In the past, I've written about the origins of religion and how belief in gods likely arises from one of humanity's most common psychological fallacies, the tendency to attribute agency where none exists. (When was the last time you got angry at your computer and felt as if it was trying to balk you? It happens to me much too often - even when I know there's no one inside there.)

There's another, related tendency that often manifests in religious belief, which is that human beings are concrete, categorizing thinkers. Our ability to create abstractions and parse the world into categories is a very successful strategy, one that forms the basis of our science, but it can be taken too far. That point is passed when we lose sight of the fact that our abstractions and categories are just mental conveniences, and begin treating them as if they were real things in their own right. In short, we're susceptible to reification.

One species of reification is the belief that things of this world inherit their nature from cosmic archetypes that exist on another plane. This, of course, is Plato's idea of "eternal forms", and the influence it's had on religion has been enormous. In all the offshoots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we find beliefs about how things that exist on Earth are imperfect reflections of perfect processes in Heaven. Thus, in Christianity, we encounter beliefs that the ritual animal sacrifices of Temple Judaism were inferior precursors to Jesus' once-and-for-all sacrifice of himself. In Islam, each earthly copy of the Qur'an is thought to be a mirror of a preexistent heavenly copy.

But more than anything else, the belief in forms has been the underpinning of creationism. To the naive observer - and the most creationists past and present certainly fall under that category - most living species appear to be distinct, and this supports their conclusion that all life can be classified into "created kinds", which are divided from each other by boundaries beyond which evolution cannot go. Of course, if you include all living species and not just a few carefully chosen representatives, many of the seemingly wide gaps shrink by a significant margin; if you include the many more extinct species known to us by fossils and other traces, those gaps contract still more; and if you examine the genetic commonalities that form a nested hierarchy of descent, the gaps disappear entirely.

A similar concept is the idea of the "essence", as if the qualities that define a thing had an objective existence all their own and could be distilled and extracted like a rare liquid. Again, it seems to be natural for us to think in this way. Consider how easily we accept the notion that Cupid's arrows could be coated with the pure essence of love or that a particular stone or plant could be impregnated with good luck, or how many tribes have believed that they would acquire the qualities of animals by consuming those animals. Or consider the classic sci-fi plot, dating back to Robert Louis Stevenson, of splitting a person into their "good side" and "evil side" - as though these were two separate essences mixed together in the same body, and one or the other could be made to precipitate out of solution by the right technique.

But most of all, the idea of essences gave birth to the notion of the soul. It causes people to think erroneously that the information-processing activity of the mind is not just the product of the brain's functioning, but a separate thing in its own right that can exist independently and survive the death of the body. Given what we now know about how the brain works, this makes about as much sense as believing that a computer could continue to process data and display programs after its hard drive and CPU have been melted down. But when our tendency to reification is not checked by evidence, humans are natural dualists, and find little difficulty in believing in ghosts in the machine.

When well-chosen, our mental patterns accurately capture the way the world is organized and may even point to hidden truths. Consider the twin nested hierarchy of evolution, or Mendelev's successful prediction of undiscovered elements based on the gaps in his periodic table. But even in this case, we must take care to resist the trap of reification. Many superstitions have been born in the minds of people who failed to realize that the patterns they saw were descriptive conveniences, artifacts of human perception, and not things in their own right.

Oh yes - it's that time again. As difficult as it is for me to believe, today officially makes it three years I've been writing for Daylight Atheism.

This past year has been the most eventful one yet. I finished writing my first book; met a fellow freethinker in an unlikely setting; was attacked by a sitting member of the U.S. Senate (still a proud moment); and more. As well, I continue to be encouraged by the thriving, friendly community here. It's the commenters that make a site what it is, more so than the author. There are blogs much bigger than mine, much more heavily trafficked; but in terms of the number and especially the quality of the comments, I couldn't be happier. To be honest, I prefer getting a number of comments where I can read every one!

What lies ahead in the coming year for Daylight Atheism? I have a few ideas:

• First off, I'd like to do more pure-science posts. Many of the essays in the Observatory have been aimed at debunking popular superstitions or laying out principles of critical thinking, but I'd like to devote more time to the glories of real science. These new posts will be similar to past essays like "Hello, Beautiful" or "Other Shores". Expect the first of these to start appearing soon.

• I want to stir the pot and get some good debates going. Let's face it, as encouraging as it is to sing the praises of atheism, it would be boring if that was all I did. (In much the same way, a site of nothing but debate and argument would get tedious; I like to have a balance.) I don't just mean debating religious apologetics - I'm confident most of us know those claims and counterclaims in our sleep - but genuinely interesting issues where atheists don't all find common ground.

• In line with the last point, I also want to move in the direction of more guest essays, including some from authors whose positions I don't necessarily agree with - possibly even some from theists. For three years, save for a few exceptions, I've been the sole author - and DA is and always will be my platform first and foremost - but I think any conversation is enriched by a diversity of voices, and I plan to seek out some good ones.

Lastly, there's one more point I want to touch on. These past few months have been a time of consolidation, and now I'm aiming for growth. I remain convinced that there's a huge potential audience of atheists and freethinkers who could stand to hear a friendly voice in the wilderness of superstition, and I want to be the one to reach them.

In terms of traffic, October 2008 was my best month ever, and I want that to be the new baseline. My intent, by the end of this year, is to be routinely surpassing 200,000 hits per month. That's about one-fifth of PZ's traffic, which doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

But if I'm going to reach that milestone, I'm going to need some help from the wisdom of the crowd. I put it to you, readers: What can be done to get Daylight Atheism's name out there? Weekly dissections of the Left Behind books? Live chats? Podcasts and video? More cephalopods? (The first person to suggest Twitter will be taken out and shot.) What say ye?

In one of my first posts on Daylight Atheism, I asked whether atheists should evangelize. My conclusion was that, while it would be foolish to go door-to-door on Sunday or pass out fliers on street corners, we can and should appear in forums like TV, radio and print media to press our case before the public.

In the two years since I wrote that post, I'm glad to see that many prominent atheist groups have come to feel the same way. In the U.S., there's the Freedom from Religion Foundation's highly successful atheist billboard campaign, which has brought the message of freethought to public places across the country. Even the occasional setbacks, far from hurting the cause, draw coverage and controversy that brings more attention to the original message. Similarly, the wildly successful atheist bus campaign that started in the U.K. is going global, giving rise to spinoffs in countries including Spain, Italy, the U.S. and Canada. Next up, I've heard, are subway ads.

Now more than ever, atheists are making a splash and getting our message out. And that's just what we should be doing: it's in the first generation of activism, in the renaissance of the modern atheist movement, that we have the most potential to cause change. Our newness, and the shock of our message to a society that's not used to hearing it, is just what we need to pierce the bubble that surrounds many religious believers.

But, as always, there are concern trolls who fret that we're being too radical, too controversial. Tyler Wolfe is one:

While this ad campaign may be refreshing in its originality, at its base it is no different than the religious advertisements I have already criticized. The atheist campaign, too, attempts to tell you what to believe and how to live your life... [These ads] are mimicking a strategy long criticized by the atheist community.

They are? What strategy would that be? The strategy of explaining what you believe and arguing that others should do likewise? That "strategy" is simply called persuasion, and I know of no atheist who opposes it. (What's the alternative - sitting at home and never talking to anyone, lest you inadvertently expose them to a point of view?) What atheists object to is not communicating one's opinions, but the manipulative, coercive, and often deceptive tactics used by so many proselytizers to advance that end.

Next up, Mark Fefer of the Seattle Weekly tells us how "atheists are botching their war on religion", in reference to the FFRF's winter solstice sign:

The sign read in part "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds" — exactly the kind of boneheaded provocation that undermines the cause.

First of all, what's routinely overlooked about the FFRF's sign is that it was deliberately provocative. It was placed in the Olympia, Washington state capitol as a protest against the state government's plan to install a nativity scene there. The message is that atheists don't appreciate religious endorsements on government property, and to show why that's a problem, we took advantage of the open forum to post a statement that most religious groups would similarly find shocking and upsetting. A more mildly worded sign would not have driven that point home.

...religion is no different from sports, music, or any other part of our culture. It can be a life-enriching experience that promotes community feeling and social values. It can also lead to destructive extremes. Should we Imagine No Sports because of steroids, concussions, and Pioneer Square knife fights?

If the rules of sports - not the occasional violent excesses, but the written rules of the game itself - promoted violence and discrimination against non-sports fans; if sports fans sought to deny non-sports fans the right to marry or to hold political office; if suicide bombings and holy wars were routinely waged against fans of rival teams; if sports fans sought to water down or outlaw science and instead teach their belief that an Intelligent Referee created the world: then yes, we would have to question whether the benefits of sports were worth the costs.

People who cling to the homophobia in the Bible do it because...they're homophobic. If they couldn't justify it through Leviticus, they'd find some other way; atheism sure isn't going to cure them.

This analysis is far too glib and naive. Is Fefer saying that religion has never changed anyone's moral opinions, but only gives them a way to express the views they already have? How do we reconcile this with his previous statement that religion "promotes social values"?

In contrast to this simplistic view, an honest accounting would have to conclude that there are many cases where prejudices like homophobia are shaped, encouraged, and sustained by religion. When a believer is taught from birth that homosexuality is a terrible, revolting sin which God hates, then yes, it is fair to conclude that their homophobia stems from their religion, and yes, it is fair to conclude that these people would lose this prejudice if they became atheists.

Lastly, and on a somewhat different note, there's this report from Jocelyn Bell, a liberal Christian journalist who attended the last Atheist Alliance International convention. Personally, I recommend giving the friendliest reception possible to reporters seeking to learn more about us, but the reactions she did receive from atheists were the next best thing. They ran the gamut from sharp confrontation to warm greeting, such that she concluded that atheists are "actually as diverse a group of people as you’d find anywhere".

This is just the message we should want to communicate - that atheists are a diverse and freewheeling group, united by our lack of religious belief and our opposition to bullying fundamentalism, but otherwise not in ideological lockstep. Bell left the convention with a better understanding and greater sympathy for atheists, and possibly even with some seeds of doubt planted in her mind. As a practical goal for atheist evangelism, there's no higher goal for us to aspire to.

The last time I did a post like this, it was to share some of the more uplifting and inspiring e-mails I received. This one is headed in a different direction. Here, for your reading pleasure and amusement, enjoy this selection of kookery culled from e-mails I've gotten, as well as the occasional preaching comment I've rejected from Daylight Atheism.

First up, there's this from "wayofthegoldenlion", which starts off as standard creationist drivel but builds up steam as it goes, until it suddenly blasts off into awesome heights of lunacy:

As for myself, I believe that science has proved that there has to be a creator (The best mathematicians, physicists, biologists, astronomers,etc all admit they cannot explain how the DNA data gets into each cell/gene and can only be put there by intelligent design. But a campaign of disinformation from the atheist scientific communtity was exposed on British TV (I have the documentary), that proves that even the atheists admitted in secret scientific unpublished journals that all organic life in the universe had to come from a designer creator, and cannot appear randomly. The documentary exposed these findings and carried the atheist scientists through to their final statement and conclusion (which was pretty weak) that all artificial intelligence can appear randomly, but they admit that all organic life has to have a creator. THAT WAS THE COVER UP! THIS WAS EXPOSED AND THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY WERE INFILTRATED BY OCCULT SECRET SOCIETIES AND PAID TO NOT PUBLISH THEIR FINDINGS. (MOSTLY HIGH RANKING FREEMASONS, ROSICRUCIANS, ORDER TEMPLAR ORIENTALIS,ETC). tHE DOCUMENTARY PART 2 STATES THAT 90% OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY DO NOT BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION BUT AGREE WITH CHRISTIANS SCIENTISTS THAT NATURAL SELECTION IS A CORRECT THESIS, BUT THEY CANNOT ADMIT THIS, BECAUSE THEIR FUNDS WILL BE STOPPED BY POWERFUL INSTITUTES CONTROLLED BY THESE OCCULT FREEMASONS/BUSINESSMEN WHO OWN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS

"Secret unpublished scientific journals". Gotta love it. There's considerable potential here for a Christian-fundamentalist version of The Da Vinci Code - our brave hero races against time to find the secret journals and uncover the scientific conspiracy! If only we could find some bold author who's equal to the task.

Next, this comment from "John", who evidently doesn't think that preaching the gospel is important enough to justify spellcheck:

hey why dont u guys jsrt stop hating on everything and chillax and read about Jesus (whose da bomb) cuz otherwise when ur dead ur gunna be like "man that dude on the athiest website knew his stuff."

The translators of the King James Bible must be turning over in their graves. Whatever else we can say about that book, its language is often beautiful and poetic as only Shakespearean English can be. This comment - not so much. ("Verily, Jesus spake unto the multitude: 'O ye fools and blind, can ye not discern that God the Father is da bomb?'")

There's also this anonymous commenter, whose keen insight allowed him to divine the true reason so many people are atheists:

WOw.. you guys are amazing. except for one thing. even if GOD did exsist you'd never know it, cause if ever He did something you'd justify and explain it away. and the reason for this is simple. most of you are addicted to porn or masturbation or alchohol or whatever(please don't reply with what good people you are or what great things you do or how noble you are). and you want to keep doing what you are.

Curses! Found out! And we'd have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling Christians!

Finally, there's this e-mail I got a few weeks ago from someone with the disturbingly Naziesque handle of "The Cure". He starts out with the usual apologetic blather, but then suddenly decides to veer in another direction and start preaching about abortion and homosexuality, despite saying he has no idea what I believe about either (it's not hard to find out if you look). I can only surmise that the thought of "atheism" rattled around inside his brain until it activated the more general category of "things I dislike". And why do so many homophobes target their invective at gay men and rarely, if ever, mention lesbians? Could it be that they focus on the topics they find simultaneously the most fascinating and repelling - and if so, what does that imply about them?

Dear Atheist,

I came across your website and wonder why someone would be so driven to disprove the existence of God? Perhaps your lifestyle does not line up with religious people who believe in God propagate? Just curious. Or perhaps you think hypocracy in the church disproves the existence of God. That is a fallible argument. If a man has been faithful to his wife, provided for his children, and has lived by good moral standards (although I know this is probably subjective to you), but then has a son who gets married, cheats on his wife, and abuses the children, does that disprove the existence of the father? Seriously, a hypocrite does not prove God does not exist, it just proves the Devil does!

I agree that every person is inherently designed to be able to judge between issues of morality on some level; therefore, even you could make some good judgments. But to deny the existence of something greater takes more faith than those who believe in a God.

Two topics that I believe are important to this society and its existence are homosexuality and abortion. I do not know what you believe about these, yet, by natural law even aside from any religious basis they can be judged as wrong!

I am a religious person and I do not want to be vulgar; however, I am sure you are adult enought to handle this statement. Does not common sense tells us that if two different kinds of the same species have different genitalia, and that if used together reproduction is accomplished, then they are made to live together and have a family? The rectum region is existent for both man and women. It is used by both for the same purpose. Yet, the genitalia region is used for another purpose in general; that is to reproduce. Although, the rectum region can be used between man and man to have sensual pleasure, it does not appear to have been "created" or in your terms "evolved" for that use in specific. The main use is to excrete waste. Does not common sense also tells us that since a man and women's genitalia are in same location but are different and fit together like a puzzle, then do you not think man and women belong together? Not man and man, women and women. For just a moment, let us say that everyone decided to be in homosexual relations without the ability by modern science to reproduce in a test tube. If that had happened during the "dark ages" we would not even be here today! The homosexual life style does not promote a constructive foundation of the existence of the world, it brings it to an end!

Abortion is murder. To defend one's life is not murder, that is justice. Capital punishment is justice. Can a baby defend itself? I think not, therefore, abortion is murder.

Perhaps you believe aborition and homosexuality to be wrong. If you do, then you have proved my premise. Even atheists can make some good jugdments. Yes, I believe you can have values; however, this society will crumble if we do not change. Our values need to be based on a higher standard, the Bible! The Roman Empire fell because of the lack of values! Two of their immoral practices were homosexuality, and senseless killing!

My purpose in writing this was to show aside from the Bible, one can prove something to be wrong by its own nature!

The Cure

Last month's post "On Cryonics" outlined why I'm skeptical of that transhumanist doctrine. In today's post, I want to discuss more directly the goal which advocates of cryonics hope to attain - the achievement of immortality through technology that gives us the ability to halt or reverse the aging process.

In this case, my objection is not one of feasibility. I think it's entirely possible that we'll figure out how to do this eventually. (We already know of species, such as lobsters or giant tortoises, that show negligible senescence and that we can use as lab models.) My objection is instead along moral lines: even if we could do this, should we?

It's often said that new ideas triumph not because their advocates convince everyone, but because all their old defenders eventually die out. What, then, would be the effect on human society if we ceased to die? To put it another way, what would the effect on our society have been if immortality had been invented in the era of slavery, or before women's right to vote was recognized, or during the theocratic medieval ages when kings and popes held sway? Humanity's moral progress would have been halted forever, our existing power structure and distribution of opinions lithified by a horde of immortal bigots.

I think we can agree that it would have been a disaster if immortality had been invented during the dark ages of our past. But have we made enough progress since then to be ready? It's true that we have come far; but, I think any fair-minded person would agree, we have not come far enough. Many of the old prejudices still linger, and in some quarters their strength is virtually undiminished. And there are many more cases of bigotry and irrationality yet to be overcome, where whole groups of people are still denied the exercise of basic rights.

If immortality were invented, many of the people who would be among the first to take advantage of it are some of the ones we would least want to live forever. Wealthy dictators could exert a literally endless dominion over their oppressed people. Just imagine the theocratic clergy of Saudi Arabia or Iran living forever, strangling their countries' liberty in a deathless grip of dogma; or North Korea becoming a cult state worshipping an immortal tyrant in fact and not just in ideology. Imagine racism or segregation enshrined as the eternal order of things. Up until now, natural death has forced every regime, no matter how despotic, to change eventually. But immortality could usher in tyranny that was literally never-ending. This is not a utopian vision, but the worst kind of dystopia imaginable.

Another point to consider is that the advent of planet-wide immortality would require us to give up something that is a deeply built-in part of our natures - the drive to have children. Yes, I'm aware that some transhumanists talk rapturously of settling other planets and expanding into the universe, but we should face up to the fact that voyaging on such a grand scale, leaving everything familiar behind, is never going to appeal to any more than a small fraction of the population. And even if it did, the economics of space travel are likely to remain prohibitive. We might be able to send small groups of colonists to other worlds to establish societies there, but it will probably never be a feasible way of emptying the planet of large numbers of people. Unless the advent of immortality brought with it drastic changes in human psychology, a world of immortals would soon become ruinously crowded and unsustainable, leading in short order to resource wars and the collapse of society.

And finally, what would be the effect on our individual lives? An extended life, with more opportunities to take in all that life has to offer, I certainly would welcome. But an endless life, in the long run, would lead inevitably to terminal boredom and despair. I find it more ethical and more rational to live life for a time, take advantage of its bounty, and then make way for a new generation for whom all the wonders of the world are brand-new. Who really wants to live forever?

Why don't we already have gay marriage in all of America?

I mean this as a simple question of law, not a matter of fundamental rights or justice. The reason I ask is because we already have legally recognized gay marriage in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and because Article IV of the U.S. Constitution contains the following clause, commonly known as the Full Faith and Credit Clause:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

The language of the clause is clear and unmistakable: any act or judicial proceeding that's valid in one state must be legally recognized by the other states. Marriage is a government act and comes under this definition, so why aren't all the states required to recognize gay marriages performed legally in Massachusetts? Even if they refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, they have no grounds to deny the validity of a marriage license issued elsewhere, nor to refuse couples with a valid marriage license the same benefits offered to any other married couple.

The obstacle usually cited is that Congress already passed (and, disappointingly, President Bill Clinton signed) a law called the Defense of Marriage Act, which forbids the federal government from recognizing gay marriage and grants an exemption to any state which does not wish to do so. But a simple law passed by Congress can't overrule the Constitution, nor can the mini-DOMAs that many states have enacted on their own. DOMA is plainly unconstitutional, and it should be a no-brainer decision for any court to strike it down. I can't see how even a conservative court, especially one allegedly committed to textual originalism, could avoid coming to that conclusion.

The second sentence of the clause offers no support for DOMA. It says that Congress may prescribe how the validity of a state proceeding is to be proven, but does not give a blanket grant of power for Congress or other states to completely refuse to recognize a valid proceeding. (Analogously, the Constitution gives the government the right to impose some reasonable conditions on firearms possession - "a well-regulated militia" - but not the right to ban gun ownership outright, as the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller). To read the clause in that sense would completely strip it of meaning and is an unreasonable interpretation by any measure. (Law professor Joanna Grossman agrees, calling such a reading of the clause "perverse").

Admittedly, this clause does give Congress the right to legislate what the effects of such recognition shall be. This conjures up the scenario of a legal contortion where gay marriage is "recognized", but offers none of the benefits or privileges usually associated with marriage. However, I don't think that scenario could ever come to pass. For Congress to grant the states a license to withhold benefits from gay couples, but not from heterosexual couples, would be a clear violation of the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment and would run counter to decades of clear Supreme Court jurisprudence. Again, I can't see even a conservative court engaging in such a sweeping negation of precedent by ruling otherwise. The religious right could obtain a Pyrrhic victory by stripping the benefits of marriage from all couples, gay and straight alike, but I doubt they'd consider that outcome a desirable one.

This seems like fertile ground for some enterprising civil liberties group to bring a federal lawsuit, but I haven't heard of any constitutional challenges being filed against DOMA. What's holding us back?

Friendly Atheist has posted the third part of a dialogue with Christian apologist Lee Strobel. In it, Strobel poses questions that he thinks would be the most effective at planting seeds of faith in an atheist's mind. In this post, I'll answer those questions. I've written on some of these issues at greater length in the past, and I'll also provide links to those essays where appropriate.

Historian Gary Habermas: "Utilizing each of the historical facts conceded by virtually all contemporary scholars, please produce a comprehensive natural explanation of Jesus' resurrection that makes better sense than the event itself."

These historical facts are: (1) Jesus was killed by crucifixion; (2) Jesus' disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them; (3) The conversion of the church persecutor Saul, who became the Apostle Paul; (4) the conversion of the skeptic James, Jesus' half-brother; (5) The empty tomb of Jesus. These "minimal facts" are strongly evidenced and are regarded as historical by the vast majority of scholars, including skeptics, who have written about the resurrection in French, German, and English since 1975. While the fifth fact doesn't have quite the same virtual universal consensus, it nevertheless is conceded by 75 percent of the scholars and is well supported by the historical data if assessed without preconceptions.

Ebon Musings: Choking on the Camel

Even if we grant that dubious 75% figure, what Habermas fails to acknowledge is that most of the scholars who study the historicity of Jesus are Christians, and are unlikely to produce conclusions that deviate from orthodoxy, even if - as in this case - those conclusions are supported by no evidence outside the biblical record itself. Habermas' alleged "historical facts" are just the tenets of Christian belief presented in a facade of neutrality.

As such, I don't intend to begin by making the concessions he would prefer. I maintain that of his five facts, (1) is recorded primarily in the Bible, and only secondarily, and spottily, in some documents written decades later. (2) is mostly correct, so long as we remove the question-begging assumption that the first Christians were disciples personally chosen by Jesus. (3) and (4) derive from no evidence I know of outside the Book of Acts, which was written for apologetic purposes and which Habermas has naively accepted as historical truth (see below). (5), again, is just a derivation from the creeds of Christian orthodoxy, not from any historical documents which suggest that first-century non-Christians acknowledged this.

For a comprehensive natural explanation, I propose this alternative: The first Christians believed that Jesus was a savior deity, similar to those of other mystery religions of the time, whose sacrificial death and resurrection was a sacred mystery that took place in a higher, heavenly plane and was revealed to believers through visions and revelations. Allegorical documents like the Gospels set the activities of this mythological figure in recent history for teaching purposes. Over time, through war and disruption, the original purpose of these writings was forgotten. This explanation neatly accounts for most of the available facts, including the vague and fragmentary references to Jesus in early historical documents that gradually become more concrete, the lack of reference in the epistles to a human life and career of Jesus, and the first Christians' apparent lack of interest in sacred relics or holy places of their religion.

Philosopher Paul Copan: "Given the commonly recognized and scientifically supported belief that the universe (all matter, energy, space, time) began to exist a finite time ago and that the universe is remarkably finely tuned for life, does this not (strongly) suggest that the universe is ontologically haunted and that this fact should require further exploration, given the metaphysically staggering implications?

Ebon Musings: Unmoved Mover: The Fine-Tuning Argument

I take strong exception to the claim that the universe is "remarkably finely tuned for life". On the contrary, simple observation suggests that the universe is not well suited to life such as ours. When we consider the entire volume of the cosmos, we see that 99.999999... percent is cold, hard vacuum with a temperature of 3K. Within the galaxies, most of the interstellar medium is flooded with radiation. Most of the planets we've discovered are either freezing cold or boiling hot, unsuitable for life. In fact, in all the vastness of the cosmos, we only know one place where life can thrive - our own world - and even there, it's restricted to a relatively narrow range of habitable zones and climates. A universe "finely tuned" for life should produce it abundantly; but in fact, life is confined to a single, infinitesimally small and fragile corner. This strongly suggests that life, far from being the intended purpose of the universe, was an unintended side product arising from a confluence of rare and unlikely circumstances.

And, second, granted that the major objection to belief in God is the problem of evil, does the concept of evil itself not suggest a standard of goodness or a design plan from which things deviate, so that if things ought to be a certain way (rather than just happening to be the way they are in nature), don't such 'injustices' or 'evils' seem to suggest a moral/design plan independent of nature?

Absolutely not! The injustices and evils that we perceive are not intrinsic properties of the universe, but qualities of human perception. We evaluate natural phenomena based on whether they have a harmful or beneficial effect for us. Often those effects are harmful, but this doesn't imply that the universe has deviated from an original plan of goodness - that belief is a product of Christian presuppositions - only that natural phenomena occur randomly and don't take human needs into account. In reality, the randomness and amorality of nature is a much stronger argument for atheism than it is for theism.

Talk show host Frank Pastore: "Please explain how something can come from nothing, how life can come from non-life, how mind can come from brain, and how our moral senses developed from an amoral source."

Ebon Musings: Pay No Attention to the Deity Behind the Curtain

Pastore is asking for a full account of the current state of several entire scientific disciplines - cosmology, abiogenesis, and the evolution of the conscious mind. This is more than I'll attempt to explain or even summarize in this space, but I do have one shorter observation. If Pastore's question is meant to raise doubts in atheists, it can only be an example of the "God of the Gaps": the belief that anything not currently known must be miraculous.

The fallacy is a glaringly obvious one. Throughout human history, countless natural phenomena that were not understood were attributed to divine action: mental illness, contagious disease, the seasons, weather, fertility, life and death, and many more. Without exception, these supernatural explanations have receded and been replaced by natural ones as our knowledge grows. Pastore is just applying this tactic to the issues where we don't yet know the full answers, trusting that this time the gaps will remain impenetrable, and expecting that supernatural answers should be accepted despite their repeated past failures. But if we go by track record, we should all admit that the more likely answer is that these phenomena will turn out to be natural ones as well.

Historian Mike Licona: "Irrespective of one's worldview, many experience periods of doubt. Do you ever doubt your atheism and, if so, what is it about theism or Christianity that is most troubling to your atheism?"

Yes, I do occasionally experience doubt, as I've written about before. That's a necessary consequence of having an open mind. But what I generally find gives me the most uncertainty is unfamiliarity. I'm not the kind of person who can dismiss a claim out of hand without looking into it, and claims I've never heard before usually give me a moment's pause for that reason. But so far they've all failed to pan out, and the more I learn about most religious and supernatural claims, the less plausible they seem.

Author Greg Koukl: "Why is something here rather than nothing here? Clearly, the physical universe is not eternal (Second Law of Thermodynamics, Big Bang cosmology). Either everything came from something outside the material universe, or everything came from nothing (Law of Excluded Middle). Which of those two is the most reasonable alternative? As an atheist, you seem to have opted for the latter. Why?"

Ebon Musings: Unmoved Mover: The Cosmological Argument

Atheists are not committed to believing that "everything came from nothing". Koukl's alleged dichotomy overlooks a third alternative: that we simply do not know the ultimate origins of the universe at present, and that we can accept this as our answer for the time being until more evidence is discovered. As with Pastore's question, Koukl assumes that a supernatural explanation, even one with no evidence in its favor, "wins" by default if a natural explanation is not currently known - this despite the well-established pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones over time.

I didn't email Alvin Plantinga, considered by many to be among the greatest philosophers of modern times. But based on his assertion that naturalism is self-defeating, we could formulate this question (thanks to William Lane Craig for some of the concise wording): If our cognitive faculties were selected for survival, not for truth, then how can we have any confidence, for example, that our beliefs about the reality of physical objects are true or that naturalism itself is true? (By contrast, theism says God has designed our cognitive faculties in such a way that, when functioning properly in an appropriate environment, they deliver true beliefs about the world.)

Daylight Atheism: Are Evolved Minds Reliable Truth-Finders?

The fallacy of this argument is its assumption that "survival" and "truth" are two different objectives, such that they could be selected for independently of each other. But it should be obvious that, all else being equal, greater accuracy in perceiving the world will always be a survival advantage. Granted, evolution can and does take shortcuts, producing well-known psychological fallacies like the urge to anthropomorphize natural phenomena, and many people have been misled in this way. But even here we are not helpless. By using cognitive prostheses like science, we can compensate for our mental shortcomings and learn to view the world still more accurately.

By contrast, a theist who believes that God has designed our cognitive faculties to be accurate is faced with the embarrassment of explaining why there are so many conflicting and incompatible religions. How is this so, if we are designed to perceive the world accurately? Why is there so much confusion, ignorance and error among humans when it comes to determining what the true faith is?

For me, when viewing all Strobel's questions, what stands out about them is their ordinariness. I concur with Greta Christina that these arguments, far from being anything new or unusual, are no different - and no more difficult to defeat - than those of the run-of-the-mill amateur apologists that most atheists encounter on a routine basis. That's not surprising, of course, since most of those people take their cues from the leading apologists.

But for the same reason, it's meaningful because this should give us confidence - confidence that we truly can stand up to the superstars of modern apologetics and answer the best that they have to offer. It's not even difficult. Any reasonably well-versed atheist should be able to shoot down these arguments without a problem. If this is truly the best they have to offer, then we can be all but certain that the evidentiary base of Christianity does not have anywhere near the depth or breadth that would justify an atheist's conversion.

Although it's much too early to look forward to a world without religion, one thing we can be confident of is that the numbers and influence of atheists will continue to grow in the near future. Census figures over the last few decades have consistently shown the rise of the nonbelievers in the educated and industrialized nations of the First World - even in America, despite its high religiosity as compared to its cultural neighbors. We can expect this trend to continue, to the point where it's reasonable to predict that within twenty to fifty years, atheists will be a significant political lobby in their own right.

This is a hopeful vision, but there's a potential dark side to it that concerns me. My concern stems from this thought: At whose expense will the rise of atheism occur?

It's not likely to be from sheer population growth, considering that atheists most often come from the educated and relatively prosperous sectors of society that are correlated with smaller families. Nor do we subscribe to ideologies like Roman Catholicism or its Protestant equivalent, Quiverfull, that encourage us to raise as many children as possible. Instead, the growth of atheism will probably be through rhetoric and persuasion, winning believers over by the power of our ideas and convincing them to deconvert.

The question, then, is who will be deconverting. What types of believers will we have the most success at persuading? Who is most likely to pay heed to our arguments?

Ideally, what we want is a soft landing. We want the extravagantly supernatural faiths, those whose members believe in a world drenched with miracles and demon possessions and faith healings, to transition to a gentler, less extreme form of belief. Those more moderate churches, in turn, will fade to a more rationalist outlook that holds miracle stories to be only symbolic, similar to many Unitarian Universalists, Buddhists or secular Jews. Finally, these cultural institutions will become outright atheist. This is the blueprint for a peaceful and smooth transition to a more rational world.

But I fear it may not happen this way. What I worry about is that, instead, the moderate, mainstream religions will be the first to go. After all, their members inhabit a world similar to ours, with few outright miracles and little explicit supernaturalism. Our arguments will make the most sense to them. If that happens, what will be left behind is a world polarized between atheism and religious fundamentalism; those theists who remain will be the members of the most extremist, hardcore faiths, the ones that are separated from us by such a wide gulf in worldviews that we scarcely even agree on any basic principles with which to start talking. A world like that would likely see more outbreaks of violence, theocracy and destructive fundamentalism.

How can we avoid this outcome? Withdrawing from the field is not an option, for that would just give the extremist believers free rein to grow their own ranks. (For reasons I've set out elsewhere, I doubt that moderate religionists have the ability to effectively counter their fundamentalist brethren.) This could lead to an even worse outcome. We do need atheists to lobby and to speak out - but if we can't sap the power of militant and power-hungry religion, we're going to have a much tougher field to fight on.

For this reason, I think that atheists should team up with moderate believers - whenever and wherever they're willing to work with us - to oppose destructive fundamentalism. We each bring our own strengths to the fight: we have the passion and uncompromising rationalism that effectively strikes at the heart of fundamentalism; they supply a welcoming but still theistic alternative, for people who need that, and the credibility to counter apologetic assertions that atheists are anarchist radicals who only want to destroy.

This past week, the Times ran a story about the extent of the gains made by the reconstituted Taliban, not just in Afghanistan or in the semi-autonomous tribal regions on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but well within Pakistan itself:

Using a portable radio transmitter, a local Taliban leader, Shah Doran, on most nights outlines newly proscribed "un-Islamic" activities in Swat, like selling DVDs, watching cable television, singing and dancing, criticizing the Taliban, shaving beards and allowing girls to attend school. He also reveals names of people the Taliban have recently killed for violating their decrees — and those they plan to kill.

The Taliban are now the de facto rulers of the Swat Valley, a chunk of territory the size of Delaware that's just a hundred miles outside Pakistan's capitol Islamabad. Every night, they terrify villagers with radio broadcasts announcing who will be killed that night - from policemen to dancing girls - and more often than not, the bodies of those named are dumped in the public square the next morning.

For atheists, this is the endgame. This is what we're up against. All that is worst in the human spirit, all that is savage and low and cruel, finds its expression in the Taliban. They are amoral and nihilistic fanatics who never create, only destroy - whether it be the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the girls' schools in Swat, or the very lives of those who oppose them. To them, everything good in life is a sin, and existence is a narrow, cramped, twisted path between vast mountains of prohibition. Violence is all they know and the only method they ever consider. And if they had their way, they'd plunge all the world into the dark age they've imposed in miniature in Swat, into perpetual stagnation, fear, and brutality. That is their utopia, their vision for the future of humankind.

One wonders, how many people would they be willing to murder to realize this goal? Would there ever come a time when the slaughter would exhaust even their thirst for bloodshed and force them to conclude that imposing uniformity through violence is futile? Or would they willingly continue shooting and slitting throats until every last spark of independent thought was stamped out from the world - and if so, would they then turn their knives on each other?

But if this story starkly outlines the danger we face and the evil that religious extremists have wrought, it also hints at how we could triumph over them:

"The local population is totally fed up, and if they had the chance they would lynch each and every Talib," said Mr. Naveed Khan, the police official. "But the Taliban are so cruel and violent, no one will oppose them. If this is not stopped, it will spill into other areas of Pakistan."

For all their cruelty and brutality, they are not invulnerable. They do not command the allegiance of the majority, nor will they ever. They can only succeed by keeping all their slaves terrorized, so that they're too afraid for their own lives to band together and rise up in unison. If all the people of Swat decided as one to fight back, the Taliban wouldn't stand a chance against them.

Of course, the opposite is true as well: if the people of Pakistan do not unite to stand up against them (and if the army continues to turn a blind eye, as it has so far been doing), the Taliban will continue to make gains, until in time they might threaten the government itself. Needless to say, in a nuclear-armed state, that would be a catastrophe too horrible to imagine. Only the cold logic of mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War from erupting into a nuclear exchange; if one side in such a standoff was a horde of death-welcoming religious fanatics, as the Taliban are, that slender reed of safety would likely not hold. It's the moral duty of all nations, the people of Pakistan first and foremost, to fight back against these monsters and ensure that that nightmare scenario never comes to pass.

I knew the Catholics were having trouble finding enough people to be clergy, but I didn't think things had gotten this bad (HT: Pam's House Blend):

I believe that the historical evidence — the historical evidence — is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolph Hitler... I believe there were no gas chambers.

Those are some choice words from Richard Williamson, one of four bishops excommunicated 20 years ago after being appointed by the breakaway archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and whose excommunication Pope Benedict has now lifted. Here are some other viewpoints of Williamson's. First, there's the ever-popular "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" meme:

By lies, Judeo-Masonry brought about the first two World Wars... By lies, Judeo-Masonry is preparing for the Third World War. (source)

He says that homosexuality naturally evokes a "violent repugnance", that homosexual behavior is a sin "crying to Heaven for vengeance", and favors us with the following quote, which I swear I'm not making up:

"Oh, but Our Lord had chawity, (unlike thumwun we know who wath tho nathty to Pwintheth Di!). Our Lord loved thinnerth, and faggotth, and tho thould we!!" So runs the objection! (source)

Predictably, he thinks that women should not receive higher education:

...because of all kinds of natural reasons, almost no girl should go to any university!

The deep-down reason is the same as for the wrongness of women's trousers [yes, he's also against those —Ebonmuse]: the unwomaning of woman. The deep-down cause in both cases is that Revolutionary man has betrayed modern woman; since she is not respected and loved for being a woman, she tries to make herself a man. Since modern man does not want her to do what God meant her to do, namely to have children, she takes her revenge by invading all kinds of things that man is meant to do. (source)

And just for good measure, how about throwing in some 9/11 conspiracy lunacy as well?

None of you believe that 9-11 is what it was presented to be. It was, of course, the two towers came down, but it was absolutely for certain not two airplanes which brought down those two towers. They were professionally demolished by a series of demolition charges from top to bottom of the towers. (source)

Make no mistake about it: By personally lifting this man's excommunication and welcoming him back into the fold, Benedict has sent an unmistakable message that he, and by extension the entire Catholic church, condones sentiments like this. His decision signals that these views are acceptable ones for a Catholic bishop to have. (Meanwhile, Catholics who believe that women should be ordained or that being gay is not a sin continue to be persona non grata to the leadership.)

Based on decisions like this one, it appears that whatever progress was achieved by John Paul II, this pope intends to roll it all back and then some. Even as the world advances, Benedict is deliberately moving the church backwards, as if intending to position it as a bulwark against modernity. And if that's what he wants, so be it. Nothing could better support the atheist contention that the Catholic church is an archaic and obsolete institution.

As parishes shrink and the church fades, ultraconservatives like Benedict are bent on accelerating the decline, by promoting the attitudes that have led to so many people leaving in the first place. They may well wind up presiding over a tiny and hardened remnant, one that matches their medieval vision but is otherwise irrelevant, as the rest of the world progresses in its moral outlook and ultimately leaves them behind.