boys need money.” I was getting ready to haggle with him, and I thought to myself, “I have one up on him. He thinks I am Italian, and I know he is Jewish.” I answered him with, “Well, I don’t need as much money as you had originally offered.”

Suddenly my ears went completely deaf. I could not hear any noise from the crowd in the room. We were only one floor up, yet I could not hear any noise from the street. I looked at the people in the room. Some of their mouths were moving, but I could not hear anything they were saying. Suddenly I heard a voice, a voice that came from every direction. It was all around me. It was going through every fiber of my being. My head, my arms, my legs; it was all around me. The voice said, “I AM THE LORD THY GOD. STAND UP ON YOUR FEET AND TELL THE PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM THAT JESUS CHRIST IS COMING BACK TO EARTH, OR THOU SHALT SURELY DIE.”

I looked around the room to see if someone was putting me on some kind of a trip, and they were all looking at me. I felt as if I were sealed into some sort of gigantic vacuum. I thought, “I am going crazy. I’m losing my mind. Yes, that’s it, I’m cracking up.” People had told me I was a genius, and geniuses often cracked up, so that was it. So I would get out of here before I made a fool of myself.

I stood to my feet and said, “I am ill.” The giant pressure that was upon me forced me back into my seat, and the voice as many waters flooded all around and through me again. “I AM THE LORD THY GOD. STAND UP ON YOUR FEET AND TELL THE PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM THAT JESUS CHRIST IS COMING BACK TO EARTH AGAIN, OR THOU SHALT SURELY DIE.”

I struggled to my feet again and took one step. As I did, God started playing with my soul like a yo-yo. He would pull it half out of me, and then put it back. My heart was palpitating so hard it felt as if it was going to jump out of my body, and suddenly a revelation came to me, so real I was astounded that I had not always known it. I knew there was a Heaven and a Hell. I started screaming to the top of my lungs, “No, God, no! Please don’t kill me… I’ll tell them! I’ll tell them! I’ll tell them!” The breath went back into my body, and my heart stopped jumping.

I said, “God, You don’t know these people like I do. They won’t believe me. But I’ll tell them. I’ll call them all on the phone, send them telegrams, anything. But please don’t make me do it here, they will think I’m crazy.” Again He started pulling the soul out of me. My heart was jumping out of my body. I was gasping for breath. “No, God, no…please,” I began screaming, “I’ll do it, I’ll do it. I’ll tell them.” Again my breath went back in my body, my heart stopped thumping.

Interestingly, Alamo was aware of the incredible nature of the experience, even as it was happening:

I looked at the people in the room. They were all staring at me with eyes as big as owls. “I know you won’t believe me,” I said, “but God is telling me to tell you that Jesus Christ is coming back to earth.” Now, I said to myself, I said it. Oops, again my soul started going in and out, again, gasping for breath. “What’s the matter, God? I said it, I told them.” Suddenly every promotion I had ever done in my life was laid out before me in block form. The enthusiasm I had built and sold a star or a product with. And the Lord said, “NOW THAT YOU KNOW I AM HERE, IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO FOR ME?” “I know you won’t believe me, but Jesus Christ is coming back to earth again.” This time when I looked at the group of people, they all looked so small to me, and I really wound up with all enthusiasm. “Repent,” I screamed. “Jesus is coming!” I had never read a Bible scripture in my life. I had seen the picture, “Elmer Gantry,” and I commanded everyone in the room to get down on their knees and repent immediately, that Jesus was coming. I thought that if I did not do a good job, they would all disintegrate before my eyes and I would disintegrate for not doing a good enough job.

Alamo went to priest with news of his theophany. The priest told him to "keep it in [his] heart" and be baptized, a reaction that infuriated Alamo, and began a long career of anti-Catholicism. After that, he "went from one church to another, but found no one preaching the powerful message that God had given to me."

Thus began the illustrious career of Tony Alamo, Christian evangelist.

As you might expect, the next step was buying a home in Malibu, and setting up shop manufacturing ornate, beaded and custom painted jackets for the Hollywood stars. And of course, all the proceeds from that enterprise is bound to eventually cause trouble for the humble preacher; in 1994 he was sentenced to six years in prison for tax evasion.

Back in 1982, Tony's wife Susan Alamo had died of cancer. Inspired by a vision that had revealed his wife as resurrected, Alamo declared to the community that she would in fact be resurrected, and kept Susan's body, embalmed, on display in the community compound for the better part of a year in anticipation of the miracle. The body was finally turned over to Susan's family as part of a three year legal battle, ending with Alamo using the body's turnover as part of an arrangement for surrender to authorities on tax evasion and other charges.

Of course when your wife dies of cancer and doesn't get resurrected as you planned, after many months of waiting, the only thing to do is remarry, and quickly. A beautiful Swedish woman would do the trick. Good things never seem to last when you're Tony Alamo, however, and two years ylater, she would be gone, divorcing him with the complaint that Alamo wanted her to have plastic surgery so as to resemble his dead, beloved Susan. Oh, that and the regular beatings and druggings he gave her.

But an evangelist must press on, and run the race, and in 1998, after serving four years of his six year tax evasion sentence, he started to rebuild the languishing Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. Before long, Alamo's message could be heard on radio stations all over America, and as far away as Sri Lanka.

Satan, offended by a resurgent Tony Alamo, hit back hard, either stirring up damnable lies about Alamo, or tripping Tony into temptation. Reports had started to accumulate that the evangelist's compound had become a den of pornography and abuse, possibly including pre-pubescent children. In an interview given after the raid, Alamo denied the charges:

"They (government agents) have got six of our girls in custody. Little girls. They probably disrobed them. I mean it's the most filthy bunch of devils that I've ever heard of," Alamo said.

As for former followers making the allegations, Alamo said, "I've kicked a lot of people out of the church and they'll say anything to get back at me."

He suggested efforts to gather evidence against him will only bring more people to his ministry, noting that daily traffic on his Web site has grown more than 10-fold, to more than 1 million hits, since the raid.

"They're really making us famous," he said with a laugh.

Satan's plan having backfired -- again! -- Alamo was more defiant than defensive about the charges of pornography and abuse, suggesting he had a mandate from the Bible for the, um, "young marriages":

"In the Bible it happened. But girls today, I don't marry 'em if they want to at 14-15 years old. Because we won't do it, even though I believe it's OK," Alamo said.

In an AP interview on Saturday, he had said that for girls having sex, "consent is puberty."

On Monday he bristled at descriptions of his organization as a cult, saying enemies want to cast him as a "weirdo for preaching what the Bible says."

Enemies abound when you are Tony Alamo.

Debunking Creationism Sister Blog Started!

If you'll look on the navigation sidebar you'll see several sister Blogs have just been created by us. A couple of posts have already been made to Debunking Creationism by Touchstone. We're looking for people who have an expertise in these areas who would like to contribute to these Blogs.

Handicapping of Skepticism (part 2)

Human beings have an innate tendency to search for patterns and simple explanations in order to make sense of the world. Such a practice results in an incorporation of elements that fit into an understandable answer and a neglect of elements that do not.

Psychologists often use this phenomenon to explain the reason people believe in clairvoyance, horoscopes, prayer, and other such foolishness. In a sense, we remember when these methods “work” and forget when they do not. With respect to religion, people will often remember “answered” prayers but forget or rationalize the unanswered ones. Have you ever noticed how people will trumpet abundances of miracles when there are a few survivors of an accident or natural disaster yet say nothing about the many people who died? It’s the same principle. Dawkins alludes to this:

[Pope John Paul II’s] polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: “A maternal hand guided the bullet.” One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided.

It is very easy to claim that prayer healed a person dying of a terrible disease, but quite another to prove it. Study after study demonstrates that prayer has no effect on patients when they are unaware that they are being prayed for. On the other hand, when subjects do realize that they are being prayed for, two results tend to reoccur:

1) Patients typically improve from holistic methods, such as laying of hands, meditation, compassionate care, etc. This is nothing new. Medical researchers have well established that the mind can work wonders and inexplicably heal the body. The problem with crediting God for the healing, other than the fact that it only works in concert with the patient’s knowledge of being prayed for, is that the results appear across the religious and irreligious spectrum.

2) Patients sometimes take a turn for the worst due to what some believe is a form of performance anxiety. They may stress over the need to get better in order to not let the people who are praying for them down. Perhaps they might also start dwelling on the severity of their conditions because the physicians are using drastic, unorthodoxed measures like prayer to assist them. People use prayer as their way of appealing to God and use God’s will as an explanation for why certain things happen. Since we can easily discredit the idea of prayer serving as a simple pattern for the complex natural events of the world, its usefulness should be self-evidently ridiculous.

[Source: STEP from American Heart Journal April 2006, MANTRA from Lancet volume 366, and the 2001 Mayo Clinic coronary care unit trial are perhaps the three most definitive investigations on the topic.]

Suppose we really wanted to test the power of prayer and see to it that no confounding variables from the temporal realm would be present. To begin the study, we gather a group of fifty atheists and a group of fifty Christians who volunteer to have an extremely lethal dose of bacteria injected intravenously. Following the injection, we provide the fifty atheists with a regimen of broad-spectrum antibiotics to counteract the infection. We then isolate the atheists in a secret location and tell no one that they are involved in the experiment. Essentially, they do not exist to the rest of the world. Likewise, we isolate the Christians in a secret location but refuse them the antibiotic regimen. News of the fifty Christians injected with the lethal bacteria will then be broadcast over the entire Christian world. The report will ask everyone to pray to God for their facilitated recovery from the infection so that deductive reasoning will force the world to acknowledge the one true religion because of the unquestionable and verifiable power of God and prayer. Because no one knows about the atheists in isolation, no one is specifically praying for them. All they have are antibiotics, while the Christians have the power of prayer from hundreds of millions of certain volunteers and the omnipotence of God. After two months, we will end the experiment and see which group has the most survivors.

Whether or not Christians are willing to admit it, I think everyone knows which group would fare better in this study. No semi-rational Christian would ever sign up for this deadly experiment even with the added promise of a great monetary compensation for the survivors. They know that God isn’t really going to answer the divinely directed requests of hundreds of millions of Christians because God only seems to answer prayers in some mystical and unobservable fashion. Deep down, these Christians may even realize that they cannot consider prayer dependable. Some Christians reading the results of this hypothetical experiment would simply appeal to authorities who assert that there have been studies demonstrating just the opposite. Other Christians would manufacture reasons such as “God doesn’t like being tested” or “People didn’t have enough faith.” They will avoid the rational conclusion that prayers are only “answered” by placebo effect. They will avoid admitting that tragic events or unbelievable coincidences are the result of complex natural factors. They will avoid admitting that prayers have answers just as often as problems have solutions.

One of the Earliest Witnesses

Apologist writers and speakers like William Lane Craig, NT Wright and Richard Bauckham attempt to make the argument that the evidence of Jesus' resurrection was overwhelming to the apostles and that multiple eyewitnesses to the events of the resurrection were the core set of believers whose stories were transferred to the Greek gospel writers. Yet this fails to explain the data we have within just the New Testament itself. One man, Saul of Tarsus, was most definitely not convinced of the resurrection by the evidence that was available to him in Palestine shortly after the events took place.

Richard Carrier, refuting a similar argument from JP Holding, puts it best when he writes the following:

Why would he have persecuted them so vehemently if the evidence for the Resurrection was already as extraordinarily good as Holding's argument requires? Why does Paul only believe after he himself sees a vision of the Christ telling him he is wrong? Why does Paul never mention any other reason for converting? Even in Acts, he never cites any evidence as having convinced him, except his own personal vision (besides the scriptures, of course). He never makes any references to checking the facts of the empty tomb story, or being persuaded by the testimony of other witnesses--not even in Galatians. In fact, in Galatians Paul goes out of his way to deny having done any such thing until, at best, many years after he was already converted. So why did it take a personal visit from God to convince Paul? We cannot say he was loony or stupid--from his letters we can see Paul clearly was neither. There can be no plausible explanation for his not believing the Christians except the fact that he had no reason to believe them. Which entails there was no evidence that could be checked at all, or what could be checked was inconclusive to any reasonable man like Paul.

So contra Craig, Wright and Bauckham, we have multiple people who lived in Palestine around the time of the supposed resurrection and empty tomb, some of whom were referred to as Christians, who simply were not convinced by the evidence for the resurrection. The largest group who weren't convinced were the Jews, who simply saw no reason to believe this supposedly miraculous event took place even though they could also interview anyone involved. Paul was a member of this group before his vision on the road to Damascus and he was definitely not convinced by the evidence.

Therefore, the evidence wasn't convincing enough for Paul, who was alive and able to interview the supposed Christian eyewitnesses whose stories supposedly later became the Greek gospels. The only evidence that convinced Paul was a vision. If Paul had not had the vision, he would have continued to remain unconvinced, meaning there simply was not adequate physical or testimonial support for the belief in the resurrection prior to the time Paul had his vision.

This is a large problem for arguments such as William Lane Craig makes with his claims that the resurrection is the best explanation for the historical facts presented by the Greek gospels. Craig puts it this way in "The Historicity of the Empty Tomb":

Therefore, the Christian community also, of which Peter was the leader, must have believed in the empty tomb. But that can only mean that the tomb was empty. For not only would the disciples not believe in a resurrection if the corpse were still in the grave, but they could never have proclaimed the resurrection either under such circumstances. But if the tomb was empty, then it is unthinkable that Paul, being in the city for two weeks six years later and after that often in contact with the Christian community there, should never hear a thing about the empty tomb. Indeed, is it too much to imagine that during his two week stay Paul would want to visit the place where the Lord lay? Ordinary human feelings would suggest such a thing. So I think that it is highly probable that Paul not only accepted the empty tomb, but that he also knew that the actual grave of Jesus was empty.

However all Craig really has here is speculation and he fails to address the primary question of Paul's rejection of the evidence prior to his conversion. In addition, he simply glosses over the existence of the Ebionite community who considered themselves Christians yet rejected the bodily resurrection. For of course all of the chances to investigate the claims of Christianity were just as available to the Ebionites, Jews and Paul prior to his conversion. Furthermore, prior to that time Paul would have been approaching those claims with the doubts of a skeptic, rather than the beliefs of someone who had the fervor of a new convert.

To phrase the argument briefly then I would say this:

1. Prior to Paul's conversion, any evidence for the resurrection was just as strong as it was after his conversion.

2. The evidence for the resurrection failed to convince Paul of the truth of Christianity.

3. Therefore, the evidence for the resurrection alone, without specific interventions by God to make someone believe, must be inadequate to convince a skeptic who has not had a vision from God of its truth.

I Started Two New Debunking Blogs

That's right. We're expanding into new areas: Debunking Creationism, and Debunking the Christian Right. I don't have the needed expertise to deal effectively with these two topics but I think they are needed. I'm looking for two individuals who have expertise in these two areas and would each like to run these two sister blogs. Leave a comment or e-mail me if you're interested.

Was Atheism the Cause of 20th Century Atrocities?

A student of Soviet history and communist ideology with a MA in Russian Studies from Georgetown University answers this question here. Be sure to check out the pictures of the Nazi connection with the church here, and Martin Luther's dirty little book about the Jews.

More Angels Than Atheists, According to Baylor Study

Today's Washington Times reports on a study performed by researchers at Baylor who found that half of all Americans believe they are protected by guardian angels, and a "significant majority" are comfortable with the supernatural. Also, the study pegs the number of atheists in America at 4% of populace, a number they say is unchanged since 1944.


I don't doubt the answers reported on belief in angels; if anything, I'd say the numbers were higher, based on my own admittedly theist-heavy experience. The results are the responses gathered on 350 questions for 1,648 individuals. Here's a short synopsis of the findings on supernaturalism in the group:

The survey, which has a margin of error of four percentage points, also revealed that theological liberals are more apt to believe in the paranormal and the occult - haunted houses, UFOs, communicating with the dead and astrology - than do conservatives. Women (35 percent), blacks (41 percent), those younger than 30 (40 percent), Democrats (40 percent) and singles who are cohabitating (49 percent) were more likely to believe, the survey said.

What caught my eye here, however, was the editorial provided by Rodney Stark, the researcher, who is an.... well, I guess an "iconoclast" would be a charitable way to put it (see here, here and here, for why I say that).

From the news article (and remember, this is the Washington Times):

Baylor researchers also criticized a much-ballyhooed “new atheism” as a barely discernable trend, saying the number of Americans who are atheists has stayed at 4 percent since 1944.

Why? Atheism is a “godless revolution that never happened,” the survey said, adding that irreligion often is not effectively transmitted to children who, when they reach adulthood, often join conservative religious denominations.

Heh. There is an old adage in Christian circles: God has no grandchildren. That's a nod to the observation that while kids can be indoctrinated by their parents, they eventually grow up to think for themselves (to some extent), and real faith commitments must be made anew by each person. Faith isn't really an heritable trait, in other words, as much a cultural tradition.

But here, we have a corollary from Stark: Dawkins has no grandchildren, either. What's striking about this article is all the interesting things they don't say. Don't Christian families have trouble replicating faithful kids? What about the "jumping ship" phenomenon in the homeschool world, as identified by authors like Michael Pearl? And... Barna? I'd expect a Baylor theist and sociologist of religion to be quite familiar with the God has no grandchildren dynamic, but apparently attrition only goes one way, in his view.

Perhaps this can be resolved by understanding this in terms of Christian culture. Where kids grow up to be basically uncommitted, the dominance of Christian culture exerts a kind of social gravity that attracts them, appealing in its comfortable (if waning) cultural hegemony. They don't so much embrace the dogma as much as the find a comfortable place to float along in the main of the cultural stream. It also occurs to me that the rigors and demands of atheism are a kind of selection filter itself, which anticipates just such attrition.

Later in the article:

Moreover, atheism is hardly taking over the world. Europe does have more atheists than the U.S., the survey said, but no country has more than 7 percent except France, which is at 14 percent of the populace. Farther to the east, Japan is at 12 percent and China is at 14 percent.

Mr. Stark dismissed the popularity of several recent books on atheism, saying they are mostly the products of “angry” people who are largely ignored by theists.

“The religious people don't care about the irreligious people,” Mr. Stark said, “but the irreligious are prickly. I think they're just angry.”

This is a curious mix of commentary. Setting aside the op/ed prose from the article's author (Julia Duin), this is a strange analysis of the situation for an academic, and a sociologist, no less. Stark explains the popularity of recent books on atheism as the product of... anger. That's an odd hypothesis, given the number of angry books out there -- especially from theist authors -- that no one pays any attention to. It's stranger still as a response when we read that Stark doesn't buy it himself, announcing in the next sentence that religious people don't care about irreligious people. Just to make sure we understand that Stark is confused, and not just telling us that this apathy is not attached to atheist anger in selling books, he connects them, finishing the sentence with his observation that the "irreligious are prickly", "angry".

So, the large religious majority in America can't be bothered by the irreligious, because (at least) they are angry. But yet a raft of "angry" atheist books have soared on the best seller charts, in a country in which (according to Stark) only 4% of the people identify themselves as atheists. That's not an explanation from Stark, but an unwitting? emphasis of the problematic nature of his findings and conclusions.

And that is the underlying problem, here. I've not read the study in question yet, but how naïve is it to ask your subjects if the are atheists, or if they have no belief in any God or gods, and accept the answers back at face value? Do we suppose that we might go around the room, even with "confidential questionnaires" and ask our subjects if they are homosexual and expect to get an accurate set of answers back? It's fine to report back that 4% of respondents are comfortable identifying themselves as atheists -- which doesn't strike me as an implausible number -- but it's not even a crude gauge to the underlying reality, and Stark has the clue pointing him to the problem right in the article, with the question about the popularity of books from the likes of Dawkins, Dennett and Harris.

For every self-identified atheist, in public or in a poll, stands an atheist who just isn't comfortable owning up to that in this culture. Ask your favorite, friendly self-identified atheist and they will tell you there's at least one they know (and often several) who remain "in the closet" for any of many social and emotional reasons. In my own case, the fact of my reasoning towards atheism produced several days of terror, with the urge to hide it, deny it, hedge against it, just out of fear for the social costs it may exact. In a society where atheists, for all the popularity of Dawkins' book, atheists are still commonly demonized in a similar fashion to the way homosexuals are, and for much the same reasons.

Behind the silent atheist(s) stands a small gang of agnostics, folks who do not identify themselves as atheists, but who nonetheless either have no belief in God but aren't certain enough to take on the "atheist" label, or are actually on the fence, unconvinced either way.

In this article on the same release, Stark blames the media for the popularity of the New Atheist books:

Despite the wave of best sellers by atheists blasting religion and predictions that religious belief is fading, Stark said the survey shows atheism has not gained momentum. Nonbelievers still represent only about 4 percent of Americans, Stark said, but they attract interest because they are a novelty and because "there's a lot of support and sympathy for them in the media."

Here, we have Stark conspicuously omitting agnostics. Above, he pegs "atheists" at 4% of the population. Here, he describes this 4% as "non-believers", with the implication being that the complementary 96% representing "believers".

There's a much more efficient answer than either of Stark's odd explanations. While the number of self-identified atheists may not be growing (and for the record, I'm calling "bull" on that finding, too, but am willing to accept it, arguendo, for the purposes of this post), the growth in "non-believers" has been dramatic in America in recent years. A look at Barna's work over those same years dovetails nicely with the New York Times Bestseller List, sporting so many atheistic and irreligious books selling in such large numbers. Non-belief, skepticism and scientific thinking are growth industries.

Given the traditional demonization of atheism in the culture, something not even given passing acknowledgment in the articles I linked to (caveat: this may be addressed in the analysis of the study which I've not yet read), this is what we would expect to see in evolution of an skeptical, rationalist culture. The doubt and skepticism precede the atheistic self-identification, and the dissolution or dissipation of the social animus takes time, a trailing indicator following early indicators like the surge in books sales on the topic, and the broad decline of participation and enthusiasm observed in churches across the land.


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Ray Boltz, Popular Christian Music Artist, Comes Out

This recent article in The Washington Blade is causing a lot of anguish among my Christian friends. Christians coming out of the closet as gay really gets under the skin of many evangelicals (I had one Christian friend tell me that as bad as my atheism was, at least I wasn't gay), but Boltz's story is particularly difficult, because of his popularity as an artist, and character Boltz shows in making the decisions he's made, to finally be honest about himself and his life.

I was never much for Christian music. I spent most of fifth and sixth grade listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, over and over, and I think that is a bit of inoculation for what has been contemporary Christian music in the last 30 years. But Ray Boltz is a familiar name, and several of his songs are instantly familiar to me. Recently, Ray has disclosed that he is a gay man, has divorced his wife, and moved to Florida to start on a new path, a fresh start. The article provides some interesting background on Boltz's thirty year struggle with his homosexuality, and how he managed to build a successful marriage to a woman he loved and raised his kids while dealing with the inner conflict of his disposition.

This is agonizing for many of the Christians I talked to. He's so well known, and not just famous (in evangelical circles), but his songs were "so true, so filled with the spirit, so heart felt" to quote a Christian friend's recent lament. After thirty years of being a Christian, and very visible, inspiring leader in the Christian community, how does a man so immersed in the Gospel, the culture of the Gospel, in an otherwise healthy and happy family situation just decide to go off the reservation? This is not a case, so far as we can tell, of a Christian coming forward and confessing his struggles with sin, his battle against temptation. Rather, he decided that being homosexual wasn't just something he did, which is the typical view in evangelicaldom (see the frequent comparisons evangelicals frequently supply to show they understand the homosexual struggle against temptation: the lure of gambling, alcohol, gossip, even sweets are commonly trotted out as badges of solidarity with those struggling with their homosexuality), but something he was.


As is evident in Boltz's current situation, post-coming-out, one can make large theological adjustments, gerrymandering around what seem to be strong prohibitions in the Bible and still live as a Christian, albeit a non-traditional one. But here I think we see the playing out of seismic pressures where Christianity and living experience grind together. It's difficult to read Paul in Romans 1 and miss the invective:

24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. 28Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

This isn't hemming and hawing about the historical accuracies about genealogical timelines in the mists of Genesis. This is Paul laying it on heavy in moral and soteriological terms. On a face value reading of the text, Boltz has aligned himself with the absolute worst all creatures in God's eyes -- full of every kind of evil. I don't know how Boltz harmonizes passages like that with his current beliefs, or even if he tries. But this passage and others in the Bible do not seem to grant much leeway on this topic. I've heard the arguments for Paul being "read of context" here, with the suggestion profferred that Paul was only speaking about the homosexuality practiced in local pagan rituals of the time, and not of homosexuality in general. That's quite a stretch, and if that kind of adjustment holds, there's little in the Bible propositionally can survive the intent application of such "adjusting" hermeneutics.

Rationalizations borne of necessity aside, Boltz's revelation has been deeply discomforting for Christians I've talked to in the past few days. One of the realizations that is finally sinking in in evangelical circles is the waning of traditional hostility toward homosexuality of previous generations in the culture. Homosexuals are still widely detested and shamed, thanks in large part to evangelical Christians, but the stigma is not what it was, even recently, especially among young people. Ray Boltz just changing course and charting a new path toward life as an actively gay man just highlights how compelling the the homosexual as counterfactual to Paul and the Bible has become. I don't know Boltz personally, but I think one would be hard pressed to reconcile the stream of evils Paul tells us characterize those who "do what ought not be done". Of course the claim will be made that homosexual practices are themselves desperately wicked, but the Biblical view suggest something much stronger and pervasive obtains for the homosexual. Pretty much you turn into the worst kind of human being in every way, to hear Paul tell it.

“If you were to hold up the rule book and go, ‘Here are all the rules Christians must live by,’ did I follow every one of those rules all that time? Not at all, you know, because I kind of rejected a lot of things, but I’ve grown some even since then. I guess I felt that the church, that they had it wrong about how I felt with being gay all these years, so maybe they had it wrong about a lot of other things.”

- Ray Boltz

According to the article, Boltz has a friendly, supportive relationship with his ex-wife (they have since divorced) and his kids (who were grown and out of the house by the time this came about). Boltz has made enough money to provide for his family, and while there must have been a lot of pain and anguish in the way all this played out, Boltz and his family have emerged on as positive a note as one might hope. Carol Boltz now is active in a gay advocacy group called Soulforce.

Maybe the process Paul is describing in Romans 1 just hasn't played out yet, and it will take some time for Ray Boltz to embrace the various kinds of wickedness Paul enumerates for the unrepentant homosexual. But as Boltz proceeds with this new chapter in his life as a gay man, as his "Boltz-ness" remains, and the qualities and virtues he demonstrated in his life over the past 30 years continue, he's yet another point of dissonance for the Biblical Christian. This isn't how it's supposed to be, the gay man who's decent and kind, responsible, talented, giving. If Paul was the inspired "hand of God" they suppose he is, what do we do with Ray Boltz?