Proof that Jesus was male

March 7, 2012 • 8:14 am

His floury image just appeared on a tortilla in New Mexico, clearly showing a beard and moustache.

David Sandoval said he discovered an image of Jesus on a tortilla his mother baked for Ash Wednesday.
He couldn’t bring himself to eat the tortilla, so he posted a picture of it on Facebook.
“Everybody has been able to see it. They’re calling it a miracle,” Sandoval told local station KOAT-TV.
“New Mexico has always been known to have interesting things happen during Lent time.”

Given that every image of Jesus that has ever appeared, from chairs to tortillas to tree trunks, shows him as unambiguously male, I think we can take that as dispositive that he was male, and therefore not a hermaphrodite.

Kitteh contest: Newton

March 7, 2012 • 6:40 am

Reader Jess sends a photo of his hapless moggie Newton:

This is Newton. He gets his name from Sir Isaac due to his clumsiness as a kitten (he would fall a lot trying to jump up onto things, making him very familiar  with gravity). He originally joined the family as a mouser and scored double digits in his first week, some of which he left as presents on my pillow. He has an open door policy: if a bedroom or closet door is not open, he will stand in front of it and meow and lay on his back sticking his arms through the crack under the door until it is opened. But. . . when you open the door he has no interest in going through—he just wants it open. He is also very skilled in the fine art of indifference but somehow knows when I am sick and will come lie next to me.

Theologian argues for Anglican ordination of women because Jesus might have been a hermaphrodite

March 7, 2012 • 6:29 am

While women still can’t become priests in the Catholic Church, they can in many provinces (the “dioceses”) of the Anglican church.  But not all of them, which has led to schisms in the Anglican church and breakaway sects that limit the position of bishops, priests, or even deacons, to men.  This discrimination against women is based on the tradition of Jesus having chosen only male apostles.

How do you argue against that discrimination? The simplest way is on moral grounds: it’s unfair to have a church hierarchy dominated by one sex, and there’s no moral reason why women shouldn’t be allowed equal access to the priesthood.  Those, I think, are the reasons why many Anglican provinces allow ordination of women.

The worst way to do it is to argue that there isn’t a strong distinction between the male and female gender, that Christ could have been a hermaphrodite or intersex, and therefore that drawing sharp gender distinctions for the priesthood is unjustified.

But sadly, that’s the way that Susannah Cornwall argues. She’sa postdoctoral research associate at the Lincoln Theological Institute of the University of Manchester—the university of my pinch-blogger Matthew Cobb (Matthew: what are they putting in the water there?).  The argument, reported in many places (the Telegraph and HuffPo, for example), is that a dichotomous model of sex and gender is not adequate to deal with this theological problem.  Ergo, we need female priests. Cornwall supports her argument by vetting the possibility that Jesus, born of a virgin, could have been of ambiguous sex.

Her paper, “Intersex and Ontology: A response to The Church, Women Bishops and Provision” (download a pdf from that link) is a response to a previous paper by the Latimer Trust (a theological think tank) arguing that, “In this debate, there is finally no middle ground. We will argue that it is not possible to affirm gender distinctions and, at the same time, implement complete interchangeability of gender functions.”

Cornwall says there is a middle ground: intersex individuals whose gender is ambiguous.  And Jesus could have been one of them! As she notes:

But in actual fact, it is not possible to assert with any degree of certainty that Jesus was male as we now define maleness. There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some “hidden” female physical features. He might have had ovarian as well as testicular tissue in his body. He might, in common with many people who are unaware of the fact, have had a mixture of XX and XY cells. Indeed, as several scholars have pointed out with their tongues both in and out of their cheeks, if the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is taken as scientific fact, then Jesus certainly had no male human element to introduce a Y chromosome into his DNA, and all his genetic material would have been identical with that of his mother (that is, female) (see e.g. Mollenkott 2002, 2007: 115-7). There is simply no way of telling at this juncture whether Jesus was an unremarkably male human being, or someone with an intersex condition who had a male morphology as far as the eye could see but may or may not also have had XX chromosomes or some female internal anatomy. The fact that, as far as we know, Jesus never married, fathered children or engaged in sexual intercourse, of course, makes his “undisputable” maleness even less certain.

The point is whether all this conjecture and appeal to statistical improbability “from below” matters. I would argue that it does matter if Jesus’ undisputed maleness is deemed crucial to his Christness, to his sacerdotal function and the sacerdotal function of the priestsand bishops who minister in his stead – which the authors of The Church, Women Bishops and Provision insist is the case. But that Jesus was male is simply a best guess – a kind of sexual docetism on which ecclesiological truth and essentialist ontology is now being madeto rest. It is no accident, maintain the authors, that Jesus was male: his authority required (and bishops’ authority continues to require) physical maleness (Beckwith et al 2011: 45), because of the “creation order” in which it is given to males to have governance over what is taught. However, since we cannot know for sure that Jesus was male – since we do not have a body to examine and analyze – it can only be that Jesus’ masculine gender role, rather than his male sex, is having to bear the weight of all this authority.

Genetically, if Jesus was born of a virgin, he would have either had to be produced parthenogentically (from a nonreduced gamete of Mary), in which case he’d be a normal XX female—a clone of Mary.  Alternatively, if he was produced by a haploid egg that was unfertilized, then he would have been inviable—no Jesus at all!  If you analyzed the Bible in the light of modern genetics, there’s no way that Jesus could have been male. (There are some XX hermaphrodites who appear male but have  ambiguous genitalia, but those—victims of de la Chapelle syndrome—require a corporeal father who contributes an X chromosome carrying a bit of his Y).

But this is all nonsense, of course.  There was no virgin birth, and may well have been no Jesus.  And if there was an itinerant apocalyptic rabbi of that ilk, he would almost certainly have been male.  If you argue that he had some XX and some XY cells, then you are saying Jesus had a corporeal father, for only a real male father could have introduced a Y chromosome into Jesus’s genome.  And in that case there was no virgin birth, so why argue about this in the first place?

It’s even because, according to Cornwall, “It is estimated that about 1 in every 2,500 people is born with some kind of physical intersex condition.” So even if Jesus had a corporeal father (in which case he wasn’t divine), the odds are very strong that Jesus was a straight-up male.  (I doubt that the lack of Jesus’s kids adds probability to his intersexuality.)  Yes, it is formally possible that any itinerant rabbi who was the nucleus of the Jesus legend was a hermaphrodite, but I’d bet 2000-1 odds against it.  Sadly, there’s no way to decide.

This kind of theological hair-splitting is what Jews call pilpul.  Let’s not base questions of morality on assertions about reality which cannot be subject to empirical investigation, and indeed, are not even questions that are coherent in the first place.  Women should be ordained in the Anglican church simply because there is no moral basis for discriminating against them.  But, as Eric MacDonald has discovered, there’s not much reason to be an Anglican priest in the first place.

Like all theology, this navel-gazing and groundless speculation is a complete waste of time. Is there any reason for a secular university to have a school of theology, or hire even one theologian?

_____________

UPDATE:  Reader Kevin notes below that a peevish Anglican priest has responded in the Telegraph: the Rev. Dr. Peter Mullen angrily asserts, “Jesus was a man: look at the evidence, Dr Cornwall.”  It’s all hilarious: Mullen says that we know Jesus was a man because the Bible tells us so. But he’s ignoring genetic evidence, which tells us that Jesus must have been a woman!

h/t: Denise

Crazy rabbi says that atheists are mentally ill for not believing in Creation

March 6, 2012 • 11:28 am

UPDATE: Rabbi Lurie asked me if he could respond to the points I made in this and my previous post, and I’ve put his response in a comment below.

______

Earlier today I posted on Rabbi Alan Lurie and his new article at PuffHo,“Why the universe has a creator (and why some atheists refuse to even consider it).“  In the first of my two-part analysis, I showed why Lurie is ignorant of science, invoking tired old god-of-the-gaps arguments in both physics and biology as proof of God.

But Lurie goes beyond that, for he thinks that atheists’ rejection of the palpably obvious fact of God’s Creation must bespeak some personality disorder.  He lists three of them, and I quote him directly.  These are the reasons why, according to Lurie, atheists reject a creator god:

1. A Childish Concept of God

For many, the belief in a Creator is rooted in a personal, direct encounter, in which God is experienced, often as pure consciousness, pure creation, endless love, the animating energy of everything, or the Ultimate Reality. For those who have not experienced this Presence, though, God is a concept. And this concept may be sophisticated or childish, based on ones maturity, knowledge and innate gifts. The childish concept sees God as some kind of being — perhaps with a white cloak and long beard — who somehow made the world according to a “sacred text.” When Richard Dawkins, for example, said, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in; some of us just go one god further,” he showed such a childish image of God. And he showed a lack of any experience in the spiritual realm. If he had any direct experience he would have known that all these societies were attempting to describe the mystery of Spirit in human — often archaic — terms, and that the idea of competing gods is a literalistic and immature one. He also would have humbly recognized that theology is an activity for which, frankly, he has little talent or understanding.

This childish view of God is not limited to atheists, but also applies to those “religious” folks who place dogma over personal experience, and for whom any digression from dogma is punished.

I don’t get the distinction those who experience God as love or “pure consciousness” (I think that’s a fancy term for revelation), and those who form a “concept” of God.  Surely there’s substantial overlap between these people.  The dumb part of Lurie’s analysis is his flagrant dismissal of most of the world’s faithful whose concept of God is indeed “childish,” for they conceive of him as a humanoid god that shares traits with His flock.  Even “sophisiticated” theologians like Alvin Plantinga experience God as having human emotions and qualities, even if He is disembodied. God, for example, has a kind of brain that thinks, a set of emotions that feels love and concern, and an ability to store information in a kind of brain.  In other words, even sophisticated theists often see God as a sort of disembodied human. What else would it mean to say that God made man in His image? And wasn’t Jesus human after all, but divine at the same time?

Yes, sophisticated theologians sometimes reject an anthropomorphic god in favor of some nebulous Ground of Being, but really, given that there’s no evidence for God at all, much less of any specific kind of God, it’s just as rational to accept an anthropomorphic God as a Ground-of-Being God. That is, it’s equally irrational to accept both.  What is striking here is Lurie’s arrogance—as if he knows what God is like, and anybody who thinks He’s different from that is immature.  Really, Rabbi, who gave you a pipeline to the divine?

2. Tyranny of the Mind

The human mind is a powerful tool, but can also be a cruel tyrant. While it is skilled at storing and analyzing data, it cannot feel, and so there is much — such as art, music, compassion, love, sex or Spirit — that it cannot truly know. The mind, though, insists on analyzing these things, and tries to convince us that its analysis is the only way of knowing. It does this because it has little trust or respect for anything that is not measurable and linear, and consequently it resists recognizing the other essential human facilities: the needs of the body, the wisdom of emotions, and most especially, the guidance of Spirit.

For those who have developed strong connections to body, emotions and Spirit, the mind can be managed and used properly. But there are those who, for a variety of reasons, have weak connections to body, emotions and Spirit. For these, the mind has free reign, dominating their lives and seeking to eliminate anything that it cannot rationally comprehend. Then the mind eliminates anything that challenges its supremacy. And for such a tyrannical mind the concept of a Creator God — an ultimate intelligence that dwarfs its own — is completely intolerable.

Really? The mind can’t “know” compassion, art, music, love, and the like? These things are perceived in the mind, which generates (along with hormones) the emotions.  But beyond that, this is just a diatribe against rationality and a call for superstition, for the unevidenced—for the existence of things that lack proof.  It’s also a call for recognizing ESP, space aliens, Xenu, Ouija boards, astrology, faith healing, and the whole panoply of superstitions that aren’t rational.  Lurie: “Evidence? We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence!”

Finally,

3. An Ego Strategy

As I’ve written in several previous blogs, the ego is the software implanted in us to ensure survival. Its job is to scan for threats and devise strategies to avoid pain and death. The ego knows only fear, and it will fiercely fight anything that threatens its survival. And nothing is more frightening to the ego than sharing or ceding control with another, because this feels like death. So the ego’s favorite strategy for protecting itself is the refusal to surrender to anything or anyone. It will even go so far as refusing to acknowledge a mistake, to apologize, to recognize superior abilities in others, to admit a weakness and, most pathetically, to ever express gratitude.

I recently heard a man state that he “does not believe in gratitude,” but instead prefers the word “appreciation”: “I appreciate a delicious meal or a beautiful sunset, but I feel no need to say ‘thank you,'” he proudly proclaimed. This is the voice of ego.

I would say “thank you” to a waiter who brought me food, or to a chef who cooked a meal, but there’s no evidence that anybody gave us a sunset.  Should we say, “Thank you, laws of physics!” A refusal to thank god is not a manifestation of ego, it’s simply a refusal to grovel before a nonexistent being. I’ll thank god when a stack of thousand-dollar bills drops from the heavens into my lap.

Lurie’s capper is this:

Clearly one does not need to believe in God or follow a religion in order to be a wonderful, happy, caring, human being. What matters most is how we treat each other. But the refusal to even consider that a Creator may exist — often accompanied by the adamant desire to “prove” otherwise and to ridicule those who do — especially in the face of much blatant evidence, is an indication that a psychological mechanism is at work. Perhaps what is needed for such an irrational position may not be more intellectual investigation, but psychoanalysis.

Earth to Lurie: we have considered the claim a creator may exist, and have rejected that claim.  Why? Because we have no evidence for such a creator. (We’ve already disposed of Lurie’s “blatant evidence”.)  That makes us rational, not mentally ill.  If anyone is disordered, it is those people who are victims of The God Delusion.  And talk about ridicule!  Prescribing psychoanalysis—a technique resembling religion since it’s based on wish-thinking rather than evidence, has its own bearded God, and is unable to discover truth—for atheists? Really?  Who is being strident here?

It make me ashamed to be a cultural Jew when I see a rabbi go this far off the rails.

Oreos are 100 today!

March 6, 2012 • 8:28 am

Today, March 6, is the 100th anniversary of the Oreo cookie, now sold in 100 countries throughout the world. You can celebrate at the Nabisco page, read about it at The New York Times, and get a coupon for a free Dairy Queen Oreo Blizzard. The first version of these cream-filled chocolate cookies rolled off the factory line on March 6, 1912, at the Nabisco factory in New York City (Nabisco is now part of Kraft Foods). On that very day, the doomed Scott expedition was slogging towards its tragic demise in Antarctica.

I happen to love these cookies (biscuits to you Brits), though I almost never buy them.

Fun Oreo facts:

  • Half the people who eat them separate the cookies and eat the cream filling separately (I am not one of these miscreants)
  • 491 billion Oreos have been sold in the century since their introduction
  • Oreos are the best-selling cookie of the 20th century
  • According to Wikipedia, “The Oreo was originally called the Oreo Biscuit. The name was later changed to the Oreo Sandwich in 1921. In 1948, the name was changed again to the Oreo Creme Sandwich. It was then changed to the Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookie in 1974.”
  • We have no idea where the name “Oreo” came from
  • Oreos are the best-selling cookie in China, which is the second largest national market after the U.S.
  • And. . . much to my chagrin, other countries have cool Oreo flavors unavailable in the US.  Here are some:
Green Tea Ice Cream Flavor from China

Orange and mango flavor from China:

And one I’d dearly love to try: dulce de leche and banana flavor from Argentina:

Treat yourself to a package today—eschewing the grotesquely overladen “Double Stuf®” version—and don’t forget the milk.

BTW, black and white cats are sometimes called “oreo cats” and are often named Oreo.

Wacko rabbi tries to pwn biology and physics; accuses atheists of needing psychoanalysis

March 6, 2012 • 6:36 am

UPDATE: I posted a link to this after the Rabbi’s article (my first post on HuffPo!), inviting Lurie to reply.  I doubt that will happen, or even whether my comment will survive moderation.

____

When will I learn that Jewish rabbis can be just as ignorant as goyishe clerics?  Another painful instance has just surfaced in HuffPo, with Rabbi Alan Lurie expatiating on “Why the universe has a creator (and why some atheists refuse to even consider it).”

Now I’m not going to say that Rabbi Alan Lurie has no business pronouncing on science since he lacks advanced degrees in the field, but his “unique background,” as detailed by HuffPo, doesn’t give us much confidence that he’ll be able to show that all evolutionists and cosmologists are wrong about their trade:

Alan Lurie has a unique background. He is currently a Managing Director at Grubb & Ellis, a national real estate service firm, following a 25-year career as a licensed architect. He is also an ordained rabbi, teaching, leading prayer services, and writing on issues of faith and religion. This combination of meeting the demands of the business world while attending to the needs of the spirit gives Alan both insight into, and access to, a diverse community.

His article, like his tuchus, has two parts: a “proof” that the Universe was designed, and then an analysis of why atheists won’t admit that. Let’s take the science first. I may get so peeved posting this that I’ll deal with the “why atheists reject creationism” argument later today.

Throughout recorded history the majority of humanity has seen the existence of a Creator, Who intentionally brought the Universe in to being and sustains all life, as an obvious truth . .

Scientific discoveries have only reinforced this realization, as it becomes even clearer that the Universe was carefully designed. Prominent British mathematician Roger Penrose calculated the probably of random chance producing a Universe conducive to life at vastly less than the scientifically accepted definition of “zero.” Even if one were to accept arguments from those who claim that the Universe is not so “fine tuned,” we must rely on the mind-boggling, and empirically unproven, concept of multiple Universes, and even then the probability of random events leading to life only budges from staggeringly unimaginable to extraordinarily unlikely.

The fine-tuning argument has become the last weapon in the arsenal of apologists.  But although I don’t have Marshall McLuhan behind this sign, I do have a smart physicist, Sean Carroll, who, when I sent him Lurie’s piece, told me that the good rabbi knows nothing about physics. Sean doesn’t address the idea of multiple universes, but you can read his great essay “Does the universe need God?” to see why multiverses are not a desperation move to save physics from the supernatural, but a natural outgrowth of some theories of physics.  Anyway, here’s Sean’s response to Lurie’s nonsense, quoted with permission, of course:

First, the phrase

“vastly less than the scientifically accepted definition of “zero””

is just nonsensical.  The “scientifically accepted definition of zero” is, in fact, zero.  There are plenty of numbers less than zero, but they are all negative.

I suspect that Lurie is talking about the entropy problem of the early universe, which Penrose has indeed championed, and which is a very important problem.  My last book, From Eternity to Here, is all about what it means and how we might solve it.

We have a universe with a certain amount of stuff in it, and we can think about all the different ways that stuff (photons, neutrinos, atoms, dark matter) could be arranged.  Almost all of those ways look like thermal equilibrium — basically, huge amounts of empty space plus a few particles with some extremely low temperature. But that’s not at all what the universe actually does look like; the matter is arranged into planets and stars and galaxies.  So we are “low entropy.”  The early universe was an even more non-typical arrangement (even lower entropy), with all that matter very smoothly distributed over a large region of space.  If you randomly chose a configuration that the universe could be in, the chance that it would look like our early universe is about 1 in 10^(10^120).  Very small, and certainly something that cries out for an explanation. (If you explain the low entropy of the early universe, you also explain the not-quite-as-low entropy of the current universe, since we’re in the midst of the gradual march toward equilibrium.)

From this we can safely conclude that our early universe is not well explained by choosing a random configuration of stuff. Nobody disputes that, and people like me are hard at work trying to come up with physics mechanisms to account for it.

However, we certainly can’t conclude that it’s designed.  Indeed, theologically-minded folk who pick on this particular cosmology problem have fallen completely into a trap.  The point is that if the universe were designed for life (in particular, for human beings), there is absolutely no reason why the entropy at early times would have to be anywhere near as small as it was.  The “God did it” theory, to the extent that it accounts for anything at all, makes a prediction: the universe should be finely-tuned enough to support us, and no more.  Every galaxy in the universe has a much lower entropy than it might have, and none of those galaxies (over 100 billion) is at all relevant to the existence of life on Earth. Indeed, the other stars in our galaxy aren’t really relevant.  You could have done with just the Sun and Earth, maybe the Moon if you’re picky.  (You need some heavy elements to create biochemistry, which in the real world come from supernova explosions — but God can just snap His fingers.)The rest of the universe should be in thermal equilibrium — a smooth gruel of ultra-cold particles spread thinly throughout empty space.

Of course you could say that God made all the other stars and other galaxies because he wanted to create not just humans, but 10^22 other intelligent civilizations. And that the universe is dominated by dark matter and dark energy, even though they are also irrelevant to life, because God likes to give astronomers and physicists something to keep themselves amused.  That’s the great thing about God — whatever happens in the universe, you can say that’s exactly how God would have wanted it.

Or you can be intellectually honest, and take the predictions of your theory seriously. If God made the universe in order to support life on Earth, the skies should be empty.  They are not. QED.

But Lurie isn’t content to just go after cosmology, for he takes on biology as well:

And we are still left with such clearly designed, and incredibly complex, mechanisms as DNA and the brain. . .

Clearly designed? Maybe to Lurie! The rest of us are working on how the hereditary material and the brain evolved.  Lurie’s creationist explanation would have us stop all this work and just fob it off on Yahweh.  And, OMG, Lurie brings up Anthony Flew:

Late in his life the previously ardent atheist Anthony Flew famously noted, “What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.”

. . . And to make the claim, as did the late Christopher Hitchens (who I deeply respect for his exposure of injustice), that there is no Creator/Designer because Hitchens did not approve of the way that eyes are designed, is also the pathetic voice of ego; it is the refusal to say “thank you” for the gift of life and the miracle of sight. This is very sad.

This, of course, is a combination of intelligent-design creationism and a God-of-the-gaps argument.  It’s the argument that “unbelievable complexity” could not have evolved by natural selection (Lurie isn’t even smart enough to use the concept of “irreducible complexity”, which, if true [it isn’t], would be a genuine problem for neo-Darwinism). And to say that Hitchens’s argument rested on his “disapproval” of the way eyes were designed is fatuous.

If you read Hitch’s argument, you’ll see that he doesn’t really “disapprove” of the eye’s design, but asserts, correctly, that the human eye is a botch, with the nerves and blood vessels running in front of the retina, where they not only impede vision, but can efface it if a blood vessel ruptures.  And those nerves have to then gather together into the optic nerve and dive back through the retina to get to the brain, leaving us with a blind spot where they go through.  That’s evidence not only against an intelligent creator, but for evolution, since this bad design is a byproduct of the origin of the vertebrate eye as an evagination of the brain.  (Cephalopod eyes don’t have the problem of a blind spot—the nerves and blood vessels are behind the retina—because in that group eyes evolved as an in-pocketing of the head.)

Here’s a video showing Yahweh’s incompetence vis-à-vis the eye, and here’s another showing how the eye could have evolved gradually.

Now Lurie has the temerity to assert that his argument is not a god-of-the-gaps argument. But in so doing he shows that it really is:

This is not a “God of the Gaps” explanation, any more than looking under the hood of a car and deducing a designer is “Engineer of the Gaps.” To postulate a random, undirected, meaningless, existence in the face of this unbelievable complexity and purpose of life is, in actuality, the much more irrational, and less logical, conclusion. This has been compared to proposing that a hurricane whipped through a junkyard and randomly assembled a jet plane.

That is, to Lurie design implies a designer.  Shades of William Paley! Does Lurie not know that the complexity of life has been rationally explained by Darwin and his successors, and that natural selection is not a “random” process but a deterministic one, one that produces the appearance of purpose: the “purpose” of adapting plants and animals to their way of life? The “hurricane” argument is simply recycled and ignorant creationism. I’ll take a well-understood process, known to operate in nature and be capable of producing complexity, over an unevidenced sky-fairy who disapproves of bacon any day.

To make the scientific claim that one will “go where the evidence leads,” and yet consider such utterly unsupported hypotheses as multiple Universes, alien seeding (which, of course, still leaves the questions of where the aliens came from), mind memes (a total fantasy) and lightening strikes that animated primordial chemical soup to create life (which has never been scientifically reproduced), while not even considering the obvious possibility of a deliberate Creator, is to be intellectually dishonest at best.

What are the reasons for this irrational, and often very nasty, refusal by some to even consider the existence of a Creator as a viable hypothesis? I offer several possibilities:

We’ll get to those possibilities later today, which includes the accusation that those who won’t accept God’s design are mentally ill.  But let me note again that multiple universes, as Carroll points out in the article cited above, are not “unsupported,” but natural predictions of some theories of physics.  And who among us, except for a few eccentrics, believes in “alien seeding”? I don’t know what Lurie means by “mind memes,” but it’s irrelevant here. And he really needs to learn to spell “lightning”, as well as “free rein” (which he misspells as “free reign” later in the piece). And yes, we don’t yet understand yet how life originated, but does that prove that God did it?

As for our refusal to consider the existence of a Creator as a viable hypothesis, science used to do that! That was, in fact, how natural historians explained the “design” of organisms before Darwin. And earlier astronomers claimed that God’s hand was needed to keep the planets in orbit. But, as Laplace noted, we no longer need the hypothesis of a creator in science, for many of the unexplained phenomena once attributed to God have fallen to purely naturalistic explanation. There’s no reason to think that the others won’t.

God is simply a science-stopper, an appeal to ignorance.  And, of course, there’s not a shred of evidence for Lurie’s God, but plenty of evidence for natural selection. So which is more rational to believe: the methods of science and naturalism, which have worked and made enormous progress—or the methods of theology, which haven’t helped us understand anything about the universe?

We’ll get to the psychoanalysis part in a post later today.  Now I want to talk about Oreos. . .