The Case for a Creator, Closing Thoughts

After spending over a year on this project, we've come to the end of The Case for a Creator. Before bringing this series to a close, I have some closing thoughts on the overall message and tactics of the book.

First: Although Lee Strobel tries to pass Case off as a dispassionate examination of scientific findings that just happen to support the existence of an intelligent designer, the obvious truth is that it's a Christian apologetics book dressed in a thin gown of pseudoscience. No better evidence of this could be given than how he treats his interviewees differently based on their religious beliefs. Everyone he interviews in the book, save for one person, is a fundamentalist Christian of some kind, and he gives each of these people ample opportunity to preach and to expound on their religious beliefs without challenge or objection. But when he speaks to his sole non-Christian interview subject, he suddenly changes his tune and declares he's only interested in hearing about science, not religion. See for yourself:

J.P. Moreland:

"[Scientists] will come to believe in the reality of the soul and the immaterial nature of consciousness. And this could open them up personally [my emphasis] to something even more important - to a much larger Mind and a much bigger Consciousness, who in the beginning was the Logos, and who made us in his image." [p.271]

Michael Behe:

"Based on the empirical evidence - which is continuing to mount - I'd agree with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger that 'the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error... [They] point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly than ever before.'" [p.216]

Jay Wesley Richards:

"Christians have always believed that God testifies to his existence through the book of nature and the book of Scripture. In the nineteenth century, science effectively closed the book of nature. But now, new scientific discoveries are reopening it." [p.189]

Robin Collins:

"Romans 1:20 tells us that God's eternal power and divine nature can be seen and understood through things that are made, and that this is the reason humanity is without excuse. I see physics as uncovering the evidence of God's fingerprints at a deeper and more subtle level than the ancients could have dreamed of." [p.149]

William Lane Craig:

"That afternoon Jan and I prepared a little handwritten version of the Four Spiritual Laws, which spell out how a person can become a follower of Jesus. When we sat down with her at the meal that night, we opened the booklet and read the first sentence... We described how she could pray to ask God to forgive her wrongdoing and to receive Jesus as her forgiver and leader." [p.122]

Stephen Meyer:

"I see this not only in cosmology and physics and biology, but also in the historical revelation of the Bible, principally in the revelation of Jesus Christ. He is so compelling!... I remember thinking at one point that if the Jesus of the Bible weren't real, I would need to worship the person who created the character." [p.90-91]

And the only non-Christian interviewed in the entire book, Jonathan Wells:

I hadn't come to Seattle, however, to seek spiritual wisdom from Wells. [p.34]

Strobel's single-minded focus on Christianity is even more apparent in this excerpt from chapter 7:

Astounded by the Earth's fine-tuned physical, chemical, and biological interrelationships, some writers have gone so far as to liken our biosphere to a "superorganism" that is quite literally alive. In fact, James Lovelock's pantheistic Gaia Hypothesis even seeks to deify our planet. However, Gonzalez and Richards said it's unnecessary to go that far.
    "Despite these admittedly incredible interrelationships, there's nothing that requires anyone to see the Earth itself as being an organism, especially a god or goddess," Richards said. [p.166]

This is not scientific evidence being examined to reach a conclusion. Rather, this is a conclusion being chosen in advance and scientific arguments being selected based on whether they support it. What test could you possibly run to decide whether the Earth itself is a deity or whether it was the handiwork of an external creator?

This happens yet again later on in the book. As I mentioned in a previous post, J.P. Moreland raises the possibility that, if human minds emerge from matter, a divine, godlike mind could also emerge from matter - only to have Strobel swiftly point out, "That wouldn't be the God of Christianity" [p.265], which Moreland concedes. Again, this is not just "the case for a creator", in the sense of a generic argument for the world having been created by some kind of intelligent being. Strobel has a very specific creator in mind, and is only interested in investigating science that he feels supports his belief.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

I just finished reading Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book on what we can do to improve the status of women worldwide. One of the book's major arguments is that, despite their opposition to abortion and contraception, religious groups often do more good than secular liberals give them credit for:

Religious conservatives... have also saved lives in vast numbers by underwriting and operating clinics in some of the neediest parts of Africa and Asia. When you travel in the poorest countries in Africa... the people you almost inevitably encounter are the missionary doctors and church-sponsored aid workers. [p.142]

Kristof and WuDunn write that both religious and secular groups do important work, and that liberals, moderates and conservatives from across the political spectrum should be able to cooperate to accomplish more. I agree! And so does Saad Mohammed Ali, a U.S. resident and former Iraqi refugee who's fluent in English and Arabic. He applied for a caseworker position at World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, for a job that involved helping Iraqi refugees resettle in America. On the face of it, he seemed ideally suited. And World Relief would have thought so too - except, it turns out, for one small, insignificant detail (HT: The Wall of Separation):

...a few days after he applied for the position last December, [Ali] got an unexpected call from the same manager at World Relief: She was sorry, she told him, but the agency couldn't offer him the job because he is not Christian.

Saad Mohammed Ali, you see, is a Muslim. And no matter how well qualified a Muslim might be to help the people World Relief wants to help, World Relief doesn't hire Muslims. It only hires evangelical Christians.

The opponents of atheism often accuse us of believing that no religion has ever done any good for anyone - a position that's obviously absurd and is held by no atheist that I know of. (Even Christopher Hitchens, atheist firebrand extraordinaire, says only that there's no good which a religious person could do but an atheist couldn't do.) The argument that atheists actually make is twofold. First, we assert that churches and religious groups' charitable work comes from the universal human sense of compassion, not from any specifically religious teaching. (This is most clearly shown by the fact that every religion, regardless of its beliefs, does work like this. Even Hamas builds schools, hospitals and orphanages.) Second, we assert that in spite of this, the religious beliefs of those groups often hamper their efforts by causing them to accomplish less good than they otherwise could have - even worsening the very problems they're trying to solve.

The clearest example is Roman Catholicism: the church does social work that helps the poor and AIDS victims in Africa and Asia, but by their hard-line opposition to condoms, they're making the problem worse by ensuring that there will be more poor people and more AIDS sufferers. A similar case is that of abstinence-only sex education. I don't doubt that the Christian evangelicals who support these programs genuinely want to reduce teen pregnancy and STDs. The problem is that their approach has been shown to be not nearly as effective as comprehensive programs that teach about contraception.

So too with World Relief. The problem isn't that they do no good at all, but that they artificially and arbitrarily limit the good they do by turning away perfectly qualified candidates just because they don't hold the right beliefs. And because atheism, as a movement, is relatively new and unorganized, we don't yet have the infrastructure to offer an alternative path to people who are rejected by religious charities that refuse to hire nonbelievers.

The major churches have been been running social programs for decades, have local branches all over the world, and have support from governments and wealthy, well-connected donors. They have a head start on us. We're working to organize and to catch up, but this takes time - and since they won't work with us or hire us in the meantime, it's more difficult to get our own efforts off the ground. This makes any straightforward comparison, of the "atheists don't do as much charitable work as religious people" sort, misguided and ignorant. (Another thought: How many current employees of World Relief are not evangelicals, but are afraid to disclose their beliefs lest they lose their jobs?)

One more point to highlight: according to AU, World Relief gets up to seventy percent of its funding from the U.S. government. That's your tax dollars and mine, American readers, going to underwrite jobs that we can never be hired for because we don't believe the right dogmas. This glaring constitutional violation would be excellent grounds for a lawsuit, if the right-leaning Supreme Court hadn't slammed the door in our faces by ruling that, due to legal technicalities about who exactly is spending the money, freethinkers have no power to compel the government to respect the First Amendment. We're at a double disadvantage: the government can take our money, use it to fund prejudiced, proselytizing religious charities without our consent, and then to cap it off, arrogant religious apologists demand to know why we aren't accomplishing as much good as those charities!

Our next stop was the Liberty campus bookstore. It was run by Barnes & Noble, and it looked pretty much like any other campus bookstore. I was surprised by the range of books available there, some of which I would have expected to be verboten on campus - from Neil Gaiman's American Gods to Jeff Sharlet's The Family, as well as books on global warming and dream interpretation. That said, there were also four or five whole racks of shelves, a good half of the store, devoted to Christian material - Bibles, apologetics manuals, theology texts, proselytizing handbooks, and one shelf given over to books written by Liberty faculty, including the current president, Jerry Falwell's son Jonathan.

This is a good place to comment on Liberty University's code of conduct, the "Liberty Way", which all students living on campus must obey (students who are under 21 and not married are required to live on campus). Among other things, it requires student groups to get prior approval from the administration for all on-campus speakers, demonstrations, and petitions, with the clear implication that permission will be denied if the activity would "compromise the principles and policies of Liberty University". (Remember what Johnnie Moore said about "disputable matters"? Not too many of those in sight around here, it seems.)

Even more surprisingly, the code of conduct bans Liberty students from seeing any R-rated movies - even while off-campus. (I asked; there was a special exemption for The Passion of the Christ.) Also banned are any video games, posters or music whose content is incompatible with a "healthy Christian atmosphere" or not "in harmony with God's word". This is why it surprised me to find such books in the bookstore - although, like most totalitarian states, I'm certain that Liberty has many unwritten rules in addition to the written ones. It may well be that students are expected not to read or possess unorthodox books, even if the rules don't say so explicitly.

Outside the bookstore, we came across this interesting little pavilion. I'm still not certain why Jerry Falwell chose the Liberty Bell as the symbol of his university, or why he named it "Liberty" in the first place. The Christian belief that Jesus provides "liberty" from sin may be part of it - but if that's the reason, why use a secular symbol like the Liberty Bell, rather than a cross or something else explicitly religious?

This could, yet again, be an example of how the evangelical mindset so often values image over substance. Doubtless, it serves rhetorical ends to proclaim their love of liberty, even while the rules they impose on their students and faculty regarding permitted speech, correct belief and so on are the antithesis of this.

Last but not least, there was our visit to the on-campus memorial to Jerry Falwell. It was on a hilltop, set aside from the other campus buildings, behind the house that Falwell lived in while he was alive and that's now used as an administrative center. There was a stone cross rising out of a reflecting pool, with an eternal flame on top, and a fenced-off plot of land watched over by a small bronze plaque. The snow was well-trampled, but in the chilly peace of that Sunday morning, my friends and I were the only ones there. On the far side of the memorial, someone with a less-than-reverent cast of mind had built a fort in the snow.

I shed no tears over Falwell's death; he was a spiteful, small-minded hatemonger, and proud of it. And to judge from all the accounts I've read, Liberty reflected that attitude while he was in charge of it. For instance, The Preacher's Son tells of several students being instantly expelled if they were even suspected of being gay; some of them were kicked out of their homes because of it, and at least one committed suicide.

Yet it does seem that Liberty has mellowed at least somewhat since Falwell's passing. The Preacher's Son also said that when the author attended Liberty, in the early 1990s, students were forbidden to see any movie or to listen to any contemporary music, even Christian pop; that girls were required to wear dresses or skirts; and that the administration put wheel locks on undergraduates' cars to stop them from leaving campus without permission. None of those things still seem to be true today.

Make no mistake, Liberty hasn't gone very far from its roots. It's still a deeply conservative Christian fundamentalist college, still teaches its students young-earth creationism and the Rapture, still makes attendance at religious services mandatory, still engages in the policing of viewpoints and the monitoring of thoughts, and still views voting Republican as synonymous with Christianity. (As I was writing this, I heard that Americans United has asked the IRS to investigate Liberty's tax-exempt status in light of the administration using the school newspaper, the Liberty Champion, to endorse political candidates.) But despite its origins, Liberty hasn't been able to completely resist the tides of modernity, it seems.

But the problem is that even what's moderate by evangelical standards is not moderate by the standards of wider society. From biology classes that teach creationism to law classes that teach Christian dominionism, Liberty is systematically deceiving its students about the facts of the world. And the old, ugly paranoia and hatemongering isn't far beneath the surface either. And while, by the strict letter of the law, they have every legal right to lie and mislead, we likewise have every right to call this behavior what it is and denounce it. It seems a feeble weapon, but in the long run, no belief system is entirely immune to questioning.

When the church service let out, my friends and I toured several other buildings on campus. We stopped by the dorms, which are strictly gender-segregated:

I wonder what mindset lies behind this. Is it because the trustees of Liberty believe it's indecent for men and women to mingle in public? Then why aren't the classes and the church services also sex-separated? And why don't they also enforce the biblical decree that women not wear jewelry or braid their hair (1 Timothy 2:9)? That's as clear a command as you could ask for, but the administration of Liberty seems to be comfortable allowing students to flout it.

As with many aspects of evangelicalism, I think this rule is more concerned with avoiding the appearance of impropriety than actual impropriety. I mentioned earlier that Liberty's official policy is that students aren't allowed to spend a night off campus without prior permission, and even then, they can only stay at the home of a married Christian couple. This, like the segregated dorms, is presumably intended to discourage students from having sex. But it's not much of an obstacle: after all, there's nothing to stop two students from checking into a motel just for the day (or availing themselves of a secluded parking spot and the back seat of a car...). And sure enough, one of the first rumors we heard on campus was of a female Liberty student who had gotten pregnant and was being pressured to drop out of school.

The next building we visited was one of Liberty's academic halls. This was the first place where the true nature of this university made itself unmistakably clear: the walls were lined with displays advocating young-earth creationism and making snide comments about "evolutionists". I was surprised that they were daring enough to include Archaeopteryx - although, as you'll note, the model plays up the resemblance to a pigeon, and the card doesn't include any information about what this creature was or what evolutionists think about it.

But even that wasn't the height of crazy. At the far end of the hall was a "Center for Judaic Studies", with a display case filled with replicas of artifacts from Roman-era Palestine. A plaque next to the door announced that one of the offices within belonged to Dr. Thomas Ice, "Pre-trib Research Director". I took a pamphlet from a box next to the door, which is reproduced in part below.

See also.

The sheer, undiluted lunacy of this newsletter goes on and on, blithely presenting ludicrous assertions about how the future will unfold as if they were undisputed facts. One can clearly see just how little effort Tim LaHaye put into fictionalizing these beliefs for the Left Behind series. Note this passage from one of the inner pages, which the author somehow managed to write without irony:

A highlight was the bestowment of the Walvoord award upon Tim LaHaye, John Whitcomb, and Chuck Smith... It was a moving experience to realize that those three men were all over 80 and have served the Lord their entire adult lives. Each man is still excitingly looking for the Lord's return at any moment.

And Thomas Ice, despite the cheerful, froggy grin in his headshot, is an utterly demented kook, to judge by writings of his like this post:

Brannon Howse reveals the largely unknown story of how the Obamas are taking national their radical, socialist, and anti-Christian worldview training that was birthed through their organization "Public Allies". The training will include "social justice" training which is code word for Communism, socialism and Marxism.

It's not surprising that a person of this mentality would believe in the Rapture; this belief fits right into the paranoid mindset that's constantly jumping at shadows and that sees evil conspiracies lurking around every corner. But it is amazing that such a person could ever be considered qualified to serve as a professor (at the "Pre-trib Research Center", no less, as if there were were something to "research" about all this, rather than Christian believers telling each other the same fairy tales generation after generation).

At the time I saw all this, I laughed. Can you imagine anyone still believing this nonsense? was my initial reaction. But the more I reflect on it, the more sobering an experience it is. The fact of the matter is that there are people who do believe this nonsense, and are doing their best to broadcast it to the world - and, in large part, they've succeeded.

The church service was one thing; no one who attends that should have any illusions about what they're going to hear or where that information is coming from. But what we have here is ignorance systematically misrepresented as knowledge, virulent religious delusion concealed behind a cargo-cult facade of science. This, perhaps, goes back to what I said before about evangelicals valuing the appearance of the thing more than the thing itself. It's a strategy they've used very successfully here, presenting beliefs that are utterly insane in the manner and the style of academia.

The students who pass through these halls, most of whom have probably never been exposed to a contrary perspective in their lives, likely have no idea how contentious any of this material is. They'll listen, they'll lap it up, and they'll believe it - because that's what they've been taught to do. And when people who genuinely believe this go to the voting booth, when they influence the decisions that affect our society and the lives of everyone in it, this isn't comical; it's incredibly dangerous. When American foreign policy is based on fever-dream interpretations of the Bible; when research funds for science are allocated based on the myths and superstitions of the Bronze Age; when critical thinking is nonexistent and blind faith rules the day; when extremist religion is merged with politics; and when reason is drowned in paranoia and fearmongering, then our society is in grave danger. Liberty's malignant fundamentalism, flaunted to the world without a hint of embarrassment, is a lesson for anyone who still thinks that religion is essentially benign.

Coming up: The campus bookstore, plus a visit to Jerry Falwell's memorial.

(See Part I here.)

When the band finished their set, they departed and the pastor took the stage. He was relatively young, probably not much older than most members of the audience, and dressed in a plain shirt and jeans. His name, displayed on the giant screens overhead, was Johnnie Moore - a self-conscious use of the diminutive that was probably intended to emphasize the similarity between himself and the churchgoers.

I had come to Liberty expecting a fire-and-brimstone sermon, unapologetic quotations from the more hateful parts of the Bible, pulpit-pounding denunciations of Democrats, feminists and gay rights advocates. That wasn't what we got; if that ever was the atmosphere on campus, it's mellowed a bit since the Falwell days. Instead, like the music, his sermon seemed self-consciously bland, intended to be inspirational rather than wrathful. But there were a few points of interest which I'll talk about here.

The major theme of the sermon came from Philippians 2:14, which Moore translated as "Do everything without grumbling or complaining", and compared it with several other New Testament verses that teach similar lessons. He repeatedly described this as an absolute command - no complaining, ever, about anything, under any circumstances! Even if your life is hard or your job is terrible, he said, it's the duty of Christians to turn the other cheek and to always be so happy and contented that the rest of the world will wonder what they've got that makes them feel so good.

As part of this, he urged his audience to consider how good they have it in America. He pointed out that Christian converts in developing countries regularly suffer much greater poverty, deprivation, and persecution than American believers (such as one Indian convert whom he says was beaten and forced to drink cow urine by unfriendly villagers). And while this is indisputably true, he didn't point out the obvious implication: that American evangelicals are being deceptive when they depict themselves as a besieged, persecuted minority, as they routinely do. Nor did he mention that millions of people worldwide, not just Christians, are often subjected to unjust and cruel treatment from their culture or their government. It would have been nice to have some acknowledgment of that, especially in a sermon whose theme was that we should consider ourselves fortunate, but there wasn't any. Instead, in the moral universe of his sermon, Christians are apparently the only ones whom we should feel sympathy for.

I also want to draw attention to a dangerous implication of this teaching. I certainly wouldn't object if evangelicals ceased their perpetual whining about persecution, but there are real injustices that call for a response. Very often, it's been the complainers and the grumblers who succeeded in abolishing these evils. If we all heeded the advice that no one should complain about anything, ever, there would be no women's suffrage, no civil rights movement, no labor unions, no gay rights movement, no environmental movement, none of the social reform groups that work to improve conditions for the average person. The end result of following this teaching would be meekness, passivity, and docile compliance in the face of authority, even when it abuses its power - and perhaps, for good reason, this is exactly the attitude that the religious right seeks to instill in its followers.

Moore also cited Romans 14:1 to call for unity among evangelicals on "disputable matters", saying that senseless argument and contention over unimportant points of doctrine divides the church where there should be unity. But the question he never addressed, of course, is who decides what's a disputable matter? After all, it was Liberty University that only last year tried to ban the College Democrats from campus, claiming that the political positions of the Democratic party are incompatible with Christianity, and still refuses to hire any professor who does not swear allegiance to young-earth creationism. Clearly there are very few things, if any, that the religious right considers to be disputable. (The sole example that Moore cited was the biblical controversy over whether it's OK for Christians to eat meat that's been sacrificed to idols, hardly a live issue today.) It would have been helpful for him to list some modern issues where Liberty considers there to be room for dispute, just to get a sense of their position on this.

To finish up, Moore spoke of evangelistic efforts abroad. He exulted over how Christianity is exploding in South America and Africa, rising from just a few million believers several decades ago to tens of millions today. As my fiancee astutely observed, he obviously doesn't count Roman Catholics as Christians. As for myself, I was thinking of the savage anti-gay madness unleashed in Uganda by its booming evangelical population, or the witch frenzies in Nigeria, or the harm done by Pentecostalism in the Republic of the Congo. Such things, of course, were entirely omitted by Moore in his sermon. It was no surprise at all that he presented the rise of African evangelicalism as an entirely one-sided picture, portraying Christian missionary efforts as wholly noble and good and the converts solely as the victims of unjust persecution and never its initiators.

Coming up: Part III of my tour of Liberty University. We visit an academic hall to see what's being taught to Liberty students, check out the campus bookstore to see what the administration wants us to read, and make a pilgrimage to the university memorial to Jerry Falwell!

If you noticed that Daylight Atheism was quieter than usual this past weekend, you were right - I was out of town and had limited internet access. But there was a good reason for my absence: I was on a secret mission to penetrate into the very heart of the Bible Belt. Namely, I was storming the gates of Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college founded by Jerry Falwell, infamous for banning the College Democrats from campus and for instantly expelling any student found to be gay. Would they recognize me on sight? Would some supernatural sense of discernment tell them that an atheist was among them? And what would they do if they did find out?

The idea for this trip developed several weeks ago, when one of my friends, a frequent traveler, mentioned having read The Unlikely Disciple, a book by a liberal Brown student who transferred to Liberty for a semester and wrote about his experiences there. I had likewise just finished The Preacher's Son, a similar memoir about a survivor of an extreme fundamentalist family who accepted that he was gay while attending Liberty. A third friend of ours mentioned that she knew someone who attended the school and would be willing to show us around, and over a conversation, a plan was hatched. We set off on a road trip to Lynchburg, Virginia, with a few other stops along the way - one of which was Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, which I may write about later - and at the end of our journey, we saw the sign that let us know we had arrived:

Lynchburg is a semi-suburban town in rural Virginia, sprawled around a tangle of highways and strip malls. Like many communities, I guessed, it owes most of its growth to the university, which was founded in 1971 by Falwell as Liberty Baptist College. The campus certainly dominates the town: it's by far the largest institution there, its buildings and their prominently placed logos visible from far off. And just in case you missed the point, a giant "LU" is landscaped onto the side of a nearby mountain.

For all of that, getting onto campus was easier than I had hoped. There was no Soviet-style security, no checkpoints or guards at the gates controlling who entered or left campus, as I had been more than half-expecting. (I later learned that this is enforced in a different way: resident assistants perform nightly checks to ensure that every student is in their room by curfew, and undergrads must get written permission to stay off-campus overnight.) It would have looked just like any other college campus if not for the first building we passed, the first one that gave me a strange, world-turned-upside-down feeling of disorientation I'd experience many more times on this trip: an arena that was boldly lettered "LaHaye Ice Center".

Our first priority on the trip was to attend a Sunday-morning church service, so we headed for the Vines Center, a domed structure that doubles as the stadium for sporting events and assemblies. When we walked in and found seats, I was taken aback: what stood at the center of the arena was not so much an altar as a stage, complete with swirling spotlights and a fog machine. It could have been the setting for any concert or rock show, if not for the signs scattered about (and for the sharp-eyed, notice the "Falwell" jersey hanging above the stage on the left):

We were early, and I was expecting a flood of people to arrive before services started, but the flood never materialized. I estimated that the stadium could hold around ten thousand people, but throughout the service, most of the seats were empty; I doubt the number in attendance ever got much above a thousand. Attendance at these services isn't mandatory, although I'm told it used to be, and we later found out that many Liberty students attend Thomas Road, the nearby Baptist megachurch also founded by Falwell, or one of the other local churches in the area. (Liberty students are still required to attend convocation, a three-times-weekly mini-church service that includes prayer, announcements and worship songs.)

The stage setup was there for a reason, as we soon found out. The band arrived and took their places on stage, and the service began with a half hour of Christian rock music, during most of which the crowd was asked to stand. I had read in The Preacher's Son that Liberty banned all rock music, even Christian rock, at the time the author attended, so it seems they've relaxed their rules somewhat since then. In any case, I doubt they ever had reason to worry: most Christian music is carefully devised to contain nothing that could possibly offend even the most uptight evangelical, and this was no exception. The music was technically accomplished, insofar as I'm any judge - it was a seven-piece band, with four different vocalists - but the lyrics were insipid and repetitive, each song consisting of the same chorus sung over and over again. It was easy to endure, although after a half hour, I thought I could feel my brain beginning to turn to mush.

But for all its calculated blandness, there were some disturbing undercurrents in the music's message. One song praised Jesus as follows: "I know you're my healer; you cure all my disease". Needless to say, any Liberty student with diabetes or appendicitis would soon find out just how lethally untrue that claim is, if they took it literally and tried putting it to the test. Another one referred to Jesus as "the Lord of this city", which was the kind of unsubtle theocratic message I had been expecting from the beginning.

The music was probably intended to work the crowd into a heighted emotional state, the standard tactic of mass manipulation, but if that was the effect they were seeking, they didn't get it. There was no speaking in tongues, no students collapsing in their seats or hollering amens and hallelujahs. The most visible effect I noticed was a scattering of people raising their arms and swaying sedately in time to the music. That said, the whole spectacle was very well-produced and well-televised. Four enormous screens hanging around the interior of the stadium showed a close-up view of what was happening on stage, and there were cameras recording the action from every angle.

I was unmoved by the music, but there was just one part of the performance that I found genuinely affecting. In between two songs, one of the vocalists read a section from the Bible, from Hosea chapter 6. It was a good choice: there's still some wonderful poetry in that old book, and this is one of the better examples:

Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces
but he will heal us;
he has injured us
but he will bind up our wounds.

After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will restore us,
that we may live in his presence.

Let us acknowledge the Lord;
let us press on to acknowledge him.
As surely as the sun rises,
he will appear;
he will come to us like the winter rains,
like the spring rains that water the earth.

That said, the band obviously skipped over some of the darker and bloodier parts of that very same book, like this one:

The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open.

The schizophrenic contrast between these passages just goes to show what a deeply conflicting book the Bible is: it blends beautiful, pastoral imagery with savage threats of hate and bloodshed, all supposedly sanctioned by God. Evangelicals arrive at the belief that the Bible is divinely inspired only by ignoring or downplaying the nastier parts, whereas atheists see this book for what it is: a mirror of the humans who wrote it, magnifying both their best and their worst traits and attributing both to a vindictive and omnipotent god.

Coming up: Part II of our heroes' adventures at Liberty University, as the campus pastor takes the stage. Will he deliver a sermon to stir even the hardened heart of an atheist?

In the U.S., the cause of gay and lesbian rights has made major advances in the last few decades. Anti-discrimination laws are in wide effect, including a recently passed federal hate-crime law; marriage equality is already an established reality in several states; and despite setbacks, the now overwhelming tolerance and acceptance of gays and lesbians among younger generations heralds further progress in the future.

But in spite of these hopeful signs, the hatemongers and bigots of the religious right aren't giving up. As their cause slowly, but inexorably dries up at home, they're spreading their poisonous seed to foreign countries where it takes root in more welcoming soil.

Such is the state of affairs in the country of Uganda, where American evangelicals have long enjoyed a disproportionate degree of influence over the government. Homosexuality was already illegal in Uganda and has been for a long time, but Ugandan religious conservatives have learned from their American counterparts that even an oppressed and politically powerless group can easily be depicted as a menacing enemy in propaganda campaigns intended to stir up fear and hate among their followers. Just such a campaign has led to a proposed "Anti-Homosexuality Bill", which threatens to open the floodgates for the state-sanctioned mass murder of gay and lesbian people.

As previously discussed on Daylight Atheism, this bill would imprison homosexuals for life, and in some cases, would establish a crime of "aggravated homosexuality", which is punishable by death. But what I haven't discussed as much is the shockingly large role that American evangelicals played, both in the propaganda campaign that led up to it, as well as in the actual drafting of the bill itself. An article from the New York Times from earlier this month has the details, including the names of several key figures:

Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including "7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child"; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads "healing seminars"; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is "mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality"...

As the article explains, these missionaries visited Uganda in March 2009, giving a series of talks about how "the gay movement is an evil institution" which seeks to prey on boys, eliminate marriage and replace it with "a culture of sexual promiscuity". And just a month later, a Ugandan politician introduced the bill, which threatens to punish gays and lesbians with death.

Naturally, these American evangelicals claim they never wanted this outcome and profess shock that anyone could have misconstrued them in this way. But before Western media picked up on it, they were far less reticent:

But the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to "a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda."

Whether Lively and the others knew specifically about the death penalty provision is uncertain - but to claim that they were entirely ignorant of what the government was planning is a claim that strains credulity.

In the face of Western threats to withdraw millions of foreign aid, the Ugandan government has backed down slightly - offering to change the death penalty provision to life imprisonment, as if that was an improvement - but whether the bill will pass, and what its final form will be, are still very much open questions. A hint of the attitude that still prevails comes from the Ugandan minister of ethics and integrity, who recently said, "Homosexuals can forget about human rights."

If this bill passes, the evangelicals who played a role in its creation will have bloody hands. All their pious pleas of naivete and innocence cannot change what their actions have wrought. They chose to travel to an extremely anti-gay country and try to whip the populace up into a frenzy of hatred and fear. And they profess shock at the outcome, but they shouldn't be surprised: all that's happened is that the Ugandan government has taken them at their word and proposed a policy that's the logical conclusion of their starting premises.

How else did they expect the government to react to claims, like these ones made by Lively, that the gay movement is raping and preying on children, that they're recruiting and bribing young boys to engage in sexual relationships with older men, that they're importing pornography "to weaken the moral fiber of the people", that they want to abolish marriage and replace it with a culture that embraces "sexual anarchy"? They've systematically portrayed gays and lesbians as evil deviants defying the law and engaging in a malevolent conspiracy to destroy Ugandan society. Did they really think the Ugandan government would do nothing more than build some Christian therapy centers?

To be absolutely fair, I don't doubt that Lively and the others are sincere when they claim they weren't seeking the execution of homosexuals. It's just that their brand of shrill, hysterical rhetoric is what they're accustomed to using; in America, it often gets them their way. But in America, this intemperate language is counterbalanced by a strong feminist movement and an effective system of constitutional rights. In Uganda, neither of those things exist; and again, the Ugandan government didn't treat their speeches as rally-the-troops political posturing, as American politicians and media usually do. Instead, they treated them as literal truth and acted accordingly. This potential theocratic horror is the result.

But this outcome was completely predictable, which is why the American evangelicals will have bloody hands if this bill does pass. If they haven't acted with malice aforethought, they've shown reckless indifference at the very least. Like the right-wing pundits whose deranged rhetoric pushes some of their more unstable followers over the edge, they will bear moral responsibility for whatever may result. (A little more credit, but only a very little, goes to Rick Warren, who after weeks of silence and an onslaught of bad press was finally shamed into offering a grudging condemnation of the bill.)

So, the next time the gay-bashing evangelicals claim to know what's best - the next time they claim to have moral authority over the rest of us - remember this moment. Remember their bloody hands. Remember their guilt and their responsibility. They'd clearly love for this whole sordid story to be forgotten. That's an opportunity we should be certain to deny them.

Most of you have probably heard the name of William Dembski, one of the prominent advocates of intelligent-design creationism. Like all ID advocates, Dembski claims vehemently that his work is scientific and not in any way motivated by his religious beliefs, which is why he's currently a professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

But never mind that; today, somewhat surprisingly, I come to praise Dembski rather than bury him. That's because I've come across this very interesting essay of his about his family's experience visiting a faith healer.

You may not have known that Dembski has a severely autistic son - as he describes it, "largely nonverbal, still not fully toilet trained, serious developmental delays" - who was 7 years old at the time he wrote this essay. This, of course, is not a fate I would wish on anyone, regardless of their political or religious views. And while most cases of autism can be treated to an extent with intensive therapy, the paucity of good options and the daily struggles would be enough to drive any parent to despair and frustration. Thus, it's probably not surprising that Dembski felt he had little to lose when his fellow evangelical Christians recommended he attend an "impartation service" held in July 2008 by the faith healer Todd Bentley.

As Dembski tells it, the hyping and manipulation started early. Though the service began at 7 PM (in a basketball arena north of Dallas), the organizers urged them to arrive by 3 PM to be sure of getting a seat, citing expected overflow crowds:

At 6:30, after sitting for two hours, the arena was about three-quarters full. One of the organizers then announced that traffic was backed up for miles around Denton and that several thousand were trying to get into the meeting, most of whom would have to be turned away. This was sheer hype. A significant block of seats (at least 20 percent) were cordoned off and never used throughout the whole night. We could have arrived anytime and still gotten seats.

The service began at 7 with two hours (!) of "music ministry" (terrible, repetitive music, according to Dembski). Bentley himself finally took the stage at 9 PM, and spent most of the time talking about the astonishing miracles he claims to have performed. Dembski shows a welcome measure of skepticism toward these extraordinary claims in a passage that made me laugh:

Bentley told stories of remarkable healings. In fact, he claims that in his ministry 30 people have now been raised from the dead. Are these stories credible? A common pattern in his accounts of healing was an absence of specificity. Bentley claims that one man, unembalmed, had been dead for 48 hours and was in a coffin. When the family gathered around at a funeral home, the man knocked from inside the coffin to be let out.

But what are the specifics? Who was this man? What's his name? Where's the death certificate? And why not parade the man at Bentley's meetings? If I am ever raised from the dead through anyone's ministry, you can be sure I'll put in a guest appearance.

Bentley claimed that he would "soon go public with the evidence" of these dramatic healings. This, presumably, is the same sense of "soon" used by Christian evangelicals who claim that Jesus' 2000-year-overdue second coming is sure to happen any day now.

When the "healings" finally began, I'm sure it will surprise no one to hear that Bentley's focus was mainly on milking the gullible and the desperate for as much money as possible.

After preaching, Bentley took the offering. During the offering he asked "How much anointing do you want to receive?" Thus he linked the blessing we should receive with the amount of money we gave.

After a "general prayer for mass healing", Bentley then indicated that people who needed the most help should come forward to receive special prayer. Dembski's wife attempted to take their autistic son down to the altar, but was repeatedly prevented by the ushers:

Over an hour later my son with autism was still not able to get to the main floor for prayer. Ushers twice prevented that from happening. They noted that he was not in a wheelchair. Wheelchair cases clearly had priority — presumably they provided better opportunities for the cameras, which filmed everything.

...Our son was refused prayer twice because he didn't look the part, and he was told to wait still longer for a prayer that would never have been offered. And even those who looked the part seemed to look no better after Bentley's prayer — the exodus from the arena of people bound in wheelchairs was poignant.

My son's situation was not unique — a man with bone cancer and his wife traveled a long distance, were likewise refused prayer, and left in tears.

After waiting for over an hour, the Dembski family gave up and left. He describes the experience as "an education... about how easily religion can be abused, in this case to exploit our family" - a welcome conclusion from a person who's spent so much of his career encouraging belief in superstition and religious pseudoscience.

Todd Bentley isn't the only faith-healing charlatan out there. There are plenty of others working this highly profitable circuit - I recall my brush in 2006 with Jaerock Lee, a Korean evangelist whose fliers made similarly grandiose, but detail-free, claims about curing blindness, cancer, paralysis and even raising the dead. Interestingly, as I noted in my post at the time, William Dembski endorsed that con man. One wonders if this experience has done anything to disillusion him about faith healers in general.

I recently finished Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready!, a book exploring of Christian pop culture and some of its stranger manifestations, from theme parks like Florida's Holy Land Experience to the Ultimate Christian Wrestling pro circuit (no joke). But one event that he paid special attention to was Cornerstone, a Woodstock-like Christian music festival held each year in Illinois that routinely draws hundreds of acts and tens of thousands of people. According to Radosh, Cornerstone had a more open, authentic feeling than most of the events and festivals he attended, and was more welcoming of different perspectives than other Christian gatherings where all attendees are expected to march in lockstep with the religious right's political platform.

Radosh had this to say about the person whom he felt best summed up the Cornerstone ethic:

If there is a quintessential Cornerstone artist, it is probably David Bazan, who played the festival for the better part of a decade with the band Pedro the Lion. Among the qualities that made Bazan such an important figure here was not only the depth of his talent, but the fact that he actually had more credibility in the secular world than the Christian one. Bazan had been raised in a strict Pentecostal household, but had grown into the kind of Christian who treasures the Jesus who freed his followers from religious rules. In the book Body Piercing Saved My Life [get it? —Ebonmuse], Bazan describes his Cornerstone gigs - one of his last remaining attachments to the Christian culture industry - as missionary work... [p.175]

However, he did note that Bazan wasn't at the festival the year he attended (the book was published in 2008), and speculation was running rampant as to why. Some people guessed that he had been kicked off the grounds due to his habit of drinking during his sets (Cornerstone is officially a dry festival), or that he had gotten fed up with festival organizers hassling him about it, or that he had been disinvited because of the occasional cursing in his songs.

Well, as it turns out, the truth is rather different:

I worked as Bazan's publicist from 2000 till 2004. When I ran into him in April — we were on a panel together at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Music in Grand Rapids — I hadn't seen him or talked to him in five and a half years. The first thing he said to me was "I'm not sure if you know this, but my relationship with Christ has changed pretty dramatically in the last few years."

He went on to explain that since 2004 he's been flitting between atheist, skeptic, and agnostic, and that lately he's hovering around agnostic...

Bazan's latest album, Curse Your Branches, is a confessional chronicle of his deconversion and the personal turmoil he went through as a result. Somewhat surprisingly, he returned to Cornerstone in 2009 to play some songs from it. According to the article, it met with a cautious reception - Bazan's fans from his evangelical days were still drawn to his music, but most of them didn't want to admit he had changed his mind and invented elaborate rationalizations for how his lyrics could be fitted into a Christian worldview. Nevertheless, the fact of his deconversion was widely known, even if not widely acknowledged.

Bazan himself, however, appears to have come to terms with the change in his beliefs and is far more at peace than he ever was:

After a long few years in the wilderness, Bazan seems happy — though he's still parsing out his beliefs, he's visibly relieved to be out and open about where he's not at. "It's more comfortable for me to be agnostic," he says. "There's less internal tension by far — that's even with me duking it out with my perception of who God is on a pretty regular basis, and having a lot of uncertainty on that level. For now, just being is enough. Whether things happen naturally, completely outside an author, or whether the dynamics of earth and people are that way because God created them — or however you want to credit it — if you look around and pay attention and observe, there is enough right here to know how to act, to know how to live, to be at peace with one another."

And David Bazan isn't the only Christian entertainer who's recently walked away from religion. Another interesting example is from the Coexist Comedy Tour, featuring stand-up comedians from a variety of different faiths. Except as it turns out, John Ross, who was the Christian member of the troupe, isn't a Christian anymore either.

Ross embraced Christianity enthusiastically. He taught youth groups, toured the nation with Christian punk rockers Anguish Unsaid and even got religious tattoos. (The dove on his calf and the "Jesus" in Japanese kanji on his neck now act as sight gags onstage.)

"From the beginning I had questions," Ross said, "but I would just write them off with 'Our understanding is not God's understanding.' Until the last few years. It's hard to keep doing that."

By Ross' account, he converted to Christianity as a means of escape from a broken and chaotic family, gravitating towards the stability that the evangelical church offered. But eventually, he realized that faith had only provided a way to sweep his problems and doubts under the carpet; it hadn't actually gotten rid of them. With that realization in hand, he had the key to freedom, and like David Bazan, he's found a new sense of peace and tolerance for himself:

Having left Christianity, Ross is surprised by how little has changed. "I'm still just as compassionate towards people," he explained. "I'm not going out and living in sin." The only difference "is that I don't feel guilty anymore," he says. "There's no war in my head."

It's worth wondering if the use of irony, which plays a vital role in both good music and good comedy, may have been a factor in both these deconversions. Evangelicalism is a creed built on certainty and on having all the answers, and many evangelical believers insist, or fear, that to doubt or to question any tenet of their faith could bring the whole thing crashing down (something we've seen demonstrated recently). But the nature of music (at least, music more sophisticated than bland, one-note Christian pop), and certainly the nature of comedy, requires self-doubt, introspection, and self-questioning. When these collide with the brittle certainties of fundamentalism, stories like these may be the inevitable result.

Dave Schmeltzer's book Not the Religious Type has many examples of what he calls "napkin stories" (i.e., short enough to write on a napkin), brief anecdotes from people who claim to have experienced miraculous events in their lives when they trusted in God. Here's a typical one:

I found out that my aunt and uncle's marriage was unraveling due to an affair. I fasted and prayed for them. After thirty-eight days, I was contacted by my uncle. He was about to sign a lease on an apartment to move in with his lover. Before he could sign, he felt an almost audible voice in his head say "stop." He went back to my aunt and started to see how their marriage could be saved. She found a way to forgive him.

I've observed in the past that evangelical religious belief is sustained by a kind of natural selection among ideas. Stories and personal testimonies that fit neatly into Christian narrative prototypes - stories that resonate with what Christians already believe - stir interest and excitement among believers who hear them, are repeated and passed on from person to person, and soon become common in the apologetic literature. But stories that can't be fitted into these templates don't draw interest or excitement from believers, are not repeated or passed on, and tend to be forgotten. Because of this tendency to count the hits and forget the misses, Christians uneducated in critical thinking tend to believe that answers to prayer are common.

But if you look at all the evidence, a different picture emerges. We hear stories about faithful Christians who are stricken ill, pray for healing, and then recover; we hear stories about evangelists who founded a ministry and saw it flourish and grow; we hear stories about nonbelievers who pray for God to reveal himself and then mysteriously receive aid from a helpful Christian stranger at just the right time. However, unless you're looking for them specifically, you probably don't hear stories about Christians who are stricken ill, pray for healing, and then die. You don't hear stories about churches and ministries that fail to attract members and fall apart, despite the hard work of their founders. You don't hear stories about nonbelievers who pray to God to reveal himself and then nothing out of the ordinary happens. It's not that these stories never get written - they do, and I'll give some examples - it's just that they don't take root and spread through the Christian community like the other kind.

In this post, I'll try to counteract that tendency by presenting some stories of when prayer fails. The first two examples are from Philip Yancey's book The Jesus I Never Knew:

One terrible week two people called me on successive days to talk about one of my books. The first, a youth pastor in Colorado, had just learned his wife and baby daughter were dying of AIDS. "How can I possibly talk to my youth group about a loving God after what has happened to me?" he asked. The next day I heard from a blind man who, several months before, had invited a recovering drug addict into his home as an act of mercy. Recently he had discovered that the recovering addict was carrying on an affair with his wife, under his own roof. "Why is God punishing me for trying to serve him?" he asked. Just then he ran out of quarters, the phone went dead, and I never heard from the man again. [p.159-160]

Even the "answers to prayer" confused me. Sometimes, after all, parking places did not open up and fountain pens stayed lost. Sometimes church people lost their jobs. Sometimes they died. A great shadow darkened my own life: my father had died of polio just after my first birthday, despite a round-the-clock prayer vigil involving hundreds of dedicated Christians. Where was God then? [p.165]

Or this tragic story of a young mother dying of cancer, who prayed with a hospital chaplain that God would give her the time to finish a needlepoint project she was making for her children:

I was totally hooked. We prayed. We believed. Jesus, this was the kind of prayer you could believe in. We were like idiots and fools.

A couple of days later I went to see her only to find the room filled with doctors and nurses. She was having violent convulsions and terrible pain. I watched while she died hard. Real hard.

As the door shut, the last thing I saw was the unfinished needlepoint lying on the floor.

Or Paul Barnes, former pastor of a 2,000-member evangelical megachurch, who resigned after admitting that he was homosexual:

"I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy... I can't tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away."

Or this sad story of an injured man, unable to afford a doctor, who waited months on end for a miracle until he died:

"He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God," said Webb. "And he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn't think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people."

And Dave Schmeltzer himself, though he repeatedly claims to be happy and blessed, admits that his life too has times of depression and darkness:

"...it's not as though my life is consistently such a powerful case for connection with this super-duper God. For someone who talks as much as I do about joy... why is it that a few times over the years I've mentioned to my wife that I feel as if my life has been squeezed out of me like water from a sponge, like I relate to Woody Allen's working title for Annie Hall (Anhedonia - the clinical inability to feel joy)."

This quote highlights an important point that shows how miracle stories get started. Every life, regardless of which religion you belong to or whether you believe in God, has its high points and low points. Every person experiences both favorable and unfavorable coincidences. Evangelicals are doing nothing more clever than giving God the credit for the good times, while ignoring or downplaying the bad ones - save for the rare glimpses of honesty like the ones cited above.

But whatever theological embellishments that evangelicals put on them, these ups and downs happen to everyone. Atheists, too, experience them; the only difference is that we recognize them for what they are, the inevitable working of chance, and don't claim them as evidence of some supernatural creature's favor or disfavor. And atheists, too, experience the same kind of favorable coincidences that Christians unhesitatingly ascribe to miracles; again, the difference is that we recognize that occasional striking coincidences are bound to happen in the course of any normal life.