I recently received another response to my piece “I am a Militant Atheist” over at Plasma Pool. The commenter – a Mr. John Pilkey – is much more level-headed in expressing his opinion than the previous commenter, which I appreciate.

I have to disagree that Biblical Christianity possesses great logical depth. In fact, it’s rife with contradictions that can only be explained with special pleading. For example, the fact that God is supposedly all knowing and all loving, but that he created man and placed him in the garden with the tree of knowledge. By definition an all-knowing being would know the outcome of these actions – namely that Adam and Eve would fall victim to temptation and eat of the tree. By definition, an all-loving being would seek to create a world without suffering. So why would God do this?

A suitable analogy would be someone releasing a priceless vase from the window of a ten story building. The perpetrator knows with exact certainty the trajectory the vase will follow, and can therefore be held responsible for the ensuing destruction. And while our vase-dropper is culpable, his knowledge of gravity is only based on a lifetime of feeling its effects (and perhaps a few physics classes). For all he knows, this time, there could be a lapse in Newton’s laws. Also for all he knows, a truck carrying a load of pillows could drive under the vase at the last moment, cushioning its fall. God, on the other hand, is omniscient: he would know with perfect certainty that man would bring sin into the world.

This simple contradiction is a crack in the foundation of all Christian theology, and as much as you try to buttress that which you build on top of it, this fundamental weakness remains.

Mr. Pilkey claims that he never expected to bear witness to a miracle, and that miracles of the past served as “authentication proper only to the times when they occurred.” He says that, because he is not an Old Testament prophet or an Apostle, he has no need of such miracles to establish or bolster his faith. Presumably, the faith of modern peoples should be grounded in tradition and upbringing. I think this contradicts yet another attribute of the Christian God: perfect justice.

How fair is it that members of generations past were permitted incontrovertible evidence of God’s existence – the sun standing still in the sky, the parting the Red Sea, any one of Jesus’ miracles– while I should be content with two thousand years of tradition and hearsay? Their salvation was virtually guaranteed because they benefited from direct evidence, while I have to struggle with ambiguous data, ultimately placing my bet on insufficient knowledge, and risking an eternity of suffering. This preferential treatment of generations past is not what I’d expect of a just God.

Mr. Pilkey also makes the point that for those such as himself, God’s existence is “presuppositional.” Now, I don’t intend what follows to be an insult, since he was so gracious in his response, but I feel it’s necessary to my rhetorical point: if that’s what he believes, Mr. Pilkey is not someone who’s looking for an answer that explains all his evidence, he’s looking for the evidence that explains his answer.

I object strongly to the accusation that scientists “hold fast to their fundamental convictions” as believers do. On the contrary, the entire endeavor of science starts with unshackling yourself from your presuppositions, or at least trying your best to. Just because you’re willing to disclose your prejudices outright does not excuse you from purging them. In science, nothing can be an “established fact beyond dispute,” because people’s reputations are made by challenging the paradigm. If someone could disprove Atomic Theory or the Theory of Evolution, they would be immortalized in scientific history overnight. The only reason scientists continue to believe that space is a “transparent vacuum,” for example, is that it’s evidenced by direct, laboratory observation, and it withstands experimental scrutiny. Neither of those things can be said of God.

A quick perusal of Teh Intarwebz shows there is a historian Dr. John Davis Pilkey, who seeks to reconstruct human history immediately after the waters of Noah’s flood receded, which he claims happened two thousand years ago. Our commenter did not provide a website, but a quick check of the source code of his comments shows his e-mail address as jpilkey@earthlink.net, which is the same for this site, so I suspect commenter Pilkey is in fact Dr. Pilkey.

Rebutting such a theory is far beyond the scope of my ability as a blogger and budding scientist, but I’d like to point you in the direction of at least one line of argument that’s compelling to me:

For example, the published count of alleles of ABO glycosyltransferase, the gene associated with the ABO blood types, is up to 29 so far. The three sons of Noah and their three wives only had a total of 12 copies of chromosome 9, where the gene is located, and even assuming maximum heterozygosity and no shared alleles between any of them, that still leaves 17 alleles that had to have arisen later.

There’s a lot more out there to be had. Talk Origins is a good site if you’re in the market for explanations.

Anyway, I’d like to thank Dr. Pilkey for sharing his opinion. I deeply enjoy discussing these matters, and appreciate the opportunity.

Seriously.

From their page on atheism:

Given that atheism appears to be significantly less appealing to women, atheists are a minority in the population and that people tend to marry people with similar values or who resemble their parents or themselves; this would suggest that male atheists may find it more difficult to find prospective female partners for marriage.

There are actually multiple subheadings about atheism and its attractiveness to women. I guess, their image in the eyes of women is of deep concern to the 11 year old boys writing this garbage. They’ve even written an entire page dedicated to the topic of

Atheism appears to be significantly less appealing to women

Jesus.

From the first paragraph of their page on Evolution.

Since World War II a majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the evolutionary position which employs methodological naturalism have been atheists.

Somebody poisoned the waterhole!

On their page about homosexuality, they draw a comparison between homosexuality and cannibalism:

In respect to the homosexuality and animals myth, there is currently interest on whether homosexual behavior is or is not zoologically “natural.” This is largely a sterile debate because behavior is not necessarily moral even if “natural;” because the nature of human beings is not necessarily the same as the nature of other species, and because it is not at all clear when an observed behavior can be counted as “sexual,” or as implying a sexual “orientation.” Also, Creation Ministries International wrote on this subject of whether or not there is homosexuality in the animal kingdom: “There is…documented proof of cannibalism and rape in the animal kingdom, but that doesn’t make it right for humans.”

Here’s the first paragraph of their page on feminism:

Feminism originally was an expression used by suffragettes - who were predominantly pro-life - to obtain the right for women to vote in the early 1900s in the United States and the United Kingdom. By the 1970s, however, liberals had changed the meaning to represent people who favored abortion and identical roles or quotas for women in the military and in society as a whole.

Apparently, feminism is about abortion and quotas. Who knew?

The entire site is full of this crap. My forehead is bruised from facepalming.

Just to give you an idea of the hot topics (read: objects of unhealthy obsession) on Conservapedia, here’s a screenshot of their google search result:

Yep. That’s what people are going to Conservapedia to learn about.

To be fair, here’s the same result for Wikipedia:

At first I laughed, but this is exactly what you’d expect if people were relying on a site to learn about things they were interested in, as opposed to playing wiki-circle-jerk around hot-button social and political issues.

Now that there’s been so much talk about the “Ground Zero” mosque, I figured it’s time I offer my two cents. Lots of good arguments have been made … entirely by those in support of the builders’ rights.

From the opponents’ side, I hear a lot of people asking “why does it have to be so close to Ground Zero?” That’s a question you’re free to ask yourself, or perhaps those who selected the site, but you cannot ground a serious objection in that question alone. Besides, what would you offer as a solution, to have a legally enforced radius around this hole in the ground where no Muslim edifice can be erected? Sounds constitutional to me …

I’ve also heard that it would be a “slap in the face” to the victims of 9/11. Well, I think that abandoning our nation’s principles is a greater affront to the memories of those killed in the attack than an “Islamic Cultural Center” ever could be. Not to mention the American Muslims who were in the towers when they were brought down; wouldn’t disallowing the construction of the Center be a slap in the face to them?

Which brings me to my next point: if there was ever any doubt in our minds that the Right is in the habit of systematically vilifying Islam and Arabs, that should by now be expunged. After all, these aren’t al-Qaeda operatives who want to build the Center, they’re Americans: that’s right the opponents are trying to deny Americans their right to worship wherever they want. Well, let them be reminded that the first line of the First Amendment reads

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

Yes, let them be reminded that their bellyaching can never beget any legal instantiation, because it would violate one of the first rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution.

In the end, I think that the anti-”mosque” people’s idiocy speaks for itself. But I should say that, while I think their entire rhetoric is vile, I would happily die for their right to voice it, as should any American for the free speech of their brothers and sisters.

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