It must be really frustrating to be a thinking person who believes in god because he doesn’t help you in the least. Since god does not seem to actually do anything that you can point to as incontrovertible evidence of his existence, believers have to look in obscure corners of knowledge, as was the case with so-called intelligent design. God seems like this passive-aggressive personality who wants you to believe unquestioningly in his existence and worship him but doesn’t give you anything in return. As a result, believers have to confront the question of why god is so elusive.

A rabbi by the name of Alan Lurie has taken up the challenge and written an essay titled “Why Does God Hide?” His essay lays out the problem clearly enough:

This notion, that God’s presence is hidden, is a significant dilemma for many, and for some is clear proof that God does not exist. Why, one asks, would the creator of the Universe be so difficult to spot? Surely if such a creator exists, there would be obvious evidence. And why wouldn’t this creator, in order to silence disbelievers and recruit more faithful, simply appear on the White House lawn, announce his presence, and miraculously end all war, hunger, and disease? For some, this hidden presence is evidence that even if a creator deity does exist, such a being is not worth worshiping. What kind of a god, who religious people say loves us, would stand by as horrible atrocities happen, and silently allow us to suffer? Such a god is either not all-powerful, not all-knowing, or certainly not completely benevolent. Many site [sic] the Holocaust, for example, as clear proof of God’s impotence or indifference.

Why yes, rabbi, these are excellent points and exactly what we atheists say. But please go on.
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On Tuesday 9:00am-10:00 am, I will be on our local NPR affiliate WCPN 90.3 on their Sound of Ideas program to discuss the results of the latest Pew survey on the state of religious knowledge, in which atheists/agnostics came out as the best informed.

You can listen live or to a podcast after the show.

[Update: This show has been pre-empted and will be re-scheduled.]

Blog reader Norm sent me this link to something called “The first annual conference on geocentrism” to be held in South Bend, Indiana near the University of Notre Dame. It has the title Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right.

My first reaction was that this was an Onion-type spoof but it seems to be legit.

Of course, the choice of any point in space to be the origin of the frame of reference is purely arbitrary. Which frame one chooses depends on one’s purpose. For purely practical purposes such as navigation, choosing the Earth to be at rest makes sense. The heliocentric model is the best choice for describing the motions of the planets, and the center of a galaxy is most convenient to describe the motions of stars in the galaxy.

The church was wrong in insisting that the geocentric model was the only choice and it was Galileo’s assertion that there were alternatives to it that disturbed them. All this has been well known for some time and so the point of this conference completely mystifies me. Are the organizers really suggesting that there is only one allowed frame of reference and that its origin is at the Earth?

A young Catholic woman dresses up as a man and joins the priesthood (not hard, given that the robes they wear), goes to Rome, and ends up as the pope. She then gets pregnant and delivers the child on a public street during a procession in which she is wearing the full papal regalia. The bystanding worshippers, outraged by the revelation of her deception, kill her and bury her by the roadside. This is the story in a new German film called Die Papstin.

Far fetched? Perhaps, except that the film is based on events that might have actually happened. The September/October issue of The New Humanist has an article by Sally Feldman (not available online) that looks at the story of ‘Pope Joan’ who supposedly lived in the ninth century. The catch is that even though there are about 500 reports on this episode written from early medieval times to the 17th century, there are no contemporaneous records of what happened during her time, which has rightly called the Dark Ages, and the powerful Catholic Church would have had every reason to expunge any mention of such an embarrassing episode.

The article points out that this story has been investigated by many people and even though unproved is quite widely known and believed. In the course of investigating it, Peter Stanford, the former editor of the Catholic Herald discovered a chair that was used in papal elections in medieval times that had an odd key-shaped hole cut in the seat. According to accounts, before the election of a new pope could be confirmed, the would-be pope was required to sit in it and then the youngest deacon present would have to reach up through the hole and confirm the pope’s ‘eligibility’, if you catch my drift. Such a precaution might well have been the result of the Pope Joan episode.

In a previous post titled The fog of religious language I said that sophisticated religious apologists tend to speak so vaguely and elliptically that it is hard to know exactly what they actually believe, and singled out Marilynne Robinson as one culprit. In an interview in the September/October issue of The New Humanist, she does it again.

Q: You use the word “soul” in your book. What do you mean by this?

A: There is a very primary self, a companion self one answers to, intimate and aloof, keeper of loyalties, bearer of loneliness and sorrow, faithful despite neglect and offence, more passionate lover of everything one loves, the unaccountable presence of joy in quiet and solitude. Soul is one name for this self within the self, which I believe is a universal human possession.

Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.

We are going to see another round of discussions about whether the Bible is literally true. New computer simulations suggest the possibility that winds could have created a temporary land path over the Red Sea.

Of course, there is no independent scientific evidence that any of the Biblical stories earlier than about 650 BCE (which encompasses almost all the period covered the Old Testament) are true but religious people tend to be desperate these days and are likely to seize upon this as ‘proof’ that the Bible is true.

Of course, this leaves the sophisticated theologians, those who argue that the reason there is no evidence for god is because he exists ‘outside of space and time’ in a quandary. Does god act within our space and time or not?

What we will see once again is religious people saying that science has no relevance to religious beliefs, except when it appears to provide some support for it.

Update: The lead author of the paper has a Christian website. Why am I not surprised?

Continuing from yesterday’s post, I said that some religious people think that since there is matter in the universe that did not exist before the universe came into being, this must constitute a violation of scientific laws and thus requires some agency to create it. But they do not understand that energy comes in many different forms and that they all have to be included in the calculation. The fact is that despite all the matter that exists in the universe, the net energy of the universe is zero because the positive energy in the matter is canceled by the negative gravitational potential energy. So the appearance of an entire universe out of nothing need not violate the law of conservation of energy or any other law. Hence unless expressly forbidden by an as yet unknown law, there is nothing to prevent a vast, even possibly infinite, number of universes to have been created and exist simultaneously with ours, each with its own space-time and laws and matter distinct from ours.
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One of the fascinating things about watching how the science and religion debate has evolved is to see how religious apologists have been backpedaling, shifting the goal posts, trying to find ways to avoid having god become redundant. This process has been going on ever since scientists no longer saw their role as reconciling science with religious revelations and started pursuing their lines of inquiry wherever it led. This decoupling of science from religion began in the mid-19th century as the new sciences of geology and biology made it impossible to believe in a 6,000 year-old Earth or in the special creation of species.

This began the inevitable process of scientific explanations contradicting the religious ones that had been used as evidence of god’s actions. As various inexplicable phenomena and miracles that had been considered evidence of god’s actions came under scientific scrutiny, they were found to have natural, physical explanations. And science has the huge advantage over religion in that it is reliable and predictable, unlike god explanations. As Stephen Hawking says in this interview, science will win over religion because science works.

The more sophisticated theologians and religious apologists realized that having their faith depend upon the existence of such gaps in knowledge was a losing strategy that was causing religion to look silly because it required constant shifting of things that were supposedly inexplicable by science (‘intelligent design’ being the most recent manifestation) and ‘the god of the gaps’ became a term of derision, with even religious apologists disavowing it. As Isaac Asimov said, “To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”

As an example, in response to the publicity surrounding the book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow that claims that god is an unnecessary concept, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was quoted as saying that “Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.” (I have just started reading The Grand Design and will provide a review when I am done.)

Williams’ comments were supported by other religious leaders in Britain. Denis Alexander, director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, said “The ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.” Similarly, Fraser Watts, an Anglican priest and a scholar in the history of science at Cambridge University, said that “A creator God provides a reasonable and credible explanation of why there is a universe.”

These apologists’ words signal a shift to what may be the last goal post. Rather than looking for specific inexplicable things to ascribe to god’s actions, a strategy that has not worked well for them in the past, they have gone big, for the Hail Mary, saying that the universe itself, either its physical existence or the reason for its existence or both, is inexplicable without god. The cartoon strip Jesus and Mo recent points out one obvious problem with this approach.

(Another response to Hawking’s claim that god is unnecessary is to adopt a world-weary ‘So what?’ attitude, and suggest that these questions are not even interesting. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation … The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the Universe came into being.” Sacks also tried to pooh-pooh the support for atheism generated by Hawking’s book, telling the London Times “What would we do for entertainment without scientists telling us with breathless excitement that God did not create the universe as if they were the first to discover this astonishing proposition.”)

So sophisticated modern theologians have been reduced to claiming that god has to exist as the ultimate creator of the universe, which is no different from one of Thomas Aquinas’s old proofs of god that said that you needed something to produce the something of our universe out of a prior nothingness. This argument may have seemed plausible at one time. After all, the universe has a lot of stuff in the form of planets and stars. How could all this stuff suddenly appear? Surely their sudden appearance must violate the laws of science and the only way this could happen is because of the actions of some divine being?

But that argument is simply not credible anymore. Theologians think that since there is matter in the universe that did not exist before the universe came into being, this must constitute a violation of currently accepted scientific laws and thus requires some agency to create it, and thus is evidence for god. Of course, as I have argued before, saying ‘God did it’ is not an explanation for anything in the first place but in the next post, I will show why this hope is misplaced even on scientific grounds because the creation of the universe does not violate any laws.

Richard Dawkins takes on Pope Ratzinger’s absurd charge that Hitler’s crimes grew out of atheism at the Protest the Pope rally in London which drew about 10,000 people. Hitler was baptized a Catholic and never renounced it.

Dawkins really lets the pope have it. And he deserves it.

(Thanks to Why Evolution is True.)

In her regular column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on September 15, 2010, Connie Schultz demonstrated once again the curious sense of entitlement that religious people have. She began as follows: “Years ago, I criticized atheists who wanted to dissuade believers of their faith. My argument was always the same: Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

In response, I wrote her a personal email:

Dear Ms. Schultz,

I read with interest your column today that started by saying that years ago you criticized atheists who did not leave you alone but wanted to dissuade you from your faith.

What exactly were these atheists doing to bother you? Were they coming to your door? Were they stopping you on the street to hand out their literature? Do they have TV and radio shows that preach their viewpoint and warn of dire consequences if you do not convert to their point of view?

As an atheist myself, it doesn’t bother me when people express their ideas in the public sphere, or even in the private sphere. Those people think they have the truth and want to convince me and that’s their right. Similarly atheists think that they are right and seek to convince others of it. These kinds of exchanges are no different from debates over politics or anything else, where the goal is to win hearts and minds.

It also does not bother me that your newspaper provides almost saturation coverage of religious matters, especially concerning the recent closing of Catholic churches or religious festivals and parades in Little Italy. In fact, after an initial swipe at a few religious people, your entire column today was a paean to the virtues of religion. Despite the cutbacks in the size of the paper, it still has a Saturday page devoted to religious matters, with a column dedicated to advancing religious views. Do you think atheist views get anywhere near that level of coverage? Would they even consider allowing an atheist regular use of that Saturday column space?

So I find it a little odd that when atheists speak out about their disbelief, religious people feel as if they are being imposed upon, as if they have the right to be shielded from opposing views. Are they so insecure of what they believe that they need to be surrounded only by affirming views?

There is no reason why religious beliefs should be privileged and shielded from criticism. Surely we all benefit from a full airing of a wide diversity of views on issues?

Sincerely,

Mano Singham

No response yet.