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:

The Blind Leading the Stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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