In previous posts, I wrote about how to talk to the devout concerned believer and the devout offended believer when you tell people you are an atheist.

Today, I will address the religious fundamentalist intellectual: These people are the most fun to deal with because there is usually no rancor or personal element involved in the disagreements. These are people who have essentially constructed an alternate reality. They believe that the Bible is literally true, that Noah’s flood and ark are historical events, that humans lived alongside dinosaurs, that the Earth and the universe is less than 10,000 years old, and so on. They have satisfied themselves that what they believe can be substantiated and will try to convince you of it. They are usually not offended by you being an atheist but are convinced that you are mistaken. If you are lucky enough to engage such people in conversation and have the time, you should probe their beliefs and why they believe them and you will witness the unfolding of a fascinating and complex set of hypotheses that are invoked to explain why their beliefs are so out of step with the results of mainstream science.
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In the previous post, I discussed how to deal with the concerned devout believer. Today I deal with a more difficult case.

The offended devout believer: Like the concerned believer, this reaction will come from someone who is devoutly and unquestioningly religious. But their reaction will be to take strong offense at the idea that you have rejected beliefs that they hold dear. Some of them will be people who are close to you. Parents often fall into this category since they are the ones who taught you their religious beliefs and your rejection of the beliefs will be interpreted also as a rejection of them.
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One of the consequences of the outspokenness of the new atheists is that it enables people who are quasi-atheists to become more frank about their doubts about religion. Unlike closet atheists who are people who keep quiet about their atheism, ‘quasi-atheists’ are those people who would not call themselves atheists but are already tugging at the some of the beliefs that hold together the fragile structure of belief and are thus close to bringing down the whole house of cards. Such people tend to say they are agnostics and not identify any specific religious group and instead hold on to some unspecified notion of spirituality.

Quasi-atheists’ religious beliefs are just hanging on by a thread. Most thoughtful people have serious doubts about the existence of god and the afterlife. How could they not since everyday experience provides no support at all for such beliefs? But given the climate of official piety, most people will just keep their doubts to themselves to avoid the attention that expressing views that are different from the mainstream brings.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In recent posts, I have been highlighting the absurdities of religions like Mormonism and Scientology. There is no end to such religious weirdness. There is in India right now a person who calls himself a God-man who has millions of devout and devoted followers, manyy rich and powerful, who visit his ashram and give him money. His name is Sai Baba and he is a household name in the Indian sub-continent. I personally know people who believe his claims that he is an incarnation of god and have tried to persuade me to believe in him too, although there are many serious allegations that he is a pedophile and using magic tricks to create the illusion of having godly powers. See this video of him getting caught using a trick.

People who value rationality and logic and scientific thinking can dismiss all these religions, old and new, as the products of fraud, excessive credulousness, superstition, and wishful thinking, without a shred of credible empirical evidence in support of them. But people who belong to one of these religions have a tougher time explaining why their own religion is more credible than the others. For an example of this, here’s what Jacob Weisberg wrote in Slate magazine during the last election when Mitt Romney (a Mormon) was still a candidate, trying to justify why he would not vote for a Mormon or Scientologist for president, while Jews and Christians were just fine with him:

One may object that all religious beliefs are irrational—what’s the difference between Smith’s “seer stone” and the virgin birth or the parting of the Red Sea? But Mormonism is different because it is based on such a transparent and recent fraud. It’s Scientology plus 125 years. Perhaps Christianity and Judaism are merely more venerable and poetic versions of the same. But a few eons makes a big difference. The world’s greater religions have had time to splinter, moderate, and turn their myths into metaphor.

In other words, Weisberg says that yes they may all be frauds, but at least the old religions (which conveniently includes his own) have had time to create elaborate justifications for their frauds. Weisberg, though hypocritical and self-serving, is actually right. The only reason that traditional religions are not subject to the same kind of scrutiny that new religions face is because they have long had an army of propagandists (who go by the label of theologians) whose job is to create vague rationalizations that believers can grab onto to convince themselves that what they believe is not utterly absurd. Theology should be defined as the discipline that makes absurd religious beliefs acceptable to people who want or need to believe.

The sophisticated theologians and the average Friday or Saturday or Sunday worshipper have almost nothing in common in terms of beliefs, though they may use a common vocabulary and holy book. Sophisticated theologians think that the beliefs of ordinary people are laughable but they don’t say so openly. Their rationalizations are aimed at persuading sophisticated believers. The belief of these people then reassures the ‘common’ believers that their religion must be believable since all these sophisticated people subscribe to it.

It is quite conceivable that in the future, once they have had sufficient time to get their act together, we will see sophisticated Scientology apologists defend their religion in the high manner of Christian apologists like Karen Armstrong, H. E. Baber, and John Haught (more on him in a future post) arguing that there are ‘deep truths’ buried in the religion that we silly atheists with our shallow preoccupations with trivial things like evidence and truth, and our childish insistence that things make logical sense, simply cannot appreciate.

Some droll commenters over at Why Evolution is True provide examples of the kinds of verbiage we might see in the future from Scientology apologists, once they get the hang of how theologians in the older religions operate.

The problem is that militant scientology-haters are ignorant of sophisticated sciento-theology. Real scientology is like poetry–it transcends the question of whether Xenu exists. Fundamentalist a-xenuists are just rehashing the long debunked dogma of logical positivism. But if they read some Quine and got more up to speed on their philosophy they’d see the error of their ways. It’s entirely possible for an individual to believe in both Xenu and the science of aerodynamics, so clearly there is no conflict between science and Scientology. (Commenter Wes)
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All Scientologists understand that Xenu is in fact a symbolic metaphor for the ground of being in which we all seek meaning. Thetans are sophisticated representations of our own inner journey to understanding, and limn the boundaries of our inner/outer conflict. (Commenter Tulse)

Of course, ordinary believers will find such things preposterous because they want magical thinking. Sophisticated theological language is always aimed at the intelligentsia, to persuade them to stay on board and give the religion credibility in the eyes of the masses. As George Orwell said in his Notes on Nationalism (1945) albeit in a different context: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

POST SCRIPT: Scientology exposed

Scientologists are sensitive to questioning about their beliefs, perhaps because of a realization of how ridiculous it sounds and also because having that knowledge freely available lowers its sale price. Recently the spokesperson for Scientology Tommy Davis walked out of an interview with ABC News’s Martin Bashir when he was asked about the Xenu stuff. He later tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent the broadcast of the interview. Watch.

Commenter Eric pointed out an expose of Scientology by the St. Petersburg Times that revealed the take-no-prisoners attitude that the church uses against defectors and those that accuse it of abusive practices.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

If the rise of Mormonism in recent times is surprising, Scientology is even more so, since it came into being in just the last fifty years. I must emphasize again that the belief structure of Scientology is no more bizarre than that of Christianity or Islam or Mormonism or any other religion. What is surprising that it, like Mormonism, came into being at a time when people had easy access to the story of its founder, stories that had enough suspicious elements that should have made any reasonable person wary as to his bona fides.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I sometimes hear the argument that Judaism must be true since so many people would not have been fooled by a scam such as a priest, on instructions from his king, creating their texts and claiming that they were of divine origin. I hear that kind of argument from Christians too who say that Jesus’s disciples would not have believed and propagated the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, an incredible story, unless it had really happened and they had seen it for themselves.

Those who think that their own religion must be true because it is highly unlikely that so many people could be gullible enough to be fooled by a false prophet’s claims should bear in mind how other religions began because each one has a similar incredible origin and they can’t all be true. So we have direct evidence that large numbers of people can be fooled in precisely this way.

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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In the manner of TV soap-opera introductions, we ended yesterday with my talking with three Jesus people, a middle-aged woman, a middle-aged man, and a younger man, who had just made the astounding claim that if god did something, anything, (like the mass murder by drowning of infants) it could not be evil by definition, even if that same act would be universally condemned if done by a human.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Continuing from yesterday’s post, in trying to convince me of the existence of the afterlife, the woman who stopped me on the street outside my office suddenly brought up Hitler. Religious people love Hitler because they think he is a winning argument for them. They argue that he was an unbeliever and he did evil things hence unbelief leads to evil. Even if the two premises are true, the conclusion does not logically follow. But even the first premise is false since Hitler was born a Catholic, never renounced it, and even spoke many times in favor of god. In a speech delivered just a year before his death, Hitler says, “I may not be a light of the church, a pulpiteer, but deep down I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence.”
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Last Wednesday, we had on our campus at Case Western Reserve University the promised free distribution of Ray Comfort’s printing of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, with an introduction by him containing his pathetic attempts at combating evolution.

The distribution seemed as if it was being done by community people and not by our own students. I did not get a copy myself but a number of people were gathered at the intersection just outside my office handing out religious tracts. I was stopped by a middle-aged woman who gave me a pamphlet and asked me if I believed in god. I said no. She asked me why not and I said that there was no reason to believe in god.

I asked her why she believed in god and she said that god spoke to her. I said, Really? You actually hear voices in your head? Yes, she said. I asked, What language does this voice speak and in what accent? She said English and added that god would speak to me in my own language and in my own accent. I said that I never heard such voices and that was why I did not believe but since she spoke to god, I asked her to ask god to tell her the serial number of the dollar bill in my wallet to convince me that the voice she heard really was god. She looked pained. That would be mocking god, she said. Why, I asked? It just would and she would not do that. I decided not to press her further on this point.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In the previous post, I discussed the book The Creation of the Universe (2000) distributed under the name of Harun Yahya, which is the pseudonym of Adnan Oktar, a Muslim creationist based in Turkey. He has now put out an even more expensive 800-page glossy publication called Atlas of Creation (2006) that gives the creationist arguments against evolution. He has not deigned to send me a copy of it as yet, maybe because I am not on lists of biologist academics or I have dropped down in the rankings of worthy recipients. Darn!

They say politics make for strange bedfellows but so, apparently, does religion. Perhaps no group in America is as hostile to Islam as the evangelical/fundamentalist Christians. But this group has also demonstrated that when it comes to advancing their cause, they are willing to forge alliances with almost anyone. We have seen them cavorting with right-wing Israeli politicians in supporting their appallingly repressive policies towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories because they think such policies advance the day of the glorious Rapture. Of course, on that day Jews and all the other infidels will be slaughtered in a bloody rampage by the forces of Melvin. Why would Melvin commit such mass murder? Because he loves us.

Now, adopting the old dictum of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, American Christians are also joining up with Oktar/Yahya to spread their anti-evolution message worldwide. Scholars have found that Muslim creationists are importing creationist ideas from America to foster their own anti-science extremism in the Islamic world

What is disturbing is that Muslim creationists are not only spreading anti-evolution thinking, but are using it to buttress a virulent form of Islamic fundamentalism that sees the ‘Christian’ west as an enemy. This unholy alliance of supposedly holy groups is going to breed even more extremism.

Islamic creationists differ from Christian creationists in that they are not committed to a young Earth idea. They are willing to accept that the Earth has existed for billions of years. Their range of anti-science views go from demanding that all living species were special creations of god to one in which all species except humans have evolved. But they all denounce the theory of evolution by natural selection as not only wrong but as an idea that has had evil consequences.

As I said in the previous post, Oktar/Yahya’s book The Creation of the Universe (2000) deals mostly with the origins of the physical universe but he has an appendix titled The Evolution Deceit that rehashes the old, familiar, and discredited creationist arguments against evolution.

He says that there must be a creator since all the things that we see could not have occurred by ‘coincidence’ (which is the word he uses for chance), thus ignoring the fact that natural selection is anything but chance but is a highly directed process. He calculates the odds that the base sequences in amino acids and proteins could have occurred by pure chance and writes out the result with a huge number of zeros.

He then reproduces the same bizarre argument about hybrids as Christian creationists, saying that evolution requires a “a bird popped all of a sudden out of a reptile egg” and “the existence of half-bird/half-reptile or half-fish/half-reptile freaks”. Since none of these have been found, evolution must be false (p. 180). He also has the same mistaken idea that a ‘transitional’ form means something less than perfect, saying “Every living species appears instantaneously and in its current form, perfect and complete, in the fossil record.” (p. 184)

Oktar/Yahya has had a love-hate relationship with the intelligent design creationism movement. In his 2000 book, he speaks favorably about ID because they are against evolution. But in a more recent press release, he denounced intelligent design as “another of Satan’s distractions”, since they did not explicitly acknowledge that Allah is the creator of all things but instead spoke vaguely of a ‘designer’ or some kind of ‘force’. Oktar/Yahya has no patience for such wishy-washy euphemisms.

However, ever since the 2005 Dover, PA trial shattered the ID façade that theirs was not a religious theory, intelligent design creationists have been more open about the fact that their secretive designer is none other than (drum roll, please) Melvin. So now Oktar/Yahya seems to be willing to join up with them again.

The Discovery Institute, backers of the intelligent design version of creationism, have seemingly joined forces with Oktar/Yahya, thus finally shedding all pretenses that what they were advocating was a purely scientific idea.

So the Christian and Muslim creationists are joining forces against evolution. But it is only a matter of time before these two groups turn against each other because, after all, Islam and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible belief systems. They each think their own god is the true one and their own book is the one true revelation. They cannot both be right. Allah and Melvin cannot co-exist.

POST SCRIPT: Richard Dawkins on Harun Yahya

Dawkins gives a talk to the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain where he exposes the shallowness of Oktar/Yahya’s book against evolution. Dawkins speaks for 16 minutes and then takes questions from the audience.

Unfortunately, the video does not show some of the images Dawkins projects on the screen that illustrate the ludicrousness of Oktar/Yahya’s claims, but you can see a few of them here.