What Will It Take? Mini-Blog #1

          One important distinction between science and religion is what it takes to change each. While virtually all religions have different sects, all teaching slight variations of the religion as a whole, the main doctrine of each has not changed since its beginning. For instance, the Bible still teaches Noah's Flood as it always has. The Qur'an still teaches that Muhammad visited Heaven and flew with the archangel Gabriel to Jerusalem in one night. Mormonism still teaches that Native Americans are actually descendants of the Lamanites, an ancient tribe of Israel. These are religious teachings that have been unchanged since each respective religion was created. These teachings are taught as truth every day, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are completely untrue. Religion never changes, and this is a terribly disturbing thought. On the other hand, science is in a constant state of change. This change is what has brought humanity out of the dark ages and into the realm of intellectual liberation. The realm of curing diseases, understanding the universe, learning of human origins, saving our planet, making our society free and equal. Scientific progress is fueled by evidence and critical thought, something most religions seem to admonish. Indeed, religion has been a tiresome roadblock, standing steadfastly in the way of human progress for centuries. When Galileo tried his best to infect us with the knowledge of heliocentrism (the fact that our solar system's planets revolve around the sun), the Catholic church found him guilty of heresy and condemned him to house arrest for the rest of his life. Galileo was correct, of course, but it was not until hundreds of years later, in 1992, that the Catholic church finally acknowledged their hideous mistake and apologized. Sadly, this mistake was only one instance of many. When it comes to truth, science holds the monopoly over religion, and it always will.
          So my question to any person of faith is what will it take to change your mind? Many people of faith admit that nothing will. I need not ask people of science what it would take to change their minds, because the answer is evidence. One of the most important distinctions between science and religion is what it takes to change each. For science, it is evidence. For religion, it is nothing. This is a truly disturbing fact. A fact that poisons minds, closing them forever from accepting difference. From accepting change. From accepting truth.

--Corey S.

"God was invented to explain mystery. 

God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand."
Richard Feynman --American physicist, awarded Nobel Prize in 1965

 

 "Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. 

No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now" Sir Arthur C. Clarke --British science fiction author and inventor

The Nature of Evidence

          The famous teapot in space. The flying spaghetti monster. Bigfoot and the Lochness Monster. Extraterrestrial beings. God. All of these have one thing in common: a lack of evidence to support them. During my many arguments with theists, I have asked them time and time again to present evidence for their claims and they always come up with one of three things.

1. They show "evidence" that seems secure at first glance, but falls apart under closer scrutiny.
2. They give anecdotal evidence (personal accounts that cannot be verified.)
3. They give up all hope and claim that faith must take the place of evidence.

          All three of these points are obviously utter bollocks of the most underhanded, deceitful origin. Let us break them down one by one.

1. They show "evidence" that seems secure at first glance, but falls apart under closer scrutiny.

          This is by far the best choice one can make in presenting evidence for their faith, and happens to be what most intellectual theologians use in their debates. The infamous Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind lays almost all of these claims out in his DVDs. I was subjected to these diabolically asinine tales of whimsy and even believed the man at one point during my naive teens. For the sake of brevity, I will not go into all of his claims. In short, he claims that the earth is roughly 6,000 years old, that evolution (macro-evolution to be exact) does not occur at all, that the Bible is the literal truth, that the great flood during the time of Noah actually occurred and formed the grand canyon, and the coup de grâce, that human beings and dinosaurs lived together at the same time and in the same place. It goes without saying that this absolutely flies in the face of scientific fact, and indeed, in the face of reality. I will be doing a complete series on Hovind in the future, and I will also touch on his son, Eric, who has taken over the family business of bullshitting ignorant people while his dad serves time in prison for tax fraud. Not all theologians are mad as a hatter and many of them are supremely intelligent and well-meaning. A few of them that I have witnessed in debate are John Lennox, Cardinal George Pell, and Dr. Hugh Ross. Under closer examination, though, they are only ever able to hold their ground in debates because they will not touch on anything that can be falsified at the current point in time. For example, Dr. Hugh Ross is a creationist and believes that God created everything. However, he differs from Kent Hovind in the fact that he is an "old earth creationist." He believes that God made the universe about 14 billion years ago and that God used evolution to create what life now exists. Science agrees that the universe is that old, and it cannot prove that God did or did not do it. So for now, Dr. Ross is safe. What we have here is a strange phenomenon. One that is very old. The "God of the gaps" phenomenon. Whenever science proves that something happens naturally without the need for any supernatural entity, God grows smaller, inhabiting only the recesses of the scientifically unknown. With every passing day, God grows smaller and smaller as we learn more and more about the universe. At some point, if this progress continues, it will be very hard for a theist to find any use for their God at all. His fate may be to become nothing more than a personal pacifier, used for comfort in hard times. At the end of this post, I will link to a great page that scientifically tackles and destroys virtually any creationist claim that has been brought up throughout history.

2. They give anecdotal evidence (personal accounts that cannot be verified.)

          Anecdotal evidence is something that no person should put any stock into. As a rationalist, I put very little stock into even my own anecdotal evidence. At one point in time, when I was a christian, I prayed for someone that I knew was borderline anorexic. I prayed that she would eat something, and five minutes later she did. At the time, I was amazed. I just knew that God intervened and answered my prayer. Obviously, this was one way to interpret what happened. As we look at it rationally, however, it is much more reasonable to assume that she was merely very hungry after starving herself for so long and submitted to her basic survival instinct of eating. In the past year or two, I have conditioned myself to think rationally. For example, if I were to go out tonight and look up and see a cylindrical metallic object hover over me before shooting off into space, I would not immediately assume that I had a close encounter. I would instead look for natural causes. If I still could not explain what I had seen, I would suspect that I had seen some kind of secret government project of earthly origin. Or maybe I had hallucinated! Both of these explanations are more rational than jumping to something as unprecedented as a close encounter. As human beings, we cannot make the mistake of always trusting our senses. Our eyes play amazing tricks on us all the time. Optical illusions are a great example of this. Auditory hallucinations are the most common type of schizophrenic hallucination. Once my temperature goes to 104 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, I begin to experience visual hallucinations. The point is, human sensory organs are still prone to malfunction and they often do without us even taking the time to realize it. For this reason alone, it is a mistake to trust your own senses when it comes to irrational beliefs. It may just be that what you think you experienced was just a hallucination. Anecdotal evidence from others is even worse to put stock into because (and I know this seems outlandish) people lie! If any religious person comes up to me and tells me that God answered their prayer, I would barely take notice. For the most part, I believe people think they are telling me the truth when they tell me tall tales of talking with God or entering Heaven for some type of Biblical tour. But because they can never show me physical evidence for their claims, I cannot rationally accept them as truth. People long before our time came up with a grand mechanism for finding truth: the burden of proof mechanism. What this means is that only those making a claim are responsible for proving the claim is true, not the other way around. Many Christians tell me to prove God is not real, which is just illogical. It is only the responsibility of the one making the claim to prove the claim. Without this mechanism, anyone could make any stupid claim and everyone would have to believe it until someone disproved it. We would live in a world in which everyone believed in leprechauns and unicorns and two-assed-black-titted lemurs that piss rainbows. Fortunately, we live in a world in which we can, and should, only believe claims that have evidence to support them.

3. They give up all hope and claim that faith must take the place of evidence.

          This one is just dastardly. The first question is "Why must we rely only on evidence?" Most theologians will tell you that because God gave us free will, it is up to us to believe in Him. If He revealed Himself to us there would be no question of His existence and we would all automatically worship Him, thereby completely destroying free will. Nice try, but no sale. Lucifer knew of God's existence and still managed to get himself thrown into Hell. There are plenty of people right now who believe in God but refuse to worship Him. In all honesty, if God reached down and picked me up and shook me and told me Himself that he was the exact God of the Bible, I would still refuse to worship such a monster as that. I will touch on this topic at a later time. The point is, the argument for the requirement of faith is baseless. Another problem with faith is that it can be turned around on the user. For example, if a christian tells me that I must have faith in God, I could easily tell them that they must have faith in Allah or Zeus. Faith alone is a wild card! It can be applied to anything. Indeed, many religious people of differing faiths have the same resolve and belief in their particular god/gods and the same level of faith that the other god/gods are false. So how can anyone, anywhere decide which god/gods are true? I assume the answer lies somewhere between delusion and arrogance.

--Corey S.

An Index to Creationist Claims

TalkOrigins Creationist Claim Index

 

Why Atheism?

          Atheism is one of the most misunderstood concepts of our time and perhaps one of the most controversial as well. Living in a small mid-western town, I am acutely aware of this. Here, one cannot go outside without the fear of tripping over someone of a particular faith. As it happens, the faith most prevalent in the United States is the Judeo-Christian faith. This same faith is the largest the world has ever seen, and it is quite old, going back 1500-2000 years depending on when one defines its origin. In the United States of America, nearly every single person shares this faith in one aspect or another. Whether Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, Nondenominational, etc., between 85-95% of Americans are a part of this blanket faith. So why not me? 

          I hesitate to group atheists together at any point in time simply because the definition of atheism does not allow it. Atheism is simply the "rejection of the idea of supernatural entities known as gods." So yes, we can throw all atheists into the same bucket, but it only tells us one thing about them: that they do not believe in gods. It tells us nothing of what they do believe in at all. It tells us nothing of their background or the terms in which they think. Let us turn this around and use a christian instead. We automatically know that this person believes the Holy Bible is divine, that it was divinely inspired by only one god (Yahweh), that a man named Jesus lived, performed miracles, and let himself be sacrificed to save every human from sin, that the world and universe we inhabit and everything within it was created by Yahweh, that Hell and Heaven are real places where the souls of the dead will forever dwell, that Satan is a real being that hates humanity and will rise at some point to be judged and forever thrown back into Hell and that the Trinity will lift the world up on the final day of judgement and seal the fate of every being that has ever lived. Of course there are many more assumptions one can make of all Christians, but these are some of the main tenets and beliefs that basically all Christians share. I hope it is now clear why it is a mistake to pigeonhole atheists in the same manner as can be done with people of faith. But if we must, I think the best thing to say that would encompass as many atheists as possible would be to label them "free thinkers". After all, that is what we are! We all think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions. This is exactly what led me to atheism. The more I learned about the world, the more I learned that it just did not fit with the Bible, or with any faith for that matter. I began to realize that science actually did what faith claimed to do. Science gave me answers. Faith only raised more. Science is testable. Faith, by definition, is not. Science admits it knows little. Faith claims to know all. Science encourages attainment of knowledge. Faith admonishes the same act. "God did it.", says faith. "That's all you need to know." 

          Well it isn't all we need to know. We need to know much more than we know even now. The earth, which the Bible says sits on four pillars, we now realize is a rather special planet in a rather average solar system orbiting a very average star in a still average galaxy rocketing through space and time in an astonishingly gargantuan universe that is still expanding! And the expansion is getting faster and faster every second! And in a few years time, we hope to know just how this universe came into existence. With the launch of LISA, we hope to finally look back into the time BEFORE the Big Bang. Amazing. And all of this happened with absolutely no need for a god. It is all natural. 

          So why atheism? Because atheism allows me to do just what Sherlock Holmes did to solve the mysteries surrounding him. It allows me to keep my mind wide open and twist theories to suit facts instead of wrongly twisting facts to suit theories. I am not burdened by the need to start from the Bible to explain the universe. I start with the universe to explain the universe.

--Corey S.

"Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world;

it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious." Sam Harris --American neuroscientist