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.

Today's post on atheist morality concerns the use of natural and artificial pharmaceuticals for pleasure. This practice may be nearly as old as humanity - three-thousand-year-old Andean mummies have been found to contain traces of coca, and the brewing of beer may date back to the Stone Age. Today, the legality of such substances varies widely across the world: some religious sects consider psychoactive drugs to be a sacrament, while other religions, such as Islam, ban them altogether.

Rather than rely on these reasonless edicts presented as absolute dogma, we can turn to the moral system of universal utilitarianism, which is a means for arriving at objective ethical decisions founded on human happiness. Given this basis, one of the most important moral principles of UU is self-determination. No one other than you yourself can speak with authority about what makes you happy, and therefore we should permit individuals the maximum freedom to choose for ourselves and pursue our own course in life, so long as those choices do not cause others to suffer or infringe on their equal right to choose for themselves. Just because we disapprove of another person's choices is utterly insufficient grounds to forbid them from choosing.

That being the case, I believe that the general principle which UU dictates is that we should permit people to seek happiness in whatever way seems best to them, including the use of recreational drugs if they desire. Granted, some drugs can be addictive; nevertheless, the initial choice to take them, if made by a mature and informed person, is still a free one. Granted, drugs can have harmful effects on the health of the user. Nevertheless, this is insufficient justification for banning them. Protecting people from themselves is not a goal that is cognizable under UU, unless the people being protected are children or otherwise mentally immature in a way that would interfere with their ability to make rational choices. Otherwise, we should stay hands-off and permit people to chase their happiness in a way that seems best to them.

There are many other hobbies that involve a significant risk of personal harm - skydiving, mountain climbing, motorcycle riding, even playing sports - yet I've heard no one suggest that all these activities should be banned as well. As part of living in a free and democratic society, we must accept that other people may have different risk-reward structures than we ourselves do. I, personally, think drug use is ill-advised, and I would discourage others from trying it. (I feel the same way about football or boxing, in fact.) But I don't think it's my right to overrule other people's own decisions if they make a choice that I think is wrong.

Now, if there are drugs that by their very nature make the user violent or otherwise dangerous, that's a different story. But very few drugs could plausibly be said to do this, and one of the most commonly banned drugs, cannabis, has no such effect at all. There is no rational justification to outlaw marijuana use! If its transport and consumption is frequently associated with crime, that's only because legal businesses can't supply it, leaving ample room for criminals to step in. And even if it serves as a "gateway drug" - though I know of no reputable studies which demonstrate this - it's very likely that this is only because people who try it and find it harmless are apt to conclude that government's claims about other drugs are probably lies as well.

Society's hypocrisy in allowing some drugs while banning others is evident when one considers that the two drugs which are legal throughout most of the civilized world - alcohol and tobacco - are almost certainly the two most dangerous and most addictive drugs in existence. Tobacco is incredibly addictive - only 6% of users who try to quit succeed for even a month - and kills more than 400,000 people each year in America alone by producing malignant cancers of the jaw, esophagus and lungs. Alcohol, meanwhile, is so toxic that a person can easily kill themselves unintentionally from a single session of binge drinking, and over 1,000 people die from alcohol poisoning each year in the U.S. alone. Drunk driving, meanwhile, added almost 18,000 more deaths in America in 2006.

If any illegal drug produced anywhere near these death totals, we could be sure of mass protests and outraged demands to know why the government wasn't doing more to protect people. But there seems to be no meaningful constituency pressing to outlaw alcohol or tobacco. Of course, America did once outlaw alcohol; the fact that this experiment fizzled out may still serve as a reminder discouraging modern-day prohibitionists.

There's no doubt that addiction exists, and that it is a serious problem which should be dealt with. But treating it as a criminal matter solves nothing at all. Imprisoning non-violent drug offenders floods the jails, producing a massive strain on society's resources for no perceptible benefit. I'm ashamed to say that America imprisons more people than any other country in the world, mostly because of drug offenses. This head-in-the-sand attitude creates a disenfranchised underclass that perpetuates cycles of poverty and crime, and our draconian measures in combating drug crops abroad have led to terrible violence and shocking violations of human rights in numerous countries, including our own. Ironically, meanwhile, all this effort has had no effect whatsoever on the availability of illegal drugs.

It's time for society to adopt a rational ethical policy and recognize that this approach simply is not working. If we legalized most drugs and allowed them to be sold by legitimate businesses, this would solve a multitude of problems at once. It would cut off the cash flow that has fueled so many violent and bloodthirsty criminal gangs. Since these businesses could be legally monitored, it would be easier to prevent the use of drugs by children, as opposed to illegal traffickers who have no incentive to refrain from targeting the young. People suffering from addiction could come forward to get the medical help they need, and legitimate businesses could be taxed to support these programs. And pardoning those non-violent offenders whose lives have been destroyed by brutal, Kafkaesque anti-drug laws would permit them to become productive members of society once again.

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...

(Author's Note: The following review was solicited and is written in accordance with this site's policy for such reviews.)

Summary: A libertarian political tract disguised as a work of science.

Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market concerns "evolutionary economics" - the way that evolutionary forces have shaped human instincts about trading, value and exchange, and how those tendencies have played out in creating the variety of economic systems in the world today. There's enough material on these topics for a good book. Unfortunately, Shermer didn't stop with presenting the science. Instead, he took a large step beyond it and presumed to make conclusions about which is the best economic system. Unsurprisingly, those conclusions lined up with the political views he holds, which appear to be an extreme form of libertarianism. (Even Timothy Sandefur, himself a libertarian, found Shermer's arguments unconvincing and lacking in scientific rigor.) I found it hard to believe that this was the same Michael Shermer who once wrote a biting expose of Ayn Rand titled "The Unlikeliest Cult". Evidently, he retains considerable sympathy for her ideas.

In this review, I'm not going to focus on the scientific studies Shermer discusses. The book covers topics like the evolutionary roots of fairness and reciprocity in primates, the parts of the brain involved in economic reasoning, and some common fallacies in human decision-making. For people who've read books like Blink or Stumbling on Happiness, most of this will not be new. At least in my eyes, Shermer's condescending political lectures drowned out the relatively uncontroversial scientific material. This review will likewise focus on those chapters.

The political moralizing begins in chapter 2, titled "Our Folk Economics". The analogy is to "folk science" - incorrect and superstitious ways of interpreting the world that result from our brains only being wired to comprehend the types of phenomena we encounter every day. Human beings originally lived in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, where food and goods were equally shared out of survival necessity, and where the accumulation of individual wealth was an outrage against the group. Shermer claims that this psychology survives today, and that it is for this reason and this reason only that people believe in redistributive taxation. If we could get past this primitive mentality, he says, we would understand that there is no injustice in having a few people be vastly wealthier than the majority, no matter how large the wealth gap is or how abject the poverty of the majority is.

As part of his argument, Shermer does something that many libertarian works do: he considers the potential worst-case scenarios of socialist policies, pronounces them undesirable and thereby asserts he has settled the issue - but he never attempts to examine the potential worst-case scenarios of the libertarian position.

For example, consider universal health care. Shermer expresses concern that this policy would lead to waste, inefficiency, and cost overruns. I quite agree - these are things that can go wrong with government-provided universal health insurance. Now, let's consider the alternative: what can go wrong with private health insurance? I can think of one obvious negative consequence: people die painfully from treatable conditions because they cannot afford medical care. This seems like an obvious followup point, but Shermer ignores it. In a similar passage, he discusses the phenomenon of confirmation bias as it applies to members of both American political parties - again, a serious and legitimate issue, I agree - but never shows any acknowledgment that this is a problem which might apply to him as well.

Shermer also discusses the creative power of free markets and their role in fostering efficiency and innovation. This is true, as far as it goes, but he then goes on to claim that fewer restrictions on markets are always better. He also argues that markets' ability to create innovation without top-down regulation is comparable to the way evolution creates novelty through random changes in individuals. As a consequence, he states explicitly that people who advocate any sort of regulation or restriction on markets - laws against collusion and monopoly, import duties and tariffs, even patent protections - are analogous to evolution deniers. (I hope you can see why this book raised my hackles.)

I'm not denying the power of markets. Directed to the right ends, they are potent tools for generating wealth and fostering innovation. They fully deserve the credit for the millionfold rise in the number of goods and services available to us as compared to what is available to hunter-gatherer tribes. But they are not panaceas to solve every problem, nor are they sources of omnipotent wisdom whose choices are always the best ones.

Shermer's analogy between markets and evolution is an excellent one in more ways than he realizes. Both processes emerge in a bottom-up fashion from the interaction of many local decisions; both can produce superbly adapted results directed toward their given ends; but both processes also tend to be short-sighted, concerned more with immediate gain than with long-term sustainability, which can lead to dead-ends in design space and catastrophe when the environment abruptly changes, and in both processes, the winners prosper while the losers suffer disastrous consequences. Contra Shermer, the reason many people advocate legal controls on markets is not because we do not understand their similarity to evolution, but because we understand it all too well.

Today I'm inaugurating a new series on Daylight Atheism, Strange and Curious Sects. The follies and fallacies of larger, mainstream religions are well known; this series will examine some of the smaller and lesser-known splinter groups, cults, and sects, both past and present, that are part of the vast diversity of religions imagined by human beings. By examining these frequently unique and bizarre belief systems, I find, we stand to gain a clearer perspective on various aspects of the larger and more influential faiths.

This installment will focus on the strange sect of John Frum. This religion, indigenous to the remote South Pacific island of Tanna, is one of the "cargo cults". Cargo cult religions sprang up across the Pacific during World War II, when thousands of American troops set up bases and airstrips on remote islands that previously had little or no external contact. The indigenous people of these islands, who lived in simple subsistence cultures, were amazed by the strange visitors and the technologies and gifts they brought: steel tools, canned food and chocolate bars, cigarettes, radios, motorcycles, airplanes, firearms, and many more novelties unlike anything in their experience. But when the war ended and the troops left, they took their cargo with them. The islanders, in many societies, responded by forming religions that mimic the American installations - down to carving "airstrips" out of the jungle, complete with bamboo control towers and mock planes made of straw - hoping to summon the strange visitors and their wonderful cargo back by sympathetic magic. It sounds almost too strange to be true, but the cargo cults have been widely studied and reported on. With time, many of them have faded; but on Tanna, the cult of John Frum survives to this day.

In the morning heat on a tropical island halfway across the world from the United States, several dark-skinned men — clad in what look to be U.S. Army uniforms — appear on a mound overlooking a bamboo-hut village. One reverently carries Old Glory, precisely folded to reveal only the stars. On the command of a bearded "drill sergeant," the flag is raised on a pole hacked from a tall tree trunk. As the huge banner billows in the wind, hundreds of watching villagers clap and cheer.

...Some 40 barefoot "G.I.'s" suddenly emerge from behind the huts to more cheering, marching in perfect step and ranks of two past Chief Isaac. They tote bamboo "rifles" on their shoulders, the scarlet tips sharpened to represent bloody bayonets, and sport the letters "USA," painted in red on their bare chests and backs.

..."John promised he'll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him," a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. "Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things."

John Frum's cult is a recognizable microcosm of larger religions, right down to the miracles:

...Jessel tells me that he is the brother-in-law of one of the cult's most important leaders, Prophet Fred — who, he adds proudly, "raised his wife from the dead two weeks ago."

as well as the relevatory visions and belief in answered prayer:

"Have you ever seen him?"

"Yes, John comes very often from Yasur [the local volcano] to advise me, or I go there to speak with John."

"What does he look like?"

"An American!"

and even the dissension and factioning into sects:

When I mention Prophet Fred, anger flares in Chief Isaac's eyes. "He's a devil," he snarls. "I won't talk about him."

...two years ago, Prophet Fred's rivalry with Chief Isaac exploded. More than 400 young men from the competing camps clashed with axes, bows and arrows and slingshots, burning down a thatched church and several houses. Twenty-five men were seriously injured.

When the reporter raises the obvious point that, several decades after the war, John Frum and his cargo have not made their promised return, the chief has an unanswerable reply:

"John promised you much cargo more than 60 years ago, and none has come," I point out. "So why do you keep faith with him? Why do you still believe in him?"

Chief Isaac shoots me an amused look. "You Christians have been waiting 2,000 years for Jesus to return to earth," he says, "and you haven't given up hope."

So who is this mysterious American, John Frum? Why did he, out of all the soldiers, inspire the natives' reverence? Was he a commander of some renown who particularly impressed them? The answer, it turns out, may be more complicated.

In the early 20th century, Scotch Presbyterian missionaries came to Tanna and took over by force, establishing their own government and banning traditional cultural practices such as dancing and the drinking of the intoxicant kava. They also forbade work or play on Sundays and began the forcible conversion of the natives to Christianity. For several decades the islanders struggled under the burden of colonial rule.

Then, in the 1930s, John Frum first appeared. According to the islanders' traditions, he told them he had come to liberate them from their oppressive foreign rulers. Fired to devotion by their strange messiah, the people of Tanna joined the new religion en masse, revolting against the colonialists and throwing their missionary-provided clothing and goods into the sea. The following year, 1941, saw the arrival of American troops in the Pacific theater. Their presence provided a measure of stability, as well as the aforementioned cargo, and it seems to be then that John Frum began to be specifically identified as an American.

It's uncertain whether John Frum was a real person, or even whether he was based on a real person. No American soldier by that name is known, and while the islanders call him an American and a white man, they also speak of him as a "spirit" or use other mystical terms. One intriguing theory is that "frum" is the pronunciation of "broom" in the local pidgin, making "John Broom" the one who would "sweep" the hated colonial rulers off the island. An alternative theory holds that his name is a mispronunciation of "John from (America)". But whether he was person or myth, the islanders still fervently believe in him. Every year they celebrate February 15 as John Frum Day, which they believe will be the date of his promised return.

Each Friday afternoon, hundreds of believers stream across the ash plain below Yasur, coming to Lamaraka from villages all over Tanna. After the sun goes down and the men have drunk kava, the congregation gathers in and around an open hut on the ceremonial ground. As light from kerosene lamps flickers across their faces, they strum guitars and homemade ukuleles, singing hymns of John Frum's prophecies and the struggles of the cult's martyrs. Many carry the same plea: "We're waiting in our village for you, John. When are you coming with all the cargo you promised us?"

In many respects, John Frum's cult bears a striking similarity to mythicist theories about what the origin of Christianity would have looked like: a supernatural messiah, invented to serve the needs of an oppressed group of humans, who gradually acquired the characteristics of a recently living human being. The messiah is given a symbolic name (Jesus, or Yeshua, is Aramaic for "Yahweh saves"), works miracles among the people, then disappears after promising to return in the near future to establish an earthly kingdom.

And, in contradiction to those Christian apologists who claim that historians of the time would have investigated and refuted the cult's claims if they were not true: in 1943, the U.S. government sent the USS Echo and its commander, Maj. Samuel Patten, back to the island to tell the people that John Frum had no connection to them. This apparently had no effect on the growth of the cult. The obvious ridiculousness of the cargo-cult belief gives us confidence that this particular faith is not true, but aside from the intrusion of a far more technologically advanced culture which altered things somewhat, the cult of John Frum is an insight into how some major modern religions might have gotten a similar start.