The exorcists

August 11, 2011 • 5:56 am

God bless America!  As if we don’t need any more proof that faith makes people bat-guano crazy, here’s a longish article from today’s Daily Mail about a school for exorcists run by Reverend Bob Larson in Phoenix, Arizona (where else?).  Part of Larson’s crack team, which travels the world casting out demons, is a coterie of teenage girls:

‘We have found that our female, teenage exorcists are particularly effective at curing the possessed,’ says Rev Larson, whose daughter Brynne is a supernaturally talented exorcist.

Here’s Brynne. If there was ever a picture that says “religion poisons everything,” it’s this one:

Highly experienced in casting out demons, saving souls, and banishing evil spirits to hell, she is also a student who enjoys styling her hair, shopping and meeting her friends at Starbucks.

Those friends include trainee undergraduate exorcists, Melanie Massih, 16, her sister Christina, 15, also students at Rev Larson’s exorcist school.

They may love hanging out like normal teenagers, but they don’t watch TV like the rest of us.

‘I think Harry Potter and Twilight are instigators of evil,’ Savannah says. ‘They nullify morality and just serve to hook people in with evil.

‘I don’t watch any television at all. I’m much too busy praying and fighting the devil.’

Brynne’s fellow exorcists:

Teenage exorcists: Savannah Schurkenback, Jess Shurkenback, Christina Massih, Melanie Massih and Brynne Larson stand brandishing their Bibles and silver crosses

There are two parts to an exorcism,’ explains graduate Tess, who clutches an attractive, red leather-bound Bible.

‘Firstly, you must deal with inner healing, to get rid of traumatic experiences from your childhood and beyond, and secondly, deliverance from demons.’

To do this, the girls are taught ‘curse-breaking’: The more experienced exorcists Savannah and Brynne will teach Christina and Melanie how to read from a list of demons, designed to provoke the ‘demon within’, when chanted aloud to possessed folk.

Tess practices reading from the list of curses. ‘Death,’ she says, ominously, raising an eyebrow to the room. ‘Cancer.’ She pauses, dramatically. ‘Murder.’

It is normally after she says ‘murder’, that all hell breaks loose, she says. ‘Many belch on hearing the words, or start weeping,’ she whispers.

‘One woman collapsed and started convulsing, while another man started choking once. I remember I felt excited the first time. “This is it,” I thought to myself.’

I love the belching part!  Here’s the man who corrupted his daughter, Reverend Larson:

But for Brynne, who like all of the Reverend’s young exorcists, is a home-schooled, teetotal teenager, her life, she insists is nothing but exciting.

‘We have travelled all over the world performing exorcisms. I have been to Africa, Australia, New Zealand, China, Korea, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia and even the Bahamas, saving souls along the way.’

And Brynne is defiantly single, admitting: ‘I have never had a boyfriend, but I consider myself lucky – I don’t have many of the demons that can be associated with obsession, or desire.’

‘I want to one day get married and have children, for God says in the Bible that we should marry. But while there are people that need exorcisms, people who need help – that is all I’m interested in.’

Lest you think this insanity is the purview of small and fanatical Protestant sects, be advised that the article adds this:

The Vatican’s chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, has revealed that he alone has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession.

That seems a bit many to me, and “dealt with” may mean only handling paperwork. [UPDATE: Bob Felton has shown how unrealistic Amorth’s figure is.] Nevertheless, exorcism is a going concern of the Catholic church. To find out more about it, read this article from last year’s New York Times.   Catholics, of course, are very secretive about this, for they realize that it makes them look almost as crazy as the people they shrive.

h/t: Sigmund

Ayaan Hirsi Ali urges oppressed Muslims to become Christians

August 10, 2011 • 9:13 am

On her website, Maryam Namazie highlights a somewhat distressing 15-minute interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Ali, of course, is a famous atheist and a tireless crusader against Islam—especially its oppression of women.

In the video, Ali urges both female and male Muslims to turn to Christianity if they either find their religion oppressive or live in Western countries where Muslims are stigmatized.

This is distressing because although Ali is an atheist, she says that for those people who must have a God, Christianity is a good exchange for Islam. No matter that such conversion is, under Islamic dictates, punishable by death.

And yes, Ali is affiliated with a conservative organization (the American Enterprise Institute), but I still admire her tremendously.  As a Muslim apostate, she lives in hiding, protected by guards.  But if she’s going to recommend a religion swap, couldn’t she have touted Buddhism?

Namazie notes:

As an atheist herself, Ayaan must know full well that all religions are misogynist. How can one advocate for others what one does not want for oneself?

Also as I have said a million times before, Christianity only seems tamer because it has been dealt with by an enlightenment. To the degree it has been weakened – that is the degree to which people and women have more freedoms and rights. It’s not because of Christianity but because of the resistance against it.

A minimum precondition to safeguard women’s rights is secularism – the separation of religion from state, educational system and judicial system. But then I guess Ayaan can’t really say that because that would be like advocating Marxism amongst her friends.

On another note, read Namazie’s transcript of the speech she’ll give today at the World Founding Congress of Free Thought in Oslo:

Ironically, whilst the far-Right appears to target Islamism, they have similar ideologies, characteristics, tactics, and aims. Islamism is also an extreme Right movement. Both rely on religion. Both use a language of hate. They are extremely xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. Both rely on indiscriminate violence and terrorism to intimidate the population at large. They are dogmatic and punish free thinkers and dissenters. Both use threats and scaremongering to push forward their agenda. Both are vehemently anti-working class and the Left. They believe in the superiority of their views and culture and deal harshly with anyone who transgresses. The world they have in mind is equally bleak, segregated, hateful and inhuman.

What we need today is a renewed anti-fascism that is against the far-Right and Islamism and puts people – real live human beings – and not cultures, religions, nationality, race, ethnicity at its centre.

Only a renewed anti-fascist movement that stands firm against both, and unequivocally defends citizenship and universal rights, freedom, equality and secularism can hope to win. In the face of regression and abomination, its banner must be a humanity without labels. It must hold the human being sacred and nothing else.

NPR: The veracity of Adam and Eve is a crisis for faith

August 10, 2011 • 6:36 am

On yesterday’s Morning Edition show on National Public Radio, religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty did a piece on biblical literalism: “Evangelicals question the existence of Adam and Eve.”  (The link contains not only the broadcast piece, but its full transcript).  I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith.  For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness.  These can then be saved only by post facto theological rationalizations about why humans are special in an evolutionary sense, and also sufficiently sinful to require salvation.

It’s a pretty good piece given that it’s only about eight minutes long, and accurately portrays the controversy.  Here is the cast of characters:

The diehards (Biblical literalists):

Fuzale Rana, president of Reasons to Believe.  “But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you’ve got a problem.” . . . “I think this is going to be a pivotal point in Church history because what rests at the very heart of this debate is whether or not key ideas within Christianity are ultimately true or not.”

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“When Adam sinned, he sinned for us,” Mohler says. “And it’s that very sinfulness that sets up our understanding of our need for a savior.

Mohler says the Adam and Eve story is not just about a fall from paradise: It goes to the heart of Christianity. He notes that the Apostle Paul (in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) argued that the whole point of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection was to undo Adam’s original sin.

“Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul’s description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament,” Mohler says.

The accommodationists

Dennis Venema,  a senior fellow at BioLogos who has written there about the genetic problems with the Adam and Eve story.

Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”

John Schneider, former teacher at Calvin College.

“Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost,” Schneider says. “So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings.” [JAC: What he means is that they have to make new stuff up.]

Daniel Harlow, religion professor at Calvin College.

“Evangelicalism has a tendency to devour its young.  You get evangelicals who push the envelope, maybe; they get the courage to work in sensitive, difficult areas, and they get slapped down. They get fired or dismissed or pressured out.”

“Uncle” Karl Giberson, former vice president of BioLogos.

“When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face.  The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it.”

Why is this important?  Because it strikes at the heart of the debate between science and faith.  Here is a case in which science has absolutely falsified a major tenet of a major religion.  (This isn’t new, of course, for the Biblical Flood never happened either. But the flood is nowhere near as important in Christian theology as is the Adam and Eve tale.) This shows, first of all, that the accommodationist claim that science and religion aren’t in conflict is flatly wrong. The only way to save the comity of science and religion is to assert, hypocritically, that Biblical literalists simply have the wrong faith.

Second, it will force believers to choose one path or another: they can be literalists, and look really dumb to thinking people, or they can be accommodationists, and make stuff up to save the Adam and Eve story. Fuzale Rana, literalist though he is, is correct when he says, “But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you’ve got a problem.”

Yes, you’ve got a problem.  Because if Adam and Eve didn’t really exist in the way the Bible describes them, maybe Jesus didn’t either.  And if he didn’t, there goes Christianity.  For even non-literalist but evangelical Christians, like Francis Collins, hold fast to the literal truth of the divinity and resurrection of Christ.  Why does that story bear more veracity than Adam and Eve? If it doesn’t, there’s simply no good reason to continue being a Christian.

Few religious accommodationists, including those at BioLogos, have the stomach to dismiss the Adam and Eve story as complete fiction.  Rather, they concoct all sorts of convoluted stories about how there could have been a literal Adam and Eve but that the two weren’t really the genetic ancestors of all humanity.  Or there was some point in which God instilled a pair, or a small band of humans, with some inherent sinfulness.  But of course that looks pretty bad, too, for it becomes palpably clear that “sophisticated theology” is just a rearguard action against the advances of science.  As I always say (and I want some credit for my quote!):

“Theology is the art of making religious virtues out of scientific necessities.”

I suspected that BioLogos wouldn’t like the NPR story, for Dennis Venema, its own guy, was on record as dissing the historicity of Adam and Eve but not trying to save the story in some other way, which of course is a major goal of Biologos‘s attempted rapprochement with evangelical Christians.  So today Linda Applegate and Darrel Falk (president of BioLogos) issued a response to what I saw as a fairly evenhanded story on NPR.  They’re trying so save some historicity of Adam and Eve, and it’s worth quoting in extenso just to show the tortuous ways accommodationist Christians try to save the story:

While we at BioLogos appreciate many aspects of the story, we need to make one all-important clarification: the debate over the historicity of Adam and Eve is primarily a theological debate, one that is more complex than the story lets on. All science can say is that there was never a time when only two people existed on the earth: it is silent on whether or not God began a special relationship with a historical couple at some point in the past. This subtle but extremely important point was missed entirely in the NPR story. It is a consideration that we raise repeatedly at BioLogos. See, for example this article by Daniel Harrell and this series by Denis Alexander. . .

It is important for Evangelicals to know that science is silent on the historicity of two people named Adam and Eve, just as it is silent on the existence of persons named Abraham, Isaac, and Moses. Adam and Eve may well have been two real people, who through the grace of God entered into a paradisiacal relationship with him, until—tragedy of tragedies— they allowed their own self-centered desires to reign in their hearts, instead of their love for God. Although genetics convincingly shows that there was never a time when there were just two persons, the Bible itself may even provide hints of the existence of other people—likely we’ve all wondered about those hints since we were children. “Did Cain marry his sister?” we want to know. “Who were the people that Cain was afraid of as he wandered the earth after killing Abel? If they were his brothers or nephews, why didn’t the author refer to them that way?” The author doesn’t seem to be as puzzled by this as we are. We’ve always known about those little pointers—in fact, ancient interpreters wrestled with them too, long before Darwin or modern genetics appeared on the scene. So it ought not to necessarily surprise us for genetics to come along and confirm that, sure enough, there were others around at the time of Adam and Eve.

The NPR story, as much as we appreciate it, implies that, according to science, there are only two options for Christians—dismiss the conclusions of science, or dismiss the notion of a historical couple named Adam and Eve. This is simply not the whole story. Any dismissal of a historical couple, who entered into relationship with God only to sin and break that relationship, is going to have to come from theology. There is no scientific reason to upset that theological apple cart. Indeed as scientists, we must respect the theological diversity of Evangelicalism.

Cain and Abel, of course, were the sons of Adam and Eve, not just “others who were around at the time of Adam and Eve”.  And their existence wouldn’t change the fact that humanity was, according to that story, genetically descended from Adam and Eve, because Cain and Abel (and any sister they had), were genetic descendants too. 

BioLogos says that “any dismissal of a historical couple” who broke a convenant with God “is going to have to come from theology.” But of course theology isn’t capable of dismissing or verifying a historical couple. That’s the purview of science, and science already tells us that the whole story is bogus.  We’re not descended from two people, and there’s not the slightest evidence that there were ever any two people who caused humanity to be sinful, or that humans suddenly started behaving badly only about 10,000 years ago.  The Adam and Eve story is bunk, the fictional remnants of a superstitious and prescientific age, and theologians who want any credibility (is that an oxymoron?) should admit as much.

Was the serpent really a kitteh? Remember, these stories are metaphorical.

h/t: Uncle Karl

Jazz improvisation: Waitin’ for Benny

August 10, 2011 • 5:00 am

I can’t believe I found this on YouTube, as this specimen of jazz improvisation is pretty obscure.  A few days ago I put up the song “Rose Room” by Benny Goodman and his sextet, featuring Charlie Christian on the electric guitar.  Idly entering “Waiting for Benny” in the search engine, I found that that song was on YouTube as well.

I’m putting it up because it’s the only recording I know that shows the actual birth of a jazz melody during an improvised jam session.

On March 13, 1941, some members of Goodman’s group were waiting for the boss to arrive in the studio.  These included Cootie Wiiliams on trumpet (formerly a famous member of Duke Ellington’s orchestra), Georgie Auld on tenor sax, Johnny Guarnieri on piano, Artie Bernstein on bass, Dave Tough on drums, and Charlie Christian on guitar.  The engineers did a sound check while the group was warming up, and recorded it, capturing an amazing session.

Christian starts noodling around, and then, at 1:30 into the recording, comes up with a theme.  The other players riff on it (Cootie does great trumpet work) until the boss arrives five minutes in, when the engineer says, “Stand by—ten seconds.”  It’s is a superb example of how accomplished jazz musicians can put together a great piece on the spot.

The theme was later recorded and released by Goodman as a regular song: “A Smo-o-o-oth One,” which you can hear here. I have “Waitin’ for Benny” on the CD “Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar.”

I notice that Goodman gets credit for the composition of “A Smo-o-o-oth One,”, although he had almost nothing to do with it. He was famously a real s.o.b. as a boss.

Charlie Christian was an amazing guy, the first jazz musician, I think, to fully realize the possibilities of the electric guitar (Django Reinhardt is also famous for jazz guitar, but was more of a one-off). Christian was also a huge influence on bebop.  And he made all his contributions before he died of tuberculosis (exacerbated by wild living) at age 25.

Charlie Christian

20 voices of belief

August 9, 2011 • 10:06 am

To complement neurosurgeon Jonathan T. Pararajasingham’s videos of 100 academics explaining their atheism, he’s also made a 25-minute video of 20 academics and theologians explaining why they believe in god.  My comment on each speaker follows his name (they’re all men).

Here’s Pararajasingham’s explanation of the video and list of speakers:

It is easy to find examples of how religious thinking among lay or fundamentalist Christians can result in profoundly irrational ideas. But the evidence that reason is abandoned in Christianity equally comes from the mouths of “sophisticated” theologians, leaders, scholars and spokespersons practising it.

Speakers in order of appearance:

  1. Professor George Coyne, Astronomer, Vatican Observatory.  Not a relative! Doesn’t believe in most miracles except for the virgin birth and the resurrection.  He’s embarrassed to believe in that stuff as a scientist, but then maintains that he’s “c0nsistent.”
  2. Robin Collins, Professor of Philosophy.  Says that evil is part of God’s plan because it’s an inevitable byproduct of God-given free will.
  3. Dr Benjamin Carson, Paediatric Neurosurgeon. Doesn’t believe in evolution, and you’ll find his reason hilarious.
  4. John Lennox, Oxford Professor of Mathematics. Dawkins presses him hard to pinpoint when in human evolution the primates became “people.” He squirms. And this guy is an Oxford professor!
  5. Francis Collins, National Human Genome Research Institute Director. What can I say? He admits that he accepts God-created miracles, but doesn’t say which ones. In a panel discussion, he admits that his faith involves a suspension of rationality, and then says that he’s unwilling to deny the existence of Satan!
  6. John Polkinghorne, Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics.  “God is both connected with time and also outside time. That’s puzzling and difficult to work out, but I think it’s absolutely essential.”  He goes on to spew more deepities.
  7. JP Moreland, Professor of Philosophy, Biola University. “God is an individual person and angels are finite persons.”
  8. William Dembski, Research Professor of Philosophy. I can’t figure out what he’s trying to say about theodicy, but it involves God going back and changing the past to create the Fall, and God giving us vipers to serve as metaphors for the evil in our hearts.
  9. Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. OMG.  Miracles are not suspensions of the laws of nature, but “nature living up to its own depths.” Dawkins is too charitable here, giving the good Archbishop an out by suggesting that he’s using “poetic language.”  I never understand those atheists who see this man as a friend.
  10. Dinesh D’Souza, Hoover Research Fellow, Stanford. Claims that God instilled the soul into humans about 5,000 years ago, when all of a sudden there was an efflorescence of culture and the wheel was invented. Says that his faith was affirmed when he stopped letting his brain get in the way.
  11. Dr Ravi Zacharias, Renowned Christian Apologist. Tells gay people to “renounce their dispositions for the sake of Christ.”
  12. Brian Leftow, Oxford Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion. If you can figure out what he’s trying to say, please enlighten me!
  13. Dr William Lane Craig, Renowned Apologist and Philosopher. Laments the futility of human effort in light of the impending heat death of the Earth.
  14. Nicholas Saunders, Science and Religion Scholar, Cambridge. Argues that, in quantum mechanics, it could be God who makes probabilistic events actually occur.  You can’t prove it, but he says you can’t disprove it, either.
  15. NT Wright, Leading New Testament Scholar. Claims that the existence of males and females is not an accidental genetic quirk, but is the direct result of God’s plan.  And if you think that makes the Bible homophobic, well, you have to stand on some moral high ground.
  16. Alvin Plantinga, Notre Dame Professor of Philosophy. For a world to have the Incarnation and atonement, there has to be not just evil, but a lot of it.
  17. Alistair McGrath, Oxford Professor of Historical Theology. Dawkins asks him why McGrath claims that God doesn’t intervene in human affairs, but that God does intervene sometimes to save lives.  His answer is perhaps the greatest example of bafflegab in the whole video.
  18. Freeman Dyson, Physicist, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Says that an electron and atom have “rudimentary consciousness;” implies that quantum mechanics has something to do with human consciousness.  Says his God is part of the universe, evolves with the universe, and has no idea what’s going to happen.
  19. RJ Berry, Professor of Genetics, University College London. Explains that we couldn’t be physically descended from Adam and Eve, but we could be spiritually descended from them (whoever they are). In one instant we became Homo divinus.
  20. Denys Turner, Yale Professor of Historical Theology. Espouses negative theology, in which “one doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”  He says that that, in fact, is what theology is about.  Sounds pretty much right to me.

The curiosity conversation: a debate about Hawking, the universe, and God

August 9, 2011 • 6:29 am

As Sean Carroll has noted over at Cosmic Variance, he was part of a 20-minute panel discussion, moderated by David Gregory, following the Discovery Channel show on Stephen Hawking and his views of God and physics.  The other participants were theologian John Haught and cosmologist/believer Paul Davies (a Templeton Prize winner).  I’ll put up both parts of the conversation, followed by my take.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Besides the three discussants, there were brief statements by three other people: science popularizer Michio Kaku, astrophysicist and Christian Jennifer Wiseman, and Father William Stoeger.  These people added nothing to the dialogue and I found Kaku annoying in his faux-enthusiastic accommodationism (he suggested, for instance, that God could have created multiverses and string theory).

This is hardly an unbiased judgment, but of the three I found Sean Carroll refreshingly forthright and honest. He refused, for example, to admit that the question of God is completely beyond scientific ken. Here are two of his statements:

“If one of your roles for God is creating the universe. . . .then modern cosmology has removed that.”

“I agree that there are questions that science doesn’t answer. Science tells us what happens in the world and how it happens. That’s a little bit different from questions of purpose and meaning.  But when we get to questions of purpose and meaning, I think it’s very important to base that discussion on reality—on how the world really does work.”

Carroll then emphasized that if you believe in a theistic god, one who intervenes in the world, then that assertion can be judged scientifically, while deism, of course, is outside the bailiwick of science.  When asked about the Big Questions, that is, “questions of purpose and meaning,” Carroll responded that the answers must come from within ourselves, and that we must always base our values of meaning and purpose on reality. (The implication, of course, is that we shouldn’t impute them to god.)

John Haught‘s positions were pretty much in line with what I’ve read by him.  He wants to accept the findings of modern cosmology, but deems them irrelevant to what he sees as the important religious question, “is there a basis for hope?”  He emphasized repeatedly that science  isn’t wired to answer the Big Questions—questions of value, purpose and meaning.

Haught took Hawking to task for trespassing on theological ground, asserting that Hawking “dramatically redefined what science is capable of”, i.e., dismissing the possibility of God. I think that Haught, though, missed the major point of Hawking’s program, which is the Laplace-ian idea that the idea of a god is simply unnecessary to explain the origin of the universe.  If that’s true, then cosmologists can certainly assert that they don’t need the God hypothesis

Carroll asked Haught an excellent queestion: “If God didn’t exist, would the universe be different in any way?”  Haught responded with the only answer he could give: without God, “the universe would not exist.”  But for a theist that is an untestable and unverifiable claim, particularly if the universe could really have originated from the “vacuum state” of quantum physics, which for all practical purposes is creation ex nihilo.

After asserting that a universe-creating God could very well bring the dead to life (read Jesus), Haught backed off of issues about heaven and the afterlife, saying that the question of the afterlife coincides with whether “there is a meaningful outcome to this whole wonderful story that we call the universe.”  That is a weaselly theological answer.  We either live on after death or not, not whether or not (as Haught has emphasized in his writings) everything is getting better.

Finally, Haught made his usual assertion that evidence for God resides in the very fact that that the universe is scientifically intelligible, and that this intelligibility is the big contribution theology makes to science.  He and other science-savvy theologians like to argue that without God there could be no mathematical laws of physics, and no understanding of the universe.  I found Haught rather haughty in his assertion that he’s trying to “save science” by “leaving out the big questions.” That is, scientists overstep their bounds and lose credibility when, like Hawking, they make science-based statements about the nonexistence of God.  He really does think—and I read this just last night in one of his books—that theology makes a meaningful contribution to science, and that contribution is the demonstration that science works.

Paul Davies pretty much hewed to Haught’s line, although he shied away from direct statements about God.  He agreed with Haught that the big mystery of physics—presumably the one that points to God—is this: “Where do the laws of physics come from?”  (I guess these folks aren’t satisfied with the answer that “they are just there—the ineluctable properties of matter.”)  For the life of me I don’t see how the lawfulness of physics (which, after all, is required for us to be observing it in the first place, since we could not exist as organisms without such laws) point to a deity.

Davies stayed away from his personal beliefs, but asserted that the question of an afterlife is not meaningful to him.  He also argued that “miracles are horrible concepts”, but also claimed that religion, despite its truthfulness or lack thereof, does cause people to lead better lives.  He finished by arguing, as did Haught, that science looks bad when scientists (presumably those like Hawking) appear too arrogant. We should lace our arguments with “humility.”

My overall impression: “sophisticated theologians” are backing off of the Big Bang as evidence for god, and perhaps from the anthropic principle as well.  What they now bang on about are the origins of order, the intelligibility of the universe, and the regularity of the laws of physics, which they see as evidence for God.  They are being pushed back into a corner, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer claimed they would if they tied their belief in God to the findings of science.