Category: apologetics

Does the nature of the Universe show that there’s no God?

November 4, 2017 • 12:15 pm

That, at least, is the contention of Emily Thomas, an assistant professor of philosophy at Durham University, in an essay at RealClear Science (“Does the size of the universe prove God doesn’t exist?“) This point has been made by many people before, including, as I recall, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins: the Universe is unbelievably large and all those extra galaxies and planets would seem to be superfluous if God’s real concern was Earth. After all, the Bible refers to this planet, not others, and so what’s going on with all those other planets, even if they do harbor life?

The good bits in Thomas’s essay are simply the facts she gives (these are quotes from her piece):

  • Scientists estimate that the observable universe, the part of it we can see, is around 93 billion light years across. The whole universe is at least 250 times as large as the observable universe.
  • Our own planet is 150m kilometres away from the sun. Earth’s nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system, are four light years away (that’s around 40 trillion kilometres). Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains anywhere from 100 to 400 billion stars. The observable universe contains around 300 sextillion stars. 

The last fact is for just the observable universe. 300 sextillion is 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, and multiply that by at least 250 (or more, if the 250 is a linear dimension and not volume). That’s HUGE–even bigger than William Howard Taft! Thomas quotes Douglas Adams here as saying the Universe is “big really, really big”, but as I’m reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’ll give the full and accurate quote:

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

The Universe is also old: about 13.7 billion years. Why did God wait so long to create Earth, and then wait another 4.5 billion years—until about 4000 years ago—to reveal himself to us?

As Thomas notes, this evidence—the size and age of the Universe—does not comport with a God who’s deeply concerned with what happens on Earth: the superfluity of stars and of time does not comport. As Thomas argues:

Over the last few decades, a new way of arguing for atheism has emerged. Philosophers of religion such as Michael Martin and Nicholas Everitt have asked us to consider the kind of universe we would expect the Christian God to have created, and compare it with the universe we actually live in. They argue there is a mismatch. Everitt focuses on how big the universe is, and argues this gives us reason to believe the God of classical Christianity doesn’t exist.

To explain why, we need a little theology. Traditionally, the Christian God is held to be deeply concerned with human beings. Genesis (1:27) states: “God created mankind in his own image.” Psalms (8:1-5) says: “O Lord … What is man that You take thought of him … Yet You have made him a little lower than God, And You crown him with glory and majesty!” And, of course, John (3:16) explains God gave humans his son out of love for us.

These texts show that God is human-oriented: human beings are like God, and he values us highly. Although we’re focusing on Christianity, these claims can be found in other monotheistic religions, too.

. . . Clearly, there is a discrepancy between the kind of universe we would expect a human-oriented God to create, and the universe we live in. How can we explain it? Surely the simplest explanation is that God doesn’t exist. The spatial and temporal size of the universe gives us reason to be atheists.

As Everitt puts it:

The findings of modern science significantly reduce the probability that theism is true, because the universe is turning out to be very unlike the sort of universe which we would have expected, had theism been true.

She then suggests several ways that theologians could answer this argument, including the possibility that we don’t understand God’s plan, or that God simply values natural causation and lovely stars. But these seem like post facto rationalizations (which they are), and so she concludes that this is all evidence against God:

The problem with these rival explanations is that, as they stand, they are unsatisfying. They hint at reasons why God might create tiny humans in a gargantuan place but are a million miles away from fully explaining why. The weight of galaxies, and the press of years, seem to sweep us towards atheism.

Well, this is all fine and good, but is somewhat unsatisfying on three counts. First of all, it’s not a new argument, though of course hardly any arguments against God are new.

Second, theologians have other answers to the Argument from Douglas Adams not mentioned by Thomas. Michael Ruse—an atheist who specializes in helping Christians keep their faith by telling them how to harmonize science and Jesus—has suggested that Jesus traveled from planet to planet throughout the Universe, saving aliens everywhere (I am not making this up). But of course the Bible is Earth-centered. So theologians would have to claim that each planet has its own Jesus, and that God is saving different life forms in different ways—if those forms are “made in God’s image” and have souls to be saved. (In that case, what does “made in God’s image” really mean?)

Finally, there are many other reasons beyond the size and age of the Universe that already tell us that the probability of God’s existence is unlikely. And some of these arguments, like the existence of physical evils and the death of innocents and animals from horrible diseases, simply do not comport with an omnipotent and loving God—a God also described in the Bible. There’s the fact that God doesn’t show himself to us in convincing ways, and yet could if he wanted to. Why is he a deus absconditius? There are evolutionary arguments, too: if evolution is God’s way of creating humans, why all the wastage—the terrible suffering due to natural selection, and the 99% or more of species that have gone extinct without leaving descendants? Why the superfluity of species, much less stars?

Theologians have answers for these, too, for there is nothing that a clever, committed and well-paid theologian like Alvin Plantinga cannot rationalize as comporting with God’s existence. (If you can  accept the Holocaust and God at the same time, there’s nothing that can dispel your faith.) But that, too, is an argument against accepting God: if his/her/hir/its existence cannot be disproven by anything, then we need not take God seriously.

I’m not overly impressed by arguments like the superfluity of stars as evidence against a God, though it does count for something. And I’m pleased that RealClear Science is giving arguments for atheism. But Thomas writes as if scientists and philosophers like her have just discovered this argument in “the last few decades”. In fact, we’ve known for much longer that this is not the kind of universe that argues for existence of a god, and we’ve known it from several other considerations. Unwarranted suffering alone is, to me, the strongest argument against the Biblical god, for theodicy is the Achilles heel of theology.

Readers might amuse themselves by thinking up other reasons why the sheer size and age of the Universe alone do not militate against God’s existence. If you can walk like an Egyptian, you can think like a theologian.

Two pairs of tweets about the NYC murders

November 1, 2017 • 10:45 am

The odor of apologetics is strong today. . .

My friend Dr. Orli Peter, a psychologist, analyzed Sarsour’s tweet in a FB post:

Notice how Sarsour invents the “criminalization” of Allahu Akbar so she can foment outrage and divisiveness. This is a common tactic among narcissists — to fan unrest, enflame the crowd with outrage, and take advantage of the ensuing divisions. Watch narcissistic community leaders and religious leaders do the same thing.

 

. . . and the ever-reliable apologist Nathan Lean, the director of research for the Pluralism, Diversity and Islamophobia project at Georgetown University’s for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

 

h/t: Orli

Sunday school: A rabbi explains the spiritual lessons we should learn from hurricanes

September 10, 2017 • 9:00 am

“Why do bad hurricanes happen to good people?” is the title of a PuffHo article by Rabbi Pinchas Allouche of Congregation Beth Tefillah in Scottsdale, Arizona. And indeed, one may well ask why a loving and omnipotent God would allow innocent people to die. More than that—if he’s omnipotent, then he’s actually killing them by not intervening. The “evil as byproduct of free will” argument won’t work for physical “evils’ like earthquakes and hurricanes, for the damage is not done by other humans exercising their so-called will, but by blind physical forces or microbes without free will.

The suffering or killing of innocent humans by disease or natural disasters is the Achilles heel of theology, for there is no explanation that either punts and says “we just don’t know” or confects a convoluted scenario that is risible for everyone but religionists.

Rabbi Allouche appears to choose the first alternative, quoting another rabbi:

Rabbi Yekutiel Halbershtam, of blessed memory (1905-1994), who lost his wife and all eleven of their children in the Holocaust, was asked a similar question. His response was moving:

“I too have many, many questions for G-d,” he once revealed to his students. “And I know that G-d would be glad to invite me to the heavens and give me the answers to all of the questions I have. But I prefer to stay here on earth with my questions, then to die, and go up to the heavens, to receive the answers.”

Indeed, tragedies are, almost always, inexplicable, in the realms of human understanding. Sometimes, G-d is super-rational. And, sometimes, our finite minds will never be able to comprehend the ferocious disasters conducted by the infinite Creator of the heaven and the earth.

Well, if you can’t answer that question (and the Holocaust is as good an example as any), then how do you know that “G-d” exists at all? Or that G-d is benevolent rather than malevolent?

And since when did Jews believe in Heaven anyway? It’s not mentioned in the Old Testament, though with judicious scrutiny and arduous mental labor you can barely scrape the concept out of the Talmud. But never mind. The existence of the Holocaust should turn any rational Jew into an atheist.

Instead of pondering these unanswerable questions, rabbi Allouche chooses to draw some “spiritual lessons” from hurricanes and their attendant tragedies.

Therefore, it would behoove us to replace the unanswerable question of “why” with the challenging questions of “how should we respond” and “what can we learn from this.”

These questions are diametrically opposed. Asking “why” to a question that cannot be grasped, leads to passivity and despair (even if some fools claim to know the answers to these impossible questions). Yet, asking, “how should we respond” and “what can we learn from this” propels us to take positive action, and provide direction to a world that seems to have lost it.

So what are the lessons that “provide direction to the world”? There are two:

1). “Where there is destruction, we must respond with construction.” In other words, help shelter strangers, send medical supplies to the affected areas, and tender other diverse means of help.

 2) “Live a life that matters.” Here’s the good rabbi’s advice:

For when death rears its ugly head, and we are struck with the realization that life – with all of its material pursuits and possessions – is so vulnerable, we are then forced to ask ourselves:

“Am I living a life that matters, or am I wasting it on temporary activities and pleasures? Am I making the important – important, and the trivial – trivial? Am I devoting adequate time and effort to that which will live on forever: my soul, my family, and my values? And have I made a difference yet today in this world, and in someone’s life, with acts of unconditional love and kindness to my loved ones and strangers alike?”

 Except for the “soul” part, this is the same lessons that many secularists can and do draw from physical tragedy: help other people who are afflicted and, realizing your life is ephemeral, make every day count. As James Taylor (not a rabbi) wrote, “Shower the people you love with love.”)

It’s telling that a rabbi, faced with the hardest questions of theodicy, retreats into pure secularism. You don’t need any god to support those answers, and you don’t need any rabbi to give them.

Reza Aslan: There’s no divide between Islam and American culture—it’s people, not religion

July 27, 2017 • 10:00 am

If you’re willing to be a bit mendacious, there are two guaranteed ways to make a lot of dosh in America. The first is to pretend that you’ve had a near-death experience and have temporarily visited Heaven, seeing God, Jesus, and your long-dead relatives and friends. This reassures Christians that all will be well after death. An example of someone enriching himself in this way is neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who, though his book Proof of Heaven has been thoroughly debunked, continues to rake in oodles of cash thanks to credulous Christians.

The second is to pretend that religion is a uniformly good phenomenon—that nothing bad comes from it. Anything like the terrors of Islamist extremism, or the Troubles of Northern Ireland, comes from culture, not faith. Were there not religion, these apologists aver, something else would take its place, causing precisely equal amounts of evil.

Although Mariam Sobh made an odious video claiming that ex-Muslims (read: Ayaan Hirsi Ali) were motivated to leave the faith by the prospect of gaining fame and money by criticizing Islam, there’s a big downside to that: fear of death. A vociferous ex-Muslim is a threatened ex-Muslim, and that’s why Hirsi Ali has bodyguards. It’s much safer and easier to extol religion, and these days the big money and fame is in extolling Islam. Guilt-ridden liberals lap that stuff up like cats at a bowl of cream.

The prime examples of those who gain renown from defending religion against all comers are Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan. Today we’re discussing Aslan, who, unchastened by the failure of his CNN “spiritual adventure show” Believer, is back in the pages of Foreign Policy magazine with his piece “Reza Aslan argues: There is no divide between Islam and American culture.”

This claim is problematic for reasons that you already know. First of all, many of the values imparted by Islam, and embraced by many (but not all) of its adherents, are truly in conflict with “American values”, at least as limned by progressives. Islam devalues women: in dress, in property rights, in giving them a role of temptresses, and so on; it is not a big fan of freedom of religion, especially for atheists; and it’s not a big promoter of gay rights or gay marriage. Further, at least as expressed by Linda Sarsour in her recent “jihad” speech, many Muslims, like Orthodox Jews and some extreme sects of Mormons and fundamentalist Christians, prefer to maintain semi-closed communities held together by identity politics. But unlike Orthodox Jews, the goal of some Muslims is to make their faith into a principle of government, for that’s what sharia law is. Here’s what Sarsour said:

Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our community. It is not to assimilate and to please any other people in authority. Our obligation is to our young people, is to our women, to make sure our women are protected in our community, and our top priority, even higher than all those priorities, is to please Allah and only Allah.

Now of course many Muslim-Americans fervently desire to integrate into U.S. culture. Still, one can’t deny that certain values instilled by Islam, like those instilled by Orthodox Judaism and extremist Mormonism, are at odds with values of the wider society. That’s why the hyper-Orthodox and polygamous Mormons segregate themselves in enclaves where they can live their faith without being tainted by secular American culture.

Reza Aslan, of course, denies such a clash, but his reasons are deeply dubious:

There is no clash between Islam and American culture. In fact, there is no clash between any religion and any culture because religions are inextricably linked to culture.

Think of it this way: Culture is like a vessel, and religion is like water — it simply takes the shape of whatever vessel you pour it into. And this is why the prosperity gospel — the notion that what Jesus really wants for you is to drive a Bentley — can exist in the United States, and why the liberation gospel — the notion that Jesus was a warrior who fought oppression and poverty — exists in El Salvador. Both versions of Christianity are equally valid. They’re just dependent on the culture of the community to which they belong.

When you look at Islam in the United States what you see is an overwhelmingly moderate version of Islam, but more interestingly what you see is a highly individualistic form of the religion. Islam is a religion that often advantages the community over the individual, but in the United States, where the culture is rooted in radical individualism, you see a radically individualistic Islam forming.

The last paragraph itself notes the possibility of a clash between Islam and American culture, and yes, not all Muslims in the U.S. become “radical individualists.” But the first paragraph is just nonsense. When a minority religious group inhabits a society of a different faith, or no faith, their values not only are often derived from religion, but clash with values of the society in which they’re embedded. When those values deal with things like human “rights”, it can cause trouble. One cannot, for instance, sensibly say that there’s no clash between Islam and European culture, for that clash is painfully evident. (Again, I’m talking about religious values here, not the desire of Muslims to assimilate into Western culture.) It’s better in America, but my own observation of organizations like CAIR and Students for Justice in Palestine convince me that attitudes like Sarsour’s aren’t uncommon.

Because Islam, like Orthodox Judaism, is both a religion and a culture, in the sense of dictating ways of living throughout the day and not just at worship, Aslan can get away with saying that “it’s all culture.” But if large parts of that culture are drawn from religious scripture or dogma, then his statement is tautological and meaningless.

And if religions are inextricably linked to culture, why do you find people of nearly identical cultures, but of different faiths, in clashes that are sometimes deadly. In what respect do Shia and Sunni Muslims have different cultures if you leave out the disparate religious dogma that divides them? In what respect to Muslim men and women, or gays and straights, have different “cultures”? In what respect did Irish Catholics and Protestants have different “cultures”—if you leave out religion? Aslan would argue that these are cultural and not religious differences; but since he sees them as the same thing, that’s simply a ploy to exculpate religion, which is what he gets paid to do.

As the article goes on, Aslan even exculpates culture, saying “it’s just different people” who cause the supposed clashes. But here he slips up, because he then admits that these people are reflecting different “ideologies”, and ideology can include religion:

So he says this:

The clashes we see are created by people, not by culture or religion. When people say Islam doesn’t fit in with American culture, what they really mean is that it does not fit with their sense of self and their conception of themselves as Americans. It does not jibe with how they understand what Islam means. But they are doing what most people do when they try to define themselves, which is that they are defining themselves in opposition to an other. And for a great many Americans, that other is Islam. They know nothing about Muslims. They know nothing about the religion or its history. It’s just that Islam becomes a byword for whatever is not American.

But that contradicts this, which he states in the previous paragraph:

When people talk about the clash between religion and culture, it mostly stems from ideological reasons. Ideologies are predicated on certain absolutes, which provide a certain confidence about people’s identities and where they belong in the world. It’s how people construct their very understanding of the universe. Ideologies can include religion, but they can include nationalism, culture, and race. People who tend to fall back on ideologies are trying to create a sense of stability about who they are and how they see themselves in the world.

What this means is that the “people” who are said to clash with American culture, and here I’m referring to Muslims, are doing so because their ideology (read: Islam) gives them a sense of identity that is not the same as the “identity” of Americans. Yes, Americans have ideologies, too, but the clash I’m worried about is not between Christian ideology and Muslim ideology. I have no patience with Christians who demonize Muslims because they’re not down with Jesus as a prophet. What I do worry about, and what Aslan brushes off, is the feeling that Islam fosters values inimical to those that many Americans embrace, especially the values of democracy above theocracy and the notion of equal rights for all, regardless of sex, religion, or sexual orientation. This is not a clash between two religions. It’s a clash between religious values and Enlightenment values. I would not want to live in a country whose values and institutions reflect the ideas of Linda Sarsour.

Sarsour and Aslan are both dangerous because they want us to avert our eyes from a theology that is explicitly anti-democratic, and because that theology motivates terrible oppression against both Muslims and non-Muslims. Remember, outside the U.S (and even to some degree within it, Islam oppresses half of its own adherents: the women.

As far as I know (I don’t check), the only other person who blocks me on Twitter is P. Z. Myers.

Fox News op-ed: The things atheists like really point to God

July 9, 2017 • 11:30 am

Here’s another series of insupportable arguments for theism, this time in the Fox News op-ed section. The piece has the provocative title of “Could zombies, jazz artists, and scientists all point to God?“, and it’s by Rick Stedman, whose answer is “YES!” His website describes him like this:

[Rick Stedman] is a collector of classic-rock vinyl LPs, bookaholic, author, philosopher, pastor, and devoted husband and father. He founded and for two decades led Adventure Christian Church in Roseville, California. He has graduate degrees in theology, philosophy, and ministry, and for relaxation likes to tinker in his garage, read, listen to music, and hang out with his wife and best friend, Amy.

He also wrote this book, which is Amazon’s #1 new release in Christian Apologetics (click screenshot to go to the Amazon site):

Amazon’s summary of the book, below, suggests that it’s a full-length treatment of the argument Stedman makes in his Fox piece:

We’ve all had doubts about God’s existence—or we know people who have. What if we could uncover evidence of the reality of God that would bolster our faith or plant seeds of belief in the hearts of skeptics?

This 31-day intellectual journey reveals hints of the divine all around us—in what we believe, what we love, what we have, and what we know. Discover how sports, superheroes, science, and dozens of other topics point to unexpected clues of God’s existence.

This carefully reasoned yet whimsical approach to a perplexing topic paves the way for meaningful dialogue between those who believe in God and those who are skeptical.

No species of books is more likely to include a success than one “proving” the existence of God or Heaven (a possible exception are books about rich men who practice acceptably light bondage during sex).

But I digress. The story that Stedman tells at Fox is that an atheist whose wife was becoming a Christian asked her husband to speak to Stedman, hoping that the pastor could convince her husband join her in delusion.  Stedman, who flaunts his expertise in religious discourse (“Oh pleeease,” I moaned inwardly, “he thinks he has me pegged. He has no clue that I studied Ph.D.-level philosophy at a secular university, or that I’ve talked with many, many skeptics over the years. Plus, I’m a pastor, so I should be better at this whole patience thing by now, so get a grip and listen…”), sighs and begins to convince the nonbeliever. He has three arguments, two of which are familiar. The indented bits are Stedman’s:

1.) You can’t prove that the scientific method reveals truth from the method itself (or presumably from a priori philosophical considerations):

Over the years I’ve simply learned to find common ground with skeptics and atheists, and prompt them to think deeply about the things they value.

So I began with science. “I’m glad you love science and always seek to follow the scientific method. I love science too. But I’ve noticed that there are some things the scientific method just can’t prove.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there are many, but this is a big one: you can’t prove the scientific method by the scientific method.”

Silence. Again—awkward.

Actually, I’m surprised that anyone still uses this argument, but it’s quite common. And it’s easily refuted. Yes, there’s no way to prove a priori that the scientific method “works” (i.e., presumably finds out what’s true about the cosmos). But so what? It’s an approach to finding out what’s true that’s been honed over several centuries, and IT WORKS! Presumably Pastor Stedman takes antibiotics or other drugs when he’s ill, flies in planes, uses the Internet or GPS devices, and accepts the truth of evolution and black holes. I’m sure he thinks that a molecule of regular water has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atoms.  These were all worked out by a method that Stedman says can’t be justified.  In fact, when you’re faced with an empirical puzzle, the best way to solve it is through science. (Actually, the observation that science works refutes Stedman’s claim that “you can’t prove the scientific method by the scientific method.” The fact that the scientific method works shows that it is indeed efficacious at finding truth.)

There are two more responses that atheists should know (if you have others, put them in the comments). The first is that the same argument holds for religious belief, but holds even more strongly, because religion has NO track record of finding out truths about the cosmos. We know this because there are thousands of religions, each making different claims about reality and god, and there’s no way to find out which, if any, is true. At least science has a way of testing its claims, and that’s why we rely on science rather than faith to find out what’s true. Revelation and dogma are no way of arriving at truth. If they were, there would be only one religion, and we could just ask God which drugs would be good for which diseases.

Finally, it surprises me that the absence of an a priori philosophical justification for using the scientific method is somehow taken as evidence for the presence of God. How does that work? It’s not even a god-of-the-gaps argument; it’s just dumb.

2.) Many famous scientists were religious, and science arose from Christianity.

So I [Stedman] asked, “Who are your all-time favorite scientists?”

“Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein,” he responded.

“Me too. Incredible geniuses, every one. And, by the way, all of them believed in God. Especially Newton, who wrote more pages on biblical studies than he did on science.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s true,” I said, “Also, did you know that the scientific method developed only in western civilization because it was based on Christian principles?”

“That’s not true.”

“Well, I have graduate degrees in philosophy and theology, and there are some fabulous books by science historians that verify this—one just published recently from Oxford. Would you be interested in reading it with me, and discussing chapters over lunch?”

“I would love that!” He exclaimed, “And so will my wife!” We both laughed.

In the years that followed, he and I read dozens of books together. And he became a close friend—and, in time, a fellow believer.

Well that shut the damn atheist up (and changed his mind!). Sadly, the only reason that famous scientists of the distant past were religious was because everyone was religious. If you took this tack, you’d have to claim that everything devised by humans in the West before the 18th century is evidence for God: the printing press, steam engines, telescopes, slide rules, barometers, adding machines, and so on. And of course a lot of bad people were religious, too, and a lot of harm was done from “Christian principles” (the Inquisition with its torture devices, the Crusades, the religious wars of Europe, and so on). If good stuff is to be laid at the door of God, so is bad stuff. By the way, nobody pays any attention to Newton’s religious writings any more, and what religion did enter his science (e.g., his claim that God must keep the planetary orbits stable) made that science worse.

Einstein, of course, was a secular Jew, who asserted repeatedly that he didn’t accept a personal or theistic God. My best guess is that he was a pantheist who saw “religion” as “the awe before the laws of physics.”

As for science being based on Christian principles, I don’t really accept that. One can argue that some religious institutions supported science, like medieval universities, but religion hampered free inquiry and suppressed science as well. I suspect that had Christianity not been invented, we’d be farther ahead now in science than we are.

And science isn’t really a western invention; it was employed, for instance, by the ancient Greeks, who certainly weren’t Christian. Science as a going concern and as a profession did develop in Europe, but there are other reasons for that as well, including commerce, communication, and the Enlightenment.

Finally, in what respect does the fact that many scientists (and all their countrymen) were religious give evidence for God’s existence?

3.) Many secular pursuits and avocations of atheists really testify to God’s existence. This is perhaps Stedman’s most bizarre argument—one that seems to be a major theme of his book—but I don’t understand it at all. Read and weep:

Since then I’ve had numerous encounters with other skeptics and have always found that we share much in common. We love music, whether classic rock or jazz; we enjoy movies and books, from sci-fi to zombies; and we like sports or museums. Plus, we strongly oppose sex trafficking here and around the world, we despise people who are cruel to animals, and we think Hitler was evil and deserved to be defeated.

But the biggest surprise of all was when I looked deeper into these diverse likes and dislikes, and I found that each of them, in their own unique but definite way, pointed to God. That is, each made more sense in a theistic worldview than in an atheistic one.

I’ve learned that God is indeed real, but he hides in our deepest likes and loathings, ready to reveal himself to us in the very parts of life that we care most about.

I call this The Argument from Charlie Parker. (You could equally well call it the Argument from Hitler.) All these secular pursuits point to God? How, exactly? Pastor Stedman doesn’t answer this burning question. I guess you’ll have to read his book to find out how sci-fi and museums point to God, but I’ll leave that pursuit to someone with a stronger stomach.

h/t: Laura

The Young Turks show and The Spectator on the London attacks: the former ignores religion, the latter indicts it

June 10, 2017 • 1:00 pm

The Young Turks news show has become increasingly regressive as time goes on. Here’s a 13-minute video with hosts John Iadarola, Ana Kasparian, and Michael Shure discussing the recent terrorist attacks on London.

Two words are completely missing from the long discussion: “Muslim” and “Islam.” I don’t think that omission is accidental.

The tone was set in the opening statement by Iadorolo: “In terms of exactly who they are, I don’t care about that–they’re assholes who got what they deserved for an absolutely terrible attack, especially considering that the Manchester attack just happened; but even that wasn’t the first attack in the UK. That’s very rough.”  Well, some of us care who they are! The U.S. and British governments, for one thing.

And so it goes on, with Shure blaming George W. Bush and Tony Blair (via the Iraq War) for the terrorost attacks and the subsequent blame the fell on “that community” (a.k.a. Muslims). At 4:29, Kasparian refuses to name the terrorists, even though their names had been released by the police. Why? Could it because they had names that sounded like Muslims? At 8:39, Kasparian mentions “this group of people” (she means Muslims), and blames “Western governments [who are] killing innocent civilians in Middle Eastern countries.” She goes on to say that the attacks are due to those people who get angered at drone strikes and enact retribution, saying that we’re “missing the mark because we let our emotions get in the way.” In other words, the terrorism is the fault of the West, and it’s understandable that an angry Muslim would want to blow up a bunch of kids in Manchester or diners in London.

The whole discussion judiciously avoids not only the topic of religion but even the name of the religion. It’s Islamist apologetics and West-blaming of the worst stripe. I was no fan of the Iraq war, but I don’t think that it somehow makes the retaliatory killing of other innocent civilians justified. Kasparian’s conclusion, given later on, is that the solution to Islamist terrorism is for the West to stop bombing other countries. Perhaps that will help, but we already know the problems with that “solution” (see also here). It’s not going to stop Muslims from attacking other Muslims, or Islamists from attacking in the West.

*********

In contrast, Tom Holland, identified by the Spectator as “a historian of early Islam, [and] a dinosaur enthusiast and a translator of Herodotus’s Histories,” has no problem indicting religion as a major cause of these attacks, and something essential to recognize if we want to solve the problem. His new Spectator article, “After five centuries, religious war has returned to Britain,” is a passionate defense of his view that Britain is now in a faith-against-faith (or faith-against apostasy) battle. Now you won’t be able to read his piece as it’s behind a paywall, but judicious inquiry might yield you a copy.  Here are two excerpts:

But then, last Saturday night, religiously motivated killing returned to London Bridge. Three men, swerving to murder as many pedestrians as they could, drove a rented van across the very spot where severed heads had been fixed to the bridge’s southern gatepost. They crashed opposite Tooley Street. Then, brandishing long knives, they plunged into the warren of streets and passageways around Southwark Cathedral where, back in the reign of Mary, six high-ranking clergymen had been tried and convicted of heresy. For eight terrible minutes, terrorists — no less convinced than Tudor inquisitors had been that they were the agents of a stern and implacable god — visited slaughter upon Borough Market. Just four days later, another group of Islamists, equally fanatical and set on martyrdom attacked the Iranian parliament and Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum in Tehran, killing at least 12 people and injuring many more.

The London Bridge attackers wanted us to be in no doubt about their motivation. ‘This is for Allah,’ they shouted, as they slashed and stabbed their victims. When they could, they slit people’s throats — just as Isis executioners in Syria, claiming obedience to a command in the Quran ‘to strike off the heads of unbelievers’, had slit the throats of western hostages. Shot by police marksmen, the three men were hailed by supporters of Isis as ‘martyrs’.

Sometimes it can be hard to recognise ghosts for what they are. Reactions to the atrocities committed on Saturday — as to the atrocities committed only a few short weeks previously in Manchester and on Westminster Bridge — have mingled despair with perplexity. We just don’t understand violent religion.

And this:

And yet, for all that, it is clear that the legacy of Islamic supremacism, deriving as it does from both the Quran and sayings of Mohammed, still has a potent and seductive appeal. Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be precisely the integration into Islam of the Western notion of human rights that is helping to fuel its recrudescence. After all, if — as Muslims believe — their religion is the last and ultimate of God’s revelations, then any dimunition of its purity, any dilution of its traditions, can all too easily be portrayed as a lethal threat to the entire future of humanity. Isis, who have pointedly reintroduced both the jizya and slavery, are merely the most extreme of those factions within Islam who insist that Muslims, far from compromising with the values of the West, should instead seek to destroy them utterly.

We are witnessing a civil war within Islam and the three men who brought carnage to Borough Market last Saturday did not see themselves as murderers, but rather as warriors. They imagined that they had been divinely summoned — just as Mohammed had been — to the overthrow of kufr: unbelief.

No laws, no increase in police numbers, no boost to the powers of the security services can adequately patrol such ideas. Only by directly confronting these beliefs do we have even the faintest prospect of diminishing their potency. To do that, though, will first require acknowledging what Isis and their cohorts in the West actually embody: a strain of Islam that has its roots deep in the past, and which, as our most careful analyst of Isis, Shiraz Maher, has put it, ‘believes in progression through regression’. To dismiss it, as Theresa May did, as ‘a perversion of Islam’ is not merely to close our eyes to the nature of the threat that it presents to Britain’s future as a free society; it actively risks making it worse.

So as we begin the inevitable discussion about what to do next, the first step ought to be a fairly basic one: recognise the problem.

And that’s what people like The Young Turks adamantly fail to do.

CNN cancels Reza Aslan’s t.v. documentary, “Believer”, but for bad reasons

June 10, 2017 • 10:30 am

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Reza Aslan. I dislike his apologetics for and whitewashing of Islam, his osculation of all faiths and false claim that, at bottom, they’re all the same, and his flaunting of his  bogus credentials that he’s a “religious scholar.” His CNN show about religion, “Believer,” which I’ve written about before (here, here, and here), hasn’t been favorably reviewed (see the recent mixed review in the New Yorker as well as the last link), and the bits I’ve seen have been dire (I haven’t watched the whole series).

“Believer” was going to go into a second season after the first six episodes, but CNN announced a few days ago that the show would be canceled. My Schadenfreude, however, has been considerably tempered by the reasons for the cancellation: not because the show was bad—though I gather it was, and the parts I saw were abysmal—but because Aslan issued a series of nasty tw**ts about Trump. As CNN itself reported:

The network said Friday that it has “decided to not move forward with production” on Aslan’s “Believer” series.

Season one of “Believer” premiered in March. Season two was announced at an event for advertisers in mid-May. Aslan’s production company had already started working on the new episodes.

But the network decided to break off the production relationship after Aslan called President Trump a piece of excrement, using an expletive, last Saturday.

. . . Aslan has been a virulent critic of Trump for some time, but this particular tweet crossed a line in the minds of some media critics. Prominent conservatives weighed in and said they wanted Aslan to be fired.

Aslan posted the tweet in reaction to Trump’s promotion of a “travel ban” in the immediate aftermath of a terror attack in London.

“I lost my cool and responded to him in a derogatory fashion. That’s not like me,” Aslan said in a statement the next day. “I should have used better language to express my shock and frustration at the president’s lack of decorum and sympathy for the victims of London. I apologize for my choice of words.”

CNN responded in a statement: “We are pleased that he has apologized for his tweets. That kind of discourse is never appropriate.”

The network’s statement also pointed out that Aslan is not a CNN employee. Unwinding the contractual relationship with Aslan’s production company apparently took several days.

CNN’s Friday statement about the cancellation of “Believer” said, “We wish Reza and his production team all the best.”

Here are the tweets at issue. I believe at least some of them have been deleted, but I can’t check because Aslan has blocked me from seeing his Twitter feed. These I got from Google image:

 

Now I wouldn’t have issued those tweets were I doing a show for CNN, even though I agree with Aslan’s sentiments, but he has to maintain a certain level of decorum. Even if he wanted to criticize Trump publicly, I wouldn’t have used “piece of shit,” nor will I use it on my own tweets now. Here’s his apology:

And here’s his statement that appeared his Facebook page:

That’s reasonable, but the part about “I need to honor my voice” rankles a bit since “honoring his voice” means using scatological language. I can’t imagine a public figure such as Neil deGrasse Tyson issuing tweets like that.

However, I’m not sure why someone who’s doing a CNN show has to mute their political opinions. I suppose the threats from conservatives were distressing to the network, and I guess there are journalistic considerations at issue that I don’t fully understand. Still, this amounts to a kind of censorship. Why couldn’t CNN have asked Aslan to apologize, and then let him continue the show? It may be the case that because the show didn’t get good reviews, their reason for canceling it could have been twofold.

But CNN’s statement prevents me from celebrating the cancellation of a dreadful show—not if it was done for political reasons. I thus share the sentiments of Ali Rizvi expressed below:

And I’m sure that Aslan, as greedy for fame as he is, will find plenty of other venues where he can express his misguided views.

h/t: Barry