The Problem of Evil

So following on from yesterday, I’m going to do a piece on the problem of evil. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the argument that uneccesary and gratuitous evil exists, and therefore the idea of God held by theists cannot possibly exist, because if an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God did exist, then there would be no suffering, because he would want to, and would be able to, prevent it. Hopefully that makes sense.

Anyway there are various ways this is explained away by Christians (I say Christians only because that’s the religious group I’m most accustomed to, I daresay it applies equally well to many other religious groups), depending often on what kind of Christian they are.

Fairly traditional Christians may point to the Fall as an explanation. They say that God created the world perfectly without sin, without death and without suffering, but man turned away from God, and this brought sin into the world. The punishment for sin is death and suffering, so it’s all our fault (as usual in Christianity).

This Fall doesn’t make sense unless you’re a creationist, for a fairly simple reason. If someone uses this as an explanation, all you have to do is ask when the Fall supposedly happened. If they say it happened in the Garden of Eden about 6,000 years ago, you can point to geology and evolution to prove them wrong as usual. But if they’re a theistic evolutionist, it doesn’t fly, because animals were killing each other and eating each other and dying from the word go, there was no time when there was no death, certainly not right the way up until anything resembling humans came around within the last 200,000 years. That’s how natural selection works. When you’re in the middle of a debate it’s quite useful, as Stuart demonstrated once, to ask something like “so when did the Fall happen, before or after the Precambrian?”, because this divides the creationists from the theistic evolutionists. I also used this with a street preacher and he was left saying “erm erm erm” because if he’d said “in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago”, then everyone listening would have laughed and walked away.

I did once hear a curious answer which took me by surprise and stopped me using this argument for a while because I thought he’d put a hole in it. A geologist said that it didn’t matter when the Fall happened because whenever it happened, it had ripples of effect both forwards and backwards in time and space. Think about that, he means that it could happen in the future… weird eh? That sounds pretty solid but actually it isn’t, that’s impossible too. If humans did it, and then it had effects corrupting the creation throughout history as well, then that means in some other now-corrupted reality humans must have evolved without death and suffering, and as I’ve said, that’s impossible with natural selection. So the Fall only works if you’re a full-blown creationist.

Another way the problem of evil may be explained away is through Free Will. As you may have read in my last post, God’s Free Will is on shaky ground anyway but let’s carry on regardless. The argument is that God created the world perfectly, but he gave us Free Will and some people have chosen to cause suffering, and that’s the source of evil.

Well, first of all, not all suffering is caused by people choosing to cause evil. What about diseases? What about natural disasters? What about accidents? At this point they may try and cover the gap with the Fall argument, but then you can just go back up to the last argument. One person did try and come back to that with the argument “well, a natural disaster isn’t evil in itself, people being close to it causes the suffering”, which threw me off for a second, but then a bullet isn’t evil in itself, but if I shoot you with it then it is. If people aren’t causing it, then in Christian thinking that leaves God. God is killing people using natural disasters. Brilliant.

Other Christians may explain evil away by saying that evil is caused by Satan, and goodness is caused by God. Well it’s kind of wishful thinking really to attribute all the good things to God but all the bad things to either people or to Satan, fairly arbitrarily. But this argument (and both the above) is fairly easily knocked down by pointing out that God is supposedly omnipotent and whatever is causing this evil, be it people, the Fall or Satan, God should be able to overcome it and prevent suffering. That’s what a loving, perfect God would do.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if someone did something evil, say, shot someone, but then the suffering caused by that evil didn’t happen. Say the victim got shot but was still alive and felt no pain and had no adverse affects. That way the suffering is being prevented but God isn’t affecting Free Will. What if disease and natural disasters happened but didn’t harm people. Then suffering would have been prevented, but the Fall will still have happened. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Wouldn’t that be a good reason to believe in an all-loving God?

I think this is fairly solid but if you can put a hole in any of what I’ve written, or you can think of another way of explaining evil away, go ahead and leave a comment.

Rectorial Elections

None of you are probably interested in this but I just spent over an hour tolerating George Galloway’s opinions and I’m determined to make sure it wasn’t in vain.

So here’s the background to the story. Stuart mentioned ages and ages ago at a pub night that George Galloway is a creationist, mentioning vaguely an article written by Johann Hari, writer for The Independent. Now George Galloway is standing for the position of Rector at the University, so I checked it out, made sure for myself the allegation had been made, and mentioned it briefly whilst commenting on the Student Newspaper website (that link), which consequently got published in the paper copy the next week.

Anywho during the pub night tonight, one of our members Alex got a phonecall saying that Galloway was over in Frankenstein’s. Turns out he was just showing his face at a Debating Union event on sex tourism, but we approached him outside whilst he was having a smoke just before the event. After Stuart saluted his strength, his courage and his indefatigability, I shook his hand and asked him whether the allegation that he’s a creationist is true or not. He looked me straight in the eye and denied it, saying he’s not a creationist and he’s never been a creationist. I told him I’d read a transcript of a radio show he’d presented and he said that it was not a transcript. I began to wonder if Johann Hari had been lying, since I had nothing but his word to go on. Stuart then asked him to repeat on a recorder what he’d just said, and he said something along the lines of “I believe evolution to be a scientific fact. But I also believe that, since God created everything, he also created evolution.”

Well I wasn’t really satisfied, so I decided to check for myself. I correlated the date of Hari’s accusation with Galloway’s radio shows, which are handily archived on his website, and decided that if he said it, it would’ve been on the 1st December [Edit: 2007]. So I put in my headphones and listened to the show instead of going to bed and forgetting about it like most people probably would have. 56 minutes in, an atheist calls up (one of the themes of the show was ‘militant atheism’) and says that if God did create us, evolution isn’t the best way to do it because it involves so much death and destruction. George Galloway then said this, which I’ve taken from Hari’s original allegation linked above, but I checked against the recording and is correct. You have the details, you can listen for yourself:

“I was looking at my little six month old baby today beginning to take his first steps crawling across the hall of the Methodist Central Hall today, and it doesn’t look like an accident to me. He doesn’t look like an accident of evolutionary chance to me. I’m not really prepared to believe that from the bottom-dwelling slugs of the pond came the voice of Pavarotti. I’m not really prepared to believe that Albert Einstein and a spider are really the same thing, that they just took a different evolutionary path.”

The lying get. He’s not getting my vote (not that he would’ve anyway).

The Nature of Faith

I know I’ve already done a few pieces on the issue of faith, but it’s come up a few times recently at the ECG and at Student Alpha, and I want to address a couple of specific claims.

Firstly, at Alpha they were saying that we use faith for everything. Sitting on a chair, for example, you don’t know if it’s going to support your weight but you put your faith in it. I later said in the discussion that it’s a totally different kind of faith. From experience you know that most chairs do support your weight because that’s what they’re designed to do. So even though it’s not 100% certain that it won’t collapse, you can be fairly sure. Someone gave the other example that you put faith in all kinds of experts who say things about which we have little to no idea, such as your doctor’s medical advice, but again this isn’t blind faith. Scientists and even just academics in general go through a lot in the way of peer review to get their work published, as I’m sure Tim over at the Friendly Humanist will testify. The faith that you put in these kinds of everyday things is also not unfounded, it is again based on experience. You can’t really say the same about religious faith. So just because we sometimes use the same word to describe it, doesn’t make it the same thing.

It was said at the ECG that you must put faith in any account of the origin of the universe and that God is one of those accounts. Particular attention was drawn to people believing in the multiverse theory in spite of the lack of evidence, and that this is no different to faith in God. I have a couple of points to make about this.

1. Belief in the multiverse theory is not totally unfounded, it is to a small degree based on experience. We live in one universe, why could there not be other ones like it? Similarly there’s no reason to suggest the Universe could have existed forever, why does it have to be a beginning?

2. As I’ve said about a gazillion times, I have no problem with the deist idea of God as the first cause, or the idea of Spinaza’s God; it’s just as valid as any other origins theory. But this is totally different to the personal Christian God that the people at the ECG were talking about. It is not a case of accepting all or nothing.

There’s also the issue that I don’t put faith in things that are really important. I wouldn’t advocate the use of faith in something so important as whether to worship God every day of my life or not, or what to believe on certain contentious moral issues that have an effect on everyone. That I leave to reason, as I think we all should.

Back to the ECG… again!

So last night kick-started another series of lectures from the Edinburgh Creation Group, hosted at the Greyfriars and Buccleugh Free Church. Take note that I’ve added their blog to my blogroll on the right of your screen. I only discovered it yesterday but it’s good to have a written explanation of a theory. I’ve often said that text such as on websites and forums is a much better medium through which to hold a debate than in person, so maybe it’ll be a catalyst for further blog posts in the future.

Anyway last night’s presentation was entitled “Chosen Planet: Earth’s Uniqueness for Life” by Dr George Marshall. In many ways it was quite similar to another talk last year but it didn’t go anywhere near as far as that one did. Several things were covered that I wasn’t aware of. For example, I knew that the moon caused the tide but I thought it was just the gravitational pull of the moon which pulled the water towards it, causing deeper water. Apparently there is also a high tide on the opposite side of the earth too! The point was that if the moon was closer it would cause catastrophic floods which would hinder the development of life on earth. Any further away, and the oceans wouldn’t be churned up enough to allow nutrients to come to the surface and feed the algae which are so fundamental to the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But ours is juuust right, so that’s ok (you’ll notice this becomes something of a theme).

Next up is the Earth’s orbit. If it were smaller, we’d be too hot, bigger and we’d be too cold. If our orbit were more elliptical the temperature would be too temperamental, and if other planets had elliptical orbits it would pull ours out of orbit creating the same problem. A bigger orbit would also result in a greater level of vulnerability from comets and asteroids. But ours is just right.

Many stars, including red dwarves, give out massive solar flares which would also make the climate too temperamental to support life. But ours is just right. Our solar system’s location in the galaxy is also idea to support life.

So, as the more astute among you may have noticed, this is no coincidence. We shouldn’t be surprised that, as living beings, we live on a planet that is suitable of supporting life. I was about to point out that the way the world is is exactly as we should expect it if it happened naturally, when someone on the front row came out with “What exactly is your point?” What followed was a very heated discussion whereby the question-asker didn’t at all make himself clear, really annoyed Dr Marshall (who didn’t understand the point he was making at all), and abiogenesis was brought up which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand (oh, I should mention that halfway through the presentation it emerged that Dr Marshall is a biologist, not an astronomer), and the discussion went nowhere. I kind of brought it back up again in a more polite and clear way, and got the answer we were looking for. Dr Marshall wasn’t arguing that all these parameters amount to such a coincidence that God must have done it, it’s just that you have to step back and say “wow”. He still referred to it as a coincidence though, so I don’t think he grasped the idea that it’s not a coincidence at all.

Anyway, I think this shows the importance of at least appearing to be tolerant of people’s ideas. You don’t get anywhere by shouting and screaming, you just kind of come across as a bit childish. We were both on the same page, he just went about it a different way which I think was detrimental to the discussion.

In short, I’d heard all the arguments before and more along the same vein (which if people would like to bring up here I’m happy to discuss – last time Dr Ross’ 101 quantities was mentioned), so it was nothing new, although some things were mentioned that I hadn’t been aware of. It was also claimed that it takes faith to believe in a multiverse or an oscillating universe just as it does to believe in God. I have my own opinion on that and if anyone wants to discuss it further, drop me a comment here.

Faith

Faith is a strange thing, something we as humanists are generally opposed to. That sounds sad to a lot of people on the street, because ‘faith’ is so often used as a synonym for ‘trust’. But let’s be clear here, faith is a specific type of belief which goes beyond what the evidence says.

The reason I bring this up is because we had a conversation at the Chaplaincy Fayre today with Jack from the Christian Union. He started off by plugging one of their joint events with the Philosophy Society (which I’d also like to mention), which is called “Is Faith in God a Delusion?” It’s a debate on the subject between 2 fairly big names; Alistair McBay from the National Secular Society and David Robertson, author of ‘The Dawkins Letters’. It should be good, I’ll be there, it’s THIS TUESDAY 23rd September at 6.15pm in the George Square Lecture Theatre at Edinburgh University. Be there if you can.

Anyway so he was talking about the discussion they had deciding whether to use the word ‘faith’ or ‘belief’ in the title. It was interesting because he said the discussion was about whether to define belief in God as a belief or a faith position, but in my mind it doesn’t matter, that’s the subject matter of the debate. I would say that any faith is delusional by definition (after all, faith has been described as “an illogical belief in the improbable”), and so ‘belief’ would be the correct word to use, with the debate itself dealing with whether belief in God is logical or specifically a faith position. That in turn will determine whether it is delusional or not.

In any case that was merely the first sentence of our discussion. Jack denied that belief in God is a faith position because there’s plenty of evidence for the existence of God. We of course enquired what that was and he told us that the “rational information” of the universe was evidence enough to imply an intelligent designer. By that I presume he means that the universe is so complex it couldn’t have come about by ‘chance’. So then we realised we were talking to a creationist and gave other examples of rational information coming from an intelligent force, such as peanuts in a jar sorting themselves out through gravity with the smallest at the bottom, pebbles on the beach having the smallest ones furthest up the beach, craters on the moon as well as clouds that look like things. But he was having none of it. We also gave examples of how things are badly designed, such as the human eye, but he said he wasn’t commenting on the level of intelligence involved (even though he’s saying his perfect God did it :/).

We then got onto the problem of evil, and he said that it’s a punishment from God from the Fall. I said that there are a lot of innocent people who suffer, and the amount that people suffer isn’t proportionate to their sin, so what kind of judicial system does God run? Jack said it’s an imperfect system because the world has been corrupted by sin, and God’s waiting for everyone to repent before he fixes it. In the meantime he judges after death.

Now see, the problem is that a lot of people think that as long as the existence of God is possible, it’s perfectly rational to believe, regardless of whether things can be explained naturalistically. In fact, Occam’s Razor says that we should go with the option that presupposes the least, so even though the naturalistic option may seem against the odds, it’s better odds than presupposing the existence of an invisible, all powerful entity, for which we have no evidence whatsoever. Anyway, a bit of a ramble today. I apologize.

Evolution vs Intelligent Design

Last night I attended a talk at the Edinburgh Zoo given by Stuart Ritchie, President of the Humanist Society at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the Darwin 200 celebrations. Stuart is a good friend of mine and I looked forward to the talk a lot, as I know he’s very enthusiastic on the subject of creationism.

Basically he outlined the difference between Creationism and Intelligent Design (ie. not much, according to the Wedge Document), then outlined the theory put forward by evolutionists. He then took arguments used by Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents in turn and demolished them as he knows how to do so well, incorporating the circular logic of the Bible, information theory, the bacterial flagellum, the Climbing Mount Improbable analogy, the scrabble analogy, and pretty much everything important that needed to be included, although I’m sure he could have continued for much longer afterwards if he’d had the time. He placed evolution side-by-side with both creationism and Intelligent Design to see which one stood up to scrutiny, and lo and behold evolution came out on top.

What interested me was the Q&A section towards the end. Several people who appeared to be from a religious background said that Stuart was simply bashing religion and its theories in the same way as ID proponents bash evolution. This is completely untrue! If ID theorists stood their own theories up to half as much scrutiny as Stuart did to evolution, I would be a happy man. In reality it is a blinkered, religiously motivated view which holds them back from seeing the truth and leads them to take others into their false beliefs. And if nothing is done, they will still be doing it when we’re celebrating Darwin 300.

Another man who confessed to being a Christian and a former RE teacher said to me afterwards that really both his position and that of Stuart were against fundamentalism. Whilst Stuart repeatedly said he had no qualm with religious people who kept their beliefs out of science (I happen to know otherwise ), my major problem with the so-called “religious moderates” is that they rarely, if ever, speak out against fundamentalists within their ranks. How often do we see the British Muslim Council speak out against lies told in the name of Islam? How often do Christians turn on creationists and say “hold on a sec, you’re talking rubbish, I’m not letting you represent me”? We only ever see religious people speaking out against fundamentalism after a serious terrorist attack, when they’re effecively forced to. Instead the debate is between different faiths, or between faith and science, and too seldom do religious people scrutinize themselves. I suspect there’s a reason for that; if they did, there wouldn’t be too many religious people left.

In any case, I fully support the Darwin 200 events, and urge anyone who’s remotely interested to get along to one of the many events happening nationwide. You won’t regret it. I think we’ll be getting Stuart to do the same talk again in the Humanist Society’s first semester programme, too.

The Christadelphians

Sorry about the lack of activity around here but I don’t have net access at home at the moment.

On my last night in sunny Wirral I decided to go to a meeting called “Jerusalem, the spark that will set the world on FIRE!!” by the Christadelphians. I’d got a leaflet through my door about it, it was only 5 minutes down the road and I had nothing better to do, so off I went.

The talk was in a tiny little conference room with a screen at the front with a powerpoint presentation on it, so I thought it would be the same as the Edinburgh Creation Group (btw, hopefully they’ll be doing more talks this semester so stay tuned), but really it wasn’t much the same at all. It wasn’t very interesting or illuminating so I’m not going to discuss it much, there are other more interesting things. In any case the second I walked in 20 minutes early, a girl about my own age called Sarah came over and sat next to me, asking me questions (assuming I was a Christian, actually. I can see why these meetings only attract Christians though). She seemed genuinely surprised when I told her I believed in evolution, and asked me the ever-so-common question “so why are humanists moral if they don’t believe in God?” I retorted with the usual “so you’re only a good person because God’s watching you, you wouldn’t be so otherwise?” and when she replied that there wouldn’t be any point, I was flabbergasted. Normally that question puts Christians on the back foot, but her dedication to her position and all that it implies (however scary) was extraordinary.

We also spoke a lot about prophecies in the Bible (something which I gather the Christadelphians are very interested in), and I explained that the prophecies are always so very vague, that you can’t really call it a miracle when it’s fulfilled (particularly because there’s no timescale involved, it literally gives itself eternity for its own prophecies to be fulfilled), and she replied that it’s the way it has to be, otherwise it would be too easy to believe and everyone would do it. Why do Christians have this obsession with making things hard for themselves? Now I appreciate that she’s young and a more experienced Bible reader probably would have answered differently, but it’s still totally the wrong attitude to take. I asked her the question I always ask religious types, why she trusts the Bible as evidence, but not other books like the Q’uran? She replied that the Bible is full of proof and evidence, such as the fulfilled prophecies she’d already mention, and others aren’t. “So how much of the Q’uran have you read?” I asked. As I expected she’d never even opened it, excusing herself because she had so much Bible reading to do. Apparently the Christadelphians assign themselves certain reading schedules each day, so they read the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice each year, analysing it closely. I quickly saw the problem with taking all your authority with one source, as the whole talk was just “this is in the Bible, and it’s true”, with no kind of outside evidence.

Anyway Sarah glimpsed a page out of my ‘loony book’ that I take to all these kinds of meetings to take notes (for some reason I don’t have it with my right now but I’ll check it when I get home to make sure my memory’s reliable from last week), which mentioned the role of women. Ironically enough, in the next minute or so, all the women in the room started covering their heads with veils! I asked her what they were doing, and she said they had to cover their heads and sit in silence so as to not “usurp the authority” of the man! I quickly noticed all the veiled-covered heads were sitting at the back too, and as an explanation of sorts she pulled a passage out of Timothy (she’d referred to her Bible several times during our conversation) which said pretty much exactly what she’d just said. For some reason the version linked is slightly different but it has the same gist. I asked her how any woman could dedicate their life to a sexist organisation like that, and she replied that men and women weren’t being treated unequally, they just had different roles in worshipping God. Nevertheless she contradicted herself later when she spoke about something she’d learned in Bible study about the head of a woman being a man, and the head of a man being God. I was weirded out, to say the least. I hope one day she leaves the Christadelphians because she’s obviously been brainwashed into it.

Anyway, to at least brush on the topic of Israel I’ll mention the talk. Basically the speaker outlined the history of Israel, claimed that the Christadelphians weren’t a pro-Israeli group (just a group interested from a Biblical perspective), and showed how the prophecies had come true. He basically fit his interpretation of the Bible around current events. There was no question and answer session at the end, much to my surprise. At the end I went up to him and asked him in no uncertain terms why the Israelis had any more right to be in Israel than anyone else, and he replied “because the Bible says so. From the start God is very much concerned with the Iraeli people, the descendents of Jacob.” I said that it was kind of self-fulfilling that the Jewish God is going to be concerned with the Jewish people, so why do you believe that and not other self-fulfilling books like the Q’uran? He said the Bible is a book of prophecy (kind of what Sarah said, isn’t it?). I entertained the idea by asking, like what? He said, well, Israel itself is a miracle! “Excuse me? No it’s not. A miracle is something that cannot happen naturally, a supernatural event. Israel reformed because people wanted it to.” “Yes but it hasn’t happened anywhere else in the entire history of humankind!”

After debating that point with him and getting nowhere, I took some of their literature to read and went home, thoroughly deflated. As soon as I’ve read it (one of them is entitled “proof that God exists”, so that should be interesting), I’ll get something about it up here.

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.