And Love turned into a beer bottle and got in a fight down in the Castro, while Logic manifested as a duck and quacked Desire

I know that Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer, is a nice guy, and that he supports good science…but he’s also a wackaloon who makes twisted rationalizations for god-belief. In a recent interview, that tendency is on full display.

Despite people often having the “crazy idea” that science and religion conflict, science is “really one of our best principles for getting to know God,” he told CNA.

So now god is a material, natural entity? The kind of thing that science can study? Someday, we’ll get one of these guys to actually define concretely what they mean by “god”. Not this time, though! Consalmagno is just full of squinky evasive fluff in this interview.

During his talk, titled “The Word Became Flesh,” the planetary scientist explained that modern atheists tend to understand God as being merely a force that “fills the gaps” in our understanding of the universe.

No, we don’t. I understand god as the nebulous nonsense that believers try to impose on our understanding of what we do know. Every time we call them on some babble they make about how the world works, though, they willingly and enthusiastically flee into the gaps.

I call the gaps in knowledge “gaps”. I don’t call them “gods”.

“To use God to fill the gaps in our knowledge is theologically treacherous,” Br. Consolmagno said, because it minimizes God to just another force inside the universe rather than recognizing him as the source of creation.

Oooh, “theologically treacherous”. That’s a good thing, right? I’d love to sneak up behind Theology in the dark and stab it in the kidneys.

Those who believe in God should not be afraid of science, but should see it as a an opportunity that God gave humanity to get to know him better.

No god “gave” us science. It is hard work and human effort that enables science — and what we see is a universe with no need for any deity, anthropomorphic or otherwise, and especially no need for the bizarrely quaint and exceedingly silly dogma of Jesus.

Br. Consolmagno said that he believes in God, “not because he is at the end of some logical chain of calculations” but because he “experienced what physics and logic can show me but cannot explain: beauty and reason and love.”

Oh, crap. Isn’t Consolmagno supposed to be one of the smart ones? So why is he trotting out this same stupid bullshit that Joe Doofus splutters every time he encounters an atheist? I experience beauty and love all the time; they are part of my perceptions and experience, are responses of my mind and brain, and are not invoked by some mysterious supernatural force. Dogs know love, and I suspect they recognize beauty (which is very different from our sense of beauty) — are these senses instilled by a god of dogs? I don’t think so.

The primary difference between him and atheistic scientist Stephen Hawking is that he recognizes that God is not another part of the universe that explains the inexplicable, but rather “Logos” and “Reason itself.”

The bullshit is rising. I’m drowning! Help!

If God is reason, then it does not need me to worship it, and certainly has no anthropic perspective, let alone desires or goals. It just is, like gravity or the weak force, and all the rituals and prayers and magical dogmas are irrelevant and a distraction from the reality — it means that god is the principle that atheists, not Catholics, live by, and we can just repurpose the churches as bowling alleys and dinner theaters, recycle all the bibles and print physics and chemistry and biology texts on them, and dismantle the church hierarchies and put the people to work productively. Consolmagno, for instance, could be a full-time astronomer rather than a part-time apologist for stupidity.

He spoke of the faith needed to embrace Christianity and said that although other world religions and philosophies can give us a rational view of the universe, “only the Gospel could tell us that Reason itself became flesh and dwelt among us” in the form of Jesus Christ.

Wait…what happened to that talk of god being “reason”? Now he’s suddenly meat. And sectarian meat at that.

The Incarnation is remarkable because it happened, Br. Consolmagno said, and also due to the way it occurred. In coming into the world as an infant, God “exercised a kind of supernatural restraint” which still respected the laws of nature.

This is the kind of absurd and fundamentally dishonest inconsistency I find so objectionable in religion. One minute their god is “reason” or the “ground state of all being” or some similar vague cosmic principle, and the next they’re telling us that gravity/reason/language turned itself into bare-skinned baby ape (Why? Because it wanted to!), walked around, appointed a pope, told us that women are unclean, hated a few gay people, slaughtered some fig trees and Mycobacterium leprae, violated a few laws of physics (or played some cheap magic tricks), and told us to follow a set of arbitrary parochial rules and obey a child-raping priesthood, and then vanished off to some paradise in the sky.

I know reason, Mr Consolmagno, and I think your vision of reason constitutes an extreme act of disrespect to the principle, and shows that you don’t have the slightest clue about what you’re discussing.

I get email

Yes, I still get affectionate, loving email from devout Catholics.

The gore and tenacity to take the consecrated Host and desecrate it by piercing a nail through it and discarding the Blessed Sacrament.

Your soul will plead in mercy at the final Hour of your Death.

When you are in grave pain, cry out in Mercy by saying Jesus, I Trust in You…at the final Hour of your death.

Foolish Man…What good is it for you to gain all the wisdom in the world with your professorship yet lose your soul…

I was robbed. I was supposed to get all the wisdom in the world when I became a professor? Who do I complain to about getting my due?

The Child Catchers

I like a good horror story, but sometimes I get so terrified I want to crawl under the covers and not emerge for a good long while. The books that terrify me, though, aren’t the one ones by Stephen King or Clive Barker — supernatural horror just makes me laugh — it’s the real-world scary stuff that makes me tremble. For a long time, my standard for nightmare fuel has been Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. That’s a book that makes you aware of a kind of malevolent insanity gripping a significant chunk of the leadership of our country, a malignancy that goes unquestioned and even with approval. There really are monsters at the top.

But move over, Sharlet, here’s a new book that’s even scarier: The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, by Katherine Stewart. The monsters aren’t off in Washington DC, they’re right next door, and they’re coming for your children.

Stewart first notices these odd little happy Christian clubs popping up in her child’s schools, and then she digs deeper: she talks to their representatives. She attends their conventions. She takes their training courses. She sees precisely what they’re doing, and gets the words straight from their mouths: they’re out to convert every child in the world to their hateful, narrow, “Bible-believing” dogma, even while in public they claim to be ecumenical and kind and loving.

Who is “they”, you ask. It’s the Child Evangelism Fellowship, and just the name ought to chill you: this is an organized, well-funded group of people dedicated to proselytizing specifically to 4 to 14 year old children, the prime age for conversion.

They also have other goals, among them the total obliteration of public education. It’s ironic: they often take advantage of our institutions, leasing our public school buildings for church services and Sunday schools (They’re cheap! Professional, well-maintained buildings available at minimal cost), trading on the credibility of the schools (They try mightily to produce the illusion that their efforts are sanctioned by and part of the official school curriculum), yet privately they detest the whole principle of universal education, and their goal is to subvert the whole endeavor and turn education into Christian indoctrination.

They found something called “Good News Clubs” at schools, led by community volunteers, which superficially promote a kind of generic moral religiosity which often wins over culturally diverse communities — you know the ones I’m talking about, the kind where they might detest gay-hatin’, science-despisin’, Pat Robertson-style fundamentalism, but nod in happy agreement at the importance of faith, and blandly accept that religion in general is good and virtuous and that we should encourage our children to adopt a faith tradition…for their moral upbringing in an environment of conscience, don’t you know. What they don’t realize is that the Good News Clubs stealthily promote that gay-hatin’, science-despisin’, Pat Robertson-style fundamentalism directly to their children, while asking them not to talk about it to Mommy and Daddy. They will cheerfully take in the children of Catholics and Jews, so that they can tell those children that Catholics and Jews will burn in Hell.

These people are just plain evil. Sure, they’re kindly old grandmas and sincerely pious ordinary joes, but they’ve also got it in their heads that they must inject their poisonous beliefs into everyone’s children. And they are dedicated: they will make time and invest money in their cause. Fear them. They lie and fight dirty and will use your own liberal and progressive values to undermine those same values in gullible children.

These Good News Clubs are springing up all over the place, so the first thing I did when I finished the book was to look to see if there were any Good News Clubs in the Morris area schools. I found plenty in other schools — often in cheerfully bland announcements in PTA newsletters or school websites — but nothing about Morris. I breathed a sigh of relief, and thought that was one nightmare I’d dodged…and then…and then…

Child Evangelism Fellowship is targeting Minneapolis/St Paul for a major conversion effort this summer!

Capture a city for Christ! That’s the battle cry of over a hundred workers from across America who join together to “jump start” a Gospel outreach to children in a target city.

This coming summer, CEF workers will gather in the Twin Cities of Minnesota where volunteers from local churches will be trained to reach children in their area for Jesus. These same churches will continue ministry in the fall by sponsoring Good News Clubs in the public elementary schools nearby.

It’s like the monster jumping out of the grave at the very end of the horror movie! They’re coming to get us!

Listen, Minnesotans, this is your only chance. Read The Good News Club now, before it’s too late. These people will be making proposals to your schools to install a fifth column of radical evangelical Christians into privileged positions, all in order to snare the local children into a hell-and-damnation, sulfur-and-brimstone, Satan-is-out-to-get-you, boogety boo version of hateful Christianity. Your local mega-church pastors and conservative wackjobs will be encouraging this because it’s what they believe anyway; your gentle-souled namby-pamby neighbors who see nothing wrong with faith will go along because they are ignorant and unaware.

Sound the warning. They’re here already! You’re next!

Or perhaps, more accurately, the Child Catchers are coming to town.

Even more annoying, and for real

I regret to say that I introduced some of you to Eugene Delgaudio, an extraordinarily annoying spammer whose gimmick is calling himself the “Public Advocate of the United States”, writing these histrionic emails to people declaring the imminent take-over of the country by the radical homosexual lobby. All he does is scream about fear and weakness and homosexuals coming to get you, and how he needs your money to protect us all…but of course, he does nothing with your money except use it to beg for more money on the internet.

And pay himself a nice salary. He has submitted an IRS 990 form, so his budget and expenditures can actually be examined, and yeah, he’s a fraud. He pays himself about $170,000 a year, and the bulk of the rest of it goes to postage and printing for mailing out his pleas for cash.

Somebody ought to investigate him. It’s pure fear-mongering and scammery.

I get email

Those Australians…they recently ran a segment on their Dateline program featuring their fellow Australian Ken Ham and the Creation “Museum”, which includes portions of an interview with me. Actually, I seem to be the only critic to get any airtime in the show, which is flattering, but I could have used a little more support!

Anyway, the show was recently aired, my name is played up as an atheist opponent of creationist nonsense, and now I’m suddenly receiving lots of email from Australian creationists because they want to persuade me to their foolish cause. And some of them are just weird. I’m including one of the weirder ones below the fold — warning, it’s very long — in which the author uses a novel argument: the zodiac, therefore God.

This ain’t astrology: it’s that arbitrary, human-assigned labels attached to groupings of stars can be rationalized into Christian symbology, therefore, the stars are evidence of the truth of the Bible. It’s one of the sillier arguments I’ve seen. Would you believe that the Sphinx is a Christian testimony, since it binds together a virgin woman (Mary) and a lion (Jesus)? Centaurs represent “Christ’s dual nature”. You can just imagine what he does with Virgo and the Southern Cross.

And then he does the usual thing of claiming that the Bible foretold legitimate scientific conclusions: Somehow, “He [God] set a compass [circle] upon the face of the deep” becomes a biblical explanation that the Earth is spherical. How do you draw a sphere with a compass?

It is grammatically well written, he spells my name correctly, and he uses paragraph breaks, so it’s a step above what I usually get. But behind the superficial courtesies, there lies a brain that has totally stripped its gears and lost most of its connections to reality.

(Also on Sb)

[Read more…]

I get email

You cannot imagine the volume of stupid that arrives in my mailbox. Here’s yet another example.

Hello Prof,

An atheist 150years ago would have said it is impossible to have a conversation with someone not with you, whom you’ve never seen, or can’t see, but today telephones make it seen very possible.

Have atheist believe that it’s impossible change?

What’s you’re take on this historic and present day disparity?

Thanks,
andre

An atheist 150 years ago would have been thoroughly comfortable with the concept of mail, and would have had many conversations with people they’d never met. Charles Darwin, for instance, carried on extensive conversations through correspondence with people in whole countries he’d never visited. Most people were aware that the world was much bigger than their local village, and read travelogues and articles and saw magic-lantern shows that documented the existence of all these exotic places and people.

So the disparity is nonexistent, and hasn’t been the case for a few thousand years. Telephones merely add greater immediacy to communications around the world. They don’t add any significantly greater evidence that there is more to the world than the small group of people we can see right now.

But OK, Andre is trying to play a particularly idiotic game to justify belief in gods. Tell ’em to give me a magic phone call, and give me direct evidence of their existence. And just to magnify the stupidity of Andre’s implied argument…what kind of evidence for a deity would it be if my phone rings, I answer, and a voice says, “I am Vishnu. Worship me!”?

The League of Nitwits has farted in my general direction

I feel powerful. A silly gang of people stung by the criticisms of the New Atheists met for dinner to grumble about us, and my name came up a few times. It’s kind of like being a superhero and learning that nefarious villains are teaming up to shake their fists at you and make plans to thwart you…only in this case, it’s more like the League of Nitwits, which just sucks all the glory out of it. My nemeses are sadly disappointing.

Two atheists – John Gray and Alain de Botton – and two agnostics – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I – meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.

The author is Bryan Appleyard, that tired hack of British crank journalism, anti-Darwinist and self-admitted terrible writer.

John Gray is one of those atheist apologists for religion, who claims that beliefs don’t matter — all that stuff about Jesus being the son of God, requiring your devotion in order for Christians to get into heaven? They don’t really believe that. They just like going to church for the company and the rituals and those comfy pews or something.

He’s quite right, the New Atheists haven’t been picking on Nassim Nicholas Taleb much, but it isn’t because he knows math (really — here we are, a largely science-dominated community, and Appleyard thinks we’re afraid of math? Gimme a break) — in my case, it’s because I never heard of him before. I had to look him up. All I know is that Taleb doesn’t like atheists, and likes religion for a stupid reason.

You’ve written a lot about chance and probability. Do you believe in God?
I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of George Bush.

What’s your view of the “new atheists”, people such as Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?
They’re charlatans. But see the contradiction: people are sceptical about God, yet gullible when it comes to the stock market.

Yeah, he’s some stock market guru. It seems to me that the only way to really make money in the stock market is by getting paid for telling people how to make money in the stock market; Taleb tells people how to make money in the stock market, which sort of says everything you need to know about him, and also makes his accusation of charlatanry particularly ironic.

Oh, and he also likes Ron Paul. Not impressed.

The final guest at this peculiarly petty dinner party is Alain de Botton. Haven’t we heard enough of the silly de Botton lately? He’s the atheist who has been straining to crawl up religion’s asshole and take its place.

De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists’ temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.

Right, because that’s exactly what atheists want, a new religion. And now he’s shocked that atheists sneer at his temple, and reject the papacy of Pope de Botton.

To rationalize this pity party, Appleyard tries to define the New Atheism by listing the three legs of our position. Would you be surprised to learn that he gets every one of them wrong? No, you would not, because this is Bryan Appleyard. You would be startled if he got something right.

First, a definition. By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.

Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.

Heh. His weird misunderstandings say so much about Appleyard, and so little about atheism.

  1. Wrong. Science provides evidence that all religions are wrong or vacuous. The charge of scientism is a common one, but it’s not right: show us a different, better path to knowledge and we’ll embrace it. But the apologists for religion never do that. You’ll also find that we recognize that there are obvious attractions to religion — most of them don’t require a gun to the head to get adherents — but that they get the facts of the universe fundamentally wrong, and building on error is a bad policy.

  2. Wrong. We’re quite aware of the difference between atheism and secularism. I do not teach atheism in the classroom, nor do I encourage teachers to do so; I want a secular educational system. I do not argue that only atheists be allowed to serve in government, but that government only implement secular, non-sectarian, non-religious decisions that are appropriate for a pluralist society. You may notice I’ve got a badge over on the right sidebar to Americans United, a secular but not atheist organization that I whole-heartedly support.

  3. Wrong, but hilarious. Darwin is not proof of the non-existence of gods. He showed how life actually diversified and changed on this planet, and he provided a mechanism that works without divine meddling of any kind. He makes gods superfluous. I love the fact that this kook finds science as threatening and scary as an AK-47, though. It says a lot about him.

Appleyard was so enthused about his new buddies in the We-Hate-New-Atheists movement that he had to get right on the phone and call up his buddy, Jerry Fodor, the philosopher who wrote an anti-Darwinian evolution book and got thoroughly panned everywhere. A new recruit for the League of Nitwits!

Of course he complained about me. And complained dishonestly.

Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology – an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits – seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.

It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.

Fodor now chuckles at the memory. “I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway.”

No, I haven’t read and won’t be reading the book by Piattelli-Palmarini and Fodor. But that article he’s whining about wasn’t a review of his book at all, and I plainly said so! It was a review of Fodor’s article in New Scientist, and I did read the whole thing. I am impressed that I and the other critics have completely driven him away from blogs; now if we can just scare him away from books, magazines, and television, he can spend the rest of his life happily rocking away in an empty room.

Appleyard closed his meeting of the shocked, traumatized, trembling victims of New Atheist ferocity with the tepid call of the religious apologist:

Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t.

I’m pessimistic that religion will go away in my lifetime, too, but not because it is a valid and reasonable reaction to the world around us. It isn’t. It’s the invisible friend the fearful cling to in the darkness, it’s the lie the desperate tell themselves in denial. But there is a better solution: you can turn on the light, and the invisible friend evaporates, the dangers are all exposed to be dealt with, and the truth emerges. Atheists are the ones who’ve flipped on the light, and found the universe to be not quite as scary as the ignorant claim it to be, and even better, to be full of wonders — wonders that we are part of, that aren’t painted on a fabric of myth.

And it really feels good. Religion can go away, every one of us atheists is testimony to that, and it leaves us better, stronger, and happier. I see no barrier to the complete eradication of religion someday, other than the fearfulness of craven little shadow-huggers like Appleyard.

I am officially disgusted with Alain de Botton

Unfortunately, he’s extremely talented at self-promotion, and keeps saying things that deluded god-botherers love to hear, so he keeps popping up in the media, saying the same stupid things. Now he’s on CNN, whining about atheists again.

Probably the most boring question you can ask about religion is whether or not the whole thing is "true." Unfortunately, recent public discussions on religion have focused obsessively on precisely this issue, with a hardcore group of fanatical believers pitting themselves against an equally small band of fanatical atheists.

Fuck you very much, Alain de Botton.

He might find the question boring, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s central and important. Are we to live in a society that values truth, or one run by idiots like de Botton, who think the truth is irrelevant, in which we are governed by and our children taught by people who promote falsehoods? Who live their entire lives guided entirely by disproven myths and falsehoods, and evangelize that nonsense intensely?

Our culture is currently divided between three groups: Atheists, who think the truth matters, and want our problems addressed with real-world solutions; theists, who want a god or supernatural powers to solve our problems with magic; and fence-sitting parasites like de Botton who see a personal opportunity to pander to the believers for their own gain, who will ride the conflict while pretending to aloof from it, and win popularity with the masses by trying to tell everyone they’re all right. He is no friend to reason; he’s a really good pal to Alain de Botton.

Holy christ, but the Discovery Institute is full of morons

They’ve jumped on a bandwagon and written an opinion piece so stupid I thought my eyes might bleed. They are just tickled that Richard Dawkins said he was agnostic. Why, I don’t know, except that it illustrates how utterly unaware of atheist thought they are.

In an informal dialogue with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Dawkins surprised his audience by disclaiming the title of “atheist” — as in World’s Most Famous Atheist, as he’s been universally known up till now — in favor of “agnostic.” This prompted one Christian email correspondent of ours to speculate longingly on whether Dawkins could emerge as a sort of latter-day St. Paul, eventually seeing the light and embracing religious belief.

Nonsense. It’s exactly the same thing he wrote in The God Delusion. Really. I’ll show you in a moment.

Don’t hold your breath on that one, though Dawkins’s listeners were undestandably startled at his backing away from “atheism” in favor of the more modest descriptor, “agnosticism.” He explained that he can’t know with certainty that God doesn’t exist but on a scale of 1 to 7, (with a nervous laugh) he rates himself a 6.9.

Well, that would work out to 98.57 percent confidence.

No, it doesn’t. It’s a landmark on a continuous spectrum of belief, not a statement about the probabilities of certain outcomes. Cancer staging is a series from I to IV, with increasing severity; it is not a statement that cancers spend 25% of their time in stage IV, or if you’re in stage I that there is a 75% chance your cancer doesn’t exist. It’s complete misuse and misunderstanding of the metric.

And then the stupid goes mile high.

I happen to have a ten-sided dice handy — used in a game I play with my 10-year-old son — with which, by rolling twice, you can conveniently generate random numbers between 1 and 100. Let’s see how long it takes me to beat the odds against God.

You are witnessing a real-time scientific trial. (And they say intelligent-design advocates don’t do those!) Here we go: 68, 10, 27, 40, 64, 36, 77, 96, and…99.

That took 9 attempts and about 30 seconds. Dawkins said, “I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low.” Yet even at 98.57 percent, the odds were not that bad. I would be somewhat reluctant to bet a hundred bucks on that basis. If I were Richard Dawkins it sure does seem like, rather than continue a campaign of mockery against religion, the better-advised course would be to continue on my course of enhanced modesty and just be quiet.

That was an awesomely idiotic bit of rhetoric. He’s trying to get one of two results out of 100 possibilities: on average, if he were reporting it honestly, it would have taken 50 tries to hit the desired values, and his paragraph would have swollen to pointless tedium. He got it in 9 tries. That could have happened by chance, but more likely…he wasn’t reporting the run honestly. Given that it is an intelligent design creationist, I’d say it’s pretty damned likely.

But again, the 7-point scale is not a measure of the probability of existence of a god, and you can translate it into a 1.43% chance that god exists. It’s amazing that they think they can make a serious point with that claim.

Even worse is the faux-astonishment that Dawkins said he was agnostic, or that this represents some softening of his position. It’s what he has said consistently all along.

Here’s what he wrote in The God Delusion.

Let us, then, take the idea of a spectrum of probabilities seriously, and place human judgements about the existence of God along it, between two extremes of opposite certainty. The spectrum is continuous, but it can be represented by the following seven milestones along the way.

1 Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C. G. Jung, ‘I do not believe, I know.’

2 Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. De facto theist. ‘I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.’

3 Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. ‘I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.’

4 Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic. ‘God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.’

5 Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. ‘I don’t know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be sceptical.’

6 Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.’

7 Strong atheist. ‘I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung “knows” there is one.’

I’d be surprised to meet many people in category 7, but I include it for symmetry with category 1, which is well populated. It is in the nature of faith that one is capable, like Jung, of holding a belief without adequate reason to do so (Jung also believed that particular books on his shelf spontaneously exploded with a loud bang). Atheists do not have faith; and reason alone could not propel one to total conviction that anything definitely does not exist. Hence category 7 is in practice rather emptier than its opposite number, category 1, which has many devoted inhabitants. I count myself in category 6, but leaning towards 7 – I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

I have no illusions that posting the facts will sway those batbuggering deranged goons at the Discovery Institute one way or another. But you rational people will at least be able to see how inane they are, and can now point and laugh at them.

Dawkins has his own account of the debate that prompted this silliness.

I read the Regal Standard so you don’t have to

Dennis Prince is one of those humble Christians who, like the evangelicals who plan to evangelize at the Reason Rally, is determined to intrude on the Global Atheist Convention. His method: he has produced a rag of a paper called the Regal Standard which he’s asking people to buy and distribute as testimony to the godless heathens who will be gathering in Melbourne.

I feel special because Prince has personally mailed a copy of the paper direct to me before the convention, and I have it right here in front of me. All 8 pages of tripe. There’s not much to it — it’s all the familiar nonsense. But here’s what Prince has to say about it:

“It surprised me when I got all the articles together how compelling was the case for God and his greatness. I was delighted and humbled by that. But I know that atheists will raise hard questions — some are insurmountable.”

Oh. There’s a “compelling” case for God here? Let’s go through it, page by page.

Page 1.

The Antony Flew story. Well-known atheist philosopher’s faculties begin to erode in his old age, and under the influence of an evangelical Christian, changes his mind…therefore, God.

The Colton Burpo story. Four year old boy almost dies in a medical emergency, and afterwards begins telling his fundamentalist Christian father stories about meeting a blue-eyed Jesus in heaven, which self-serving fairy tales Dad gathers into a book and sells to credulous Christians…therefore, God.

Page 2.

Continuation of previous stories, and DNA means “Definitely No Atheism. DNA is really complex…therefore God.

Page 3.

The Matthew Parris story. Conservative UK MP and atheist thinks Africans need Christian influence to bring them out of their primitive barbarism…therefore, God.

Page 4.

The Bible argument. The Bible is the top-selling book of all time…therefore, God.

An unsourced survey. Most people go to church because it helps in their relationship with god…therefore, God.

The Lady Hope story. Unfortunately, the story of Darwin’s deathbed conversion are false. He did not convert before he died, but after he died (yes, it really says that)…therefore, God.

Page 5.

The argument from distorted data. 2.5% of the world’s population were Christians in 1900, now it’s 12.5%…therefore, God.

The persecution argument. The Chinese have not been able to exterminate Christianity, and some Muslims have had dreams that led them to convert to Christianity…therefore, God.

Page 6.

The problem of evil. Sure, Christians have tortured, raped, and murdered in the name of God, but so have the Muslims, and besides, they’ve also built hospitals…therefore, God.

The problems of suffering. Why doesn’t God stop all the suffering in the world, if he’s so powerful? He did, by sending Jesus…therefore, God.

Page 7.

God & Sex. God says sex is OK, as long as it is between one man and woman within the bonds of holy matrimony…therefore, God.

Page 8.

Atheist authority. British politician and atheist Roy Hattersley wrote a book about the Salvation Army and was impressed with their dedication…therefore, God.

The promise of salvation. Kneel and pray to God right now and you will go to heaven…therefore, God.

That’s it. I’ve only given the gist of each story in the paper, but really, I think you can see that it is a lot of fluff, and there’s absolutely nothing compelling about any of it.

It’s a bit of a scam. I’m sure some well-meaning Christians will send Dennis Prince some money and get copies of this crap to hand out at the conference, but all the atheists who get it will find it pathetic and laughable, so it’ll be money wasted.

I’m mainly astounded that the two best arguments for the existence of god that this guy could find, judging by their placement in his newspaper, are the ridiculous Heaven is for Real book and an anecdote about an elderly atheist who get wobbly about his unbelief. If that’s the best they can do for evidence, it’s clear that Christianity is dying.