Gospel Disproof #51: No good arguments for God

I’m going to piggyback off an excellent post by The Uncredible Hallq on the topic of whether there are any good arguments for God. You often hear Christian apologists protest that, when you disprove Apologetic Argument X, you still have not disproved the existence of God, because you haven’t addressed Apologetic Argument Y (and when you address Y, then they’ll claim you need to address Z, etc. etc.). All the apologist has to do is keep drawing one more line in the sand, indefinitely, in order to claim that the skeptic has failed to cross the right one.

Despite this ingenious exercise in goalpost-moving, though, the nature of the arguments themselves is enough to establish the fact that there are no good (i.e. valid and reliable) arguments for the existence of a deity like the Christian God.

[Read more…]

White House pulls plug on popular petition (or does it?)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center reports a disturbing but sadly unsurprising development in the struggle to recover our civil liberties.

At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House “We the People” website. About 22,500 of the 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the Administration were obtained when the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition. The site also went down for “maintenance” following an article in Wired that sought support for the campaign.

If you follow the link to the Wired article, you can read about the circumstances which led to the petition, which was basically asking the White House to intervene to get the TSA to comply with the law.

UPDATE: Commenter Eidolon tracked down a post from the petition’s author stating that the petition was not pulled early, but simply expired. He speculates that people were assuming that the signing period would extend through midnight, but instead it expired in the middle of the day, at roughly the same time as when he first posted it. That’s not unusual, given how computers keep track of time periods, and it’s understandable that this could create the misperception of a prematurely-terminated petition. He also notes that the petition was given an extra day to compensate for the outage.

Miracles and the power of suggestion

According to a story in the New York Times, the placebo effect isn’t just limited to a drug’s expected benefits. People can and do suffer negative side effects as a result of believing they are taking real drugs. It’s called the “nocebo” effect.

In a curious study, a team of Italian gastroenterologists asked people with and without diagnosed lactose intolerance to take lactose for an experiment on its effects on bowel symptoms. But in reality the participants received glucose, which does not harm the gut. Nonetheless, 44 percent of people with known lactose intolerance and 26 percent of those without lactose intolerance complained of gastrointestinal symptoms.

In one remarkable case, a participant in an antidepressant drug trial was given placebo tablets — and then swallowed 26 of them in a suicide attempt. Even though the tablets were harmless, the participant’s blood pressure dropped perilously low.

Is it any wonder that people have reported similarly astonishing effects produced from things like God, or demons? Influencing the imagination can and does produce measurable physical effects on the body, even in the absence of the things that are supposed to be causing them.

Something to think about the next time you’re flipping through the channels and find some shiny clean evangelist “healing” people.

The art of prophecy

Here’s a challenge for you. Consider these six words “He washes his clothes in wine.” Given that this statement appears in Genesis 49:11, can you turn it into a prediction that Messiah will be born of a virgin? Justin Martyr can, as we see this week at Evangelical Realism.

 

Well duh

From the That Answers That Department: I was coming back from the store and flipping the dial on my radio, and came across this (paraphrased):

… that ETI could actually be responsible for the destruction of all life on this planet. Now think about that. Aliens. Who would create them? (*chortle*)An alien god?

Isn’t this just another case of science run amuck?

Silly old me. I forgot: our God is the only God anywhere. That means that they—the aliens—can’t have a God of their own. And if they haven’t got a God, then there’s nobody to create them. Therefore, they do not exist.

More state-sponsored malware discovered.

Having problems with your computer? You may have a virus paid for by taxpayer dollars.

A newly uncovered espionage tool, apparently designed by the same people behind the state-sponsored Flame malware that infiltrated machines in Iran, has been found infecting systems in other countries in the Middle East, according to researchers.

The malware, which steals system information but also has a mysterious payload that could be destructive against critical infrastructure, has been found infecting at least 2,500 machines, most of them in Lebanon, according to Russia-based security firm Kaspersky Lab, which discovered the malware in June and published an extensive analysis of it on Thursday.

The spyware, dubbed Gauss after a name found in one of its main files, also has a module that targets bank accounts in order to capture login credentials. The malware targets accounts at several banks in Lebanon, including the Bank of Beirut, EBLF, BlomBank, ByblosBank, FransaBank and Credit Libanais. It also targets customers of Citibank and PayPal.

via Wired.com.

Thank goodness we can rely on Russian heroes to defend us from the predations of democracies like the US and Israel.

Dawkins and Mormons (follow-up)

Looking over the comments from yesterday’s post, it seems that some people understood my point about Dawkins’ Mormon quote, and others didn’t. It’s an important point, though, so I want to follow up and try to make it clear for everyone.

The problem I see is not that Dr. Dawkins is impugning the sanity of people who would seriously consider voting for Mitt Romney. That’s fine, that’s fair game. Romney is a candidate for the US presidency, and it’s perfectly reasonable to discuss his expected behavior as president if he were elected. The problem is that the quote, as originally phrased, does not address Mitt Romney’s qualifications, it addresses the qualifications of “a Mormon.” Not any specific Mormon, but just “a Mormon”—and thus, by implication, any Mormon.

That may seem like a quibble, but it isn’t. There’s a hugely significant difference between saying you’d be crazy to vote for Mitt Romney because he makes important decisions based on irrational beliefs, on the one hand, versus saying you’d be crazy to vote for “a Mormon,” on the other. One is a specific assessment of a specific individual based on observed patterns in his behavior, and the other is prejudice against an entire class of people, based on religious affiliation, regardless of individual qualifications for the position. The former is fair game; the latter is prejudice based on religious affiliation.

[Read more…]

Well darn.

PZ Myers has a post up that has my feelings a bit mixed. It’s a quote attributed to Richard Dawkins:

Yes, America STILL manages to reach Mars despite half the country preparing to elect a man who believes he’ll get a planet when he dies. It is all the more to the credit of the sane, rational half of America that it manages to achieve so much despite being positively held back by the other half, the half that believes the universe is 6,000 years old, the half that seriously contemplates voting for a Mormon.

I have tremendous respect for Dr. Dawkins, but I have to say, this is an incredibly bad quote, and I hope he didn’t really say it. As phrased, it is an appeal to religious bigotry, plain and simple. I think I know what it’s trying to say, and I definitely agree that (a) Mitt Romney would be a terrible choice for president and (b) the anti-science activism of fundamentalist right-wingers is a serious detriment to America’s ability to thrive and progress in a modern technological world. However, the suggestion that it would not be “sane” and “rational” to consider voting for a Mormon is just plain bigotry. Merely having a denominational affiliation does not dictate how qualified a candidate might or might not be to serve, nor does it even reliably indicate how strongly or weakly he or she upholds the tenets of the denomination. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made of Mr. Romney; we do not need to stoop to this.

I do not regard Dr. Dawkins as a religious bigot, and I believe that this quote, if genuine, is merely an unfortunate and ill-considered choice of words. But if someone said that it would not be sane and rational to vote for an atheist, I’d make the same protest. Candidates stand or fall on their own qualifications, and should not be arbitrarily dismissed based on religious affiliation. I hope that if this quote is legit, Dr. Dawkins retracts it or at least clarifies it.

4th Amendment protections officially moot

Wired magazine reports the depressing news that we now officially have fewer constitutional rights than we did under Bill Clinton.

The federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a decision reversing the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program.

In other words, the government can freely and secretly violate the Constitution, with absolutely zero accountability or oversight, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. They can watch everything we do, and we cannot watch what they do.

Violence and lack of belief

With the recent shootings at the movie theater and the Sikh temple, a lot of people are pointing fingers at unbelief, and saying that the reason we have so much violence today is because we’ve lost the faith that used to guide us, that sense of supernatural reward and punishment that helped us resist evil and do good.

You know, they might have something. I mean, there’s a pretty definite pattern here. Not just the two most recent gunmen, but any number of violent criminals before them, are men who have lost the simple faith they once had in Santa Claus, who “knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” I’m sure that if they had only held on to their original, childlike belief in an all-seeing Father Christmas, making a list and checking it twice, they’d have never done anything so terrible.

It just goes to prove that Santa actually exists, doesn’t it.