The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

The essence of science isn't test tubes or lab coats, but a special kind of scrupulous intellectual honesty. It's the willingness to try to prove yourself wrong, to subject your own ideas to the most rigorous, make-or-break tests you can conceive of. Equally as important, it's the willingness to consider every plausible alternative and weigh them all fairly - and if a competing hypothesis explains the data better than your own, to acknowledge that and respond accordingly.

This is a standard that this book doesn't meet, and chapter 10 shows why. A recurring theme of this chapter is that Strobel and Moreland consider only the simplest possible hypotheses of how the brain causes consciousness - and when they identify a weakness, they conclude that not just that hypothesis, but all the more complex alternatives as well, are false.

In this section, Strobel has asked, "What positive evidence is there that consciousness and the self are not merely a physical product of the brain?" Here's how Moreland responds:

"For example, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk, or swallow. Invariably the patient would respond by saying, 'I didn't do that. You did.'....
No matter how much Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, he said, 'There is no place... where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.' That's because those functions originate in the conscious self, not the brain." [p.258]

This argument only works if you assume an extremely simplistic model of consciousness: that beliefs and decisions originate from one single spot in the brain, and by poking that spot, you can activate the processes that produce them. But this is unlikely in any plausible materialistic view of consciousness. It's much more likely that these higher-order functions involve the coordinated activity of many brain regions, since after all, forming a belief or making a decision necessarily requires integrating many different sources of input. In fact, Moreland's view that simple electrical stimulation should produce beliefs and decisions would make more sense under a Christian view of the brain - like that of Descartes, who believed there was a single anatomical region (the pineal gland) where the brain interfaced with the soul and received its marching orders.

But you'll notice that Moreland, unintentionally I'm sure, has committed himself to a completely testable claim: if we have a soul, our beliefs and decisions originate there and not in the brain. Therefore, it's a necessary consequence of his view that no physical alteration of the brain, whether caused by accident, disease or anything else, should cause a person to believe or decide in a particular way.

Well, if that's his challenge, I'm happy to take him up on it. It may be that Penfield's crude electrical stimulation didn't cause his patients to form beliefs or make decisions, but there are many types of brain disorders that do exactly this. I'll list a few, all of which are described in greater detail in my essay "A Ghost in the Machine":

Capgras' syndrome: Sometimes occurs in people suffering from schizophrenia, dementia, or head injury. The patient suddenly begins to insist that a friend or loved one has been replaced by an impostor who looks and acts exactly like the missing individual. This meets Moreland's criterion of brain injury causing a person to believe.

Frontotemporal dementia: A disease similar to Alzheimer's that causes degeneration in the frontal lobes of the brain. Individuals suffering from the early stages of FTD have been known to show dramatic changes in their personal likes and dislikes, political preferences, and even their religion. This meets Moreland's criterion of brain injury causing a person to decide.

Environmental dependency syndrome: Often caused by tumors pressing on the frontal lobes or other types of frontal lobe dysfunction. Patients with this disorder act as if their behavior is governed by external cues rather than internal decisions. They also show dramatically reduced impulse control, often choosing to act in ways they previously never would have done. One famous case is Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman who survived a freak accident that destroyed part of the frontal loes of his brain, but in the aftermath, baffled his friends and family by transforming from a diligent, well-respected worker to a lazy, shiftless drifter.

Akinesia: Unlike paralysis, the inability to move, akinesia is the unwillingness to move. Akinesia sufferers lose the motivation to do anything except respond to the most immediate needs. Again, this condition is often caused by tumors or brain damage. One case I detail in my essay is of a Baptist preacher who quit his church because he no longer felt like going to work. When a surgeon removed a tumor pressing on his frontal lobes, he soon regained his motivation and returned to work.

All these disorders, and others like them, are totally inexplicable on Moreland's view. If the soul is the source of belief and decision and is not dependent on the brain, as he insists, then we should never find cases like this. On the dualist view, we might expect to find cases where the soul's "lines of communication" to the body were cut by brain damage, but that should only produce effects like paralysis or coma, not actual alterations to a person's desires and personality. But the dualist view clashes with reality. In cases like the ones I've described, people can still do exactly what they want; the problem is that what they want has changed.

Strobel and Moreland never address evidence like this, so it's hard to tell how they would respond to it. The thoroughly mechanistic nature of consciousness, and the fact that it can be changed by changing the brain, as surely as a computer can be reprogrammed, is evidence that Christian apologists in general haven't acknowledged or come to terms with. But to anyone who's familiar with the discoveries of modern neuroscience, the idea that beliefs and decisions originate somewhere other than the brain, in some separate and supernatural "conscious self", is as laughable as the idea that mental illness is caused by demonic possession.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

I've received another response to my essay on Ebon Musings, "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists", which challenges theists to explain what they would accept as proof that their religious beliefs were mistaken. For the record, I'll point out that this essay has been publicly available since June 2001, almost nine years, and in that time - counting the response just received - I've gotten a total of three replies.

What's ironic is that this latest response underscores, rather than contradicts, the point I originally made in my essay which explains why I posed this challenge:

Many theists, by their own admission, structure their beliefs so that no evidence could possibly disprove them. In short, they are closed-minded, and have been taught to be closed-minded.

This is a perfect description of the latest response. Its author, though he puts on a pretense of open-mindedness, has offered terms that are purposefully designed to be impossible to fulfill. His response is therefore made in bad faith and is not a serious answer to my challenge, but I'll analyze it anyway, the better to show how the theist mindset works.

Here is how he begins:

To convince me that God doesn't exist, please come up with an alternate explanation for the existence of every single physical particle in the universe. Everything - down to the minutest sub-atomic particle known or surmised presently, to everything yet to be discovered in the future - must be accounted for up-front each with its own individual explanation. Since we can not assume that an agent that has one address, so to speak, like a Supreme Being, will organize and order our material universe, so any convincing explanation of existence must, out of necessity, account for each individual particle in the universe separately and distinctly, each one by itself.

The observable universe has on the order of 10⁸⁰ - that is, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - subatomic particles. For each one of these, this person demands an individual, separate and distinct explanation. Obviously, this task could not be accomplished in the lifetime of a human, or, for that matter, in the lifetime of the universe. And even if we somehow had the resources to attempt this, most of the explanations this person demands would require historical facts that are irretrievably lost to us. Atoms don't accumulate evidence about their past history; how in principle could you ever find out that iron atom #7,128,462,971,394 originated in the supernova of this star and not that star?

My respondent has numerous other demands, most of which are equally unreasonable, but I won't belabor the point. His entire lengthy essay was a waste of his time to write; it's just a roundabout way of saying, "Nothing could ever change my mind about the existence of God." Why he didn't just say that, I don't know - unless it makes him feel better, soothes his cognitive dissonance, to be able to tell himself that he's offered an "answer" to my challenge and therefore isn't closed-minded. His essay suggests as much:

Now Mr. Atheist has noted that some people have rigged the conditions under which they would give up religion to be so impossible that, of course, their beliefs could not be touched. Now I'm not into those kinds of games.

Needless to say, I don't intend to permit him that false comfort, which is why I'm calling his sophistry what it is. His "challenge" is designed to be impossible, and he's well aware of this. He's dishonestly playing the very same kind of game he claims to deride. Too bad for him that I don't intend to indulge him in it.

It's no surprise, also, that his ludicrous standard of proof for atheism is not one he ever applies to his own beliefs. Does he require an individual, separate and distinct explanation of how and why God manufactured every proton, electron, photon, quark and graviton in the cosmos? Of course not. For him, as for most believers, "Goddidit" is a perfectly sufficient explanation that requires no further detail or supporting evidence. Of course, when dealing with scientists, they demand meticulous proof, every step checked and triple-checked, every single bit of relevant data unearthed and supplied, every possible alternative hypothesis conclusively disproven with mathematical certainty. If they applied anything near this level of scrutiny and hyperskepticism to their own faith, they'd long since have become atheists!

My correspondent also thinks he has something to offer that would satisfy one entry on my list of convincing proofs for theism. I'll consider his evidence in a followup post to appear shortly.

Late last year, an evangelical Christian pastor in Brooklyn announced that he had secured a major grant totaling millions of dollars from the massive evangelical charity World Vision. The pastor, Isidro Bolaños, promised to use this money to hire people from the community to do faith-based social work:

Mr. Bolaños, pastor of the Christian Church of El Dios Vivo, has reassured employees that the enterprise, called Community Project, Brooklyn Pilot Program, is ready to send them into neighborhoods to provide services to families, young people, addicts and the elderly from offices at the Brooklyn Army Terminal.

As you might have expected in these troubled economic times, hundreds of people flocked to job interviews and informational sessions. Most of these took place as part of religious services held at Pentecostal churches run by Bolaños and his associates. As is usual at a church service, the collection plate was passed among these eager hopefuls; some were even asked to bring food for everyone. But the attendees, many of whom were told they were hired on the spot, were in high spirits. Bolaños collected their personal information, such as Social Security numbers and copies of driver's licenses, and told them that his mission would officially open soon in a renovated space in the Brooklyn Army Terminal.

But several promised deadlines for the project kickoff - January 1, then March 1, then March 31 - came and went with no word. When a reporter went to check, he found that the city agency that owns and rents the terminal had never heard of Bolaños and his project, and World Vision denied having awarded any such grant. When Bolaños was reached by phone and asked to explain these facts, he hung up on the interviewer.

Despite these disclosures, Bolaños continued to insist that the project launch was imminent. At his sermons, which now allowed only pre-screened applicants, he blamed the delays on Satan trying to stall the project. He urged his hires not to lose faith, even encouraging them to borrow money if they had to in order to hang on in the New York area while waiting for their first paycheck. He denied ever mentioning World Vision and said that the project's backer was the "American Holding Charities Group", whose existence no outside observer has been able to confirm. He promised that April 5 would be the new start date, which passed with no word. And finally, last week, Bolaños disappeared altogether. An associate said that he had left for Nicaragua on a "missionary trip" and would return in a few weeks.

At this point, I'll be surprised if Bolaños ever returns. This story has all the hallmarks of the advance-fee fraud used so successfully by Nigerian con artists, and he probably realized that the law was starting to take an interest. The only question I still have is what he hoped to gain from this scheme. Did he make that much just from passing the collection plate among his flock? More likely, he had something else in mind. After all, if there was never any grant or any jobs program, what was he collecting people's personal information for? It seems likely that this information will end up in the hands of identity thieves, who'd probably be all too happy to pay for it.

But what's perfectly clear is that Bolaños was able to pull off this scam by exploiting the unquestioning trust that believers have in religious leaders, as well as the Christian teaching that miracles will be granted to those who persevere in faith. Both of these teachings make it much easier for con artists and hucksters to evade scrutiny:

"We never doubted, because since he was a minister, we never thought he would lie to another minister," said that member, the Rev. Gonzalo Rodriguez, who has served as secretary to an executive council of pastors Mr. Bolaños assembled.

Rev. Dale T. Irvin, president of New York Theological Seminary, said those incidents point to a vulnerability that has long endangered these small, independent churches.
"What makes the people vulnerable are their hopes for a miracle," he said. "They are hoping a pastor will come and rescue them."

Stories like these are exactly why the New Atheists call on society to tear down the abnormally thick wall of respect afforded to religion. Of course there are secular versions of this scam, but religion is unique in having built-in mechanisms to discourage doubt and questioning, which con artists can all too easily use to their advantage as long as they know the right code words. If more people were willing to apply skepticism and critical thinking to religious claims, scams such as this would be much harder to get away with. And conversely, whatever measures local ministers take to help those who've been taken in by Bolaños, their efforts will be for naught as long as they keep teaching their congregations that they must have faith in the unseen - because that core religious teaching is what enables these scams to flourish in the first place.

The Supreme Court heard arguments recently in a case out of California, in which a Christian student group at a public law school sued because they were denied recognition and funding by the school. The reason for this denial is that the school requires student groups to be open to all members, and the Christian Legal Society wants to ban - you'll never see it coming - people who are guilty of "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle". That means gays and gays alone, of course, since being gay is the only sin that Christians care about now. The Bible also prohibits divorce quite clearly [Matthew 19:6], but I've heard no allegation that this group seeks to exclude people who are "unrepentantly guilty" of having gotten divorced.

Some of the arguments before the Supreme Court verged on the comic, such as this exchange:

"Are you suggesting that if a group wanted to exclude all black people, all women, all handicapped persons, whatever other form of discrimination a group wants to practice, that a school has to accept that group and recognize it, give it funds and otherwise lend it space?" asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

No, McConnell said. "The stipulation is that they may not exclude based on status or beliefs. We have only challenged the beliefs, not status. Race, any other status basis, Hastings is able to enforce."

"What if the belief is that African Americans are inferior?" Justice John Paul Stevens said.

"Again, I think they can discriminate on the basis of belief, but not on the basis of status," McConnell said.

So apparently, a student group would not be able to outright bar black people, but would be able to bar black people who refuse to sign a sworn statement declaring their belief in the racial inferiority of black people. Totally different! Thanks for clearing that up.

The Christian group's lawsuit claimed that their constitutional rights of free association and free speech are being denied, which is an obvious falsehood. No one's freedom of association is being denied; the Christian group, or any other group, can select its membership based on any criteria they like. The issue is whether the school, which as a public institution is an arm of the government, must subsidize that discrimination by giving official recognition and funding to such a group. This question should have been settled long ago, but while the CLS isn't seeking to overturn civil-rights laws, it obviously wants to carve out an exception permitting them to practice anti-gay bigotry with state support as long as it's founded on religious belief (as if racism of past eras was not also justified with religion).

Sadly, this revolting argument isn't an American aberration. On the other side of the pond, Christian fundamentalists in the U.K. (yes, they do exist!) are making exactly the same argument:

A top judge was warned that court rulings against Christian workers risk causing "civil unrest" as he heard the case of a relationship counsellor who was sacked after refusing to give sex advice to homosexual couples. Gary McFarlane's barrister said that laws banning discrimination had taken precedence over religious freedoms.

...Christian leaders are particularly concerned by a ruling by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls on behalf of the Court of Appeal. Lillian Ladele, a registrar who refused to conduct civil partnerships because they were against her beliefs, was deemed to have broken the law and could no longer work as a registrar.

They claim that the ruling meant that the right to express the Christian faith must take second place to the rights of homosexuals.

That last sentence could be more accurately written as follows: "They claim that the ruling meant that the right of Christians to be bigots must take second place to the rights of homosexuals to be free of bigotry."

After all this time, Christian fundamentalists are still committing the same fallacy I pointed out in one of my very first posts: the erroneous belief that their free exercise rights have been violated if they haven't been accommodated in any way they demand. They've very successfully managed to remain ignorant of the fact that having freedom of religion means, if you have religious objections to performing the duties of a job, then you're free to not take that job. There are plenty of positions where you're not required to serve the public, if these people find the idea of rendering service to a gay person so utterly unthinkable.

But no. They seek the right not just to express their opinions as private citizens, but to carry those opinions over into the performance of their official duties and decide who they will or will not serve based on whom their religious beliefs tell them to hate. What next? Christian doctors who won't treat gay people because they believe God is punishing them with plagues? Christian firefighters who refuse to extinguish a burning house if a gay couple lives there? Christian policemen who refuse to arrest a person who assaults or murders a gay man? Where does it stop?

What these loathsome fundamentalists really want is to make up their own laws based on their personal religious beliefs. And once we allow them to do that in even one area - once we accept that religious beliefs ever trump the equal protection of the law - there's no consistent place where this principle should end. The only rational thing to do is to draw the line right at the beginning, and declare that bigotry and hate are never valid reasons for treating people unequally - the same argument that's already accepted in the case of race and gender. There's every reason to believe that the day is rapidly approaching when the Christians who seek to safeguard their own right to discriminate will be considered just as reprehensible as the bigots of past eras who fought equal rights for women and black people.

Atheists have a great number of famous names to our credit. We can justly claim renowned composers, scientists, musicians, civil rights leaders - and conservationists, as we'll see in today's post on the contributions of freethinkers.

Richard Leakey was born in Nairobi in 1944, son of the famous archaeologist Louis Leakey. The elder Leakey was a strong supporter of racial equality, and Richard's upbringing reflected that belief. He started school soon after the Mau Mau rebellion had been defeated, and when he spoke up in favor of the native Kenyans, his classmates taunted him as a "nigger lover", beat him, spat on him and forced him into a wire cage. Several online sources say that he also resolved never to be a Christian after he was caned for missing chapel services.

Partly due to incidents like this, Richard never finished high school. But despite this, he showed an impressive aptitude of his own for finding fossils of human ancestors - including Turkana Boy, one of the most complete hominid skeletons ever unearthed, which was discovered by a paleontological team under his direction. He also showed impressive skill at administration, becoming director of the National Museums of Kenya at just 25.

In 1989, in response to an international outcry over the slaughter of elephants and rhinos by poachers, President Daniel Arap Moi appointed Leakey head of the Kenya Wildlife Service and tasked him with protecting Kenya's endangered wildlife. Leakey accomplished this in characteristically bold fashion - by creating well-armed, specially-trained park ranger units that were authorized to shoot poachers on sight. Draconian though this seems, it was effective: almost a hundred poachers were killed during his first year at KWS, and poaching rates declined thereafter. Leakey also made international headlines when he burned 12 tons of confiscated illegal ivory, worth more than $3 million, in a massive bonfire.

In 1993, Leakey was flying a small private plane that crashed near the Great Rift Valley. This is widely believed, though never proved, to have been sabotage by someone seeking to assassinate him, probably in revenge for the anti-poaching campaign. He survived the crash, though he was badly injured and both his legs had to be amputated. Within a few months, however, he was up and walking again on prosthetics and back on the job.

Unfortunately, as a crusading reformist, Leakey may have been too zealous even for his own government. President Moi demanded that he reinstate 1,600 KWS employees who had been fired for corruption or inefficiency, and when Leakey refused, Moi gutted the agency, taking away most of its budget and power. Leakey resigned in protest, and in 1995, founded a new political party, Safina, devoted to the cause of reform. His campaign drew angry threats from British settlers who felt his zeal was putting them in jeopardy, and on one occasion, he was attacked by a mob loyal to Moi's party. As always, however, he refused to quit, and two years later, he won a seat in Kenya's Parliament. A year after that, with international lenders withholding funds because of pervasive corruption, Moi asked Leakey to rejoin his administration. As a January 2010 article in Sierra puts it:

So Richard Leakey, five times accused of treason — and of being a racist, colonialist, and atheist (the only accusation to which he pleads guilty) — was named head of Kenya's Public Service.

This time, Leakey had even more power than before: in his new job, he had authority second only to the president. But even this wasn't enough, and when his anti-corruption efforts ran into repeated political roadblocks, he quit for the second time. This time, he swore off politics for good.

At 65, Leakey still lives in Kenya, hale and hearty after two kidney transplants and still working to advance the cause of conservation in the country where he's spent nearly all his life. His most recent achievement is the launch of WildlifeDirect, a website that directly connects Western donors with conservationists and field biologists working with threatened and endangered species throughout the world. In 2008, WildlifeDirect helped to fund and train 700 park rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Throughout his life, Leakey's zeal for combatting corruption has been exceeded only by his passion for bridging the gap between humans and nature, whether through unearthing our fossil past or preserving our threatened present for posterity. It's plain that his being an atheist didn't deprive him of an ethical compass. If anything, it contributed to the sense of profound interconnection with the natural world that's driven all the greatest advocates of conservation, past and present. Richard Leakey is one freethinker that atheists can be proud to have on our side.

Other posts in this series:

• The Contributions of Freethinkers

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

Chapter 10 of Case, which concerns human consciousness and the brain, is an interview with J.P. Moreland, a Christian philosopher and theologian. Like many of Strobel's other interview subjects, Moreland is not a scientist and has no scientific credentials to speak of - this despite Strobel's initial boast that he'll be interviewing "authorities" [p.28] in the relevant fields.

I've already pointed out how Strobel tries to put a positive gloss on his interviewees' backgrounds to make them seem more like scientists, but his attempt to inflate Moreland's academic credentials is particularly hilarious:

Moreland's science training came at the University of Missouri, where he received a degree in chemistry. He was subsequently awarded the top fellowship for a doctorate in nuclear chemistry at the University of Colorado but declined the honor to pursue a different path. He then earned a master's degree in theology at Dallas Theological Seminary and a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Southern California. [p.253]

Amazing! So now everyone who has an undergraduate degree in chemistry is a scientific authority. Who knew?

This is the final interview of the book, which is fortunate for Strobel, since he's really scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. If the book had gone on any longer, he'd probably be reduced to claiming that some Bible-thumping Christian theologian is a scientific authority because he learned Newton's laws in high school. And please note, even if Moreland had been a master chemist, that field is still completely irrelevant to the subject of this chapter! Why is it that Strobel couldn't find even one actual neuroscientist who was willing to speak to him?

This credential inflation is a direct and necessary consequence of the ideological straitjacket that Strobel has forced the text into. Throughout this book, it's clearly demonstrated that he doesn't conduct adversarial interviews; he only seeks out people who already have the same opinions as him, so the "interview" is just a matter of asking the right questions to give them an opportunity to regurgitate those opinions. This approach rules out interviewing more qualified people who genuinely do dissent from the orthodoxy in significant ways, such as the philosopher John Searle, who's quoted in the beginning of the chapter as follows:

"You can expand the [computing] power all you want, hooking up as many computers as you think you need, and they still won't be conscious, because all they'll ever do is shuffle symbols." [p.248]

The problem, in Strobel's eyes, is that even though Searle dissents from the mainstream view of consciousness, he's not an evangelical Christian. (He's actually an atheist.) Therefore, he can be quote-mined, but no more than that; he must be kept at arm's length and can't be given the opportunity to express his actual views. This restricts Strobel's potential interview subjects to the very small set of people who are not only orthodox evangelical Christians, but are willing to put that belief ahead of their scientific research. It seems that there's no one at all in the field of neuroscience who fits that description, which is why Strobel is reduced to interviewing a Christian theologian with no scientific credentials and trying to pass him off as an authority on the brain.

Lastly, I want to point out the curious fact that, according to Strobel, Moreland was offered a fellowship to get his Ph.D, but turned it down in order to attend seminary. Why is that, I wonder? Is it remotely possible that he realized succeeding in the field of chemistry requires actual, concrete results... while being a theologian tends to be a cushy job which makes few demands on its practitioners and has no objective measure of success? Such is the intellectual waste produced by the non-subject of theology, a field of inquiry possessing not a single piece of verifiable data. Countless minds, many of them quite brilliant and perfectly capable of producing something of benefit to humanity, have been squandered in the idle and futile speculations of religion.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

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

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

I live in Sacramento, and I'm a de facto single father in the process of "making it official." I work for the family engineering firm as a technician and am majoring in Physics at Cosumnes River College and Mechanical Engineering at Sacramento State.

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

I was raised in a household that was strongly politically liberal and was more or less secular but with a substantial residue of "believing in belief." I was more or less agnostic for the majority of my childhood, though I was not particularly hostile to religion and would occasionally sort of "play along" with rituals like prayers, etc., either on my own or with others. This reached a peak in middle school when I semi-attached myself to a small circle of friends which included the son of a local pastor and was persuaded to attend a Christian youth group his church offered, which I did for a while, off and on. I identified myself as "Christian" at that point and was fairly attentive to going-through-the-motions but in retrospect my mental state was inconsistent with either a sincere sense of conviction or a clear idea of what it was I was supposed to be believing - it was all sort of surreal to me. I wound up disengaging from that group when I wound up going to a different high school. I ran across some information on Secular Humanism as a teenager, though I don't remember where, and felt a strong sense of resonance. Some years later I ran across the Ebonmusings site while searching for supporting references for a paper on evolution for a "we can't believe you learned this the first time in high school" college English class, and was subsequently inspired to rethink my unconscious deference to religion and to adopt the identity of "atheist." I am 24 now and have called myself an "atheist" consistently since I was 18.

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

I technically "have" a blog and one or two comparable sites but have never had time or inclination to follow through with keeping them updated.

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

I have previously given to Goodwill, to various local food bank style organizations, I believe to Planned Parenthood, to St. Jude's children's hospital, and one or two others that I don't remember well, as well as political advocacy groups which don't meet the "charitable donations" qualifications but whose mission I see as a way of giving back to and improving society (Equality California, for instance). I wouldn't particularly say I have a "favorite."

What membership level did you join the Foundation at? How do you plan to divide your initial donation?

I'd already written $25 of charitable donations into my "when the dust settles" long-term budgeting plan, so this seemed like a good place to start. I intended to increase my participation level later once I had a better understanding of what my expenses as a single parent would be like, though oddly there doesn't seem to be an easy, straightforward way to do that via the "my account" pages.

How do you plan to divide your initial donation?

I allocated 9% of my donation to each of the other nine categories, and the remaining 19% to the "Big Bang" charity, Smart Recovery. Their mission is a fairly personal one for me, given that my wife's alcoholism is a major driving factor in our divorce and particularly in my having custody of our daughter, and given my discomfort with many aspects of the 12-Step approach, which I've learned far too much about secondhand.

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

I'm happy to be doing something practical to help, and would suggest others forward the link to the foundation web site to any local atheist/freethinker/freethinker groups.

I wrote in 2007 about the National Day of Prayer, a ridiculous ceremony created by Congress in the 1950s to urge all Americans to pray. That obviously unconstitutional objective would be bad enough, but what makes it even worse is that official National Day of Prayer events, held in city halls and government offices across the nation, are overrun by evangelical religious-right groups who claim the day as their own and don't allow members of the "wrong" religions to participate.

Well, I'm thrilled to say that freethinkers and secularists have won a tremendous victory against this blatantly illegal government-sponsored religious exercise. The Freedom from Religion Foundation has won summary judgment in a district court over their lawsuit, filed in October 2008, which seeks to bar the federal government from recognizing the National Day of Prayer.

Judge Barbara Crabb wrote a 66-page decision that lays out the history of the National Day of Prayer, exhaustively considers the precedents, and makes a clear, thorough and compelling argument for why this event is a complete violation of the constraints placed on the government by the First Amendment. The ruling is available online, and I'll quote a few of the choicer parts:

However, recognizing the importance of prayer to many people does not mean that the government may enact a statute in support of it, any more than the government may encourage citizens to fast during the month of Ramadan, attend a synagogue, purify themselves in a sweat lodge or practice rune magic. [p.4-5]

[R]eligious expression by the government that is inspirational and comforting to a believer may seem exclusionary or even threatening to someone who does not share those beliefs. This is not simply a matter of being "too sensitive" or wanting to suppress the religious expression of others. Rather, as explained in a recent book by the Provost of Princeton University and the Dean of the University of Texas School of Law, it is a consequence of the unique danger that religious conduct by the government poses for creating "in" groups and "out" groups.... [p.19]

If the government were interested only in acknowledging the role of religion in America, it could have designated a
"National Day of Religious Freedom" rather than promote a particular religious practice. [p.34]

The same law that prohibits the government from declaring a National Day of Prayer also prohibits it from declaring a National Day of Blasphemy. [p.64]

The opinion also takes a few well-deserved swipes at the excuses that some judges have devised to sneak state-sponsored religion in through the back door:

Establishment clause values would be significantly eroded if the government could promote any longstanding religious practice of the majority under the guise of "acknowledgment." [p.33]

and especially:

One judge [that would be Judge Reinhardt, who ruled for Michael Newdow in the Pledge case —Ebonmuse] observed recently that ceremonial deism is a "hazily defined" concept and suggested that it "represents mainly the judiciary's less than courageous response" to certain longstanding religious practices. [p.44]

Crabb's decision explained something I didn't know - that the National Day of Prayer was proposed by conservative congressmen (including Absalom Robertson, Pat Robertson's father) to an evangelistic revival held in Washington, D.C. by Billy Graham which called upon the government to be more Christian. She quotes from Graham's speech to show how openly partisan and sectarian his intent was:

We have dropped our pilot, the Lord Jesus Christ, and are sailing blindly on without divine chart or compass, hoping somehow to find our desired haven. We have certain leaders who are rank materialists; they do not recognize God nor care for Him [sic]... Ladies and gentlemen, I warn you, if this state of affairs continues, the end of the course is national shipwreck and ruin. [p.6]

Graham, of course, is a private citizen and is welcome to hold the opinion that our leaders should be Jesus believers or engage in prayer - but it is not the role of the government itself to back him up. It is not the role of the government to tell people to "recognize" or "care for" one particular set of god-beliefs, nor is it any of the government's business to tell us how, when, or whether to pray. Thomas Jefferson explained why when he wisely refused to issue religious proclamations as President:

I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting and prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them, an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, and the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands where the Constitution has deposited it... every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.

This is just the first step, of course; this ruling is all but certain to go to an appeals court. Even if it survives the first round of appeals, it's very likely to wind up before the Supreme Court, and there's no telling how they'll rule. Nevertheless, this is a major victory, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation deserves tremendous credit for taking on this case and fighting it out in court. If you're an atheist and you're not an FFRF member, why on earth aren't you?

Every time I think we've seen the worst of what the Roman Catholic church and this pope are capable of, they come up with a way to sink lower still. Back in January, when Benedict reinstated a misogynist, Holocaust-denying bishop, I could never have imagined that that would be the least offensive and disgusting thing they'd have done this year - yet it seems like that may very well be the case.

The newest evidence of this comes via this story from the AP. I previously detailed a case where the current pope, back when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, assigned a known child molester to therapy and then washed his hands of the matter; and another case where Ratzinger ignored urgent letters from an archbishop requesting an ecclesiastical trial for a priest known to have molested as many as 200 deaf boys. But this story is the most direct evidence yet of Ratzinger's culpable neglect and stonewalling over cases of child rape.

Back in 1981, the diocese of Oakland wrote to Ratzinger, who was then head of the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, urging him to begin proceedings to defrock Rev. Stephen Kiesle, another confessed priestly pedophile. Kiesle had previously pleaded no contest to tying up and molesting two children in a church rectory, and the diocese wrote to Rome asking that he be defrocked (in fact, Kiesle himself requested to be defrocked). Ratzinger ignored multiple letters for four years. Finally, in 1985, he wrote back - but said that the case needed still more time, and that proceedings had to be slow and deliberate in order to safeguard "the good of the universal church" (!)

This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favor of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner. (source)

The young age of the petitioner - that is, the pedophile priest! Incredibly, Ratzinger was more concerned about the harm defrocking a child molester would do to the Church's public image than he was about the harm that the molester had already done and might still do to vulnerable children. As multiple commenters have pointed out, the young age of the molester (he was 38 at the time) might well have been a factor also. Ratzinger must be aware of the aging and dwindling priesthood and the paucity of new recruits; it's likely that he wanted to hang on to every ordained man as long as possible, regardless of the price.

Andrew Sullivan, himself a conservative Catholic, calls this outrageous letter "the third strike" for this pope:

It is a document designed to prevent dismissing a priest as young as 38. Perhaps the fast-aging priesthood was a concern and dismissing such a young priest was to be avoided. But it's clear that the age of the priest is of far more importance to Ratzinger than the age of the minors he raped. All the sympathy and concern is with the rapist, not the raped. This is a document about protecting the powerful even when they rape the powerless.

So far, the typical Vatican apologist defense has been to claim that Ratzinger was an ivory-tower type, so concerned with ponderous matters of theology that he couldn't stoop to deal with such mundane trivia as a man in his employ raping and molesting children. But in 2006, when an archbishop openly defied the Vatican's rule on celibacy by ordaining married men as priests, Pope Benedict excommunicated him six days later. Again, this is the same man who took four years even to respond to a letter pleading with him to do something about an active pedophile.

All of this has led to this announcement, by a British human-rights lawyer seeking to have the Pope put on trial for crimes against humanity the next time he visits the U.K. It's a good idea, although I'm not yet convinced that the Pope's culpability rises to the level of the criminal. Despicable as they were, it seems that his sins were of omission rather than commission - failing to do anything about pedophiles preying on children, rather than actively assisting them in doing so - though given the steady trickle of new details, I may have to retract that statement in the near future. And in any case, I'm sure the U.K. government would do everything in its power to preempt any criminal investigation (conservative Catholics are still an influential voting bloc). However, I think a civil lawsuit is a very real possibility and a legal avenue that should be explored.

Lastly, and in case there was any doubt in your mind remaining about the Catholic church's intentions, there's this story from Connecticut. The state legislature has proposed a bill that would lift the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases, and the bishops ordered a letter to be read during Mass urging their parishioners to lobby against it. This shows, more clearly than anything else possibly could, that the Catholic church is still concerned first and foremost with protecting itself, rather than seeing that justice is done. If they truly wanted to be sure that no molesters were left in their ranks, they'd welcome this bill - and the fact that they oppose it can only mean that they know of more cases of molestation that haven't yet come to light.

But if I had to pick one quote to sum up the depths of wickedness and hypocrisy displayed by this church, it'd be this one from the columnist Libby Purves, a former Catholic turned deist. She beautifully turns their own words against them by quoting the Penny Catechism she learned as a child:

Numbers 328 and 329 refer, making it clear that we are "answerable for the sins of others" when we share the guilt "by counsel, command, consent, provocation, by concealment, by silence..."

Forget the lordly authoritarianism which speaks of the "good of the Universal Church": that Church itself plainly states that concealing crime by silence is wrong, and that it is worse still to counsel and command others to commit the same sin of silence and concealment. Yet this crime, this sin, was being regularly urged on children, parents and parishioners by men in authority: the solemn clerical authority which purports to draw its privilege direct from the eternal Truth and to see into the depths of the heart. It is an all-male authority, too, in which the greenest young priest outranks an experienced nun or devout mother. It has been the perfect screen for wickedness.

If you debate theists very often, there will soon come a point where you'll start hearing the same arguments over and over again. And although I do my best to bear in mind Greta Christina's wise words on patience and remember that most proselytizers have never been exposed to an effective atheist critique, some of these claims annoy me more than others. Usually, this is because the logic behind them is so patently flawed, or the fallacies so obvious, that even an evangelist with no formal education in critical thinking ought to be able to spot them.

In this post, I'll list a few of the apologetics used by Christian proselytizers that I find the most irritating, in the doubtless vain hope that it will help put them to bed sooner.

Jesus defied chance by fulfilling the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament.

Christian apologists love to tout the many prophecies of the Jewish scriptures and the allegedly staggering odds against anyone fulfilling them by chance. Here's a typically overblown example:

"Someone did the math and figured out that the probability of just eight prophecies being fulfilled [by chance] is one chance in one hundred million billion. That number is millions of times greater than the total number of people who've ever walked the planet!" (Louis Lapides, in Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, p.246)

Discounting these ludicrous numbers and the fanciful assumptions that doubtless went into them, what these apologists always ignore is that this was not a blind comparison; the Old Testament was not a set of sealed scrolls that was cracked open only after the New Testament was written. No, as even the most hardened apologists acknowledge, the New Testament authors were well-versed in the Old Testament and could well have had the scrolls in front of them while writing.

If they noticed that their story did not fit the guidelines of prophecy, there would have been nothing at all to prevent them from revising, embellishing, or outright inventing, as necessary, to make it conform to the predetermined Old Testament prophecies which any plausible messiah candidate would have to have fulfilled. (This need not imply a deliberate effort to deceive. It may be that they believed Jesus was the messiah so strongly, they assumed that he must have fulfilled the prophecies, even if they didn't have direct knowledge of him doing so.) And once we admit this possibility, those supposedly astronomical odds evaporate.

The gospels must be true stories because they contain references to real people and places.

Apologists such as Lee Strobel make hay out of the fact that some people and places mentioned in the gospels, such as Quirinius or the Jewish bath at Bethesda, did exist in history. They're not reluctant to imply that the gospels' accuracy about these historical facts should convince us to trust them about matters that aren't as easy to verify.

But this doesn't prove that the storyline of the gospels actually happened. At best, it means that the gospels were written by authors who knew of those people and places, but what does that prove? As in the last point, there's nothing to prevent an author from writing a work of fiction that's set against the backdrop of real historical events. If the apologist logic was correct, we'd have to conclude that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is an accurate historical documentary, since it, too, depicts real personages (i.e., Adolf Hitler) and places from history.

The New Testament is trustworthy because Jesus' resurrection was vouched for by four hundred witnesses.

This one is particularly irritating because of its willful disregard for the laws of evidence. We do not have four hundred separate, notarized eyewitness accounts of anything in the New Testament. What we have is one verse in the New Testament, by one writer, who says that four hundred people saw the resurrected Jesus.

Clearly, this is a completely different situation. We don't have four hundred separate testimonies that can be checked against each other for consistency, to see if their authors all had the same experience. We don't know who these alleged four hundred witnesses were - neither their names, nor anything else about them by which we could verify their trustworthiness. We don't even know if there actually were four hundred of them, or if Paul might have been fudging the numbers, exaggerating, or honestly miscounting.

If I said, "A thousand people saw me levitate off the ground", that by itself would not establish that I had a thousand witnesses to vouch for my supernatural powers. This kind of evidence is called hearsay, and it's banned from criminal courts for a reason. A witness who can't or won't speak for themself is no witness at all.

Jesus was neither a liar nor a lunatic and therefore must be who he said he was.

This argument, the so-called "Lord/Liar/Lunatic" trilemma usually credited to C.S. Lewis, may be the most absurd of the bunch. It implicitly assumes that the New Testament is historically reliable and that everything in it can be treated as true. Well, if you accept those presuppositions, it hardly matters what Jesus said - the stories of him calming storms, walking on water, healing the sick and raising the dead would be more than sufficient evidence of his divinity.

But if you don't accept that absurdly broad premise, then the trilemma grows another option: lord, liar, lunatic or legend. It's possible that he was a real person, maybe even a would-be religious reformer, but that his words and his deeds became exaggerated over time, or that episodes which would cast doubt on his character have been censored from the historical record. It's also possible that he began as a purely legendary figure who was gradually historicized into a real human being. In any of these cases, the simplistic choices of the trilemma fall apart.