Roy Moore, the controversial former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, famous for his refusal to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building, is now a nominee for the U.S. Senate. In case some here aren’t all that familiar with him, here are some of his views:
How do believers know there's a god? Because of supposed miracles. Yet miracles are impossible in the natural world without a supernatural god (i.e., a natural explanation is required when there is no god). Therefore believers have to presuppose god to verify miracles. Presupposing a god to justify unverifiable miracles--which in turn provides the reason for believing in god--is what we mean by the delusion of faith (i.e., pretending to know things you don't know). Apologists can try to claim they're not presuppositionalists all they want, but they are preuppositionalists nonetheless.
A few items that the cherry-pickers don't pick
On a recent post here I asked how the apostle Paul could possibly have known that there are “spiritual” bodies; this claim, of course, is yet another clue that his grip on reality was shaky at best (and I
do exclude his hallucinations of the risen Jesus as a source of data). But a Christian apologist had a simple answer: that God had told him. Silly me, why didn’t I think of that? But let’s play Spot-the-Flaw: “My advice to believers who are sure they felt a god or heard a god’s voice is to be skeptical and remember that believers have been hearing those same whispers from many gods for many centuries.” (Guy Harrison,
50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God)
Split-brain patients are individuals who have had the corpus callosum (which connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain) severed. This causes the individual to have two centers of both perceptual and motor activity. Each side of the brain may give a different answer to the same question.
In the video clip below, neurologist V. S. Ramachandran discusses a split-brain individual whose right hemisphere believed in God and whose left hemisphere did not.
The batshit crazy theology of the apostle Paul: four texts
John Loftus has displayed his skill at backhanded compliments with his comment that “…it takes a great deal of intelligence to defend Christian theism, because Christianity cannot be defended without a great deal of mental contortionism” (
The End of Christianity, p. 92).
Apologists do indeed rise to the occasion. They have a broad menu of absurdities to choose from, but their ultimate challenge must be the writing of the apostle Paul.
Of course, Paul has a lot going for him: the high drama of his Damascus Road conversion (we find three versions of this episode in the Book of Acts—but Paul never mentions it in his letters); nothing could hold him back from preaching the gospel: “Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits…” (II Corinthians 11:24-26)
And of course, he got to be a “saint”—which tarnishes that coin considerably.
Loftus’s observation that faith makes smart people say stupid things reminded me of two instances I’d previously come across. The first involves Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. As some here may already know, Collins, a geneticist and defender of evolutionary theory, “knelt in the dewy grass… and surrendered to Jesus Christ” as a result of seeing “a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall” while hiking in the Cascade Mountains. That he considers a purely emotional reaction like that as a reason for accepting the claims of Christianity shows just how unscientific a scientist can be. (How would he respond to someone who denied evolution based on nothing more than emotion?)
I once taught a hermeneutics class for a Christian college using a book titled "How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth." In a comment to a friend recently, I wish I would have taught them to do this:
Here's how you should read the Bible. You need to read it as if you're listening in on a phone conversation where you cannot hear the person on the other end. You know they're saying something, so you have to reconstruct it from listening to the person you can hear.
Think of it this way. In all my days debating the Bible no one wins any debate with just a comment or two. Yet this is what we repeatedly see in the gospels in the case of Jesus. He always wins all of his debates with just a comment or two. In a few cases we read where his opponents walk off grumbling, so they were obviously not convinced. From this we know the gospels don't tell us the whole story. What is their story? We must reconstruct it. What would they have said in response? I think in many, if not most cases, I know. The same goes for all of the epistles, including Paul's authentic ones. When Paul argues against others who claim to be Christians you can bet they had their responses. What were they? In many cases I think I know. Can you do this? Have you ever tried? You realize these were smart people who had intelligent answers, right?
Look at the OT in the same way when it my comes to the prophets who denounced people. You realize there were other prophets who said different things and who denounced each other, don't you? How would people living in those times know which ones to believe? It would be very difficult for them. How do you know that the prophets who eventually won out were the true prophets of the true god?
When it comes to the destruction of whole peoples and the slaughtering of their babies, what would these people say to such a holy war? Have you ever seen the need for a complete genocide? Do you know any people worthy of nothing but slaughter?
Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.
My main point is that it was not obvious to the people of that day which god is the "real" one. The "real" god or gods surfaced later as more people grew to believe in them (just as some religious groups are larger than others, the largest one being the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages) who were retrospectively written back into what you now read in the Bible.
Robert Conner wrote something recently that prompted me to write this.
The Ten Well-Founded "Presuppositions" of Atheism:
1. We require sufficient objective empirical evidence before we will accept any claims of divine revelation.
2. We accept the general principle that any specific miraculous claim must overcome the strong presumption that it didn't occur based on the overwhelming cumulative evidence that miracles have not occurred.
3. We accept the view that believers must shoulder the burden of proof as outsiders to show their faith is objectively true, given that learning a religion as an uncritical child from one's parents in a religious culture is a notoriously unreliable way to know which religion is true, if there is one.
4. We accept the results of scientific clinical studies that have shown petitionary prayers work no better than chance, and reject personal antecdotal unconfirmed stories told by believers.
5. We accept that the laws of nature in the ancient pre-scientific world were the same as they are now, so we have a very strong presumption against accepting miraculous claims in the ancient superstitious world prior to the rise of modern science and the modern world.
6. We accept that which is objectively probable, and reject that which is merely possible.
7. We reject any and all double standards and special pleadings from religionists when they argue for their faith over the faiths of others.
8. We accept the overwhelming consensus of scientists as the surest guarantee of what is true, over any and all claims by religious leaders, scholars and their holy books.
9. We proportion what we conclude based on the strength of the objective evidence.
10. We accept the approach of methodological naturalism in assessing miraculous claims, whereby we seek out natural explanations for any and all events in question, given that doing so is the best and only way to know the truth in the midst of so many religious frauds, fakes, liars and hucksters.
In reference to God's goodness in the face of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, a Christian asked me this question:
Q: "Why is God obligated to help someone who rejects Him?"
A: Who is obligated to help someone who suffers? The person who cares the most, who also has the most power or financial ability, has the greatest obligation to help a person who suffers, especially if that person's life depends on it, and especially if it demands so little from the helper.
So God has the greatest obligation to help the ones who suffer.
If someone only helps others based on tit for tat, where helping others has strings attached, then that person isn't a giving person at all. Hell, the worse person in the world can abide by that.
Of all the beings who could alleviate this suffering God could have had the greatest impact by stopping the hurricane dead in it's tracks before it materialized. No one would know he did anything, should he want to keep hidden from us.
If a god supposedly created the universe with its laws then s/he could even perform a perpetual miracle and keep all hurricanes away from us. But s/he's either lazy, uncaring, powerless, or doesn't even exist.
If you want to see the kind of faith the biblical god demands then look no further than the story of Job.
Job's story is fallaciously being used to offer comfort to believers in the midst of the terrible suffering caused by hurricances Harvey, Irma and Jose. "God knows what he's doing" they say, "even if we don't understand his mysterious ways, because his ways are loving and kind."
The lesson however, isn't about God's love or kindness toward us. It's not meant to provide any comfort to us either. The real lesson is that god reserves the right to bring as much suffering into our lives as he wants, even to kill us, for whatever reason he wants, and we are not to question why. We are to have blind unquestioning faith that he has the right to mistreat us at will. He can do whatever the hell he wants to us simply because he's GOD. We're simply to take what he dishes out. It doesn't matter if we're good or not either. This lesson is missed by almost all believers.
A review of David Fitzgerald’s Jesus: Mything in Action
Christians Aren’t Going to Blow the Whistle
A famous atheist once railed at me for giving a damn about the “Jesus Question”—that is, whether or not Jesus existed. It’s not a relevant issue—so he said, and it’s a waste of time to devote any energy to it. Really? Since about two billion people are obsessed with Jesus, it doesn’t hurt to find out if their obsession is warranted—especially if we suspect that something isn’t quite right. Religiously-biased scholars, as it turns out, have done their best to maintain a cover-up—of course,
they don’t call it that; so okay, they’ve been sincere, pursuing their agenda without guile. But they have been covering up: the case for Jesus is deeply, sadly flawed.
A couple of years ago, I published a blog post showing that if one accepts the explanations offered by apologists like William Lane Craig for some of the terrible things Yahweh commands, then one should want there to be as many abortions as possible. Since these explanations — or excuses — recently came up in the comments section here, I decided to re-publish that post. The conclusion is of course not meant to be taken seriously, but it does follow (with a few minor assumptions that would be unreasonable to deny) from the screwed-up views of these apologists.
As a sort-of follow up to my previous post, one more comment related to the problem of evil:
According to some believers, God can do anything – and that means literally anything. He can make square circles, married bachelors, and even non-Catholic Popes! In these people's opinion, to say that God is omnipotent is to say that logical impossibility is no obstacle to his power.
Why in the world do they believe such things?
Sometimes even Sunday school kids have the presence of mind to ask, “But where did God come from?” To which the assurance is always given, “Well, God has always been there.” But rarely do the kids—or even the adults—ever ask, “But how do you know that?” How do you KNOW that about God? Without the evidence it’s just another assumption—one of so many that derail religious thinking. Bertrand Russell punctured this lazy conjecture when he pointed out that it’s just as easy to believe in a universe that has always existed—as it is to believe in a god that has been around, uncreated, forever.