To Christian believers, Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate and therefore possessed of omnipotent power. According to the Bible, he backed up this claim by doing many miracles while on earth - casting out demons, healing the sick and the crippled, calming storms, walking on water, producing food, and raising the dead. It would seem to be pure hubris for a lay believer to ever aspire to match such miraculous feats, much less entertain the unthinkable idea of surpassing them. But in fact, that's exactly what the Bible promises any true Christian will be able to do, as we see from the following little-known Bible verse.

This passage is John 14:12-14. The context is Jesus speaking to the apostle Philip:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it."

Greater works than these shall he do. According to Jesus himself, as recorded by the divinely inspired and inerrant text of the Bible, any true Christian believer will be able not only to reproduce the miracles of Jesus, but to do better miracles.

Just to make absolutely sure we understand this, the text has Jesus promise that he will grant any miracle whatsoever which a believer prays for in his name. In fact, he promises it twice. There are no loopholes or qualifications to this pledge, none of the convenient apologetic excuses used by modern believers - "but only if your faith is great enough", "God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is no", "God only does miracles in front of the faithful", and so on. Jesus says plainly and clearly, "If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it."

Of course, these excuses have arisen because this promise is plainly false. Christians can not do miracles like those of Jesus, much less miracles which exceed those of Jesus. They cannot heal the paralyzed, they cannot still hurricanes, they cannot stroll across seas, they cannot raise the dead. Their prayers, like the prayers of all other believers of all other religions, are empty words and nothing more. However fervent they may be, however many times they invoke Jesus' name, they produce no tangible effect greater than slightly stirring the air. The only power that a Christian or any other person has to affect the course of events in the world is what they can achieve through their own, non-supernatural effort.

This verse is just one of many in the Bible which promise, repeatedly and without qualification, that God will grant any prayer prayed by a faithful believer (see "Nothing Fails Like Prayer" for a more complete list). In the superstitious and credulous times when this book was written, perhaps that false promise was not such a great impediment. Its very extravagance may even have been a help. But in this somewhat more skeptical era, it seems likely that many believers would be shocked and upset if they knew their own text made promises it could not deliver. How many Christians might become disgruntled and realize they have been taken advantage of if they knew about this Bible verse?

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• Little-Known Bible Verses

Inspired by a recent post on Philosophy, et cetera, I want to talk a little about zombies and what they imply for a materialist theory of the mind.

When I say "zombie," I don't mean the shambling, flesh-eating undead of horror films. This thought experiment is about philosophical zombies, which are a different beast altogether. The philosophers' zombie is a hypothetical creature which, to all outward appearances, is indistinguishable from an ordinary human. The difference is that they lack phenomenal consciousness - they lack qualia.

Qualia are the subjective sensory perceptions of our inner mental life. We see colors: the redness of red, the greenness of green. We hear tones, sharp or high-pitched or dull or low. We taste flavors, salty or bitter or sweet. We feel emotions like joy, anger, or sadness. Zombies, by contrast, have none of these experiences. They are not truly conscious of anything, any more than a stone is conscious, but they act exactly as if they were. A zombie can duck a thrown baseball or write a restaurant review. Point a gun at one and it will flinch and act as if it were afraid.

What does such a bizarre idea have to do with atheism? The answer is that some prominent philosophers claim that zombies are a conclusive disproof of any strictly naturalistic theory of how the mind functions. The train of argument usually goes that zombies are not a metaphysically impossible notion; it involves no self-contradiction to imagine their existing. If they are not self-contradictory, then they are possible. If they are possible, then we could hypothetically build one - a sophisticated robot, let's say. Such a being would act with rationality and apparent intelligence, yet lack consciousness. But if it's possible to be an intelligent, rational being without consciousness, the question is, why aren't we zombies? What makes us different from the robot? The answer, they say, is that there must be a supernatural component to the mind, in other words, a soul. This supernatural component is what gives us our consciousness, our qualia, whereas a being lacking that component could never truly be conscious no matter how much mental processing power it might have.

The problem with zombies, as with many philosophical notions, is that they do not truly prove a point but simply play on people's differing intuitions about what is possible. No obvious self-contradiction arises when we imagine a zombie, I grant. It is logically possible for such a thing to exist. But that does not mean that zombies are possible in our world, under the laws of physics that hold sway here. Our ability to imagine them is no disproof of this. We, fallible humans, are not cognizant of all the laws of physics, much less their almost infinitely complex hierarchy of ramifications. An intelligence like Laplace's demon, with perfect knowledge of the universe, might well see some consequence of physical principles which we overlook, and which renders zombies impossible in our world.

Consider a similar example. Just as dualist philosophers claim they can imagine creating a zombie, I claim I can imagine creating a perpetual motion machine. I couldn't tell you exactly how to build it, just as no one can say exactly how to build a zombie, but I can readily imagine some marvelous machine - blinking lights, coils of wire conducting electric arcs, spinning flywheels, a big brass switch - that, once it's powered up, begins producing free energy out of nowhere. No self-contradiction arises when I imagine this. But does that mean we can actually build one? Have I just disproved the laws of thermodynamics without getting out of my armchair?

Obviously not. Though we may think we can imagine a working perpetual motion machine, reality is bound to disappoint. So far, every attempt to build one has ended in utter failure, stymied by some physical principle they failed to take into account. The laws of our universe, it appears, interlock in such a way as to perfectly rule out the possibility of perpetual motion machines. There is no loophole where an inventor, however clever, can slip through. It only seems possible because our imaginations do not take into account the critical details that any practical attempt cannot avoid.

The dualists, I believe, are in the same boat. They may think they can imagine zombies, but that doesn't mean they're actually possible. Indeed, I suspect the opposite is more likely true: any creature complex enough to behave with all the creativity and adaptability of a human being would have to have consciousness and qualia, or something very much like them.

After all, how could a zombie dodge a thrown baseball, unless its eyes (or cameras) conveyed images of nearby objects; unless those images were in some way converted into an internal model of the world; and unless that model contained some data stream or symbol which represented a small, round, rapidly approaching object? How could a zombie write a restaurant review unless its chemical sensors were linked to a sophisticated mapping of what readings correspond to what flavors and the many subtle ways in which various combinations could interact with each other? How could a zombie convincingly simulate fear unless it had a wide-ranging ability to keep track of events in the external world and infer which ones could pose a threat to its continued existence?

It is not at all obvious to me that a being with such a sophisticated repertoire of memory, understanding and perception could fail to be conscious. In fact, I strongly suspect the opposite: any being with this capability would have to be conscious, given the physical laws that hold in our world. Consciousness is not an optional add-on, but an inevitable product of a certain degree of cognitive sophistication. In particular, I believe the ability to explicitly represent one's own self in one's mental catalog of objects, and to introspect one's own internal information processing - which, again, a zombie can do - is a vital building block of true consciousness as humans possess it, if it is not consciousness itself.

The dualists assume that an intelligent being could fail to possess qualia, and therefore conclude that intelligence and consciousness are separable. But this claim is an example of the fallacy of circular argument. If you assert that it's possible to hold everything else about the world constant, but subtract consciousness, then you're not arguing for dualism, you're assuming dualism! The conclusion which you wish to reach is already contained in the starting assumptions you feed into your argument. Whether consciousness is an inevitable outcome of the working-out of physical laws inside intelligent brains, or whether it's an unnecessary epiphenomenal accompaniment, is the very thing at issue. I argue that, contrary to some people's intuition, consciousness and intelligence are in fact not separable. I can't prove it; but neither can the dualists prove that they are.

The only remaining question, which I admit is a vexing one, is: why qualia? Why does consciousness have any subjective character at all? The way in which our minds represent characteristics of the external world as ineffable interior perceptions does seem strange, and not like most other phenomena we encounter. It does indeed seem difficult to imagine that any science, however advanced, could explain precisely how such subjective experiences arise from the collisions of atoms inside the brain.

But our inability to imagine it, at this point in time, is no proof that it's impossible. The existence of life was also once considered to be an impenetrable mystery, inexplicable except by postulating a supernatural "vital force". Yet life has since been shown to have an explanation comprehensible in terms of physical laws. (Overcoming Bias writes about "encapsulating the mystery as a substance" - an apt description of the situation.) I see no reason to believe that qualia will prove to be any different. Though they may seem to be a fundamentally different kind of thing, that's just an artifact of our present ignorance. Most likely, qualia arise from the physical laws of the cosmos no less than any other natural phenomenon. We don't understand precisely how - and maybe the mysterians are right, and we never will - but still, that is no proof that it is impossible.

Although abortion is stereotyped as the most controversial and divisive social issue there is, I think the moral issues at stake are actually fairly unambiguous. This installment of "On the Morality Of" will explain why.

Pared down to its essence, the moral question posed by abortion is a simple one: is an unborn fetus a human being, with all the moral rights and protections that pertain thereunto; or is it a non-human, an assemblage of cells, the existence of which may be terminated without wrongdoing?

The answer to this question, of course, depends critically on how you define a human being. Is a fetus a human being if it has a face, or arms and legs, or a beating heart? None of these criteria seem to me to be definitive. Being a human is far more than a matter of superficial physical appearance - we do not grant humanity to department-store mannequins, after all. Nor is humanity the mere arrangement of internal organs. If a person's heart or lungs are failing and they need to be kept alive by machinery, does that deprive them of their moral personhood? Obviously not.

What if we were to define a human being as a living organism which possesses a certain, characteristic set of genes? This definition seems somewhat closer, but again, I think it misses the mark. If humanity consists of being a living organism which possesses human DNA, then we would also have to grant personhood rights to HeLa cell colonies, or to fetuses with anencephaly (warning: disturbing image). More to the point, if a living thing with human DNA is human, then every single one of our cells should be considered to be a human in its own right, and the millions of them that are naturally sloughed off our bodies each day would constitute a holocaust of unthinkable proportions. Obviously, this is absurd.

I submit that there is one and only one defining characteristic of a person, one thing which sets us apart and gives us our unique moral worth. That thing is consciousness - the facility for self-aware thought. That is what most clearly differentiates us from all other species on this planet, and it is also what gives us the uniqueness and individuality that is rightly viewed as a key component of moral worth.

Taking consciousness to be the defining characteristic of humanity gives us a clear dividing line to use in deciding whether abortion is immoral. Ending the existence of something which does not possess the ability for conscious thought - whatever else it may be - is not the destruction of a human being. Ending the existence of something which does possess that ability is the destruction of a person. This is a solid, rational standard. It's a good sign that this position also neatly mirrors the common position on end-of-life care and euthanasia: once a human being has suffered brain death, or any other injury that results in the irreversible cessation of consciousness, they no longer possess moral personhood and we are under no obligation to ensure their physical continuance.

So, when does consciousness begin? This is a question which has an empirical answer. As Carl Sagan wrote on the topic:

Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy—near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this—however alive and active they may be—lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.

This boundary line - which is the same boundary line the U.S. Supreme Court drew in Roe v. Wade, although for different reasons - is a feasible and defensible standard. It safeguards the autonomy of the woman, and her moral right to exercise control over her own body and not be forcibly subjected to the risks and burdens of pregnancy, without compromising the important principle that every human life should be protected. If a woman wishes to obtain an abortion, it seems to me that half a year is more than adequate time for her to become aware of her pregnancy, make the decision to abort, and obtain access to medical services.

As Sagan points out, six months is actually a conservative boundary, since regular brain waves are often absent in fetuses. Also, it's conceivable that a fetus could possess them and still lack the ability for conscious thought. Nevertheless, it's still a good standard and not one we should seek to push. When we know, based on our physiological understanding of how the brain functions, that consciousness cannot exist, then no person is present and we are under no corresponding ethical obligation. However, if there's a rational possibility that consciousness may exist, then we should err on the side of caution and defend that life, just as it would be immoral to shoot into a closed box without knowing if there's a person inside. Of course, if continued pregnancy would pose a threat to the life or health of the mother, then terminating the pregnancy is an unambiguous matter of self-defense.

Until the capability for conscious thought exists, a fetus cannot have the same moral status as a person. Doubtless, the fetus is a potential person. But potentiality is not the same as actuality, and a person who only potentially exists cannot claim moral rights which match or supercede the rights of an actual, living, conscious person. (The language is imprecise here; in truth, a person who only potentially exists does not exist, and a non-existent person cannot claim anything. There is no one to make the claim.) Therefore, no harm is done when a woman aborts a pregnancy before this point. There is no person for harm to be done to.

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...

In "Unmoved Mover", I wrote about the presuppositional argument used by some modern Christian apologists. In this post, I want to say some more about presuppositionalism.

The presuppositionalists have a point in this sense and in this sense only: a worldview is worth being held only if it is possible to reason consistently from that worldview given its own starting principles. If those principles lead inevitably to their own negation, then that worldview is self-contradictory and must be discarded. This is correct as far as it goes. Where presuppositionalists go wrong is in the assertion that Christianity is the only worldview that possesses or could possess this kind of consistency. This assertion is both fantastically arrogant and unequivocally false.

Here's an example of a worldview that genuinely is inconsistent. The laws of thermodynamics say that, over time, entropy increases to a maximum. The higher-entropy configuration - the more "chaotic" state - is always more likely. Yet our universe as we currently observe it is in a low-entropy state, with plenty of organized pools of energy available to do work.

As we proceed toward the future, the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that entropy will increase. But the laws of physics are time-symmetric: they make no distinction between past and future. Therefore, if we look back into the past, it is also far more likely that entropy was higher back then than it is now. Granted, it's unlikely that entropy would spontaneously decrease, from a chaotic past to an orderly present. But if we assume that the past had less entropy than the present, we have an even more unlikely configuration to explain - we're making the problem worse, not better. Applying the laws of thermodynamics in a naive way, then, leads to the conclusion that everything we observe might be a rare, but statistically inevitable, random fluctuation that produces a temporary island of order in the midst of pure chaos.

And the smaller the island of order, the more likely it is that it could arise through random fluctuations in chaos. Thus, compared to the odds of producing an astronomically vast, orderly cosmos, it's much more probable that random fluctuations would produce a single, isolated observer - a disembodied brain, say - floating in the void of chaos and falsely imagining a whole world surrounding it. This is called a Boltzmann brain.

But there's a problem. If we are Boltzmann brains, then nothing we believe about the world can be trusted - including the very observations which led us to suspect we might be Boltzmann brains in the first place. The circle of logical contradiction is closed: observations lead us to infer conclusions which in turn lead us to doubt and disbelieve those observations. The Boltzmann-brain worldview falls apart from its own inconsistency. (This is not to say it's necessarily false - maybe we are Boltzmann brains, there is no way to disprove that - but even if it is true, we could never know it, because the hypothesis itself undercuts all possible basis for believing it.)

The way out of this dilemma is to assume that the evidence is reliable, and that our sensory perceptions and memories of the past reflect a real external world with a real history. This starting point leads to a position which does not contradict itself.

The atheist viewpoint runs along similar lines. Its intrinsic starting point is that the universe is a collection of physical things which exist independently of us, the behavior of which is governed by orderly, immutable principles which we call natural laws. Although the cosmos is complex far exceeding our ability to fully conceptualize it, and although our senses are imperfect and can be misled, we still have the ability to perceive reality with a fair degree of accuracy, to discover its governing principles, and to make inferences about how events will unfold in the future. In other words, we are rational creatures who can learn how the world works.

Contrary to what presuppositionalists claim, this view is consistent. Accepting it as true does not lead to any self-contradiction. (The usual response - that evolution would not produce rational believers - I dealt with in 2006, in "Are Evolved Minds Reliable Truth-Finders?")

Of course, this by itself does not prove that atheism is true. This is a trivial conclusion, since there are infinitely many consistent worldviews, but only one world. A worldview might be entirely consistent with itself and still be false because it does not reflect the way the world actually is. But self-consistency is the starting hurdle that any worldview must clear before we begin examining it to see whether it corresponds to empirical reality. Atheism is one of the consistent worldviews worthy of consideration, and the attempts of religious apologists to rule it out of hand from the beginning - or to make the ridiculous claim that theirs is the only possible consistent worldview - cannot be sustained.

Malverde's shrine stands near the railroad tracks on the west side of Culiacan, well-known to just about everybody in town. Nearby are Malverde Clutch & Breaks, Malverde Lumber and two Denny's-like cafeterias: Coco's Malverde and Chic's Malverde. Outside the shrine people sell trinkets, candles, and pictures. Inside the shrine are two concrete busts of the man. Malverde, supposedly a poor man from the hills, turns out to look a lot like a matinee idol -- dark eyes, sleek mustache, jet-black hair, resolute jaw. Near the main busts are stands of pendants, baseball hats, tapes with corridos to the bandit, countless picture cases with photographs of the bandit and a prayer to him in thanks, and rows of plaster busts wrapped in plastic.

English society has the legend of Robin Hood, a heroic outlaw who fought back against unjust rulers on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed. That story could be a template for today's entry in "Strange and Curious Sects", for Jesus Malverde, like Robin Hood, is a semi-mythical figure who fights against repressive authorities. But whereas Robin Hood stole from the greedy rich, Jesus Malverde grants his followers prosperity in a somewhat different way. Malverde is the folk saint of Mexican drug smugglers, and the "miracles" he performs for them tend to involve keeping them safe from the police on their cross-border runs.

Mexican drug smuggling began in Sinaloa. Here smugglers are folk heroes and a "narcoculture" has existed for some time. Faith in Malverde was always strongest among Sinaloa's poor and highland residents, the classes from which Mexico's drug traffickers emerged. As the narcos went from the hills to the front pages, they took Malverde with them. He is now the religious side to that narcoculture. Smugglers come ask Malverde for protection before sending a load north. If the trip goes well, they return to pay the shrine's house band to serenade the bandit, or place a plaque thanking Malverde for "lighting the way"; increasingly plaques include the code words "From Sinaloa to California."

As with John Frum, it's uncertain whether Malverde ever was a real person, even though the origin of his cult is in the recent past. He's alleged to have lived in the early twentieth century, around the time of the Mexican Revolution. Like the conflicting gospels of early Christianity, there are a variety of stories about his early life. All agree, however, that he ended up turning to an outlaw life to protect the poor against corrupt rulers. Most agree that he was eventually betrayed by a friend, captured and executed by the government, which hung his body from a tree in May 1909. Local historians believe Malverde may have been a composite figure created from several historical bandits. Today, almost a hundred years after his alleged death, he is still a major center of worship and devotion for the impoverished people of the Sinaloa region, and miracles are attributed to him on a regular basis. Here are some:

The summer when Florentino was 23, he was working as an oyster diver in Mazatlan. One day he became tangled in his rope underwater. He wrestled with the cord and began to drown. Then suddenly the face of the bandit Jesus Malverde appeared to him. Florentino finally freed himself. He rose to the surface and came immediately to Malverde's shrine to give thanks.

They leave behind photos and plaques with grateful inscriptions: "Thank you Malverde for saving me from drugs," writes Isaias Valencia Miranda, from Agua Zarca Sinaloa; "Thank you Malverde for not having to lose my arm and leg," reads the dedication on a photo of a man in sunglasses identifying himself as Lorenzo Salazar, from Guadalajara.

To one side sits Dona Tere, rocking the day away. She is a cheerful, plump woman, made up with bright red lipstick. She, too, has her tale of faith. Eight years ago, doctors diagnosed Dona Tere with cancer. She decided not to take medicine. "I said, ´Malverde, they say you do miracles. I'm going to ask you for a miracle. I don't believe in you. I know I'm going to die.'" Dona Tere's still around. "I have four Malverdes in my house," she says. "One in the kitchen. One in the dining room. One going up the stairs and one in the bedroom. I bless myself every time I'm at the foot of the stairs." Last time they operated on her, Dona Tere paid for two hours of music to be played to Malverde.

Even after death, Malverde's grave was reputed to possess miraculous power:

They say all of Culiacan turned out for the demolition of the pile of stones and pebbles. They say, too, that stones began to jump like popcorn and that the bulldozer operator had to get drunk to have the guts to roll over it; they say the machine broke down when it touched the grave.

It's remarkable how similar Malverde's miracles are to those of mainstream religions - miraculous visions, rescues, healings, transformed lives. Of course, there are also the aforementioned protections of drug smugglers, which has earned Malverde descriptions like "The Narcosaint" and "The Generous Bandit". In a region where brutal anti-narcotics crackdowns are all too frequent, it's not surprising that the government is no friend of most of Malverde's worshippers. And, like nearly all new religions, his cult started among the poor and the voiceless - the people most likely to seek supernatural assistance, and to console themselves with the thought that God is on their side and against the corrupt rich.

If Malverde's cult survives much longer, it will doubtless soon spread to the middle-class and the wealthy and acquire a veneer of respectability; the article gives several indications that this process has already begun. With further time, his stories could be collected into a canonical form and polished to remove theologically troubling elements. For all we know, in some distant future age, there may be Malverdian apologists claiming that his life, miracles and resurrection are historically established facts, and only hard-hearted atheists would say otherwise.

Today's edition of "Little-Known Bible Verses" is specific to the Roman Catholic denomination of Christianity. This is because, of all major Western denominations, Roman Catholicism is the only church that still requires that its clergy members remain celibate. The Catholic church to this day believes that this is a biblically supportable doctrine. But in fact, the opposite is true, as we can see from two little-known Bible verses.

Both the verses in question come from the epistle of 1 Timothy, which is accepted by the Catholic church as canonical and appears in the Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible. First, 1 Timothy 3:2:

Now a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher...

This verse does more than just say that marriage is compatible with being a bishop; it actually says that a bishop must be "the husband of one wife". (Note also the sexist language - the text clearly assumes that only men are suitable candidates for bishophood - but I've discussed that elsewhere and won't belabor the point.)

The Catholic church, in keeping with their practice of reinterpreting the Bible to match what they've decided, has issued a statement, The Biblical Foundation of Priestly Celibacy, which claims that this verse is actually meant to indicate some sort of allegorical "marriage" between the priest and the church:

Yet the symbolic and spiritual meaning of the expression unius uxoris vir remains ever the same. Indeed, since it contains a direct reference to the covenant, that is to say, to the marriage relationship between Christ and the Church, it invites us to attach much greater importance today than in the past to the fact that the minister of the Church represents Christ the bridegroom to the Church his bride. In this sense, the priest must be «the husband of one wife»; but that one wife, his bride, is the Church who, like Mary, is the bride of Christ.

No doubt, this mystical nonsense shows the interpretive genius of apologists. Faced with the unchangeable text of a biblical commandment, they get around it by inventing new meanings for words in that text and substituting them for the commonly understood meanings. (It's almost as clever as the stroke of genius by which the church evaded the biblical prohibition on divorce - that is, dissolving an existing marriage - by inventing the concept of annulment, retroactively declaring that a marriage had never existed in the first place.)

But there's another verse which that document never discusses or even mentions:

"Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, through the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth."

—1 Timothy 4:1-3 (RSV)

This verse is a direct attack on Catholic notions of celibacy, explicitly claiming that such doctrines are invented by demons and are departures from the faith. It's not surprising that this verse is little-known among Catholic believers, although it's often (correctly) cited by Protestant polemics.

UPDATE: A Roman Catholic commenter helpfully points out that according to the Bible, Peter the apostle, considered by Catholics to be the first pope, was married (Matthew 8:14).

Other posts in this series:

• Little-Known Bible Verses

Recently, an offended Christian left this comment on my satirical post "Footprints":

Call me close-minded, but am I the only one who looks at the whole text of Scripture, and not just the parts that deal with eternal damnation?

Because, if we're playing a game where we take the Holy Word of God out of context, I can alter His meaning to say just about anything, really.

....why does everyone fail to mention all the times that God blessed His people? Why is everyone so quick to point out where God brings punishment upon those who deserve punishment? Why does no one want to talk about the innumerable people who witnessed the miracles of Christ?

First of all, I have to say I found it rather odd that this visitor acknowledged that the Bible can be made to say "just about anything", depending on which verses one selects, and that he doesn't see anything unusual about that. Is that the hallmark of a good book, that you can make either a collection of very good lessons or of very bad ones, depending on what you choose to emphasize? Shouldn't a truly good book present a consistently good message no matter which parts you pick?

But, leaving that aside, I'll gladly take this Christian up on his challenge. Let's look at the whole text of scripture.

If one starts reading at the beginning of the Bible, the first thing one should notice is that it's far from the unblemished collection of just and beautiful teachings that many of its followers would have us believe. In just the first few books of the Old Testament, there's a great amount of hatred, bloodshed, and violence - and not just practiced by God's enemies, but often waged by his followers in his name and with his approval, or even committed by God himself. The book of Genesis, for example, records God becoming so angry that he sent a massive flood to drown nearly every living thing on earth. The book of Exodus shows how he tormented the Egyptian people with plagues to punish their ruler. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy contain many cruel and savage laws, such as how homosexuals should be stoned, or how women who are raped should have to marry their rapists. The books of Numbers and Joshua gleefully recount a genocidal war of extermination which God ordered his chosen people to carry out against the Canaanites.

I could go on, but I think the point is clear. Even if we take an overview that looks at "the whole text of Scripture", we see that it's far from faultless, and that there are many passages which we rightly consider to be cruel and abhorrent. Indeed, if one reads the deconversion stories of former Christians, a common element is that their journey to atheism began when they actually read the Bible and saw for themselves what it contains.

Now, to grant this Christian's point, I'm not claiming that the Bible is all bad. It's quite true that, mixed in with all the violence and terror, there are also some quite good verses, including excellent and profound lessons about compassion, love, and generosity. (I would not, however, count the "loving" sacrifice of Jesus among them. If anything, I think it belongs more with the former group of verses than the latter - showcasing as it does either the savagery of a god who demands that someone's blood has to be shed to forgive sin, or else the bizarre masochism of a god who put himself through a needless, agonizing death.)

However, the good verses don't predominate. If anything, I'd say that the bad ones outnumber the good, and that the Bible's overall message is more about suffering and destruction than it is about hope. (Jesus' statement in Matthew 7 that most people are going to Hell is a microcosm of this.) That is not a conclusion reached by taking biblical verses "out of context", but by simply reading the Bible for what it says, without seeking to deny or downplay the verses that raise troubling theological issues.

But my Christian visitor missed a more fundamental point. Yes, it's true that the Bible contains many bad lessons. It's also true that the Bible contains many good lessons. But trying to determine the "balance" of good and bad, as if the good verses could somehow outweigh the bad ones, overlooks a basic truth. The fact that there even is such a mixture makes the Bible a bad book overall - because a truly good book would not have good and evil parts mixed together. A truly good book would be consistently good, not just occasionally good!

Mixing good and evil lessons is like, to use an analogy I heard once, mixing wine with sewage. It doesn't matter if there's a lot more wine than there is sewage; you still get sewage in the end. Similarly, evil doesn't cease to be evil if it's mixed with some good, but good definitely does cease to be good if it's adulterated with evil. If there was a benevolent deity who inspired the Bible, why would he be willing to share real estate with the shocking atrocities and infamous cruelties recorded in that book? Would he want or allow his message of love to be stained with blood and mingled with these evil deeds?

Pointing out this absurdity is why I wrote "The Great Sage's Visit" on Ebon Musings. In the case of a human being, this conclusion would be clear to everyone. But when cherished religious beliefs are at stake, some people will resist even the most obvious and persuasive reasoning.

Last month, in "The Aura of Infallibility", I talked about how some religious believers declare themselves and their beliefs to be infallible in order to ward off the frightening possibility of having to decide what is true. This is, obviously, a futile tactic. We can proclaim ourselves to be immune to error as often as we like, but reality is unlikely to be impressed. Human beliefs, no matter how strongly or confidently held, do not decide the way the universe is.

What these believers fear, more than anything, is the slippery slope: that once they change even one of their beliefs, all the rest will follow. As one of them put it:

Yet, how can one know anything for sure about Jesus if the Bible that reveals him is wrong often or even from time to time. Is the Virgin Birth wrong? Is Jesus both God and man, or is that wrong? What about the Trinity? All such doctrines are attacked by secularists and non-believers as much as the Young Earth doctrine, why not jettison those as well? And if not, why not? How can you know what is right and what is wrong in the Bible?

Perhaps this fear is indeed valid in their case; since all their beliefs are reasonless and based only on faith, if they abandon one, then there's no reason not to abandon all the others. But this doesn't mean that belief in general is a futile endeavor. It means that we should endeavor to hold substantive beliefs - ones which are justified by facts. That way, even when one of our beliefs is shown to be wrong, we still have good reason to continue holding the others. The evidence of the world anchors our beliefs and prevents them from turning into the slippery slope of faith.

Human fallibility is obvious in every aspect of our lives. Although our ability to predict and therefore control the world has been increasing gradually since the scientific revolution, that understanding has been hard-won, and we've had many mistakes, missteps and blind alleys along the way. In the realm of morality, each new era reveals the painful ignorance of the last (and there's no reason to believe ours will be an exception). In politics, war, corruption and scandal are rampant, and even if human nature is largely good, it's not hard to get the opposite impression from skimming the news.

If there's one lesson to take away from all this, it's the following: We need systems and institutions that are capable of self-correction. Since we'll always make mistakes, we need to set up a framework that permits us to learn from them and not repeat them in the future.

The scientific method is the essence of self-correction, which is one reason it's been so wildly successful at finding out the way the world works. The system of scientific peer review and replicability exposes every idea to critical scrutiny and probing tests. Only the soundest, best-supported ideas can pass through this gauntlet. And even when wrong ideas survive initial scrutiny, they can always be overturned later by new evidence. Science's tendency to shower rewards on those who disprove conventional wisdom gives this system a built-in method of correcting its own errors.

Democracy, too, is another system that is well-provisioned for self-correction. A monarchy, or any other system of absolute rule, offers people little recourse if their ruler turns out to be a bad one. By contrast, regular elections keep the system healthy and its officials accountable to the popular will, by giving the voters regular opportunity to throw out the ones they dislike.

By contrast, religion is a system of thought notably lacking in mechanisms for self-correction. The vast majority of religious beliefs do the exact opposite - assume that all significant truth was handed down at that religion's founding, perfect and complete, and that nothing of significance remains to be learned. There is no reward in religion for those who introduce new beliefs into the system or argue against old dogmas. In fact, most religions are set up specifically to discourage that possibility, with some going so far as to pronounce curses and divine wrath on anyone who tries it. There is no system of voting or other means by which the lay believers can express their discontent or call for a change of direction. And in many religions, there is an oligarchical elite of clergy who choose their own successors, shutting ordinary followers out of the decision-making process altogether.

Of course, many religions have changed to reflect scientific and ethical advances made since their founding. But it's not an unfair generalization to say that these changes almost never originate "top-down", beginning with the official hierarchy and then propagating downward the same way as any new creedal statement. Instead, they usually begin with ordinary believers who wake up to the errors taught by their faith (often with assistance from nonbelievers, who've played an important role in many major social reform movements). And these reform movements always face fierce opposition from the entrenched religious leaders, who slander and demonize them to their last breath. The abolition of slavery, the women's suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the introduction of birth control - all these and others were denounced by clergy and religious leaders, their advocates labeled "godless atheists" regardless of whether they were believers or not. Most of these religious leaders resisted correction until their dying breath, and reform was only brought about when the societal consensus had grown too overwhelming to resist any longer.

Today, as we face ever more serious threats and crises, we can no longer wait for the rigid guardians of orthodoxy to give way. In place of dogmatic faith, we need all our societal institutions to be built on the idea of self-correction.

Since the comment thread for my post "On Amateur Atheism" has sparked a lively debate, I looked around on the internet earlier today for some further explanation of John Haught's views. I found them in this Salon interview, and I'd like to offer some further comments on the theology outlined therein.

One of Haught's major points regarding modern atheists that they rely too much on scientific inquiry to learn about the world:

Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth.

The problem with this paragraph is that Haught, like the many other theologians who deny that science is the only way of knowing truth, inevitably never explains what alternative he has in mind. If you have knowledge that you did not come by scientifically, how did you come by it? What is your method for discriminating true statements from false ones? We never get an answer to this. I'm confident that it's because their actual method, if it were stated explicitly, is so transparently silly that even its backers would have to recognize the absurdity of it: they simply assume that their own personal convictions are a totally reliable guide to external reality, and cling to the faith that the particular religious beliefs they were taught, and not the millions of different religious beliefs, are the one true way.

Like many theologians, Haught wants to have it both ways with regard to science. Despite his lengthy complaints in the article about "scientism" - he says that atheists like Steven Weinberg illicitly assume that "that science itself has the capacity and the power to comment on things like [God]" - he does not hesitate to draw the opposite lesson when he thinks it's warranted.

We have to distinguish between science as a method and what science produces in the way of discovery. As a method, science does not ask questions of purpose. But it's something different to look at the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology. From a theological point of view, that's a part of the world that we have to integrate into our religious visions. That set of discoveries is not at all suggestive of a purposeless universe. Just the opposite.

The hypocritical message of this statement is that Haught is permitted to make claims about the implications of "the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology", but atheists are not. When a theist says that science suggests the universe is continually growing toward greater complexity and this suggests a divine purpose, he's fine with that. But when atheists say that the rampant evil and diaster in nature suggests that the universe was not made with us in mind, suddenly Haught is indignant about this "abuse" of scientific reasoning to discuss areas it has no right to talk about. The double standard he's using is very obvious when you look for it.

So what is the proper place of Haught's god, if it can't be discovered through science? Apparently, according to Haught, the proper answer is to assume that God is found only in the realm of "higher" reasons - that is, what Aristotle would call final causes, rather than material causes. Science can provide explanations of how physical phenomena unfold, but according to Haught, God resides at the level of why those things happen. A corollary of this is that God does not intervene in history. As Haught puts it:

Careless Christian thinkers wanted to make a place for God within the physical system that Newton and others had elaborated. That, in effect, demoted the deity as being just one link in a chain of causes that brought the transcendent into the realm of complete secular immanence. The atheists quite rightly said this God is unnecessary.

...What intelligent design tries to do -- and the great theologians have always resisted this idea -- is to place the divine, the Creator, within the continuum of natural causes. And this amounts to an extreme demotion of the transcendence of God, by making God just one cause in a series of natural causes.

But now Haught has a large problem: Christianity absolutely does require an interventionist god. Even if one dismisses the Old Testament narratives as allegory, even if one believes that God does not provide miraculous answers to prayer, Christianity is still built on a fundamental, keystone claim - the resurrection of Jesus - which implies that, on at least one occasion, God intervened in the world to change the course of events in a way that natural law would not permit.

Haught strains mightily to get around this problem. Here is his solution, which I'll quote in full so I'm not accused of misrepresenting him:

But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.

So if a camera was at the Resurrection, it would have recorded nothing?

If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it.

...We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable?

In the end, it's not at all clear what this theological contortion actually means. It's a simple question of fact: Did Jesus physically rise from the dead or did he not? Did his body resume functioning? Did he get up and walk out of the tomb? Did his disciples see him in the flesh, handle him, and watch him eat and drink? These are all yes-or-no questions!

This is where Haught's contorted theology is stretched to the breaking point. Even if we grant his argument that science cannot speak to teleological claims, science most certainly can examine empirical claims, and the resurrection of Jesus absolutely is an empirical claim. Clearly, what he's trying to do is to somehow remove this empirical claim from the realm of science and place it safely within the realm of faith, where it can't be examined or disproved. The only way he can do that is by asserting that the very occurrence of the event is somehow just a matter of faith.

It's not at all clear what he means by this. If we'd had a video camera in the upper room, would it have recorded the disciples interacting with an invisible, inaudible person? Or would it have found the room itself empty, as though the disciples resided in some parallel universe where their existence was only accessible to those who believe? More importantly, if we'd trained the video camera on the dead body of Jesus, would that body have winked out of existence at some point (as it entered the "realm of faith"), or would we have seen the body remain dead, as if a totally different set of events happened for those who chose not to believe versus for those who did?

Whatever the answers to these questions, it seems Haught's god is so far removed from the real world that it is, literally, indistinguishable from a god that does not exist. Haught is adamant that science cannot detect God, and yet, all that science is is a way of examining claims about the physical world to determine which ones are verifiably true or false. If science cannot speak to Haught's god, then that means that Haught's god has no influence or effect on the physical world in any way whatsoever. By his own definition, then, Haught's god and Haught's theology are literally irrelevant. We should treat them as such.

This week, the Christian Century published an article by the Catholic theologian John Haught, titled "Amateur atheists: Why the new atheism isn't serious".

Before I say anything more, I want to acknowledge that John Haught is not the real enemy. He testified for the side of the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design trial, for instance, arguing that religious faith is compatible with scientific inquiry and that ID is pseudoscience. I'm appreciative of his service on this issue. That said, the rest of this post will show no mercy.

First of all, as the title implies, Haught presumes for himself the right to judge which atheists are or are not sufficiently "serious":

For many years I taught an introductory theology course for undergraduates titled "The Problem of God." My fellow instructors and I were convinced that our students should be exposed to the most erudite of the unbelievers... The recent books by Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris and Christopher Hitchens would never have made the required-reading list. Their tirades would simply reinforce students' ignorance not only of religion but also of atheism.

Although Haught makes noises about wanting his students to be exposed to the best arguments for nonbelief, when it comes time for practical application of that policy, he swiftly pivots and says, in effect: "I'm going to decide which arguments for atheism are most convincing, and take it from me, these guys aren't saying anything worthwhile! It's not necessary for you to read what they're writing. Trust me." Despite his pretense of allegiance to open inquiry, it seems clear that his wish is to act as a censor, deciding which are the best (i.e., the safest) arguments for nonbelief, and sheltering his students from all the rest. If these extremely successful, influential modern atheist authors are not worthy of mention as far as Haught is concerned, then he's doing his students a serious disservice by failing to acquaint them with what real atheists are actually saying today.

Who are the atheists that Haught wants his students to learn about? The next excerpt provides a revealing answer:

The classical atheists, by contrast, demanded a much more radical transformation of human culture and consciousness. This is most evident when we consider works by Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. To them atheism not only should make all the difference in the world; it would take a superhuman effort to embrace it.

Haught is infatuated with those few atheists who proposed a sweeping, dramatic reinvention of humanity from the ground up. This is no surprise. Clearly, his aim is to make atheism seem as radical and disturbing a proposition as possible, the better to frighten his students away from embracing it.

By contrast, the modern atheists he sneeringly dismisses aren't proposing any radical social transformation. They're simply pointing out that enormous potential for good already exists in the human mind. We don't need to make ourselves into totally different creatures; we just need to unleash the potential that's already there. And one of the largest obstacles to that enlightenment is religion, which teaches that non-evidence-based faith and unquestioning obedience to authority are positive character traits. They are not, and people who erroneously believe so have caused terrible violence and other tragedies. It's these unmistakably deleterious effects of faith that the modern atheists are calling attention to.

No attack on atheism would be complete without the obligatory slander that atheism can provide no basis for morality. Haught doesn't disappoint:

Has Harris really thought about what would happen if people adopted the hard-core atheist's belief that there is no transcendent basis for our moral valuations? What if people have the sense to ask whether Darwinian naturalism can provide a solid and enduring foundation for our truth claims and value judgments?

As an expert witness at a creationism trial, Haught should be well aware that no prominent atheist claims either of those things. In fact, Sam Harris (whom he derides) states in his books that he believes morality is objective, while Richard Dawkins (whom he derides) has argued that "we, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." Either Haught is grossly ignorant of the actual views of the atheists he's attacking, or else he's lying about their positions for rhetorical advantage. I invite my readers to decide which is more likely to be the case.

Haught does say that "logical rigor" leads atheists to the conclusion of moral nihilism, implying that atheists who think otherwise just haven't thought it through clearly enough. But, for obvious reasons, a Catholic believer has no authority to decide what atheism "really" implies. I've said it many times before, but it can never be said often enough: atheism is compatible with an objective morality, one that's based on reason fused with compassion and conscience. We do not blindly mimic nature, but instead apply our rational natures to determine what would be best for us, independent of what does or does not happen in the natural world. The existence of God offers no surefire path to absolute morality, due to the Euthyphro dilemma: either God is simply communicating a preexisting standard which we could have discovered ourselves, or else his commands are wholly arbitrary and provide no objective basis.

I'll close with these words from Haught:

In fact, a distinguishing mark of the new atheism is that it leaves no room for a sense of moral ambiguity in anything that smacks of faith. There is no allowance that religion might have at least one or two redeeming features. No such waffling is permitted. Their hatred of religious faith is so palpable that the pages of their books fairly quiver in our hands.

Even if we accept this insulting falsehood of a characterization, one thing Haught has notably failed to do is show any instance where these atheists are wrong. He doesn't even attempt it. Instead, he just asserts that these atheists are nasty and mean (oh yes, and also "amateurs" and "unserious"), and so believers can safely ignore them, with no need to consider their argument on the merits. He may call us amateurs, but I'd like to return the compliment: If this shallowly fallacious reasoning is all he has to offer, then he's the intellectual amateur, not the atheists who've examined religious belief more dispassionately and incisively than he ever has or will.

I note one final point: whatever they wrote or said, Camus, Sartre and the rest made little effort to actually establish atheism as an organized and vital force in society. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the other modern atheists are doing exactly that. I view it as entirely possible that Haught's entire essay is an elaborate exercise in concern trolling. In effect, he's saying, we should stop making all these practical criticisms, stop pointing out the evils that religion has wrought, and stop trying to found a social and political movement that advances the interests of atheists. All that is unserious and "amateur". Instead, you should be nihilists, and you should recognize that atheists have no morality and that they want to turn human society inside out and change everything. In return, I'll teach about you in my introductory theology course!

If that's the bargain Haught is offering, then I hope he'll understand that real atheists neither want nor need his approval, and that we are likely to be utterly uninterested in taking him up on it.