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.

I am honored by theologians: there’s now a “Coyne Fallacy”!!!

January 3, 2017 • 1:00 pm

Who knew? For two years there has been a theological fallacy named after me, one imparted to me just today by reader Jon. Now I’m not sure how far this fallacy has spread among theologians, but I hope it goes far, for it’s ineffably stupid. The post in which it appears was written by William M. Briggs, whose website gives his name and the subtitle “Statistician to the Stars.”

First, who is William M. Briggs? Well, he answer the question on his site: “Who is W.M.B.?”

Me

I am wholly independent; i.e., I have no position. I depend on you, dear reader, for my livelihood. I do not jest. The burden is on you. Hire the Dancing Briggs. Spread the word.

Résumé

Currently a vagabond statistician and Adjunct Professor of Statistics at Cornell. Thought leader (have your thoughts led by me). Previously a Professor at the Cornell Medical School, a Statistician at DoubleClick in its infancy, a Meteorologist with the National Weather Service, and a sort of Cryptologist with the US Air Force (the only title I ever cared for was Staff Sergeant Briggs).

No comment.

Here’s a photo:

On to The Coyne Fallacy, laid out in Brigg’s post about a terminally smug and arrogant book by Sophisticated Theologian™ David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox Christian whose views I’ve criticized before (see here). The book is The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, which I’ve read and discussed (see here and here, for instance). It purveys the brand of Sophisticated Theology™ that sneers at atheists but also claims a knowledge of what God is really like: and he turns out of course, not to be the kind of God that most Christians accept. (Think of a Ground of Being: an Orthodox version of Karen Armstrong.) But Hart knows better, for, due to his Deep Thinkings, he has a Pipeline to God Himself.

It’s not surprising that Briggs likes Hart’s book, because it posits a kind of God that can’t be empirically disproven. How do you know He exists, then? Briggs tell us!:

The transcendent God can be “‘investigated’ only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and induction and conjecture or, on the other, by contemplative or sacramental or spiritual experiences.”

Hmm. . . a God immune to refutation by observation.

And, says, Briggs, the theistic, in-your-life savior God is a fiction concocted by atheists, because Christians don’t accept that kind of God! (my emphasis):

Because it turns out that the god modern-day atheists have in mind, what Hart calls the Demiurge, is a god Christians also reject. The Demiurge is a kind of “superior being”, a being like any other only more so, and it is this small-g god that the man-in-the-street atheist, and certainly those well known celebrity authors, find implausible or ridiculous. And so does the theologian.

Really, do Christians really reject the Demiurge? Because here are the data on what all Americans (not just Christians) believe, taken from a 2013 Harris poll:

Sounds like a Demiurge to me. But wait! Briggs then does a 180-turn, claiming that the average Christian doesn’t know who God is, and he/she might really believe in The Wrong Kind of God. Then we have to call in theologians like Hart to correct us:

Of the God, the necessary Being, the new atheist knows little to nothing. Well, maybe the Christian-, Muslim-, or Hindu-in-the-street knows little of Him either, in the sense of being unable to write down a philosophically consistent definition of just who and what God is. The theologian, however, can, and this is Hart’s task. To definite, delimit, demarcate just what it is the great religious traditions say about God. Hart’s isn’t a work of apologetics nor a list of proofs of God’s existence. It is an in-depth examination that spells out precisely who God is. Something very necessary for those who say they don’t believe in God: just what is it you don’t believe?

Now I’m not sure what the Great Religious Traditions are, but they are surely varied, even among Christians, and many are literalist. Read Aquinas or Augustine to see how literalistic they are, and how specific about the nature of God. How wrong they must have been–to have to be corrected by the likes of David Bentley Hart! What’s worse is the notion that theologians can distill these traditions and give us an idea of who god really is—in the absence of any evidence for a God. (Remember, though—Briggs thinks we don’t need that.)

But I must get to My Fallacy. Here it is:

Let’s get one popular fallacy out of the way. This is the most-people-believe-what’s-false-therefore-it’s-false fallacy, or the Coyne fallacy, named after its most frequent user, Jerry Coyne. This fallacy is used to reject a proposition because most people misunderstand or hold false beliefs about that proposition. So that if the average church or temple goer has a definition of God that suffers certain inconsistencies, therefore God doesn’t exist. If you accept that then you’d have to believe that since the average citizen has mistaken ideas about evolution (holding to Intelligent Design, say), therefore evolution is false. Truth is not a vote.

That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. The fallacy, ascribed to me, is to claim that because a group misunderstands the nature of something, that thing doesn’t exist. So it’s just as false to say God doesn’t exist because some Christians (or atheists) have a “false” notion of who He is as it is to say that evolution doesn’t exist because many people misunderstand it.

And yes, many people do misunderstand evolution. But there’s a difference between evolution and God. Do I need to point out that we have evidence for evolution but not for any kind of god, from Demiurge to the Ground of Being? That’s a big difference. So we can correct misunderstandings about evolution because, as evolutionary biologists, we know how it works. David Bentley Hart has only a knowledge of what other theologians said and whatever revelations strike him when contemplating the Numinous.

So, in contrast to the evolutionary process, neither David Bentley Hart, Briggs, nor anybody else knows who God really is—or even if there’s a god.

I am thus somewhat saddened to see that the Coyne Fallacy is lame—a version of the Courtier’s Reply. And, in the end, Briggs’s argument shows the Fallacy of the Coyne Fallacy.

I can haz better Coyne Fallacy pleez?

Adam and Eve: More than two ancestors?

December 27, 2016 • 12:45 pm

I’ve posted repeatedly (e.g., here) about the dilemma that Adam and Eve pose for some believers, since population genetics shows not only that our species never dipped below a total of about 12,500 in the last 50,000 years or so. That directly contravenes Catholic (and some evangelical) doctrine that Adam and Eve were real people and the ancestors of us all. This is codified in Pope Pius XII’s 1950 statement from De Humani Generis (my emphasis):

37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism [that we descended from more than just two people], the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

In other words, the Pope said that all living humans, starting with Adam, had to be descended from him, and that Adam cannot simply stand for a “certain number” of first parents. Not accepting the statement above means you don’t accept Church dogma. Of course, theologians are still busy trying to force the idea of Adam and Eve into the Procrustean Bed of population genetics, with the predictably risible results.

A few days ago I got an email from reader John, who said this:

“There’s one thing I don’t believe you addressed that I’ve recently seen sophists (err, theists) suggesting: that each of us is related to either Adam *or* Eve, but not necessarily to both–i.e. that there was an initial pool of 10,000+ humans, and only Adam and Eve had souls, but at this point all living human beings are distantly related to either Adam or Eve (but not necessarily to both of them).”

He then pointed me to a reddit thread on Adam and Eve, in which one commenter tried to reconcile Catholic doctrine with the evidence that the human population didn’t undergo a bottleneck of only two people. The commenter said this:

You are not engaging my point, and ignoring my argument for it. To remake my point, then. Catholic doctrine does not require a bottleneck of only two people. To insist that all people are descended from one particular pair does not equate to saying that all people are descended from only that particular pair. Here’s a visual representation of my point: all the yellow blocks are descended from the red pair, but at no point is there a bottleneck of only two people.

In other words, Adam and Eve for some reason, were two among many people (A&E in red), but that all living people somehow can trace their ancestry back to the Primal Couple. But this violates both science and the Pope’s doctrine in several ways. First, there are clearly “true men after Adam who did note take their origin through natural generation from him as the first parent at all.” These are the white rectangles in the second row, and of course there would have been many more white rectangles had there been more than six people alive, and those rectangles would have extended into future generations. Second, the Bible clearly says that Adam and Eve were the only two people around then; it doesn’t mention a population of humans created with them. If you’re going to take Adam and Eve as literal ancestors, why not accept that they also were the only two humans on Earth?

Further, as I wrote in the thread above, were Adam and Eve the genetic ancestors of all of us, then

. . . all the genes of every living human should “coalesce” back to the same time and the same two people. But we don’t see that either: each gene segment had its ancestor at a different time (and often at a different place) in the past: the Y chromosome, for instance, coalesces back to an ancestor who lived about 60,000 years more recently than the female ancestor who bequeathed us the genes in our mitochondria. So this solution is also untenable.\\

And that solution is untenable even if you think we all inherited Adam’s Y chromosome (if we’re male) and Eve’s mitochondrion.

Now this of course leaves aside how “Original Sin” is inherited. It cannot segregate like a gene, which is present in pairs and thus a given gene has a 50% chance of getting into a single offspring. Rather, Original Sin must be passed on to EVERY offspring. So if every offspring of an Adam and Eve, and all their descendants, had Original Sin—as if it were a virus spread by both sperm and egg—then yes, every living person could have Original Sin, if you see them as all descended from Adam and Eve. But the genetic data show that even the claim, that Adam and Eve lived at the same time, is wrong. Ergo, there’s no way to save the Catholic dogma on the First Couple. It is, as all rational people realize, a complete fiction: a story descending from the ignorant childhood of our species.

Nicholas Kristof, religious doubter, interviews a dead certain Christian pastor

December 25, 2016 • 11:15 am

We have to have at least one post about religion today, and here it is.

Oy! The New York Times, for its Sunday Christmas Review, features a long interview of Pastor Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian whom the interviewer, Nicholas Kristof, characterizes as “among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today.” Keller is also the author of the best-selling books The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith, and Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God.

The interview, called “Am I a Christian, Pastor Timothy Keller?“, is characterized by Kristof expressing his doubts about Jesus’s divinity, the truth of the Resurrection, and the Christian doctrine that only acceptance of Jesus as savior will get you to Heaven. Keller slaps these doubts down one by one, assuring Kristof that yes, all these things are true, and that Christianity is certainly based on true statements about how the world is. (That’s a point I made in Faith Versus Fact, but one that many religionists still deny, claiming that much of the Bible is metaphorical, and yes, everyone has the chance to go to Heaven, be they Jew, Buddhist, or Muslim.

In the end, Keller tells Kristof that he, Kristof, is not really a Christian!

Here are a few bits of the Q&A that I’ve put under my own headings (bold). Kristof’s questions are in italics, Keller’s answers in Roman type.

Religion is based on truth statements, not just communality or moral sentiments. Absent those empirical truths, religion is worthless:

KRISTOF Tim, I deeply admire Jesus and his message, but am also skeptical of themes that have been integral to Christianity — the virgin birth, the Resurrection, the miracles and so on. Since this is the Christmas season, let’s start with the virgin birth. Is that an essential belief, or can I mix and match?

KELLER If something is truly integral to a body of thought, you can’t remove it without destabilizing the whole thing. A religion can’t be whatever we desire it to be. If I’m a member of the board of Greenpeace and I come out and say climate change is a hoax, they will ask me to resign. I could call them narrow-minded, but they would rightly say that there have to be some boundaries for dissent or you couldn’t have a cohesive, integrated organization. And they’d be right. It’s the same with any religious faith.

Kristof then asks whether one can be properly skeptical of the Virgin Birth. Keller’s response:

If it were simply a legend that could be dismissed, it would damage the fabric of the Christian message. Luc Ferry, looking at the Gospel of John’s account of Jesus’ birth into the world, said this taught that the power behind the whole universe was not just an impersonal cosmic principle but a real person who could be known and loved. That scandalized Greek and Roman philosophers but was revolutionary in the history of human thought. It led to a new emphasis on the importance of the individual person and on love as the supreme virtue, because Jesus was not just a great human being, but the pre-existing Creator God, miraculously come to earth as a human being.

And that is that! Then Kristof, chastened, asks about the Resurrection: did it really happen? Keller, of course, says “yes”:

Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19).

. . . The Christian Church is pretty much inexplicable if we don’t believe in a physical resurrection.

They then go back and forth on the Resurrection, with Kristof, who knows his Scripture, pointing out the discrepancies in the different Gospels’ accounts of that miracle, with Keller proffering the usual apologetics, rationalizing these discrepancies and making the dumb claim that the Resurrection must have happened because women were the first eyewitnesses, and who would have believed women if the story wasn’t really true? QED

Can you be a Christian unless you buy the whole hog?

Kristof, then, wonders if he’s a real Christian. Keller dashes what hopes he had:

[Kristof] So where does that leave people like me? Am I a Christian? A Jesus follower? A secular Christian? Can I be a Christian while doubting the Resurrection?

[Keller] I wouldn’t draw any conclusion about an individual without talking to him or her at length. But, in general, if you don’t accept the Resurrection or other foundational beliefs as defined by the Apostles’ Creed, I’d say you are on the outside of the boundary.

Faith, says Keller, is perfectly concordant with science, and, anyway, we have lots of faith-based beliefs.

When asked why would should suspend our skepticism when it comes to religion, and just take things on faith, Keller drags in Tom Nagel, a philosopher who is one of the doubters of materialism when it comes to evolution and consciousness—though Nagel is not a believer. (Read Allen Orr’s negative review of Nagel’s ideas.)

I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.

But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience. Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.

But of course Nagel is buying the “The Something of the Gaps” argument, one that is deeply flawed. We can alter consciousness (or remove it and then bring it back) by material intervention, which is pretty good evidence that consciousness is indeed a material phenomenon, even if we don’t yet understand how it works or how it evolved. Keller goes on:

In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe. He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.

Here Keller is conflating the religious view of faith (“believe these fairy tales without evidence”), with a confidence we have that if we treat people better, our society will wind up the way we want. Yes, it is a preference to favor human rights and equality over human non-rights and inequality, but you can at least see what kind of societies result from different interventions, finding out if what you wanted comports with what you do. Morality is also a preference (I don’t believe that moral values are objective), but I wouldn’t call it a “faith”, since it’s not belief without evidence. Your choice of a moral system is no more a “faith” than is your preference for steak over tilapia or chocolate ice cream over broccoli.

Keller’s non-Bayesian view of God.

Keller seems to think that because we don’t really know whether God exists, the odds must be about 50/50. But what about the priors: the lack of any evidence for a god, much less the Christian God? There are, after all, such things as likelihoods, and Keller’s embrace of Christianity seems no more rational than a Muslim’s embrace of the Qur’an as the literal truth:

I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.

. . . I’d also encourage doubters of religious teachings to doubt the faith assumptions that often drive their skepticism. While Christians should be open to questioning their faith assumptions, I would hope that secular skeptics would also question their own. Neither statement — “There is no supernatural reality beyond this world” and “There is a transcendent reality beyond this material world” — can be proven empirically, nor is either self-evident to most people. So they both entail faith. Secular people should be as open to questions and doubts about their positions as religious people.

Of course one can’t prove there is no god, but, as Victor Stenger used to say, “The absence of evidence is the evidence of absence—if there should have been evidence.” If God wants us to accept him and his son, why did he withhold the evidence from us, and in fact allow most of the world to believe in non-Christian faiths that Keller absolutely rejects? I’m sure Keller would reject all kinds of things (like Russell’s teapot) for which there’s as little evidence as there is for his Christianity. We simply have no evidence for a God, just like we have no evidence for a real Santa Claus. The sensible and parsimonious thing to do is provisionally reject a god.

Non-Christians don’t get saved.

Sophisticated Theologians™ twist themselves in knots trying to show that yes, even Jews, Muslims, Hindus and—except for Edward Feser—even dogs can be saved. Keller slaps them all down, though he can’t really give a good reason why all those non-Christians will broil in Hell. In the end, Keller just punts and says salvation is reserved for Christians because the Bible says so. But of course the Qur’an is clear on the same issue, but with respect to Muslims. And, in the end, Keller punts again and says, well, God’s ways are mysterious (my emphasis in the following):

The Bible makes categorical statements that you can’t be saved except through faith in Jesus (John 14:6; Acts 4:11-12). I’m very sympathetic to your concerns, however, because this seems so exclusive and unfair. There are many views of this issue, so my thoughts on this cannot be considered the Christian response. But here they are:

You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.

Christians believe that it is those who admit their weakness and need for a savior who get salvation. If access to God is through the grace of Jesus, then anyone can receive eternal life instantly. This is why “born again” Christianity will always give hope and spread among the “wretched of the earth.”

I can imagine someone saying, “Well, why can’t God just accept everyone — universal salvation?” Then you create a different problem with fairness. It means God wouldn’t really care about injustice and evil.

There is still the question of fairness regarding people who have grown up away from any real exposure to Christianity. The Bible is clear about two things — that salvation must be through grace and faith in Christ, and that God is always fair and just in all his dealings. What it doesn’t directly tell us is exactly how both of those things can be true together. I don’t think it is insurmountable. Just because I can’t see a way doesn’t prove there cannot be any such way. If we have a God big enough to deserve being called God, then we have a God big enough to reconcile both justice and love.

What a reprehensible and unempathic little toad Keller is! And why did Kristof and the NYT give his blatherings space in the Christmas issue. Where’s an atheist to talk about evidence?

h/t: Barry

Giles Fraser: Terrorists aren’t religious enough (!)

December 23, 2016 • 12:00 pm

Giles Fraser is described by the Guardian as “priest-in-charge at St Mary’s Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral.” He writes regularly for the Guardian, but it’s nothing that is edifying. It’s apologetics, Jake! Fraser has appeared on this website several times before (e.g., here, here, and here), and never in a favorable light.

But his piece in yesterday’s Guardian (he has a column), may be the worst yet. You can tell that from its title, “How to defeat terrorists? True extremism.” Now what on Earth can he mean by that? He starts by talking about the truck that killed people in Berlin’s Christmas market. (The suspect, Anis Amri, has now been killed in Italy, and there’s a video of him pledging allegiance to ISIS.) As a true apologist, Fraser argues that Amri, and other religious terrorists like him (at least Fraser admits religion was involved!) wasn’t a true believer, for a true believer would have trusted Allah to do his own work, rather than enlist a truck driver to do it for him.

The problem with the person who drove a lorry into a crowded market of Christmas shoppers wasn’t that he was too religious, but that he wasn’t religious enough. It was the action of a half-believer, the sort of thing done by someone who doesn’t so much believe in God – but rather believes in the efficacy of human power exercised on God’s behalf, as if God needed his help. As Rowan Williams once put it: “For the person who resorts to random killing in order to promote the honour of God, it is clear that God is not to be trusted. God is too weak to look after his own honour and we are the strong ones who must step in to help him. Such is the underlying blasphemy at work.”

This is about as bogus an argument I can imagine. First of all, it ignores the fact that God, if He exists, allows horrible things to happen to innocent people—children killed by leukemia, tsunamis, and so on. If God was doing his own work, he would be holding back the tides and curing the kids, with no doctors required. The fact is that the whole basis of Christianity, which is clearly laid out in the Bible, is for people to do God’s work: to act in a Godly fashion. Jesus, after all, was setting about his Father’s work.

Christians and their missionaries regularly say they are “doing God’s work.” Nobody calls them “half-believers” despite their conviction that they’re doing what God wants. It’s only when God requires bad acts, as he did regularly in the Old Testament, that one who performs them is called a “half-believer.” Let God commit his own genocide. But in the Qur’an there are repeated calls by Allah (through Muhammad) to smite the unbelievers. Allah tells them to do that. And that is what Amri did.

“The great aim of all true religion,” wrote William Temple, “is to transfer the centre of interest from self to God.” Religious terrorists don’t get this because they still think it’s all about them, and what they can achieve. That’s the heresy. The man who shot the Russian ambassador to Turkey shouted “Allahu Akbar” – that God is great. The thing is, if he really thought that, he wouldn’t have shot the ambassador. His mistake was to think that God was somehow dependent on, and grateful for, his violent assistance.

Oh really? How does Fraser know that the guy who shot the ambassador didn’t think God was great? I suspect that Turkish policeman thought that he was acting as an extension of God. And that’s not a mistake if you interpret the Qur’an in certain ways.

I don’t want to go on with this, as there is nothing a theologian can’t argue from scripture. But in this case Fraser ignores both the Old and New Testament’s call for believers to do God’s will.

Indeed, what Allahu Akbar surely means (and Arabic speaking Christians use the phrase too) is that God needs nothing from me in order to be God. And when this is recognised, I can (sometimes with quite considerable relief) drop all my desperate schemes and arguments that try and keep him going in the face of opposition and disbelief. Indeed, in order to seek to transfer the centre of interest from self to God, to achieve other-centredness, you can’t make it all about you, your spiritual struggle, your religious heroism.

. . . But as Jonathan Swift famously explained: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Which is why I want religious people to be more extreme in their faith, not less; to put aside their own boiling inadequacy and to trust in God’s greatness and that he knows what he is doing.

Moses and Jesus and Muhammad were all extremists. They trusted in God over their instincts. And the shorthand for this is Allahu Akbar – a phrase the terrorists will never understand.

Umm. . . . I think they understand it better than Fraser. And his call for Muslims to be more extremist is one not likely to have good results.

Here’s an exchange Matthew (who does Twi**er) sent me, along with the note, “Tom Holland – historian, Christian, and honest man – points out some problems to sophisticated theologian Giles Fraser.” That’s Tom Holland the author and historian, not Tom Holland the actor, and you might read his Wikipedia bio.

More waste of Templeton money

December 20, 2016 • 11:30 am

Now that execrable organization, bent on blurring the boundaries between science and religion, has its sticky fingers in Oxford University (it’s long invaded Cambridge University). Here’s a worthless series of podcasts, for which Templeton anted up 1.3 million pounds (now about #1.6 million US)

Here are some of the topics. I love the last one (#29)! And. . . epistemic defeat!

screen-shot-2016-12-20-at-10-54-27-am

Now you tell me: was anything substantive added to human knowledge by these lectures? It seems to me they were simply arcane academic exercises designed to buttress fairy tales. How much clean water could have been given to African villages for 1.6 million dollars?

h/t: Dennis

The TLS osculates Christianity

December 17, 2016 • 12:30 pm

I used to write a lot of reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), but I do that no longer. But as far as I’m aware, the TLS is turning into an organ of religious-osculation, with piece after piece making nice to faith. Now I may be wrong, as I don’t subscribe and have to depend on what people send me (surely a biased sample), or what is free online. But what is free online now is pretty dire: an article by Rupert Shortt called “How Christianity invented modernity.” (Note: it’s free this week only.) Shortt is in fact the religion editor of the TLS, so one can get an idea of what their attitude is to religious books—OSCULATION OF FAITH. Shortt is a Christian whose written a book called , Christianophobia: A Faith under Attack, and, as this interview shows, is clearly afflicted with a Christian persecution complex . He’s also written a book about the former Archbishop of Canterbury: Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop, and a theological book called God is No Thing: a Coherent Christianity, which appears to be a polemic against New Atheism.

In this piece Shortt reviews two books: The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values, by Nick Spencer, and Sceptical Christianity: Exploring Credible Belief, by Robert Reiss. The two things you discover on plowing your way through this review is 1. It’s not really a review, but a sermon, setting out Shortt’s views on Christianity and his opprobrium towards nonbelievers (at the end Shortt lapses into full Jonathan Edwards mode) and 2. for a literary editor, Shortt can’t write very well. You’ll see that from the excerpts. I’ll give a few from different areas (indented, with emphases mine), so you can see how his “sophisticated” views consist, as with Sophisticated Theologians™, of academic prose veiling a simple will to believe.

New Atheism: In shortt, he doesn’t like New Atheism because it gives us no purchase for morality. Further, Shortt raises the usual canard that New Atheists criticize only a strawman: a simplified version of Christianity.

First, is secularism really robust enough to carry the freight once shouldered by the Church in Europe? Ask politicians or NGOs about the functional aspect of human rights, say, and you’re likely to get an assured answer. Ask about the source of those rights, or about deeper questions of truth and purpose, and the replies are coy. Second and more significantly, is Moran’s apparent assumption that we are simply dancing a minuet around the void actually true? Armchair philosophers – many of them far less acute than James or Moran – regularly announce that the centre cannot hold. As Terry Eagleton among others has emphasized, such people can purchase their unbelief on the cheap, usually by setting up a straw man version of religion no thoughtful believer could accept, before felling it with a single puff. To counter that things do not fall apart may take courage, or insight of another sort – or maybe just the innocence of a child.

. . .A forward glance – this time taking account not just of postmodern discontents, but also of the formidable forces arrayed on Murdoch’s side of the argument – might reference the work of Charles Taylor or Alasdair MacIntyre in the English-speaking world. Murdoch’s spiritual leanings were idiosyncratic. She accepted tags such as Platonist and Christian Buddhist. But MacIntyre and Taylor, standing at different points on the Catholic spectrum, have set out with greater clarity a revised humanism based on the creative agency of human beings over and against reductive and instrumental patterns of thinking. Their work rests on a potentially far-reaching awareness: that if we are not self-created, we are answerable to a truth we don’t make.

First of all, what does he mean by “answerable to a truth”? Morality is not an objective truth, at least not in my view. Our ethics are devised to conform to our preferences, informed by empirical observation. Throughout the article, Shortt is distressed that there’s no basis for morality without God, and Christianity in particular. The response to this is to show that atheists are at least as moral as religionists, which seems to be the case. If that weren’t true, most of Northern Europe would be a den of perfidy and criminality.

Social contributions of Christianity

Liberalism’s theological pedigree has been forcefully set out by Christopher Insole in The Politics of Human Frailty (2004). He also points to elements of secular thinking in areas like law that a Christian can own and celebrate, for instance John Rawls’s emphasis on the importance of reciprocity, the withholding of coercive power, and the difficulty of making moral judgements given the tangled nature of experience. Here we get a glimpse of Christianity’s protean character. Theology has spawned many schools of thought, both complementary and competing, including secularism itself.

Is that a contribution of religion, or a reaction against religion? I think the latter. Shortt has some chutzpah to give credit to theology for secularism! But don’t forget justice!:

. . . (Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae contains a far more detailed treatise on justice than anything Aristotle provided. It addresses a host of topics including homicide, unjust enrichment, injuries against the person, slander, fraud and professional misconduct.)

Yes, and he also believed in divine punishment, consigning sinners to hell, which is a form of ‘justice’ founded on wish-thinking and social control. I’ll let those more learned than I comment on the nonreligious social contributions of St. Thomas Aquinas. But wait! Shortt gives Christianity credit for almost everything!

In brief, it is no accident that developments including the rule of law, the market economy, democracy and the welfare state have flourished most strongly in traditionally Christian societies. Within the past few generations, the UN Declaration of Human Rights emerged mainly from the hands of Catholics and Protestants working in tandem, while faith-based conviction has mobilized millions of people to oppose authoritarian regimes, inaugurate democratic transitions, and relieve suffering on a grand scale.

What he means is not “traditionally Christian societies”—for much of Western Europe is not Christian now, but is still capitalistic and all that other stuff—but “the West”. And of course Marxism and Nazism, as well as nuclear weapons, also arose in traditionally Christian societies. Further, democracy arose in ancient Greece, not to my knowledge a Christian society.

If Christianity gets all the credit for stuff that arose in the West, then it must take the blame as well. And faith-based conviction has also motivated millions of people to construct and obey authoritarian regimes, and to inflict suffering on a grand scale. (I refer to the Catholicism Shortt lauds.) What galls me most, though, is that Shortt gives Christianity credit for science:

The scientific contributions of Christianity

What is true of social developments applies in large measure to science. Taylor’s A Secular Age (TLS, February 1, 2008) is among the most important works of revisionist scholarship to have overturned religion-versus-science clichés. For all the obduracy of certain theologians and church leaders, modern science did not arise in opposition to religion; on the contrary, it grew in a godly crucible. Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and countless other pioneers were nothing if not serious Christians. The secularist turn only arose later. In establishing his thesis, Spencer supplies bite-sized introductions to the work of contemporary figures including Stephen Gaukroger, Peter Harrison and David Bentley Hart.

My guess is that from the 19th century on, scientists were, by and large, far more atheistic than the general public, a finding clearly documented in modern society. Once again Shortt gives to Christianity everything that arose in the West. The notion that all of these men wouldn’t have made their discoveries if they weren’t religious is dubious, with perhaps the exception of Newton. Note that neither Gaukroger, Harrison, nor Hart are scientists: they are theologians, philosophers, and historians (none is all of these).

Finally, Shortt might be asked, “Well, even if Christianity made those contributions, is it true? Or doesn’t that matter?” It surely does matter, for if the truth claims of Christianity be false, then there’s no reason to prize Christian morality above secular morality—or the morality of any other faith. And Shortt lays out the reasons we should believe in God (clearly the Christian God). For the life of me it all sounds like pure gibberish, but of the academic species:

You cannot (to posit a crazy thought experiment) add up everything in the universe, reach a total of n, then conclude that the final total is n + 1 because you’re also a theist. God belongs to no genus; divinity and humanity are too different to be opposites. By definition, then, no physical analogy will describe our putative creator adequately. We are migrating off the semantic map. But light is among the more helpful. The light in which we see is not one of the objects seen, because we apprehend light only inasmuch as it is reflected off opaque objects. From a monotheistic standpoint, it is the same with the divine light. The light which is God, writes the philosopher Denys Turner, we can see only in the creatures that reflect it. “Therefore . . . when we turn our minds away from the visible objects of creation to God, . . . the source of their visibility, it is as if we see nothing. The world shines with the divine light. But the light which causes it to shine is itself like a profound darkness.”

In other words, we know God exists because humans are godly and the world evinces divinity. But those aren’t the humans and the world I know.

Shortt also recycles the “first cause” argument, though he pretends it’s something else:

Given the hostility of many believers – let alone atheists – to the philosophy of religion, it is important to be clear about what theistic arguments amount to. They do not “prove” the existence of God. Apart from anything, a deity established on the Procrustean bed of human reason would be a small thing by comparison with the Creator who immeasurably surpasses our imaginings. To those who accept any of them, arguments such as Aquinas’s frequently misinterpreted Five Ways establish a more modest premiss: that theism is a valid inference of metaphysical reasoning, because contingent existence is not its own cause. There is no such thing as pure potentiality; even a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is an entity within a structured cosmos. That God defies definition should neither surprise nor trouble enquirers. Reason infers the existence of causes from the existence of effects, without always being able to specify the nature of the causes from the nature of the effects. Perceiving God’s presence is a far cry from knowing what God is.

That’s just the old argument of “everything had a beginning, and the Beginning of the Beginning must have been God.” But that begs the question, because God is defined as not having a contingent existence. Finally, there’s always that good old “leap of faith”: you accept God’s existence simply because you want to. Here Shortt tricks that notion out a bit, but it’s still wish-thinking:

None of this, then, is to downgrade the importance of a leap of faith, better termed a leap of the imagination. Many take a lead from figures including Luther and Pascal here. Pascal thought that God can be expected to appear openly to those who truly search, but to remain hidden from those who do not seek. His work points to the importance of the motivational heart and will, rather than just the mind or the emotions. This path in turn connects with the gospel summons to newness of life.

Well, I’ve looked for God, and I haven’t found him. Why does He hide himself from me? Is it possible that a “seeker” is someone who is predisposed to find God? More tautology afoot.

I am weary of theology, and swore I wouldn’t discuss it much after I wrote Faith Versus Fact. Theology is pablum for intellectuals, an unworthy enterprise on a par with learned discourse about fairies. As Dan Barker quipped, it’s a subject without an object. So I’ll end with an excerpt from the end of the review. Here Shortt puts on his dog collar and steps into the pulipit (he’s not just summarizing a book’s thesis). It’s embarrassing, and I weep for the TLS of old:

Over and again, Jesus indicates that the question of how people relate to him will govern how they relate to the God he called Father. In effect, he is re-embodying and radicalizing God’s call to Israel at the dawn of the biblical drama. The message of the early Church is that a new phase of history has been ushered in by the cross and resurrection. God is not to be seen as a monad, but as a pattern of loving relationship (the awareness refracted in language by the doctrine of the Trinity). God invites humanity to share in this mutual exchange of love – that is, to partake in the divine life – as daughters and sons by adoption. The Church is the community on earth representing a “new creation”. It is both a human society with a sometimes woeful history, and a divine society called to implement God’s will for universal reconciliation.

There is much else that Reiss might have conveyed more vigorously. For example, that although the Scriptures as a whole are humanly written and developed history riddled with ambiguities and dead ends and fresh starts, they nevertheless form powerfully challenging calls to humanity to grow and reform itself. Or that because of the conviction that God’s world helps make itself at every level, the believer can fit into one picture evolution and its costliness, and the Christian redemptive answer to human and natural evil. Or that, in the words of the Dominican theologian Cornelius Ernst, God is not only the background and the presupposition of human experience; “he is the foreground, the personally accessible sense in human terms of the human search for the absolute beginning and the absolute end”

That last bit is, as far as I can see, meaningless. Readers are welcome to torture themselves trying to interpret it. And with that I’ll end.

	mike on Friday: Hili dialogue
	mike on Duck doings, part 2: Vashti…
	mike on Jesus ‘n’ Mo…
	Steven E. on Jesus ‘n’ Mo…
	revelator60 on Friday: Hili dialogue