When good people do bad things

(Today is Memorial Day, a holiday in the US. Since I am traveling this weekend, I am reposting an old item, updated.)

Amongst Catholics, it had long been thought that children who die without being baptized have not had their original sin expunged and are thus excluded from heaven. While the church had no formal doctrine on this, there has been the belief that such children enter the state commonly called limbo, without being in communion with God.

However, it seems that concerns have been raised about this because of the growing number of children who now die without being baptized. (I am not exactly sure why this is seen as a bigger problem now than before. Is there a finite amount of space in limbo and thus a danger of overcrowding?) Anyway a recent news report says that the Catholic Church has appointed a high-powered International Theological Commission to study this problem and now thinks that there is reason to hope that babies who die without baptism can go to heaven. (I always wonder what kind of “study” is involved when religious people discuss such things. It cannot involve any new data, surely. It usually boils down to people suddenly seeing in the same old texts the new meanings that they want to see.)
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The end of god-17: The god who loves playing peek-a-boo

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

There used to be a time when religion and belief in god reigned supreme and science was secondary. It was believed to be incontrovertibly true that god existed, and one did not really need to argue in favor of that proposition. Scientists of the period earlier than (say) the 18th century took the existence of god for granted and saw their research as shedding light on how god worked. True knowledge was believed to be derived from god. Some religious apologists use the views of religious scientists of that time (like Newton) to support the contention that science supports the existence of god, since those scientists believed in god.

But all that has changed dramatically. Scientific knowledge has advanced greatly since that time while religious knowledge has remained static and this has resulted in the link between science and religion being severed. Beginning with the theory of evolution, science first shed its role of being subservient to religion and later abandoned even the pretence of trying to show that the two knowledge structures were consistent with each other. This liberation from the constraints of religious dogma has led to the dramatic advances in science and of our knowledge of how things really work. And what has become clear is that the concept of god is totally irrelevant to understanding anything about the world. Science has made god obsolete and redundant.

It is now the knowledge created by science that is supreme. Although this knowledge is not infallible and is constantly subject to change and revision, there is nothing else that comes close to it in terms of reliability and usefulness. The achievements of science are unquestionable. Science is also truly universal. Its principles transcend narrow sectarian divisions of ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Anyone who rejects modern science and its methods of evidence and reason to create new knowledge is increasingly being seen as someone who is living in the past.

As a result, religion and belief in god is being increasingly revealed as little more than an irrelevancy, a bunch of superstitions, belief structures that children are taught and might find credible while they are still young but which are childish to cling on to when one has reached adulthood.

Faced with this new reality, and not having any new evidence to produce in their favor, what religious apologists have done is try and reframe the debate. One approach that is taken by advocates of intelligent design creationism (IDC) is to argue that science is dogmatically burying its head in the sand and deliberately avoiding, ignoring, or suppressing evidence for the existence of god. The second approach is to argue that science is just like religion because they are both faith-based, and that thus they are equivalent knowledge structures that each person can accept or reject on the basis of which faith they prefer.

In the first approach, believers try to elevate religion to the level of science while in the second approach, they try to bring science down to the level of religion. Both approaches try to equate science with religion.

The first argument, that scientists, because of a dogmatic commitment to materialistic explanations for phenomena, are deliberately ignoring the evidence for god, is really rather ridiculous. The reason that scientists seek materialistic explanations is not because they have received an edict that they must do so but simply because such an approach has been extraordinarily successful for doing research

It is undoubtedly true that scientists can be and have been dogmatic. There have undoubtedly been instances where individual scientists who have been the passionate originators or supporters of some theory have ignored or even suppressed evidence for alternative theories. Scientists are all too human and can fall prey to the same kinds of failings as other people. A scientist may well suppress evidence of a rival theory that challenges his or her own work out of petty ambition or jealousy or fear of failure.

But to extend this to saying that the community as a whole is suppressing evidence of the existence of god is preposterous. After all, this is god we are talking about. You know, lord of the universe, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, etc. A scientist who suspected that he or she had evidence of such a being would be mad to try and suppress it. After all, god could presumably easily thwart the pathetic attempts of any mere mortal to throw a cloak over him. Besides which, a scientist who tried to do that would presumably be inviting everlasting torments in hell. Scientists may be dogmatic but they are not that stupid.

It is far-fetched to think that a scientist would not reveal evidence that is unearthed for the existence of god or even the supernatural and the paranormal. After all, such a thing would be the biggest discovery in the history of the world. We live in a world so steeped in religious superstition that there are billions of people who so desperately seek a sign from god that they are even willing to accept as evidence pieces of burnt toast that seem to show an image of Jesus, despite the fact that no one knows what Jesus looked like, assuming he even existed. A scientist who revealed convincing evidence for god would be guaranteed to receive fame and fortune beyond imagination. The scientist would be even bigger than Oprah, if you can imagine that. Why would they not reveal the evidence for god? It makes no sense.

To counter this objection, religious apologists have a variant of this scientific dogma argument and that is to argue that perhaps the evidence that some scientists have for god is not definitive enough but at present is somewhat tentative and preliminary and needs to be pursued further to become more conclusive. The scientists who have such tentative evidence are unwilling to go public with it for fear of being scorned by the rest of the academy and even losing their jobs. This is the premise of the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

In the next post I will examine the plausibility of this argument.

POST SCRIPT: More religious craziness

As if his other views were not problematic enough, new audio clips of his sermons have emerged where John McCain’s buddy John Hagee claims that Hitler was used by god as a ‘hunter’ to hunt the Jews in order to encourage them to go to Israel.

And of course, this craziness has to be true because Hagee says he got it from the Bible. You wonder how the Bible can say that since it was written before Hitler? You are ignoring the magic interpretive glasses that all deeply religious people have that enables them to see precisely what they want to see in their religious texts.

The Hitler sermon was apparently too much for McCain who has now rejected Hagee’s endorsement.

The kind of thinking that religious people like Hagee exhibit has its own weird logic. They believe in a god who is a micromanager. Hence any major event (hurricane, genocide, war) had to be planned and implemented by god. They also believe that the Bible is the blueprint for god’s plans for the world. Once you accept those premises, then it’s off to the races, trying to infer the reasons for god’s actions by combing through the Bible.

Meanwhile, another McCain backer, a major evangelical pastor Rod Parsley has been preaching violently anti-Muslim sermons.

So now that Catholics, Jews, and Muslims have been targeted, McCain only needs to add anti-Hindu and anti-Buddhist backers to his roster to have the Grand Slam.

The end of god-16: The tortured reasoning of the new apologetics

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the previous post I discussed the fact that the new religious apologists start by arguing that a God of the Ultimate Gaps cannot be ruled out as a logical possibility and then simply assert that this means one can believe in a Personal God as well.

This raises an interesting question. Why do religious apologists take this tortured style of bait and switch arguing? Why not, right from the start, argue for the existence of a Personal God, the way that religious fundamentalists do? After all, the same logical arguments used in favor of the possibility of existence of a God of the Ultimate Gaps can also be used to argue for the existence of a Personal God. In fact, such an argument can be used for the existence of anything you like, however preposterous, as was emphatically pointed out by Hermione Granger in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007, p. 411) when she says, “But that’s – I’m sorry, but that’s completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove [the Resurrection Stone] doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of – of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

In order to logically argue this way for the existence of a Personal God, all you have to do is add the feature that this god, for inscrutable reasons, has decided to hide all evidence of his existence and has made his presence so undetectable that his existence is evidence-free (except for a few clues here and there) and requires unquestioning faith to accept that he exists. This is a logically impeccable stance to take since we cannot prove such a negative. We cannot logically exclude such a possibility any more than we can logically exclude the possibility of fairies or magic unicorns or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Of course, such arguments for the existence of god are pretty much free of any content. They do not really add anything to our knowledge and such reasoning is designed “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”, as George Orwell so pithily put it in his classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. But since belief in god means abandoning belief in reason and evidence, this lack of content should not bother apologists.

So why is it that when you ask more sophisticated religious people why they believe in god, they will initially resort to something like that there must have been someone who initiated the big bang or first created life or the anthropic principle? This is a far cry from the kind of god they actually believe in, a Personal God. Why not simply start with the latter god and say that we cannot logically rule any type of god we wish to believe in?

I think that there are two reasons for this tortured argumentation route.

The first is that this argument is so obviously self-serving, so obviously tailored to support a pre-determined conclusion, that it invites ridicule.

The second is that sophisticated religious people are embarrassed by those religious people whom they themselves look down upon as anti-science extremists, such as religious fundamentalists and young Earth creationists, and seek to find ways to differentiate themselves from them. These latter groups people believe in a Very Personal God who micromanages everything down to the last detail, to the extent of whether they recover from an illness, whether they win the lottery, whether they get a new job or a promotion, and so on. But what is worse is that many also believe in the literal truth of the Bible, that every event recorded in it is historically accurate, and reject all of science in order to cling on to their idea that the Earth is just 6,000 years old, Adam and Eve were real people, Noah’s flood actually happened, and so forth. They also reject the theory of evolution almost in its entirety, believing that god created each species individually.

Such fundamentalist believers in a Personal God are an embarrassment to the sophisticated religious apologists because the latter like to think of themselves as children of the Enlightenment, supporters of science and reason, while the former are seen as ignorant prisoners of medieval thinking. So in order to distinguish themselves from the fundamentalists, the new apologists need to resort to using the God of the Ultimate Gaps to try and establish a kind of respectable intellectual beachhead, and then sneak in a watered down version of the Personal God behind it, hoping that no one will notice the switch.

Just like people put out the good china when guests are visiting while using plastic plates in everyday life, the God of the Ultimate Gaps has become the god that sophisticated religious believers trot out for formal public occasions where the existence of god needs to be defended, while the Personal God is the one secretly believed by them in everyday life.

Next: A god who plays peek-a-boo.

POST SCRIPT: The O’Reilly gift that keeps on giving

I mentioned recently that a video clip had surfaced of Bill O’Reilly letting loose an obscenity-filled tirade at an off-camera producer on his former show Inside Edition. O’Reilly has apparently sanctimoniously chastised celebrities for using obscenities, so this example of his hypocrisy did not go unnoticed.

I showed this clip earlier of Stephen Colbert coming to the defense of his hero by revealing his own meltdown many years ago.

Perhaps you were wondering how the producer at the receiving end of O’Reilly’s anger reacted. Now someone has managed to obtain video of the producer’s reaction. (Very strong language advisory)

You can now even dance to this remix of O’Reilly. (Very strong language advisory)

The lesson is that in the internet age, be very careful if there is a camera anywhere near you.

The end of god-15: Switching gods in mid-argument

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In my previous post in this series, I argued that sophisticated religious apologists know that the only kind of god that they can argue for that can co-exist with our current state of knowledge is a God of the Ultimate Gaps, who created at one instant the universe and its laws and at a later instant created the very first form of life, and then did nothing else at all after that

But they also know that this god lacks broad appeal. After all, most people want to believe in the Personal God, an entity that has human attributes, who cares about them as individuals, listens to their prayers, and is willing and able to violate all the laws of nature to do them a personal favor. In other words, people seem to have a deep emotional need for a combination of a father figure and a powerful best buddy. It simply will not do for sophisticated religious apologists to tell them that their Personal God is dead and that all they have is an austere, aloof, retired, God of the Ultimate Gaps. Religion as we know it, a multibillion dollar international business, would quickly lose all support. People would rapidly desert their religious institutions (and more importantly not give money to them) if their Personal God is taken away from them.

So what we see in debates is that sophisticated religious apologists, after arguing for the logical possibility of a God of the Ultimate Gaps, then do a swift about-face and argue that this means they are also justified in believing in a Personal God. While this may be a somewhat watered down version of the Personal God believed in by religious fundamentalists, perhaps requiring a stated belief in just a few basic tenets such as that Jesus rose from the dead, it serves the purpose of opening the door for the entry of each and every variety of traditional and popular Personal Gods. After all, if you allow that Jesus rose from the dead, then it is not a stretch to believe that he did other miracles and from there, it becomes simple to believe that he is all around you all the time and listens to your every word.

In other words, apologists seem to believe that allowing for the possibility of existence of a God of the Ultimate Gaps allows for the possibility of existence of a watered-down Personal God which in turn allows for the existence of a full-blown Personal God which in turn allows for every superstitious belief that people have in the supernatural, all the way down to the cults and fanatics. This is how ‘moderate’ religion serves to provide intellectual cover for the beliefs of fundamentalists and extremists, even as they deplore their actions.

After spending the whole evening arguing for the possibility of the existence of a God of the Ultimate Gaps, in his final closing statement at the very end of the The God Delusion Debate, religious apologist John Lennox pulled off this classic bait-and switch by simply asserting, without any evidence or argument whatsoever, that he believed in the whole story of Jesus and his divinity and his actual physical resurrection. In other words, that he accepted as true the whole Christian god belief complex, miracles and all. He seemed to think that the logical possibility that a God of the Ultimate Gaps existed gave him the license to believe in anything he wanted.

His debate opponent Richard Dawkins had, of course, seen this happen before, though he seemed a little surprised that someone of the intellectual stature of Lennox would attempt such a crude rhetorical ploy. He wearily responded that it always seemed to come down to this: that religious apologists start by saying that they accept science and begin with sophisticated arguments for god that seem to be superficially compatible with science, but ultimately end up saying they believe in absurdities that violate almost every major scientific principle, such as that people can actually come back from the dead. However sophisticated religious apologists may argue intellectually, they seem to need the emotional crutch of magical thinking as much as any fundamentalist, and desperately want to believe that there is this invisible entity who is looking out for them personally. It is kind of sad.

I too see this same kind of argumentation all the time. After making the trite point that it is logically impossible, at present, to exclude the possibility of the existence of the God of the Ultimate Gaps, people then seem to think that gives them the license to believe in any and all gods and still have that considered a rational belief. It seems like they think that if atheists can be made to concede the possibility of a powerful god who can create the universe, then they must concede the possibility that this god can be a Personal God capable of doing anything, including being born of a virgin, doing miracles, rising form the dead, listening to and answering each person’s prayers, revealing his likeness on toast and on highway overpasses, etc.

It is to avoid falling prey to such a bait and switch argument that one has to, when talking to religious people, establish right at the beginning exactly what kind of god they believe in: a Personal God, a God of the Gaps, or the God of the Ultimate Gaps, so that they don’t later shift between the various gods.

Next: Why do sophisticated apologists resort to this tortured style of reasoning?

POST SCRIPT: Flying fish

This remarkable video captures a fish flying for 45 seconds. It is an amazing sight.

The Hagee chronicles

I have written before about John Hagee, head of the group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI). This is a group that is politically aligned with the extreme right wing of American and Israeli politics, opposes any land for peace deal with the Palestinians, opposes withdrawing from any of the occupied territories, and does not see violence and chaos on the Middle East as a bad thing.

What kind of idiotic thinking could possible lead to such dangerous conclusions? You can be sure that it is based on religion. Hagee and CUFI are apocalyptic, rapture-ready Christians, just waiting for the moment, which they believe is imminent, when Christ will came back to Earth and personally escort them to heaven, to escape the time of tribulation that will then be unleashed on Earth. (I have written about this crazy belief system before. See here, here, here, here, and here.)

You would think that a religious extremist like Hagee with borderline insane beliefs would be so toxic that any mainstream political candidate would shy away from any link with him. But you would be wrong. John McCain eagerly sought and obtained Hagee’s endorsement.

But then things hit a snag. It turns out that Hagee also believes in that golden oldie, that god unleashed hurricane Katrina on New Orleans because of that city’s sinfulness, particularly because of the gays there. But even being callous and hateful towards the people of New Orleans and gays was not crazy enough to make McCain keep him at arm’s length. After all, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell also stated something similar and neither was ridiculed out of the public arena.
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The end of god-14: Sleight-of-hand arguments for god

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

When religious apologists like D’Souza appeal to Augustine’s statement that the universe had a beginning as evidence that Christianity is right, they do not spell out the full implications of what they are saying because that would show the ridiculousness of the argument. If they really believe that Augustine’s ‘prediction’ is not just a lucky guess but is really an argument in favor of god, that must mean they are saying that god whispered this revelation in his ear.
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The end of god-13: The new apologetics, same as the old

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Religion has always had its own defenders, called religious apologists, who have tried to find ways to make religious beliefs intellectually respectable and at least somewhat consistent with advances in knowledge in science and other areas. In response to the recent onslaughts on their faith by the new atheists, there has arisen in response what one might call the ‘new apologetics’, attempts to combat the arguments of the new atheists. But in examining these arguments one is startled to discover that there is really nothing new.

While this series of posts has demonstrated that developments in science over the last two centuries have resulted in powerful new evidence and arguments against religion and god emerging thick and fast, religious apologists are still appealing to the arguments of Saint Augustine of Hippo (4th century), Thomas Aquinas (13th century), and William Paley (19th century), and even Paley is just revamping the arguments of his predecessors.

[Read more…]

The end of god-12: God and natural disasters

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the previous post, we saw how religious believer try to absolve god for his failure to stop wars and genocide by arguing that god gives us free will and that it is therefore our fault when things like that happens. This is a weak argument at best but it does not address another problem of theodicy: how to explain away the massive suffering caused by natural disasters and disease, where no human agency is involved.

Just this week we have immense death and destruction due to the cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China. A few years ago we had the Asian tsunami. And we have had hundreds of millions of deaths over the centuries due to diseases like the plague, malaria, and typhoid. We have horrible diseases even now, afflicting all kinds of people down to the youngest children.

Why does an all-powerful and loving god allow such cruel things to happen? No convincing answer has ever been given for this, though some radical clerics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are quick to say that these calamities are deliberate punishments by god for people’s sins. Of course they mean the sins of people they disapprove of (like gays) and not their own.

But such weird attitudes do not come just from well-known crackpots like Robertson. Even high dignitaries of so-called mainstream liberal churches like the Church of England are not immune from this kind of childish thinking. Take for example the remarks of some Church of England bishops after floods devastated large parts of England a little over a year ago.

The floods that have devastated swathes of the country are God’s judgment on the immorality and greed of modern society, according to senior Church of England bishops.

One diocesan bishop has even claimed that laws that have undermined marriage, including the introduction of pro-gay legislation, have provoked God to act by sending the storms that have left thousands of people homeless.
. . .
The bishop [of Carlisle], who is a leading evangelical, said that people should heed the stories of the Bible, which described the downfall of the Roman empire as a result of its immorality.

“We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate,” he said.

“In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as ‘the beast’, which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want,” he said, adding that the introduction of recent pro-gay laws highlighted its determination to undermine marriage.

“The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance.”

In some sense, radical clerics like Robertson and Falwell and the bishop of Carlisle are only following to their logical conclusion where a belief in an all-powerful god leads them. If god is omnipotent, then he can prevent any natural disaster and if he does not do so, he must have a reason. The only reason they can think of is that this must be an act of retributive justice. Of course, earthquake, tsunamis, and floods that kill vast numbers of people indiscriminately do not look like the acts of a loving god, but these people tend to favor ‘tough love’ doctrines, as long as that tough love is applied to other people and not to them. Jerry Falwell died suddenly while in his office last year but I did not hear his good buddy Robertson suggesting that god had killed him because he thought Falwell was a major sinner in addition to being an annoying pest.

While one can think of many possible social and economic reasons why god might get mad, for some reason radical clerics tend to get really worked up by the thought of sexual (particularly homosexual) activities, and this is usually the reason they bring forward to explain any natural disaster.

Those people for whom the god-is-love idea is more important than the god-is-just idea have a harder time explaining natural catastrophes. They tend to have to resort to saying that god must be having some plan that we mere mortals cannot comprehend. When confronted with the problem of explaining massive numbers of deaths of even infants, believers shrug their shoulders and say the equivalent of “Well, stuff happens, and we don’t know why. We have to just assume god has a good reason for letting it happen even though he could prevent it.”

Some resort to saying that god created the universe and its laws and has simply decided to allow events to unfold according to those laws whatever the consequences (i.e., they invoke the God of the Ultimate Gaps when it is convenient to do so), and that the reasons for his leave-alone policy are inscrutable. This is the infamous ‘mysterious ways clause’, the get-out-jail-free card that religious people play when they are faced with something they cannot explain away.

They do not seem to realize that such a statement of ignorance of god’s intent is in direct contrast to their assured statements at other times: that they know that god is loving and just, cares for each one of us, wants us to be good and join him in heaven, and that it pains him when we stray from the path of righteousness. How could they know all that about the mind of god and yet not know why he allows droughts and floods and earthquakes?

In other words, popular religious apologists try to sidestep the theodicy problem by shifting between the contradictory beliefs of saying they know and understand the mind of god and god’s intentions and nature, while at the same time saying that the reasons for his actions are utterly inscrutable.

One cannot avoid the conclusion that these are the justifications of people who desperately want to believe. Some people have a deep emotional need to believe that there is a mysterious, invisible, father figure looking out for just them, and they will make up any story that allows them to cling to that, however irrational it may be.

Although the model of god-as-loving-father may look superficially more sophisticated than the god-as-authoritarian-puppeteer believed by the woman in Kansas, they both ultimately spring from the same source. First you decide what you want or need to believe, and then you make up some story that allows you to believe just that.

The only way that such people will abandon their beliefs is if they realize for themselves that their beliefs are divorced from reality and that a reality-based belief structure can be far more satisfying.

Next: What the more sophisticated apologists are saying.

POST SCRIPT: Colbert and O’Reilly

Blog junkies have probably seen the clip of Bill O’Reilly (on his former show) letting loose a profanity-laced tirade at his off-camera show producers. Stephen Colbert comes to his defense and reveals a dark secret from his own past.

The end of god-11: Trying to find reasons to believe in god

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In response to the powerful new evidence and arguments against the existence of god brought forward by the new atheists, the defenders of religion have had to regroup and respond. The next series of posts will look at some of these developments on the pro-religion side.

Today I will look at the popular arguments in favor of god, those advanced by regular people who are not professional theologians or academics. These people are simply trying to figure out for themselves why it is reasonable to still believe in god while living in a world that seems to be functioning as if there is no god at all.

Such people must yearn to return to the days when god would routinely demonstrate his existence and power by burning bushes without them being reduced to ashes, turning water into wine, stopping the sun in its tracks, raising people from the dead, and so on. Alas, those days seem to be permanently gone. The only miracles that seem to occur these days are the occasional reports of a crying statue or an image of Jesus on a piece of burnt toast, hardly the kinds of things to fire the imagination of the devotee. God even passed up the chance to provide evidence for his existence by winning a NASCAR race.

At one extreme of the popular arguments are the religious fundamentalists. Their approach is illustrated by what happened to me after I debated the intelligent design creationism (IDC) advocates in Kansas in 2002. A very earnest woman came to talk to me after the session. She was clearly disturbed by my challenge to the IDC members on the panel to provide the kind of predictions that scientists expect of any theory, and my conclusion that since they had failed to do so, IDC did not belong in science. She wanted very badly to have god as part of science, so she had carefully written out on a piece of paper what she felt was a definition of science that would not contradict the existence of god. Her definition said that everything that had ever occurred and would occur in the future was directly due to god and so everything in the world was due to god’s actions and thus science could never refute god’s existence.

She had made god’s actions synonymous with everything that happens. And she was absolutely right that science cannot provide evidence against such a definition of god. How could it?

But more sophisticated people shy away from such an extreme, and one might even say childish, view of god as it seems to deny the existence of any form of human agency. According to that model of god, we are all just puppets following a rigid script written long ago by an authoritarian puppeteer. The idea of good and evil and free will are casualties of such a model and it is not very flattering to the human self-image as thinking persons.

In order to preserve the concept of morality and that we are agents who can choose how we act, other religious believers replace the model of god-as-authoritarian-puppeteer with that of a god who has given us free will to choose how we act. People also like to think of their god as a loving god who is also all-powerful.

The catch is that with this new model, you immediately run up against the problem of theodicy: why a loving and all-powerful god allows awful things to happen.

When I was growing up as a Christian and struggling with this particularly difficult question, the answer that was offered and that satisfied me at that time (and coincidentally was repeated just this week in a private communication from a reader of this blog) was that while god wants us to do good, he has given us free will and allows us to exercise it to choose whether we do good or evil and some people pick the latter. The lesson we learn from our bad decisions is that we must do better in future.

This model of god is that of a parent who can if he wishes dictate to his child what to do but does not do so because that would be stifling to the child’s growth to adulthood. Instead god lets people learn for themselves from their own actions and mistakes, even if the short-term consequences are appalling. In such a model, the evil acts caused by humans (like the genocides of Native Americans, Jews, Cambodians, Rwandans, etc.) are not the will of god but due to people making bad choices.

In other words, gods don’t kill people, people kill people.

The model of god-as-loving-parent is not without its own serious problems. It assumes that while god has the power to stop this kind of slaughter at any time, he allows massive acts of evil to occur because he views them as learning experiences. Is this argument really credible to anyone except those who want to believe at any cost? If a parent let his child slaughter the neighborhood children in a playground with a machine gun, we would hardly accept his explanation that he was allowing his child to exercise his free will so that he could grow and learn from his mistakes that guns are dangerous and that it is wrong to kill, and thus become a better person in the future.

An interesting feature of this model of god is how such religious apologists are quite confident that they know what god’s intentions are, and they seem sure that he is loving, cares for each one of us personally, that he wants us to use our free will wisely and in good ways, and that it pains him when we stray and do bad things. This is quite an extraordinary level of knowledge of the mind of an omnipotent deity. Of course, they have no evidence for any of these assertions. All the awful events named above can be explained as well (or even better) by saying that god is a vindictive and cruel entity who enjoys pitting one group against another, and seeing the suffering that ensues.

Next: Explaining away natural disasters

POST SCRIPT: Einstein’s views on religion

Given his well-deserved reputation as a deep thinker and thoughtful and humane person, Einstein’s views on religion have always been a source of great interest and his varying statements have been interpreted as being both supportive and dismissive of a belief in god.

In a little known letter written in 1954, he seems quite unequivocal in his contempt for religion:

In the letter, he states: “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel’s second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God’s favoured people.

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

(Thanks to onegoodmove.)

The end of god-10: When vinegar is better than honey

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The previous post in this series raised the question of, given a conviction that religion is a negative influence in almost every area of life, what is the best strategy to persuade people to abandon their religious beliefs? Should we suggest that their religious beliefs are reasonable but that atheism is better (the honey approach)? Or should we come right out and say that religious beliefs are irrational and even pernicious and should be abandoned by any thinking person (the vinegar approach of the new atheists)? Or should we just do nothing at all and let events take their natural course?

The last option (doing nothing at all) is probably the most appealing to atheists on an intellectual level and has been suggested by some commenters to the previous post. After all, if you think that belief in god is silly and without any foundation, then why be concerned if others believe it? But doing nothing has resulted in religion continuing to be pervasive and if, as I have argued before, religion leads to bad results, then surely we should try and change things, just as we would for any other belief structure that has negative social consequences, such as racism or sexism or homophobia.

I think that in the private sphere, in a face-to-face encounter with a religious believer, directly telling them that their beliefs are silly is not a good thing to do. People tend to respond to direct challenges to their beliefs by finding reasons, however irrational, to support those beliefs. In other words, they dig themselves in even deeper, commit themselves even more strongly, merely in order to save face in an argument. So a honey approach is called for here. One should try to gently point out why atheism provides a far more satisfying approach to life than belief in a god.

But the situation is quite different in the public sphere. Then most people are merely third-party observers, watching other people argue, and thus they themselves are not being personally confronted, although their views are.

When the new atheists in public discourse, in a debate or in the media, demonstrate that the views of their religious opponents are silly and irrational, this will likely not cause their immediate opponent to back down for all the reasons given above. But the debate opponent is not the real audience for their remarks. It is the viewing or listening or reading audience that is the target. Religious believers who watch the debate, when they see that the views of the person representing their own religious views being subject to withering criticism and unable to respond adequately, may come to realize that such beliefs are truly irrational. But since they are not being directly challenged, they do not have to immediately and publicly acknowledge this and can quietly think it over and slowly change their minds on their own without suffering a loss of face.

In some cases, ridicule may be the most effective weapon in countering preposterous claims, since it may persuade the observer that holding such views is embarrassing. In fact, some religious propositions cannot be countered without appearing to ridicule them, and this may not be an altogether bad thing. Take for example the widely held belief in the US that the world is just 6,000 years old. If someone asserts this, the honey approach would be to give them all the evidence from physics, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and biology that are all inextricably linked and point towards the conclusion that the world is billions of years old. This is hardly feasible in a limited time.

The vinegar approach is to say that to believe such a thing is to reject all of modern science and to regress to the Middle Ages. Richard Dawkins says in public that believing that the Earth is 6,000 years old and not 4.5 billion years old is not a minor disagreement about a factual detail. It is an error on the scale of asserting that the distance from New York to California is about 20 feet. That kind of argument can be seen as dismissive and ridiculing the beliefs of young Earth creationists, but I think it is more effective in cases like this. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”

Just as no thinking person today will publicly acknowledge a belief in astrology or witchcraft because it reveals one to be positively medieval in one’s thinking and puts one so beyond the pale of science and rationality that it is positively embarrassing, so the new atheists are making the case that to believe in god and religion is no better than holding on to those other beliefs that we now view as pure superstitions.

Even if people realize that it embarrassing to hold on their beliefs in god and religion because of the strong criticisms made in the public sphere by the new atheists, and decide to abandon them, there is still some difficulty in having to explain to the people they know personally why they switched. For some time, these people will likely still pay lip service to their prior religious beliefs while slowly distancing themselves from them. But at some point, they will feel confident in repudiating their former beliefs and this is made easier because they worked it out for themselves on their own, in their own minds.

I suspect that this process is happening right now in the minds of many people. As a result of the strong arguments put out by the new atheists, many people are probably coming to the private realization that the religious beliefs they have been subscribing to for so long are really rather ridiculous and embarrassing for any rational, scientifically-minded person to hold on to. They may stay silent now, or try to find some intermediate position that is not a total renunciation, but at some point they will repudiate religion altogether and do so publicly.

Their path will be made easier the more people adopt the new atheists’ approach.

Next: But enough about the new atheism, what’s new on the pro-religion side?

POST SCRIPT: Batman and the Penguin discuss the American electorate

(Thanks to This Modern World)