By B.J. Marshall

In The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Francis Collins presents what he believes to be the strongest arguments for theism: what he calls the "Moral Law," the origins of the universe, and life on earth. In a nutshell, Collins sees the ubiquity of morality to be the work of God on our hearts; he sees the marvelous universe and the nature of reality to be "an insight into the mind of God" (p.62); and he sees life on Earth to be the handiwork of God. While the brand of theism he supports is specifically Christian, he does not spend a great deal of time arguing the point. He does spend one chapter apiece devoted to refuting atheism, agnosticism, creationism, and intelligent design. He then posits what he calls "BioLogos" as an alternative worldview (Bio meaning life and Logos meaning word.)

Well, that covers the gist of the book. Before we delve into it, starting with Collins' introduction, I would like to introduce my plan of attack here. I intend to post weekly, where I will most likely cover a chapter in anywhere from two to four weeks depending on the content of the chapter. I openly welcome your comments to my content, so feel free to use the comment section liberally.

To understand Collins' perspective, it is helpful to know a little about him. Here's an excerpt of his Wikipedia entry: "Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950), M.D., Ph.D., is an American physician-geneticist, noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project and described by the Endocrine Society as 'one of the most accomplished scientists of our time.' He currently serves as Director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Collins... was president of the BioLogos Foundation before accepting the nomination to lead the NIH. On October 14, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Francis Collins to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences."

Collins starts his book by recounting a press conference with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair (connected via satellite), and others to announce the complete mapping of the Human Genome. He asks the reader to consider blatant religious references by political figures (Clinton referred to this event as "learning the language in which God created life" (p.2)) and the number of scientists who hold a belief in God. Collins is obviously discouraged that there exists such antagonism between the spiritual and scientific worlds, and he claims that a synthesis of the spiritual and scientific worlds is possible, although he maintains the notion of non-overlapping magisteria.

Collins asks why a president and a scientist would feel compelled to invoke God. In reply, he lists a few possibilities: is it poetry, hypocrisy, currying favor from believers? Presidents and prominent figures invoke God all the time. Every State of the Union address has "And God bless America." Although I try hard not to, I still invoke god with surprise "OMG!" or when I stub my toe (use your imagination to think of what I say). Given that almost everything a president says is carefully crafted, Clinton's statement may very well be to curry favor from the 92% of Americans who believe in God.

Collins also attempts to demonstrate to readers how many scientists believe in God, but I found it to be disappointing. Collins mentions a 1916 study that asked scientists whether they believed in a God "who actively communicates with humankind and to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer" (p.4). In 1997, the survey was conducted again with much the same results - about 40%. Collins doesn't cite his source for this study, so we don't know who these "scientists" are. Are they they same scientists who doubt evolution? According to a 1996 article in the journal Nature, in which scientists who were members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) were polled, more than 65% did not believe in God. (Percentages varied by fields of study.) Many who did not believe were agnostic. In the table of the link I provided, one figure for personal belief in God is only 7%. That's a far cry from 40!

Whatever the number of scientist-believers are, Collins maintains that "[s]cience's domain is to explore nature. God's domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science" (p.6). There are two glaring problems with this. First, wouldn't God's domain be both the spiritual and natural realms? I mean, he's omnipotent and omnipresent, right? Second, the Christian deity is apparently one that operates in the world. Recall how the study Collins cited asked scientists whether they believed in a god who actively communicates and answers prayers. (I'm assuming at least some of those prayers have expected results that are tangible.) As soon as God enters the natural world, science can test those claims. In fact, it has in many cases.

Collins at least gets it right when he states that science "is the only reliable way to understand the natural world" (p.6). So I wonder how he justifies a belief in something he can't validate. He says that science can't answer certain questions like "why did the universe come into being," "what is the meaning of human existence," and "what happens after we die?" I think it might be these questions which spur him to look at something beyond the natural.

In the next chapter, Collins shares with the reader his journey from atheism to belief in a "God who is unlimited by time and space, and who takes personal interest in human beings."

Since I've written a fair amount lately about the child-rape scandal engulfing the Catholic church, it would be unfair of me to overlook any steps they've taken toward reform. Well, you all know I'm nothing if not fair, so I have to report on this tiny, hesitant step:

Last week, the Vatican for the first time issued guidelines telling bishops they should report cases of abusive priests to police where civil laws require it.

Marvelous! At long last, the Vatican has bravely decided that its employees should report criminals to the police to prevent them from committing more crimes. How stirring! How inspiring! Give them a medal for heroism!

Seriously, while it's good that they've done this, it's not an accomplishment worth praising them for; it's literally the bare minimum. Let's be very clear that a step as astoundingly obvious as this - as announcing that Roman Catholic bishops will henceforth actually obey the law, rather than aiding and abetting child molesters - wasn't official church policy until April 2010. Yes, yes, the Vatican has insisted that this was its unwritten policy all along. That perfunctory assertion is hard to believe in view of the fact that there was apparently unanimous agreement among the bishops to keep these cases covered up. I'm not aware of a single case from the last five or six decades where a bishop who was informed of a predator priest went to the police. Instead, for the most part, they dealt with it by shuffling problem priests around so that they could abuse more children in new parishes.

And that's the real reason I'm not satisfied here. Yes, fine, the church has generously agreed to start turning in child molesters (as if they could have said anything else). What they notably haven't done is institute any kind of accountability or punishment for the bishops and cardinals who protected, aided and abetted those child molesters. That's no surprise, really, since the current pope is one of them.

But that's the real scandal here - not the relatively small percentage of predator priests, but the huge percentage of bishops who helped cover up their crimes and enabled them to continue abusing children. And it's clear that the church authorities haven't come to terms with their own culpability in this. One Irish bishop has resigned after being cited in an Irish government report on abuse in Catholic schools, and a Belgian bishop resigned after admitting that he himself abused a child (!), but nothing has been done about the many others, like the despicable Cardinal Bernard Law, who haven't stepped down voluntarily.

And if you want more evidence that the church has learned nothing, take this case in New Jersey. The church higher-ups are still fighting tooth and nail against statute-of-limitations reform and other legal measures that would let the victims have their day in court. (Read the link, it's quite astonishing - the church filed an amicus brief in a case it wasn't even directly involved in, arguing that non-profit organizations should be immune from liability even if their employees acted criminally to protect child molesters.)

Efforts like this show that the church's reforms are, at best, cosmetic. When faced with a tidal wave of bad publicity for actions no sane person would defend, they'll condescend to apologize - but only on their own way and in their own terms, and with the proviso that there be no punishment for anyone who did anything. Just as in the earlier child-abuse cases, they're more concerned with protecting their own assets and reputation than making any meaningful effort to repair the damage they've caused. And why should they do otherwise? Whatever hits their reputation has suffered, the scandal hasn't hurt their finances, according to this article:

After hundreds of incidents of priests sexually abusing their parishioners were disclosed in 2002 in the U.S., fundraising by bishops and parishes went up, said Harris, the author of "The Cost of Catholic Parishes and Schools," published in 1996 by Sheed & Ward.

..."Parish giving wasn't affected by the earlier scandal and I expect the same pattern to hold here," said Charles Zech, director of the Center for the Study of Church Management at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of real reform is that there are still millions of Catholic loyalists who support the church financially, regardless of what crimes it commits. They may even give slightly more in times of crisis, due to a circle-the-wagons mentality. As long as the church is being sustained by this steady stream of cash, it has no incentive to change its ways, and probably won't.

However, I'm not as pessimistic as that article would imply. As is usually true with religion, I think change comes about generationally. Younger people who aren't as set in their ways are seeing the crimes of the church and are turning away from it. This may not have a large immediate impact, but the biggest effect of this scandal isn't going to be in the present; it's going to be some years down the line, as elderly Catholic faithful die off and aren't replaced. We already know the church is fading, and this crisis can only accelerate its decline.

As we ring in the new year, here's some news to give you a sense of optimism for 2010. This holiday season, we can add another piece of evidence to the growing pile which indicates that atheists are becoming more numerous and more successful:

This Christmas season, 78% of Americans identify with some form of Christian religion, a proportion that has been declining in recent decades. The major reason for this decline has been an increase in the percentage of Americans claiming no religious identity, now at 13% of all adults.

Granted, 13% doesn't seem like much, especially compared to the size of the Christian majority. But considering it was 2% in 1948, and only 6% even as recently as 1998, it can't be denied that this represents a major demographic boom for atheists and nonbelievers of all stripes. I can't think of any religion, historical or modern, that's ever enjoyed such rapid success. And given the steadily increasing rates of secularism among the younger generations, we can expect this rise to continue.

What this shows, as I've said before and will doubtless continue to say, is that we should ignore the brow-furrowing and finger-wagging of the Very Serious theologians who sternly inform us that we're doing a disservice to our own cause by advocating and defending it in public. We have every reason to believe that atheist campaigns of persuasion are working, achieving their intended purpose of convincing more people to become atheists and weakening the social prejudice that treats religious belief as immune to questioning.

Further evidence of this comes from the Gallup poll, which shows not only that more people are walking away from religion, but also that those who stay are beginning to question whether religious belief has all the answers:

Note that the percentage who say religion is "old-fashioned and out of date" now stands at 29%, significantly higher than the 13% of Americans who say they have no religion. We could call these people "soft atheists". Most likely, the majority of these people aren't formal members of any organized church, and either don't attend religious services or attend only infrequently. But because of societal pressure to conform, or their own belief that belief in God is necessary for virtue or community, they continue to call themselves religious even as they reject most of religion's factual claims.

These people are the low-hanging fruit whom atheists can reach. We need to deliver a strong, effective message that belief in God is not necessary for the things human beings care about - that nonbelievers can justify morality with reason and conscience, and build a secular community without reference to faith. And given that our audience's sympathies are already leaning in that direction, we should continue to make the case that religious belief is archaic superstition, contains many immoral rules, and has no solutions for the ethical problems humanity faces today. Let the theologians and mystics continue to carp and complain that atheists are being disrespectful, that we're not acknowledging the magnificence of the emperor's new clothes. We don't require their consent, and they're not our target audience anyway. The continuing growth of atheism throughout the world is all the encouragement we need to speak out.

Earlier this week, I posted a piece by Sikivu Hutchinson, "The White Stuff", about the legacy of racism in science and to what extent issues of race affect the atheist movement. Today, I want to write a response to that piece and venture some of my own thoughts on the subject.

To begin, I want to echo one of the more common objections raised in the comments: this piece was long on criticisms, short on suggested solutions. Granted, it's not the responsibility of every woman or member of a minority to educate white males on the explicit and implicit prejudices that still exist in our society (just as it's not the responsibility of every atheist to educate believers on the privileges afforded to religion). But if you're going to take the time to write about this at all, why not offer at least some suggestions as to what we can do about it?

However, that said, I still appreciate Hutchinson's bringing up this topic. Even if we don't know the solutions, this is something we should be talking about. As atheists, we should appreciate the value of consciousness-raising, of enlightening people to prejudices they may not even have realized they were holding. And as a political movement, we should recognize the value of including people of all types, including women and minorities - if for no other reason, then because it will make our criticisms more consistent and effective when we point out the examples of explicit racism that still exist in many religions - but more importantly, because I believe we have the most to offer to groups that have historically suffered the most from religious oppression.

For that reason, I strongly disagree with sentiments like this one from the comments:

I never thought I would see racial politics being brought into atheist discourse... It saddens me that, once again, skin colour and gender have taken center stage in an arena in which they do not belong.

I reject the suggestion that issues of race and gender "do not belong" in atheist discourse. Again, I agree with Hutchinson that not having to think about these issues is a privilege reserved almost exclusively for white males, whereas most women and minorities are confronted with them on a daily basis. That makes it all the more important that we do think about and discuss them, even those of us who don't have to.

Refusal to consider the possibility of unconscious bias is a sure way to perpetuate such bias, and to perpetuate the hostility that - like it or not - some women and people of color have felt from our movement and that's dissuaded them from joining us. Whether you think these criticisms are valid or not, the fact that they're being made clearly proves that some people feel snubbed. As good skeptics, we should make every effort to find out why that is, and to bend over backwards looking for anything we might have done wrong rather than dismiss the possibility out of hand. After all, we're asking religious people to reevaluate their entire worldview - the least we can do in the name of honesty is to subject our own to that same scrutiny.

I do want to take issue with a few of Hutchinson's specific points. For instance:

Surveys that suggest that atheist affiliation actually reflects race/gender demographics similar to say a John Birch Society confab are dismissed as being just the way it is because white boys naturally dominate science and are better writers anyway.

I don't agree that atheists' race and gender demographics are as distorted relative to the general population as Hutchinson suggests here. Although it is true that our movement has a decided (though not overwhelming) imbalance of males, according to the 2008 ARIS results, our racial breakdown in terms of black, white and Hispanic is virtually identical to the general population. Granted, she might be calling attention to the lack of visible, well-known atheist spokespeople who are women or people of color; in that case I would be more inclined to agree, though again there are notable exceptions.

However, more importantly, I think the accusation leveled in this paragraph is false. I know of no prominent atheist who has suggested that white males "naturally" dominate science, or that we are better writers than members of other race and gender groups. (If any counterexamples are given, I'd be glad to join in condemning them.) I know that such sentiments have been expressed by certain people, but I'm not aware of any well-known atheists who've done so.

If there's anything that does concern me, it's the attitude I've observed in many atheists when this topic is brought up - the casual, automatic dismissiveness that claims this can't possibly be a problem, that only whiners and malcontents say otherwise, and therefore there's no need for us to engage in any self-examination or consider whether we're inadvertently perpetuating any prejudice. We should know better than to say this because, as atheists, we ourselves have been on the receiving end of that patronizing message so often.

It's not PC to suggest in the science-besotted circle jerk of atheist-supernaturalist smackdowns that Hottentot-obsessed traditions of scientific racism and fire and brimstone Judeo-Christian religiosity went gleefully hand in hand for much of the West's enlightened history.

Again, I know no one who is expressing this sentiment. Most atheists do recognize that science has been used to serve awful ends, from Sarah Baartman to the Tuskegee experiments. Science is a tool for gaining knowledge about the world, and like any tool, it can be misused. But the actions of ignorant and hateful men do not impugn the tool itself. Nor do they prove that science is an intrinsically white, male, or "Western" enterprise, or that it does not produce objective truth about the world, and I unequivocally reject any suggestion to the contrary.

And it flies in the face of the myth of meritocracy to suggest that eminent white philosophers and scientists don't "focus" on race and gender because their identities are based on not seeing it.

I also do not agree that prominent white male atheists have neglected issues of race and gender. For instance, in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins devotes an entire chapter (chapter 7) to these issues in the context of how our society's moral attitudes have changed over the decades. He quotes prominent thinkers of the past, including Thomas Henry Huxley, Abraham Lincoln and H.G. Wells, to illustrate how even people who were progressive social reformers by the standards of their day held attitudes which we would describe as intolerable racism. Christopher Hitchens writes in God Is Not Great about Martin Luther King Jr. and the "filthy injustice" of racism. Daniel Dennett writes in Breaking the Spell about how racism is recognized as a great social evil and how this affects the legitimate scientific study of racial differences (for example, how people of different ethnicities may respond to certain drugs). One could argue that the New Atheists don't pay enough attention to these issues or don't treat them in sufficient depth, but to argue that they neglect them entirely is a charge that is simply not true.

Our movement is about atheism, not about racism or sexism, and there's nothing wrong with that. We don't have to give up our chosen cause altogether to address a different injustice. (Individuals, of course, can belong to more than one cause at once.) But, at the very least, these are issues we should be aware of - what they consist of, how they impact our movement (because they do), and how we can avoid obvious blunders. This is the right thing to do morally, will make the atheist movement more open and welcoming to people of all kinds, and will help us avoid repeating the mistakes that so many societies have made in the past.

A note from the editor:

There are some things in the following post that I agree with, and some that I don't. I intend to write a response to it myself, but I wanted to offer my readers the chance to have their say first. I've said in the past, in regard to those who wish the "new atheists" would sit down and be quiet, that I'd rather see too much criticism of religion than too little. I think exactly the same is true of our movement. Whether you agree with her criticisms or not, I see no harm in merely letting them be heard. If you disagree, then join the conversation and explain why. —Ebonmuse

Her name was Sarah Baartman, aka the Venus Hottentot, and she had ass to spare.

Like many Africans staged for public exhibition in 19th Century Europe before her, Baartman became an object of scientific investigation. She was poked, prodded, measured, assessed and ultimately dissected in death by British and French empiricist wizards like the esteemed scientist Georges Cuvier. She was marshaled as resident Other to determine the exact nature of her "difference" from "normal" (i.e., white) men and women. This standard only had weight and relevance in the context of Baartman's grotesqueness. Her deformations provided white femininity with its mooring as the standard of feminine beauty. Her sub-humanity gave her white male examiners a biological compass (and canvas) that was then translated into immutable racial difference. The sexual deviance signified by her enormous backside literally functioned as an epistemological frame and cover for her interpreters' own cultural biases and assumptions. Identified as the "missing link," Baartman's anatomy was critical to affirming white racial superiority and capturing inexplicable gaps in the ascent from "savage" to "civilized." Through the lens of the scientist, looking, seeing and interpreting were deemed to be "transparent" enterprises--not naturalized through the cultural position of the observer.

Tim Wise, the foremost white critic/interpreter of the phenomenon of white supremacy, once noted that whites "swim in white privilege." Like fish in water, whites don't grasp or see the complexity of white privilege because they breathe it and live it 24/7. It immunizes them in the predominantly white schools, neighborhoods, social networks, media, places of worship and scholarly traditions that they inhabit. It makes the systemic institutionalized nature of racial hierarchy invisible. And it marginalizes race and racism as part of the narrow, sectarian and, ostensibly, divisive concerns of a "minority" lens.

Navigating a fantasy "post-racial" universe, these "invisible" cornerstones of white supremacy are not supposed to matter. It is not supposed to matter that a five year-old African American male has less chance statistically of going to college or even of living to the age of 25 than his white male sandbox comrade. It is not supposed to matter that home equity for blacks and Latinos of all classes has historically been far lower than that of whites due to institutional segregation in so-called inner cities and working class suburbs. These "blemishes" in the fabric of American liberal democracy are not supposed to matter because individualism is the currency of Americana, and there is no evil intelligent designer separating one's exercise of free will from free enterprise.

Yet for W.E.B. DuBois, these disparities constitute the "wages of whiteness," a public and psychological wage of white social capital, translated into everyday white privilege. For those who bemoan the "provincial" and "race-obsessed" orientation of American writers of color, DuBois implicitly forces us to consider how the very arc of European American intellectual, social and economic "progress" has been shaped by the racialization of the Other. As an artifact of a supremely barbaric and unenlightened aspect of the Enlightenment, Baartman's dissected backside was a key player in the birth of the objectivist researcher. Representing reason and rationality, Baartman's interpreters were conferred with a personhood and subjectivity that afforded them "unraced" status.

Toni Morrison has defined unraced status as the ability to appear to be beyond racial classification or identification. Whiteness becomes the norm not only through racial segregation but through the discursive tools of defining value and worth. This status rests on having the right to write, analyze, classify, quantify and have one's conclusions recognized as universal truths, rather than as the culturally contextual products of a racist colonialist legacy.

When it comes to the "new atheism," the romance and Bambified innocence of not seeing is just a living. Recent debates in the blogosphere about the whiteness of atheist discourse get sidelined by accusations about the perceived "hysteria" of those making the claim. Surveys that suggest that atheist affiliation actually reflects race/gender demographics similar to say a John Birch Society confab are dismissed as being just the way it is because white boys naturally dominate science and are better writers anyway.

So it stands to reason that white folk don't like it when it is inconveniently pointed out by ghetto interlopers that knowledge production and universal truth claims in the West have historically been marked as white. It's cartoonishly pro forma when white folk, ignorant of these historical traditions, swaggeringly insist that atheist discourse is implicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist because one, we say so, and, two, hierarchy is something only those knuckle-dragging supernaturalists do. It's paint-by-the-numbers entitlement time when the so-called new atheist "movement" is resistant to the charge that racial and gender politics just might inform who achieves visibility and which issues are privileged in the broader context of skeptical discourse. It's not PC to suggest in the science-besotted circle jerk of atheist-supernaturalist smackdowns that Hottentot-obsessed traditions of scientific racism and fire and brimstone Judeo-Christian religiosity went gleefully hand in hand for much of the West's enlightened history. It belies humanist delusions of pure objectivism to say that "science as magic bullet" boilerplate will not enlarge the conversation to include those for whom organized religion has had some cultural and historical resonance (as an albeit complicated bulwark against white supremacy and racial terrorism). It is treasonous to argue that having the luxury and privilege to proclaim one's atheism, publish, become recognized as an unraced authority, disseminate tomes to and command a global audience and garner recognition for capsizing the sordid ship of theological tyranny is a peculiarly white enterprise precisely because of the history of Western knowledge production. And it flies in the face of the myth of meritocracy to suggest that eminent white philosophers and scientists don't "focus" on race and gender because their identities are based on not seeing it.

As Greta Christina has noted in her insightful critique of racism, sexism and visibility within the new atheist movement, hand-wringing about the absence of diversity without confronting the historical power dynamics of access and visibility becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When not seeing becomes a virtue, it's equivalent to telling all those uppity "missing links" to sit down and shut up. Let us write the record for you, because we know how it ends.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.

The researchers behind the ARIS, which is the gold standard for American religious demographics, have released a new study that builds on their 2008 results with an in-depth look at one group that's near and dear to our hearts: "American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population". (HT: Friendly Atheist)

As always, there's plenty of interesting data here to contemplate. Although "nones" show a decided gender imbalance - 60% of them are male, while the general population is 51% female - their racial breakdown in terms of black, white and Hispanic is virtually identical to that of the wider population. This data is a useful calibration to my recent post on atheism, race and gender. I admit I was surprised by this result. It's contrary to my own experience, which is that female atheists are numerous, but atheists who are people of color are not nearly as common.

A particularly welcome point in this study is the fact that members of younger generations are more likely to be nones. This demographic trend leads the ARIS researchers to forecast that they could account for 25% of the American population within 20 years. This spells bad news for the religious right and the Republican party, since nones, for obvious reasons, are also much more likely to be Democrats than Republicans (although even more of them are independents).

However, the ARIS researchers strongly emphasize that not all nones are atheists. About half are deists (which the authors define as people who believe in a higher power, but not a personal god) or theists (believe in a personal god, though not members of any organized religion). The authors classify the rest of the nones as either agnostic or atheist, and argue that atheists make up only a "small minority" of this group. It's not clear how they reconcile all this with their earlier findings that about 12% of Americans are atheists and another 12% are deists, based on their stated beliefs. Wouldn't that put us nearly at the 25% mark already?

P.Z. Myers argues that these results tell us only that "the long-running campaign in American culture to stigmatize atheism has been highly successful", and that many people who are functional atheists are nevertheless afraid to claim that term to describe themselves. I think there's a fair amount of truth to that. The ARIS itself provides evidence for this: as previously mentioned, one thing it found is that the number of people who call themselves atheists is relatively small, but the number of people who are atheists, based on their stated beliefs, is much higher.

That said, the number of self-identified atheists is growing, more rapidly than the growth of the nones in general, which in turn is faster than the growth of any other religious group in the U.S. As I've said before, this is all the more reason for atheists to speak out, forcefully and passionately, and continue our campaign to publicly advocate atheism. We need to make "atheist" a label that people are comfortable, or better yet, proud to claim for themselves!

Even if a substantial fraction of nones hold some form of belief in God, that doesn't mean atheism is losing ground. Rather, the conversions are coming from the other direction (also a point supported by the study) - religious people are falling away and becoming nones. They may not entirely discard the beliefs they held before, but they've dropped their formal allegiance to a church.

The lesson to draw from this, I think, is that the pull of orthodoxy is weakening in America. It used to be that a relatively small number of churches had control of the religious landscape, and they exerted enormous pressure on everyone to define themselves in terms of one denomination or another. But their role as cultural arbiters is fading, and people are becoming more comfortable seeking their own religious identities, defining themselves in their own terms rather than through strict adherence to ancient creeds. The rise of the atheist movement is one part of this diversification, and by spreading the message that people aren't required to be theist, we can accelerate the trend and ensure the continued weakening of religious orthodoxy.

In A Shattered Visage, a book-length emotional rant against atheism, Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias puts forth the following assertion:

The words of Augustine are most appropriate: "You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee." Or, as Pascal put it, "There is a godshaped vacuum in the heart of every man, and only God can fill it." [p.89]

Although they probably don't realize it, apologists who say this have committed themselves to a testable prediction: even after controlling for all confounding factors, believers, on average, should be happier than atheists. After all, that's just a more precise restatement of what they've always claimed: that belief in God fills an emotional void that can't be quenched by other means, that it's a source of strength and contentment that atheists can never match, etc., etc.

Well, the test has been done. As reported in a recent issue of Free Inquiry, Michigan psychology professor Luke Galen conducted a personality survey of members of the Center for Inquiry Michigan, using members of two local churches as a control group. Some of the findings weren't too surprising:

One area of identifiable difference was that the churched participants perceived themselves as having a greater degree of social support from their social network relative to the CFI/Michigan members.

The dimension that showed the greatest distinction between religious and nonreligious was the previously mentioned "Openness to experience" [according to the study, this personality trait "involves a high need for cognition, intellectual engagement, and interest in new experiences" —Ebonmuse]... nonreligious individuals reported being more intellectually oriented and unconventional.

Another personality dimension that distinguished the religious from the nonreligious was "agreeableness" (a quality of being amiable or nonconfrontational as opposed to skeptical of others). The church sample was higher in agreeableness.

But the real meat of this study is its findings on life satisfaction and emotional well-being. Prof. Galen makes the point that previous studies, which often found that higher religiosity is correlated with greater life satisfaction, are methodologically flawed. They treated all the nonreligious as a single group, lumping together strong atheists with people who are doubters, who are unsure, even some who are weak believers. This study clearly differentiates among those groups by correlating people's confidence in their beliefs - from those who are absolutely certain there is no god to those who are absolutely certain there is - with their self-reported levels of happiness and satisfaction in life.

The relationship that emerged from the data is best described as curvilinear. Rather than a straight line of rising satisfaction linked to increased religious belief, the survey found that the highest life satisfaction was found on both ends of the spectrum - the confident atheists and the confident theists. The happiness and emotional stability of these two groups were statistically equivalent, exceeding that of the general population. It was the doubters and the seekers, the people in the middle who weren't sure either way, who were worse off.

From what we know of human psychology, or from the personal experience of many happy and contented atheists, this is no surprise. But it does provide us with some concrete, rather than anecdotal, data to vanquish the apologists who implausibly claim that, over billions of lives throughout thousands of years of human history, members of their particular sect are the only ones who have the true key to happiness. The truth is that atheists can be, and are, just as happy as the most devoted of religious believers.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 4

Lee Strobel's usual interview technique is to ask softball questions that are carefully phrased to make it as easy as possible for his interviewees to "refute" them. But credit where credit's due - in the next section of chapter 4, he actually asks a good one. In talking to ID advocate Stephen Meyer, he brings up the evidence I discussed in my previous post:

"If the scientific evidence for theism is so compelling... then why don't more scientists believe in God? A study in 1966 showed that sixty percent of scientists either disbelieve or were doubtful about God, and the percentage goes up if you look at the most elite scientists." [p.84]

Then again, maybe I'm still being too easy on Strobel. After all, he only refers to a survey done in 1966, which allows Meyer the convenient out of claiming that "the best evidence for theism is very new" [p.84], and perhaps not all scientists are aware of it. However, he doesn't explain what "new" evidence he has in mind. (The Big Bang, after all, has been well-accepted scientific truth for decades, and most intelligent-design arguments such as irreducible complexity are little different from arguments creationists have been making for a long time - since Paley, even!) In any case, more recent studies, such as the one I cited from 1998, show the same high rates of disbelief among leading scientists. Why hasn't all this "new" evidence started changing people's minds yet?

This leads us to the all-purpose creationist excuse: those nasty, mean materialists are oppressing us!

"Also, the materialistic worldview has exercised dominance on intellectual life in western culture for a hundred and fifty years. It has become the default worldview in science... Some people who dissent from it have experienced intense hostility and sometimes persecution." [p.84]

Indeed, those poor, put-upon theists are under constant assault. Why, do you remember that time in the 70s when angry mobs of evolutionists went on the rampage, shooting at church buses and firebombing chapels, all because they were upset about Christianity being taught in Sunday school?

Of course you don't, because it happened the other way around. As I mentioned at the time, Strobel carefully refrained from drawing any lessons from that unpleasant episode. It's a shame he doesn't hearken back to it here, because it would demonstrate an important point: if you're going to make an honest accounting of who's persecuting whom, creationists routinely resort to intimidation and even veiled threats, whereas the worst "persecution" experienced by creationists is that scientists are unconvinced by their ideas.

I also note that Meyer refrains from drawing any conclusions on why the "materialistic worldview" has become dominant in science. To admit the obvious - that scientific naturalism has become dominant because of its demonstrated success, whereas centuries of religious faith and church edict failed to make any measurable contribution to our understanding of the world - would perhaps undermine the story he wants to tell.

But I give him credit for audacity. In his next point, he attempts a rhetorical judo move. Strobel asks, "almost all the people... in the Intelligent Design movement are Christians. Doesn't that undermine the legitimacy of their science?" [p.85] and Meyer responds by citing the data on atheism just mentioned by Strobel, arguing that it could be used to establish the very same conclusion:

"The vast majority of people who advocate Darwinism are naturalists or materialists, so you could play the motive-mongering game either way." [p.85]

It almost sounds like a good point. But Meyer hasn't mentioned one especially important piece of evidence which goes to establish motive in a very relevant way.

In 1999, a copy of a secret Discovery Institute paper, the "Wedge Document", was leaked onto the internet. (The original document was stamped "Top Secret" and "Not for Distribution"). The Wedge Document was written by the founders of the intelligent-design movement and lays out their goal: "to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions"; "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God." This would lead to "spiritual renewal' in society at large and "positive uptake in public opinion polls on issues such as sexuality, abortion and belief in God". One scarcely need ask which positions on abortion and sexuality would be strengthened by this so-called positive uptake.

This is the important point. The problem isn't that ID advocates are Christian - there are plenty of good scientists who are Christian, like Allan Sandage, and there are even plenty of good scientists who are Christian and accept evolution. The problem is that prominent ID advocates have admitted that their intent in founding the ID movement was ideological - they want to overthrow evolution so that more people would believe in God and adopt the specific political positions they favor. That is not a motive likely to lead to good science.

The ID advocates are doing the scientific equivalent of "astroturfing" - the sleazy technique used by wealthy corporations or special-interest lobbies that pay people to masquerade as regular concerned citizens. In the same way, ID advocates are religious proselytizers masquerading as disinterested scientists in order to advance the political aims they genuinely care about.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 4

Strobel's next interview is with Stephen Meyer, a philosopher who's also one of the cofounders of the Discovery Institute. Strobel and Meyer touch on several topics (fine-tuning, irreducible complexity) that will be discussed in more detail in later chapters, so I'll defer responding to those arguments for now. Amusingly, Strobel also gives Meyer credit for contributing to Of Pandas and People - the textbook which provided one of the crucial pieces of evidence in a court ruling that intelligent design was religion and not science - so maybe we should give him credit for that!

But I want to begin on a different point. In the introduction to this chapter, Strobel tells the story of Allan Sandage, a respected cosmologist raised as a nonreligious Jew who shocked his colleagues by announcing his conversion to Christianity at the age of fifty. As usual, no one can ever convert to Christianity without it being the most stunning and significant thing that has ever happened, which is why Strobel dutifully hails Sandage as "the greatest observational cosmologist in the world" [p.69]. (I have no doubt that if I ever converted to Christianity, I'd immediately be praised by apologists as "formerly the world's most influential atheist". Maybe I ought to stage a conversion - I bet I'd get some nice pull quotes for the back cover of my book!)

I don't doubt Sandage's scientific achievements (he was a student of Edwin Hubble, and did some crucial work in helping to precisely determine the age of the universe), but I do question if such a title is appropriate for any scientist. Science is by nature a collaborative field, and it's almost never the case that a great discovery can be credited solely to one person. Every major scientific achievement is made possible by the research of many people and by building on the findings of those who came before - hence, Newton's famous comment about "standing on the shoulders of giants".

As far as I can tell, Strobel accurately relays the story of Sandage's conversion. What he omits, though, is Sandage's own reasons for why he converted. Sandage himself explains this, and makes it clear that, unlike Strobel and his creationist interviewees, he does not believe the theme put forward in this book, that science points to the existence of God:

Q. Can the existence of God be proved?

I should say not with the same type of certainty that we ascribe to statements such as "the earth is in orbit about the sun at a mean distance of 93 million miles, making a complete journey in 365.25 days"... Proofs of the existence of God have always been of a different kind - a crucial point to be understood by those scientists who will only accept results that can be obtained via the scientific method.

...The Bible is certainly not a book of science. One does not study it to find the intensities and the wavelengths of the Balmer spectral lines of hydrogen. But neither is science concerned with the ultimate spiritual properties of the world, which are also real.

In this essay, Sandage states that science is extremely effective at answering "how" questions, but not "why" questions (i.e., why is there something rather than nothing?), and he finds that theism answers these questions satisfactorily, although it cannot be proved by the scientific method. This is a completely different view than what creationism avers, and it's small surprise that Strobel doesn't delve more deeply into Sandage's actual views.

But there's a larger context that Strobel avoids mentioning here. It's the same creationist fallacy that we've seen before: take a few isolated, anecdotal accounts of scientists turning to theism, and use them as a basis to claim that most scientists are turning to theism, when the statistics tell a completely different story.

The last definitive survey on this topic was published in Nature in 1998 by the historian Edward J. Larson. Questioning the several hundred members of the National Academy of Sciences, Larson found

near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists [including astronomers —Ebonmuse] it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers.

Eighty percent of NAS physicists and astronomers disbelieve in God - and, as Larson's paper shows, this number has actually risen over the decades. This is a far cry from Strobel's misleading assertion that "many scientists are now driven to faith by their very work" [p.71]. The Big Bang and other cosmological issues, clearly, are not perceived as evidence for theism by the very people who study them for a living and are most knowledgeable and familiar with them. (This point is argued persuasively by Sean Carroll in his paper Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists.)

As with Sandage, there are always exceptions. But these cases should be viewed as what they are - rare, unusual holdouts - rather than, as Strobel dishonestly portrays them, the vanguard of a new or coming revolution in scientific thinking.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

While we're on the topic of science and the public, I came across another opinion poll worth mentioning: a survey released this month by Pew, Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media, which analyzes how the public views scientific achievement and what professional scientists think of how their work is covered in the media (HT: Obsidian Wings). There's lots to chew over in this report, but I want to focus on this section, which shows how many ideas that are accepted by an overwhelming majority of scientists do not enjoy similar levels of support from the public:

There are a couple of things we can take away from this, but here's the first one: The media is not doing its job. Just as we lambaste the food industry when people come down with mass E. coli infection from tainted meat or contaminated greens, so too do media outlets deserve criticism when the public whom they serve believes demonstrably false things about the nature of our country or our world. This, like outbreaks of food poisoning, is a sign that there's been a failure of quality control somewhere along the line.

The media is supposed to inform the public and communicate the truth about important issues. Instead, in their pursuit of the illusion of balance, many media outlets have taken the stance that their job is to be stenographers to the powerful - writing down opposing views in he-said-she-said fashion, without making any effort to adjudicate between them or to point out which viewpoint finds support in the facts. This intellectual laziness too often masquerades as "fairness". In fact, it's a victory for ideologues who oppose the scientific consensus - creationists, climate-change deniers, and others - and who can win a debate merely by creating an artificial controversy and preventing the truth from becoming widely known.

But scientists aren't entirely blameless either. Although they're right to complain about sloppy or sensationalistic news coverage, scientists themselves should be doing more to convey their views to the public. Our goal should be a culture where public communication - writing books, giving talks and interviews, blogging, and furthering science-themed media outlets - is viewed as an important part of a scientist's career, not as a frivolous adjunct or a distraction from the really important work. Pushing back against pseudoscience, and creating an educated, scientifically literate public, is by far the best solution to the problem that scientists mention the most: the chronic lack of funding and support for basic research.

To close the science gap, we need a competent media and an active, engaged scientific community. Where either of these is lacking, fundamentalism and other forms of antiscience sprout like weeds. As a society, we've made tremendous progress in coming to understand the world we live in; that's the legacy of the Enlightenment. Now we need to see that those discoveries are communicated to the public as a whole, and are not just the domain of professional scientists.