He tells everyone that if you question anything in the Bible, it puts you on a slippery slope to apostasy — you must believe every word is literally true or doubts will creep in, and then you are damned. He’s right, sort of. I’ll qualify that a bit, though.
Here’s a beautiful example: the story of Sandra Edwards, a serious, dedicated Christian and young earth creationist, so serious that she published a children’s book promoting creationism, who one day find herself thoughtfully reading material on the internet…and next thing you know, GODLESS.
After a long and difficult struggle, I’m finally stepping away from the Christian faith I’ve known for 46 years–the faith I grew up in, then selected for myself as an adult and shared with my husband and our 5 children, and hundreds of people in churches, women’s groups, Sunday school classes, and Awana clubs. Shortly after "coming to Christ" and being "born again" at 22, I discovered Young Earth Creationism through Answers in Genesis, and was completely convinced by their mantra: "The issue is not the age of the earth, but biblical authority. If you can’t trust Genesis, you can’t trust the Bible." Without the Genesis explanation of "original sin" corrupting God’s perfect Creation, there would be no need for a Savior to save us from its consequences, and no explanation for the disease, suffering and death we observe despite "God’s goodness". I decided–and taught–that if you’re going to invest your life in a religion with the Bible as its foundation, that demands that you study it, quote it, sing it, connect with others over it, legislate your morality by dissecting it, and worship and pray to its central figure, you must accept it as true and fully reliable–or you’ve allowed "compromise" to creep in, and any undesired doctrines could be cast aside as well: you could tell God what he really meant. So I subscribed to Answers magazine, watched AiG videos, funded an advertising campaign for their Creation Museum on a Christian radio station, and visited it along with nearly 2 million others. I knew YEC was dismissed by many Christians as a "fringe belief", but I championed it because it starts with the Word of God, not man; I often declared, "God made the rules, so he has the right to say we’re wrong." A year ago, my book was published and I got on Twitter to promote it…and was challenged by atheists who knew a lot more about science, reality and the Bible than I did. In order to be able to present my position with any credibility–and be a good witness to my faith–I had to quickly learn what the arguments were and how to address them…so I continued to engage in conversations with non-believers…and became one myself.
She has a much more detailed discussion of all the points that made her question her faith, and it’s a good thing for any Christian to read.
I do have to point out one thing, though, to make it clear that this story shouldn’t cause excessive exuberance among atheists. Followers of Ken Ham/Kent Hovind style creationism are setting themselves up to fail. They’ve created a starkly black and white universe in which either you are completely in agreement with their dogma, or you are completely wrong in all things, which means small cracks in their façade quickly tear wide open into vast chasms. It might mean they’re impenetrable in the short term, but over time, they crumble, and they crumble hard, since losing faith in certain pseudoscientific claims means you are inevitably going to have to question the whole of your faith.
So Ken Ham is doing good work for us atheists by building a very brittle Christian wall. It can resist a few punches, but when it goes, it goes in its entirety.
Thanks, Ken!
PZ saying Ken Ham is right about something? That’s one of the 5 signs of the Apocalypse. Perhaps the Nic Cage movie will come true after all.
Way to go Sandra Edwards! Once again, questioning the bible has led someone away from christianity. More. More. Gimme more!*
*with the caveat that if ‘more’ means more libertarian atheists, I’d rather they stay theists.
i understand the reasoning behind YEC, even if i don’t agree. The only thing in that camp i’ve ever seen worth some thought was a theory about light moving faster in the early universe. don’t remember the details, but it was interesting.
I know what you mean. The husband of a friend who died last year has gone back to christianity and posts a lot of pro-christian messages on his FB page. He was always conservative but now he’s gone off the deep end by posting a photo basically saying that climate change isn’t real because 1) there’s snow and 2) it used to be called something else. The comments supporting him are even worse with ad hominem attacks against Gore, liberals, scientists, etc. It’s pretty disturbing.
Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here’s a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn’t understand [and now we do understand] […]. If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on – so just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem. – Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Ms. Edwards has chosen to step out of that receding pocket of ignorance. HORAY Ms. Edwards!!
Plus it leads to some hard questions. Like “why was Jesus so angry at that fig tree?”
Without the Genesis explanation of “original sin” corrupting God’s perfect Creation, there would be no need for a Savior to save us from its consequences, and no explanation for the disease, suffering and death we observe
To me, the irony of building an entire worldview out of this logic is that it’s based on an interpretation of Genesis 2-3 that is at odds with its original meaning.* It’s an old interpretation, and certainly pre-Christian, but it’s several centuries newer than the text itself. It’s tempting to draw a line somewhere and consider expressions and attitudes on one side of it “ancient” and those on the other side “medieval” or “proto-modern” but the fact is that in a lot of ways our thought world is closer to those living in the post-Classical Hellenistic and Greco-Roman eras than it is to that of people in the Iron Age. Making yet another reason why it’s problematic, to say the least, to base your life on obscure ancient texts. The authors weren’t writing for you and they would have no idea what you’re on about.
*Awesome book I just read on Genesis 2-3 in its original context: What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden?, by Ziony Zevit. The thesis was not entirely new to me, but it’s by far the most persuasive demonstration of it that I’ve read.
I think this also should serve as a reminder of the fragile state our audience might be in. We could be shattering an entire world-view, possibly with far-reaching consequences. I tend to be too angry, too preoccupied with the lie they’ve been served to focus on the good parts, being reminded how hard it must be for many isn’t a bad thing.
Also: Hooray for Sandra Edwards. Good for you. There’s no point fearing reality, it’s there whether you like it or not. Hope you find as much comfort in reality as I’m sure the rest of us are.
Around 400 CE Augustine of Hippo considered the literal interpretation of Genesis. He rejected it for several reasons:
* Christians believe that the world and the universe were created by God. The Bible was written by people. Preferring a book written by humans over God’s universe is insulting to God.
* If there’s a discrepancy between God’s universe and a person’s interpretation of the Bible then the problem is most likely in the interpretation, not in reality.
* Quite often a non-believer will know about the world and the universe and how they work. If a Christian tells the non-believer something they know is wrong and cites the Bible as authority for the wrongness then the non-believer will consider the Christian to be a fool and the Bible as merely a collection of myths and stories with nothing worthwhile to say about anything including redemption.
Sorry, Ham, but your arguments were considered 1700 years ago by a Christian theologian and your side lost.
I don’t understand why you would be so mean to librarian atheists! Librarians are smart people – they’d have to be, being surrounded by books all day long – so why wouldn’t some of them become atheists? And then, even if they are atheists, they would still help you figure out that new-fangled computer that replaced the good old card index. (*whisper whisper*) Oh! libertarians, not librarians? Oh, well then – never mind.
(with apologies to Gilda Radner)
That’s actually a really interesting angle. It tends towards the idea of the book of nature. Nature is beyond forgery, so anyone who accepts scripture over evidence is holding up scripture as an idol, dismissing the tangible works of god.
If there really is a god and he really created the world, the science is a much more reliable way of discovering this fact than some old book, written by people who didn’t know even the most basic facts about that creation. In other words, even if you think there is a god, creationism is still bullshit.
@Al Dente, 8
Not just ‘a Christian theologian’, the guy who pretty much defined Christian theology for the next millennia.
The literal interpretation of the bible stories was always held to be the least important. Hermeneutics gave the four level model of interpretation. Why do these people find it so hard to understand that a story about a preacher talking in allegorical parables is a parable?
There are explicit clues to the syncretic nature of the text throughout.
Meh ….. PZ committing the fallacy of anecdotal evidence.
About 50% of the Dutch are christians and that percentage has been stable for a few decades. Literalists are only a small minority. So why Edwards’ story would be representative only PZ seems to know.
PZ is saying what?
Air is sometimes breathable?
Put simply: the bible is the original “graven image”, and Creationists of today seem remarkably keen on worshipping it.
I’ve always kinda liked the Progressive Christian idea (I first heard it from Fred Clark), that the Bible was the Map and reality the Terrain. If the map shows a mountain range, but you go to the location and there’s no mountain range there:
Atheist: “The map’s wrong.”
Progressive Christian: “I think we’re holding the map upside down.”
Creationist: “Holy shit invisible mountains!!!!1!”
I have wondered about Ham’s persistent quoting of the bible verses in which God supposedly looked upon the creation and pronounced it , “Very Good.” The quote is used in support of his claim that there was no death, suffering or anything else bad before human disobedience.
Couldn’t an omnipotent God have managed an “Excellent” or an “Outstanding?”
The “Very Good” description sounds like, “Nice, but I really could have done much better had I applied myself.”
quasar @15 LOL that bit is so going into my personal db
julial @16: he did do better, he created atheists /endsnark :)
Wow apostasy threat from Mr. Hamcephalic. Where have I heard apostasy before?
I am even more amazed that there are those who would debate this terrorist.
mnb0 @ 12.
We aren’t talking about the Netherlands, we’re taking about the USA where Creationists are both common and politically/social influential.
hoku(#5)
No shite. I have yet to get a sensible answer from a xian for that. The popular “living parable” explanation fails on a couple of levels. I used to hope to get that response from xian relatives, just so I could tear it apart to them.
I was a devout Catholic until I read a book that turned me atheist. You guessed it.
Frank Stallone.
Sandra says she shared her faith with hundreds of people in churches, women’s groups, Sunday school classes, and Awana clubs. I wonder if she’ll ever apologize to the people she converted, or will she just let them plod along in blissful ignorance, believing a lie.
You know, I was one of the people who talked to Edwards and observed the conversations. Don’t ever let anyone tell you these conversations, call them “debates”, on Twitter are absolutely pointless. There are truly unhinged fanatics there, there are mounds of trolls, but some people to have the decency and integrity to at least check if they might be wrong.
I shouldn’t think “The Playdough Poem” had a chance to convert many innocent children. It was vanity-published through Winepress, a company owned by (or rather taken over by) the unsavoury Sound Doctrine Church, and probably had minimal sales even before Ms Edwards pulled the book.
More about the bizarre saga of Winepress here:
http://www.chipmacgregor.com/current-affairs/last-word-winepress-publishing/
Alternative Creationist: (points accusatorily) “Those flat plains are WRONG!”
Actually, I’m comfortable with the scientific evidence for creation, as are apparently the discoverers of the Cosmic Background Radiation:
The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the bible as a whole.
Dr. Arno Penzias, Nobel Laureate in Physics – co-discoverer of the Cosmic Background Radiation – as stated to the New York Times on March 12, 1978
“Certainly there was something that set it all off,,, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match Genesis”
Robert Wilson – Nobel laureate – co-discover Cosmic Background Radiation
“Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.”
Robert Jastrow – Founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute – Pg.15 ‘God and the Astronomers’
In other words, not everyone, including Dembski, Meyer and Behe,, accepts Ham’s YEC. ,,,
Actually, I’m comfortable with the scientific evidence for creation, as are apparently the discoverers of the Cosmic Background Radiation:Still no evidence for your imaginary deity, and without your imaginary deity, the whole concept of deity caused creation goes out the windoe. You have no evidence, just imagufactured presuppsitional bullshit and twisted factoids. Try again.
gack, blockquote borked #27:
Still no evidence for your imaginary deity, and without your imaginary deity, the whole concept of deity caused creation goes out the window. You have no evidence, just imagufactured presuppsitional bullshit and twisted factoids. Try again.
Ken Ham’s right about another thing, and I think it is this that PZ refers to. Another fundie once said that the bible is like an old sweater – if you pull on a loose thread, the whole thing unravels. If you prove one thing undeniably false, the whole bible becomes suspect, because most all of it could be false. THAT is why we must never question anything in the bible.
The black-and-white anti-science view of YEC isn’t the only brittle part of the Christian Wall. The much more common, liberal, even humanistic idea that one should address one’s critics with honesty, respect, and reason is a leaking hole in the dike, with the crack growing wider and wider.
Ah — so in order to properly defend her faith she had the integrity and courage to try to learn what the opponents are actually saying and why they are saying it? She wanted to meet nonbelievers on their own ground, the better to persuade them? How commendable. How honest. Sucker.
It’s called “faith” for a reason. It’s an immunizing strategy adopted so that you don’t do that.
The popular image of the dogmatic conservative fundamentalist believer is of someone who likes to argue. They want to debate. How fundamentalist of them.
But debate is a liberal value, that of reasoning against worthy opponents in the marketplace of ideas and together getting closer to truth. Fundamentalists aren’t marked by the fact that they want to argue that they are right and you are wrong: they are diagnosed by the particularly dishonest way they go about it — when they do. It’s pseudo-reason or emotional conversion techniques which valiantly distort the evidence or sidestep around the problems.
But it seems to me that the most hidebound, conservative approach is one of isolation. The faithful take great care not to get into arguments, not to try to see things from another point of view, and above all not attempt to be objective. They avoid challenges like the plague. “You do not try to reason with the damned because their hearts are closed to God. They already know that God exists and are in denial. Debate assumes an equality which isn’t there … and besides, it’s rude. So never try it lest you forget that faith is higher than reason and fall — as did this poor woman.”
quasar #15 wrote:
Yes, but notice how the Progressive Christian has cut out the rest of the dialogue:
Atheist: “When you hold the map upside down the mountains are more or less in the right place, but now all the lakes and rivers are screwed up. The map’s still wrong.”
Progressive Christian:”It is possible that ‘water’ is being used as a metaphor for ‘love.'”
Atheist:”Then why do water routes indicate trade routes? And what would that say about towns which aren’t in close proximity to ‘love?’
Progressive Christian:”You’re being too literal. What matters about the ‘map’ is not whether or not it’s accurate, but that it IS a map. The miracle is that it’s there at all — because maps indicate a desire to understand a terrain. No Terrain, no Map. Therefore, God exists.”
Sophisticated believers don’t just turn the map upside down. They turn it backwards, forwards, and into paper airplanes; they shred it, mix it with paste, and make sculptures. But it’s still a map. In essence.
bondjamesbond, #26
Weird. Nobel Prize winning physicist and co-discoverer of cosmic background radiation doesn’t know what the word theory means. Also, his stature as a scientist only helps your case if his statement was arrived at scientifically.
Wait, I think I remember your username from previous posts here, and I’m pretty sure you’re an idiot/troll.
Yep, bondjamesbond was the troll from this thread, where he hit all the golden oldies of creationist trolling: quote mining, copy-pasting, changing the subject and generally talking nonsense.
Yeah, there’s no reason to take anything bondjamesbond has to say serious. That one is a wingnut crank.
I dread the day that the atheist community does the same. Oh wait….. :P
What I still don’t understand about fundamentalists is why they clearly show that their own belief is so fragile otherwise there would be no need for me to believe for them to be comfortable. Wouldn’t you want to hide this fact?
This looks like it could make for a fascinating and informative case study. What tactics were effective for persuasion, and which weren’t?
ambrosethompson #35 wrote:
Fundamentalists are not a monolithic block. So I’m not sure and it probably depends on which ones you’re dealing with. Sometimes they want the soothing comfort of large numbers to shore up their own dangerous tendency to doubt. Sometimes they sincerely want to spread the “good news!” And sometimes they are so sure that their beliefs are true that the possibility of honest disagreement simply doesn’t compute. They think of nonbelievers the way we think of people who advocate a transparently implausible conspiracy theory, one which denies a reality which is as plain as the nose on your face. Perverse … and with a dangerous agenda. So of course they’d want to stamp that out for their own and everyone else’s safety.
Or, as I pointed out above, some deep-died fundamentalists don’t even try to convince the perverse. It looks like gee, they don’t “need” for you to believe, they just accept you. But it’s more like they gave up on you before they began.
P.Z., while the thesis of this post has logical validity, it does not consider one important factor – the denial that is facilitated by compartmentalized thinking.
In my years of dialogue with a Dominionist evangelical cousin of mine, the one recurring element in his thinking, that makes his irrationality so easy for him, which keeps coming up almost constantly, is his extreme degree of compartmentalized thinking. On the one hand, he can read science popularization literature with great enjoyment, marvelling at the research and scientific progress. And yet he can immediately turn right around and quote chapter and verse in support of an ideological viewpoint that is directly contradictory to what he just read. And he NEVER sees the conflict!
That kind of compartmentalization pervades his thinking in policy matters as well, and explains a great deal of his conservative irrationality. For example, he’ll condemn a British Columbia business owner, an atheist, who wrote a rejection letter to a Christian job applicant on the basis of her Christianity recently, yet fully applaud a bakery owner in Colorado Springs who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple celebrating their wedding. He is totally blind to the hypocrisy in taking such positions simultaneously. And compartmentalized thinking is why he is so blind to such obvious hypocrisy. He can jump back and forth between compartments with such truly remarkable facility that he never sees the conflict. And stubbornly insist that his thinking is logically consistent! When the conflicts are pointed out to him, he uses incredibly tortured and obviously lame convolutions of logic to make it appear to be consistent.
This is why you can have all the evidence in the world for evolution, and Creationists will not dispute it for a second – and in the next second, deny that there is evidence for evolution!
Think about that – and if you do, you’ll quickly recognize that the most important mental facility that committed metaphysical religionists must cultivate in order to maintain their faith free of cognitive dissonance, is the ability to compartmentalize their thinking – and the more radical the religionist, the deeper and more agile the facility needed to compartmentalize. The subject of your post gave up her Christianity when she could no longer compartmentalize her thinking and was forced to reconcile the conflicts – the same as for why I left religion many years ago. And I dare say for most religionists who transition to atheism.
If we want to combat the irrationality of religion, I believe that the essential requirement for compartmentalized thinking to maintain conversion is its Achilles’ heel, and we should begin by teaching people what compartmentalized thinking is, and why it is a psychological pathology. We need to teach them the importance of, and get them in the habit of, reconciling the conflicting beliefs rather than simply walling them off from each other.
And the simple truth will do the rest.
Typical Christian self-delusion. About the only point in common between the Big Bang as currently hypothesized and Genesis is that the universe had a beginning – and scientifically, that’s far from certain.
I used to debate this all the time on a fundamentalist message board, arguing with creationists that their absolutist position was far more likely to destroy someone’s Christian faith than anything in liberal Christianity could, but of course, they could not accept any other position, so they would simply deny that the saving power of Christ was so brittle.
But even amongst more liberal Christians, the unsaving power of the Bible can work its magic…
My elderly parents have been liberal Methodist church goers all their lives, meaning much emphasis on the social Gospel and very little religious dogma and Bible study. In fact, so little that I believe the first time either of them had really studied the Old Testament was when their church did a “Through the BIble” Bible study when they were already well into their 70s.
Not long after finished their trek through the Old Testament, they admitted to me that if they were 20 or 30 years younger, they would probably leave the church altogether. Given their age, and the number of really good friends they have in the congregation, it would have been foolish for them to cut themselves off from much of their existing social life, so they made the right choice in staying, but when a sermon gets a little too biblical, Dad has to watch that he doesn’t mutter too loudly.
It’s not easy to admit that you’ve been wrong after a lifetime of religious adherence, so I’m very proud of my parents for owning up to their change of heart to their atheist son.
One should not make a hero out of St. Augustine too quickly. He may have considered *some* aspects of the Genesis creation stories allegorical, but he was a firm young-earther. CHURCH FATHERS: City of God, Book XVIII (St. Augustine)
Was most of Xianity’s history some Golden Age of Allegorical Interpretation? Complete with burning people at the stake for believing that the Genesis creation stories are literal truth. It most likely was not, because when they tried to estimate the age of the Universe, they always used some number that came from adding up the Biblical begots. Young-earthism was taken for granted until the late 18th cy. at the earliest.
Re jrfdeux @ #4
The example that Tyson likes to use is the stability of the Solar System. Issac Newton opined that the intervention of god was required to maintain the stability over long periods of time (Newton was not a YEC), due to the interactions of the planets with each other. A hundred years later, the French mathematician Laplace used perturbation theory, which did not exist in Newton’s day and demonstrated that the system was stable. When asked by Napoleon what part god might play. Laplace famously replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis”. A textbook example of the receding of scientific ignorance reducing the need for invoking a deity to explain something.
http://goo.gl/6gPGkJ
I am grateful to people like bjb, because it was watching their screeds carefully debunked on rational sites, particularly Pharyngula, that helped me become an atheist.
Yes, it took the Horde to show me why and how all those apparently plausible anti-scientific claims were fundamentally flawed. Thank you.
Meantime, I learned that attempting to discredit established science was the only strategy these people had, because they DON’T have the equivalent of ‘an eternally burning bush’ than hasn’t been shown to have a natural, not supernatural, cause.
Even eternally burning rocks have a natural explanation. =^_^=
Showing that an interpretation of an ancient text is wrong does discredit a religious sect in eyes of some of its adherents, such that they form a break-away sect. This means that all sects of each religion regards all the others as heretics, failing to follow the One True Faith. So it’s likely that people such as bjb think that they can splinter the ‘monolith’ (in their minds) that is science, by sowing the seeds of doubt in ‘the faithful’.
It simply hasn’t registered yet with bjb, the way it eventually did with me, that science is the exact opposite of faith.
I now know that all the conclusions of scientific enquiry are held tentatively awaiting the results of rigorous testing (albeit with increasing confidence if successive tests and increasing evidence fail to show the conclusion wrong, as in the theory that evolution is the result of natural selection on random variation). Scientists are constantly trying to prove their own and each other’s conclusions wrong, by testing them against reality. Scientists recognise the helpful work done by predecessors, and reject that which has been shown to be wrong.
However, religions are constantly trying to prove their suppositions right, by shielding them from reality. Work done by the founders is revered and contradictions are rationalised as being beyond the understanding of the reader.
It seems that bjb thinks that if only xe can show that Darwin was ignorant of modern biology, the whole of evolutionary science will collapse. Xe hasn’t noticed people saying that it is already well known and widely acknowledged that Darwin was (necessarily) ignorant of vast swathes of evidence which, nevertheless, has helped humanity to have an even greater confidence in the modern theory.
Much as I was disappointed to learn that the vast realm of the supernatural (so lovingly described by people with far greater imaginations than I) is totally non-existent, I have had to come to terms with the fact that reality doesn’t give two figs for my preferences. (I want a pet gryphon, dammit!)
Atheism has its upsides, too. No eternal afterlife! What a relief it has been to discover that that particular piece of imaginative story-telling is nonsense! (Although I might be a little disappointed to learn that there is no way I’m going to be re-incarnated as an owl.)
lpetrich@41,
Hmm, but if he was citing their claims correctly, Augustine was right about the Egyptians grossly exaggerating the age of their astronomical science!
colnago80 @42:
No he didn’t. He (and Lagrange) demonstrated short-term stability, and reconciled previous disagreements between observation and calculation. Mere decades after Laplace’s death, Le Verrier showed that higher order terms rendered L & L’s calculations useless for indefinite time lengths. So, not sure Newton would have been too impressed, if he’d been alive.
More over-the-top oversimplification from Tyson. Hohum.
I did not know the CMB discoverers were that…incurious, let’s say. At best their argument is good for Deism (and I won’t disagree with them as far as that goes).
But, and pay a-fucking-ttention, Agent Double-Oh-Nothing, this is NOT an argument for the Judeo-Christian conception of God. Indeed, astronomy and astrophysics provide the most devastating ANTI-evidence for Yahwism in various forms that have ever been discovered…except, of course, for internal and textual critique :)
In fact, it is clear the good doctors did not speak Hebrew, as Yahweh is stated to be creating out of a formless, WATERY void…which means they plagiarized the myth from the Sumerians! So not only is this NOT creation ex-nihilo, it;s creation ex-aqua if anything. Where did the “tehom” that was “tohu-va-bohu” come from, hmm?
It’s sad, but when some people get Nobels they think they’re suddenly qualified to hold forth on anything. Bond, shut up from now on, okay? This, right here, demolishes this particular argument into space dust. I don’t want to discover you’re still using it.