Ken Ham vs. Karl Giberson — should I care who wins?

Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson have written a book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, which I haven’t read…but the NY Times has what appears to be a very balanced review. It’s premise is that evangelical Christianity has gone far astray, that within the evangelical stew there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism and contempt for academia…it is not surprising that Uncle Karl would make note of that, given the way his own views were steadily squeezed out of BioLogos, the site he co-founded, as more literal-minded views took hold.

The reviewer makes the point, though, that evangelicals’ attitudes towards academia are more complicated than the authors make out: that in particular, there is a tendency for many Christians to make an exceptionally big deal out of degrees. Kent Hovind went to a fake college to get his Ph.D.; Jonathan Wells stumbled through a real graduate program to get a degree; Marcus Ross got his Ph.D. in Cretaceous paleontology so he’d have more credibility in his claims that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. I don’t think that really sinks Stephens’ and Giberson’s point, though — evangelical Christians love the mantle of authority that a Ph.D. gives, but despise the substance of it. A person with a doctorate is only revered as long as they reinforce their superstitious prejudices.

But I don’t find all this serious discussion of the book that interesting. What made me laugh was that both the book and the review have infuriated Ken Ham, one of the chief targets of the argument against these evangelical know-nothings. Oh, Ken Ham is spitting mad.

Recently, two AiG staff members reviewed a book entitled The Anointed, co-authored by a writer who is well known for compromising the pagan religion of millions of years and evolution with God’s infallible Word.

If you follow the creationist movement at all, one of the clear messages is that atheists like me might be the imps of Satan, but we’re mostly irrelevant to their concerns. We offer no serious temptations to Real Christians™. No, the real dangers are those heretics who still promise all of the good rewards of Christianity — eternal life, paradise, good buddy Jesus, that sort of thing — yet do so without demanding the rigors and trials of pure Biblical literalism and fundamentalism. They offer an easy route out of their specific sect, and the fear is that they will substantially erode the faithful away.

So Answers in Genesis will take an occasional contemptuous swipe at godless heathens like me, or even Richard Dawkins, but the real enemies and the real targets of their hatred are people like Ken Miller and Karl Giberson. Compromisers. People who try to find a place for Jesus in evolution are especially wicked.

They also cannot comprehend atheism in the slightest, which is why we’ve been relegated to the status of “pagan religion”. Everything is a religion, from church service to lifestyle to beliefs, so everything is dealt with in a great grand act of projection.

Here’s how Answers in Genesis sees the world:

In our modern church today, there are many leaders who have compromised with the pagan religion of the day (i.e., evolution and millions of years—indeed, this really is today’s pagan religion to explain life without God). Sadly, many Christian leaders have been teaching generations in the church to accept this secular worldview and re-write God’s Word (particularly in Genesis) to fit with it.

Yes, as harsh as it might sound, today there are shepherds in the church who are also “wolves”—they have infiltrated the church with their destructive teaching. Now, I am not saying these wolves are not Christians—I suppose the term can fit Christians as well as non-Christians.

One such example is seen clearly in the writings of Dr. Karl Giberson. Until recently, he was a physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts—probably leading many students astray about the Bible’s authority with his compromised teaching.

Gosh, I’m a little bit jealous — I wish Ken Ham saw me as just as dangerous as Karl Giberson. All I’d have to do is convert to liberal Christianity and start attending church regularly and…ack. No. Not going to happen, too high a price to pay.

Ken Ham and Georgia Purdom also ripped through the book and found errors. These are real errors and represent genuine problems in the scholarship behind Stephens’ and Giberson’s book (if Bill O’Reilly can get slammed for errors in details, then Karl Giberson should, too), but it’s amazing how petty the problems are.

This is a book that attempts to be a scholarly look at “unscholarly” Christian leaders of prominence in America. It is, after all, published by the prestigious Harvard Press. Yet we were surprised to find several mistakes in the introduction and first chapter alone—plus a generally snide tone that is unbecoming of a scholarly work. For example, the authors gave the wrong month for our Creation Museum’s opening (p. 11); they mistakenly claimed that Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is a young-earth creationist (p. 19); the year given for the first “Back to Genesis” seminar is incorrect (p. 41); and the name of our daily radio program is incorrect (p. 11).

The biggest mistake there is the attribution of young earth creationism to Dobson, although to be fair, Dobson has been a murky wad of BS on the issue, and seems to me to be willing to take whatever objection to science is currently expedient and babble ignorantly about it. He does promote Hugh Ross, the old earth creationist, which indicates that if nothing else he lacks the ideological purity expected by AiG.

And the bottom line is that Ham cannot refute the major thrust of the Stephens/Giberson argument: the evangelical Christian attitude towards science is epitomized by their lionization of unlettered wacky yahoos like Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, and Eric Hovind, and that they’re willing to learn from people with Ph.D.s, like Philip Johnson for instance, only as far as they give them rationalizations for their dogma. This is what the NY Times says about that central issue, and Ham can’t dispute it.

Many evangelicals, Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson say, get their information on dinosaurs and fossils from Ken Ham, an Australian with a bachelor’s degree from the Queensland Institute of Technology. Ham believes human reason should confirm the Bible rather than reinterpret it, and teaches that God created the world a few thousand years ago. His ministry, “Answers in Genesis,” includes a radio program broadcast over more than 1,000 stations, a magazine with a circulation of 70,000 and the ­multimillion-dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky. While other evangelicals — for example Francis Collins, the born-again Christian who runs the National Institutes of Health — offer more nuanced perspectives on science’s relationship to the Bible, Ham commands a far larger audience.

It’s entirely true that Answers in Genesis is the most popular creationist organization in the US (he won’t argue with that), and it’s also entirely true that he’s an ignoramus with minimal education in biology. Not mentioned is that, without concern for what letters he has or doesn’t have after his name, he gets all the science wrong, misrepresents the evidence, and willingly confesses that he’s irredeemably shackled to a book of dogma. Yet his is the voice evangelical Christians choose to listen to. And if they don’t like him, they turn to Eric Hovind, another moron for Jesus, or his jailbird daddy, Kent Hovind.

To be fair, they’re stuck in a hard place. I disagree that Collins is more nuanced — he’s just as loony on Christianity as Ken Ham — but that’s the Christian problem. Ultimately, all of the paladins of faith are forced to defend Christianity, which is antique ooga-booga bullshit on toast. When all of your choices are eye-buggingly batty, you can’t use reason to decide among them any more.

Why I am an atheist – Krio Gnosz

I grew up in a rural area of Finland and went to a tiny school of about thirty pupils. As such, I now suppose their education methods could get away with being less than mainstream. Being only about seven to eight years old, we were taught Biblical stories as though they were the truth of what happened.

I was a personality that would find the thought of a perfect, just, omnipotent authority appealing. Being an obedient, yet ingratiating child I strove to act polite and hide my flaws from God in an effort to appease him. All in a very similar manner to my faith in Santa Claus. However, I also had a very absolute sense of morality. Since the Christian stories that I had heard taught that even a malicious thought is a sin, I figured that I was not in control of my own sinfulness. A person would be sent to either Heaven or Hell according to their sins. This made me panic, since I would have to live my entire life in constant fear of a divine punishment that might not even be fair. Normally, I would disguise my misdeeds and pretend to be nothing but pure of thought… but how could I even attempt to disguise and pretend in front of an omnipotent, omniscient God?

One day, I finally broke in tears due to this sense of insecurity. My father asked what was wrong, and I opened up to him. What he said to me afterwards was nothing short of comforting as hell. Something along the lines of “There are thousands of religions on this planet, many of which promise eternal comfort and threaten with eternal agony. And everybody believes theirs is the right one. Christianity just happens to be dominant in this particular country, so take it easy, you are not bound to anything.” This did not make me truly atheist, though. I just mentally told God, “Well, it seems that despite all your greatness, you haven’t provided me with any proof that you exist. So I’ll continue to live my life without you. No hard feelings, but you can’t expect me to have faith in you when you don’t give me a proper reason to do so.”

There was a subsequent chapter of my life where I was, in fact, fundamentalist… in a very special way. Although it is rather hilarious and would make this story much more entertaining, it’s also so incredibly embarrassing that I don’t quite feel ready to disclose it, even anonymously. Let’s just say that I was extremely devoted and routinely exercised some serious fact-bending to justify my brand of religion.

Since having gotten over that phase, I was a live and let live -style nontheist. I figured that since there are so many people who are fervent believers in God, they must all have very good reasoning. As an outsider I couldn’t possibly know enough about their beliefs to criticize them. This changed when I started frequenting a certain forum on the Internet where certain posters in particular, who had received “orthodox upbringings”, were very vocal about what their religions ordered and forbade them to do. This opened my mind to the possibility that… maybe the human mind really can be so willfully illogical as to endlessly defend a mindset that has some serious flaws in it? After all, I had been through this too.

I finally got my hands on a copy of The End of Faith by Sam Harris upon skimming through a selection of books in an online library. At first, I thought the writer must have been some sort of radical. Yet his arguments, backed up by statistics as opposed to meandering pseudo-philosophy, were such a refreshing treat that I became a “radical” myself in my stance to religion. Eventually, my sister found my copy and mentioned that she had read a similar book too, by Richard Dawkins. And so on.

Krio Gnosz
Finland

Why I am an atheist – Tony Moss

I was a devout Catholic. I believed. I believed in literal transubstantiation, I belived in Hell, I believed in the Virgin Mary, I believed in Adam and Bloody Eve and the damned Deluge! I was, I suppose, a victim of the phenomenon put forward by Dawkins in which adults tell you, in a serious voice, that something is literally true and you have a tendency to believe them.
When the priest said “let us pray” I really did, and a friend of mine in the pew next to me used to pray with an incredible intensity that made me envious. So what happened? Very basically I left my childhood.

The questioning that is customary in one’s teenage years led to me to realise the absurdity of some of the propositions. For instance the creation story was completely incompatible with evolution which living in England was considered science and not some infernal little secret. But the one thing that really led me to seriously question my pre-pubescent faith was the utter ridiculousness of the notion of an all loving, all forgiving father who would let you burn forever if you didn’t believe. I began to be exposed to the mental gymnastics of Catholic theologians who attempted to explain away quandaries like “what about people who never heard of Jesus?” and “what about babies who die before they get baptised?”. It was also revealing to me that the age of your confirmation at which you declare, before the Church, that you as an adult of sound mind accept the teachings of the Catholic faith and are baptised again as a permanent member of the Church began to diminish from fourteen (!) to eight (!!). What sort of eight year old could possibly be ready to declare their eternity? The cynic in me might suggest that this rewinding age of responsibility might go some way to explain the disgusting scandals that have plagued the church in recent years.

For years I struggled with faith (the imagery of eternal damnation is horrible enough to resonate with a young adult and I’m not ashamed to admit that the main motivation of my flirtation with Catholicism in my older years was fear) eventually settling on what I thought was a reasonable position of agnosticism. Then I read The God Delusion. Dawkins’ description of himself on his scale of belief seemed to gel perfectly with what I was. I didn’t believe and hadn’t for decades! I was a de-facto atheist, and because of stupid religious apologism I never realised it.

To put this in perspective the bulk of my catholic teaching came from my public Catholic school. My family were fairly liberal. My dad is a nominal Anglican protestent to whom Sundays were an excellent opportunity to sleep in. My mother describes herself as Catholic but her statement on belief is “I think that there’s something….”. Her mother was the daughter of Irish catholics and while being very devout she indicated she did believe in reincarnation. I think the liberal nature of my family’s beliefs can be summed up in the female members’ reaction to one of my cousin’s neighbours, a gay couple:

“It’s such a shame that those to are gay isn’t it? They’re both GORGEOUS!”

Imagine then the struggles facing an atheist brought up in a truly devout or dare I say fanatical household. I had it easy.

Tony Moss
United Kingdom

Creationist math and accounting

It took me a moment to figure out what the heck Answers in Genesis was banging on about. In this bizarre article, AiG says the Galileo wondered why pumps could only move water upwards about 32 feet in 1630, meanders through random technological innovations, and ends up with Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, and then they do some higher math and figure out that 1875 – 1630 = 245 years.

Are you as baffled as I am yet?

Then they say that in their imaginary Biblical chronology, there was 1600 years between Adam and Eve and the Flood. 1600 > 245, therefore the Ark is plausible.

Riiiiiight.

Well, gosh, I think 1600 is a lot bigger than 245. If 245 years was enough to inevitably lead from mining pumps to electromagnetism and world-wide communications, then I think 1600 years was enough to go from fruit-picking to starships, therefore we ought to look for the wreckage of Noah’s Ark on the largest mountain of any habitable planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri. That makes about as much sense to me.

Hey, also, if I found a quarter on the sidewalk this afternoon, two years is more than enough time for a dynamic, brilliant organization like AiG to raise $25 million to build their fake boat. So how come their fundraising is stalled out at $5 million, and they’ve had to delay and delay and delay their groundbreaking?

(Also on Sb)

Is Seattle’s KOMO news sympathizing with creationists now?

Or maybe it’s just guilty of bad journalism. Look at this story they ran: it’s about a creationist who claims that Arizona sandstones are proof of Noah’s flood. It’s a remarkable piece of crap. The creationist, Greg Morgan, is a nuclear safety engineer, not a geologist, and his argument consists entirely of pointing at some swirly sandstone formations and saying they look flowy, like they’d been formed in water. That’s it. It got published in Answers in Genesis magazine, though!

They gave this nonsense 35 paragraphs. The surprising thing is that nowhere in it did they consult an actual geologist — I guess “he said she said” journalism only applies when you’re talking about science. If it’s creationism, just “he said” is enough. The journalist, John Trumbo, did make the effort to call Andrew Snelling in Kentucky to get a second creationist’s opinion, but could not trouble himself to call the UW or WSU to find out what the opinion of a real geologist might be.

I’m not a geologist, not even close, but I’ve traveled through Utah and Northern Arizona and have seen a lot of these spectacular formations, and even I know the answer: these were formed by aeolian processes, built up and carved away by the wind. I can even lift my fingers and consult the BLM via Google and get a fairly thorough explanation.

The Jurassic Navajo Sandstone is 1200 feet thick in Paria Canyon and is the most prominent formation. It is composed of crossbedded eolian sandstone deposited over millions of years as huge sand dunes migrated across a large desert broken only by an occasional oasis. Where the Paria River and Buckskin Gulch have cut through the Navajo Sandstone, slot canyons have formed. The Navajo Sandstone is very resistant in this desert environment and forms sheer cliffs and conical hoodoos.

John Trumbo did not make the slightest effort to evaluate the bullshit Greg Morgan is spouting, or if he did, he ignored it. John Trumbo is an incompetent journalist. John Trumbo is a creationist. Why is KOMO news supporting him? They did issue a statement on their facebook page.

Folks, please note that we shared this story on our Facebook page because it is currently one of the most popular stories on our website. We are not promoting any agenda, including “young-earth creationism.” Thank you.

No, they are promoting creationism. They published a completely credulous story with no fact-checking at all that parrots a totally bogus explanation of a well-understood geological phenomenon.

That’s promoting a young earth creationist agenda.

Hey, KOMO. How about issuing a correction and consulting a competent geologist to get some goddamned truth in your news?

(Also on Sb)

Andrew Wakefield lashes out

Poor Andy. Once upon a time, he had the power to kill children just by doing some very bad science and writing a few very bad papers, and now he’s reduced to living in Texas and being supported by mobs of New Age cranks. He’s powerless and bored, but his ego is still being inflated by sycophants…so what does he do? He decides to sue the British Medical Journal and journalist Brian Deer for defamation.

He has no medical career left. His entire life is now tied to his anti-vaccine crusade, and he’s got nothing to contribute, other than his status as a martyr to the cause, so what he’s done now is crawled up on a cross and is asking for more nails to be hammered in. He knows he can’t lose in the grand scheme of things; if he wins the court case (which won’t happen), he’s a hero; if he loses (the inevitable result), he’s a victim of the evil forces of Big Pharma, and his defeat proves that the bad guys are out to get him, so he must be right.

Orac explains why he’s going to lose the court case.

I find it very amusing that Dr. Wakefield claims his “professional reputation” was damaged by Deer’s most recent article The reason, of course, is that Dr. Wakefield’s reputation was destroyed by his having done and publicized his bad science, by his having intentionally consorted with the antivaccine movement and continued (in my opinion) to crank out bad science in the service of smearing the MMR with the claim that it causes autism. Wakefield destroyed his own reputation by doing fraudulent science. That happened years before Brian Deer ever wrote that BMJ article a year ago. Wakefield had already been found guilty by the General Medical Council of “serious professional misconduct,” which included acting in ways not in the clinical interests of disabled children. Shortly after that, he was struck off the medical register, and fired from Thoughtful House. All of this happened many months before Brian Deer wrote his article.

To but it bluntly, Andrew Wakefield no longer had any professional reputation to be trashed. This will be a major problem for him in any libel action, because one has to prove damage to one’s reputation to be successful in a libel suit.

Just wait, though. When his case is thrown out, he’ll throw himself into the arms of his sympathetic supporters, and they will respond with more affirmations and more money and more status in his movement.

(Also on Sb)

Real Spiritual Exercises for Atheists

Several years ago, I had a very strange dinner with Paul Nelson, who tried to convince me that my materialist view of biology was totally wrong and was missing all the important stuff. To do that, he performed a little demonstration for me. He flexed his arm at me.

“Look at that,” he said, “My mind is doing that.” He didn’t give me a nice spooky “woOOOoooo”, but he should have — it would have been perfectly appropriate. I don’t think he was on drugs, either.

But I’ve seen this phenomenon many times. Take some woo-inclined individual, put their brain to work on some incompletely understood process, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’ll come back to you utterly convinced that mundane physical events are ultimately confirming evidence for whatever metaphysical nonsense is poisonously wafting about in their heads. And now we have a wonderful example of this kind of sloppy stupid bullshit right here on freethoughtblogs.

I have no idea why Daniel Fincke is indulging this Eric Steinhart character, but he’s had a number of guest posts lately that are raving mad rationalizations for ‘spirituality’, whatever the hell that is. Here’s an example.

Spiritual exercises typically involve mental preparation for performance through visualization or emotional preparation for performance through arousal regulation. Visualization involves working with mental imagery while arousal regulation involves conscious control of physiological and emotional arousal (it involves neocortical control of the limbic system and autonomic nervous system).

Of course these are real phenomena. Like Paul Nelson bending his arm, you can consciously control many aspects of your mental state (but not all; ask anyone in the throes of depression — you can’t just will yourself out of everything), and there are behaviors and ways of thinking that you can do to shift the way your brain is working.

But that paragraph above is a perfect example of bullshitting to justify crap. Notice the scientific justification of “neocortical control of the limbic system and autonomic nervous system” — sure, that’s the core of your brain that is involved in arousal, and we know that from scientific experiments and observations. But look what he does: he calls these spiritual exercises.

They are not. They are physiological exercises. They do not manipulate “spirit”, they change the physical state of the brain. But these glib pseudoscientific quacks just love to borrow the language of science and slap the label of “spiritual” or “Wiccan” or “transcendental meditation” or “Buddhist” onto them. It’s intellectual theft, plain and simple: it’s woo-meisters doing their damnedest to appropriate natural phenomena to their cause. It’s the same thing as when Pat Robertson ascribes a natural disaster to the wrath of a divine being — he’s pointing to reality and claiming it for the kingdom of irrational supernaturalism.

I can do the same thing. Next time you encounter one of these kooks, I want you to stop and contemplate what they are doing. I want you to fan the rage, that is, channel your inner being to stimulate your amygdala. Feel the anger grow. Concentrate on your arm; make it rise. Flex the elbow (Amazing! How are you doing that?) and then…reach out and slap ’em upside the head.

If they complain, just tell them you were practicing your Myersian spiritual exercises. I think I’m going to have to start a whole school teaching these skills, so I can get paid for it.

Why I am an atheist – Tom J

At some point in my teens I became rather disenchanted with being Catholic. Well, not with all of Catholicism. Mainly I was disappointed over the sacrament of Confirmation. All my life my parents and elders told me God was real and that Confirmation (“bierzmowanie” as they call it in Polish) was going to prove it to me. The Great Catholic Bishop James Timlin traveled all the way down from Scranton to anoint my fellow Catholics and me with the Sacred Chrism and make me a man in the eyes of God. We were all going to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Finally the moment came. One by one were brought before His Excellency, The Bishop.

He made his rounds to all us who spent the last decade learning and preparing for this second baptism. While I waited, I imagined what it would be like to finally meet YHWH in person. I pictured lots of singing and soft lights. Those around me straighted up as His Excellency approached. At last, it was finally my turn. He said some words of prayer. I responded. I closed my eyes and I was ready to faint and receive the gifts of the Almighty. “Be sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit.” I felt a greasy thumb smear a rough triangle across my brow. I closed my eyes tighter, waiting for the Holy Spirit to make himself known. I took several slow deep breathes in anticipation. The bishop moved on to the person next to me and the cycle repeated. I looked to the left. I glanced to the right. Everyone had shiny, sticky foreheads that fittingly smelled like church. Just prior to the mass, all everyone was talking about was how much cash they were getting from their relatives for being confirmed. Cash was nice, but I felt no Holy Spirit and I was let down. Maybe the Bishop was just bad at anointing. Maybe I didn’t say the words sincerely enough. Whatever the reason, it didn’t happen to me. I must have dropped the Gift of the Holy Spirit or something.

A girl from school invited me to go to her Wesleyan youth group several times and I got to see how Christians discuss the Bible. Catholics don’t discuss the Bible. The Catholic Brothers and Fathers tell you what the stories are and what they mean. It was nice to have an interactive forum for a change. However, they never discussed the parts of the Bible where the morally questionable stuff happened– like the part where Lot is seduced by his daughters (Genesis 19:30-36) or where bald Elijah gets Yahweh to send two bears to kill the youth that mock his lack of hair (2 Kings 23-25). I didn’t know about these stories either so selective teaching is alive in well not just in Catholicism..

A pivotal test of faith for me came when I saw an TV ad for a debate about God in 2007. It was to be on ABC’s Nightline. Martin Bashir was going to moderate a debate over whether God exists.

It featured the somewhat famous actor Kirk Cameron and YouTuber Ray Comfort proclaiming that they would demonstrate evidence that God exists. The other debate team was two people named Brian and Kelly from some obscure organization called the “Rational Response Squad”. Who were these damned dirty atheists claiming there was no YHWH? Those fuckers– how dare they challenge the evidence of God! I genuinely was excited to finally see evidence, at long last. I wanted once and for all know whether my mom and dad’s religion had something to it. I wanted to be a better Catholic and this was the incentive for me to finally grow up and be responsible for my sins and fell the power of the Holy Spirit.

The promos of the debate promised that Ray and Kirk were going to prove God exists without invoking scripture. I was finally going to see this for myself. I missed the original broadcast of Nightline because of my work schedule, so I caught the debate as clips posted to YouTube. The opening statement from Ray left me aghast. His claim was that “using eyes that see and a brain that works” we can see that we are standing on God’s creation. A creation needs a creator. Therefore, YHWH exists. Creationism. Plus he threw in a sermon about sinning while invoking the ten commandments (from scripture). The same shit I heard all my life. The bit about buildings needing builders and paintings needing painters, was trumped in grade school science class when we learned the Earth’s creation is plausibly explained by the process of accretion. No YHWH required.

Brian and Kelly didn’t even need to say a word. To me, they already won. Kirk and Ray were the best that religion had to offer on national television? Brian and Kelly went on to point out the philosophical and logical flaws in Ray’s and Kirk’s arguments. Atheism trounced the foundations of YHWH so soundly, I could not ever go back to believing in that bat shit craziness anymore. Only then did it make obvious sense why the Holy Spirit didn’t visit me at Confirmation. For the first time I saw truly rational people telling the religious, to their faces, that they were not only full of shit, but that their burden of proof is not met by a self-contradicting bronze age tome cobbled together by a committee who performed the miracle of turning monotheism into polytheism by inventing the Trinity™, a concept which oddly is never hinted at in said tome.

In the years since then I’ve enjoyed watching guys like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens debate creationists and apologists in the dozens of YouTube clips available on the subject. Not once has any of the religious put forth anything credible to show the existence of their deity. The burden of proof has always been on theism and their burden is no longer mine.

Tom J
United States

Why I am an atheist – K. Davidson

Firstly, I take issue with having to explain why I don’t believe in the existence of one possible, or few possible, entities in a universe of infinite possibilities.

Why don’t I believe that doing three cartwheels down a particular road in Katmandu while whistling Ode to Joy backwards will rain pogo sticks upon the world? (What, it didn’t work? You must have missed one of the notes.) Why don’t I believe that the world sits on the shell of a giant turtle? Why don’t I believe that having sex with my boyfriend will result in an eternity of hell fire? Just because something can be conceived doesn’t mean it has to be disproved.

But I do object to religion, and that deserves an explanation. First let me state that I take a quintessentially American view toward personal belief: That’s cool. What’s none of my business is none of my business and I am not so omnipotent that I can expect everyone to think the way I think. Nor would I want them to. I am not everyone, only myself and I want to learn from other people, I want to be persuaded, I want other people to have thoughts different from own.

I also don’t want to take things away from other people. Religious belief can be very significant, even life saving. I live a privileged life. I’m one of the few people (let alone women) throughout history who experienced genuine autonomy. I have control over what happens to me on a day to day basis. I have no major crises to attend, no survival to fight for. My life is not a series of things just happening to me. I have control, mostly because I have an education, pale skin and knowledge of how to navigate this liberal, wealthy society. Not everyone does. Many, if not most, people live lives like pinballs, tossed around from bumper to bumper, scared, depressed, anxious. They lack control. So if those people get through their days with a belief that live under the umbrella of God’s love, if they are able to get up and function because they think when this is all over they will receive their just reward (and those rewards would be just), then God bless them. I will never begrudge anyone any tool of survival.

The problem comes when those with power believe in a false cause and effect. That is dangerous, that is anti-social and needs to be stamped out for the betterment of people.

There are two obvious problems with false cause and effect. The first is quite obvious. If a child is sick with infection and her adult care-taker believes that doing three cartwheels down a particular road in Katmandu will cure her, but antibiotics won’t, that empowered caretaker will cause unnecessary suffering, and possibly death. We can extrapolate that across society. If people with power believe that giving HPV vaccinations will lead to retaliations from a vengeful god, those empowered people will cause unnecessary suffering, and possibly death. There are so many examples of this affecting OUR shared society. Psychological torture of gays, miseducation of our children, stunting the potential of young girls by refusing them access to information about birth control, shooting wars with other cultures… ad infinitum.

That is completely unacceptable. We cannot allow the hard won bounty of human endeavor, i.e., knowledge and information, to be squandered at the expense of real, live humans who have the right to the best possible lives we as a society can offer each other. We have come together throughout history to benefit from our collective knowledge and works. Those who would stand in opposition to this knowledge reap its benefits every day. They flush toilets and watch television and eat cheap food. In my view, there is no difference in avoiding cholera by means of sewage systems and avoiding the pain of ostracism by means of admitting that it’s the only downside to homosexuality.

In short, I believe that failing to proceed with the best possible information about cause and effect is a crime.

The second problem with religious adherence is more subtle, but possibly more dangerous. On an individual level, believing that there is a set of specific desires held by some higher power leads to a population of people “just following orders.” It removes all ethical and moral agency from the individual, which is, in my view, distinctly unethical and immoral. One hears the tired argument, “How can anyone who doesn’t believe in God’s retribution know right from wrong?” The absurdity of this is obvious to anyone with a deeply personal and evolved set of principles. I know it is wrong to hurt people for my own gratification and I suffer emotionally in the here and now for it. I am not so disconnected from the rest of humanity that I forget the value of other humans. I am not so mercenary that without threat to my own personage I would harm others. I am a fully formed, typical human in that way.

But I would take my response to that a step further and say that I am more moral because of it. This is because I have to choose, from my own free will, what is wrong and what is right. When I was a child, my sense of right and wrong was influenced by adults, but I am no longer a child and have to take full and complete responsibility. If I simply believe that there is a list handed down from some higher being, I can no longer say that I know right from wrong. Anything can be plugged into that list — a list interpreted by humans, no less — and I will happily go along. Don’t eat meat on Fridays? Okay. Give ten percent to charity? Okay. Kill all first born children? Okay. (Interestingly, there are some beautiful Christian works which hit exactly on this issue, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, which fundamentally posits that God chose his most beloved and beautiful angel to become the devil because He knew that there was no meaning in faith unless people chose it of their own free will. Even St. Augustine said that God values most the souls of those who sinned and came to Him by choice.)

Here’s what it really comes down to: the public sphere. There are places where I and other people have to intersect, people who believe in different sets of cause and effect. But here’s the thing: I can’t have a religious conversation with people in that public sphere, in doings of the State. I have nothing to say about anyone’s religion on a theological level and, not to put to fine a point on it, I don’t care how many angels one group thinks can dance on the head of a needle versus another group. When discussing social and public policy, I cannot have this conversation. I don’t know how strongly I can express this. I can only discuss the pragmatic outcomes of cause of and effect based on evidence and the shared knowledge created by my fellow humans.

But of course a religious person would be a hypocrite if they left their truest and deepest beliefs at the door. It’s the absolute and inevitable outcome of earnest belief. Now, I know a lot of people who identify as religious who do no such thing, who keep these spheres very separate and I have absolutely no objection. These are also the people who would walk away from any religious leader who asked them to violate their sense of right and wrong. But this is not everyone. We see people running for the presidency of the United States who quite literally cannot see any “right” besides pushing forward their own personal theology onto the nation as a whole. If you truly believe that doing three cartwheels down a particular road in Katmandu would prevent a massive tsunami, wouldn’t you hope you were the kind of person who would do everything in her power to get to Katmandu and do those cartwheels?

This is why religion is destructive. It is to this that I object. It for this reason that I would like to see it fade away into wisps of nothingness. So perhaps this doesn’t answer why I don’t believe in a god, but I hope it answer why I think it’s best not to believe in a god.

K. Davidson