The lack of foresight in the Bible

Religious people like to dwell on the virtues of their holy books. They also like to claim that those books were either directly dictated by god or at least divinely inspired. But what is remarkable is that there is not a single thing in any of those books that shows any insight that could not have been held by an ordinary person living two thousand years ago or so with the knowledge that was at hand at that time. The lack of any hint of divine foresight in the Bible is striking.

For one thing, modern science has revealed that the universe is, by any measure, absolutely huge. Even the craziest of the religious crazies do not claim that the Earth is the center of a small universe and that the sky we see is just a bowl with holes in it. But as Carl Sagan pointed out, “[T]his vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.”
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The big tent of the atheists

Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently fall prey to the temptation to classify things in groups. I would have been in my element as a 19th century biologist implementing the Linnaean classification scheme of all living things. Recently I have been thinking that the term ‘atheist’ is associated with too narrow a meaning. In fact, I think that there are six different types of atheist.

The most common type of atheist is the explicit atheist. These are the people who say openly that they do not believe that god exists, and this is the group to whom the label is commonly believed to apply.

Then we have the covert atheists. These are people who no longer believe that god exists but do not feel that they can openly say so. The climate for atheists can be quite hostile in some parts of the world, enough to be socially ostracized or even lose one’s job, requiring such people to keep mum about their lack of belief. Others may keep quiet because they belong to religious families and may not want to upset loved ones by speaking about their lack of belief. I suspect that the ranks of elected officials in the US or those seeking such office have a large number of covert atheists.
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Atheism has won the debate

I think it should be clear to any thinking person that atheism has won. Not in terms of numbers, of course. People who call themselves religious still heavily outnumber those who say they are atheists, though the gap is closing. In a future post I will argue that the gap is closer than the raw numbers indicate but this post is about how atheists have clearly won the debate over whether it makes sense to believe that god exists.

The evidence for this is that religious intellectuals have pretty much given up on a god that has even a remote resemblance to what the word usually conjures up, and have instead created a faux god that merely provides them with a metaphor of transcendence to cling on to.

One can see this in the problem faced by religious intellectuals like H. E. Baber and Robert Wright. They are forced to agree with the atheist position that a god who intervenes in any way in the working of the universe is incompatible with a scientific worldview, since they realize that abandoning methodological naturalism puts them in bed with the religious crazies. But for whatever reason they are reluctant to call themselves atheists, so they are forced to invent the Slacker God to whom they can pledge allegiance and thus retain their religious credentials.
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Being a new atheist means not saying you’re sorry

The main complaint against new atheists made by accommodationists is not with what they say but with how they say it, their supposedly hostile ‘tone’. They are accused of being rude, uncivil, arrogant, extreme, militant, shrill, strident, etc. but it is important to note that they are rarely accused of being wrong. This is undoubtedly because evidence and logic is on the side of those who claim that there is no god and that to believe in one is incompatible with a scientific worldview. Believers in god have to go through all manner of tortuous apologetics to argue in favor of even a Slacker God, let alone the super-powered miracle worker believed in by most religious people.
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Hail the Goddess Shirley!

During the Labor Day weekend, I spent a good portion of it going through all the comics on the Jesus and Mo website. For those not familiar with this strip, the premise is that Jesus and Mohammed are roommates somewhere in the United Kingdom who spend a lot of time at the neighborhood pub being challenged about religion by an atheist barmaid. Moses is a mutual friend of Jesus and Mo who does not live with them but drops by for periodic visits.

The comic strip is a remarkable blend of philosophy, theology, and humor that appears twice weekly and if you start from the very first strip in November 2005 and go through to the present, you get a good introduction to many of the issues concerning religion and atheism that this blog has been addressing, except that the strip says things more concisely and is funnier. It is well worth your while to read all the strips.

It is also very insightful. This strip from 2008 made me suddenly realize that we new atheist scientists have been going about things all wrong in our attempts to show that being an atheist makes the most sense intellectually.

The trouble with scientists is that when we are asked a question to which we don’t know the answer yet, we say we don’t know the answer yet. This is our usual reply when religious people ask, “What existed before the Big Bang? What caused the universe to come into being? How can matter arise out of nothing? How did the laws of science come into being? How was the first life form created?”

Religious people seize on these frank admissions of ignorance as if they are a fatal weakness of science or of atheism and their theologians triumphantly claim that religion does provide answers to all these questions and is thus superior to science, since this shows that religion has ‘ways of knowing’ that are superior to science.

But what are their answers really? When you come right down to it, what religions do to get ‘answers’ is simply make stuff up. They have no evidence or proof for their answers or even decent arguments that are not circular and self-serving. But once you invent an imaginary entity to which you can assign any powers you like, you can give facile answers to any question.

Here are some examples:

Q: Who created the universe and matter and the laws of science? A: God.
Q: How did he do all that? A: He is omnipotent so he can do anything.
Q: Why does he allow evil and suffering? A: Because he loves us.
Q: How does that make any sense? A: He has a cunning plan.
Q: What is the plan? A: It is a secret.
Q: Why? A: We are not ready to understand it.
Q: When will it be revealed? A: When we are ready to understand it.
Q: Why don’t we see any evidence of god? A: He carefully hides the evidence from us.
Q: Why? A: Because he has a cunning plan.
Q: What is the plan? A: It is a secret.

And so on, ad infinitum. You could easily write a computer program to provide these kinds of answers.

Scientists should take a cue from the theologians so that whenever we are confronted with the kinds of questions that religious people love to ask, like “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is the purpose of beauty?” instead of answering honestly, we should simply make stuff up too.

This was the genius of Bobby Henderson. Rather than debating the existence of god, he simply made up a new deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster and challenged traditional religions to explain why theirs is more credible than his. This, of course, they cannot do. So the Flying Spaghetti Monster now proudly stands as an equal in the pantheon with Amun, Zeus, Odin, Krishna, Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Zoroaster, and others. To get a sense of how many gods there have been in the history of the universe, the website Machines Like Us has compiled an alphabetized list, though the FSM is inexplicably not included.

So taking my cue from Jesus and Mo (and Bobby), here are some sample answers that I will give in the future to some popular questions:

Q: What existed before the Big Bang? A: Shirley MacLaine, in the very first of all her previous lives.
Q: What caused the universe to come into being? A: Shirley sneezed, and this was the Big Bang.
Q: Where did all the matter come from? A: Shirley baked it in her oven.
Q: Who created the laws of nature? A: Shirley again. That amazing woman can do anything!
Q: By what mechanism did the first life form come into being? A: Shirley gave birth to it.
Q: What is the meaning of life? A: To propagate Shirley’s genes.
Q: What is the purpose of beauty? A: To give pleasure to Shirley. She likes pretty things.

Actually these answers are even better than the ones provided by standard theology because they involve no secret cunning plans. Shirley tells her followers everything.

Truly Shirley is the greatest of all gods.

POST SCRIPT: Happy Birthday, Baxter!

The wonder dog is four years old today.

BaxSep09.jpg

My colonoscopy saga-4: Some final thoughts

(See part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

What is interesting about my experience is that even physicians whom I know personally and to whom I have told this story are surprised that whether I am charged for a colonoscopy depends on whether any polyps are found.

I also spoke about my experience at a health care panel a couple of years ago. Another panelist, a professor at another university, said that he thought that it was perfectly reasonable for us to treat health care like any other commodity and that consumers should shop around for the best deal. I responded that this was absurd. Health care is not a commodity to be compared like buying detergent. People often confront the health system in situations where they are deeply troubled or their plight is urgent or where they have few choices.
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My colonoscopy saga-3: More discussions on the word ‘routine’

(See part 1 and part 2.)

By now I am fed up with all this back and forth and decide that I will schedule the colonoscopy anyway and deal with being charged afterwards. I call the doctor’s billing office again to get the final ok and learn something new. They say that the colonoscopy is considered ‘routine’ and thus free not only if there were no prior indications of cancer but also only if the doctor finds absolutely nothing. If the doctor finds even a single benign polyp (which is not uncommon), then it ceases to be routine (and free) and I have to pay the full amount, which is about $1,500. The insurance company had not told me this piece of interesting news nor is it spelled out in their policy. So whether I pay nothing or whether I pay about $1,500 depends not on the procedure itself but on what they find during the procedure! In other words, I have no idea going in what it is going to cost me coming out.
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My colonoscopy saga-2: When ‘routine’ does not mean what you think it means

In my first post in this four-part series, I pointed out that the choice of doctors and hospitals is very limited in the US. But as I continue to look further into my ‘free’ colonoscopy I discover more pitfalls.

I know that insurance companies try to find ways to avoid paying so I analyze my policy carefully and call the insurance company and ask what the word ‘routine’ means, since only those kinds of colonoscopies are free. I am told that the colonoscopy is considered routine if it is done as part of a regular check-up and not because of any symptoms that might suggest that I may actually have colon cancer.

This strikes me as bizarre, that the procedure is free only if there are no indications at all that I have any problem. The slightest hint of a symptom and bang, I am on the hook for well over a thousand dollars, the cost of the procedure.
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My colonoscopy saga-1: So where is this freedom of choice I hear so much about?

(For previous posts on the issue of health care, see here.)

In anticipation of Obama’s speech on health care this week and as a coda to my long series on health care, in a four-part series I am going to write about a recent experience I had with the bureaucracy of the health care system in the US, not for any serious illness, but to get a ‘routine’ colonoscopy.

I recount my story in detail not because it is tragic (it isn’t) but to show how even seemingly simple things are made enormously complicated because of the private profit-seeking system that we have. The absurdity of it is that what I went through is so common in the US that people think that it is the only way to do things, unaware that in other developed countries, people do not have to go through this nonsense.
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It’s smiting time!

(Since it’s the Labor Day holiday, I am reposting something from July 16, 2008, updated and edited.)

The last time we encountered Christian evangelist Ray Comfort he was, along with his trusty sidekick the Boy Wonder Kirk Cameron, arguing that the exquisite design of the banana was absolute proof of the existence of god. The banana, Comfort pointed out, was “the atheist’s nightmare.” Why? See for yourself.


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