As you probably already know, today is Mother's Day. But I learned something very interesting about the holiday from a sermon today at the Unitarian Universalist church my wife and I attend, and I'd like to share it with you.

Given how rampantly commercial Mother's Day has become, you might be forgiven for assuming, as I did, that it was dreamed up by the jewelry and greeting-card companies. But that couldn't be further from the truth. Although the holiday did become commercialized soon after it was established, so much so that one of its creators spent the rest of her life protesting it, it was originally created for a very different reason.

In response to the bloodshed of the American Civil War, Mother's Day was first conceived of as an explicitly pacifist holiday by the radical American feminist, abolitionist, and social activist Julia Ward Howe. Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation, written in 1870, expressed her belief that women had a political responsibility to shape the society they lived in by opposing all war and violence. It's an amazing piece of writing, and if you can overlook the biblical quote added as window dressing, it's still well worth a read:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

The Language of God, Closing Thoughts

By B.J. Marshall

Collins' final word comprises two points: that there is joy and peace in God's creation, and that the war between science and spirit should end. In this post, I'll discuss these two points. I'll conclude by giving a final word of my own as my journey of blogging through a book closes.

Collins' first point fits perfectly well whether one holds to science or spirit or, as I'll rephrase the dichotomy, faith and reason. I do not believe in any supernatural entities, and yet I can unequivocally say that the universe is freaking awesome! I remember having a conversation with my parents shortly after I came out as an atheist, and they questioned me as to what meaning my life had now. I told them that I had far more meaning in my life as an atheist than I did as a Christian. Knowing that this life is the only shot I have, that there is so much awesome and beauty to behold, and that there is so much suck I want to combat so my son and his generation can live all give me ample reason to get out of bed in the morning.

In fact, I am so enamored by the universe, that I find amazement in salt! I had a cold recently and used this salt/baking soda mixture as a sinus rinse. And I would find myself in awe that the elements that combined to form the salt in this little container came from stars. Billions of years ago, stars fused heavier and heavier elements before exploding. And I used some of that stellar explosion to rinse my sinuses - amazing!!

I remember being just as enamored by the idea that surrendering control to God gave one a certain sense of freedom. But now I feel an even greater sense of freedom in that my life is incredibly more purpose-driven now, because I am in the driver's seat. I no longer feel like a pawn in some cosmic game that God plays between good and evil. If I'm going to fight against evil, it's because I want to do it, not because I think I should do it because God would want me to. And, because I live in a society and not as an island, I don't think it follows that acknowledging that I'm in control and responsible for my actions drives me to nihilism or hedonism.

However, in our search for joy and peace, I disagree with Collins as to a likely source of assistance. It comes in a quote from James 1:5:

But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all men generously and without reproach, and will be given him.

I wonder how well this tactic worked for faith-healers, who watched their children die of easily curable ailments. I wonder how well that worked for parents killing their children for fear that they're witches. Or how Christians used the Bible to advocate slavery in the U.S.; where was the wisdom in that?

Collins implores us to work together. Even if we discount the previously mentioned source of wisdom, Christians and atheists probably have more similar goals than different goals. However, it's the thought process and methodology behind these goals that differs strongly. We both have views favoring stronger family values; many Christians want to strengthen them by fighting against homosexuality, whereas atheists want to strengthen them by fighting for equal marriage rights. We both have views supporting life, despite us having differing opinions regarding when life begins. We both want to protect our rights; Christians might think they have free speech to hang the Ten Commandments in a courtroom or say a prayer to start of a government meeting while atheists think it violates the Establishment Clause. I am reminded of Representative John Shimkus, who hoped to chair the House Energy Committee, saying that we don't need to worry about global warming because of God's promise to Noah. He might have the same goal as I do - taking care of our environment - but his way of attaining the goal is by punting to God to take care of us whereas mine is to take action based on conclusions I draw from the available evidence.

I think what Collins perceives as the war between science and spirit - faith or reason - is due in large part to the differing sense of what "truth" is. And as long as some viewpoints ground truth on the observations of objective reality while other viewpoints ground truth on subjective, traditional ideas that have no basis in objective reality - or are even contrary to objective reality - then I'm not sure this war will ever end. Sad face.

Well, that pretty much ends it for my journey through this book. It's been interesting and fun. When I came out as an atheist and my parents gave me "The Case for a Creator" for my birthday, I was a fairly new atheist who needed help understanding all the drivel in that book; this site helped me a lot. I hope my effort has returned the favor.

Thank you for being with me on this journey through The Language of God. I want to extend a warm, heartfelt thanks to Ebonmuse for giving my ideas voice. I really appreciate all the time and effort he's taken to post my series and catalogue it on his blog. I also want to thank all the readers and commenters, especially where you challenged me to think differently and more clearly. You've helped push me over the fence to "strong atheism," you've helped me refine my ability to perceive and explain logical fallacies (especially the ones I've made myself, showing that I still have a lot to learn!), and you've encouraged me to help expand this community.

The road, including this series, hasn't been easy. Since coming out atheist, I've spent a lot of time struggling with how to deal with people whose beliefs I no longer shared. I still struggle with that: I don't necessarily think all beliefs should be tolerated, and yet I find it's very difficult to argue over beliefs (maybe even attack beliefs) without people thinking I'm attacking them personally. I shouldn't be surprised (but I was) when I found the same thing with myself: When my thoughts were challenged, as they were throughout this series, my first reaction was to get defensive. I was kind of amazed at how much mental energy it took to overcome (hopefully successfully) my biases to look at challenging views with an open mind to the possibility that I could learn something.

Thanks again for reading.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

The Language of God, Chapter 11

By B.J. Marshall

Aside from summarizing the points he's made in previous chapters, Collins uses this final chapter as his last chance to be a Christian apologist, but he surprisingly leaves the door open for other options.

First, I feel compelled to highlight Collins' honesty. He states that, after twenty eight years as a believer, "the Moral Law still stands out for me as the strongest signpost to God" (p.218). I appreciate the candor because it's sometimes difficult for theists to articulate the single best reason they have to believe in God. But here, Collins is explicitly drawing a line in the sand: The Moral Law is the single and best reason why he believes in God. Now, I'm not saying that he'd have plenty of other claims to fall back on if someone were to refute his A-game. But I appreciate him laying out what his A-game is.

In a subsection of this chapter entitled "What Kind of Faith?", Collins give us this gem:

Most of the world's great faiths share many truths, and probably they would not have survived had that not been so. Yet there are also interesting and important differences, and each person needs to seek out his own particular path to the truth" (p.219).

I'm not exactly sure what he means by "share many truths," since "truth" and "idea" could be interchangeable here given the lack of validating those "truths." Maybe multiple religions share the same truth that it's OK to beat your slave if that slave doesn't die after a day or two (Exodus 21). That these great faiths would not have survived for so long had they not been touching the "truth" is a textbook case of an Argument from Antiquity or Tradition. This argument basically says that the fact that an idea has been around for a long time implies that the idea is true. I have heard this often from acupuncturists: "It's been around for thousands of years, so it must have something going for it." However, the longevity of an idea does not necessarily correlate to its, to use a Stephen Colbert term, truthiness.

Many times in this book we've noted cases where naturalistic phenomena are completely explained, and yet Collins feels compelled to invoke God. I found it interesting that Collins states that each person needs to seek out his/her own particular path to the truth without invoking the caveat that one had better choose Jesus unless one wants to burn in Hell forever. Would Collins be cool with someone choosing a "path to the truth" that involves a deistic god that doesn't intervene in the world? Given that Collins' truth "can be tested only by the spiritual logic of the heart, the mind, and the soul" (p.204), I suppose he'd have to. It reminds me of Shepherd Book's final words in Serenity: "I don't care what you believe in, just believe in it."

But, still, Jesus is where it's at. Collins says he spent considerable time discerning God's characteristics. God "must care about persons, or the argument about the Moral Law would not make much sense" (p.219). Collins seems here to have started as his conclusion - the Moral Law exists - and worked backwards from it to posit a premiss that he insists is true, that there is a God who cares about people. This is backwards logic: Affirming the Consequent. It may very well be the case that, if a God exists (p) then there would be a Moral Law (q). However, q could obtain through means other than p. So, by saying "q therefore p" is an inference that Collins makes to his, and his readers', detriment.

Anyway, now we have this God who cares about people. Well, God is way above us sinful humans, so Collins was having a really hard time bridging the gap to God. Enter Jesus. "As I read the actual account of His life for the first time in the four gospels, the eyewitness nature of the narratives and the enormity of Christ's claims and their consequences began to sink in" (p.221). I think I only have space to touch briefly three problems this sentence poses: the accounts aren't actual, they're not from eyewitnesses, and the enormity of the claims count for nothing given the lack of extra-Biblical references.

Regarding actual accounts, I find the statement relating to four actual accounts as specious given that Matthew and Luke take 93% of their material verbatim from Mark, according to a presentation (Which Jesus?) by Jeremy Beahan of the Reasonable Doubts podcast.

Regarding eyewitnesses, Burton L. Mack, in "Who Wrote the New Testament: The Making of the Christian Myth" provides a timeline of the gospel authors based on the earliest manuscripts we have:

• Mark was written around 70-80 CE and relied on the Q source in Galilee, the miracle stories in northern Palestine, and the kerygma in north Syria. Those three sources to Mark came about some 20-30 years after Jesus.
• Matthew and John were written around 90-100 CE.
• Luke was written around 120 CE.

The testimony of eyewitnesses is on incredibly shaky ground. You've probably all seen this video of kids - some in white t-shirts and some in black t-shirts, passing basketballs to one another. You're told to count how many times some team bounces the ball. Meanwhile, a person in a gorilla suit walks in the middle, thumps its chest, and walks off. I attended an IT conference last year where this was done. The audience was then asked how many people saw a gorilla. Seriously, out of 1,500 well-educated IT professionals, a full third of them did NOT see the gorilla! Eyewitnesses can be amazingly fallible; "eyewitnesses" recounting their stories decades after the fact is just asking for fallibility.

Regarding the enormity of the claims, Collins also gives a quick reference to Josephus as among the "non-Christian historians of the first century" who bear witness to this Jesus guy. He doesn't say who the other non-Christian historians are, but Josephus' hat tip to Jesus is generally recognized as a Christian interpolation; a section in the Testimonium Flavianum reads like a Holy Bullet List of Christology: He was crucified, died, rose from the dead, appeared to them on the third day, "as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him". The lack of good, sound extra-biblical evidence for the enormity of the claims leaves me with the Bible to prove itself, which is illustrated nicely in this comic.

Collins references one scholar who said "The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar" (p.224). Interesting, then, that a ton more information is written about Julius Caesar than Jesus (apart from the Bible, that is), and yet Caesar was considered a god after his death; sadly, I don't see anyone worshipping Caesar anymore. It is possible to separate the actual history of whether a person existed from claims that the person was, in fact, a god.

Collins concludes this chapter, and this book, with a final word. I will save this for my next, and last, post in this series.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

Last night, I made my debut as a speaker for the Secular Student Alliance, appearing before the atheist student group at Columbia University to discuss the history of church-state separation. It was a short talk, about 20 minutes with Q&A, which suited me just fine for my first foray into public speaking. But I'm very happy with the way it turned out, and I'm hoping there will be more and longer engagements in the future. My thanks again to everyone at Secular Columbia for inviting me.

I've posted the video below. It's my first time, so be gentle!

A while back, I wrote a post about professional Christian apologists who defend genocide as a moral and holy act. As revolting as this is, it's unsurprising on one level: these people have devoted their careers to defending Christianity, and as such, their living depends on not admitting any flaws whatsoever in Christian doctrine. If the Bible commands an act as evil as genocide, they have no choice but to defend it, even if it means doing violence to all rational notions of morality.

But as I found out recently, it's not just professional apologists who believe this. Their genocide-excusing logic has filtered down even to lay believers, whose only stake in these doctrines is personal and emotional rather than financial, with the result that ordinary people now are defending the Bible's war crimes as just and good. I've already written one slightly incredulous post about this, but it deserves a more thorough analysis.

Here's how one commenter put it:

...according to Christianity, death isn't the end of the story. What if, instead of "God ordered the Hebrews to kill the Canaanites", we read it as "God ordered the Hebrews to teleport the Canaanites from the desert to a land of eternal happiness where everyone gets a pony"? Does that change the verdict? Granted, the particular mechanism of teleportation in this case is downright unpleasant, but compared to eternity, it amounts to stubbing your toe while you step onto the transport pad.

This is the same logic that was used by inquisitors throughout the medieval ages. In their theocracies, everyone was required by law to profess the same beliefs, and if there were any dissenters, they would be imprisoned and tortured until they recanted their error. And why not? After all, if it saved their souls, it had to be justified. Subjecting someone to the rack, thumbscrews, strappado, waterboarding, the iron maiden, etc., might be unpleasant, but in the scheme of eternity, it would be like stubbing your toe while you step onto the teleportation pad.

This same commenter went on to explain:

...yes, I believe that God, as the author and owner of life, has the right to order the murder of a child.

If you're still reading, I do not believe he will order any such thing. If Jesus appeared next to me and ordered me to go murder a child, I would first seek psychiatric help and, assuming the wiring checks out, seek spiritual help. I firmly believe that God will not order such a thing, not because a child's death is incongruous with God's nature, but because it is incongruous with the plan of salvation as revealed to the Catholic church.

As I pointed out in a comment (and as he agreed, to my horror), this isn't saying that genocide or child-murder in the name of God is morally wrong, just that it's not expedient at the present moment. There's a vast difference between these claims.

Another atheist commenter on Unequally Yoked, Patrick, put it well:

I think a surprising number of Christians are willing to posit that they WOULD be horrific murderers of children, and that this would be perfectly ok, except for a few lucky happenstances of history that meant that all the horrific murdering of children that needed to happen got done before they were born. And I think that these Christians are happy to posit this because its all just a big fantasy to them, a sort of suspension of disbelief surrounding ancient tales that happened long ago to other people who don't really count anymore... So they pretend to believe that they'd swing an axe into the neck of a child if God asked them to, and that it would be Righteous.

In a follow-up thread, a different theist commenter offered a different justification:

God possesses exhaustive foreknowledge. We don't. Not only does he have over several billion years past experience, He also knows the future. If there is something that appears evil now, but does a tremendous good in the future, was it really evil?... How can you say with any authority that the destruction of those societies did not benefit humanity?

Not only would you have to ask why God, who is omnipotent, couldn't have accomplished his ends through a different and less evil method, there's also the problem that this theodicy explains too much. It could be used just as easily to excuse any evil, however horrendous, on the grounds that God intends to use it to justify some future good. And after some prodding, this commenter eventually agreed:

I was saying, the Amalekite [genocide] was done for a purpose, and the Holocaust was allowed for a purpose. Without knowing what that purpose is, no human is in a position to impose a moral judgement for either.

And then there's this amateur apologist, whose post came up in the discussion. He has not one but two genocide-excusing explanations:

In working with the early Israelites, God was dealing with a blunt instrument. He wasn't working with a people who had already been broken of their tribal mentality and who were used to distinguishing those who were personally guilty from those who were fellow-members of the guilty party's tribe.

This may shed light on why God allowed a total tribe-on-tribe warfare situation to result, because this was what the people of the day understood. The development and purification of their ideas about collective versus individual guilt and innocence had not yet taken place.

This apologetic is based on the bizarre assumption that God's methods of justice were constrained by what people believed to be moral. If the ancient Israelites believed in corporate guilt and found it proper to eradicate an entire culture, then God had no choice but to act accordingly, even if that wasn't actually the right thing to do. Akin never even tries to explain why this should be so.

Probably recognizing that this is a non-starter, he moves on to a backup explanation:

Suppose that there was a Canaanite child who was four years old--young enough to still be an innocent, but old enough to experience the horror of watching her civilization killed around her before being killed herself.

From a purely human perspective, that is HORRENDOUS. My heart is SICKENED at the thought of what such a child would go through.

But is God--who is infinitely powerful--INCAPABLE of making it up to this child?

No, he is not incapable of making up to her the sufferings that she experienced on earth, however horrible they were.

This apologetic rests on a different, but no less bizarre, theory: that it's perfectly OK to commit a terrible evil against someone if you intend to make it up to them afterwards. By this logic, a billionaire should be allowed to molest children, just as long as he recompenses them afterwards by buying them all the toys and presents they could ever want. (You can judge for yourself how plausible religious people find this defense when it's an actual wealthy person who stands accused.)

Now, I don't think any of these people are actually in favor of genocide, whatever they say. I think they think of this as a harmless intellectual game they're playing, a thought experiment they engage in to justify other beliefs they value more. But what they fail to recognize is how dangerous this is, because the same reasoning can be used - is used - by violent fundamentalists to justify inquisitions, suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, torture, and all the other evils of religion we're so familiar with. By supporting this cold and amoral theology themselves, they give aid and comfort to those who don't stop at making it a thought experiment, but go ahead and put it into practice. And what happens if some day, the Pope or some other allegedly moderate religious figure does command believers to start waging war for the glory of God? Can they be so sure they'd still object, when they're already used to subordinating their consciences to faith?

The Language of God, Chapter 10

By B.J. Marshall

After formally laying out his premisses and his conclusions, Collins muses why Theistic Evolution (TE) hasn't caught on. He surmises that it simply isn't widely known that one can mix science and religion harmoniously, that the position is in effect invisible in the harmony it creates by blending the two harmoniously, and that "theistic evolution" is just a terrible name. He introduces BioLogos as a humble alternative.

There simply aren't very many advocates out there trying to blend science with religion, Collins says, on either side of the fence. He states there are "many scientists [that] ascribe to TE, [but] they are generally reluctant to speak out for fear of negative reaction" (p.202). We're left to wonder how many "many" is and what whether any of these scientists are in fields relevant to biology. On the other side, there are few theologians who have enough knowledge of evolutionary theory to try blending of the two. Collins cites Pope John Paul II as one of these rare birds: "new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis" (p.202). That certainly is a lukewarm endorsement of evolutionary theory at best.

But then he muggles it all up by being sensitive to religion: "If the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God" (p.202). The premiss itself is on shaky ground because it sounds vague enough to be obscured into nonsense; one could read it as saying that new human bodies come from previously alive human beings, like I just sprung up out of my dead grandmother or something. The conclusion simply does not follow, although I will admit that spiritual souls and God are related in the sense that neither exists. However, I doubt that's what JP2 meant.

I find it interesting how few theologians actually do try to meld evolutionary theory to faith in God. Almost without exception, every apologist I've heard debate, like William Lane Craig or Dinesh D'Souza, use reason and evidence whenever possible. Craig's debates involving the Kalaam Cosmological Argument rely heavily on our current understanding of science, as in when he mentions virtual particles. Even Craig's debates about the empty tomb, as in his debate with Bart Ehrman, involve Bayesian probabilities. So the question remains why apologists haven't incorporated evolutionary theory into their debate arsenal. It's all a moot point anyway, as apologists use reason and evidence capriciously; they are quick to use reason and evidence where it suits them but discard it when it doesn't support the conclusion they want to reach about God's existence.

A second reason Collins provides is that TE creates such harmony between warring factions. He muses how, as a society, we gravitate toward conflict; an example he gives is all the bad stories one hears on the evening news. "We love conflict and discord, and the harsher the better.... Harmony is boring" (p.204). This reason is just plain naïve. Perhaps a better explanation for why TE is invisible is that the "harmony" TE creates is baseless illogical drivel. It's probably for the best that TE is as invisible as Collins claims it is.

I would say that science does a far better job of creating harmony than religion. Yes, science is a messy process, and there are egos and strongarming that might get in the way, but it's a process that self-corrects over time to converge on one idea. We have one theory of evolution by natural selection, and one version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Religions make up different versions of what they want the truth to look like, so one ends up with over 30,000 denominations of Christianity. Imagine having 30,000 competing views of heliocentrism.

Collins' last idea on this is that TE just has a bad name. After all, "most non-theologians are not quite sure what a theist is" (p.203). Unfortunately, many of the terms used to bring science and evolutionary theory together have become full of baggage: one dare not use "creation," "intelligent," or "design." Collins thinks we need to start afresh by dusting off our old Greek-to-English dictionaries: BioLogos. Collins points out that scholars will recognize bios as the Greek word for life and logos as Greek for "word." To many believers (read: only Christians, naturally), the Word is synonymous with God.

So, given that the average non-theologian doesn't even know what a theist is, what part of catering to the scholars and well-read Christians sounded like a good idea to Collins? And why Greek? Collins doesn't understand his target audience; if I were trying to popularize his view of meshing God and evolutionary theory to the general populace, I would want to use words that my target audience understood.

In the next post, we see Collins defending Biologos against atheistic scientists who see this position as just another "God of the gaps" view.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

When I wrote my review of Creation last year, a commenter suggested I see Agora, the 2009 film by Alejandro Amenábar about Hypatia of Alexandria. It took me a long time to get around to doing that, but I've finally seen it, and it was worth the wait. It only had a very limited theatrical release in the U.S., but if you have Netflix or similar, I strongly encourage you to see it.

Agora is set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the late fourth century CE. Egypt is a Roman province in this age, and Alexandria is one of its crown jewels: polyglot, multicultural, an important maritime port, and a center of pagan learning and philosophy. One of its foremost citizens is Hypatia (played by Rachel Weisz), a female philosopher who's heir to the Greek intellectual tradition and renowned for her expertise in mathematics, physics and astronomy. Famous and influential men from throughout the province come to her academy to attend her lectures and demonstrations. As beautiful as she is brilliant, she also attracts her share of admirers, including her slave Davus (Max Minghella) and one of her students, Orestes (Oscar Isaac), who later becomes the provincial governor.

But in Hypatia's time, the Roman Empire is changing rapidly. Christianity, once a despised and outlawed sect, has converted the emperor and is rapidly growing in numbers and power. Its preachers, especially the murderous fanatic Cyril (Sami Samir) aren't shy about exerting their newfound authority: against the city's Jews; against the philosophers, whom they view as idol-worshipping adherents of a degenerate pagan tradition; and especially against women who defy their biblically ordained role by speaking in public and teaching men. The confrontation between Hypatia and Orestes on one hand and Cyril on the other comes inevitably to a head, and though I won't give any spoilers, if you know about the historical Hypatia, you probably have some idea of how it ends.

Although the script takes some liberties, which is only to be expected, I was surprised by how closely it sticks to historical fact: including Hypatia's close relationship with the governor Orestes, the amazing-but-true fact that one of her pupils, Synesius, later became a Christian bishop, and the memorably revolting way she rejects a potential suitor. Also, if you expect to see the Library of Alexandria engulfed in flames, think again: our best accounts say that it was destroyed before Hypatia's time, and the movie accurately reflects this. (Hypatia and the other philosophers live and teach in another building, a pagan temple/academy called the Serapeum.)

The biggest departure from history is its depiction of Hypatia as on the verge of proving the heliocentric theory of the solar system. As Richard Carrier points out in his review (some spoilers), the real Hypatia wouldn't have been as empirically minded as this - she belonged to a philosophical school that largely disdained experimentation, although there's no doubt that she was a gifted mathematician and astronomer, and all the theoretical pieces were in place in the philosophies of the time for experiments like the ones she's shown to perform.

The movie also hints that she was an atheist, which the real Hypatia wouldn't have been. However, Agora isn't by any means a black-and-white, Christianity-versus-science polemic. The pagan philosophers are depicted as just as vengeful, violent, and touchy about insults to their religion as the Christians were, and it's clear that Cyril's hatred of Hypatia used her science only as a pretext; the real reason for his antipathy is as a way to hurt his political rival, Orestes. And vicious as he is, he isn't treated as representative of all of Christianity - other Christian characters, such as Synesius, are on Hypatia's side.

Nevertheless, without treating all Christians as evil, the film subtly and powerfully conveys how the immoralities of Christian theology made this story and many others like it inevitable. There's a brutally effective scene in which Cyril boxes in both Orestes and Synesius by reading from the Bible the verses forbidding a woman to teach or have authority over a man, and demanding that they kneel and swear faith in scripture (implicitly denouncing Hypatia).

Although my wife and I both loved this movie, the reviews were decidedly mixed, which I think is because it confused critics' expectations by breaking with convention. In the beginning, it seems the script is setting up a love triangle between Hypatia, Davus and Orestes - but Hypatia herself never expresses any interest, and that aspect of the story is dropped when the political conflict begins. (Just think, a female character who's not depicted as primarily interested in romance! That's a daring departure from Hollywood orthodoxy, even if the film unfortunately doesn't pass the Bechdel test due to its lack of any other women.)

All in all, this was a beautiful, tragic story that's all the more powerful for being essentially true. Carl Sagan once wrote that, if not for the descent of the religious dark ages that crushed rational inquiry and stifled human progress, we might have reached the stars hundreds of years ago. Agora is a moving testament to that, and a reminder of how much we lost and how long it's taken to regain it. More than that, it's a tribute to the life of an extraordinary woman, and a celebration of the rational principles that she defended and that have always stood for what's best in humanity. If you have the chance to see it, you won't be disappointed.

Some of my favorite atheist writers have been jousting over the issue of whether any imaginable evidence could convince them of the existence of God. Among those who answer in the negative, the consensus seems to be that God is such a nebulous and unfalsifiable hypothesis, it's impossible to test in any meaningful way.

This is a topic I've spent some time contemplating myself, and though I think differently than they do, I'm sympathetic to that objection. Despite millennia of cogitation, theologians have never produced a clear and consistent definition of God's nature and powers.

So, let's see if we can help them out.

In this essay, I'll list three different classes of hypothetical beings that could claim the term "god" and consider how each of them differ. I'll then discuss what we might do if we ever encountered a being that could plausibly claim to belong to one of these categories.

God Type I: The Sufficiently Advanced Alien

The first candidate, and the lowest on the scale of godhood, is the Sufficiently Advanced Alien. This could be an extraterrestrial from a civilization technologically advanced far beyond ours, but it doesn't have to be. It could be a human-created Singularity-type computer supermind, a time traveler from the far future, a Star Trek-esque energy being, whatever. Its exact nature isn't important. What matters is that it exists in this universe and is constrained by its physical laws, but can do anything or almost anything that's theoretically possible under those laws. I could imagine a sufficiently advanced alien that could use sophisticated nanotechnology to cure disease, read our thoughts by mapping patterns of brain activity, control the weather in a small region to strike blasphemers with lightning, and so on, thus acting for all intents and purposes like the gods of old.

I would also count pagan deities like the Greek gods under this category. They were superior to humans in some ways, such as possessing immortality, but they were creatures of this universe and were in some sense subject to its laws.

God Type II: The Chief Programmer

Moving up a step, we come to the Chief Programmer. The conceit here is that there's another universe, which arises and evolves according to its own set of natural laws (whatever they may be), ultimately giving rise to intelligent life. That life becomes technologically advanced and builds powerful computers, or the equivalent - so powerful that they can simulate, in arbitrarily fine detail, the workings of an entire cosmos - and we are that cosmos. The true nature of our existence is that we're programs running on a supercomputer operated by a far more advanced civilization, and the simulation is so realistic that we're unaware of this.

The programmer in charge of the simulation, if it chose to interact with us, would be godlike. It could infallibly predict the future by rewinding time and then replaying it; resurrect the dead by loading their personality from a backup copy; run our universe in a debugger to read people's thoughts, influence their actions, or alter the course of events in subtle and undetectable ways. It could change the parameters of the program to selectively suspend our natural laws - creating a perpetual motion machine, making force equal something other than mass times acceleration, changing the value of Planck's constant, or removing the light-speed limit. Any form it could take in our universe would only be an avatar, and even if we disabled or destroyed that, the mind guiding it isn't part of our universe and wouldn't be affected.

This is the Chief Programmer: any being that's a natural entity in its own universe, but functionally omnipotent with respect to ours. The scientists in Stanislaw Lem's "Non Serviam" were Chief Programmers from the perspective of their artificial beings, as is the protagonist of this xkcd strip. But it doesn't have to be a computer programmer, per se. We could be figments of the imagination of some superbeing, dreaming a fantastically vast and intricate lucid dream, or characters in a novel being written by an unimaginable Author.

God Type III: The Empyrean

Finally, there's the category about which there's the most controversy, a god of the type usually pictured by monotheistic religions. Like the Chief Programmer, it's fundamentally omnipotent and omniscient from our perspective - able to alter reality at will, powerful enough to achieve anything that isn't a logical contradiction, and aware of everything that can be known. The difference is that, rather than being a natural being in its own universe, it isn't subject to any physical laws whatsoever, although it may exhibit regularities in its behavior. What it's made of, or whether it has any internal structure, are questions which theologians rarely consider.

As I said, there's much debate about whether this is even a logically coherent notion, or whether it's so poorly defined as to be a self-contradiction. The point is well-taken that gods like this are usually only defined in negative terms. Saying a being is "immaterial" or "ineffable" doesn't explain what it is, only what it isn't. Saying it transcends time and space doesn't explain in what manner it does exist, cogitate, and act. Saying it consists of "pure spirit" is a meaningless string of words when we have no other examples of this substance to examine. Most attempts to define a type III god, ultimately, consist of mysteries piled upon mysteries, all topped with a generous helping of contradiction and paradox.

So, yes, I can accept the point that the type III god is so ill-defined that we could never be sure whether we'd encountered one, or whether any plausible god-claimant was "only" an example of a type I or II.* But here's the important thing: as far as we're concerned, it doesn't make a difference. We could never threaten or oppose either a type II or III.** If it demanded worship, and your paramount desire was not being blasted into oblivion, you'd have no choice but to obey. Conversely, if you refused on principle to worship any being that hadn't proved itself morally worthy, it wouldn't matter what the source of its power was.

From a practical perspective, then, the type I, II and III beings would all be gods to us. If such a being manifested before us and directly communicated with us, logically our response should be the same in all cases. Of course, that would only be a concern for a plausible manifestation. The vague, subjective internal promptings claimed by most religions could never qualify, nor could the many-times-retold tall tales in scripture. It would need to be something clear, direct, and unmistakable, and if experience is any guide, that's a standard that no religion is likely ever to meet.

* There are differences between the various types. There are certain feats that a type II or III god could perform that a type I couldn't, for example changing a law of physics. But a type I god could probably craft an illusion realistic enough that we'd never be able to see through it.

** In theory, we could become powerful enough to overthrow a type I, but it's also possible that it would keep a sufficiently close watch on us to make this a practical impossibility. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End is an example of this.

The Language of God, Chapter 7

By B.J. Marshall

The final part of this chapter on the godless takes aim at agnosticism. Collins first gives Huxley's coinage of the term, and then he proceeds to misunderstand agnosticism in a way that's rife with glaring contradictions.

Collins gives a lengthy quote of Huxley's from Wikipedia, which you won't find in the Wikipedia article he references! His citation doesn't even mention when he accessed that page. Time to rant here: I have a friend who is a media specialist with my local library system, and she - and many others in her field - rant about students citing directly from Wikipedia. Ideally, they say, one can use it to check out information, but one should always go to the source material - the references for the article - to determine the value of the material. After all, they say, one can't just assume that the source material referenced in any given Wikipedia article is a credible primary source. I find Collins' direct citation of Wikipedia as a primary source to be intellectually lazy.

I have no idea where he got his entire quote, but you can find a portion of it here. The gist of the quote is that Huxley noticed that people seemed to have attained a certain "gnosis" regarding the problem of God's existence, whereas Huxley had not attained such "gnosis."

"It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant" (p.167).

Collins misinterprets the quote: "An agnostic, then, is one who would say that the knowledge of God's existence simply cannot be achieved" (p.168). He then describes "strong agnostics" as stating that such knowledge could never be achieved and "weak agnostics" who say such knowledge is simply not available right now.

But wait a minute. Collins wouldn't be able to conclude from Huxley's quote above that an an agnostic would say that the knowledge of God's existence simply cannot be achieved. After all, the quote Collins lifted from Huxley references the people who profess to have such knowledge. Huxley's term would be more suited to simply negate that quote: agnostics are people who profess to have a lack of such knowledge. Just as a-theism is a lack of a belief in god(s), a-gnosticism would be the lack of knowledge of god(s). To conclude that agnostics say such knowledge is simply impossible requires additional steps in logic that Collins does not provide. In addition, Collins contradicts himself: at one point he says that an agnostic would say such knowledge "simply cannot be achieved" and then - in the very next sentence! - states that some (weak) agnostics just think we don't have the knowledge right now, which sounds a lot like "maybe we'll have that knowledge later."

Collins then proceeds to characterize agnostics with bald assertions: "Most agnostics simply take the position that it is not possible, at least for them at that time, to take a position for or against the existence of God," "many biologists would put themselves in this camp," and "It is a rare agnostic who has made the effort to [consider all the evidence for and against the existence of God]" (p.168). There are, of course, no references backing his conclusions. Collins paints agnostics with a broad brush that screams "agnosticism is a cop-out!"

There is a possible objection that would rule out Collins' strong v. weak dichotomy regarding agnosticism and show that agnosticism is far from a cop-out. If a strong agnostic claims that knowledge about god is impossible, then wouldn't this mean that the agnostic has certain knowledge about gods (that gods are pesky in their unknowability) and/or the nature of reality relative to those gods? If that's the case, and strong agnosticism is self-refuting, then weak agnosticism is the only form you have.

I have occasionally run into people who question whether I'm really an atheist or whether I'm an agnostic. Unfortunately, if these people were to read Collins' book, they would not be any closer to understanding why a/theism and a/gnosticism is not an either/or proposition.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

Among the many other prohibitions in the Old Testament, there are several verses that prohibit charging interest on loans (at least to one's fellow Israelites - foreigners are apparently OK to gouge). Some of them are:

"You shall not lend upon interest to your brother, interest on money, interest on victuals, interest on anything that is lent for interest. To a foreigner you may lend upon interest, but to your brother you shall not lend upon interest..."

—Deuteronomy 23:19-20

"And if your brother becomes poor, and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall maintain him; as a stranger and a sojourner he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or increase, but fear your God; that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit."

—Leviticus 25:26

"If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right - if he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel... does not lend at interest or take any increase... he is righteous, he shall surely live, says the Lord God."

—Ezekiel 8:5-9

The New Testament, meanwhile, is more ambiguous on the subject. Matthew 25 and Luke 19 contain the parable of the talents, where a wealthy landowner gives money to his servants and rewards the ones who invest it and return him a profit. But this is most likely intended as a moral lesson about developing one's god-given talents, not as financial advice. Luke 6:35, however, is more explicit: it instructs Christians to "lend, hoping for nothing again".

The Qur'an, meanwhile, contains similar injunctions. Sura 2:275 says that Allah "permitteth trading and forbiddeth usury", and 3:130 and 30:39 similarly warn believers not to lend money in the hope of "increase". These rules, like other vague guidelines in the Qur'an, have been expanded in sharia law into a total prohibition of charging interest that's widely observed in Islamic countries (as opposed to the Jewish and Christian response, which is to largely ignore the inconvenient commands).

You might be wondering how you get a mortgage if you live in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or other Muslim theocracies. The answer is that Islamic banking companies have invented a concept called sukuk to get around this prohibition, which would otherwise make it impossible for them to do business. In essence, rather than you buying a home with money borrowed from a bank and then repaying the bank with interest, the bank buys the home outright and then permits you to live there for a fixed period, paying rent to do so, while at the same time you slowly acquire ownership of the property by paying back the bank's principal. If you think this sounds like a legalistic fiction, invented to technically comply with the prohibition on interest while exactly reproducing its legal structure, you're right.

As the tortured reasoning that created sukuk shows, regardless of what originally motivated these prohibitions, in the modern world they're archaic and irrational. Interest isn't always a cruel imposition by wealthy lenders (though it can be) - in a capitalist economy, it serves several important purposes. It compensates the lender for credit risk - that is, the risk that the loan recipient will go bankrupt and won't be able to repay. It compensates the lender for opportunity cost - for them giving up the ability to do something else, potentially more profitable, with the money that's loaned. And it compensates the lender for inflation - the fact that money becomes less valuable over time as a society becomes more productive and prosperous and the money supply increases.

The charging of interest has transformed lending from an activity that's the largesse of a few wealthy elites, to a bona fide profession whose benefits are available to everyone. Interest has made it possible for tens of millions of people to buy a home, start a business, or finance anything else that they couldn't have paid for up front and out of pocket, and it's enabled the global capitalist revolution that's lifted hundreds of millions out of subsistence and poverty. If we had obeyed the prohibitions of religious texts, none of this would ever have come about. However well-meaning these rules originally were, their existence shows that the texts that contain them were authored by fallible humans, ignorant of the mathematical and economic arguments that would propel the human species to prosperity.