Christians on the March

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a few days now but I’ve been writing essays. It’s become clear that the evangelical wing of Christianity is becoming much more active in the UK. Before, Christianity was something you could choose to partake in, or to ignore, but more and more I’ve noticed people going out trying to convert people.

Take Thursday, for example. I was eating my lunch in the Student Union, minding my own business, when 2 people came up to me asking if they could talk to me about “spirituality”, as they put it. “Sure,” I thought, “but it’ll be the biggest grilling you ever get”. The 2 Canadian students were from an organisation called Agape, associated with the Christian Union somehow (incidentally the CU have also had a marquis up in the Meadows to try and get Christianity out there a bit more).

They started off by asking about me personally, trying to get me to like them so they look like the nice guys. Then all of a sudden it turned to religion. “So,” he said, “do you have any kind of spirituality?” I replied with my position that I’m a humanist, which I had to explain, and then that basically I don’t believe anything unless I have a good reason to believe it, and evolution explains my existence (as an aside, this guy said he studied biology, but I had to explain macro-evolution to him) so I don’t need to invoke a creator God. “You believe you’re here because of chance?” Argh! Just because there’s no intelligent force behind it, doesn’t mean it’s chance!

“But if God exists” -big if - “do you think he loves us all?”. Well if he does he’s got a funny way of showing it, there are good innocent people in Africa living hellish lives, and the world is full of evil, so I don’t see how he can possibly love us all.

Quickly moving on, the guy (can’t remember his name for the life of me), then explained that there’s a big gap between God and us, and that gap is because of sin, and we are all sinful. I told him that I have a problem with thinking of myself as “sinful”, just because I’m not perfect; generally speaking I’m quite a good person.

Again , pretty much ignoring what I said, he went on to say that Jesus is the only way to bridge the gap between man and God, and it doesn’t matter how good we are on our own, without Jesus there is no way to bridge the gap, as it says in John 14:6 (John seemed to be a particular favourite of his). I asked one of my old favourite questions, how can you be sure that you are right, but the Muslims at the mosque down the road are wrong? For every quotation from the Bible that you have supporting your worldview, they have another from the Koran which supports theirs.

“Well the thing is,” he said, “Jesus is just so perfect that he must be right, and he died in our place.” I had issues with the Jesus being perfect thing but my main point was, how do you know that Jesus died in our place? How do you know he didn’t just… well die?  Because he believes in the Bible, was his answer. I explained to him just how unreliable the gospels are, that they were written a long time after Jesus died (Mark was the first written, and that was 30 years after Jesus died, all the others were much longer after that, and most of those were based on Mark’s account). “But wouldn’t you prefer to have an eyewitness account?” he replied. Yeah I would, but unfortunately that’s not what we have in the Bible. This guy seemed totally unaware that the gospels were not written by the apostles themselves and I pointed out that there are many parts where Jesus is alone, so how do we know what he did? None of the apostles were there when he was born, for example, or when he was in the desert, and in Luke’s account of the ascension it specifically says that it’s not an eyewitness account. So the only written record we have of Jesus’ ministry is a collection of myths, legends and hearsay.

The next part was almost pitiful. He brought up CS Lewis’ argument that Jesus was either lunatic, liar or Lord. Again, I’ve shot this down so many times, but my theory is that he was actually none of these, but was merely a normal man who did exist, a great teacher, but he was lied about in order to make him fulfil the Old Testament prophecies. It’s entirely appropriate, the Jews needed the Messiah to free them from slavery, and some of them were getting desperate.

“But the Bible is historical fact!” he replied. Apparently they found some books in an old library (at least that’s what he claimed), which verified the whole story. Then when he started to make sense, he said that biographies of kings at the time, for example, mention that Jesus was around. But that doesn’t make him the Son of God. Let’s look at it from another view, using the same argument. The gospel account says that Jesus rose Lazarus from the dead. If this actually happened, do you not think that the news would spread like wildfire across Palestine? Do you not think that historians of the day would think it worthy of putting it into their journals, that a man was raised from the dead? And yet there is no record of it outside the Bible. Hmm…
So I had a problem with pretty much everything he said, and I asked him questions that he’d obviously never even considered before. He was just a young guy that didn’t really know what he was talking about, he approached converting me just as he would have an on-the-fence agnostic who’d never really thought about it, and I’m sure that if he thought about his beliefs objectively, he’d be an agnostic. The only way he managed to get through our conversation with his beliefs intact was by ignoring my arguments.

I know this isn’t very constructive, but it’s just so frustrating when people come to you with half arsed arguments that haven’t been thought through, with smug moral attitude. At one point he actually said “if only you knew what I know”. Come back when you’re willing to have an open-minded conversation.

Science and Youth

A fairly short one today, but firstly I’d like to plug the God’s Warriors series that the Humanist Society is showing. Tonight’s episode takes a look at Judaism, I believe, and begins at 6pm TONIGHT in Appleton Tower, Edinburgh University. The next 2 weeks will examine Christianity and Islam.

I went to the Edinburgh Creation Group last night to watch Dr Marc Surtees make his talk on the age of the Earth. He started by establishing what the Bible says, that if we look at Genesis in the original Hebrew then it is obviously talking about 6 days of 24 hours each, approximately 6,000 years ago, so there’s no fudging the issue, that’s what it says. To claim it’s a metaphor would be to do it an injustice.

What followed for much of the talk was just theory. If humanity did start with 2 people, how long would it take for there to be 6 billion people? He calculates that with a 2% increase every year as it is now, it would take just 1100 years. I meant to ask him how he got to this conclusion, but even so, it’s well known that the human population has been increasing very rapidly over the last century or so, and I think the growth rate would have been much less than 2% per year in the past.

There were other things which would seem to suggest that the world is only thousands of years old. Long-period comets have an average ‘lifespan’ of thousands of years. If they were formed at the same time as the planets, then the planets must only be a few thousand years old, because otherwise the comets would have all burned up by now and we wouldn’t see any comets. The Oort Cloud has been suggested as a source of comets to get around this problem, but it’s never been observed.

One thing that did interest me was something called the Faint Sun Paradox. We know that through nuclear fusion, the sun is now 40% brighter (and hotter) than it would have been at more or less the start of it’s lifetime, which means the Earth would have been extremely cold. Not only would this not allow life to evolve, but it would also go against geological evidence which has flowing water making sedimentary rocks. Sagan, who first noticed the problem, explains it by the immense amounts of greenhouse gases that would have been in the atmosphere at that time.

There were other things that, although they disputed the age of the earth, didn’t really support the Biblical account either, such as levels of salt in the oceans and levels of helium in the atmosphere. Then he went on to hypothesise that dinosaurs and humans existed side-by-side as late as the Middle Ages, with the dragons slain by St George and Beowulf being the last of the dinosaurs.

Of course there’s one big issue that I’ve skirted around so far, and that is dating methods on rocks, which the scientists say show us the earth is millions and millions of years old. Dr Marc showed how inaccurate dating methods can be, saying that there are lots of assumptions involved, particularly since we don’t have a good way of measuring the half-lives of any material useful for telling the age of the earth, so we shouldn’t rely on them.

I’m going to stop storytelling now and give my opinion. The dating methods we use now, although they may well be inaccurate, give us a ball-park figure of millions of years. It’s nothing like the mere 6,000 years the 6-day creationists are talking about. If the dating methods have problems (and I’m not nearly specialised enough to tell you if they do), then I would fully support taking another look at the issue from another direction, in the interests of good science. But that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the data that we’re getting. If I counted and told you that there were a hundred sweets in a jar, and then someone else counted and said “no, I think there’s 110″, it would be like assuming that there are a pitifully small number like 2 sweets in there, because obviously the counting method is unreliable, so you should just guess. There’s going to be somewhere in the region of 90-120 sweets in the jar.

It’s an issue I’ve noticed in a lot of creationists. There are niggles and problems with any theory. We can’t pretend to know everything, but creationists tend to point at the cracks in a theory and say “look, this can’t be true, so therefore Goddiddit!!” It reminds me of this picture I saw recently:

Back to the ECG!

Last night saw my return to the Edinburgh Creation Group meetings. They started last Tuesday but I was unfortunately at work so I couldn’t go. In any case this week’s talk was by Phil Holden, the group’s secretary, entitled “A Letter to a Pagan City”. At first I thought it would be a response to Sam Harris’ book “Letter to a Christian Nation”, but in fact it was quite unrelated.

The whole talk was based around Romans: 1, particularly verse 18 onwards. Basically St. Paul writes that when people reject God, they become pagans, which leads them to sexual immorality, homosexuality in particular, and the total moral collapse of society. Now Phil went looking for examples of paganism in Edinburgh, and examples of what’s written in Romans in our society. So there were videos of Beltane and the festival, of big parades down the streets with people dressed up as spirits and taking part in a pagan ceremony.

Now I have to say that this was taken right out of context, which was brought up in the Q&A section at the end. This isn’t an example of Paganism rife in Edinburgh, this is a cultural event. Now I’m not saying that there are no pagans around, but the vast majority of people go along to such events just because it’s entertaining, it’s out of the ordinary, and it’s fun.

Next Phil showed us some pictures of “Our Dynamic Earth“, an Edinburgh exhibition which I regret to say I’ve still not visited, and pointed out the “pagan symbolism” such as a circle of stones, and a “pagan female fertility symbol”, as well as the words “Mother Earth” on the outside (also taken out of context. In full it is “the Mother Earth of all adventures”, a play on the term “the mother of all adventures”, so that’s why it’s there, not some sinister paganistic symbolism).

Next there were lots of pictures of various witchcraft shops and occult suppliers around the city, and a supernatural event organised by the Freemasons, as if this proves that Edinburgh’s become a pagan city. But it’s all irrelevant. Paganism is a cultural and tourist thing rather than religious. Celtic paganism is a big part of Scottish history, and of course that is reflected in what we see around us, and the tourism board is going to promote it actively. So even if it is quite widespread, it’s not genuine.

In any case the point was that this rise in atheism/paganism (I still don’t understand how atheism leads to paganism) is leading to a breakdown of society, with higher levels of paedophilia and divorce rates through the roof, leading to unstable family life and the “total moral collapse” of society, as well as the usual stuff about homosexuality and abortion which I’ve seen in some talks before.

Stuart, a fellow member of the Humanist Society, made a good point, saying that anecdotal evidence is no way to make a hypothesis, and if there was a correlation in a rise in paganism in more atheistic countries like the Czech Republic or Sweden, that would at least be a good start, and meanwhile on the other hand there are studies that suggest that atheists are less likely to get divorced than Christians, particularly fundamentalists, which would throw a spanner in the works for anyone suggesting that atheism is linked to the breakdown in society.

Throughout all of this, there was a suggestion that noone has any excuse for not knowing that God exists, just as it’s written in Romans 1: 19, “since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.”, and everyone should just know intuitively somehow that God exists. But a big point was also made that God often punished on a societal level rather than personal, and where in Romans it says “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts”, this is also typical of God’s kind of punishment on earth, that he lets the consequences of people’s actions be their own punishment. I can’t believe people still think divine punishment exists when they freely admit that who gets punished isn’t necessarily who does the evil deed, and that the punishment takes the form of something that would have happened anyway! What kind of judicial procedure is that? Once again, this is an example of God doing absolutely nothing, and yet we’re still supposed to ‘just know’ that he exists! It just doesn’t make sense.

I like Phil. I think he’s a good man, but if he truly believes what he was saying, then he’s also very naive and deluded. He doesn’t appear to have any idea about what paganism really is. I’ve mentioned the talk to a few people and they immediately threw up the objection that generally speaking, pagans are the nicest people in the world, and that in reality they don’t go around having drunken orgies all the time, so they can’t be held responsible for the downfall of society.  I also think it’s slightly ironic that he’ll happily dismiss paganism out of hand as being a load of rubbish, but doesn’t see that the same logic can be applied to Christianity.

Not only am I unconvinced that atheism is linked to paganism at all, but I don’t think if it were, then that would be linked to the downfall of society, which may or may not be happening anyway. It’s all very dubious and circumstantial.

Alone

Everyone’s going home for Christmas today, but unfortunately I won’t be leaving till Monday. Out of my whole building, where 122 people normally live, I know of only 4 who will still be here after 8pm tonight, and they’re not people I know particularly well. So this is gonna be a pretty boring 2 days, I think. Don’t be surprised if I make several posts, especially since there’s quite a lot of relevant stuff happening at the moment.

First off, here’s a story in the Independent about a stabbing in Ausralia. It caught my eye because it involved both Scottish and English backpackers, and because the headline says it happened “after a creationism row”. Take a minute to read it, it’s not long.

There are a few different ways of taking this story. On the one hand I think the author has greatly overstated the significance of the “creationism row”; the judge says it was accidental and the jury obviously agrees or he’d be guilty of murder, so I don’t think it should have been a feature of the headline. So this shouldn’t be read in a pejorative sense towards creationists. I’m sure the vast majority of them are peace loving, non-violent people, however deluded they might be.

However, it shows how heated such debates can be. Anyone who’s read any of my blog posts will find it quite ironic that I’m saying this, but we have to take into account that many people take their mistaken theories of origin very personally, so it’s important to be diplomatic. We’re not going to show people the error of their ways by offending them, but by reasoned debate. That isn’t to say that we should tip-toe around the issue. Creationist theories are not just a philosophical worldview, they encroach on the terroritory of science and ignore fact. Anyone who propagates such views should have them challenged, just like anyone trying to propagate a new scientific theory would expect to have it challenged.

I’ve been thinking recently about what kind of approach to take. Don’t get me wrong, many creationists have ludicrous theories and I think they should be shown up to be a ridiculous as they are, but it’s not going to help our cause to keep harping on and making fun of the same things like the talking snake in Genesis or the Allah/chewing gum thing (comment me for more details on THAT amazing piece of literature). In some respects that makes Humanists seem more closed-minded, as stupid as that is.

But on the other hand, I quite like offending fools. And being frank about things is the best way to make sure people understand, and it’s more my style.

The Blind Leading the Stupid

I went to the Edinburgh Creation Group talk last night as I do most Tuesdays, where they were showing a 67-minute DVD called “Unlocking the Mystery of Life“, which the ECG describes as “a revolutionary DVD showing evidence for Intelligent Design in molecular biology”. It was not revolutionary in the slightest. It was obviously biased and one sided, emotive and often patronizing. There was very little counter-argument.

I’ll sum the video up in a couple of paragraphs or so. A group of scientists, including notably Paul Nelson, Stephen Meyer (who I particularly ended up despising) and Michael Behe, met up at Pajaro Dunes in Monterey Bay, USA, to “discuss alternatives to evolution”. Basically they all wanted to come up with evidence for ID. The first half of the video was based on the very origin of life and how really really unlikely it is. It was full of dramatic and sometimes very sensitive music, as if these guys are crusaders for truth and justice, but victims of scientific prejudice at the same time. They tried to show how complex and beautiful life is, and several times referred to evolution as “chance”, something that always annoys me profusely. It also tried to show how we can tell things are designed (apparently complexity+familiarity=evidence of design, news to me), and then applied that to animals and plants, which of course isn’t relevant in the slightest, it just explains why we perceive (in this case mistakenly) things as designed.

The second half was about the Bacterial Flagellum. For those of you who understandably haven’t heard about this, take a look at that wiki page. It’s basically a biological outboard motor on certain bacteria, which creationists often use as evidence of Intelligent Design, through something known as Irreducible Complexity. Note that the eye and the wing were previously most commonly used as examples of Irreducible Complexity, until Dawkins replied and explained it. Of course the video went to extreme lengths to compare it to a designed outboard motor, and exaggerated saying it’s “the most efficient machine in the known universe”. If you take a look at it you can clearly see just from the shape of the “propellor” that it isn’t, it would be much more efficient if it had a propellor shape instead of a whip shape. Anywho they explained the problem of the flagellum, said a bit about how complex DNA is, and then left it at that really, saying how once we accept Intelligent Design Theory, then we can carry on with science as a way of exploring the miracle of life.

Now the first section I’m going to only comment on briefly, mainly because I know very little about the origin of life, and anyone who claims to know how it happened is probably mistaken and relying on speculation. There was an analogy I particularly objected to, about how the probability of amino acids randomly joining together to form proteins is like dropping a load of scrabble pieces on the floor and hoping it’ll spell out specific lines from Shakespeare. Well it is, but only if you do it millions and millions of times (because these amino acids didn’t just come together once, but many times), with millions and millions of scrabble pieces (because I’m guessing there were more amino acids than just the number of tiles you get with one scrabble set).

Plus, although I’m no geneticist, it seems plausible to me that there are some other combinations of amino acids that could have created life other than our one, it would perhaps create a different kind of life, but just because the combination we see here creates life, that doesn’t mean other combinations couldn’t have done a similar thing in very simple cells. I know I’m not articulating myself very well, and if anyone knows something to contrary I’d welcome a comment. To continue the scrabble analogy, it would be like not knowing in advance which line from Shakespeare it’s supposed to spell out, so you’d be equally impressed if it spelt out any line from Shakespeare. To use Dawkin’s term from ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’, this increases the PETWHAC (population of events that would have appeared coincidental) quite significantly. Then when you see that all this might have been happening on any number of possible life-supporting planets out there, not just our little Earth, then you see that any mind-boggling coincidence can be reduced to real odds, without stretching the imagination too much. It’s no coincidence that we, as living beings, live on a planet that is one of the ones that has seen an origin of life. I’m no expert, I don’t claim to be, but to me it doesn’t seem as unlikely as they’re making out.

Right, now to the Bacterial Flagellum. I was very surprised that this came up in a supposedly “revolutionary” DVD, seeing as evolutionists have owned this example countless times. The argument is that the flagellum couldn’t have evolved through tiny incrementations in natural selection because it’s irreducibly complex, that is, any one of the parts is useless on its own and would be erased from the gene pool through natural selection, so the whole mechanism wouldn’t evolve.

Now this is interesting for evolutionists, but it’s not impossible. The scientists in the video (particularly Michael Behe) who claim it’s irreducibly complex are blind. Take the example of the wing, which has been used in the past but has since been abandoned by ID theorists. There is an assumption that because something doesn’t function properly without a part, it is useless. To quote Stephen Gould;

“You can’t fly with 2% of a wing or gain much protection from an iota’s similarity with a potentially concealing piece of vegetation. How, in other words, can natural selection explain these incipient stages of structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more elaborated form?”

This is blind ignorance, just like Behe’s claim that the flagellum is irreducibly complex. The 2% of a wing doesn’t have to make the bird ancestor fly, but if it fell out of a large tree, it would be marginally more likely to survive if it had 2% of a wing to slow its fall than if it had nothing at all. 3% of a wing would be even more advantageous, and so on.

The same can be said of the eye (which for some reason Behe still upholds as an example of irreducible complexity). Although you can’t see like we can with just one part of the eye, it’s not difficult to see how it’s easier to avoid predators or catch prey with some kind of visual sense, even if it’s literally just a blurred flash of darkness a second before it’s too late. So you can see how one part of the eye could be advantageous, even if it doesn’t lend sight.

So now how do we apply this to the flagellum? There (that’s evo wiki btw, a resource I found last night) are numerous theories, one of which involves symbiosis between two other forms of bacteria, which seems possible. Another theory says that some of the parts of the flagellum are also present in other parts of the bacterium, so they could have been ‘borrowed’ to form a primitive form of the flagellum which evolved from there.

But in my mind, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that even one part of the flagellum, say the whip part, could be advantageous on its own. Remember that it doesn’t have to be used for the same purpose, natural selection doesn’t know what future mutations will take place. So the whip could have another advantageous function like increasing the surface area of the bacterium, attaching the bacterium to a solid surface similarly to a bouy’s chain or a plant’s stalk, or aiding its suspension in water, or any number of other possible uses for a big long floppy thing. Then another mutation comes along which allows it to be moved, and then that develops from there by natural selection, making it more and more efficient until it reaches its modern form. Applying Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation is usually the most true. It’s not difficult to see. I mean come on, there’s even a wiki page about this! If it’s such common knowledge on the Internet, why is Behe, a supposed expert on the subject, unaware or ignorant of it, and why doesn’t he address such explanations in this DVD? As it stands it was pretty much a totally one-sided argument.

I also think it’s ridiculous that just because these scientists think they’ve found a hole in evolutionary theory, they immediately jump to the conclusion that if evolution didn’t do it, it must have been God! Goddidit!!

But what’s really frustrating for me is that while I was sitting at the back of the room, laughing to myself at how stupid the whole thing was, I looked around and saw many people who seemed to be taken in by this rubbish. These were people who in previous talks I could tell were undecided on the issue, but this DVD, made by a reputable source (let’s not forget that, worryingly, many of these scientists are University Professors at good universities in the US), has them duped. There was no question and answer section at the end either (understandably because the film-makers weren’t present), so I couldn’t even try to dispute any of the claims made.

Now there was another issue I wanted to bring up here, but this post is already really really long so I think I’ll make a separate post about it tomorrow after my exam (:s). Thanks for reading.

Listening to: Led Zeppelin: I Can’t Quit You Baby

A Question of Ethics

After the ECG talk on Tuesday, a little, middle-aged Christian lady in a wheelchair came up to me and asked me a few questions, which I obliged to answer. First of all was the usual one about how I became an atheist. I explained my story (which can be found… 2 posts ago here I think), and she replied with “oh, so you were basically angry at God after he didn’t answer your questions and your friend died”. I found this quite patronizing, actually, but I didn’t want to offend her, so I refrained from replying “well, actually I just realised it’s a load of bullshit”, and opted for the more diplomatic “it was more of a general disillusionment than that”. I didn’t get the opportunity to ask her how she became a Christian, which I suspect would have been quite illuminating.

Anyway the next question was the good old classic, “so where do you get your morality from?” Again, I didn’t want to offend her, so I didn’t use Roger’s favourite question “so, if God wasn’t watching your every move, would you be out there stealing, raping and killing people?”, instead I said “well how come you know that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is something good in the Bible that you should follow, but that stoning homosexuals is a bad commandment and you shouldn’t follow it?”

She really didn’t answer my question, instead deciding to tell me that homosexuality is a perversion. My favourite part of this discourse was when she told me she’s got nothing against homosexuals, she was about to say “I know some homosexual people”, but corrected herself to say “I’ve met some homosexual people”, as if knowing them would be too sinful.

Anyway she didn’t answer the question so I approached it a different way and said “do you not think it’s possible for me to be moral without being a Christian?”, and she replied that it was possible for me but only because there are vestiges of Christianity remaining in me from my parents’ influence. She went on to say that the world is getting more immoral because people are more selfish, and this is because they’re turning away from Christianity. Now people put themselves first instead of God first and themselves second, so we’re all getting more selfish.

During that entire discourse she seemed to use ‘Christianity’ as a synonym for ‘religion’, so I asked her the old classic, “so there are so many other religions out there, what makes Christianity the true religion?” She said that in other religions, their God hasn’t come down to us in human form, and in other religions their God doesn’t love them like the Christian God does. “Well,” I said “that’s what makes Christianity different from other religions, but it doesn’t make it any more legitimate or true than the other religions, does it?”

- Stumped.

“And do you not realise that if you were living in another part of the world, you would be saying the exact same thing about another religion, giving me other reasons why Islam, for example, is the true religion.” She waffled on for a couple of minutes about how other religions can be partly moral too because they have some things in common with Christianity, which of course wasn’t the question I asked.

“And do you not think the ancient Athenians, for example, had at least some morals, centuries before Christianity even existed? So that’s proof that our morals don’t really come from the Christian Bible.”

- Stumped.

And my final question was “don’t you think it’s better that people think about their actions, and their consequences for other people, and make their morals that way, rather than just read their morals in a book and simply do things because God says so?” Her reply was “ah, but you have to remember that God made those rules, laws and commandments with the consequences for other people in mind.”

Our conversation was interrupted there, but I’d like to discuss that here for a little while. I’m aware this post is already quite extensive, so I won’t go on for too long. One of the most common secular ways of assessing whether something is moral or not is to decide if it causes the least suffering possible to the least amount of people. Now generally speaking the morals of Christianity do that, but there are exception, mainly to do with sexual immorality.

Why is it ok to kill homosexuals, or even just to judge them, when all it is is two people who love each other? Surely judging them inflicts more suffering on more people than the ’sin’ itself does? On abortion, scientists go to a lot of effort to make sure that feotuses aren’t aborted once they’ve reached an age where they would suffer physically by it, but having the baby born could inflict a lot of pain on the mother in many different ways which I’m sure you’re all aware of. Stem cell research could alleviate suffering for countless thousands of people in the future, but the Church opposes it because it involves chopping up a human blastocyst (or very very young embryo). Now blastocysts are little clumps of about 150 cells. They don’t even have any specialised cells, never mind brains or anything as complex as that, so we can be relatively sure that they do not suffer. To quote Sam Harris, we should be more troubled by people swatting flies than we are about the suffering of blastocysts in stem cell research.

So if God really does make these laws with the consequences for other people in mind, then he’s made some pretty grave errors here, for an omniscient God. To quote the late George Carlin, “mistakes like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being”.

Edinburgh Creation Group

I think now is a good time to introduce the Edinburgh Creation Group, seeing as I’ve just come back from one of their talks. I got involved through the Humanist Society, which had some copies of their leaflets, including this amazing piece of reading (notice how both Communism AND Capitalism are both a product of evolution, as well as student debt and STD’s, apparently). Basically each week someone with a scientific background will give a presentation on how science fits into religious interpretation in one way or other. Often several of our members will go to listen to the talk, and then ask awkward questions at the end, which is often quite a good way to get into the nitty-gritty of creationist theory which doesn’t come up in normal conversation.

Previous weeks’ talks have been on very fundamental things like “geological proof for the global flood” (apparently, trees can survive a year underwater) and “the cosmos: hallmarks of design?” (or how much of a coincidence life on this planet is, which when you think about it, is really a statistical certainty), which are easily disputable, but in the last few weeks I must admit that the talks have been very much geared towards a Christian audience, in that they already assume the existence of God, or they make no premise about evolution or creation, so there’s really nothing to dispute from my point of view. Tonight’s talk, for example, was just on Persian history and how it fits in quite well with what the Bible says in the Old Testament, supposedly proving that we should treat it as a historical document. My one question at the end was whether the speaker, Dr Mark Woolmer, thought that what we know is true about the Bible lends authority to the things that are harder to believe, like the miracles. He said yes. Surely that’s like saying that Harry Potter’s all true, just because it mentions real places like King’s Cross Station? The logic doesn’t follow.

In any case, there are a few things I’ve learned, thought about, or gained a new appreciation for during this series of talks, the last of which is happening next week (a new series will begin next semester):

First of all, although I was aware of the dogma of the Fall of Man in Genesis, I never knew that so many creationists think it has real, physical consequences in the real world. When I was a Catholic, people didn’t talk about the Fall like it was something that’s still happening, but like it happened in Genesis but has since stopped. Many of the creationists I’ve met believe that the fall means we are all genetic degenerates, and we will continue to degenerate until Christ comes again to save us. It might be easy to dismiss this, as life expectancy has consistently risen in the past rather than declined as you might expect, but it’s strange that this view isn’t more common among Christians, seeing as it’s necessary to explain a multitude of things from a creationist point of view, such as how we now have more than one blood type if we’re all descendants of two people (according to Dr Marc Surtees, a member of ECG with degrees in Zoology and Geology, and who owns a shop on Leith Walk, Adam and Eve were both A+. B, O and rhesus negative blood types are all degenerations which mean you’ve lost one, two or all of the proteins on your blood cells, which is only compatible with religion if you believe in a physical degeneration of humankind).

Another big point I’ve made to the group is that if all of this evidence is true, and science really does point to the Bible being true, then why aren’t we seeing a mass exodus of scientists converting to Christianity? The answer, I suspect, is that what’s been presented to the group is actually bad science, and that science actually doesn’t support the Bible and Christianity. I’m no scientist and I can’t dispute it very well, so that I leave to the more qualified, such as Dr Richard Dawkins, who I must say does a good job, on the whole.

Thirdly, I have a newfound respect for creationists, such as Dr Marc Surtees from the ECG, who actually think about their beliefs and why they hold them. As a humanist I find this much more palatable than the everyday Christian who doesn’t know why they believe, and doesn’t really even know what they believe. Many Christians nowadays see the Genesis story as a giant metaphor that didn’t really happen, but shows how much God loves us. But if Adam and Eve didn’t really exist, and original sin and the Fall didn’t really happen, then Jesus came to Earth and sacrificed himself for a nonexistent sin to save us all from nothing, so if you don’t believe in Genesis as it happened, they you undermine the entire Christian faith. So if you’re going to be a Christian, be a proper one.

One thing that does annoy me about Dr Marc is that he himself has said that when his science clashes with his religion, he always chooses his religion. So effectively he’s saying he chooses his unfounded beliefs over his rational knowledge. And this isn’t unique among creationists, either. Some people would rather believe what a book tells them than what they discover themselves. Ok, science isn’t perfect and it’s always being revised, but just because religion doesn’t change, that doesn’t make it better or more reliable than science. In fact I’d say it makes it much worse, outdated and old-fashioned. But that’s just me.