(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.
Once in a while I get private emails from readers of this blog who disagree with my atheistic stance. Recently I got one that said in its entirety:
Dear Sir, from your comments about the religious beliefs of scientists, I gather that you contend that, for the scientist, the greater the learning, the lesser the belief in God; and, conversely, the greater the belief in God, the lesser the knowledge of science. It never ceases to fascinate me, the adoring eyes of a child for the elderly, yet the grown up has little need for them, and, so, they confine them to a home and out of their way. By far, what the child has is greater than what the grown up has. Love never enters the equations of scientists, nor does faith; consequently, the eternal God is not in view of scientists, but only His temporal creation. Archeology has uncovered less than 1% of all the treasures of our past (just scratched the surface), yet, for many decades, archeologists, in their haughtiness, have spoken with authority against the Bible, as bulls from the chair. Many scientists today, and of the past, with their silver surfboard in hand, have yet to feel a wave flow by their ankles, as they have barely just stepped into the ocean. What the eye cannot see, and the ear cannot hear, and the mind cannot understand, the spirit (even of a child) can fathom.
This letter, in somewhat flowery language, illustrates some of the contradictory beliefs that religious people commonly express without them even realizing it.
For example, it says that a child’s understanding of the world is superior to that of the adult. It says that in order to perceive god, we need to be like children in our ignorance, and listen to the voices in our head, rather than the concrete senses of sight and sound. In other words, deeper knowledge and greater learning undermine faith. I actually agree with the last sentence but view it as a good thing.
It amazes me that people think that ignorance is a good thing. When people sing the praises of childlike faith, I don’t think they quite realize how insulting that is to their religion. It is saying that faith in god is on a par with faith in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, things that only a child would believe in. I agree with that last sentence too but am surprised that religious people advocate it as a virtue.
But the letter writer then promptly contradicts that position by implying that scientists know so little now and presumably that when we get to know more, evidence for god will emerge. So in order to perceive god should we be like children unburdened by knowledge or should we seek more knowledge? Religious people want to have it both ways, on the one hand saying that we see god only by faith and not by knowledge, and on the other hand that we are ignorant now and that more knowledge will provide the necessary evidence for what now must be accepted only on faith. What is interesting is that this contradiction never strikes them, providing another illustration of how religion undermines the ability to think rationally.
The contradictions go even deeper. After all, if god created us then he also created our unusually large brains and gave us the power to think and reason and use logic. As Hamlet says (Act II, Scene II), “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!” If so, then why would god not expect us to use the abilities he/she supposedly gave us to understand everything about the world, including religious beliefs? Why would he/she give us this extraordinary intellectual ability and then make it into a liability?
In the end, what religions want you to do simply boils down to this prescription: “You must believe in god. Anything that helps you believe is good. Anything that undermines belief is bad. Ignore any contradictions. Use your brain for everything except examining your religious beliefs to see if they make any sense.”
In the great title song from the film O Lucky Man, singer Alan Price describes the qualities that a lucky man possesses. One of them is not being tempted by promises of heaven or made fearful by threats of hell but he also adds that, “If knowledge hangs around your neck like pearls instead of chains, you are a lucky man.”
This phenomenon of religious people sacrificing knowledge and reasoning abilities in order to preserve beliefs for which there is no credible evidence whatsoever is sad, really. For religious people, knowledge is indeed like heavy chains, holding them back and burdening them because it contradicts their myths. Atheists, on the other hand, not being bound by dogma and religious texts, delight in discovering pearls of knowledge.
POST SCRIPT: Jesus and the dinosaurs
Many Christians are anxiously waiting for the promised second coming of Jesus when they will get their reward for being faithful believers. But what they don’t realize is that the first coming of Jesus was not at the time described in the Gospels in the Bible but actually occurred much earlier, during the dinosaur age. Eddie Izzard recovers this lost history.
So the second coming of Jesus has already occurred. Sorry, Christians, the show is over, there is nothing more to wait for.
Some readers may remember my post on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation where it is believed that during the communion service, the wafer and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus. I took that idea to its logical conclusion and argued that if true it could be used to clone god.
I also wrote about the huge ruckus that a college student in Florida caused when he did not immediately consume the communion wafer and instead tried to take it back with him to his seat. He got into a scuffle with a woman who wanted him to return it and the student was threatened with violence, comparisons were made to a hostage taking, and there were threats to break into his dorm room and rescue the wafer being held ‘hostage’ by him.
The university even sent in armed guards to be present at future services to prevent any more hostages being taken. The Catholic diocese also sent in a team of nuns as added protection for the wafers, though no mention was made as to whether they too were packing heat.
Well, it turns out that when the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper recently attended a memorial service in a Catholic church for a deceased dignitary, he may committed the same religious offense as the college student. Watch and see for yourself.
I can guess what happened. Non-Catholics are not supposed to receive communion in the Catholic Church. The prime minister is a Protestant and probably realized at the last minute, when he was in a line where everyone was about to be given the wafer by the priest, that he did not know what the proper protocol was to deal with it. Eating it may have been sacrilegious and refusing it or giving it back might have been seen as rude. As a non-Catholic he realized he was in danger of committing a religious faux pas and poor sap, like all politicians faced with a tricky decision, he decided to punt. He probably felt that the safe thing to do was to put it in his pocket and deal with it later, not realizing that what he did was worse than the other options. As one news report on what is being called Wafergate says:
[T]he handling of the host is no trivial matter. As a non-Catholic, the prime minister should probably have refused communion, and church officials should have been advised of this in advance. But once the communion wafer, considered the body of Jesus, was in the prime minister’s hand, it should have been consumed promptly or returned.
Of course, what he should have done when he was called on this was to admit that he had pocketed the wafer out of uncertainty about what to do and simply returned it. Even very religious people realize that their Byzantine rules are not understood by outsiders and would have forgiven him. But again, Harper’s political instincts to never admit a mistake kicked in and he denied pocketing it, deciding to brazen it out.
So he either still has the wafer or he has destroyed it in some way and removed the evidence. There is no word on whether the Mounties or an elite swat team of nuns are going to try and stage a rescue of the hostage wafer from the pockets of this infidel.
The were fears that the allegations that Harper pocketed the wafer may have caused some embarrassment for him when he later went to meet with the Pope.
If I were Harper’s advisor, I would have suggested that he give the Pope the pocketed wafer and say that he took it because he wanted to give the Pope a special gift, something with more meaning than a typical head of state gift like a painting or vase or an iPod. What could be more special to the Pope than getting a piece of the body of Christ?
POST SCRIPT: The real rulers
Government of Goldman-Sachs, by Goldman-Sachs, and for Goldman-Sachs.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
|
||||
There is a famous and funny old sketch called the Five Minute University in which comedian Don Novello acts in his character of Father Guido Sarducci.
As he says, when the students study theology at his university, all they will learn are the answers to the two questions “Where is god?” (Answer: God is everywhere) and “Why?” (Answer: Because he likes you). I am beginning to think that the answer to the first question is absolutely correct.
Take a look at this picture of a cut tree stump that is in a churchyard in Ireland. What do you see?
Nothing? Just a tree stump that someone has cut in an odd way? Oh ye of little faith! To the devout this looks like the Virgin Mary and they think its appearance is (what else?) a miracle. People are making pilgrimages to pray around it. Over 2,000 have signed a petition objecting to plans to uproot the stump, and want to convert it into a permanent shrine of some sort.
The thing that strikes me is that recently Jesus and Mary seem to be showing up all over the place, in slices of toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, womb ultrasounds, Marmite jar lid, Kit Kat bar, shower curtain, cheese curl, dental x-rays, mugs of hot chocolate, even on the backside of a dog or in bird droppings. Here are yet more sightings.
Such stories, apart from revealing religious people to be hopelessly credulous, also demonstrate how weak some people’s faith is, not how strong. It is only people who are really desperate for a sign to bolster their beliefs that will seize on such pathetic things as validating their faith. The woman who saw the Marmite Jesus ‘took comfort from the image’ saying, “I’m not particularly religious but I like to think it’s Jesus looking out for us.”
This kind of thing puts religious authorities in a quandary. On the one hand, they realize that if you have too many such sightings, religion begins to look more and more ridiculous. After all, if people start worshipping tree stumps, how can you distinguish so-called mainstream religion from more allegedly primitive religions, such as paganism. Some religions actually do involve tree-worship and the Christmas tree symbol itself likely began as one.
On the other hand, religious authorities cannot categorically debunk all of them as nonsense because their bread and butter depends on people believing that god can reveal himself to people on occasion even if it in this weird way. The problem for the church is that it wants to discourage freelancers and keep a monopoly on what qualifies as a revelation of god and what doesn’t as this is the source of their power and money. They tried to walk that fine line on this occasion too.
Local parish priest Fr Willie Russell said on radio station Limerick Live 95FM yesterday that people should not worship the tree. “There’s nothing there . . . it’s just a tree . . . you can’t worship a tree.”
A spokesman for the Limerick diocesan office said the “church’s response to phenomena of this type is one of great scepticism”.
“While we do not wish in any way to detract from devotion to Our Lady, we would also wish to avoid anything which might lead to superstition,” he said.
Fortunately for the spokesman, he was not asked what distinguishes this particular “superstition” from all the superstitions that the church expects people to believe, such as that the wafer and wine become transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus when the priest mumbles some words over it. Mary-in-a-tree-stump is nothing compared to that.
Fortunately for the spokesman, he could depend on the ‘respect for religion’ nonsense to deter ‘polite’ reporters from asking such obvious questions.
That Mitchell and Webb Look reports on another miraculous sighting.
All these Jesus and Mary sightings and the comment in the above clip that the melon message blew his tomato message out of the water gave me an idea for a new reality TV series, because what the nation really needs is another reality show. This one would consist of people bringing their candidates for an authentic god appearance and making the case for it. Then a panel of theologians would give their comments, and the audience votes for which artifact is an actual miracle of god and then worship the ultimate winner.
I think a good title for the show would be “American Idol”. I hope no one has used it already.
UPDATE: Commenter Chris sent me this compilation of a huge number of Jesus sightings. There seems to be an epidemic.
POST SCRIPT: You mean the Earth isn’t 6,000 years old?
Watch this statement by Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen (R).
What is amazing is that her statement that the Earth is 6,000 years old is said so casually during a discussion of environmental concerns over uranium mining, as if it was the most commonplace fact in the world and not at all something idiotic and controversial. These people live in their own bubble world.
For the last post in this series, I want to look at the way god has been characterized through history.
It is a popular belief, especially among Christians, that humans have been created in god’s image. Actually, it is the other way around. Humans create god to meet their needs, and as their needs change, then so does their image of god.
Robert Wright has published a new book called The Evolution of God (2009) that I look forward to reading that traces the origins of monotheistic religions. In an interview, he discusses the main ideas. Basically, he sees the Bible and other religious books originating as political documents meant to serve immediate political needs, which explains why god seems so moody, casually committing genocide one day and calling for love and forgiveness the next.
[Read more…]
Why is it that so many adults in the modern age, with full reasoning powers and all the knowledge that science and technology has made available to them, still cling to the superstitious religious beliefs of their childhood, so much so that they feel the need to even brainwash their own children? Why is it that for most adults, childish beliefs in god do not disappear in adulthood, along with their beliefs in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?
[Read more…]
Via Pharyngula, I came across this story about the appalling behavior of highly religious people.
It turns out that Orthodox Jews in Israel are upset at a local council in Jerusalem’s decision to open a municipal car park on Saturdays and have been protesting in the streets for weeks. Why? Because this would encourage people to drive on the Sabbath, and this is one of the gazillion things that you are forbidden to do if you are an observant Jew.
(I have written before about ‘Certified Sabbath Mode’ ovens and kosher telephones that provide loopholes to such laws for those who like to consider themselves Orthodox but don’t want to be inconvenienced by these weird rules. Presumably no rabbi has as yet come forward with a blueprint for how to make a kosher car but I bet they are working on it.)
[Read more…]
Today I want to look at why people believe in god, starting with its origins.
As to why religious beliefs arise in the first place, this is a fascinating and yet open question and any theories are at best speculative. The vast number of gods that have been independently invented in human history (see Machines Like Us for an exhaustive list) suggest that it is quite plausible that there is some propensity to create god beliefs that has nothing to do with the popular perception that religion arose to provide us with a moral code. As Robert Wright argues in his new book The Evolution of God (2009):
People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was not fundamentally about morality before the invention of agriculture. It was trying to figure out why bad things happen and increasing the frequency with which good things happen. Why do you sometimes get earthquakes, storms, disease and get slaughtered? But then sometimes you get nice weather, abundant game and you get to do the slaughtering. Those were the religious questions in the beginning.
It is possible that a small naturally occurring tendency to assign a causal agent to certain natural events provided a survival advantage that grew over time according to the Darwinian natural selection algorithm. For example, early humans who ascribed thunder and lightning to the anger of some unseen agent and hid in fear in their caves were more likely to survive than those who did not assign agency and wandered about freely in the storm. The natural selection algorithm worked on this advantage so that over the long period of evolutionary time, people have evolved a tendency to believe in causal agents for natural phenomena that make them more easily susceptible to religious-type explanations than to scientific ones, and this tendency would become ingrained and dominant.
It is similar to how we all seem to have a fear of snakes. It seems fairly well established that we have evolved to have an instinctive fear of snakes. Even baby chimpanzees have such a fear, suggesting that this fear developed fairly early in primate development, during the time when the common ancestors of chimpanzees and humans lived.
Once you are susceptible to assigning a mysterious invisible agency to natural phenomena, certain culture-based beliefs can take root. For example, it makes sense to postulate things like a life after death to overcome the fear of death and this, coupled with beliefs about an unseen agency, would lead quite naturally towards a belief in a god-like entity that rules the afterlife.
It is easier to understand why these beliefs, once originated, continue to be perpetuated. While childhood indoctrination by parents and priests and society at large is undoubtedly a major factor in perpetuating religious beliefs, the more interesting question is why children are so susceptible to this particular kind of brainwashing.
There seems to be a clear survival advantage for young children to believe unquestioningly what their parents and other adults tell them. Those children who unquestioningly heeded warnings not to touch fire or to eat poisonous plants or try and play with lions or wade into crocodile infested rivers were more likely to survive than those who rebelled and ignored the warnings of adults. So the propensity of children to believe authoritative adults could easily have evolved to become hardwired in the brain.
The combination of assigning agency to natural phenomena and believing adults makes it easy to understand how religion originated and is perpetuated and why children are so easily indoctrinated into religious beliefs, because they do not distinguish between those adult edicts that are truly beneficial (“Don’t pick up snakes”) with those that are nonsensical (“If you pray silently to god he can hear your thoughts and will answer your requests” or “If you get together with others and pray for rain, it will rain.”)
But what is really interesting is why people still cling on to these beliefs long after they reach adulthood. After all, as we age we develop reasoning capacities that enable us to subject ideas to close scrutiny. As a consequence, there are a lot of childish beliefs we give up as we grow up, like Santa Claus. Children soon figure out for themselves that it is highly implausible for one man to fly around the entire world in one night to deliver toys, going up and down chimneys.
Why isn’t belief in god one of the beliefs we discard, since it has as much evidence in support as Santa Claus?
Next: Why religious beliefs persist.
POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart on Mark Sanford
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Shut Up, Mark Sanford | ||||
|
||||
In a previous post, I tried to pin down what people actually believe when they say they believe in god. Today I want to look at what goes into religious belief, using Charles Darwin’s own journey as an example.
Charles Darwin was encouraged by his father, a successful doctor, to study medicine and was duly sent off in 1825 to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, a leading place for such studies at that time. But Darwin found that he hated the study of medicine, especially the horrors of surgery in those pre-anesthesia days. When his father realized that this was not the field for him, he suggested in 1828 that he matriculate at Cambridge University, get a degree, and then become a clergyman. To get into Oxford or Cambridge University at that time one had to be a member of the Church of England (i.e., an Anglican), the rule being abolished by an act of parliament only later in 1871. Although Darwin had been baptized in the Church of England, his family tradition was nonconformist Unitarians and his father and grandfather were freethinkers.
Darwin felt that he should make a good faith attempt to see if he could honestly accept the doctrines of the Anglican church. In his autobiography Darwin says that he “had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England; though otherwise I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted. It never struck me how illogical it was to say that I believed in what I could not understand and what is in fact unintelligible.” (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Nora Barlow (ed), p. 49, my italics.)
I think that the key phrase here is “persuaded myself”. I think most religious people deep down suspect that their belief in a god makes no sense, or at least know that they really don’t understand the things they are being asked to believe, but they are willing to persuade themselves, as Darwin did, to go along with the charade. The key question is “Why?” Why go to all that trouble to overrule an instinctive skepticism that arises from their natural logic and reasoning powers? Why does it never strike them, as it never struck Darwin until he was much older, how illogical it is to say that they believe in what they cannot understand and what is in fact unintelligible?
But there were limits to even Darwin’s youthful credulity. Even when he was a believer in the literal truth of the Bible, Darwin could not bring himself to actually rejoice in the contradictions, to make the ridiculous claim that some apologists do, that because the doctrines of religion seem nonsensical, that accepting them is somehow a sign of intellectual superiority, that it indicates that one somehow understands and appreciates deep mysteries. As he said, “I might have said with entire truth that I had no wish to dispute any dogma; but I never was such a fool as to feel and say “credo quia incredibile.” [“I believe because it is incredible.”] (Barlow, p. 49)
As we all know, Darwin ended up being an unbeliever. He shied away from the label of atheist and called himself an agnostic, the former term being a little too strong for someone who hated confrontations, though it is hard to tell the difference in his case since he said quite clearly in his autobiography that although his disbelief crept over him at a very slow rate, it “was at last complete” and that he “never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.” (Barlow, p. 72)
It seems pretty clear that most adults have no actual reasons to believe in god. They have not in their lives seen god or heard god or witnessed any acts that can be unequivocally ascribed to god. Those who claim to have witnessed miracles tend to ignore plausible alternative explanations. But they lack Darwin’s instinct to follow his thinking to its logical conclusion that there is no god.
Those who actually claim to have seen god or had god speak to them are presumed to be delusional and in need of psychiatric help or frauds of the sort who try to sell pieces of toast with Jesus’s image on it on eBay. The latest story that I heard of was someone who claimed that a rock fall suddenly revealed a ‘hand of god’ in a rock formation behind his home and he (naturally) has put it up for sale on eBay.
So why do people believe in god? This really consists of two related questions: Why did such beliefs arise in the first place? And why do those beliefs persist in the absence of any evidence in support of them?
I’ll examine these questions in the next post in this series.
POST SCRIPT: David Attenborough talks about god
The noted nature documentary filmmaker has made many people aware of the wonder of nature. He talks about why he does not believe in god. (Thanks to Machines Like Us.)
Apologists for ‘moderate’ religion always start by saying that they accept science, and begin with 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 virgin births or that people can actually come back from the dead. However sophisticated religious apologists may argue intellectually, they seem to need the same emotional crutch of magical thinking as much as any religious fundamentalist, and desperately want to believe that there is this invisible entity who is looking out for them personally. Religious scientists like Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller, John Lennox, and John Polkinghorne all start out arguing on a high intellectual plane, but they end up making almost the very same assertions of belief of the average churchgoer in the pew on any given Sunday.
So what do religious people actually believe? There are no simple answers. In his book God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007, p. 12), Victor J. Stenger tries to pin down the philosophical foundations of people’s belief in god. But I am interested in more practical questions.
The vague “Do you believe in god” type questions that are usually asked of believers are useless because it is not clear what people believe even if they say yes. Is it the deist god Deigod or Gosh or the full-blooded, omnipotent, omniscient, miracle working Supergod or (as is most likely) some personally concocted hybrid?
So here are some questions that would help make the discussions more fruitful. I wish that the polling agencies would ask questions like these as this gives a much better picture of what people actually believe.
My experience suggests that most religious people would answer the above questions as follows: 1: (b), 2: yes, 3: yes, 4: no, 5: yes, 6: yes, 7: yes, 8: yes
I also have bonus questions for those who call themselves Christians:
I suspect that most Christians will answer: 1: yes, 2: yes, 3: yes, 4: heaven.
Of course, all these answers lead to all manner of severe contradictions, either because they are internally inconsistent or they violate basic scientific principles. For example, the idea that god took a fully human form in the shape of Jesus is central to Christian dogma. Otherwise what was the point of the whole exercise? But if Jesus is totally human, how could he perform his miracles? It is to evade this type of contradiction that religious language and concepts like ‘kenosis’ or the doctrine that Jesus is fully god and fully human are introduced, which make no consistent logical sense but can be interpreted in any way that the situation requires.
As for the second question, we know that our bodies undergo irreversible decay rapidly after death, which is why organ removal for donations must be done immediately. So if Jesus was totally human and his body decayed for three days, how did he recover the use of his organs when his body was resurrected?
There really is no way to escape these contradictions without resorting to saying that Jesus is at least on occasion Supergod.
More sophisticated religious believers know this is a problem and will try to avoid answering the questions I posed, likely retreating to an extreme form of religion-speak suggesting that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know the answers to such questions because god is so deeply mysterious that any attempt to understand his nature in any concrete way is doomed to failure. This non-answer enables them to avoid having to publicly acknowledge any contradictions while privately assigning any properties they want to god that gives them emotional satisfaction. Or they will give the answers I provided and wave away any contradictions by invoking the ‘mysterious ways clause’ that allows god to circumvent any contradictions in ways that we cannot know.
I know that some readers of this blog are religious. I hope they will take a stab at answering those questions so that we can get a grip on what exactly we are talking about.
POST SCRIPT: Hey, I never promised you a rose garden
God makes Jesus an offer that he thinks of refusing.