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.

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.

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.

For your viewing pleasure:

(Via)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(Via)

long - length
strong - strength
broad - breadth

In each case, the stem vowel changes the place where it’s pronounced in the mouth. This is called “I-mutation.” Basically, in the adjectival form — which is derived from the noun — the vowel scoots closer to the sound /i/ (”ee” as in feet) In this case, the shift is from /ɑ/→/ε/.*

The chart below visually demonstrates the process. It’s essentially a location map of where your tongue is in your mouth during the execution of vowels. For the /ɑ/ in long, strong and broad your tongue is low and retracted, and for /i/ of feet its pushed forward and up.

Figure 1: /ɑ/→/ε/

As you can see, the sound /ɑ/ is pulled upward and forward, and winds up at an intermediate between /ɑ/ and /i/, namely /ε/.

Why would the vowel undergo this transformation in the first place? Well historically, the /-th/ suffix was more like /-ith/, so it actually contained the sound /i/ (”ee”). In anticipation of the vowel in the suffix, speakers would move the stem vowel incrementally closer to /i/, and they stopped off somewhere in between. It has been said that this is a form of laziness, in which speakers try to expend as little effort as possible to pronounce the word, but I think it’s more likely a constraint on articulation: the tongue is physical object, and must actually move from one position to another. Over time, this transition becomes audible, and begins to color the vowels. Eventually, the “slide” between sounds becomes part of the accent of that language and becomes established (think of a Spanish speaker trying to say home, they have much trouble mastering the slide from “oh” to “oo” packed into that vowel). But I digress.

For the other words in this class, the process of I-Mutation has been obscured by other processes. For example, in the following words, the adjective was derived from the noun and was preserved. Later, the Great Vowel Shift changed the sound of the noun, but left the adjective intact:

fūl → filth

Figure 2: /u:/→/i/

Later, fūl (pronounced “fool”) became foul by means of the Great Vowel shift: /u:/→/au/

hāl → health /ɑ/→/ε/ (See Fig. 1)

Here, the Great Vowel Shift covered I-Mutation’s tracks by changing hāl (pronounced “hall”) to whole and a less commonly used word hale. The likely explanation for the two results is that there were two competing pronunciations of hāl, and each went a different way with the Great Vowel Shift (and it probably has to do with the influence of /l/ on the preceding vowel … don’t ask).

In other instances, it’s more complicated. The Old English word slaw had the same vowel of modern (cole)slaw, but the /w/ was actually pronounced (like the interjection “ow!” but with the /ɑ/ of father instead of the /æ/ of cat). I-Mutation pulled the /ɑ/ forward:

Figure 3: /ɑ/→/æ/

… and we were left with slæwth, which stuck around for quite a while in Old English. However, in Middle English, slaw changed roughly to the modern pronunciation slow, and speakers – conscious of the relationship between slow and slæwth – futzed the vowels. Essentially, they performed the equivalent of changing length to longth. The important thing is that the /th/ stuck around.

One final example is young - youth, although the story of where the /ng/ went is a bit convoluted.

All of the derivations we’ve examined thus far were formed in Old English and were fossilized. At some point the /-ith/ suffix ceased being a preferred way of forming nouns, and it was abandoned in favor of suffixes like /-ness/, but the nouns that had already been formed were preserved. Linguists say suffixes such as /-ith/ are no longer “productive,” because they’re recognizable in a few places, but they aren’t actively used in the generation of new words.

However, since the process of adding /-ith/ and I-mutating the stem vowel fell out of use, some words have nevertheless been formed to superficially resemble the fossilized forms through the process of analogy. For example, wealth was formed from well under analogy to health. And tellingly, there was no application of I-Mutation: well and wealth have the same vowel.

Meanwhile, other words were analogized that DO exhibit some change in the stem vowel, but not in the manner we know to be consistent with I-Mutation. Depth was formed under analogy with breadth, but I-Mutation isn’t responsible for turning deep to depth. Similarly, analogy to breadth is also the provenance of width (from wide).

Most interesting is the emergent tendency to analogize to breadth for words relating to dimensions. It’s as if speakers wanted wide and deep to behave like long and broad, so that they could all be one neat set. This “ironing out” the kinks in the language is still happening today (although there’s some out there who would fight it). The noun height is traditionally formed from the adjective high, but you can often hear people saying heighth! It’s not hard to imagine a day when heighth has become accepted, and all the words for dimensions end in /th/.

*Technically, it was probably /ɔ/→/œ/ which was subsequently unrounded to /ε/. That’s why we have “o” in spelling today, but you get the idea.

As it turns out, the company has been surreptitiously placing references to Bible verses on their sights. So much for this not being a holy war.

From the company’s mission statement on their website.

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

John 8:12 "Prepare to eat lead, raghead."

Dear God. These people make me shudder.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

That’s precisely how this looks to Muslims.

When imperial powers engage in this kind of religious warfare, things can get very nasty. The Sepoy Rebellion was instigated by the same kind of tactics in colonial India, when the British were accused of greasing their bullets with beef tallow and pig fat, which are ritually unclean to the native Hindus and Muslims respectively.

In order to load their rifles, the soldiers had to bite the cartridges. For Hindus, this meant they would lose their caste. For Muslims, it meant that if they were shot by such a ‘tainted’ bullet, they would die unclean and be excluded from paradise.

So they revolted. And much fun ensued.

(h/t Pharyngula)

Given that you have two choices (believe in God, or don’t) and that there are two possible results (God exists, or he doesn’t), there are four possible outcomes. Traditionally, these are arranged in this decision chart to help you conceptualize.

Clearly, the most sensible solution for a soul-wagerer would be the first row: believing in God. The payoff is potentially high, and the risk is low.

Nevermind that this kind of wagering goes against the very faith-in-the-absence-of-evidence that the Christian God asks of us. Such a disingenuous attempt to feign belief in the deity probably wouldn’t go far to impress Him.

But that isn’t my main problem with the Wager. My beef arises from the fact that it only assumes one possible god. To be a real wager, you’d need to consider all possible outcomes, and that means other gods. Which is why I devised Elliott’s Wager, and the corresponding decision chart.

Unfortunately, it won’t fit in this blog format, so you can find it (here).

-

So where’s your money?

Unreasonable Faith recaps some of the points they make in the video:

1. Even if Noah took out all the “variations” and only stuck with “kinds,” that would still have been over 2 billion animals.

2. For a year in the ark, two elephants alone would require 365,000 lbs of food and 65,000 gal of water;
two giraffes would require 54,740 lbs of food
two lions would require 16,000 lbs of fresh meat.

3. If Noah took all baby animals, how would all the babies get there from around the world at the same time? Or how would all the animals have babies at the exact same time?

…

5. Not even most of the sea life could survive due to the changes in temperature, pressure, sunlight, filtration, salt.

The video makes the point that at an elevation of 29,055 feet, all the animals would freeze to death, or suffocate to death because the air is too thin.

I don’t think that’s right, because you’d displace the air upwards as well. 29,000 feet would be the new sea level, and the pressure would be the same as current sea level (or just a tiny bit less, since the air is occupying a larger volume).

But that’s just a nitpicky detail.

It’s also worth considering that the rainiest place on earth gets 39 feet of rain a year, or 1.28 inches a day. In order to cover Mount Everest in 40 days, it would have to rain 8,716.5 inches per day (726 feet). That’s so much rain that you’d drown standing in it. The sheer downward pressure of that much water would probably sink the boat.

Nothing could have survived (unless it was magic).

But there’s one I never get tired of hearing, and unsurprisingly it’s from Christopher Hitchens — in my opinion, the most eloquent of the four.

Unfortunately, I’ve hitherto been unable to find a transcript of this argument, so I took the liberty to transcribe it.

I asked Sir Francis Collins, the leading Christian who did the genome project (as you probably know), how long he thought humanity had been on earth, and I asked professor Richard Dawkins how long he thought fully evolved humans had been present. Dawkins thinks it could have been as many as 250k years, Collins thinks certainly not less than 100k — 100k is all I need. 100k years since we definitely separated ourselves from the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals…

…Now, that’s to say — if you believe in a divine intervention in our lives — that, give it just 100k years, for the first 94-95k, people are born, they die mainly of their teeth or in childbirth or of microorganisms they don’t know exist. Their life expectancy is for the first 50 or 60k years, perhaps 25 years. They’re killed by animals. They’re killed by each other in pointless turf wars. They’re killed in typhoons, floods, mudslides, and so forth. But gradually they make slow exponential progress, they get to the point (suffering all the time and heaven watches it with folded arms, like this). And then four or 5k years ago heaven decides “we can’t let them go on like this, we need an intervention. Probably the best place for it would be in Bronze Age Palestine or Egypt. Probably the best form it could take would be a human sacrifice. That might cheer them up a bit.”

Now, if you don’t believe this, you do not believe in any of the three monotheistic revelations, [because] that’s what you have to believe. That’s the minimum you have to believe in order to believe in any of those foresaid. And of course, it’s not believeable, or should I put it like this: it only re-places the argument as before. It replaces the argument as it was before we knew about Cro-Magnons, or dinosours, or Neanderthals. It argues from design. And if everything was designed, what are we to make of the designer, who sentenced so many generations to barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death?

In the first place, isn’t that a rather incompetent rather tinkering designer, to say the very least of it? In the second place, isn’t it a rather cruel, or at the very best, a highly indifferent one? And we still can’t be sure whether this same incompetent, and indifferent and cruel person cares whether we go to bed with members of our own gender or not, because there’s no way to derive verdicts like this from evidence like that. So the religious still haven’t scored the ghost of a point.

To me, that’s the most compelling argument that God is either non-existent, or an incompetent designer. Either way, the Christian God is a farce.

You can find this argument in most debates Hitchens participates in, but the transcription above is taken from a debate between him and Jay Richards.

“I am not the least surprise [sic] that he launched an attack on the Bible; it’s an old political trick – assassinate your opponent’s character in order that you can appear credible.”

Nonsense. Non-Catholic Christians justify their beliefs all the time with the assumption that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That’s their premise, and if you successfully challenge it — which any half-wit can do — you challenge every assumption they make thereupon.

“He has not submitted any credible evidence to prove the non-existence of God outside of his aberrant views of the Bible.”

This really pisses me off — when people declare that it’s my obligation to debunk their belief structure.

First off, a bunch of them unabashedly admit at the outset that there’s nothing I could do to change their minds, so you might as well stop the discussion there. And second, they’re the ones making the positive claim about the way the world is! The burden of proof is on them. If they can’t produce a single scrap of evidence for these grandiose claims they’re making about the metaphysical structure of existence, I’m under no obligation to take them seriously, or treat them with deference.

Really, I don’t have time to run around disproving every stupid idea everyone has ever had. If you want to believe there’s a bearded man in the sky who cares what gives you a boner, or that there’s some cosmic soul-soup that we all return to when we die, fine, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that warrants the slightest bit of respect in public discourse when the best evidence you can drudge up is a bronze age book of fairy tales.

“The Bible and Christianity have laid down their propositions. Where is his?”

Here’s my proposition: the world really is as simple as it seems. If you can’t touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it, see it or perceive it with the extended senses given to us by science and mathematics, it just doesn’t exist.

“Let me assure Mr. Callahan that Christianity has been down this road before and always came back stronger than before.”

By what gauge do you make this assertion? Christian faith is — and has been — on the decline in the US.

Church attendance is on a 70 year decline (just since Gallup began tracking, so likely longer than that).

And then there’s Europe, which was formerly the most Christian place on the planet. I don’t think Jesus freaks are rallying a major comeback anytime soon over there.

“May the story of Madelene O’hare [sic] be a lesson to you: God walked right into her house and pulled out a preacher. That’s not hallucination; that’s realithy [sic].”

So what? Her kid’s a preacher. Unless he turned lead into gold on national television, or predicted the exact time and location of some unexpected stellar event, or shit, did anything that couldn’t have just happened anyway it’s not a miracle.

But lo and behold, last night I was given reason to return, thanks to my local news channel.

There, nestled in between the Black Friday consumer masturbation and the insufferable holiday football recap was a tiny little mention — couldn’t have been more than a couple sentences; I would have missed it if I had gone to open another beer — about the recent findings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

They concluded that in 2001, we had cornered Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, but he escaped because we shifted our strategic attention to the nascent Iraq war.

There it was. The naked truth. The most important geopolitical factoid of the last decade, revealed non-chalantly in an momentary evening news aside. An ‘I-told-you-so’ bombshell a thousand times more powerful than Republicans’ ‘the surge worked,’ went off in my living room. And it barely made a sound.

Yet before my jaw could hit the floor, they moved on to the football scores.