Jennifer Fulwiler is an ex-atheist, she says, and is now a Catholic. With her deep knowledge of both Catholicism and atheism, she is writing a book about her conversion experience and has now posted a short guide to understanding atheists for her Catholic fellows. Oh, did I say deep knowledge? My error, I meant to say “bubble-headed delusions”.

She lists five misconceptions Catholics have about atheists, and tries to explain how atheists really think. She gets one right.

1. First she argues against the idea that atheists feel like they’re missing something in their life, which is one of the more common faith-based claims. I’ve lost track of the number of times some sincere believer has asked me if I wouldn’t feel better if I brought Jesus into my life. Fulwiler gets this partly right, in that she recognizes this is a misconception, but then she goes on to say this:

   …looking back, I actually did have a pervasive sense of incompleteness, but I simply didn’t know how to recognize it. I do believe that each of us has a God-shaped hole in our hearts, that only God alone can heal.

   Nope. I’m not incomplete. But if I turned Catholic, I would be—I’d have lost my sanity.

2. She gets the second one right when she explains that arguments laced with Bible quotes are completely unpersuasive.

   …most atheists think that large parts of the Bible simply aren’t true, and many see the entire thing as a work of fiction.

   Her only failing here is understatement.

3. She thinks it is a misconception to believe that atheists are aware of Catholic doctrine. No, we’re actually fairly familiar with the basic concepts, although we might be fuzzy on the specific details of their magic spells and incantations. I think a better case could be made that most Catholics are unaware of Catholic doctrine, or at least, that they ignore a lot of it. American Catholics and contraception, anyone?

   And then she gets really silly.

   I find that when misconceptions like this are cleared up, my atheist friends are pleasantly surprised at how fair and reasonable Catholic doctrine is.

   Bwahahahahahaahaha! No, not at all. Original sin, the trinity, blood sacrifice, transubstantiation, souls, Space Disneyland after you die, etc., etc., etc. Catholicism (and Christianity, heck, religion in general) is crazy town.

4. She thinks it’s a fallacy to try and simply reason with atheists — you also need to have an emotional appeal. And I think that is partly right, that there is more to an argument than cold-blooded reasoning. But while she pays lip service to reason and evidence, she really doesn’t understand how fundamental that is to getting through to us — see #3 above.

   …at some point you have to have an openness in your heart as well as your mind. This is why we should always focus more on showing Christ to our atheist friends rather than just offering data about him.

   No Catholic has ever offered me data about Jesus, nor have they shown him to me. All the fervent heartfelt belief in the world wrapped around an empty data set is not going to convince an atheist.

5. Guess what? She thinks we’re not immune to the power of prayer, and suggests that a good Catholic response to an atheist is “doing nothing but praying for him”.

   Hey, maybe she really is an atheist mole! I can think of no better advice to give the religious than that they should shut up, crawl into a closet, and beg and plead their magic man in the sky and all of his angels and all of his saints to persuade us of the power of faith. She’s completely wrong — prayers will do nothing at all — but I totally approve of her proposal to send all the god-praisers off on a futile snipe hunt.

Scarcely do I put up a post arguing with Jerry Coyne, when I notice he has put up another with an example of evidence for a god from John Farrell. And lo, I did look, and verily, I did become depressed at how stupid and pathetic it was.

An archeologist working in Israel, discovers an ossuary from the NT era: the inscription on the stone in Aramaic reads: “Twice dead under Pilatus; Twice born of Yeshua in sure hope of resurrection.” And the name corresponds to what in Greek would be Lazarus.

There are bones, so presumably with luck there may be some DNA that could be sequenced, but my main idea is that you have a clear physical candidate for an actual person written about in the Gospel of John. (There are some scholars who have argued that the author of the Gospel of John was Lazarus.)

Now, this isn’t evidence for “God” in his omnipotent sense, which I know is more what Jerry Coyne and PZ were debating. But, given most scholars believe the four gospels were composed no sooner than 70AD, and for that reason less likely to be reliable accounts, you now have evidence from decades before of a key character in one of the Gospels. And more: an inscription that, whatever we might think, clearly indicates whoever buried him knew of the miraculous story of his raising from the dead and believed it.

Seriously? This is the best that Farrell can do? Confirmation that people really believe in myths and fairy tales is not evidence of a deity. Nor is the existence of people named Jesus or Lazarus in the first century AD a point of contention or dazzling supporting evidence for a magic man in the sky.

With that level of empirical support, we could point to even older inscriptions that reference Jupiter Optimus Maximus and conclude that Jupiter actually was the bestest and greatest god ever, and therefore we all ought to worship him.

Farrell seems to realize his invention is rather feeble, so he adds another level of nonsense to it.

What if the family members from the same ossuary showed a related genome (as expected for his brothers, sister, parents) except that cancer-causing mutations in all of them were…found to be missing from his genome. Or even more startling, found to be ‘corrected.’

How do we know they’re all family members? Aside from the shared ossuary, all we’d have is genetic evidence…and here he’s saying there is genetic evidence that they are not related. I think if we went poking around in various families nowadays we might discover a few surprising insertions into the family gene pool, and I doubt that anyone’s first assumption would be that a Holy Ghost had been dicking around with Great Aunt Mary, or that an angel must have tweaked Cousin George’s genome when his mother wasn’t looking.

And what the heck is the difference between a particular allele being “missing” and being “corrected”? Does this guy even have a clue about what he’s talking about?

Anyway, here’s the general conflict: material evidence will have material explanations. Any natural explanation will be preferable to a supernatural explanation that drags in an all-powerful invisible boogey man in order to explain the arrangement of nucleotides in one set of old bones.

Uh-oh. Jerry Coyne is calling me out and reopening our old argument about whether there could be evidence supporting a god. I said no, for a number of reasons, but I haven’t convinced Coyne.

The statements by P.Z. and Zara seem to me more akin to prejudices than to fully reasoned positions. They are also, of course, bad for atheists, since they make us look close-minded, but I would never argue that we should hide what we really think because it makes it harder to persuade our opponents. On the positive side, a discussion like this one is really good for sharpening the mind.

He’s also gone to the Big Guy in the UK, Anthony Grayling, to get some allies; Unfortunately for him, Grayling is siding more closely with me than him. And now Ophelia Benson also sides with those who say gods are incoherent. This is not going well for him.

So I’ve got to pile on.

Religion has had a couple of millennia to make a case for its fundamental concepts: the existence of the supernatural, the existence of deities, the effectiveness of priestly intermediaries, etc. It has failed. It does not provide support in the form of evidence or logical consistency; it also fails to show any pragmatic utility. Religion never does what it claims to do. At what point do we learn from experience and simply reject the whole worthless mess out of hand? The abstract possibility that the god-wallopers will finally come up with a tiny scrap of evidence for their outrageous beliefs in the coming eon is not enough to win it credibility as a reasonable contender, either; you might just as well speculate that archaeologists could unearth artifacts from Middle Earth, or astronomers observing a galaxy far, far away will discover The Force. There is no cause to expect fictions and fantasies to manifest themselves as actual realities.

Religion plays Calvinball. There are no rules except what they make up as they go. You might think that maybe you ought to concede that they could get a score of 13 and beat your 12…but they are already convinced that their Q trumps your puny pair of digits. And if they get a score of Oatmeal-Sofa, they’ll announce victory. Heck, if they somehow end up in the realm of numbers with you and get a 7, they’ll declare that they win because they’ve got a Mersenne prime and we don’t. Or because it’s like a golf score. The mistake is to play the game in the expectation that the other side has the same respect for evidence that we do, or that evidence even matters.

Here’s an example. This is part of a debate between Peter Atkins and William Lane Craig. Craig is an exceptionally glib debater, and he’s also an evangelical Christian who supposedly defends a very specific doctrine, that his god turned into a human who lived on Earth 2000 years ago, and that belief in his magical powers is your ticket to a Disneyland for dead people in the sky. I’d like to see some evidence for that, but no…his tactic here is to demand proof of bizarre assertions from science, answering questions that his religion can’t.

What’s amazing here is that Christians are actually impressed with Craig’s millimeter-deep, reason-free handwaving. Ha ha, you scientific smartie-pants, you can’t use science to prove you’re not a simulation on a computer of a brain in a vat that was created five minutes ago with false memories of your life, so therefore, Jesus. Never mind that science doesn’t deal in proofs. Never mind that Craig’s religion can’t prove it either, except by blind obdurate asseveration. Never mind that those are all non-questions, non-issues, irrelevant sophomoric wanking. Never mind, it’s Calvinball! The score is now Paisley over Feldspar, we win!

In science, we’re used to incremental progress and revision of our ideas. Evidence is our currency, it’s how we progress and it’s what gets results. It is a category error, however, to think that the way to address free-floating word salad and flaming nonsense is to take the scalpel of reason and empiricism and slice into it, looking for definable edges. No, what you do is look over the snot-ball of self-referential piffle, note that it has no tenable connection to reality, and drop-kick it into the rec room, where the kids can play with it, but no one should ever take it seriously.

Just make sure the kids wash their hands afterwards. That thing is slimy.

On second thought, just dump it in the trash. The kids would rather play video games, instead.