Editor's Note: Earlier this month, I wrote an essay encouraging atheists to join the Foundation Beyond Belief, a new charitable group doing good for human beings and the world in the name of freethought. I also offered to write a front-page post interviewing anyone who agreed to join the Foundation as a result of hearing about it on my site. This is the next in that series of interviews, which will be posted each weekend. Please welcome TPO!

Tell us a little about yourself. Who are you, where do you live, what do you do?

I'm a happily married man in my late 30's who enjoys hiking, astronomy, earth science, science fiction and many other activities you may or may not care about. I live in lower Alabama just a couple of miles from the Florida State line and I am a network administrator for a local Air Force squadron.

If you're an atheist, when did you first become an atheist, and how long have you been one? If you're not an atheist, how would you define your beliefs?

I spent the most part of my first fifteen years going to a small Pentecostal church which exposed me to the whole speaking in tongues and flopping on the floor with the Holy Spirit spectacle on a weekly basis. I pretty much became an atheist over the summer of my fifteenth year when my church had a bible reading contest. Before this event, which I won, I was the type of kid who would admonish my peers and even older teenagers for cursing on one of the larger Baptist churches' basketball courts I frequented after school. Once I actually read through the "King James" version of this book, not once, but twice, I decided that I could not in good conscience worship the god depicted within its pages. I stopped going to church after this and studied up on several other religions over the next couple of years but I think I became an atheist that summer in 1986.

Do you have a blog of your own, or another site you'd like us to know about?

Yes, I run a blog titled "The Perplexed Observer" which focuses on Skepticism, Science, Environment, Religion and many other subjects from an Atheist/Secular Humanist perspective.

Have you given to other charities before joining the Foundation Beyond Belief? If so, which ones are your favorites?

Yes, some of my favorites are Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, Oxfam America and the Red Cross.

What membership level did you join the Foundation at?

I could only afford to join at the second level at this time.

How do you plan to divide your initial donation?

Equally among the different categories.

Is there anything else you'd like to say to atheists who are considering supporting the Foundation or other charitable groups?

Yeah, and you can read it here: http://theperplexedobserver.blogspot.com/2010/01/secular-charities-humanist-philanthropy.html.

In the early chapters of Genesis, Yahweh makes a sweeping promise to Abraham, forefather of the Jewish people:

"In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates."

—Genesis 15:18

As I've mentioned in the past, this was no small matter: the land that God promised to Abraham would encompass most or all of the modern nations of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. If the Jewish people had ever controlled this much territory, they would have had an empire to rival the mightiest powers of the Ancient Near East. But now I have an inconvenient question: Did the Jewish people ever control this much territory? Did they ever get what God promised they would have?

The archaeological evidence shows clearly that the answer is no. Although the monarchy of David - described by the Bible as the most glorious era of ancient Israel - apparently did exist, it was a relatively small and insignificant kingdom even by the standards of the day. It never controlled all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. We have abundant evidence of the great empires that did exist in this region, whether Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian or Roman: the cities they built, the monuments they erected, the inscriptions they left behind. An Israelite empire would be equally easy to find in the archaeological record if it had ever existed, and the total lack of historical evidence can only imply that it never did.

And after David and Solomon's reign, even the Bible says that things went rapidly downhill. Solomon's son was an incompetent ruler who caused the kingdom to split apart, and the divided Israelite tribes were conquered by larger powers and scattered across the face of the earth. The modern state of Israel wasn't established until the 20th century, and it still comes nowhere close to controlling all the land that God promised to Abraham.

For almost four thousand years, then, God's land promise has been unfulfilled. Considering that the land he promised is now occupied by millions of other people with a decidedly hostile outlook toward the Jews, it seems unlikely that Israel will be able to control it any time soon. (The biblical solution - military invasion and genocide - doesn't seem to be a prospect today, due to several millennia of progress in humanity's moral sentiments.) And if you believe the evangelical Christians who insist that the Rapture is due to occur very soon and the end of the world shortly thereafter, the time when this prophecy could be fulfilled is rapidly dwindling. And even if Israel did come to own all this land through some bizarre chain of circumstances, would it really count as "fulfilling" a promise if that which was promised is withheld for hundreds of generations and thousands of years? Wouldn't it, in fact, be more accurate to say that this is a failed biblical promise?

The most common Christian apologist explanation for this prophetic failure is that God's covenant with Abraham was conditional, and when the Israelites disobeyed his laws, he took away the land he had promised them as punishment. Unfortunately for them, the Bible itself forecloses this explanation. It states clearly that even though the Israelites were wicked, God still intended to give them the land, in order to keep the promise he made to Abraham:

"Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

—Deuteronomy 9:5

The only rational conclusion is that God has not "performed the word which he swore", because there is no God who shows special favor to the Israelites. This land claim, allegedly a divinely given promise, was in reality just a piece of pious self-congratulation by ancient Israelite scribes who sought to write a self-fulfilling prophecy. They thought that if they could convince their countrymen that victory was guaranteed, that would give them the determination to turn that belief into reality. But their gambit didn't succeed, and millennia later, the Bible's failed land promise stands as proof of the very human and fallible origins of that book.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned briefly that the Catholic church had threatened to pull out of Washington, D.C., ending the social services they provide for thousands of people, if the city council passed a law recognizing same-sex marriage. Well, the council did pass the bill, same-sex marriage is now legal in D.C. (congratulations!), and the church looks set to keep its promise, starting with the termination of their foster-care program. They've also decided to end spousal benefits for all employees, including terminating the benefits of existing employees, rather than give those benefits to same-sex partners.

Happily, as AU reports, this story has a positive ending: Since Catholic Charities has shut down their foster-care and adoption program, the service they used to provide will now be offered by other groups, including the National Center for Children and Families, that will get the public funding the Catholic group used to receive. Well done, Washington, and shame on this despicable, bigoted church that would apparently rather see children go parentless than have to provide health insurance to gay people.

On a similar note, there's this story of a 5-year-old who was expelled from a private Catholic preschool because his parents are lesbians:

In a statement sent to 9NEWS, the Archdiocese said, "Homosexual couples living together as a couple are in disaccord with Catholic teaching."

..."No person shall be admitted as a student in any Catholic school unless that person and his/her parent(s) subscribe to the school's philosophy and agree to abide by the educational policies and regulations of the school and Archdiocese," the statement said.

Editorial note: Does this school plan to expel all students whose parents are divorced? Maybe they should also send around a questionnaire asking parents if they use birth control so they can expel the children of the ones who answer yes. Of course, since something like 90% of American adults, Catholics included, use contraception, this might lead to a fairly steep dropoff in those all-important tuition checks. It seems politically safer to only target members of relatively small minorities for persecution, rather than actually try to apply their own rules consistently.

On the positive side, it seems clear that the staff who run the school were appalled by the open bigotry and hatred of their church superiors - another clear sign that American Catholics are more progressive than their benighted hierarchy:

School staff members, who asked to remain anonymous, say they are disgusted by the Archdiocese's decision.

...Staff members said they were not allowed to discuss the decision after it was made. Some of them said they were disheartened to work at a school that preaches peace and love, but also makes this decision.

A memo to these staff members: As this and the previous story make clear, Roman Catholicism does not preach love - at least not in the unconditional, universal sense we generally think of when using that word. It preaches conditional, selective love - love only for people who are willing to submit to its insane dictates and obey the orders of the pompous frauds in charge - and that's a different animal altogether.

The church's shameless bigotry against gays and lesbians is all the more outrageous considering its own continuing crimes and hypocrisy. I wrote in my last post on the Catholic church that, given the sex abuse scandals in America, Ireland and Germany, it was a statistical inevitability that more stories of child rapists among the clergy would appear in other countries as well. Now similar allegations have been made in the Netherlands. More amusingly, there's this scandal in the Vatican itself:

The Vatican was today rocked by a sex scandal reaching into Pope Benedict's household after a chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting.

Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness, was caught by police on a wiretap allegedly negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a 29-year-old Vatican chorister, over the specific physical details of men he wanted brought to him.

And lastly, less amusingly, there's this story. The Catholic church in Ireland has racked up a $14 million bill for victim compensation after letting sexual predators in the clergy run rampant for thirty years, and the Bishop of Ferns, Denis Brennan, is asking his parishioners to pass the collection plate to cover the costs. As the Independent puts it:

In other words the Roman Catholic Church in Ferns is asking the victims of its own bitter failings to pay the price for the crime -- it is a request which beggars belief.

At this point, the church's callousness and hypocrisy has been demonstrated ad nauseam, so this no longer shocks me. The only thing that still surprises me is that a den of vipers like this one still thinks it has the authority to instruct the rest of us how we should treat our fellow human beings. Personally, I think the Pope and his hirelings ought to turn over all the remaining predators to the police, sell off the treasures of the Vatican to pay their court costs, and spend a few decades in sackcloth and ashes before they should even think of venturing an opinion on moral topics again.

Postscript: Although it's not a sex scandal, there was one more story that came out just after I wrote this that I couldn't omit: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has banned voluntary end-of-life measures in the more than 600 Catholic hospitals and nursing homes around the country. In other words, Catholic institutions will no longer honor patients' living wills stating that they don't wish to be kept alive by feeding tubes if they're irreversibly comatose or terminally ill.

Although the law protects patients from being subjected to any medical treatment against their will, it's easy to see how this decision could be used by Catholic hospital administrators to coerce grief-stricken families and patients who may not be capable of expressing their desires. Even in the best case, it will almost certainly lead to more pointless suffering as patients who don't want to be kept artificially alive try to find another hospital to transfer to that will respect their wishes. We need to publicize the evil and tyrannical pretensions of the bishops, and I suggest this slogan: "If you want to have a feeding tube forcibly crammed down your throat or run through a hole cut into your stomach so you can be kept alive to suffer, then make sure you go to a Catholic hospital!"

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 is ostensibly about the origin of biological information, but what it's really about is the origin of life. We've discussed this in part in an earlier chapter, but Meyer has some other objections to raise.

First up, Strobel raises the question of the "prebiotic soup" - the dilute broth of organic molecules that's believed to have existed in the Earth's oceans before the origin of life, a fitting stage for many kinds of complex chemical reactions. This is a plausible environment for abiogenesis to take place, so Meyer tries to sow some doubt:

"I hear scientists talk a lot about this prebiotic soup," I said. "How much evidence is there that it actually existed?"

"That's a very interesting issue," he replied. "The answer is there isn't any evidence... If this prebiotic soup had really existed... it would have been rich in amino acids. Therefore, there would have been a lot of nitrogen, because amino acids are nitrogenous. So when we examine the earliest sediments of the Earth, we should find large deposits of nitrogen-rich minerals... Those deposits have never been located." [p.227]

There's no footnote for this, and I find it a puzzling and implausible argument. Earth today contains billions of tons of organic molecules locked up in life. But the Earth is a closed system. Aside from negligible contributions by comets and meteorites, the atoms on this planet today are the same ones that were here when it was first formed. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we know from Miller-Urey-type experiments that organic molecules like amino acids readily form in the presence of a source of energy. How could there not have been a prebiotic soup? What does Meyer imagine all those molecules were doing prior to the origin of life? (Then again, as I pointed out in chapter 4, Meyer appears to be a believer in the young-earth mythology - so maybe the alternative he's really trying to push is the Garden of Eden.)

Meyer also fails to qualify his mention of "earliest sediments". The earliest sediments, if by that he means sedimentary rocks of the same age as the origin of life, do not exist: erosion and plate tectonics tend to destroy and recycle the very oldest rocks. Most of the oldest surviving rocks that we possess are zircons, tiny mineral grains that form in igneous and metamorphic rocks. Zircons can be radiometrically dated, and some are known that are over 4 billion years old, but they don't offer any clues as to when life got started.

The oldest geologic evidence of life is significantly later. There are fossil stromatolites about 3.45 billion years old in rocks from the Warrawoona Group of Western Australia, which is the oldest clear evidence of living things. More controversially, there are rocks from Greenland about 3.85 billion years old that may contain "chemofossils". Living things concentrate the C-12 carbon isotope, rather than the slightly heavier C-13. These rocks show that same altered ratio, which could be a chemical marker left by early life. Evidence this subtle is still being debated by the scientific community, and given the extensive recycling of the Earth's oldest rocks, it's not reasonable to expect "large deposits" of nitrogen-rich minerals dating back to the origin of life to have survived.

Meyer has only one source to back up all of this, and it's a real laugh riot:

"In fact, Jim Brooks wrote in 1985 that 'the nitrogen content of early organic matter is relatively low - just .015 percent.' He said in Origins of Life: 'From this we can be reasonably certain that there never was any substantial amount of 'primitive soup' on Earth when pre-Cambrian sediments were formed; if such a soup ever existed it was only for a brief period of time.'" [p.227]

Strobel labels this an "astounding conclusion", but what he should be more astounded by is how far Meyer had to stretch to find a source for this claim. Wanting to verify this, I did a search for Jim Brooks' Origins of Life, only to find that it's long out of print according to several online booksellers. But more comical is that Strobel cites the publisher of this book as "Lion" - which I found out is Lion Hudson, which is, in fact, a Christian publishing house. A twenty-year-old, out-of-print book by a Christian publisher - that's the most reliable source that could be found to back up these assertions! Couldn't Meyer find even one actual scientific source to quote-mine?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Humanist Symposium is a blog carnival created to celebrate and showcase the internet's best writing on atheism, on positive humanism, on morality from a rational perspective, and on the bright side of a life free from religion. We're always looking for new entrants, so if this is the kind of thing you write, send in your posts today! If you see a fitting post written by another author, you're welcome to submit that as well. E-mail entries to me at ebonmusings@gmail.com, or use the form on the carnival home page.

The next edition of the Humanist Symposium will be on March 14 at WongaBlog. If you'd like to volunteer to host an upcoming edition, you're welcome to do that as well. We can always use new hosts! Contact me via e-mail if you're interested.

Editor's Note: This past week, I wrote an essay encouraging atheists to join the Foundation Beyond Belief, a new charitable group doing good for human beings and the world in the name of freethought. I also offered to write a front-page post interviewing anyone who agreed to join the Foundation as a result of hearing about it on my site. This is the first of those interviews, which will be posted each weekend. Please welcome Daylight Atheism commenter Peter N!

Tell us a little about yourself. Who are you, where do you live, what do you do?

My name is Peter Nothnagle. I live in Iowa City, Iowa, USA, where I am a self-employed recording engineer specializing in recording and editing classical music CDs.

If you're an atheist, when did you first become an atheist, and how long have you been one? If you're not an atheist, how would you define your beliefs?

By a happy accident of birth, my parents seemed to have only the minimum socially-required religious leanings for educated people in the '50s and '60s. Thus, although I was dragged to the Catholic church on Sundays, I was never required to buy in to the teachings and traditions, and I never did. I was always interested in both history and science, and by my teens it was obvious to me that Christianity was just a mythology like all the rest.

Do you have a blog of your own, or another site you'd like us to know about?

Nope.

Have you given to other charities before joining the Foundation Beyond Belief? If so, which ones are your favorites?

I have sporadically donated to Doctors Without Borders, International Planned Parenthood, and various medical research foundations. I also get my long-distance phone service from CREDO, which overcharges shamelessly but remits the excess to worthy causes.

What membership level did you join the Foundation at?

I scrolled down the list of contribution levels until I hit one that hurts, just a little. But it's a good kind of hurt. I will work just a few extra hours each month, which is a ridiculously easy way to help people in desperate need, as well as supporting the cause of reason.

How do you plan to divide your initial donation?

I divided it among human services options: education, child welfare, and poverty.

Is there anything else you'd like to say to atheists who are considering supporting the Foundation or other charitable groups?

I am happy to support an explicitly nonreligious charity like this. Together we encourage other atheists to come out and stand up. I hope the Foundation has a lot of success and by their example, other atheist-themed public service institutions will be established.

Sam Harris is famous for the argument that religion, even moderate religion, does harm by teaching that faith is a virtue that should not be questioned, which encourages militant and violent strains of fundamentalism. Today, I want to talk about another way, subtle but unmistakable, that religion causes harm to human beings.

Because of its tendency to treat all the statements of its founders and sacred texts as holy truth, religion has the effect of "freezing" the prejudices in vogue at the time of that religion's founding - encouraging followers to view them not as contingent or arbitrary cultural biases, but as the received will of God. And when a community of the faithful sincerely believes this, they'll perpetuate those prejudices for decades or centuries, long after the rest of the world has made enough progress to leave them behind. These preserved opinions are like fossils, surviving remnants of a more ancient era. But unlike fossils, they're still alive and malignant and able to do harm.

Consider the belief, still all too common, that rape victims are partially to blame for being raped if they drink or dress provocatively. This is a pernicious myth that's long been used, and is still being used, by rapists to excuse their actions and discourage rape victims from reporting the crime. It springs from the ancient prejudice that men can't be expected to exercise self-control in such situations, while women who are raped must have done something to tempt or incite the man into raping her. This is the sort of vile misogyny that our society should long since have discarded - but not only is it alive and well, it's still being propped up by patriarchal, male-dominated religions. Consider this story about a religious leaflet given to a woman in Virginia:

"You may have been given this leaflet because of the way you are dressed," it begins. "Have you thought about standing before the true and living God to be judged?"

..."Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin," the leaflet states. "By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?"

This loathsome argument, though presumably from a Christian source, has much in common with the Muslim cleric who proclaimed that women who refuse to veil their faces are like "uncovered meat" that gets eaten by stray animals. Both of them justify their woman-hating, blame-the-victim attitude by passing it off as the word of God.

The same attitude is behind a new and worrying trend in American schools: religious-right legislators who've supported teaching creationism in science class are now broadening their sights to demand the teaching of "alternative views" about global warming, as well as other favorite right-wing targets. As the article notes, white evangelicals are among the least likely to accept the science behind climate change (and I've written before about similar views from both sides of the theological aisle).

It's no surprise that people who are hostile to the scientific worldview would oppose not just evolution, but other well-established scientific truths as well. A worldview founded on faith, fallacy and magical thinking is unlikely to accord scientific research the respect it deserves. (To cite another example, prominent creationists Philip Johnson and Jonathan Wells also belong to a pseudoscientific group which argues that HIV does not cause AIDS.) And since Christianity has, for the most part, become fused with the Republican Party in America, it was to be expected that there's hardly any daylight left between the political goals of those two groups. It started with Christians infiltrating and taking over the Republican Party platform, but it's fascinating to see how this connection now runs in the other direction as well - how the corporatist, social-Darwinian agenda of the GOP has become fossilized as the de facto position of evangelical Christianity.

The harm done by fossilized opinions is most obvious in Islam, where the status of women has scarcely advanced in fourteen hundred years. Laws still in force throughout the Muslim world allow men to take multiple wives, forbid women from getting an education or traveling outside the home without a male relative, devalue their testimony in court, and more. Just a few weeks ago, Muslim tribal elders in Bangladesh ordered the flogging of a rape victim - and Bangladesh is relatively advanced when it comes to women's rights, at least when compared to most other Islamic countries.

The next time you hear some mealy-mouthed accommodationist denouncing atheists for claiming "intellectual superiority" over believers, remind them of facts like these. If atheists' opinions are better, truer, more valuable than religious opinions, it's not because we're intrinsically smarter - it's because we are willing to change our minds when new evidence presents itself. Millions of religious believers' minds are mired centuries in the past, clinging to beliefs that we now know to be false and moral tenets that we now know to be atrocities. We have every right to feel superior to people who still hold such fossilized opinions.

Our next stop was the Liberty campus bookstore. It was run by Barnes & Noble, and it looked pretty much like any other campus bookstore. I was surprised by the range of books available there, some of which I would have expected to be verboten on campus - from Neil Gaiman's American Gods to Jeff Sharlet's The Family, as well as books on global warming and dream interpretation. That said, there were also four or five whole racks of shelves, a good half of the store, devoted to Christian material - Bibles, apologetics manuals, theology texts, proselytizing handbooks, and one shelf given over to books written by Liberty faculty, including the current president, Jerry Falwell's son Jonathan.

This is a good place to comment on Liberty University's code of conduct, the "Liberty Way", which all students living on campus must obey (students who are under 21 and not married are required to live on campus). Among other things, it requires student groups to get prior approval from the administration for all on-campus speakers, demonstrations, and petitions, with the clear implication that permission will be denied if the activity would "compromise the principles and policies of Liberty University". (Remember what Johnnie Moore said about "disputable matters"? Not too many of those in sight around here, it seems.)

Even more surprisingly, the code of conduct bans Liberty students from seeing any R-rated movies - even while off-campus. (I asked; there was a special exemption for The Passion of the Christ.) Also banned are any video games, posters or music whose content is incompatible with a "healthy Christian atmosphere" or not "in harmony with God's word". This is why it surprised me to find such books in the bookstore - although, like most totalitarian states, I'm certain that Liberty has many unwritten rules in addition to the written ones. It may well be that students are expected not to read or possess unorthodox books, even if the rules don't say so explicitly.

Outside the bookstore, we came across this interesting little pavilion. I'm still not certain why Jerry Falwell chose the Liberty Bell as the symbol of his university, or why he named it "Liberty" in the first place. The Christian belief that Jesus provides "liberty" from sin may be part of it - but if that's the reason, why use a secular symbol like the Liberty Bell, rather than a cross or something else explicitly religious?

This could, yet again, be an example of how the evangelical mindset so often values image over substance. Doubtless, it serves rhetorical ends to proclaim their love of liberty, even while the rules they impose on their students and faculty regarding permitted speech, correct belief and so on are the antithesis of this.

Last but not least, there was our visit to the on-campus memorial to Jerry Falwell. It was on a hilltop, set aside from the other campus buildings, behind the house that Falwell lived in while he was alive and that's now used as an administrative center. There was a stone cross rising out of a reflecting pool, with an eternal flame on top, and a fenced-off plot of land watched over by a small bronze plaque. The snow was well-trampled, but in the chilly peace of that Sunday morning, my friends and I were the only ones there. On the far side of the memorial, someone with a less-than-reverent cast of mind had built a fort in the snow.

I shed no tears over Falwell's death; he was a spiteful, small-minded hatemonger, and proud of it. And to judge from all the accounts I've read, Liberty reflected that attitude while he was in charge of it. For instance, The Preacher's Son tells of several students being instantly expelled if they were even suspected of being gay; some of them were kicked out of their homes because of it, and at least one committed suicide.

Yet it does seem that Liberty has mellowed at least somewhat since Falwell's passing. The Preacher's Son also said that when the author attended Liberty, in the early 1990s, students were forbidden to see any movie or to listen to any contemporary music, even Christian pop; that girls were required to wear dresses or skirts; and that the administration put wheel locks on undergraduates' cars to stop them from leaving campus without permission. None of those things still seem to be true today.

Make no mistake, Liberty hasn't gone very far from its roots. It's still a deeply conservative Christian fundamentalist college, still teaches its students young-earth creationism and the Rapture, still makes attendance at religious services mandatory, still engages in the policing of viewpoints and the monitoring of thoughts, and still views voting Republican as synonymous with Christianity. (As I was writing this, I heard that Americans United has asked the IRS to investigate Liberty's tax-exempt status in light of the administration using the school newspaper, the Liberty Champion, to endorse political candidates.) But despite its origins, Liberty hasn't been able to completely resist the tides of modernity, it seems.

But the problem is that even what's moderate by evangelical standards is not moderate by the standards of wider society. From biology classes that teach creationism to law classes that teach Christian dominionism, Liberty is systematically deceiving its students about the facts of the world. And the old, ugly paranoia and hatemongering isn't far beneath the surface either. And while, by the strict letter of the law, they have every legal right to lie and mislead, we likewise have every right to call this behavior what it is and denounce it. It seems a feeble weapon, but in the long run, no belief system is entirely immune to questioning.

Over the past year or so, I've become increasingly aware that, for the atheist movement to make a difference, speaking out isn't enough. Speech is a valuable tool, but it isn't the only tool. Almost as important is our money and our effort - the way we spend it, and the causes we support. To build the world we want to see, we must be willing to act in concrete ways that advance the goal of creating a secular community.

This concern of mine is bolstered by surveys which show that evangelical Christians and other members of religious groups give more - not a lot more, but more - to charitable causes than atheists. This holds true even if you don't count donations to a believer's own church. (NB: I have serious concerns with this study's methodology, especially the way it lumps committed atheists in with infrequent churchgoers as "secularists". Nevertheless, I think the larger point has validity.)

Obviously, I don't think that this is because religious people are more generous or more caring than atheists. I think the explanation is much simpler, as I wrote in a post from 2007 which predicted this finding: religious believers give more because they have more opportunities to give.

If you're a member of a church that passes the collection plate every week, that regularly organizes blood drives, soup kitchens, after-school programs, and that regularly exhorts its members to volunteer and to participate, then of course you're more likely to give, simply because the possibility is always before your eyes. Atheists have no comparable social organization, and that makes charitable giving take more time and effort. When you do it yourself, you have to do all the legwork: remembering to make your donation, deciding on a cause, compiling a list of suitable charities, researching their background, and selecting criteria to choose a winner. It's just easier when all this work is done for you, and the only thing you have to do is sign on the dotted line.

The other advantage religious people have over us is that their donations are highly visible. When a theist gives to, say, Catholic Charities or Lutheran World Relief, there's no doubt about where that organization's budget is coming from and who's supporting them. By contrast, atheists often give to non-sectarian groups like Feeding America or Doctors Without Borders - and there's nothing wrong with that, but because people of all creeds support those groups, there's nothing to mark our charitable dollars as coming from atheists. This makes our good works invisible, which often leads ignorant religious apologists to claim that atheists have never done anything for our fellow human beings.

What we need is an option to give to charity in a way that does good for others, while also making it clear that atheists and nonbelievers are underwriting the effort. And there are already ways to do this - as I've mentioned before, there's Kiva, the microfinance site whose largest lender community is made up of atheists. But Kiva is a long-term effort, aimed at the eradication of poverty through capitalism, and there's still a call for groups that answer urgent needs.

Well, now there's a group that answers all these challenges at once. I'm happy to report on the recent launch of the Foundation Beyond Belief, a meta-charity helping atheists and freethinkers to do good (and I love that logo!). The Foundation was the brainchild of Dale McGowan, the secular parenting author whom I've interviewed before. There are some other familiar faces on the board of directors as well, including fellow blogger Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist.

The Foundation is not itself a charity. Rather, it has a list of major issues it seeks to address - environment, poverty, education, child welfare, and so on. Each quarter, it picks an existing charitable group serving each of those issues, one that has a track record of effectiveness and that doesn't proselytize. Foundation members' donations are funneled to those charities, divided among them according to the individual member's choice. You can choose to split your donation equally among all the charities, or give it all to a few or to one.

The Foundation's business model answers both of the challenges I posed above. As an explicitly secular organization which only supports non-sectarian charities, it makes our donations visible in the same way that religious charities are visible. As Dale McGowan puts it, through the FBB, our donations become "a positive collective expression of our worldview". And while the Foundation does accept one-time donations, that's not its preferred means of giving. Instead, it encourages people to sign up as members, committing to donate a fixed amount per month - as low as $5. This helps give atheists that regular reminder that we've been lacking until now.

I'm tremendously excited about the potential of this project! I became a member of the Foundation a few days ago, and I've started at $50 per month, but that's just a beginning. If I'm satisfied with how my money is spent, I plan to ramp up my contribution very soon, and I hope to eventually do the majority of my charitable giving through Foundation Beyond Belief. If the goals of this project are ones that you also share, I encourage you to join me there.

And to sweeten the pot a bit, I'm going to make a special offer. If you join the Foundation as the result of reading this post, and if you leave a comment and tell me about it, I'll do a front-page interview with you about yourself, your blog if you have one, and your reasons for joining. This offer may not remain open forever, so take advantage of it soon!

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of Case is about abiogenesis. It seems Strobel couldn't find any actual molecular biologists or organic chemists who support ID and were willing to speak with him about it, so it's back for another talk with Stephen Meyer, the philosopher already interviewed in chapter 4. With cheerful ludicrousness, Strobel describes Meyer, who is not a biologist and has never published a single piece of research on this topic, as "one of the country's leading experts on origin-of-life issues" [p.221] - which is like saying that Kent Hovind is one of the country's leading experts on tax law.

I want to quote some more of Strobel's rapturous verbiage about Meyer's intellectual prowess, to give you a sense of just how over-the-top and obnoxious it is:

In fact, I once hosted the videotaping of an intellectual shoot-out between Meyer and an atheistic anthropologist on the legitimacy of intelligent-design theories, and I remember walking away amazed at Meyer's finesse in deftly dismantling the professor's case while at the same time forcefully presenting his own. Maybe that's a throwback to Meyer's earlier years when he trained as a boxer, learning to overcome fears of taking a punch and how to jab away at an opponent's weakness. [p.222]

Creationists certainly love to describe how wonderfully convincing and compelling their arguments are. In some cases, they love doing it so much that they never actually get around to making the argument. And it's a given that Lee Strobel would never declare any debate between a creationist and a scientist to be anything less than a total victory for creationism. But I noticed something important missing from that paragraph: a footnote.

There are plenty of other footnotes throughout this chapter, but for some reason, Strobel never gives us a reference or a URL to this debate, never tells us where it was, when it was, or even who it was against. If it was such a total victory for ID as he claims, why doesn't he give his readers the tools to view it for themselves so they can see just how decisively Meyer trounced the other side? Could it be that he actually thinks the scientist won the debate, despite what he says? Or, more likely, he just doesn't want his readers to see any unfiltered pro-evolution argument in a format that creationists don't completely control. (As we saw last time, creationists tend to fare poorly in those encounters.) He'd prefer his readers serve as a cheering section, rather than giving them any information that might encourage those pesky tendencies toward critical thinking.

What Strobel also doesn't see fit to mention is that his re-interview of Stephen Meyer is likely because, at this point in the book, he's interviewed nearly every prominent figure in the intelligent-design movement. At the beginning of the book, he boasted of the parade of experts he would put on display - but it seems he couldn't fill out even ten chapters without repeating himself, and even then, the list had to be padded with philosophy professors, theologians and professional Christian apologists.

Strobel's defenders would doubtless say that there are other people he could have interviewed, such as two more names mentioned in the introduction to this chapter:

The astounding capacity of microscopic DNA to harbor this mountain of information... "vastly exceeds that of any other known system," said geneticist Michael Denton. [p.221]

...biology professor Dean Kenyon repudiate[d] the conclusions of his own book and the chemical origin of life and conclude[d] instead that nothing short of an intelligence could have created this intricate cellular apparatus. [p.222]

Yet I suspect there are reasons why Strobel chose not to include either of these two. Denton, for example, was once an ardent anti-evolutionist who wrote books like Evolution: A Theory in Crisis - but his newest book, Nature's Destiny, completely reverses course and instead argues that the laws of the cosmos are fine-tuned so as to make evolution (and the appearance of humans) inevitable. This position has significant similarities to ID, to be sure, but it also strays from the "abrupt appearance" evangelical-Christian orthodoxy that's promoted throughout the book, so it's not surprising that Denton isn't given a chance to speak here. (Jonathan Wells, the Moonie, and Michael Behe, the Roman Catholic, seem to be the farthest that Strobel is prepared to go in the name of ecumenism.)

The other name, Dean Kenyon, is more interesting. He's that rarest of rare birds, a creationist who actually has a degree in biology (Ph.D in biophysics from Stanford, 1965). On the face of it, he seems like an ideal choice for a book like this. But Strobel skips him, too, and I think this may have something to do with it:

It is my professional opinion, based on my original research, study, and teaching, that creation-science is as scientific as evolution, although it currently does not have the benefit of the volume of research that has been carried out under evolutionist presuppositions.... Moreover, I believe that a scientifically sound creationist view of origins is not only possible, but is to be preferred over the evolutionary view.

Kenyon was a major participant in the original intelligent-design movement - back when it was still called "scientific creationism". The Supreme Court dealt the decisive blow to that in Edwards v. Aguillard, which held that creationism was unconstitutional to teach in public schools. Almost immediately thereafter, the movement reconstituted itself as "intelligent design". Perhaps Strobel felt that interviewing Kenyon would be treading on dangerous ground as regards the ID movement's history. (The original proponents of scientific creationism also argued strenuously in court that their ideas were not religious, as you can see from Kenyon's affidavit.)

For all its boastful claims, the actual ID movement is quite small, and Strobel's being forced to return to the same interview subject shows it. He tries his best to create the illusion of parity, to imply that there are just as many experts supporting ID as evolution, but we've already seen the deceptiveness of that. Try as he might to make the ID movement seem a mile wide, it will still only be an inch deep, and in no way comparable to the vast amounts of actual research, knowledge, and expertise within evolutionary theory.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator