A little encounter back home

Just a brief one today, a little bit of pisstaking. I spent 5 days back at home for a funeral, but had to get some work done while I was there. To this end, I decided to go the Blackwell’s in Liverpool to find a book I needed. They didn’t have it because their foreign literature section is tiny. Anyway my mum said she’d pick me up so I waited outside (in the cold – won’t be heading back in a hurry) with a coffee, and whilst I was standing there, a guy came over and handed me a flyer. This is nothing unusual on university campuses.

Anyway so the flyer read “If you don’t believe in God, then you’re in for a shock!” Interesting, I thought, (not) expecting to find some irrefutable evidence inside the leaflet. Instead it was just repeating what the Bible says about Jesus’ “cross-work on Calvary” and that believing in him is all the proof you need.

So I said to this guy, “oh, the Bible, I’ve read that.”
“Do you believe it?” he said.
“No, I’m an atheist, a humanist actually.”
“Oh,” he replied sneerily, “I see you’ve hardened your heart like the Pharoah did, then.”

I was quite taken aback by his tone (and that he of all people was apparently accusing me of a lack of critical thinking), but luckily he brought forward an example that I knew quite well, so I replied “Well I’m glad you brought that up, because actually, the Pharoah didn’t harden his heart, the Bible says that God did it.”

“No he didn’t, not the first time.”
“Really? Because I have the Bible quote, you can look it up if you want. It’s in Exodus 4.”

So he pulled out a Bible from his bag and I went through Exodus 4 and picked out the quotation, well before Moses meets the Pharoah. God says to him, “When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.”

And again, before the second meeting with the Pharoah, God says it again “And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.” He’s essentially saying “I’m not going to let Pharoah agree, so that I can punish the Egyptians”. Nice guy, this god. Don’t know why he doesn’t just punish them anyway, doesn’t seem too far out of his character.

So anyway, this guy kept flicking backwards and forwards in his Bible, trying to look for some time before Exodus 4 when Pharoah hardens his own heart. He couldn’t find it, so he slammed his Bible with a huff and walked off without a word. Sometimes I love it when I know the Bible better than they do.

A nd I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.

(7:4, 13) “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” God hardens Pharaoh’s heart for the second time. Who hardened the Pharaoh’s heart? (7:4) “Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt.” God will make sure that Pharaoh does not listen to Moses, so that he can kill Egyptians with his armies. (7:5, 17) “And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD.” (Who else could be so cruel and unjust?)

7:4 But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.

Agora

This weekend I went to visit a friend in Madrid, and whilst we were there we went to see Agora, the film with Rachel Weisch that I’d seen adverts for, but I didn’t have any idea what it was about (it’s weird when you don’t watch TV, you see all these billboards and adverts on buses, but all they have is their name and who’s in it. Without the trailer you have no idea what it’s about and most of the time they looks ridiculously crap). Anyway it turns out it’s about the library at Alexandria. Cool!

**Spoilers will be throughout this post alongside my thoughts, if you want to go see it, go and do so before reading this**

Anyway so the film opens by explaining that in the fourth century the Library wasn’t only a great store of knowledge, but that it was also surrounded by religious debate, and the opening scene marks a debate between a Christian and what they refer to as pagans, by which it means believers in the Roman gods. The Christian proves that he’s correct with a ‘miracle’ when he walks across the fiery coals without being hurt, and then his mates throw the pagan into the coals and of course he is burnt. Several characters see this as proof of Christianity. I don’t think I need to debunk that, but I was struck by how petty this god seems to be, to intervene to help a man cross some coals, but not intervening to prevent all kinds of suffering that no doubt were happening at this point in history. People were still dying in huge numbers during childbirth!

Anyway so one day the Christians start mocking the pagan gods, throwing rotten fruit at the statues. As a response to this insult, the pagans, so famous for their rational thought, decide to go on a killing spree, and quite a pathetic one at that. They surround the group of unarmed Christians with swords, but managed to get turned away and take many injuries. The Christians force them back into the Library, and they close the gates and are trapped inside.

I was very much reminded of a verse from the Bible, funnily enough. In Judges 6, Gideon breaks the altar of Baal and when the citizens of the town call for his head for doing it, his father says, “Are you going to plead Baal’s cause? Are you trying to save him? Whoever fights for him shall be put to death by morning! If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar.” Indeed. Why gods need people to defend them is beyond me.

So this pathetic, but tragically deadly religious bickering reaches a stalemate, both sides wanting blood. The Christian Emperor Theodosius decrees that the pagans will be pardoned, but that the library is to be given to the Christians to do whatever they want. So the Christians come in, destroy all the statues and burn all the ‘pagan’ works in the Library. This page seems to agree with the story, but with a small addition, the pagans had already been kicked out of their temples by the Romans, and then the Christians put up the statues in a church by way of mocking them, and that’s when the riot started. So the pagans aren’t a problem anymore, we now have the Jews and the Christians living side by side.

Not for long. In the film, the Christians go to the theatre on the Sabbath and throw stones at the Jews there. There’s a line where one of the Jews says that they couldn’t defend themselves because it was the Sabbath and that would be work. I suspect the director’s taking a bit of a poke at the idea of the Sabbath here. The Jews retaliate, and we’re in the same situation, with the Roman prefect trying to keep the peace between the two groups. It’s just so petty, and it’s still happening now, with religious fundamentalists still waging wars against each other.

Anyway the interesting thing is that throughout all of this we have the philosopher Hypatia, nominally a pagan, but she doesn’t really refer to ‘the gods’ at all. She’s been pondering whether the sun orbits the earth or vice versa, discovers that both are possible, but comes to the problem that we’re further away from the sun in the winter. She’s a friend of the prefect, who becomes unpopular because he takes advice from this woman (albeit probably the most intelligent woman of her time), which is against the teachings of Paul as we know. Perhaps yet another dig at modern-day religious beliefs on the part of the director? So Hypatia’s literally just discovered the shape of the ellipse in the orbit, by some strange method involving dividing the sun into two parts, and seeing that the sum distance between them doesn’t change, which seems really strange considering she knows there’s only one sun. But I digress. Hypatia gets kidnapped by the Christians, taken to a church where they want to skin her alive. But one of the Christians, a former slave of Hypatia, says to stone her instead, and when they go to gather stones, he suffocates her out of mercy, while she stares at the ellipse shape made by the shadow of the sun through a hole in the ceiling. Nice feel-good ending.

But the message of this film seems clear, and I’m surprised that Christians in the US haven’t announced a boycott on this one as well (I suppose their pastors didn’t notice it so they had noone to think for them). We have religious groups fighting amongst each other, each essentially looking no less pathetic than the others. They claim to have these deep, very important beliefs, but actually in practice these beliefs don’t achieve anything but destruction. The main victims of this destruction are Hypatia as a woman and as someone accused of godlessness, and also science and the progress of the human race. It’s just such a pity that the world has changed so little between now and then. Still now we have the threat of armageddon with nuclear weapons in the hands of religious fanatics, we have religious groups holding back the progress of research into potentially life-saving science, and we still have women and atheists being oppressed in many parts of the world by religious groups. Religionists take note, many of your views seem as pathetic to me as the views of the characters will to you.

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.

Beppe Grillo and V Day

Just to draw attention to a new addition to the blogroll. This is Beppe Grillo’s blog, which I’ve been reading regularly for a couple of weeks now. You can read it in English, Italian or Japanese. Grillo is an Italian comedian who has turned his attention to political reform. He is scathingly critical of the current regime there, to the point that no public Italian TV network wants him on air for fear of attracting the furore of politicians, many of whom have a big hand in the media, not least Berlusconi himself. In spite of this, he is still one of the most famous personalities in Italy, broadcasting over the internet (not easy in Italy, where internet access it quite strictly controlled), and when he did make a rare TV appearance in the 90’s the show got huge viewing numbers.

Here’s an introductory video from the New York Times. I don’t know how to embed it else I would but it’s worth watching, please do come back . I think ‘Va Fan Culo’ (or however you spell it) is now one of my favourite expletives. It translates quite well into the fine Scottish term, “get to fuck”.

Each post will typically have a video which obviously is in Italian, I can understand more or less because I live with an Italian and I’m used to hearing it and translating into Spanish, but there’s a nifty little tool which I’ve grown to love. If you go the the bottom right of the video and turn on captions, then subtitles come up. You can then translate these subtitles into English which I believe uses Google translate (don’t knock it, it used to be crap but it’s got much better in the last few years, although it’s still not perfect). So you can enjoy too. Here’s an example so you can see just how brilliant a public speaker Grillo is, it’s a 25 minute video outlining what the movement wants to do. You don’t have to watch it all, the part about information is the best, that starts at about 16:10.

Anyway there are two things making headlines in Italian politics at the minute. First of all is the so-called ‘Lodo Alfano’ which is a law granting immunity from prosecution to the holders of the four highest offices in Italian politics. Basically it was a means of making Berlusconi not have to face prosecution for his crimes. It works quite well in conjunction with another law which shortened the time limit of prosecutions for some offenses, mainly the ones he and his cronies have been accused of. So if he can avoid prosecutions whilst in office, and he’s been in office for more than 10 years, and a law put through by him means that after 10 years he can’t be prosecuted, well then he’s just getting off scot-free. A select Orwellian quote I read somewhere by one of his supporters was that the Prime Minister should not be seen as a ‘first among equals’ but rather ‘first above equals’. Fortunately this Lodo Alfano got struck down this week by the constitutional court, because it conflicts with an article of the Constitution which says all citizens are equal before the law, and a constitutional amendment would need to be passed to pass the law. Lots of my Italian friends are celebrating this, it seems to me that good news is few and far between in Italian politics.

The other thing is the Fiscal Shield. This is a move designed to allow 300 billion euros to move back into Italy from offshore banks and investments with just a 5% tax, which the additional guarantee of anonymity. I can’t stress how corrupt this is. Basically any money from dodgy dealings, money laundering, mafia money, tax-dodgers etc will be able to reenter the country to create a legitimate-appearing front for any other illegal activities. Brilliant. This one’s still going ahead, and the deputies of the opposition parties were noticably absent from the vote in Parliament. 24 outspoken opponents were absent, and 20 would have been enough to overturn the law, which the government had also turned into a vote of confidence, so it was a monumentally important vote.

Anyway although Grillo and his V Day movement is massive in Italy, I don’t think many people know about it outside of there. I myself had never even heard about it until my Italian flatmate mentioned it. So if you’re interested in this kind of thing, spread the word. There are hordes of like-minded people throughout the rest of the world who can do a lot of damage to the Italian government’s already terrible public image, if only they had a bit of information. It’s in the interest of democracy and liberty, something that humanists should definitely be concerned about.

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.

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.

Guns and bars don’t mix

Check out this video from the BBC, I don’t think it’ll let me embed it. A woman is claiming that her having a gun with her in the bar could’ve saved her husband’s life, after a stalker followed her into the bar where she runs a karaoke night and shot her husband dead earlier this year. This comes ahead of a new law which will allow registered gun users in Tennessee to carry loaded guns into bars and restaurants.

Now I didn’t really care until she came out with this line about halfway through the video: “you know I don’t care so much, about a bad guy’s life. I’m sorry, I don’t. They make the choice to do evil. That’s their choice.” To me this indicates a naive black and white perception of people, categorizing them into good and evil, as if it’s that simple.

So let’s look at her claims. Well, I’m skeptical that her having a gun would’ve saved her husband in the first place. Let’s say her stalker walks into the bar and suddenly pulls a gun. It takes half a second to kill her husband. Then she reaches for her gun and he shoots her as well, and we’ve got (at least) two body bags on the way out of the building. Having an extra gun there just escalates the situation needlessly.

But this is just this one relatively rare scenario where a stalker goes out looking to kill. What would happen to ordinary situations if guns were introduced? A guy’s at the bar and catches another guy checking out his girlfriend. Ordinarily if he’s had a few drinks he might go over and punch the guy in the face, but if he’s got a gun, there’s the possibility he’ll pull it, and then we’ve got a dead guy instead of a guy with a black eye, and then his friend pulls and gun and gets involved, and we’ve got how many dead people instead of one guy with a black eye. How many drunken disagreements and fights do you see in bars? Would you want to add guns to that situation? It may only be registered gun users who can take them in but so what? Who’s going to be checking on the door of every bar whether they have registration documents for their weapon, and it’s not like it’s difficult to be a registered user anyway!

Here’s the one I’m most concerned about though. A guy’s had a few too many and the barman refuses to give him any more. He takes this as a personal insult, as has happened several times to me personally, and pulls a gun. Is there any less appropriate place to allow guns than in a place that serves alcohol? When will this wannabe cowboys realise that having more guns is never going to solve the problem? All you have to do is look at their gun crime figures and see that most of those situations could’ve been prevented or would’ve been considerably less deadly if there’d been no guns involved at all.

Fraternising with the enemy

The latest edition of Humanitie is out. This is my contribution, which as always should be read alongside Tim’s contribution from The Friendly Humanist.

I was invited by a friend of mine in the Christian Union (yes, I do have friends) to an Alpha Course group. For the first few weeks we followed the structure of the course guide, but we increasingly noticed that Nicky Gumbel, the incredibly well-spoken man behind the course, assumes he’s managed to turn everyone into a Christian after week three. Unsurprisingly, he’ll have to try again with me. So we did away with the course guides and instead we’d just have a discussion about some aspect of Christianity like the power of prayer, final judgement or the unlikelihood of life or something. Then after a few weeks of that we watched some short films as a stimulus and have a discussion afterwards, and we kind of fizzled out from there. All in all we met for about 10 weeks.

There were several points when I realised some differences between many theists and many atheists. For me and most other people, the reason for debate and discussion is a healthy respect for the truth. But that didn’t always seem to be the case there. Sometimes it seemed that the only reason they were engaging in the discussion was in the hope that I’d change my mind, with no possibility that they might too. Often I would make a point that they couldn’t answer (like for example that you could never justify eternal punishment), but instead of taking it on board, they just changed tack and used another argument to try and convince me. I didn’t expect that from relatively liberal Christians at university (although I’m still shocked that several members of the CU don’t believe in evolution).

So is it worth doing? Definitely! Interactions of this type between humanists and faith groups mean that next time someone at church refers to the demon atheist wallowing in sin and obstinate hatred of the innocent baby Jesus, the believer knows at least one example where that isn’t true, and similarly we don’t fall into the lazy trap of generalising religionists as idiots (we should only call them idiots if they ARE idiots). Humanists should constantly be challenging their own positions, and discussion with a group of people who don’t share those positions is the perfect opportunity to do so! I found that I came out of such encounters more sceptical of religious belief than when I went in, with my arguments and opinions honed (and my patience more durable). I have an appreciation for evidence that I didn’t have before. But most importantly of all, these interactions with faith groups mean that now, everyone at the Chaplaincy includes non-believers in their thoughts and actions from the offset. They no longer speak of ‘faith groups’ but of ‘beliefs and traditions’ or ‘backgrounds’. The humanists at the university have become part of a wider community based at the Chaplaincy. Of course many might see that as an excellent reason not to interact, but I think those people are missing out.