You’ve got to be kidding me

Scarcely do I put up a post arguing with Jerry Coyne, when I notice he has put up another with an example of evidence for a god from John Farrell. And lo, I did look, and verily, I did become depressed at how stupid and pathetic it was.

An archeologist working in Israel, discovers an ossuary from the NT era: the inscription on the stone in Aramaic reads: “Twice dead under Pilatus; Twice born of Yeshua in sure hope of resurrection.” And the name corresponds to what in Greek would be Lazarus.

There are bones, so presumably with luck there may be some DNA that could be sequenced, but my main idea is that you have a clear physical candidate for an actual person written about in the Gospel of John. (There are some scholars who have argued that the author of the Gospel of John was Lazarus.)

Now, this isn’t evidence for “God” in his omnipotent sense, which I know is more what Jerry Coyne and PZ were debating. But, given most scholars believe the four gospels were composed no sooner than 70AD, and for that reason less likely to be reliable accounts, you now have evidence from decades before of a key character in one of the Gospels. And more: an inscription that, whatever we might think, clearly indicates whoever buried him knew of the miraculous story of his raising from the dead and believed it.

Seriously? This is the best that Farrell can do? Confirmation that people really believe in myths and fairy tales is not evidence of a deity. Nor is the existence of people named Jesus or Lazarus in the first century AD a point of contention or dazzling supporting evidence for a magic man in the sky.

With that level of empirical support, we could point to even older inscriptions that reference Jupiter Optimus Maximus and conclude that Jupiter actually was the bestest and greatest god ever, and therefore we all ought to worship him.

Farrell seems to realize his invention is rather feeble, so he adds another level of nonsense to it.

What if the family members from the same ossuary showed a related genome (as expected for his brothers, sister, parents) except that cancer-causing mutations in all of them were…found to be missing from his genome. Or even more startling, found to be ‘corrected.’

How do we know they’re all family members? Aside from the shared ossuary, all we’d have is genetic evidence…and here he’s saying there is genetic evidence that they are not related. I think if we went poking around in various families nowadays we might discover a few surprising insertions into the family gene pool, and I doubt that anyone’s first assumption would be that a Holy Ghost had been dicking around with Great Aunt Mary, or that an angel must have tweaked Cousin George’s genome when his mother wasn’t looking.

And what the heck is the difference between a particular allele being “missing” and being “corrected”? Does this guy even have a clue about what he’s talking about?

Anyway, here’s the general conflict: material evidence will have material explanations. Any natural explanation will be preferable to a supernatural explanation that drags in an all-powerful invisible boogey man in order to explain the arrangement of nucleotides in one set of old bones.

Calvinball no more!

Uh-oh. Jerry Coyne is calling me out and reopening our old argument about whether there could be evidence supporting a god. I said no, for a number of reasons, but I haven’t convinced Coyne.

The statements by P.Z. and Zara seem to me more akin to prejudices than to fully reasoned positions. They are also, of course, bad for atheists, since they make us look close-minded, but I would never argue that we should hide what we really think because it makes it harder to persuade our opponents. On the positive side, a discussion like this one is really good for sharpening the mind.

He’s also gone to the Big Guy in the UK, Anthony Grayling, to get some allies; Unfortunately for him, Grayling is siding more closely with me than him. And now Ophelia Benson also sides with those who say gods are incoherent. This is not going well for him.

So I’ve got to pile on.

Religion has had a couple of millennia to make a case for its fundamental concepts: the existence of the supernatural, the existence of deities, the effectiveness of priestly intermediaries, etc. It has failed. It does not provide support in the form of evidence or logical consistency; it also fails to show any pragmatic utility. Religion never does what it claims to do. At what point do we learn from experience and simply reject the whole worthless mess out of hand? The abstract possibility that the god-wallopers will finally come up with a tiny scrap of evidence for their outrageous beliefs in the coming eon is not enough to win it credibility as a reasonable contender, either; you might just as well speculate that archaeologists could unearth artifacts from Middle Earth, or astronomers observing a galaxy far, far away will discover The Force. There is no cause to expect fictions and fantasies to manifest themselves as actual realities.

i-f5f46e60d26e5fbf397d343e5f01e15d-calvinball.jpeg

Religion plays Calvinball. There are no rules except what they make up as they go. You might think that maybe you ought to concede that they could get a score of 13 and beat your 12…but they are already convinced that their Q trumps your puny pair of digits. And if they get a score of Oatmeal-Sofa, they’ll announce victory. Heck, if they somehow end up in the realm of numbers with you and get a 7, they’ll declare that they win because they’ve got a Mersenne prime and we don’t. Or because it’s like a golf score. The mistake is to play the game in the expectation that the other side has the same respect for evidence that we do, or that evidence even matters.

Here’s an example. This is part of a debate between Peter Atkins and William Lane Craig. Craig is an exceptionally glib debater, and he’s also an evangelical Christian who supposedly defends a very specific doctrine, that his god turned into a human who lived on Earth 2000 years ago, and that belief in his magical powers is your ticket to a Disneyland for dead people in the sky. I’d like to see some evidence for that, but no…his tactic here is to demand proof of bizarre assertions from science, answering questions that his religion can’t.

What’s amazing here is that Christians are actually impressed with Craig’s millimeter-deep, reason-free handwaving. Ha ha, you scientific smartie-pants, you can’t use science to prove you’re not a simulation on a computer of a brain in a vat that was created five minutes ago with false memories of your life, so therefore, Jesus. Never mind that science doesn’t deal in proofs. Never mind that Craig’s religion can’t prove it either, except by blind obdurate asseveration. Never mind that those are all non-questions, non-issues, irrelevant sophomoric wanking. Never mind, it’s Calvinball! The score is now Paisley over Feldspar, we win!

In science, we’re used to incremental progress and revision of our ideas. Evidence is our currency, it’s how we progress and it’s what gets results. It is a category error, however, to think that the way to address free-floating word salad and flaming nonsense is to take the scalpel of reason and empiricism and slice into it, looking for definable edges. No, what you do is look over the snot-ball of self-referential piffle, note that it has no tenable connection to reality, and drop-kick it into the rec room, where the kids can play with it, but no one should ever take it seriously.

Just make sure the kids wash their hands afterwards. That thing is slimy.

On second thought, just dump it in the trash. The kids would rather play video games, instead.

It was all our fault…or was it?

You knew the religious folk were going to look at the disaster in Japan and start pointing fingers. This time, though, it wasn’t the fault of gays and lesbians, nor was it the sight of jiggling breasts…no, this time, it was the atheists’ fault.

Senior pastor Cho Yong-gi of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world, has faced vicious public condemnation as he called the catastrophic Japanese quakes and tsunamis “God’s warnings.”

“I fear that this disaster may be warnings from God against the Japanese people’s atheism and materialism,” an online Christian press quoted the elderly religious leader as saying Saturday.

Wow, I feel almost as powerful as an exposed nipple now.

But wait. We may not be able to take credit for this one. Someone else has stepped forward to shoulder the blame: American Christians. This young lady is overjoyed: she and her friends prayed to her god to teach those atheists a thing or two, and within days he answered by shaking up Japan.

Alert Homeland Security. She threatens to ask her vengeful super-thug to do the same thing to America and Europe, too.

Michele Bachmann writes a letter

Minnesota’s own pious Republican idiot (uh-oh, I repeated myself three times) has chastised Obama for his wickedness in a recent letter. His crimes are many. In a recent speech in Indonesia, he 1) referred to our national motto as E pluribus unum, not “In god we trust”, 2) quoted a small part of the Declaration of Independence that did not include the word “Creator”, and 3) mentioned that the US is unified under one flag without saying the magic phrase, “under god”. Now I know that Bachmann is an amazing expert in American history, so I think Obama should give this letter all the attention it deserves. The historicity of her complaints in this letter are thoroughly documented.

However, I’m afraid I must bring something even more significant to everyone’s attention. Recently, Ms Bachmann had a national platform in which to discuss important issues: she gave the Teabagger response to the President’s State of the Union address, and I notice something terrifying in the text of that speech.

She fails to acknowledge any gods anywhere in the speech, except as an afterthought in the very last sentence. Never mind that the speech was total BS, by her own standards, she must demand a retraction and apology from herself for its appalling absence of public piety.

I must also note something else. She is a woman. She is also working outside the home. And she has displaced a man, who could be holding down the position she is occupying. Under normal conditions, this would not be a problem, except that Ms Bachmann would like to return our country to the high moral state that it held in the 17th century, before the Enlightenment and secularism tainted our government with its ungodly latin motto of E pluribus unum, and impious independent women who deprived men of their exalted status really are guilty of a great crime.

Therefore, Michele Bachmann is a witch. I demand that we put her to the test.

Richard Dawkins in the lion’s den

Whoa — Richard Dawkins will be on Revelation TV — it looks the the British version of the Trinity Broadcast Network or similar jebus-walloping station — shortly, at 3:30 GMT. It will be streamed live on the net. I’m listening to a bit of their programming now, and it’s ghastly, nauseating stuff.

I’m going to have to miss the interview, since I’ll be teaching at that time. Maybe someone will tell us about it here.

Philadelphia’s shame

I lived in Philadelphia for seven years — it’s a great city, and it’s also an amazing ethnic patchwork. The residents are proud of the fact that the city’s neighborhoods have so much character, although it also means that there is a bit more racial tension lurking in the city, and there are also extremes of poverty and wealth. One other thing you notice living there is that some neighborhoods are extraordinarily Catholic, and that Catholicism just soaks into the area.

I imagine that there’s some deep anxiety in those neighborhoods right now: the Catholic church has just announced the suspension of 21 priests in Philly on suspicion of child sex abuse. And this is after several had been indicted on charges of rape and assault on minors.

A list has been released. I didn’t know any of the priests, of course — I recognize some of the churches, but I’d never have so much as stepped inside one. The Glenside church was right near where I lived while I was there.

Unfortunately, I’ve also heard from a few correspondents in Philadelphia who report that there’s a kind of studied blindness going on.

I don’t know why I am surprised but all the presiding priest said was
that they diocese would have a steady rotation of priests to fill in
untill a replacement is named. NOT ONE MINUTE was spent addressing the
issue. He only asked to pray for everyone involved… I was offended
for anyone hurt by what these guys did. He didn’t even take the time
to denounce the alleged actions… He didn’t mention how future kids
would be safe guarded, he did mention that the church has come a long
way in the process of their investigations.

Apparently, the church is treating this as a minor problem in staffing church functions instead of a sign of corruption and failure. I guess that’s typical.

It’s good that the church is actually doing something to remove child-rapists, but shouldn’t it be regarded as more profoundly systematic problem when you find scores of abusers working in your organization? This isn’t just one aberrant perv, it’s endemic!

Respect the tradition

Today, you may notice people wandering about with strange smudgy marks on their foreheads. You may also know that today is my birthday. And you might be wondering if those two observations are related.

Yes, they are. I traditionally celebrate my birthday by punching god-botherers in the forehead. Some of those people may have been victims of my fists, and are badly bruised. Others, more cunning, put the marks on their heads so that when they see me coming, they can say, “Hey, you already got me!” Either way, the appropriate remark to individuals you see with these smudges is, “I’m sorry, I hope you get better soon.”

There are alternative explanations. You can also say “Praise Odin” to them, and point them at the nearest monastery to sack and burn. Another possibility is that they’re credulous, brain-damaged nitwits, but I think it’s kinder to pretend they’ve been punched in the head by PZ Myers. It’s a gentler, more accommodating belief, and as we all know, tone and sucking up is so important.

How do we know when the world will end?

Harold Camping has been predicting the end of the world for quite some time. He’s always been wrong, but now he is insisting absotively posilutely that the earth really will end on 21 May of this year, and he’s got teams of brainwashed, deluded followers roaming the country claiming the end is nigh.

I’ve always wondered how he comes up with his specific dates, and now here’s a short article that lays the math out for us.

According to them, Noah’s great flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C., ‘exactly’ 7000 years ago. Taking a passage from 2 Peter 3:8, in which it is said a day for God is like a thousand human years, the church reasoned that seven ‘days’ equals 7000 human years from the time of the flood, making 2011 the year of the apocalypse.

In its second ‘proof’ the exact date is revealed by working forward from the exact date of the crucifixion – April 1, 33 AD. According to their reasoning, there are exactly 722,500 days from April 1, 33 A.D. until May 21, 2011 – the alleged day of judgement. This number can be represented as follows: 5 x 10 x 17 x 5 x 10 x 17 = 722,500.

The church then argues that numbers in the bible have special meanings, with the number 5 signifying atonement or redemption, the number 10 signifying ‘completeness’ and the number 17 equalling heaven.

That is quite possibly the dumbest reason I have ever heard to throw away all of your belongings and go on the road screaming about the end of the world. I think humanity is in on some great conspiracy to forever disappoint my opinion of it.

Ignorant rabbi demands evidence he won’t provide for himself

Why do you torture me so? For the past week, the number one request in my mailbox hasn’t been this nonsense about bacteria in meteorites, it’s been people asking me to address Rabbi Adam Jacobs’ stupid article on the Huffington Post.

I have a problem with that. I despise the Huffington Post and the fact that some liberals who ought to know better take it seriously as a leftist voice, instead of the lowbrow, pandering, honking noise of stupidity that it is. And in particular, I cannot support Arianna Huffington’s contempt for labor and her privileged pretentiousness. So I cannot link to her site any more at all.

Fortunately, I can link to Jerry Coyne instead, who takes the silly rabbi apart. I’ll only mention one item that jumped out at me.

His whole piece is a complaint that science has failed to explain the origin of life, and that we don’t have a complete step-by-step description of every process that generated the first replicator over four billion years ago.

One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it.

We’ve only had a few decades of steady progress, and already he’s demanding the moon? I notice that the rabbi has had a few millennia during which his ancestors have claimed an intimate and special relationship with an omniscient super-being, and all they have to show for it is “god did it.” You would think that with all that privileged access, there would have been some tiny fragment of scientific utility somewhere in their holy book, but no, nothing.

If we’re going to start comparing lacunae, let’s start with thermodynamics. We’ve got detailed, complete mathematical descriptions of a fundamental mechanism that drives all of biology; the Torah’s got nothin’. The believers have got a dissipated invisible vapor with not reasonable support; we’ve got Ludwig Boltzmann.

We win. Argument over.

Fuck off, rabbi.

Why is it your favorite mosque, Dr Hasan?

Religion is toxic. Here’s a case in London in which both the acute and the chronic poison are in clear view: a Moslem scientist has been threatened with murder over his views on evolution. He tried to explain how Islam and evolution are compatible.

Masjid Tawhid is a prominent mosque which also runs one of the country’s largest sharia courts, the Islamic Sharia Council. In January, Dr Hasan delivered a lecture there detailing why he felt the theory of evolution and Islam were compatible — a position that is not unusual among many Islamic scholars with scientific backgrounds. But the lecture was interrupted by men he described as “fanatics” who distributed leaflets claiming that “Darwin is blasphemy”.

“One man came up to me during the lecture and said ‘You are an apostate and should be killed’,” Dr Hasan told The Independent. “I want to go back — I’ve been going to the mosque for 25 years. It is my favourite mosque in London, and I have been active in the community for a long time. I hope my positive contribution will outweigh their feelings towards me.”

There’s one evil: zealots who think their superstitions justify threatening death to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s the obvious one.

But there’s another, subtler poison at work here. Hasan has apologized for speaking the truth about the science; he canceled a lecture out of fear for his life (quite reasonable), but then goes on to beg for readmission to a mosque filled with blind, hateful fanatics who want to murder scientists like him.

Why?

Hasan is also deeply deluded, in a nicer way, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s blind to the conflicts between his science and his religion, and to the even more immediate conflicts between himself and his local culture. That ignorance is likely to get him killed, or perhaps more probably as his behavior is currently demonstrating, likely to get him to abandon reason and science altogether.