As atheists, we're well acquainted with the irrationalities of the world's religions. We've seen it all before: the absurdities in holy books, the convoluted twists of logic used by professional apologists, the self-contradictions and incoherent definitions that the faithful swallow without a qualm. All that can safely be taken for granted. Now let's see if we can do theology better.

I'm not speaking of ways that the world could be made better; we covered that ground in "Improving on God's Handiwork". It's no fair saying you'd have created a perfect, immortal paradise from the beginning, even though we all know an omnipotent deity would be capable of that. The point of this exercise is different: you must accept the world as it currently is, and craft a theology that explains it in a reasonably satisfying manner, without any fallacies of logic or divine mysteries that must simply be taken on faith, and without replicating a currently existing religion.

To start the discussion, I have an idea to propose. It's a form of pantheism that might be called "universal transmigration", and it solves a puzzle of personal identity that philosophers have long struggled with: Why am I in this body, this life, and not someone else's body and someone else's life? Why is my "camera of consciousness" in this head and nowhere else?

This theology proposes that there is a soul, but only one soul - call it the World-Soul if you like, or God if you feel more comfortable with that. This single, immortal soul lives billions of different lives, using human beings as its vessels. Each time one body dies, it transmigrates to a new body - a new person - and starts over again. These transmigrations can move it both backwards and forwards in time, even contemporaneously with other incarnations of itself: so that ultimately God, or the World-Soul, lives many lives simultaneously, like a time traveler going into the past and meeting himself. Like a shuttle weaving at a loom, turning a single thread into a complex tapestry, this process results in God becoming, in turn, every human being who ever has lived or ever will live.

This explains why there is suffering and evil, as well as great happiness and joy. God, the only real consciousness in the universe, wants to explore life in all its diversity, and living an endless string of blissful, contented lives wouldn't teach anything new. Living through short lives of pain and toil, in addition to long lives of happiness and love, is the only way to truly experience all the possibilities that existence has to offer.

This theology also has profound personal and moral implications: namely, you are God at this moment, and so is everyone else you know, everyone else you meet. Everyone from the President in the White House to a panhandler on the subway is a different incarnation of God, and thus worthy of respect and devotion. And if you do violence to any other person, you're not only doing violence to God, but to a person whom you yourself will be someday. Such a theology could provide the basis for a very deeply felt ethic of compassion, non-violence, and concern for the future.

So, that's what I'm offering to start with. Who else has a theology to propose?

According to the vast majority of religious believers (though perhaps not to the tiny minority of elite theologians), God is basically in nature like a larger and more powerful human being. He has plans and desires which he takes actions to fulfill; he likes some people and things and dislikes others; he experiences emotions like anger, jealousy, love, and forgiveness; he can be persuaded to act on another's behalf; and so on.

The most peculiar aspect of this anthropomorphic theology is its claim that God has preferences: he likes and desires certain states of affairs, while he dislikes others and desires that they not come to pass. For example, in the Old Testament, we are told that God desires animal sacrifice; the text repeatedly says that the smell of burning animal flesh is a "sweet savor" to him. Conversely, the worship of idols or gods other than himself is something he strongly dislikes, to the extent of visiting dreadful punishments on people who do it.

Christianity, too, says that God desires to forgive humanity for its sins, but also desires a blood sacrifice before he will consent to do so, thus necessitating the death of Jesus. The Christian god strongly dislikes the vice of pride, and harshly punishes those who seek to attain equality with him. In Islam, God desires that human beings worship him alone, rejecting belief in any partners; and in the nastier strains of Islam, we're told that God desires glorious martyrdom in battle and will reward anyone who does so with eternal glory.

The belief that God wants and desires certain things is a common thread in monotheism. But when you think about it, this is a profoundly strange belief. Most theists don't recognize this, but that's because the analogy between God and human beings masks the strangeness of it.

After all, we all understand how, and why, human beings come to hold certain desires. We have instinctual physiological drives, installed in us by evolution, for basic things like food, sex and companionship. We have more complex desires as a result of culture, upbringing and past experience for things that we think will add to our happiness or help fulfill the more basic desires. Every one of us has gone through a long, complex and contingent process of development that shaped our likes and dislikes.

But God, so we're told, is eternal and unchanging. He is pure reason, pure mind, pure spirit - no physical needs to fulfill, no past history, none of the contingent events that make human nature what it is. So how is it that he has, just like us, a complex nature with specific likes and dislikes? He did not undergo the process by which human beings acquire their preferences, so where does he get them from? Why does he prefer things one way and not another?

Some believers may find this question difficult to comprehend, so as an imagination-stretching exercise, allow me to propose a variety of different preference sets which it seems, a priori, that God could have had. I invite theists to consider these possibilities, and to ask themselves: why is it that God is this way and not one of those ways?

• Self-Sufficient God. This deity knows himself to possess all perfections and sees no reason to create any inferior sentient beings. Therefore, he sits alone in the void for all eternity, contemplating his own perfection, and never creates a world separate from himself.

• Sadistic God. His greatest desire is to see maximal human pain and suffering. He desires no worship, offers no opportunity for salvation, and answers no prayer, but deliberately creates a world as hellish as possible and peoples it with sentient beings just so that he can watch them suffer for all eternity.

• Moral Relativist God. He creates a world and peoples it with sentient beings, but has no motivation to care about what they do to each other, any more than a person who owns an ant farm would care about the morality of the ants. He gives no commandments and sets no rules, but watches us for his own entertainment, regarding both great acts of good and terrible acts of evil with the same bemused detachment.

• Recluse God. His greatest desire is to be left alone. Prayers, acts of devotion and other worship just annoy him, and he has an afterlife of punishment set aside for those devout people who constantly bother him. The people whom he'll reward are the atheists, because at least they let him get some peace and quiet.

• Prankster God. His greatest desire is to do the opposite of what we expect (he finds it hilarious). Whenever people pray for something, he does the opposite. When people seek him, he hides from them; when people ignore him, he reveals himself to them. The people who are most certain they're saved, he'll doom to an afterlife of punishment, and people who don't believe in an afterlife will be admitted to a blissful heavenly realm. He's constantly leaving misleading clues and sending incompatible revelations to the world, just to keep us further confused.

Granted, some of these hypothetical gods sound bizarre. But how are they any more bizarre than a god who prefers one particular race of people above all others, or a god who demands the shedding of innocent blood to forgive sins, or a god who demands five prayers at specific times each day, or a god who desires that we ritually consume his flesh and blood each week? It's only familiarity that makes these seem natural while the ones I've proposed seem strange.

There's an interesting parallel here with the "fine-tuning" argument sometimes used by religious apologists. They ask how likely it is that a universe with physical laws conducive to life could just happen to exist with no prior explanation. But atheists can ask an analogous question in return: Out of all the billions of possible gods, each one with a different highly specific and arbitrary set of desires and preferences, how likely is it that there just happens to be one who's benevolent and kindly disposed toward humans? What prior cause can explain that favorable coincidence?

One of the most common complaints leveled against Richard Dawkins (and other atheist writers) is that his understanding of religion isn't sufficiently sophisticated - that he dismisses religion without delving into all its intricacies of doctrine. For instance, Terry Eagleton:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins's views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

What any of this has to do with the basic question of whether God exists is left unexplained. So common is this attack that P.Z. Myers gave it its own, very appropriate name - The Courtier's Reply - a reference to the famous fable of the Emperor's New Clothes. The analogy behind the Courtier's Reply is that no one has the right to claim the Emperor is naked unless they've first engaged in a detailed study of all the latest fashions in imaginary fabrics.

The use of this argument shows how religious apologists set the bar at a different height for atheists than they do for their own fellow believers. Why is it that that atheists are expected to be fluent in every last detail and nuance of theology, while no similar qualifications are needed to be a churchgoer?

Millions of theists pray, worship and attend church each week despite possessing pathetically shallow levels of knowledge and familiarity with their own religion. If atheists criticized Christianity despite possessing such shoddy knowledge of its teachings, they'd be lambasted - and rightly so. But no one seems to be demanding that the ill-informed faithful clear out of the pews until they've brought their theological knowledge up to code.

In fact, some of the world's major religions have commitment ceremonies where children as young as 12 or 13 are expected to pledge their lifelong devotion. Clearly, these faiths believe that even a child can understand their teachings well enough to make a meaningful vow of allegiance to them. How, then, can those same faiths turn around and say that atheists need to have a postgraduate education in theology to even think about objecting? This is just an attempt to create a double standard where detailed understanding is required to deny, but not to assent.

If anything, this is a bar that's not just uneven, it's perpetually moving. A lifetime of study would not be enough to learn every last detail about even a single religion. No one, atheist or theologian, could possibly know everything about the history and culture of a large faith. And again, while this is not viewed as a liability in believers, it serves as a convenient cudgel for apologists to use against us. When challenged, they can always demand that the atheist go away and study another long-dead theologian before questioning the existence of God.

But as Eagleton's excerpt shows, this is just a smokescreen. It rarely if ever has any bearing on the key question of whether theism is true. If God does not exist, of what possible relevance is the epistemological difference between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? We seek to respond to religious beliefs as they are actually held and practiced by a vast majority of the faithful, not to the rarefied views held by a tiny minority of theologians. We have no interest in debating how many angels can dance on a pinhead; we want to know whether there's any reason to believe in angels in the first place.

And, it should be noted, this argument is almost never applied in the reverse direction. That is to say, most of the believers who reject atheism know little, if anything, about it, and I'd bet that only a vanishing minority have ever read anything written by us in our own words. Greta Christina, as always, shines a clear light on the double standard being applied here. If we're expected to possess expertise on theism, why aren't theists expected to read up on atheism before rejecting it? Why aren't they expected to be experts on all the other faiths which they don't belong to?

The New York Times recently ran a depressing article about the obstacles faced by public school science teachers. I don't envy teachers their job, as important as it is: between surly and unruly students, cash-strapped school districts, incompetent administrators, and the regimented, monotonous teaching needed to drill classes for standardized testing, they have more than enough to deal with. But this outrage may surpass all the others: religious students who have been programmed by their parents and churches to reject evolution and any other branch of science that infringes on their sacred superstitions.

The last question on the test Mr. Campbell passed out a week later asked students to explain two forms of evidence supporting evolutionary change and natural selection.

"I refuse to answer," Bryce wrote. "I don't believe in this."

The article mentions "Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution", a tract written by the Moonie creationist Jonathan Wells, as one that some religious students are bringing to class. The National Center for Science Education has done a superb job answering these questions and unpacking the deceitful assumptions built into them (and the Talk.Origins Archive has a more in-depth response), so I won't spend my time on that. I have a different idea.

If the creationist churches are prepping teenagers with arguments against science, I think it's only fair that they get a taste of their own medicine. I think there should be a list of questions for Sunday-school students to ask their pastor - questions that cast light on the unsavory parts of Christian theology and raise the difficult, uncomfortable issues that most religious leaders prefer to avoid. Here are my suggestions for a list. I've done my best to raise issues that aren't often addressed by apologists, or to phrase questions in ways that aren't as susceptible to stock answers. If anyone has alternatives or additions, feel free to suggest them.

1. Why is God called loving or merciful when, in the Old Testament's stories of the Israelite conquest, he specifically orders his chosen people to massacre their enemies, showing no mercy to men, women, even children and animals?

2. Does it make sense to claim, as the Bible does, that wrongdoing can be forgiven by magically transferring the blame from a guilty person to an innocent one, then punishing the innocent person?

3. Why does the Bible routinely depict God as manifesting himself in dramatic, unmistakable ways and performing obvious miracles even before the eyes of nonbelievers, when no such thing happens in the world today?

4. Why do vast numbers of Christians still believe in the imminent end of the world when the New Testament states clearly that the apocalypse was supposed to happen 2,000 years ago, during the lifetime of Jesus' contemporaries?

5. Why do Christians believe in the soul when neurology has found clear evidence that the sense of identity and personality can be altered by physical changes to the brain?

6. If it was always God's plan to provide salvation through Jesus, why didn't he send Jesus from the very beginning, instead of confusing and misleading generations of people by setting up a religion called Judaism which he knew in advance would prove to be inadequate?

7. Since the Bible states that God does not desire that anyone perish, but also states that the majority of humankind is going to hell, doesn't this show that God's plan of salvation is a failure even by his own standard? If this outcome is a success, what would count as a failure?

8. Why didn't God create human beings such that they freely desire to do good, thus removing the need to create a Hell at all? (If you believe this is impossible, isn't this the state that will exist in Heaven?)

9. Is it fair or rational for God to hide himself so that he can only be known by faith, then insist that every single human being find him by picking the right one out of thousands of conflicting and incompatible religions?

10. If you had the power to help all people who are suffering or in need, at no cost or effort to yourself, would you do it? If so, why hasn't God done this already?

By Michael Martin

(Editor's Note: Welcome to Daylight Atheism's newest guest author! Most of you, I hope, have heard of Michael Martin, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Boston University and prominent author of books and scholarly papers defending atheism and naturalism. Some of his many published works include Atheism, Morality and Meaning (2002), The Big Domino in The Sky and Other Atheistic Tales (1996), The Case Against Christianity (1991), and Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990). His homepage can be viewed at Internet Infidels. Dr. Martin has graciously consented to offer this previously unpublished essay to Daylight Atheism.)

Recently I was astonished to learn that two modern books written from an atheistic point of view, Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006) and Richard Dawkins' best seller The God Delusion (2006), maintain that it is impossible to disprove God's existence. Thus, Dennett writes:

"Philosophers have spent two millennia and more concocting and criticizing arguments for the existence of God... and arguments against the existence of God... I decided some time ago that diminishing returns had set in on the arguments about God's existence, and I doubt that any breakthroughs are in the offing, from either side" (p. 27).

"[T]he goal of either proving or disproving God's existence [is] a quixotic quest" (p. 246).

And Dawkins says:

"That you cannot prove God's nonexistence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the nonexistence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable" (p. 54).

"God can be neither proved nor disproved" (p. 54).

One cannot disprove the existence of God? I thought that was exactly what I had been doing in Argument Alley, a column I wrote in The Open Society (a New Zealand humanist magazine) and what I had done in chapter 12 of my book Atheism. When Ricki Monnier and I founded The Disproof Atheism Society (DAS) in 1994 - a group that met monthly to discuss disproofs of God's existence - we thought our society was correctly named. After all, since 1994 DAS has met on a monthly basis to discuss what we took to be disproofs of God. When in 2003 Monnier and I edited the anthology Impossibility of God, we believed we were reprinting disproofs of God's existence. Does this mean that I am suffering from some strange misapprehension or delusion? Or are Dennett and Dawkins misinformed?

Now, according to one dictionary, to disprove something is to show it is incorrect. According to another, to disprove something is to establish that it is false by argument or evidence. These definitions do not presume one must show something to be incorrect conclusively or with absolute certainty. Nor do they assume that to disprove something, one must establish it is false by a deductive argument. Presumably, an inductive or probabilistic reasoning would suffice. Nor do they entail that one must show that God's existence is impossible. Showing that God's existence is possible but unlikely will do.
    
Given these definitions it is hard to understand what Dawkins and Dennett mean. Dawkins presents and defends a probabilistic argument against God (see Richard Dawkins, "The Improbability of God" in Martin & Monnier (ed.), The Improbability of God). According to the dictionaries' definitions cited above, he presents and defends a disproof of God. He says: "That you cannot prove God's nonexistence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the nonexistence of anything." Dawkins' use of the phrase "absolutely prove" suggests that he is wrongly assuming a proof of God's nonexistence must be certain.

It is possible that Dawkins' certainty phobia is based on a confusion between two kinds of certainty — one hypothetical and one not. Hypothetical certainty exists:

1. If true premises entail a conclusion, then it is certain that the conclusion is true.
2. If a statement is inconsistent, then it is certain that it is false.
3. If a statement is a tautology, then it is certain that it is true.

This hypothetical certainty should not be confused with the categorical uncertainty of the premises.

1'. One cannot know with certainty if the premises are true.
2'. One cannot know with certainty if a statement is inconsistent.
3'. One cannot know with certainty if a statement is tautology.

For example, although one cannot know with certainty if the concept of God is inconsistent, one can know with certainty that if it is, then there is no God.

The Impossibility of God distinguished several ways in which the concept of God can be inconsistent. However, two straightforward ways of showing a contradiction are either by showing that one divine attribute conflicts with another, for example being all-good and all-powerful, or by showing a contradiction in one divine attribute, for example being all-knowing. There are many examples of such arguments in the philosophical literature, many of which are republished in The Impossibility of God.

The first extensive discussion of arguments based on inconsistencies in the concept of God goes back to Baron D'Holbach in The System of Nature (1770) who called the concept of God "an ocean of contradictions." Dennett and Dawkins do not seem to be aware of this long tradition of Disproof Atheism. In addition, as far as one can determined, neither Dennett nor Dawkins give any arguments for their belief that no disproof of God is possible. The closest to an argument is when Dawkins says: "That you cannot prove God's nonexistence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the nonexistence of anything." However, as we have seen, absolutely certain proof is irrelevant. Once this is understood, would Dawkins really deny that one could prove the nonexistence of a round square or a brother who is not a male sibling? One shows that a round square and a brother who is not a male sibling are inconsistent ideas.  Some atheistic arguments show the same thing, i.e., God is an inconsistent idea. Dawkins is right to suggest that atheistic arguments are often probabilistic. Indeed, Monnier and I recently published an anthology of such arguments, The Improbability of God (2006), which contains a paper of Dawkins giving a probabilistic argument for atheism. But Dawkins goes wrong in denying this is a disproof and neglecting the existence of disproofs of God based on inconsistencies in the concept of God.
    
Although such inconsistence disproofs show that belief in God is irrational, it is unlikely that if they became well known they would convert believers to nonbelievers. Religious belief is often maintained in the light of powerful objections. But this psychological fact does not refute the claim that the concept of God is inconsistent. Second, showing that the concept of God is inconsistent is based on more subtle and more indirect arguments than showing that the concept of a round square is inconsistent. The concept of a round square is inconsistent on its face. The concept of God is shown to be inconsistent only by philosophical explication and analyses. Because of these factors, inconsistence disproofs of God are less certain and more controversial than disproofs of a round square. But this does not show that such disproofs of God are impossible and only probabilistic disproofs against God's existence are sound.

Dennett maintains the Darwinian perspective does not prove that God could not exist but only there is no good reason to suppose God does exist. Dennett seems to link disproof of God's existence with showing God's existence is impossible. True, some disproofs do show this; the inconsistence disproofs do. But many others do not. For example, the evidential argument from evil does not attempt to show that God could not exist but that it is unlikely that he does. It is also possible to show that the existence of God is unlikely by considerations based on Darwin's theory (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/atheism/evolution.html). Some of these Darwinian disproofs show that Dennett's conclusion - that one can use Darwin's theory only to show there is no good reason to believe that God exists - is incorrect.
    
Who says you can't disprove God? Of course, theists and agnostics do. But, as we have seen, some atheists do as well. They should know better.

Before the dawn of the scientific age, humankind had only its unaided senses to examine the universe. Certainly, there were awe-inspiring sights, but those alone give little insight into natural phenomena. At night we saw the stars and the planets circle overhead; each season we felt the rains fall and the wind blow; and in moments of terror, we saw lightning split the sky and the earth shake under our feet. But none of these things gave any clue to what the true nature of the heavens might be.

Uncontaminated by knowledge, the theologians of antiquity spent centuries pondering the nature of the universe in empirical isolation, speculating about what kind of cosmos God would most likely create for us to dwell in. This can be a very useful test. Now that we in the modern world have some genuine data, we can compare it against these pre-scientific cosmologies. If they show a correspondence, we may be justified in concluding that more than human understanding went into the founding of these religions.

But, among the monotheistic religions of the West, there's little correspondence to be found. The god of the Old Testament is a small god, a provincial, tribal deity; he gives no indication that he is in any way concerned with anything other than one race of people dwelling in one particular region of the Mideast. And the creation story of Genesis is laughably small-minded, treating the entire universe as if it were nothing more than a backdrop for human concerns. As I wrote in "A Much Greater God":

[T]he god of the Old Testament... was so interested in the Earth that he created it with loving care and effort during the first three days of Genesis, while the entire rest of the universe - awesome collisions and explosions, space and time twisting and warping, stars burning and dying like flares with the energy of galaxies, massive black holes, pulsars like lighthouses, vast and intricately sculpted nebulae light-years across, a cosmos of a hundred billion galaxies each containing a hundred billion stars - was created on the fourth day, as an afterthought, for no reason other than to serve as signs and portents for the residents of the aforementioned Earth.

Christianity, which arose from the blending of Jewish theism with Greek philosophy such as Plato's idea of emanation or Aristotle's cosmic Unmoved Mover, had a broader focus and thought of itself as a universal religion in a way Judaism never did. Even so, it too remained moored in those local, tribal concerns, continuing to think of the small, ancient city of Jerusalem as the axis around which all the universe revolved. Islam, too, inherited the provincial outlook that considered its own culture and tradition the apotheosis of the cosmos.

All these people thought long and hard about what kind of universe God would probably create if such a being existed, and I see no reason to disagree with them. Therefore, the fact that the universe is unlike these ideas and like what we observe is evidence against this conception of God. To many religious groups, the idea of a vast and ancient universe was a terrible surprise. Of course, after several centuries, they've regrouped and are now claiming that this is what they expected all along, but their own predecessors' writings put the lie to that.

Furthermore, history makes clear that these were not idle speculations, ready to be altered as soon as better evidence turned up. These cosmologies were central to the various monotheisms. How else to explain stories like that of Giordano Bruno, a freethinker who believed the Earth was just one of an infinite array of worlds each with life of their own? Bruno's cosmology was not greeted as a potentially new way to understand the majesty of God's creation. Rather, he was tortured and burned at the stake by the inquisitors who plainly preferred a small god presiding over a small cosmos. Similarly, Galileo was forced to recant and confined to house arrest for the crime of studying the universe and daring to suggest that there might be aspects of it not already accounted for by theology.

These would be no more than inert facts about the past if they did not have so many parallels today. There are still millions of theists who believe in a tiny cosmos, created by God a scant few millennia ago and destined to end in the imminent future. There are still millions who believe the Earth is the only place that matters in the grand scheme of things. And there are still millions who want to make decisions that affect all of us on the basis of this medieval, hopelessly naive and arrogantly anthropocentric belief set. A deeper and more profound understanding, one that grasped the true scale of the universe and humanity's place in it, might give them a sorely needed measure of humility and a greater degree of reliance on reason.

"The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! Good were it for that man if he had never been born."

—Mark 14:21

C.S. Lewis' book The Screwtape Letters takes the form of a series of letters, exchanged between a senior and a junior devil, on the topic of how best to tempt human beings. One of the letters in this book contains an incredible admission, the only time I've ever seen such a point made by a Christian apologist:

How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that [God] allows us so little of it. The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth. It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a "normal life" is the exception. Apparently He wants some — but only a very few — of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years.

Lewis has it exactly right here. The rate of spontaneous abortion (i.e., miscarriage) is difficult to measure precisely, because it often occurs so early that the woman never even realizes she was pregnant. However, by some estimates, between 50% and 75% of all conceptions end in spontaneous abortion. (Other estimates put the rate lower.) If we accept this number, then add the number of elective abortions, plus the people who die in infancy or early childhood, then it's indeed clear that what we adult humans call a "normal life" is the exception and not the rule.

By Christian theology, even a single-celled embryo possesses an immortal soul, and if the body dies before the age of accountability, that soul proceeds directly to Heaven. Thus, the bizarre implication is that the overwhelming majority of Heaven's residents will be souls who were spontaneously aborted in the womb and never had a human life at all. This blessed legion will far outnumber the relative few who were born, grew up, resisted sin, and attained salvation.

What this means is that, by Christian logic, being born is a terrible misfortune. The majority of those who are unlucky enough to be born will end up eternally damned. (This follows directly from the fact that Christianity comprises a minority of the world's population - even assuming that every self-described Christian sect is acceptable to God, an assumption which many denominations do not make. The more restrictive the requirements for salvation are, the more that pool of the saved shrinks.) By contrast, every single one of the spontaneously or artificially aborted embryos has a soul that goes directly to Heaven, with no opportunity to sin and no danger of going astray.

Granted, we could mitigate this problem by loosening up the rules. Maybe it's too strict to assume that only believing Christians can be saved; maybe God will accept anyone who lives an honest and moral life. Even so, if there is any act or belief or lifestyle that leads to damnation, the warped conclusion remains: it's still better to die in the womb and have salvation assured, rather than be born into a mortal life and run a risk, however slight, of ending up in perdition.

Given this, why wouldn't God just create a race of humans that all die in the womb and have their salvation assured? (The question of who would be the mothers of such a race need not pose a problem. An omnipotent god could, for example, create a planet full of artificial incubators that continuously bring forth new conceptuses, all of which die before completing their development.) To those who say that such a scenario would be absurd, I agree completely - it is absurd. But the absurdity is not my invention; it springs from the warped logic of the Christian salvation system, in which early death is preferable to a long and full life. Like all other heavens, belief in this one inevitably degrades this life by comparison.

It would alleviate the unfairness of this system to imagine that every soul which dies before birth (or in early childhood) must be sent back to "try again", and that only those who live a full mortal life and pass the age of accountability are eligible for judgment. But I know of no Christian or other monotheist sect which teaches this view.

Since the comment thread for my post "On Amateur Atheism" has sparked a lively debate, I looked around on the internet earlier today for some further explanation of John Haught's views. I found them in this Salon interview, and I'd like to offer some further comments on the theology outlined therein.

One of Haught's major points regarding modern atheists that they rely too much on scientific inquiry to learn about the world:

Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth.

The problem with this paragraph is that Haught, like the many other theologians who deny that science is the only way of knowing truth, inevitably never explains what alternative he has in mind. If you have knowledge that you did not come by scientifically, how did you come by it? What is your method for discriminating true statements from false ones? We never get an answer to this. I'm confident that it's because their actual method, if it were stated explicitly, is so transparently silly that even its backers would have to recognize the absurdity of it: they simply assume that their own personal convictions are a totally reliable guide to external reality, and cling to the faith that the particular religious beliefs they were taught, and not the millions of different religious beliefs, are the one true way.

Like many theologians, Haught wants to have it both ways with regard to science. Despite his lengthy complaints in the article about "scientism" - he says that atheists like Steven Weinberg illicitly assume that "that science itself has the capacity and the power to comment on things like [God]" - he does not hesitate to draw the opposite lesson when he thinks it's warranted.

We have to distinguish between science as a method and what science produces in the way of discovery. As a method, science does not ask questions of purpose. But it's something different to look at the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology. From a theological point of view, that's a part of the world that we have to integrate into our religious visions. That set of discoveries is not at all suggestive of a purposeless universe. Just the opposite.

The hypocritical message of this statement is that Haught is permitted to make claims about the implications of "the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology", but atheists are not. When a theist says that science suggests the universe is continually growing toward greater complexity and this suggests a divine purpose, he's fine with that. But when atheists say that the rampant evil and diaster in nature suggests that the universe was not made with us in mind, suddenly Haught is indignant about this "abuse" of scientific reasoning to discuss areas it has no right to talk about. The double standard he's using is very obvious when you look for it.

So what is the proper place of Haught's god, if it can't be discovered through science? Apparently, according to Haught, the proper answer is to assume that God is found only in the realm of "higher" reasons - that is, what Aristotle would call final causes, rather than material causes. Science can provide explanations of how physical phenomena unfold, but according to Haught, God resides at the level of why those things happen. A corollary of this is that God does not intervene in history. As Haught puts it:

Careless Christian thinkers wanted to make a place for God within the physical system that Newton and others had elaborated. That, in effect, demoted the deity as being just one link in a chain of causes that brought the transcendent into the realm of complete secular immanence. The atheists quite rightly said this God is unnecessary.

...What intelligent design tries to do -- and the great theologians have always resisted this idea -- is to place the divine, the Creator, within the continuum of natural causes. And this amounts to an extreme demotion of the transcendence of God, by making God just one cause in a series of natural causes.

But now Haught has a large problem: Christianity absolutely does require an interventionist god. Even if one dismisses the Old Testament narratives as allegory, even if one believes that God does not provide miraculous answers to prayer, Christianity is still built on a fundamental, keystone claim - the resurrection of Jesus - which implies that, on at least one occasion, God intervened in the world to change the course of events in a way that natural law would not permit.

Haught strains mightily to get around this problem. Here is his solution, which I'll quote in full so I'm not accused of misrepresenting him:

But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.

So if a camera was at the Resurrection, it would have recorded nothing?

If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it.

...We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable?

In the end, it's not at all clear what this theological contortion actually means. It's a simple question of fact: Did Jesus physically rise from the dead or did he not? Did his body resume functioning? Did he get up and walk out of the tomb? Did his disciples see him in the flesh, handle him, and watch him eat and drink? These are all yes-or-no questions!

This is where Haught's contorted theology is stretched to the breaking point. Even if we grant his argument that science cannot speak to teleological claims, science most certainly can examine empirical claims, and the resurrection of Jesus absolutely is an empirical claim. Clearly, what he's trying to do is to somehow remove this empirical claim from the realm of science and place it safely within the realm of faith, where it can't be examined or disproved. The only way he can do that is by asserting that the very occurrence of the event is somehow just a matter of faith.

It's not at all clear what he means by this. If we'd had a video camera in the upper room, would it have recorded the disciples interacting with an invisible, inaudible person? Or would it have found the room itself empty, as though the disciples resided in some parallel universe where their existence was only accessible to those who believe? More importantly, if we'd trained the video camera on the dead body of Jesus, would that body have winked out of existence at some point (as it entered the "realm of faith"), or would we have seen the body remain dead, as if a totally different set of events happened for those who chose not to believe versus for those who did?

Whatever the answers to these questions, it seems Haught's god is so far removed from the real world that it is, literally, indistinguishable from a god that does not exist. Haught is adamant that science cannot detect God, and yet, all that science is is a way of examining claims about the physical world to determine which ones are verifiably true or false. If science cannot speak to Haught's god, then that means that Haught's god has no influence or effect on the physical world in any way whatsoever. By his own definition, then, Haught's god and Haught's theology are literally irrelevant. We should treat them as such.

I have to admit, I cringe when I read quotes like this:

Max may be a long way from his old home, but he plans on going a lot further than America. Extropianism is a "rational transhumanism", he explains. There may not be any supernatural force in the universe, but pretty soon, suggests More, once we get our brain implants and robot bodies working, we will be as gods.

The linked article is about Max More, a philosopher who advocates transhumanism - the idea that we can use technology to transcend the present limits of human biology. Like most transhumanists, More advocates a potpourri of wildly optimistic ideas: freeze ourselves through cryogenics, make our bodies immortal, digitize and upload our minds to live in virtual worlds or robot bodies.

As far as I'm concerned, most of these speculations so far outstrip the limits of what is currently possible that there's little point even thinking about them. In the very distant future, perhaps, these will be issues to seriously consider. For now, I think we should be concentrating on the many more pressing problems that can be alleviated by current technology. Once people are no longer dying from malnutrition or malaria, maybe then we can start considering how to make them immortal. In the meantime, most of this is just unconstrained fantasizing that distracts us from the things that are truly important.

However, it was something else about this article that bothered me more - the throwaway line about how "we will be as gods". Nothing could appeal to me less. Frankly, I don't want to be like the gods.

Consult just about any piece of mythology you wish, and you'll find that gods are generally not very nice creatures. They're jealous, sadistic, manipulative, capricious, petty, possessing overdeveloped egos and hair-trigger tempers, and hateful toward those who are different. They're swift to anger, slow to forgive, and perpetually obsessed with whether people are groveling enough or paying them sufficient tribute. When it comes to dealing with those who disobey, violence is typically their first, last, and only resort. In short, they exemplify all the worst traits of the humans that created them, and few if any of our best traits. Why on earth would we want to be like them?

We are human beings. No matter how much knowledge we gain, no matter how much power we gain, we will always be human beings. We should not aspire to be gods, or anything else that we are not. We should aspire, instead, to be the best human beings we possibly can be - to cultivate what is best in our nature and encourage it to flourish. For all the evil that we have done, human beings are also capable of astonishing acts of mercy and benevolence. These are traits that are conspicuously absent in most of the stories of gods we read. We do not need to be forever aping our old mythologies; we have the ability to transcend their narrow perspective, and in many ways, we already have.

One of the core beliefs of Judaism and Christianity is that God is omnipotent, able to do anything that is logically possible. But surprisingly, the Bible does not consistently support this idea. I've already written about the Tower of Babel, in which the Old Testament God appears to worry that humans will overmatch him if they complete the tower. And then, there's the following little-known Bible verse:

"And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."

—Judges 1:19

Although obscure among believers, this verse is famous among critics of scripture; it has even spawned a counter-apologetics wiki, fittingly titled Iron Chariots (and then there's this amusing modern retelling).

Why God should have a problem overcoming iron chariots is not clear. In the context of the Bible it is utterly bizarre, almost as if it was inserted from a completely different religious tradition - it brings to mind the Celtic folklore about how cold iron was an effective repellent for faeries, ghosts, witches and other supernatural creatures.

On the other hand, it may just be that this verse was written when Yahweh was regarded as a local deity, supernaturally powerful but not invincible. In this respect, the biblical authors might have conceived of him as similar to the ancient Greek gods, who according to the Iliad could be wounded by humans. Iron chariots, in the world of the the Ancient Near East, were the most technologically advanced weapon of war in existence. They seem to have played a decisive role in conflicts like the Battle of Qarqar in 850 BCE, when an alliance of smaller kingdoms (including King Ahab of Israel, whom the Bible's authors reviled) fended off an invasion by the regional superpower of Assyria.

It's possible that the Bible's original authors imagined God as not powerful enough to overcome this technology, and that the dogma of his total omnipotence was a later innovation. (By Judges chapter 4, God seems to have acquired the ability to defeat chariots.) If so, this verse might be a fossil of that earlier belief, preserved in the text like a prehistoric insect in amber. As a part of modern Judeo-Christian theology it's like a puzzle piece that doesn't fit, but if we take a more rational view of the Bible as a collection of human-written and human-compiled documents, verses like this may provide valuable clues about its origin and evolution.

Of course, the usual apologists have swooped in to try to explain away this verse within the framework of their own assumptions. The standard explanation for this verse is that the Israelites failed to drive out the Canaanites' iron chariots because they were not obedient to God's desires. However, the text itself does not support this guess: it mentions no such sin, and indeed, it says "the Lord was with Judah", which one would not expect if Judah had been sinful or disobedient. Instead, it specifically identifies the presence of the iron chariots as the reason why the driving out of the Canaanites failed.

Other posts in this series:

• Little-Known Bible Verses