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.

If you haven’t heard of Pascal’s Wager, it’s a rather silly way of arguing to someone that they should believe in God. The argument goes something like this: in deciding whether or not you believe in God, you should approach the problem the way you approach a wagering situation. Ask yourself what you could possibly gain, and what you could possibly lose.

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).

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So where’s your money?

Each of the four horsemen of New Atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) has his favorite argument he likes to trot out in his talks and debates. Having listened to these guys talk over and over again, I have become pretty familiar with their lines of reasoning and preferred modes of attack.

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 have recently been repeatedly confronted with the philosophical quandary of whether or not our perceptions of reality can be trusted, or if our internal models of the world around us are bound to be riddled with flaws and misrepresentations. A fellow blogger has spurred be to put down my thoughts in writing.

I think you have to begin by admitting that we can never know if our senses do justice to reality, because we have no other way to gauge their efficacy than by our senses themselves. However, ultimately, I think they do a pretty damn good job.

I’ve found evidence for this in the fact that a brain is, in its most basic form, an input-output system. Input stimulus: output response to stimulus. Evolution tunes the system to give the proper response to the proper stimulus, and therefore to be faithful to reality. For example, we have a vermicompost box, and when we want to get the worms to move in a certain direction, we expose them to light. They promptly wriggle in the direction of the nearest shade. If their flee response weren’t faithful to reality, they’d fry to death, or waste valuable energy wriggling when there was no sun.

Granted, the human brain is more sophisticated than that, because it has a complex intermediate step of model building based on memory. This apparatus allows synchronic tuning of responses to stimuli, as opposed to letting natural selection tune them. However it’s still just an elaborate version of “when the world is this way, respond in that way.”

Therefore, if you’re not building an accurate model of the world around you, then your brain isn’t performing its function. Evolution should then select for brains that make increasingly accurate models of the surrounding environment, or at least as accurate as any given organism needs (a human needs no sense for surface tension, but a water strider needs no sense for vertical orientation). Sure, there are glitches in the system, and they give rise to models that belie reality, but only in trivial ways: like optical illusions, pareidolia, and religion.

And there’s my daily epiphany: religion belies reality only in trivial ways. The belief that there is an invisible man in the sky who sees everything you do fits neatly into the gaps in our perception in such a way that it cannot be disproven, and it does not (often) dictate our reactions to stimuli. If it interfered with our model-building apparatus in either of these ways, evolution would have–and modern science could have–disposed of it quickly.

In closing, I’d like to analogize the brain to a house; the function of the brain is to construct models of the world, and the function of a house is to protect its inhabitants. You can build a house out of all kinds of things (aluminum, bricks, adobe etc.), and while you’ll have different engineering strategies based on the materials you are using–and different drawbacks with each–the end goal is still to create shelter (in the case of the brain, to build faithful models). Evolution set us on a particular path, with a particular set of materials–namely, the more basic reptilian and mammalian brains–and the drawbacks inherent thereto. The evolutionary history of the brain presents a unique set of obstacles to building a functional model-building apparatus, and has crucially informed its eventual architecture, in the same way selecting Play-Doh as the building material for your house would present a unique set of obstacles to its construction. Surely, it’d be better to choose bricks than Play-Doh, but evolution won’t let you switch materials mid-build, but we got as close as we could. Obviously, the materials we got stuck with weren’t that bad, because we’re still here. And our model building apparatus can’t be that bad either.

This is a continuation of a previous post, in which I lay out my reasons for rejecting the a creationist god. Here I’d like to briefly address another problem I have with the concept of the Judeo-Christian God.

Scientific progress has sequestered modern Christians into a very narrow interpretation of god’s role in the universe — compared with the role he played in, let’s say, the first millennium. God is no longer the architect of the celestial spheres, he is a cosmic watchmaker, and he has stepped back to let his creation run its course. He rarely interferes.

However, the bible tells us of times when god did interact with man. What happened on these occasions? Well, in Genesis he is bested by a snake and two people successfully hide from him (3:5,3:9). Later on, he tells a man to build a boat, so he can flood the entire world, because he thinks that is the best way to destroy evil (Genesis 7:4). Some time after that, he gives us what are ostensibly the most important laws in the universe…carved on rocks (Exodus 20). Too bad the guy he gave them to lost his temper and broke them, so god made him carve them again (Exodus 32). Skip forward a bit, and he makes a wager with the devil about torturing a man (Job 1:9-12). Finally, the last time he really did anything of import, he nailed himself to cross, and cried out to himself “Why [have I] forsaken [myself]” (Matthew 27:46). And then he entreated himself to forgive us, because we know not what we do (Luke 23:34). Can you see where I am going with this?

These are supposedly the actions of the creator of the universe: the most powerful, intelligent entity we can conceive of. And these are the ways he chooses to interact with his creation. Why didn’t he just strike all the evildoers dead, instead of drowning the entire world? It was surely in his power. Why didn’t he carve his commandments in diamond, or titanium, or better still, burn them into the back of our hands? Why is his final redeeming act to mankind so morbid and nonsensical?

If these are the works of the Ultimate Creator, it’s tragic that they are not examples of divine perfection, supreme logic, mind-blowing power, and universal comprehensibility. Instead, his whole plan is foiled by two hungry naked fuckers, and in order to save them from the punishment he devised, he has to torture himself to death.

I’m sorry, I just can’t swallow that.

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.

Quick observation about the nature of god.

In his divine plan, he has condemned mankind to a life of hardship, misery, disease, heartbreak, loss, and ultimately death. But he/Jesus someday plans to ride in to the rescue (on a white horse, pulling a sword out of his throat, wearing a bunch of crowns, with his name written on the inside of his leg in invisible ink, and all the rest of that bad acid trip bullshit in Revelation), and he will make everything better.

Well, if you were watching a kitten suffer with a thorn in its paw, would you pull it out? I would.

But would you consider me a bad person if I waited a while, letting the poor little guy mew and squeal, knowing full well that I could help it at any time, but refusing to? I think, and you would probably agree that the virtuous thing to do would be to put an end to the cat’s suffering. Apparently though, that virtue is not a godly one, and although we generally equate godliness with virtue, this is one instance where the two don’t match up: the godly thing to do is to prolong the suffering of the innocent.

The only retort I can see Christians making, is the whole “god has a plan” cop-out.

What this amounts to is saying “we can not apply the rules of logic to the goings on of the universe, because what god does makes no sense to human minds.”

I would like to point out two problems with this argument. The first is that it directly contradicts one motivation for being faithful, which is that believing in god actually explains something. Creationists simultaneously claim that observing the natural world provides us with incontrovertible evidence of his existence, and that human rationality cannot be applied to the movements of the creator. WTF STFU?

The second problem is that if there’s anything that history has taught us, it’s that humans are impressively adept at figuring out how god’s hand influences the universe. Today we are nailing down the details of quantum mechanics, molecular biology, multi-dimensional calculus etc. In fact, over the ages, god has become progressively feebler, as we have learned that germs cause disease, not evil-spirits or divine punishment. We have learned that the universe as it stands today pretty much takes care of itself, and that we don’t need an invisible scarab to roll the sun across the sky, or a series of animals standing on each others’ backs to carry the earth through the cosmos. It’s painfully obvious that the god of today is impotent compared with the god of old, because the things he was invoked to explain have been sufficiently explained without him. He is vestigial: once useful, but now merely a reminder of how far we’ve come.