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.

Back when I was a creationist (I still shudder admitting that) I was a big fan of a man who called himself ‘Dr. Dino.’ Dr. Dino had a website with free videos, where he explained how evolution was false, how the geological column resulted from sediment settling out during Noah’s flood, and how the freemasons were a satanic cult that laid out the streets of Washington DC in the form of a pentagram. I thought the guy was a genius.

Turns out, Dr. Dino, whose real name is Kent Hovind, wasn’t a doctor at all. He got his degree from a Cracker Jack box known as Patriot University, and he was pretty much full of shit. The so called “Hovind Theory” of creation, which held that dinosaurs were just plain old lizards whose growth was unhampered by UV rays due to an imagined layer of ice that used to float around in the upper atmosphere, could be dismantled by a three minute visit to Talk Origins.

These days, Kent is doing time for tax evasion, but his son Eric has taken up the sword with his new website CreationMinute.com. It’s essentially a rehash of the same old tripe his dad was peddling, but now with fancier graphics + handsomer front man! It doesn’t hurt that Eric lacks his father’s demeanor of “at any moment I’m going to bolt screaming across the room to molest the nearest child.”

Anyway, go check out his idiotic website, and watch him talk about the Big Bang, throwing around the words “something” and “nothing” like he knows what they mean. Oh, and he recently posted a new video about the Grand Canyon. I love it when creatonists talk about the Grand Canyon. It’s always something to the effect of “hmm…isn’t the Grand Canyon strange? It seems to me that it’s evidence against the entire theory of geology and that the God of the Jews is real.”

If you do go, follow the link from Pharyngula, because PZ Myers is trying to win an iPod touch.

The first thing we notice about the world around us is that it’s self sustaining. Every observable effect has an observable cause: babies are born because eggs are fertilized; rain comes from clouds, which form from evaporated water; the sun rises and sets because the earth is spinning. These processes are no longer miracles because at no point do we need to assume an interventionist deity to explain them.

Not only does the world exist independently, but we don’t even expect god to intervene when we want him to. When I drop my toast, I don’t expect a little chariot of cherubim to intercept it before it hits the ground. I shouldn’t expect to wake up with straighter teeth if go to church enough. Alleged instances of god intervening on someone’s behalf can always just as easily be attributed to fortuitous chance. For example, he only cures diseases that might have gotten better anyway — he never heals amputees. If there is a god, he has apparently made the universe in such a way that it can exist independently, and without his continued tinkering.

This is why intelligent design is so unappealing to me. It admits that that natural systems are pretty much self contained, but at the same time, invokes a creator to explain certain special cases, like the bacterial flagellum, the bombardier beetle, or the blood clotting cascade. It’s inconsistent. I mean, if an omniscient, omnipontent god went to all this trouble to create a world that functioned without him, he could have accomplished it, right?

Presumably he could have, but creationists and design proponents seem to think we would be able to catch this guy with his finger in the pudding if we find examples of ‘irreducible complexity.’ These are places where conventional evolutionary explanations are purported to break down. One of their favorite examples is the bombardier beetle, an animal with a very strange defense mechanism. The beetle ejects two chemicals from its body to create a boiling hot spray that drives away predators. Design proponents say that since neither of the chemical components is of any use to the beetle without the other — the system could not be simplified and still be functional, hence irreducible complexity — this constitutes evidence for an all-in-one-go biological creation. Come on!

We have natural explanations for the hand, the eye, goosebumps, canine teeth, the spinal cord, mammary glands, feathers, flippers, egg laying, and camouflage, why wouldn’t evolution or physics explain a chemical reaction that happens on the back of a beetle?* If that were the case, we’d have to assume god stopped short of creating a pristine universe free of all supernatural influences, and just bitched out in a few places. This doesn’t really say much for god’s alleged omnipotence.

Imagine god, in the process of creation, working himself into a corner. “Shucks, I did all that work laying out the evidence for evolution — working in all of those details about common descent, features shared in lineages, the fossil record – but now I have to find a way for this bacterium to locomote. Oh well, they’ll never be able to see anything this small, so they won’t mind if I cheat a bit.” This is totally unsatisfying from both a scientific, and theological standpoint.

It makes no sense why god would make a clockwork this intricate, carefully avoiding leaving evidence of his agency, and then in handful of places, slip up or get lazy. However, a creationist/design proponent may come back with the old ‘god works in mysterious ways, that we may not understand.’ If they want to play it that way, then they should admit that they aren’t actually in the business of explaining things.

Personally, I think life is wondrous mainly because of things like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade, which are so remarkably unlikely they must give you pause. That these seemingly irreducibly complex things have an explanation within the bounds of physics and evolution should be something to marvel at.

*Hint: It does.

I wish I could roll this out whenever I come across some creationist hater.

This is the kind of nonsense that really gets my goat:

But in reality, the scientific community is extremely bias [sic] on issues that bring to question the validity of evolution, which so much of their work is based off of.

To be perfectly honest, I am very biased: I would jump for joy if there were the slightest bit of evidence for creationism, because it is still on some level a deeply gratifying (albeit scientifically messy and uninteresting) prospect that the universe was designed by a creator fairy, and that I might get to meet him/her when I die.

The problem is, there really is no evidence. I was actually forced out of belief for exactly this reason. It was a hard realization to come to, but let me make it clear: I believe there is no creator because I have to; because I hold reason as a virtue, and in the interest of consistency, I have to apply it to every facet of my awareness.

So yes, I am naturally biased: biased in the favor of irrationality and wish-thinking. But the difference between a religious person and me is that they let their bias get the best of them.

h/t Pharyngula