Bibles in Pollock Halls? You’ve got to be joking…

Edit: Since writing this, it has come to my attention that the Christian Union actually have nothing to do with the motion (see comment dated 11/11/09). It was proposed by two of their long standing committee members, which is what led to the confusion on my part. I can only apologise for that assumption. Please note, however, that although much of the argument here is misdirected towards the CU, it loses none of its validity.

Unfortunately not. The Christian Union at the University of Edinburgh have put forward a motion for the student association’s AGM to allow themselves or another organisation to put Bibles in each of the bedrooms in Pollock Halls. If you’re a student at Edinburgh University, I urge you to read this post, although it’s likely to be quite long, and if you have a comment, if you disagree or whatever, post it here in the comments thread. I’d like to get a discussion on this motion going and hopefully get a bit of interest so that the necessary 300 students turn up to the AGM and it’s not a complete waste of time for everyone involved.

But first, a bit of history. A few years ago the Student Representatives Council passed a motion banning Gideon or any other religious organisation from putting Bibles in the rooms at Pollock Halls, the student halls. Following that, the CU proposed a motion to the general meeting lifting this ban, which got a majority of the vote, but not enough votes for it to pass (the EUSA system requires that at least 300 people vote for a motion for it to pass, they got 200 and something). This all happened before I was at uni and before the Humanist Society existed, but there are legends that when Gideon were allowed to place their Bibles in the rooms, it resulted in them being thrown out the window, torn to pieces or even in some cases burnt. I’m not exactly in favour of that but it demonstrates how a lot of students feel about evangelising on campus.

Anyway here’s a copy of the motion as it is now. As far as I can tell it hasn’t been amended so this is what will go before the general meeting. Seeing as I’m not in Edinburgh and won’t be able to attend the meeting, all I can really do about it is post a point-by-point rebuttal of what is says. This is more or less the argument I would give if I were to speak, and if I were given more time than you’re allowed at that meeting.

So, first up

The association notes: Article 9 (Freedom of thought, conscious and religion and freedom to manifest such beliefs in public and private) and Article 10 (Freedom of expression which includes the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers) of the European Convention of Human Rights which is incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998.

That’s absolutely true, it does say that. This is no doubt an inclusion of one of the proposers of this motion, law student David Nixon, who even managed to use the right to freedom of assembly to justify denying non-Christians access to the Christian Union earlier this year. That was bizarre, twisted logic and so’s this. He’s trying to use the right to freedom of conscience and expression to justify leaving a Christian text within the privacy of someone’s room. You have the right to express your opinion, you don’t have the right to come into my living room and do it. Interestingly, the motion doesn’t mention the second point to each of these articles, which states that these rights may be subject to conditions or restrictions in order to preserve the rights of others, among other things.

Next:

The association believes: That the Bible has had a powerful impact on Scottish Culture and is useful to the study of many disciplines including literature, history, law, social anthropology, classics, divinity and philosophy.

That’s true as well (although I’m not sure how it’s useful for the study of law – it is, of course, a perfect example of how not to do philosophy), but so what? Would you use it to justify putting the complete works of Robert Burns in every room in Pollock? The Bible is available online (this point will come up repeatedly, just to warn you), as well as in the library. Anyone needing access to it has it right there at their fingertips.

That many religions, philosophies and spiritualities respect the contents of the Bible.

Most of them consider it blasphemy, actually. Regardless, this is a popularity argument and has no place in a motion of this type.

That many students have taken comfort in a Bible passage in times of distress and this is important given that the University Chaplaincy Centre is only open 9am – 9pm weekdays and is only staffed 9am-5pm.

Let’s take a look at that claim, shall we? Nightline is also open throughout the night, but let’s leave that aside for a minute. What are common causes of distress? Maybe being a member of a disadvantaged or minority group? Say there’s a student who’s gay, but having only just moved to university, noone there knows. Quite a difficult situation, I’d say. Now say that student opens the Bible and discovers that according to that philosophy, they deserve to be put to death. Not exactly ideal. The same kind of discrimination found in the Bible refers to women, pagans, and anyone who’s not a Christian. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing that should be allowed to be placed in people’s rooms. Those who do want to consult the Bible can do so online, or in the library.

That by providing the Bible and other Scriptures the University is not necessarily promoting the contents of such texts but merely making a service available to students. There is nothing to prevent the university or EUSA attaching stickers to any books placed in Pollock making clear that the University does not endorse the views contained within such books.

Yes, it would be making a service available. A service that is already widely available on the internet, or in the library. Hardly one that is lacking at the moment.

5. That it is in the interests of promoting religious diversity and promoting freedom of expression and religion that EUSA do not prevent Bibles being placed in rooms in Pollock.
6. That the University should be a free market place of ideas and as such no view should be suppressed or censored. True tolerance would allow all views a chance to be fairly represented and would not ban the distribution of any books.

Erm, starting with number 5, no it’s not. It’s in the interest of freedom of expression and conscience to allow people to believe and express themselves as they wish in public or private. This is completely contrary to allowing people to impose the Bible onto people who aren’t interested or who hold different beliefs.

As for number 6, the Bible is not being censored. As I’ve said several times now, the Bible is available online and in the library; the University is in fact actively making it available. To claim, therefore, that it is being censored, is nothing short of ludicrous. In addition, the distribution of the Bible has not been banned. The CU is free to, and regularly do, distribute copies of their religious texts. I have 7 copies of John’s gospel given to me by members of the CU. Unless they’ve been taken away since I was last there, there’s a big box of them underneath the stairs in George Square Lecture Theatre, the very building where the AGM will take place! The only difference between them distributing them on campus, and putting them in people’s rooms, is that when they’re distributing them, people can say no. This motion just allows religious groups to push the Bible or other religious texts onto people who otherwise wouldn’t want it.

That any group or society representing any particular point of view who wish to provide literature to be placed in every room in Pollock should be allowed to do so providing the books are made available freely at their own expense.

Oh so we’re not just talking about religious groups? So why don’t we allow the Socialist Society to put a copy of the Communist Manifesto in each room? Of course in response, the Conservative and Unionist Society will want a copy of their literature in the rooms too, and so will any other organised group out there. The University already has this kind of resource available, it’s right next door to George Square and it’s called the Main Library! But that last part, about the books being made available freely “at their own expense” is an interesting addition, I wonder why they put that in? Could it be that they know the CU, with its large membership and funded by the UCCF, is the only group on campus that would be able to afford such a project? Methinks so. More on that later.

The Association resolves: To mandate the President of EUSA to represent these views to Accommodation Services so that the situation can be returned to what it used to be prior to the SRC deciding Bibles
should be removed from Pollock.

You mean returned to what it was before progress was made, right?

Secularists tend to have two responses to this kind of problem. The first, very prominent in the States, would be to allow every group, religious or not, to put their book in the rooms. This is how ludicrous situations like the Washington State nativity scene come about. The second would be to not allow any groups to do it. I favour that option, and here’s why. It doesn’t matter if you give access to all groups, the big fish will always be able to dominate, in this case the CU will be able to put the Bible in the rooms and other groups will struggle. Then we’re back to the situation, where one group is favoured over another, that we were trying to avoid in the first place!

So that is why we shouldn’t pass this motion. Agree? Disagree? Put your comments here!

There are also a number of other motions going through the AGM which are of interest. One is about taking action against Israel, and another is about not giving a platform to discriminatory groups on campus. Maybe I’ll put a similar post up about that one. But regardless of where you stand on any of these issues, go to the AGM and vote! It’s on the 17th November 7pm in George Square Lecture Theatre.

Should the BBC have hosted the BNP?

Before I start, because this won’t be too long, a few pieces of news in case you haven’t heard:

1. Last week, Simon Singh was given permission to appeal against the ruling on meaning in the case against the British Chiropractic Association. That means David Eady’s ruling on the meaning of the word ‘bogus’ might not stand. In a stunning display of stupidity, the BCA also accused Singh of attacking them maliciously on their website, which gives him the option of countersuing, which inimitable law expert Jack of Kent reckons will bring the case to an end. I hope that doesn’t happen except as a last resort. As always, check out Jack of Kent’s blog for more information.

2. Over at the Friendly Humanist, Tim’s wife Deena has recently given birth to their second child, a healthy boy named Javan Allan Mills. Congratulations Tim, I’m made up.

3. Last week the Daily Mail published a disgusting column by Jan Moir on the death of Steven Gately, which drew links between his homosexuality, his lifestyle, his death and the deaths of other gay celebrities, saying there was nothing natural about his death (I mean it can’t possibly have been, after all he was gay), even though that’s exactly what the coroner has found. Fortunately the British public aren’t as homophobic as she is, and a record number of over 22,000 people have complained to the press complaints commission about the article. We’ll see what comes of it.

Anyway onto the issue. Last Thursday the BBC’s Question Time, a show during which members of the public can put questions to member of a panel including public figures like politicians, featured Nick Griffin, the racist and homophobic leader of the British Nationalist Party. I’m not in the UK so I couldn’t watch it live on the web, having to rely on Youtube the next afternoon to find out how it went.

I understand from discussions in forums that there has been a fair bit of controversy over whether the BBC should have allowed Griffin to appear in the show. There have been protests outside BBC headquarters, and the main claim is that it gives a platform to extremist and offensive views, and may lead to a further rise in popularity for the BNP.

This question was brought up at the end of the show, and the opinion of some of the panelists was that in our democracy we enjoy freedom of speech and under that freedom, the BNP has a right to express its opinions and the BBC has the right to broadcast them. I agree. The thing about freedom of speech is that you can’t just choose what kinds of opinions can be expressed, you have to include things that the majority might find offensive. Otherwise it would just be a tyranny of the majority. Just as the BNP has a right to their opinions I have a right to point out why they are wrong and express my opinion too.

But of course it’s not that simple. Mainstream media outlets have to realise that they have a wide audience and they have to take responsibility for what they broadcast or publish, especially when some things are put across as fact or as a voice of authority. This is one of the reasons why I objected to Jan Moir’s article above, she claims that there was nothing natural about the death when there was, and her frankly disgusting views were given a veneer of respectability by their prominent position on the pages of a mainstream newspaper. It’s not good enough.

So, does that mean I don’t think the BBC should have allowed the BNP on TV? No. The show pulled no punches; where someone tried to chat shit or avoid the question, they were pulled up on it, whether it was that Tory with the weird accent, Jack Straw, or Nick Griffin. Admittedly it was Griffin more than anyone else, but that’s just because his views are so extreme, they needed pulling up more often than anyone else. That’s one of the reasons why I think his complaint that they changed the format will fail. The format consists of questions posed by the public. Clearly the public wanted to challenge Griffin on his views. Planting other questions on the postal strike against what the majority wanted to focus on would have been changing the format, so he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He was shown to be the racist homophobic fool he is, despite his attempts to lie to the audience, so the BBC did not give his voice respectability and neither did they allow him to present his lies as facts. In that sense, I think they were quite responsible in their broadcasting.

The Ontological Argument

Ok, so seeing as the Ontological Argument is so terrible and won’t take long, I’m going to preface this with a bit of a jibe at Conservapedia. If you read the blogs you’ve probably heard by now that they’ve decided to rewrite the Bible to get rid of all the liberal bias contained within it. It’s pretty ludicrous but nothing particularly new, there are plenty of translations out there with their own theological bias and this is just one more. One little thing though. If we’re taking Conservative to mean an effort to maintain the past and oppose reform, then isn’t this action quite distinctly un-Conservative of them? I mean it’s bordering on liberal to just change the Bible. Also, they say it would take one person a year to do it, which is obviously going to be spread across a lot of people. But if anyone can edit it (in fact it’s likely a Poe that started this whole thing), then how are they going to be sure that only Bible experts are going to translate? There aren’t all that many people fluent in ancient languages.

Anyway onto the Ontological Argument. The argument was devised by St Anselm, and I’m ashamed to say that my school was named after this dweeb. One day I decided to look up who he was and when I came across this argument, it was a real facepalm moment, even though I was still a Christian. Here’s how it goes:

1. God is defined as the greatest individual that can be conceived.

2. A God that exists is greater than a God which does not exist.

3. Therefore, God exists.

Just go and read that again, hopefully you won’t need to read the rest of this post. Amazingly I’ve heard this argument used within the last couple of years. A friend of mine who isn’t a Christian but has been known to consider the first cause argument quite persuasive wrote an essay for his philosophy course agreeing with it, and somehow got a good mark. I read it afterwards, it was bollocks!

Anyway there are several lines of argument against this travesty of logic. Let’s start with the most obvious. Being able to conceive of something does not mean that it exists. Sounds pretty obvious but Anselm was one of those people who claimed faith comes before reason, which tends to lead to circular reasoning. What this argument does is assert God to be perfect, and then claim existence to be a perfect attribute, effectively asserting that God exists in the first premise! When what we should really be doing is taking a list of all the things that can be conceived, next to that taking a list of everything that exists, and then cross-checking the lists to find the Highest Common Factor (in terms of perfection), which then we know exists. This would be something like… Oreos, I dunno.

Secondly, since when is existence a greater attribute than non-existence? I don’t think you could even call existence an attribute at all since things that don’t exist don’t have any attributes. That’s a premise that you would have to justify. But besides that, I can conceive of plenty of things better than the Christian God. One who’s not such a prick for a start! So suck on those mouldy apples, Anselm, my God is more perfect than yours and therefore by your logic exists.

Another thing is, we could prove the existence of anything! Every God who is claimed to be perfect exists, even the ones who say the other ones don’t exist. Babe Ruth is apparently the greatest baseball player ever. But I can conceive of a baseball player who was better than Babe Ruth, and since existence is a greater attribute than non-existence, then a baseball player better than Babe Ruth must exist!

There are plenty of parodies of this argument but this is my favourite, which I robbed off Iron Chariots (which, by the way, is an excellent resource both for counter-apologists and for religionists who want to strengthen their arguments). It’s called Gasking’s Proof:

1. The creation of the universe is the greatest achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement consists of its intrinsic greatness and the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the handicap to the creator, the greater the achievement (would you be more impressed by Turner painting a beautiful landscape or a blind one-armed dwarf?)
4. The biggest handicap to a creator would be non-existence
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the creation of an existing creator, we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. Therefore, God does not exist.

Fine tuning argument

PostScript: This has turned into a massive post, I do apologize. It’s also kind of dry and not particularly funny. Maybe I’ll see if I can liven it up with pictures or something to make it less daunting.

I believe I wrote a piece on this topic a while ago after some goon gave a talk at an Edinburgh Creation Group meeting but this will be a more structured approach rather than a rant, I hope. The fine tuning argument is something that I’ve seen come up a few times in online discussions and it’s pretty stupid. Not quite up there with the ontological argument which I may write up about soon, but pretty stupid when you come to think about it.

The fine tuning argument simply states that there are a number of cosmological constraints which must be within a certain threshold in order for life to exist, and since they are within those thresholds that allow life to exist, it’s reasonable to conclude that the universe was designed that way with life as it’s purpose. It often comes side by side with arguments about the earth being perfect for human life which I’ll also mention here very briefly, and the strong anthropic principle which is quite similar, but also goes further to say that a universe must have the properties necessary for life, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

So lets start with the whole Earth being designed for us thing. The argument usually goes along the lines that if the Earth was any further away from the sun it’d be too cold for life, and any further away, it’d be too cold. If the moon was any closer then the tides would cause massive flooding which would make land based life impossible, any further away and the tides wouldn’t be enough which means a lot of water based life forms wouldn’t be able to survive, things like that.

Well I have two arguments agains this. First of all is that life has evolved on this planet to adapt to its environment. Yes we couldn’t survive if it was too cold, but if it was a little more cold other life forms could have arisen. We do have some beings on this planet living in very difficult conditions. Similarly if the tides were different, we would have evolved differently, just as if gravity was greater on this planet we’d have evolved a lot differently. The second argument is that we shouldn’t be surprised that we are able to live on this planet, since this is where we live and those conditions are necessary in order for the development of an intelligent observer. If this planet wasn’t capable of supporting life, then we wouldn’t be here, just as if another planet that now isn’t capable of supporting life was, then life may have evolved there and they’d be saying the exact same thing. It’s no coincidence that life has developed in conditions suitable for life. As Douglas Adams was known to say, a puddle wakes up one morning and thinks: ‘This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly… I mean really precise isn’t it?… It must have been made to have me in it.’” This is the weak anthropic principle. If there are more planets capable of supporting life than the inverse probability of life developing on any one of them, then actually life developing somewhere in the universe would be a statistical certainty rather than something to be surprised about.

Then we get to the fine tuning argument itself which is that not only is the planet designed to support us, but the universe too. So if the strong nuclear force was a bit different then heavier elements would be impossible to make, meaning life wouldn’t have formed, and if the Big Bang had expanded any slower it would have collapsed leaving not enough time for life to develop.

There are a great many arguments against this. First of all, to notice that the VAST majority of the universe does not support life, and then to claim that the purpose of the universe is to support life, is massively arrogant. Clearly the universe is better suited to making black holes than it is to supporting life, since we have observed many black holes and are yet to observe a planet with life other than ours (ok, black holes are also easier to observe but you get my point). The supporters of this argument are arbitrarily deciding that life is the purpose of the galaxy, even though it does other things much better. There is no reason to suppose that any natural phenomenon requires a fine tuner any more than any other, other than subjective judgement. In fact human beings have created areas far more finely tuned to supporting life than even just the planet Earth, never mind the rest of the universe. If we can do better than this creator, well then I’ve got better things to do than waste my time worshipping this lousy intern with a bad attitude.

Secondly, many of the constants are related so although Hugh Ross says he has 101, it’s actually much fewer than that. For example the force of gravity and the rate of expansion of the universe are related, and cannot be changed independently. This reduces the odds considerably.

Thirdly, we can also apply the weak anthropic principle to this argument. It’s entirely plausible that there could be a multiverse out there with a universe for each one of the possible combinations of the cosmological constants. Many of them may have ended by now since their particular combination rendered a universe un-maintainable. Many of them may not have even started. In this case, just as it’s no surprise that we’re on a planet that supports life, we should not be surprised that we’re in a universe that is capable of supporting life, since we are, you know, alive.

At this point the religionist will point out that since there is no evidence of a multiverse, then it is faith just the same as believing in a creator. My response to that is that it is a small leap of faith, but nothing like to the extent that belief in a creator is, since we live in one universe and see no reason why something similar could not exist outside of it, whereas we have no experience of anything like a being capable of creating a universe.

On a similar vein, it could also be that the cosmological constants are different in different parts of the universe. We have only observed a very small part of the universe and although I’m not so big on physics that I know it’s possible, it’s not beyond question. If we live in an oscillating universe, every time there’s a big crunch it could be that the cosmological constraints are scrambled. The idea of a fine-tuner is one that I don’t really accept because it implies that there’s some kind of machine with knobs that are turned by someone, which assumes the conclusion and begs the question, but let’s say that the universal constants can be changed and are, at random. Maybe in the vast majority of cases a universe isn’t possible, so the constants keep scrambling until a Big Bang happens. Maybe only a fraction of those universes are capable of supporting life, but again with the weak anthropic principle we should not be surprised that we live in one that does.

Just as a bit of an addition to this point, it could be that the constraints of our universe are conducive to the development of many different forms of life. This would kind of piss on the fire of a religionist who considers humanity to be the sole point of the universe. It could also be that a fairly wide range of universal constants different to the ones we enjoy in this universe may be conducive to the development of some kind of life. This reduces the magical properties of the universal constants we have and reduces the odds of life developing considerably.

Additionally, we don’t know how the universe works and we have no idea how many different combinations of the universal constants are possible! Without such knowledge, claiming that the constants have been fine-tuned is nothing more than speculation.

Now I’m going to get a little more philosophical and try to argue that the argument is actually self-refuting, partly inspired by the “Why God almost certainly does not exist” chapter of Dawkin’s God Delusion (which in that context I actually don’t think is a particularly good argument, but whatever). The argument claims that in order for life to exist there must have been a creator who fine tuned the constants. And yet in the same breath it assumes the existence of a creator who existed in conditions that did not require a creator. So either the initial premise that these conditions require a creator are false, or we have an infinite regress of creators fine-tuning the universe to make the existence of the next creator possible.

Additionally, it could be that the probability of the constants being the way they are is lower than the probability of the existence of a supernatural creator. That would make our existence unlikely, but a naturalistic explanation more likely than that of a creator, which means it was just a lucky roll of the dice.

The final part of this set of arguments (and I promise this’ll be short) is that the universe must contain life, else it would not exist. Well, that’s just a lie. The universe would still exist if there was no life in it, it would just go unobserved.

So I think I’ve made a pretty strong case. Sorry about that.

Jesus Camp Canadian Style

I’d just like to draw attention to a series of videos I just discovered. After a few days without internet, I went to take a quick peek at The Atheist Experience Blog, where just today, Tracie posted this little review of a YouTube playlist. She didn’t post the link but luckily (because I couldn’t find it) a commenter posted a link to the YouTube channel she was talking about, which can be found here.

The playlist is called ShwaNerd’s Camping Trip and it deals with a trip he took to a Pentecostal church camp. He attempted to make something similar to the Jesus Camp film which made the rounds a while ago, and I presume it’s not finished because it seems to just cut out at the end. A great deal of the video is actually just audio. I presume this is because (as well as keeping the size of the videos down for upload) this kid is seriously in the atheist closet and he doesn’t want to reveal where he was filming from in case he’s found out. As an atheist living in Europe I am so grateful of the accident of birth that put me in a situation where it’s OK not to believe, where I don’t have to hide and pretend to be someone else. I can be as outspoken as I like and noone can do anything about it.

Anyway one of the things that comes up in the videos is about money, which I think is a bit strange. In the Catholic Church there was a collection every week but it was understood that this money went to third world projects, especially to CAFOD, and only a small amount was taken for the upkeep of the church, for example. Maybe that wasn’t true but it’s the way it seemed to me. Here, it’s explicitly clear that this money goes to the church, you’re giving to God (because God needs money). In the first clip there’s a glimpse of how much money comes into the church from donations. They get $55,000 from donations (I think that’s just for this week long camp) and they still ask for more. In other clips, most significantly the fourth, they’re asking kids (this is a youth camp) for money at the services telling them that they can catch God’s eye that way. The giving is nothing to do with doing good deeds, it’s just for that personal relationship with God which is so crucial in a lot of fundamentalist ideologies. It’s really shocking for me, hussling kids out of their money with promises of God’s love which they can’t possibly know they’ll get. There wasn’t even any mention of the story in Mark’s gospel about the poor old woman giving more than the rich man, even though she only gave a few coins, which in a sermon about giving is pretty standard, in my experience. I don’t know what else to say.

There’s nothing positive about positive discrimination

This is the latest column in Humanitie. This time, Tim at the Friendly Humanist and I tackle positive discrimination and come to fairly different conclusions. Be sure to read this side by side with Tim’s column.

When I was at school, one of the things we did in Spanish class was to take a newspaper article on a subject, split the class and debate over its content. One day, the article was on Zapatero appointing equal numbers of men and women to his Cabinet, and I was supposed to argue against it. “Bloody brilliant,” I remember thinking, “how the hell am I supposed to argue against equal representation for women in government? That’s like arguing in favour of apartheid!”

I was about to bite the bullet and falsely take the machista line, all too familiar in an all-boys Catholic school, when I looked at the accompanying photograph and suddenly it hit me. (An idea, not the photograph.) Why are they making such a big deal out of this? Why does it matter how many women are on the Cabinet? If we’re going to insist that the government represents the demographic from which it gains its legitimacy, then are we also going to select people based on religious belief? Race? Disability? Age?  Class? Left-handedness? I understand 1 in 18 people have a third nipple… The whole point of the equality movement is that race, sex, disability and all that shouldn’t matter, and yet this positive discrimination malarkey is shining a huge light on each feature and saying “Look! Women in government! Big deal! Big deal!”

Whatever happened to just hiring someone because they’re most suited to the job? Wouldn’t women (or any other disadvantaged person for that matter) rather get a job because they’re the best person for it, rather than because they fulfil a quota? I’d rather have a black, 50 year old blind woman who’s good at her job represent me in government than someone who shares some of my attributes but wouldn’t know a good law if it bit him on the arse. Now some affirmative action advocates are going to stop me here and explain that it’s not about passing over someone who is more suited, it’s only about discriminating when two candidates are equally suited. Equally suited? There’s no such thing! When you look at everything, attendance rates, references, qualifications, interview performance, experience, one candidate will always have the edge, and that’s who should get the job.

But the main reason I despise positive discrimination is that it’s the easy way out. Without it, we’d have a lot of work to do improving access to education, facilitating social mobility and changing hearts and minds so that earlier down the line negative discrimination won’t have had an effect, and there won’t be any need for positive discrimination to make things right at the end stage. As it is, positive discrimination just puts a blanket over all the background work that needs to be done, tweaking the numbers at the end to make it look like everything’s ok, because the alternative would take a lot of time and a bit of effort. I want equal opportunities, not just equal numbers.

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.

God: arsehole

You may know these lines from Dawkins’ The God Delusion:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

These are very famous words, and Christians etc will often point at them as an example of ‘fundamentalist atheism’, if there is such a thing. But it’s an easy statement to back up, all you have to do is read the Bible with a critical eye and you’ll see the terrible things he does and advocates. He destroys civilisations for next to no reason, he damns humanity for eating an apple, he turns a woman into a pillar of salt for turning her head around, he’d rather have 2 of Lot’s daughters raped by a mob than 1 man. There are all those crazy laws set in place (which aren’t limited to the Old Testament, btw). An example of good behaviour is Abraham preparing to kill his son for no good reason! First of all, surely an omniscient God would know whether Abraham would have done it or not, there was no need for the test. But more importantly, all this God wants is blind obedience, with no critical thinking whatsoever. How is this in our interest?

But that stuff’s easy to pick out, I want to look at the things that get assumed or taken for granted by Christians, things that are so engrained into our culture that we don’t often look at them for what they really are.

So, big number 1 on the reasons God is an arsehole is the problem of evil. I’ll dedicate a whole post to this soon, I think, as I haven’t really touched on it that much, but I think this is a justifiable reason not to believe in God. Christians blame it on the Fall or Free Will (we’ll get onto that soon enough), but neither of those explanations stand up to scrutiny. Maybe I’ll be writing about that tomorrow. If I was God, you wouldn’t have to pray to me to cure your child of leukemia, I’d just do it, or I wouldn’t have let the child get it in the first place.

Anyway, next up is this free will bollocks. Here’s a series of videos which do the job of explaining much better than I can. Be sure to watch all three parts.

God wants us to choose because he doesn’t want a bunch of mindless drones in heaven with him, and yet one of the choices results in a punishment imposed by him. Say I asked you if you wanted chicken or beef, but that if you chose chicken then I’d blow your brains out, would that be a free choice? Not really. Maybe I really want chicken but because of the punishment I choose beef. Is that what God wants? Surely that’s just the same as having mindless drones? I haven’t chosen God, I’ve just chosen not-hell. It’s blackmail.

It’s ridiculous, and just like in the Abraham story, it’s totally unneccesary. Why bother with Earth when he knows who’s going to choose him and who isn’t? Why not just only create people who he knows are going to choose him? Why create people who he knows are destined to burn in eternal hellfire, like me? It’s sadistic.

Related to this point is what’s required for salvation. Remember, God is making the rules here, he supposedly created everything! First of all he needs a blood sacrifice. He can’t just forgive. That doesn’t sound like an omnipotent God to me. In fact it sounds distinctly like the musings of some stone age barbarians influenced by paganism. Secondly according to Christians, the only way to be saved is by believing in Jesus Christ. Not just being good, not helping other people, just believing. If I were God, I wouldn’t have salvation based on belief in something ludicrous despite the lack of evidence, that would leave me in heaven with a bunch of gullible idiots with no critical thinking skills. No, my requirement would be something like “don’t be a prick”. I wouldn’t care if someone believed in me or not.

So God’s an arsehole. In fact, he’s such an arsehole that even if there were proof of his existence, I’d like to think I wouldn’t worship him. I’d sooner worship a complete stranger, the odds are they’re more moral than the God Christians claim to know and love.

Skepticamp 2009

We had an excellent night at the Edinburgh Skepticamp 2009. The two Alexes gave presentations on statistical fallacies and paranormal investigations, respectively, whilst someone I’d never met before called Terry spoke about how best to win over the believers, and I concentrated on alternative medicine with homoeopathy being the main focus.

It was the last Q&A section that started the most vigorous debate, where we were speaking about whether it would be easier to win over a fundamentalist or a moderate believer, with all of the speakers up on stage. One man stood up and asked the question “What’s wrong with being a believer?” to which someone on stage replied that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong (depending on what you mean by ‘wrong’), as long as it doesn’t affect other things. The man agreed, but continued with the sentence “it’s wrong for religionists to force their beliefs on others, just as it’s wrong for skepticism to be forced on others”.

This struck me as rather curious because he was comparing two very different things, religion being a set of dogmatic beliefs, and science and skepticism being a method best suited to acquiring the truth. So I said so and he replied that, for example, ‘evolutionism’ was a belief that we were forcing on others. Somehow then we got into a discussion about the evidence for evolution and established that although it’s not a fact, it’s about as close to a fact as we have in science. But this man maintained that since it is not a fact it should not be forced onto others.

I struggle to see what his point was. Was he seriously suggesting that it’s just as morally wrong to teach a child about evolution, with all the evidence in favour of it, as to teach the child about creationism which has no evidence for it whatsoever? It’s obviously more wrong to ‘force’ a lie onto someone than a truth, and although we can’t possibly know for sure whether something is true, that’s not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. We can put them in order of what is more likely to be true, based on the available evidence, and we do know that some claims cannot be true based on the current evidence.

But that’s missing the larger point that skeptics don’t force their beliefs on others! Skepticism is about criticising other people’s beliefs and claims, picking them apart and saying “this is unlikely to be true because A, B, C.” We may then propose another belief that is better supported by the evidence, but skeptics would be more than happy to defend their beliefs from critical argument, if only because at the end of the process we’ll be one step closer to the truth! It’s all about the free interchange of ideas, something that skepticism and science do well, because they are always changing, and something that dogmatic belief systems like religion do very badly, since they don’t change at all.

I’m reminded of this video that PZ Myers posted on Pharyngula this week of Wendy Wright from American Women Concerned for America or something. I only watched the first part because I’m short on time right now, but that’s enough to see that she’s asking for a ridiculously high level of evidence for evolution (her version of evidence is ‘if you can’t put it in my hand, it’s not evidence’), whilst allowing her own beliefs to slip completely under the skepticism radar. Take a look, here’s the first part and I’m sure you can find the rest of them.

An act of God?

The regime of nonsense up in the Hebrides are demonstrating their fundamentalist side once again. The first Sunday ferry from Stornoway to Ullapool is scheduled to take place tomorrow, not due to aggressive new atheist reformists as the nutters would probably have you believe (or maybe they’re so backwards they refuse to believe that the new atheists exist), but due to popular demand instead. However, the ferry that was originally going to carry out the crossing, called The Isle of Lewis, yesterday broke down with exhaust problems, and now of course they’re all saying that it’s an act of God. One warned that bad things will happen, saying that God has the power to sink a ferry (really? I’ve never seen him do anything). Personally I put this at about the same level of fundamentalism as the Bishop of Carlisle who said the flooding a few years ago was a punishment from God for our moral decadence, or the Westboro Baptists who claim the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s punishment for the “fag-enablers” amongst the American people. Pretty much the same thing on a different scale of offensiveness.

But let’s take a closer look, shall we? If God really wanted to show us puny humans and stop the Sunday ferry service, why didn’t he sink the bugger? Why didn’t he burn the ferry station to the ground like he did with Sodom and Gomorrah? Why didn’t he cause a massive storm every Sunday so the ferry would have to be cancelled? Something a bit more obvious than, you know, something that could’ve happened anyway. More importantly, why couldn’t he get the day right?  If it broke down on Sunday itself, maybe they might have some kind of basis for claiming that God is angry, but two days earlier? That’s just sloppy workmanship! What’s the point in serving a God who doesn’t even know what day of the week it is? As it is, another ferry is just going to do the crossing. Mistakes like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. I’m actually not surprised he got the day wrong, Christians can’t even get which day the Sabbath is right (hint: their stupid book says it’s Saturday).

If it was the work of God, well he’s certainly fucked up, hasn’t he? As one of the commenters on that story said, why didn’t he make one of the Somalian pirate ships break down? Why didn’t he do something useful? If he’s so concerned about keeping Sunday holy, why haven’t all the shops that are open on Sunday burnt down, or at least (seeing as he’s insistent on taking the lazy route and not doing much at all) come across a series of complications on Sunday that they don’t encounter for the rest of the week? (What happened to you God? You used to be cool. You used to be all about the fire.) It’s so stupid that these nutcases think they can interpret the mind of a nonexistent entity through the malfunctions of seabound public transport systems.

But I do find this line of reasoning a bit weird. It’s a perverse version of the kind of logic people try to use to justify their belief in God, similar to in this video. You’ve probably heard it before, something like “oh I believe in God because I prayed that I would get a new job/get better again and I did.”  But usually this is only used if good things happen, because otherwise bad things happening would be evidence that God didn’t exist, or that God was evil. They don’t normally mention the bad things because it works against their argument.  It’s kind of like a conscious recall bias. But here the bad things are evidence that God does exist and that he’s angry. Whatever happened to this all loving God who’s waiting to take me into his arms if I just say the word? When did this God turn to doing bad things to prove (or rather not prove) his existence? How does an omnibenevolent being even do bad things?

But like I say, the ferry’s going ahead, and a small amount of normality will return to people’s Sunday lives. Hey, here’s an idea? Why don’t we let people sign a contract saying they want to observe the Sabbath on Sunday, and then if their house burns down, or they need an air ambulance, we can just say no because that’s work. Or, even better, why don’t we charge the Sabbatarians with false imprisonment. They’ve been keeping people cooped up on their island one day a week for how long now? Hmm… food for thought.