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.

Tags: atheism, christianity, Creationism, God, History, Plasma Pool, Science

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.