Thursday 7 July 2022

Michael Brown's Questions for Atheists

 Evangelical Christian Michael Brown recently posed several questions to atheists. These were framed as an 'honest' attempt to understand atheists.

I have provided my answers below.

Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?

First, would you say that you are (or, were) an atheist based primarily on intellectual study or based on experience? Or did you never believe in God at all?

I have never believed in your deity, or any other deities. I am old enough to be exposed to the arguments for the existence of your deity, and found the answers ranging from unconvincing, to fallacious, to downright dishonest.  

 

Do You Have Purpose and Destiny?

Second, would you say that even as an atheist, you still have a sense of purpose and destiny in your life, a feeling that you were put here for a reason and that you have a mission to accomplish? Or is it primarily people of faith who feel like this, since we are simply the products of an unguided, random evolutionary process?

Your leading question with evolution in it, belies your claim to honesty. The powerful and well-researched forces of evolution are not a synonym for random. I have a purpose, and it is a product of my own worldview and my indigenous culture. For example, kaitiakitanga drives the work I do in wildlife conservation, and affirms that I share a kinship (whakapapa) with all these animals. This is part of the legacy I leave for the future. 

The Christian idea my purpose is to end up, joyfully spending an eternity kissing your deity's butt while my unsaved friends and whānau are being tortured, actually fills me with utter disgust and horror. 


Does God Exist?

Third, would you say that you are 100% sure there is no such being as God — meaning, an eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing being? Or would you say that, for all practical purposes you have concluded that this God does not exist, although it is impossible to prove such a negative with absolute certainty?

I have concluded that deities are an outgrowth of our hunter-gatherer animistic beliefs, that evolved into focus points of these, first as nature gods and in some cultures, gradually evolving into High Gods and finally, Morally High Gods. Your deity is a very recent, in human terms, species of Moralising High God. Gods don't exist. They are the fantastic creations of the ancient era.

Can Science Explain the Origin of Life?

Fourth, do you believe that science can provide answers for many of the remaining mysteries of the universe, including: how the universe began (including where matter came from and where the Big Bang derived its energy); the origin of life; and DNA coding?

That's an odd question. Research on the origin of life has advanced from showing some early chemical pathways for amino acids to form in the 1950s, to peptide chains (proteins), sugars, nucleotides, lipid membranes and protocells, and self-replicating macromolecules today. The explanation is incomplete but much more powerful than the idea a virgin-mating bloodgod did it instead.

What science gives us is the most reliable method we have for discovering how things work. It does so by setting up ruthless contests between competing hypotheses, that are resolved by seeing which are wrong (falsification). Theistic claims that knowledge can be acquired instead by revelation is patently false, and the fact you simply have no reliable way to tell if your beliefs on origins are false, rule out your alternative explanations.

Have You Questioned Your Atheism?

Fifth, have you had any experiences in life that caused you to question your atheism? Has something happened to you that seemed genuinely supernatural or otherworldly? Or have you been confronted with some information that shook your atheistic foundations, such as a scientific argument for intelligent design? If so, how have you dealt with such doubts about your atheism?

No. The longer I live, the more confident I am in my atheism and the more appalled I am at the damage generated by your religion.  And there are no scientific arguments for intelligent design. What we have instead is a litany of falsehoods about genetics, molecular biology, statistics and the fossil record concocted by a small cadre of glib zealots. They have undertaken no original research to establish ID as a science. If anything Creationists (including Intelligent Design proponents) confirm how unscrupulous, how dishonest and untrustworthy your arguments are. I don't think you appreciate how badly Creationism discredits the your religion. 

Are You Materialistic?

Sixth, are you completely materialistic in your mindset, meaning, human beings are entirely physical, human consciousness is an illusion, and there is no spiritual realm of any kind? Or are you superstitious, reading horoscopes or engaging in new age practices or the like?

That's such a list of leading questions I'm not even going to bother answering it.  

Would You Be Willing to Follow God?

Seventh, if you were convinced that God truly existed — meaning the God of the Bible, who is perfect in every way, full of justice and mercy, our Creator and our Redeemer — would that be good news or bad news? And would you be willing to follow Him and honor Him if He were truly God?

If you could convince me the Abrahamic deity existed, I would accept it existed. The god of the Bible however, gave its followers instructions for beating slaves or executing non-virgin brides, but none for using soap. It promotes collective and inherited guilt, blood sacrifices and scapegoating, thought-crimes and threatens horrific torture with no chance of rehabilitation. That's not what a perfect or just entity looks like. 

 

Monday 30 May 2022

Cold-case Christianty: Review

Introduction

Popular apologetics has been around for a long time. The most popular of such apologists have found a unique selling-point that let them rise above the rest. For Lee Strobel it was the "former-atheist investigative-reporter" angle. For Frank Turek, it was the "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist" angle, still being milked today.

Recently a new entrant in this genre appeared. This is the J. Warner Wallace  "investigative detective" angle with his book Cold-Case Christianity. This asserts that the tools of criminal investigation can be applied to the Canonical Gospels and New Testament (NT) to determine they're completely reliable accounts of Jesus' life. Rather convenient really, as it means you don't need to study the society, languages, beliefs and culture of the Roman world and its Eastern Mediterranean provinces. While this hasn't convinced a lot of experts in the Ancient Near East, it has persuaded a lot of internet Christians. Usually of the evangelical flavour. And at times atheists are assured that this book will provide the evidence we have been craving to show that Christianity is true. 

So, in response to the belief that Cold-Case Christianity does provide compelling evidence for their deity, and to show I'm willing to read this stuff, I've written the following review. 

Note that this is just a review and not a point by point rebuttal. I don't have time for that.  

So what about this detecting approach?

This is wildly oversold by Wallace. What we really get is a lot of filler (the anecdotes from his past) which is best skimmed over, and some distillation of what he claims are key detecting principles. Unfortunately these are not at all insightful. It's just a matter of trying to avoid presuppositions, analysing all the evidence and reaching conclusions based on these. There is nothing here that being a Cold-case detective brings that is novel. This book is a triumph of marketing over substance.

Instead, what Wallace does is collect a lot of popular apologetic arguments and tries to link each to one of the detecting principles he's concocted. That's pretty much it. It's a litany of the same poor popular apologetics arguments we've seen many times before. 

Wallace is not even consistent with the principles he espouses. The whole premise that witness accounts from a modern Western country are analogous to the theological literature from an ancient era is is one giant presupposition Wallace never addresses. In the first century, Judaea was populated by a largely illiterate population for whom politics, culture and religion were all one, who were chafing under Roman rule, and who expected a Messiah to appear and rescue them. This is a culture that depended on oral records and anything they wrote would have been through a theological lens. 

Presuming these records would be similar to modern witness statements is a massive leap. If you're not convinced ancient and modern literature are comparable then Wallace's approach is wrong, all the way down. This is exacerbated by the fact we don't have the original crime scenes sic. Our earliest NT manuscripts are from the 2nd century, and these are both few in number and fragmentary.  

Wallace quickly demonstrates the lack of rigour in his approach. The first is how he deals with contradictions. Contradictions always support his belief that the Canonical Gospels are eyewitness accounts. There is no level or number of contradictions that will ever budge his belief. Yet there has to be some trigger point, some number, where the credibility of the accounts is seriously diminished by the contradictions. 

One of the events that is plagued with contradictions is the account of the crucifixion and resurrection. A horizontal reading of the texts shows they contradict on the day of the arrest, when the women visited the tomb, which women visited the tomb, if the women visited the tomb (1 Cor. 15 vs the Gospels), what was seen at the tomb (and that's even if we restrict ourselves to the Canonical gospels), what they did after the discovery and where Jesus later appeared to his disciples. For the single most important event in Early Christianity, dismissing these contradictions as the kind we expect to see in eyewitness accounts is stretching credulousness to its breaking point.  

Wallace can only see the NT literature as either deliberate efforts at deceit, or delusions or describing actual events. Thus he never allows for an alternative theological motivation or the accretion of legendary elements over decades of different oral traditions in different groups of Early Christians. He's mired in presuppositions and an attempt to contort the evidence to match his view the NT is largely eyewitness accounts. 

A second important weakness is his ad hoc 'scene-artefacts' to explain away material not consistent with his view. Thus the errant cigarette butt at a crime scene is analogous to say, the later addition of the story of the adulterer in John. His principle is simply that if you feel something is out of place, it is. This has enough wriggle room to sail a cruise ship through. What's to stop say, someone concluding the dead rising from their graves in Matthew is an artefact? Or the 500 eye-witnesses Paul claims to have seen the risen Jesus? There is none. There is no rigour to this principle as it is simply an ad hoc means for Wallace to dispense with many arguments against the reliability of the Gospels.  Others however could use it to dispense with any details Wallace relies upon, as it seems to them it is also out of place. History needs better standards than this. 

The third weakness is his claimed skill in forensic statement analysis are grossly inflated. Wallace never picks up for instance, that the style of writing and the topics of interest changes, in the many epistles regarded as pseudepigrapha. That is, they are fakes attributed to one of the original apostles by the writer. He never picks up the Gospel of John's Jesus differed in many significant ways from the Synoptics. 

He never picks up that Mark makes regular and creative use of irony in his account [1]. Or that Mark employs many Latinisms that a native speaker from Judaea is unlikely to use. Mark includes Latin words like κῆνσος (census or poll tax), λεγιών (legion), κεντυρίων (centurion), δηνάριονb (denarius), units of measure such as μόδιος (modius), and ξέστης (pitcher) and legal terms such as σπεκουλάτωρ (executioner) and φραγελλόω (to flog) [2]. And this list is not exhaustive. There are also geographical mistakes in the Gospel of Mark (7:31- the journey to Galilee through Sidon). Or even that Mark has Jesus quote Psalm 22:1 as his final words. Instead he claims its what an early eyewitness account would look like. 

In other words, all the things that actual NT scholars use to analyse the Gospels is absent from Wallace's approach. Wallace fails to identify problems with the text that are widely known. He cannot distinguish pseudepigrapha from genuine epistles. He promotes Intelligent Design pseudoscience and rejects evolution (Chapter 3). This does not support Wallace's claim to be skilled at analysing evidence. 

Addressing the Skeptics

The purported goal of apologetics to give good arguments to counter skeptic objections to Christianity. Wallace makes a big deal of being a former atheist and skeptic who was eventually won over. So how well does Wallace address skeptic arguments. 

Curiously, Wallace seems to be an odd former atheist. Allegedly familiar with the works of Ehrman and the like, but claims he thought the Canonical Gospels were of a second-century origin when he was an atheist! And there is an odd thing about the sceptic arguments he takes on. A lot of these, like 'the swoon theory' to explain Jesus' escape from the cross, aren't very popular. Other arguments, such as why we think the Gospels were composed at a much later date are barely touched on at all. This would be understandable coming from a Christian apologist who was never a committed atheist. Their framework often doesn't understand what are considered the most trenchant criticisms. It is really odd however, for a former atheist. 

Similarly, for a former atheist he reveals in Chapter 3 he lacked a rudimentary understanding of evolution and big-bang cosmology. He dispenses with 150 years of research in biology by quote-mining Dawkins to imply Dawkins agrees design occurs in nature. This is the exact opposite of what Dawkins argues. So Wallace not only fails to address skeptic and scientific arguments for why we are unconvinced a deity is behind the Big Bang or the diversity of life on the planet, he establishes a shocking level of dishonesty with his quote mine.  

Now let's consider the dating of the Gospels. Setting aside the academic debate on some aspects, it is (generally) accepted that Mark was composed first (around 65-70 CE), Luke and Matthew about a decade later, and John in the last decade of the first C. These are composed in fluent Koine Greek, not Aramaic, by highly literate writers. In short, the very people the original disciples were not. 

Wallace argues that Luke should precede Paul's letters (so mid 40s CE) and Mark should be even earlier still, because Luke had some dependence on Mark. So how does Wallace deal with the arguments for the later dating? Mark is dated to 65-70 CE because Iraneus says it was composed after Paul and Peter had died (c65 CE). It describes the political milieu of this era- themes of suffering, persecution and martyrdom and alludes to the Jewish War that broke out in 67 CE.

 Wallace's counter is to just ignore Iraneus and the political context of the passages in the gospels. He accuses others of a bias against supernatural explanations and that Mark, really had prophesied the siege of Jerusalem. So he does not deal with skeptical objections at all. Rather he sets up a strawman. He argues scholars concluded Mark was from 65-70 CE  because the authors are anonymous (true, but irrelevant) and have a naturalism bias. 

Luke's date is based on the extraordinary assertion that Paul, clearly showed he was familiar with Luke. Paul's letters are largely the only NT documents that can be reliably dated. This argument depends on a short proverb of little theological import, and a shared reference to a common liturgical practice. This flies in the face of genuine scholarship, which wonders why Paul comes across as so unfamiliar with the Gospels. But you don't need to be a scholar to figure this out. Just try to reconstruct the main elements of Luke, using just the letters of Paul. You can't. There is no virgin birth, no healing miracles, no feeding of the thousands, no clearing of the Temple, no parables, no empty tomb, no women who discovered the tomb first etc. 

So Wallace not only fails to establish his alternative time line has credence, he betrays a lack of awareness of the arguments and evidence for the actual dating. 

So what about that resurrection?

The purpose of trying to shift the gospels as close as possible to the crucifixion, and assert they are eye-witness accounts, is to inflate the authority of the Canonical gospels. This in turns makes the central argument of Christianity, that Jesus was resurrected after his death, more compelling. After all, if all we had were first and second century non-biblical sources and early Christian sources like Paul's letters, the Gospel Jesus would vanish. There are no contemporaneous non-biblical accounts of the Gospel Jesus. Unlike say Julius Caesar or Cicero, Jesus appeared to have written nothing for others to read. We would have no way of reconstituting the fantastic events of the Gospels solely using other sources in this era. So apologists have to go 'all in' on the Gospels being accounts that are based in actual history. Needless to say, Wallace presents nothing that would convince a skeptic that the gospels are eyewitness accounts and have an early date. 

We are left with the resurrection, and if Wallace cannot convince us it is a real event, then there is no reason to accept this occurred. As your common, garden-variety skeptic I would agree, that assuming Jesus existed, some of his earliest followers believed he was resurrected soon after his execution. But I do not think it really happened. 

Wallace tries to establish the credibility of the miraculous resurrection by asserting the 'minimal facts' as our starting point. Conveniently, this bypasses the skeptical arguments against the 'minimal facts'! 

For instance, I'm not convinced there was an empty tomb. The empty tomb isn't mentioned in any E Christian literature preceding the Gospels, which were composed decades later. For such an important detail to be not mentioned across thousands of written words and 3 to 4 decades, is extremely suspicious. The four decades from the crucifixion to Luke and Matthew is long enough for this embellishment to be added and accepted. We can see such embellishments continued, as in the Gospel of Peter from early 2nd C, who included giants and an animated, talking cross in his resurrection account.

However unlikely one feels that Jesus being left on the Cross (as was the common if not universal Roman practice) was, or put into a communal grave pit, these are still plausible alternatives. Both would ensure there was no body and conveniently, help establish the legend of the empty tomb.

We can at least, agree that several of his closest followers soon after, believed they had seen a resurrected Jesus. And that motivated them to continue resume their proselytising, and they were after Paul joined them, recruit into Gentile communities effectively also. 

I tend to the view that these early followers experienced grief hallucinations. This view has a number of proponents, including the late NT scholar Gerd Lüdemann. Grief hallucinations are fairly common phenomenon among people who suffer a loss (I'm one of them).  Auditory and even visual hallucinations of the deceased person are reported. These can be quite vivid but decline over time. This matches the overall progression of these resurrection appearances, which also fade away. 

As an aside, epileptic seizures can also produce vivid religious experiences[3]. The very non-corporeal experience reported by Paul (mimicking a seizure) suggests early Christians were open to visionary, rather than physical appearances of Jesus. 

Wallace however, does not consider the way grief can generate these hallucinations and jumps to the mass appearances (e.g. 1 Cor 15) to refute the hallucination argument. Unfortunately Paul's epistle First Corinthians makes more problems for Wallace's mass-hallucination rebuttal than he acknowledges. The first is that it contradicts the Gospel accounts by having no appearances to any women first. The second is the 500 witnesses are problematic. Nowhere else does anyone describe an appearance to 500 people. What event, if it occurred, is a puzzle [4]. 

And of course, the only way we can accept this mass appearance is to believe that either Paul is telling the truth or that it wasn't a corruption of the text by a later copyist. So in the end, an event that we do not know the location or time of, or who was present, and is possibly a later edit [4], is not the slam dunk against the hallucination explanation Wallace desires. A skeptic is after all, skeptical. 

So for the skeptic, Wallace's arguments against an hallucination explanation appear inept, and further ignores the role of memory distortion. We know that people misremember traumatic events. We are good at adding details to the story later that we think occurred as the following excerpts show. 

Crombag et al. led participants to believe they had seen the moment an El Al Boeing 747 crashed into an apartment building, killing 43 people. Although there was no film of the crash, there was considerable media coverage of the aftermath. Indeed, participants often elaborated on the original suggestion (e.g., the plane was already burning when it crashed). Importantly, and in line with the SMF, Crombag et al. opined that traumatic events might be more susceptible to memory distortion than benign events because they typically provide more avenues for mental imagery...
...Southwick et al. asked Desert Storm veterans at 1 month and 2 years after their return from service, whether certain events occurred during that service (e.g., sniper fire). They found 88% of veterans changed their response to at least one event; 61% changed more than one. Importantly, the majority of those changes were from “no, that did not happen to me” to “yes, that happened to me,” what has been termed “memory amplification.” -Strange and Takarangi (2015) [5]

This has nothing to do with dishonesty but how the mind works. Some early followers would have been shocked by the arrest and execution of Jesus, and there is no reason to suppose they would be immune to memory distortion.  Grief hallucinations get misremembered. They become more vivid, more physical, and more details are added. And in an era where oral transmission was largely used to spread Christianity, those accounts that were more wondrous, more attention-arresting, would have been selected for. And grief hallucinations that evolve into physical appearances are explicable both in terms of memory distortion and oral retelling. 

In the end, the fundamental problem with relying upon the Gospels is that the case for the physical resurrection becomes a circular argument. The Gospels have to be used to prove the (contradictory) accounts of the resurrection in the Gospels are true. There is no other way we can get to the Gospel resurrection claims without them. We can't get to it through other early Christian or non-Christian writing. 

Early Christian Motivation

When Jesus died he left no instructions or guidance to his followers on doctrine. He'd left nothing in writing to use as an authority. There was no hierarchical Church structure where leaders got together to work through the problems. Early Christian groups ended up being a very diverse bunch. We only need to look at Paul's letters. He reveals he has points of difference with other original leaders (who seemed to see Christianity as a sect within Judaism), and his letters often have the theme of correcting what he considered, where wrong interpretations emerging in the Churches he helped establish. 

By the time we get to Iraneus in the Second Century, we have 21 sects that he classes as heretical (this does not account for any that disappeared in say the Roman-Jewish wars in the late 60s and again in the 132 CE). These sects professed doctrines at odds with the view Wallace and others are trying to propagate. Gnostic Christians for instance (and there were multiple branches of these) held that the earthly world was corrupt, that Jesus was the manifestation of a spiritual being and Yaweh was not the true god but a malevolent deity [6]. The first chapter of John's Gospel which includes the words on logos, is suspiciously Gnostic in its perspective. We have many more Gospels than just the four the bible preserves and the Gospel of Peter I mentioned above. Orthodox Christianity with all its doctrines and structures did not spring into being in the first days of Christianity. It emerged after many decades in a contest with rival Christianities. 

It is this background that we need to understand the motivation of the early Christian apostles and early Christian literature. And all of this is absent from Wallace. Rather, he gives the impression that Christianity emerges in its near mature form soon after Jesus' death. Instead he argues that the Apostles and Gospel writers had no motivation to lie or mislead others.

We see the tedious appeal to martyrdom that is common in popular apologetics. The Apostles were willing to die for their beliefs, and did so without recanting, when recanting would have saved their lives. Hence we are told, the apostles were telling the truth about what they witnessed. Obviously this would still hold in the grief-hallucination/memory distortion scenario also. But a closer examination of the martyrdoms of Apostles shows that the opportunity for recanting was not an escape from their executions. James was executed for breaking the law (cf. Josephus). Peter and Paul, who disappeared in Rome around the time of Nero's persecution, would have been executed (if they were) as scapegoats for starting Rome's disastrous fire. Saying they had made up the resurrection story would not have saved them. Outside dubious later Church tradition, we really know nothing about the other disciples. 

The restricted set of motives Wallace employed excludes the theological motivation of the writers. It ignore the theological conflicts the early Christian Church had to work through. And it places a lot of credence on the writings of the early Christians. How do we know the Paul suffered great hardships establishing his Churches? Because Paul tells us so in his writings. Can we verify this? No. And given the horrendous numbers of abuse cases modern Christian leaders have kept from their followers, it would be an heroic assumption that such covert sexual predation was not occurring then. Paul may have been a really virtuous guy, but to rely upon his own writings to establish this, is as smart as using Ravi Zacharias' apologetics to establish he wasn't a vile rapist. It's not likely Paul would be confessing to such crimes in his epistles. Wallace is back to the circular strategy of using the NT to prove the NT. 

Within the first 100 years of Christianity, many Christian groups did not share the orthodox beliefs captured in the Canonical gospels. For orthodox Christians, the value of the gospels was not their historical truth. It was what they saw as their theological truth. John for instance, moves the arrest of Jesus forward by one day. The theological motivation was clear, by doing this before the Passover, it ensured the doctrine that Jesus died for "our sins" as the Passover lamb was established. Wallace however doesn't see this as deliberate, but the kind of mistake an eyewitness would make. 

For a culture who saw everything through a theological lens (unlike modern secular societies), this theological truth is what ultimately mattered. The NT Gospels, the epistles, and even the pseudepigrapha had value, not because they were historically true. They had value because they were theologically true. They established the 'correct' version of Christianity. That is why using them as largely historical accounts twists the goals of the original writers to conform to the far removed, modern orthodox Christianity.  

Conclusion

Wallace fails to see that there was a theological motivation for the Gospels, and the canonical ones were selected because they supported the view of Christianity that became orthodoxy. He fails to consider this because of a profound lack of understanding of how ancient societies differed from modern. Of how ancient literature was composed. 

His claim to have examined the evidence critically is not supported by this book. Rather he takes such a credulous approach to popular apologetic arguments, that I feel he'd find evidence for the resurrection on the cooking instructions of a packet of soup. 

And in the end, his approach shows it cannot honestly represent science, philosophy or history. It conveniently confirms a whole bunch of popular apologetics arguments and does not properly address the objections to them. I imagine Wallace will continue to be popular in evangelical Christian circles, but he has nothing that will persuade a moderately well-informed sceptic he is correct.


References


[1] Fenton, J. C. (2001). Mark’s gospel -- the oldest and the best? Theology, 104(818), 83–93.

[2] Latinisms are described in Incigneri, Brian J. The Gospel to the Romans: The Setting and Rhetoric of Mark’s Gospel. Biblical Interpretation 65. Leiden: Brill, 2003


[3] Devinsky O, Lai G. Spirituality and religion in epilepsy. Epilepsy Behav. 2008 May;12(4):636-43. doi: 10.1016/j.yebeh.2007.11.011. Epub 2008 Jan 2. PMID: 18171635.

"Several case reports and small series document religious or mystical experiences during partial seizures [30], [38], [39], [40]. The nature of ictal religious seizures varies, including intense emotions of God’s presence, the sense of being connected to the infinite [37], hallucinations of God’s voice [30], the visual hallucination of a religious figure [17], as well as clairvoyance and telepathy, or repetition of a religious phrase [40]..."

[4] Ftizmeyer (2008), First Corinthians.  https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300140446/first-corinthians/

[5] Strange D, Takarangi MK. Memory distortion for traumatic events: the role of mental imagery. Front Psychiatry. 2015 Feb 23;6:27. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00027. PMID: 25755646; PMCID: PMC4337233.


[6] A good introduction to the Gnostics is this BBC Religion Podcast discussing it. 

Sunday 3 April 2022

Braxton Hunter's 10 questions for atheists

Apologist Braxton Hunter posed 10 questions for atheists, and in a slightly idle period, I thought I'd respond.

1. What facts about the real world does your personal worldview account for that mine as a Christian doesn’t account for?

My worldview (weltanschauung) is derived from my experiences, education, secular society and indigenous culture. I have advanced degrees in biology and decades of field experience on different countries. From my perspective, Christianity has been a complete failure at explaining the authenticity of native people's religious experiences. And the divided opinions on the different branches of Creationism tells me its failed to explain the diversity and distribution of life on earth. 

Nonetheless, I don't know what your particular Christian worldview holds, but if it subscribes to some of the more popular science-denying branches, I'm good sticking with mine. 

2. If your definition of atheism is merely that it's a lack of belief in God, and you're just waiting to be convinced, but then you speak of Him as though He's in some way synonymous with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or Fairies, doesn't that at least send the message to your listeners that you actually believe that there is no God?

I let people who call themselves atheists, define atheism for themselves. I don't expect agreement with any others. Personally I have concluded that deities do not exist, that yours was concocted very late in human history by a minor ancient Near Eastern tribe, before it got promoted to the chief deity of a slave-owning society.  For me atheism is not "a lack of belief in deities" but I don't assume that's the same for all. 


3. Do you see why supporting things that believers see as sin upon becoming an atheist might make those believers think that played some role in your adopting an atheistic worldview?

I disagree that there is an atheistic worldview. Atheism is a product of worldview that often, draws on knowledge of your religion's past and comparative religion, a preference for acquiring knowledge via scientific methods rather than revelatory and the support of secular moral philosophy over religious dogmas. From this worldview, atheism is often the result. After all, it encompasses only one issue whereas a worldview encompasses far more.  

I didn't become an atheist. There was never a transition. Your deity never seemed any more real than my native Atua (dieties) or the gods of ancient Greece. And was a lot less interesting to be honest. I've always been an atheist.

I might add that the Christian conviction in sin, drove them to suppress many of our pre-colonial beliefs and practices as these were regarded as sinful. So I am not bothered by what Christians now think of my support of these things. 


4. Exactly what probability do you assign to the proposition that gods or God in particular exist?

My Bayesian prior is 0. Humans lived as hunter-gatherers for about 200,000 years. Over much of the time we were animists (my own indigenous culture still has a strong grounding in animism). Deities really do not appear until after the human agricultural revolution and both High Gods and Moralising High Gods take centuries to appear. Deities are thus an outgrowth of our hardwired beliefs in animism. Nothing I've encountered about Christianity has caused me to revise upward this prior.

5. Does it bother you or worry you that non-theistic cosmologies offer unlikely-sounding or poorly specified explanations of the origins of the universe?

I disagree that say, a quantum perturbation acting on a super-hot, super-dense, minute particle is poorly specified. Nor does it seem unlikely, especially relative to a virgin-mating bloodgod conjuring it into existence.

6. Of the arguments for God’s existence, is there one that to you seems more interesting than the rest? Do any of them weigh in favor of theism?

None. Gods are the invention of ancient peoples and have earned no more credence than any other fantastic ancient creature from this period. 

7. What sort of evidence, if any, would be enough to convince you? (Let’s take experimental reproducibility off the table.)

There's two tests that come to mind. The Thomas test- a physical manifestation of Jesus in a personal encounter, down to being able to examine the wounds on his body or the Bruce Almighty test- a temporary gift of some of your deity's divine powers. 

8. To what extent did social and moral issues start you down your path to atheism?

Creationists often force biologists to take a position on deities. It was clear I couldn't be neutral in the face of their rank dishonesty. 

9. Can you name the last three academic books by theistic authors you read on the subject? How long ago did you read them?

What do you mean academic book? Last book that has any impact on me was Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prison. 

10. If you knew that Christianity were true, would you accept God’s authority, repent of your sins, and trust Jesus as your king?

That's quite the loaded question and irrelevant! There is no overt act of rebellion going on here. I consider my own nature gods more plausible than your Near Eastern god of blood and death, and I know my deities don't exist. Gods are human constructs.  

If you want people like me to conclude your deity exists, then you need less loaded or leading questions. Try accepting that people have carefully considered your religion's claims and honestly found them unconvincing.





Wednesday 13 December 2017

Whip it, whip it good

One of the cruelest legacies of the Abrahamic religions, was the normalisation of slavery.  Slavery in the Western Christian world persisted largely until the 1800s. Islamic countries did not ban slavery for the most part until the 1900s.  Even then it survived in extremist groups as with Islamic militias in Sudan or ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

This slavery presents a major problem for theists.  It is in direct conflict with a range of claims. These include the moral character of their prophets.  Abraham owned slaves. Mohammad owned slaves. The benevolence of God of Abraham and the origin of morality with this deity, does not survive the reality of slavery.

Christians throughout history have used two main arguments to defend slavery.  These are that their version was more humane, and that slavery was in some sense, a necessary evil.

The Nice Version of Slavery Argument.

This is often seen in pop-apologist defenses of ancient Judeao-Christian slavery.  Apparently all slavery in the ancients kingdoms of Israel was voluntary debt-bondage, of limited scope (rolls eyes).  There's nothing wrong with slavery therefore, if it is practiced by ancient Israelites or Christians.

This is a completely made-up argument. The OT rules on slave ownership make it clear manumission-guarantees were limited to Jewish males. Foreign slaves did not get the right to be freed after 6 years. The OT also describes slaves taken in warfare. Exodus 21:20-21 contradicts alleged humane nature of this ancient slavery by sanctioning the beating of slaves, and more explicitly, defining them as property rather than human beings.

Despite many Christians today wanting to distance themselves from pro-slavery arguments, this 'nice slavery' defense is echoed in later centuries. The motif of the kind slaver-owner, solicitous of their slaves' welfare, was commonly employed to defend slavery.
"We ought to consider whether the negroes in a well regulated plantation, under the protection of a kind master, do not enjoy as great, nay, even greater advantages than when under their own despotic governments" - Michael Renwick Sergeant
This tries to justify slavery as welfare-enhancing. While slavery isn't a good thing per se, the slaves are better off than in their own countries.  Or even better, by being exposed to Christianity they would become Christian and so, save their souls. Slavery was a small, temporal price to pay for an eternity in heaven. And with such justifications, moral slippage occurs.
The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
- Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court


The Necessary Evil Argument

This argument is duplicated by slavery apologists, both modern and historical.  Arguments from the 18th (and 19th Centuries in antebellum US) were that slavery had benefits. It civilised or Christianised the barbaric and pagan peoples of Africa.  

The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. - Robert E Lee. 
Modern apologists do not balk at similar arguments. Slavery was necessary for ancient societies and economies. 
Noting that Jesus did not instruct followers to abolish slavery ignores the fact that slavery was often voluntary and civil and a component of societal functioning in Biblical times - Pop-Apologist Stephanie Thomson
I note that there are other forms of 'unfree' labour that ancient economies could use instead. Ancient Egypt and China used a corvee system of mass labour conscription in agricultural slack-months, to undertake public works.  And while slavery did exist in Ancient China, there were attempts to abolish it. The Han emperor Wang Mang did so in 9 CE- during the lifetime of Jesus. Serfdom in various forms was also possible. Slavery was not necessary.


But wait, Christians ended slavery

It seems always odd the Christians also want plaudits for ending slavery in the West.  While I appreciate the efforts of all who were involved in abolition movements, the reality is they were also strongly opposed by Christians. Some were still defending slavery when the Federal Army's guns reached Richmond.  Most people for much of Christendom's history, were not like Wilberforce.  

One thing that also struck me is how much the abolition arguments emphasised the cruelty and brutality of slavery, rather than Christian arguments for ending it. It seems odd that if the argument against slavery really was theological, that this was employed so rarely. 

The problem is also that Christians had to end slavery because no-one else could. They had the political power in the West. It wasn't the Atheists or Buddhists in Western countries that could abolish slavery. They had no power to do so.  And when slavery has been legal for say, 90% of your religion's history, it's not earning the religion much credit to finally abolish it. That's taken far too long and the agonising suffering slavery produced reached too great a scale. 


Summary

It seems ironic that modern apologists use arguments that mimic those from people they claim to oppose.  The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was terrible. Antebellum slavery was not wonderful. Both were defended by Christians for centuries. 

Overall, I find the arguments defending historical slavery inadequate and unconvincing.  They lack a proper moral justification.  It seems instead they require a degree of moral slippage that people outside these faiths, would balk at. In ancient times, few had the courage and moral character to seek the abolishment of slavery. Moses, Jesus and Mohammad were not among them.  I cannot reconcile slavery with the alleged morality of the Abrahamic prophets and deity. 





Wednesday 29 November 2017

Atheism and the meaning of life

I had a recent conversation on Twitter with a Christian on whether my life has meaning.  Many such theists seem to believe that life can have no meaning for atheists.  The fact that we can be out there, enjoying life and the experiences it offers, seems impossible for some to grasp.

Problem 1: The Permanence Assertion


The first problem is that argument is built on an assertion. The assertion is that an experience has to be permanent for it to have meaning.  The assertion is never proven, it is obstinately accepted by fiat by the theist.  Yet, I know that holding my daughter the moment she was born, was an extremely meaningful experience. It still provokes a powerful reaction in me. That eventually I'll be dead, does not alter the fact that I felt something real, that it did have meaning for me. It doesn't have to be a permanent experience to have meaning.

If I don't have the belief that permanence is a prerequisite for meaning, it's not enough to keep repeating that assertion. You need to produce a strong argument, not insults, to establish it.  I've never heard such an argument.

Problem 2: An eternal afterlife makes this life meaningless


This can be established by comparing the different outcomes under different assumptions about an afterlife.

Lets suppose however, that each experience in Heaven gives a payoff of B, you average an annual level of happiness of b when you're alive in the mortal realm, and that each torment in Hell gives you a payoff of -H. With Heaven being superior to this life, and Hell being worse, let's simply say the B > b > -H.

Both Heaven and Hell are eternal, and thus provide you with an infinite benefit (or harm) stream.
Hence the actual payoff to being in heaven is ∞B and the payoff to being in hell is ∞(-H). With these being infinite streams, then the B and and -H is not really relevant. Heaven has an infinitely positive good payoff, Hell an infinitely negative payoff.  This is largely the logic behind Pascal's Wager. In that wager doesn't matter how unlikely you think Christianity is true, you will always win by being a Christian (or feigning being one).  The size of the payoff completely dominates the probabilities.

Your earthly existence, assuming you generally enjoyed life, has a payoff of tb, where t is the number of years you lived.  This has to be finite. Nobody is immortal.

So the ratio of payoffs of of your mortal life to heaven is tb/∞, or zero (0). In short, your mortal life is such a tiny fraction of your total existence that all your earthly experiences vanish to nothingness. You may as well shuffle off to the afterlife as fast as you can.

If we change the assumptions to an atheist one, then there is no afterlife. All the afterlife payoffs drop to zero. Which means the ratio of payoffs to a mortal life, to the after life, is tb/0. With denominator being 0, the ratio is ∞.  In short, every experience now is of profound value when we recognise its finite. The only way life can have meaning, is if it is finite in nature.

Problem 3: the Omniscience Dilemma


It gets worse if the deity is omniscient (all-knowing) as is attributed to the Abrahamic god Yaweh. Now its not just short, finite life you face that produces meaningless. Because this deity knew before you were born, where you would end up after death. If you're Hell-bound, because say you voted for Hillary Clinton or had some gay friends, Yaweh knows you can't change anything to escape Hell. You'll exist for an insignfiicant fraction of time, before suffering horrible torture. The same argument applies to heaven. Life isn't really a test if your deity already knows you're going to pass and get to Heaven. What possible meaning can life have, if there's not a single thing you can change to avoid your eternal fate?

Summary


The argument atheists can have no meaning to their life is not based on rational deliberation. I suspect rather, it's based on being intimidated by mortality and hoping a pact with an ancient god will allow the theist to escape this. People do derive however, meaning from their lives in varied ways. Living according to the values of some ancient Near Eastern pastoralists doesn't really satisfy the goals of all.  Indeed, I'm surprised anyone finds it satisfying.






Thursday 6 July 2017

Let's Run

Introduction


This isn't so much a blogpost on running. It's a personal account, that includes running.  Maybe it's important. Maybe it's not. But it gives some perspective at least, on myself. If anyone is interested.

The Human Runner


The human body is well adapted to running. We have relatively long legs, a narrow pelvis, a valgus knee and a rigid toe.  Within the animal kingdom, we are superb endurance runners. Many of us can, and will run 42 km without stopping. Few animals can match that. We do it because its fun. We do it because it's a challenge.

I find running to be calming (running does produce good things). It gets you outside, the kilometers pass by your running shoes, for a time modern life is shut out.  You don't have to think, to interact, just settle into a rhythm and run.  You're out feeling the sun, or the wind, or the rain.  That inner African plains ape is released.

The Teenage Runner

I wasn't particularly athletic before then. I hit the teen years though, as family-life took a hit. It's somewhat too personal to go into here, and there's nothing unique about the teenage years being rough.  Still, one relationship has never recovered. Running was therapeutic. It was an escape.  I started to win races.

Later we moved. It was to a rural village. There wasn't a lot of things to do there. By the time I was 15, there were 5 other boys my age there. By the end of the year, only 2 of us were left alive.

J took the longest to die. He was smart. Really smart.  He was probably smarter than I was (and I've got a PhD so not lacking there). He got leukemia though. The bad kind. He withered away over the months and died.

His sister committed suicide a few years later.

I stayed in contact with his mother for years afterward.

K was also my age. A gangly kid teenage boy. Got on well with lots of people. He died suddenly. One day he was catching the bus to school with us. Then he wasn't. He swung some irrigation pipes over his shoulder at his farm. They hit power lines.

I never saw his mother smile again.

I wasn't close to the other two. They died in a car crash. Old cars, rural roads and teenage boy drivers aren't a good combination.  It was still a shock.  There were too many funerals that year.

I ran a lot. It helped. There was an isolated lake over some hills I could reach if I wanted to. I could disappear for a while. Feel the dry summer grass crunch under my shoes.  Feel the sun on my skin. I ran a practice marathon once, just to see if I could do it. And I got fast and fit. By the time I'd finished High School I'd got several athletics awards and cups.

I met the only other survivor of that year, G, years later at his mother's funeral. He was the one with the prison guard. He'd been let out for the occasion. He'd got fat. Teeth were missing. We locked eyes, but he didn't recognise me.  I remembered though.

I still think of J.  He'd already won scholarships at his age.  He should have lived. 

The Raw Runner

I'd got back from university for a summer break. Xmas had past. I was at  remote beach in NZ.  R was also there. Older than I was. Wife had died a bit earlier.  That was the catalyst.

He drowned himself. 

It was before cellphones hit the market, not that we'd have had coverage out there.  Getting to a landline took time. That sense of panic is still there, despite the years. It took 3 hours from the drowning, to when emergency services arrived at the beach.

That's not an optimal duration to be left with a dead body.

The nightmares started soon after.  Sleeping crashed.  Being asleep was worse than being awake.

I ran in the night instead. If you push your body to the limits of physical exhaustion, you can over-ride the brain. You'll get some sleep. My feet quickly got blisters. The blisters would burst or bleed. And I'd keep running.

After a while the insomnia wins. There are vast holes in my memory from that year.  I'd hallucinate stuff.

That was the first time I used therapy.  I was practically ordered to by the University.  There were things outside my friends' experiences. Outside their comprehension. It needed something for the experts.

Edit: I've only ever told one other person the full story of those hours at the beach. And that was my therapist. Nobody else really knows. Not my parents. Not my wife. I can't.  

I didn't stop running. But I eased back on the damage.

Everybody Hurts


I wasn't ignorant of what it was like to parent a child with a disability. My uncle R was born late in my grandparents lives. He had spina bifida. And significant intellectual impairment.   It was tough on my grandparents. It was from an era where there was little social support for such problems.  He died when he was a teenager.  As my parents were starting their family.  All that is left of him is a few scattered memories and a name on a tombstone.

At the very end, my grandmother would dream of him and her late husband. Despite the gulf of the decades, and numerous children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren, it was R she came back to.

Something is Wrong

He didn't talk.  That was the first sign. I read to him every night. It was part of the therapy. Sometimes my wife would come in to find us both asleep, book open in my hand. It exhausted us.

Along the way there was the trips to the hospital. The school years, when nobody ever invited him to a birthday party, or to hang out after school.  The sudden collapses and seizures without warning. You entered the world of MRIs, and of specialists. Of teetering on that edge of uncertainty of whether it was a terminal illness or not.  Of battling the system for the promised support, that never seemed to be as timely or as fulsome as promised.

And along the way, your friends and family find reasons not to visit as often.

Eventually you notice they don't come at all.

It's not just the people with disabilities who get marginalised, and pushed to the edges and cracks of society. Their families get carried along with them.

I like to run. It takes me back to those years when I was running as a teenager. That for a period of time, the world is calmer and simpler. I'm slower than I was then.  But the calm of eating up the kilometers in running shoes remains.

So I run.




Thursday 25 May 2017

On the side of the angels?

Or, a closer look at Morality

One of the popular arguments for deities (specifically the Abrahamic god) is based on morality.  This has always surprised me.  The argument that our morality is derived from this deity seems absurd.  The idea that we'd get morality from an ancient blood-god that commanded and committed genocide, seems, well, beyond ridiculous.  It's way out there in cloud-cuckoo land.

Nonetheless, it merits a deeper response. Many theists seem fond of it. I'm even accused of borrowing my morals from Christianity (rolls eyes).  One assumes if I was to borrow my morals from some other belief system, it wouldn't be one with a body-count as high as Christianity. Or Islam.

The argument roughly is that humans have objective morals, objective morals can only come from gods that need living creatures killed to deter its retribution, therefore this god exists.

1. Objective or Subjective Morals?

 The first problem is that a false dichotomy is created with morals. Borrowing from axiology (philosophy of values) it is asserted that locus of morality is either the object, or the subject.  If morality is objective, all the subject need do is recognise what is moral in that case. Morality is external to the subject.

If morality is subjective, the subject applies their values to the relevant case. It is thus the subject that determines if something is moral.  Morality is internal to the subject.

The crucial difference is that we would not disagree on what is moral, it it is objective.  It can't change. It's a property of that case.  We can only disagree if morals are subjective.

This however, is not the only way morals could be classed.  We could also distinguish that is authoritarian, and that which is rational.  The challenge for theists is explaining why their morality is objective, rather than authoritarian.

Let's illustrate. The bible contains the edict to kill witches. Exodus 22:18 - "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live".  For centuries, thousands and thousands of people were killed by Christians for witchcraft. It continues in some parts of the world.  It is a merciless and cruel act, tragically based on a fictional crime.



It's clearly not an application of a subjective, or rational, moral philosophy.  If the only option is objective, then it must be the objectively moral thing to do.  It is also vile and repugnant. In truth, it is not objective. It is authoritarian. And for most of Christianity's history, it was also the right thing to do.  So, no, I don't borrow my morals from Christianity!

2. Do Objective Morals Exist?

What would it take to show that morals are objective?  This requires finding a moral rule that we agree is moral, but is inexplicable by other means.  I can conceive of a minimum of two tests.

a) The Evolutionary Test

Evolutionary biology provides several mechanisms to account for why humans would adopt rules and behaviours we would class as moral.  These include kin-selection and reciprocal altruism.  In addition, some behaviours can be Evolutionary Stable Strategies.  Their evolutionary advantages make them stable and are selected for in successful societies.

Parental care is easily explained by kin-selection mechanisms.  Charity toward others also appears to be an ESS.  Early human societies would have suffered from a lot of food variance.  Being willing to sharing food acts like an insurance policy for all. An unwillingness to share would be punished by others refusing to share. This would hurt the selfish during times they suffered food shortages.

In short, we expect certain rules and behaviours to be selected for because they are evolutionary stable or advantageous.  They benefited humans, in the communities they lived in.

b) The Rawlsian Contractarian Test

Rawls is not an explicit Contractarian. Rather he is a hypothetical Contractarian.  Whether a rule is moral or not, can be evaluated rationally by all parties. If the parties agree on the rule, it can be considered moral.  To prompt rational consideration, Rawls uses the veil of ignorance.  Nobody knows whether they will be the victim of such a rule, or a benefactor.  This ignorance forces everyone to consider everyone.

Hence, a Contractarian would argue that say, killing people for witchcraft or owning blacks as slaves, is immoral.  The parties would not agree such acts are moral out of concern they could be victimised by the rule.

This makes Contractarian rules, neither purely subjective nor objective. It makes moral rules a rational product of human societies.

c) Do such rules exist?

There are many Christian rules that fail the tests above.  The problem is they're also immoral.  Whether it is the public execution of non-virgin brides, or the killing of Sabbath stick-gatherers, they don't appear moral.

3. Objective Morals Don't Exist

The morality argument fails on its first premise. Objective morals don't appear to exist.  What is considered moral changes.  Our attitude to slavery has changed, in many parts of the world, so has attitudes to divorce, gay marriage, women's suffrage and capital punishment.  Applying the brutal and authoritarian morality of the slave-owners of the biblical era would get you arrested today.

These changes in morality are more consistent with an explicit Contractarian moral philosophy.  We debate what is moral. We try to consider the welfare effects not on us, but others. And what was once moral, like slavery, becomes immoral. What was once immoral, like homosexuality, is no longer.

4. Conclusion

The argument that the Abrahamic god is the source of our moral sense is ridiculous. It relies on a false dichotomy between objective and subjective morals. It confuses authoritarian, or evolutionary stable rules, as objective morals.  And it turns a blind eye to the atrocities undertaken, and commanded by the Abrahamic god.