In my days as a minister, I would point out to potential converts the vast qualitative difference between the biblical account of creation and those of other world religions. For example, one world religion posits the idea that the world rests upon the back of a turtle, which in turn floats in a sea of milk.

I only supposed that a major world religion describes the earth this way because some preacher said it; I never took the time to confirm that this was so. In any case, I ridiculed and belittled these fantastic and unbelievable ideas taught by non-Christian religions and explained that the Bible's descriptions of reality are in line with scientific knowledge.

The fact that I was being intellectually dishonest is borne out by another fact: The Bible also contains fantastical and unbelievable descriptions of reality. For example, there is the account of giants, and gods having sex with humans:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. (Gen. 6:4)

So, what's the diff?

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Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life - March 13, 2009

Contrary to recent media reports suggesting that the country's economic troubles have led to higher levels of church attendance, a Pew Forum analysis of polls by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has shed over half its value since October 2007, there has been no increase in weekly worship service attendance during the same time period.

Original article

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I had a minor brainwave yesterday. It occurred me, not for the first time, that Christians generally don't believe their own hype about prayer. Here's what I mean: Listen to any Christian organization asking for help and you'll notice how prayer is always thrown in as an afterthought. They need your money. They need you to join. They need you to write letters and emails. They need you to attend. And, oh yes, please pray for us, too.

Why don't they ask only for prayer? Pray for us to be able to pay our bills! No need to send actual money, because prayer will get us the money. Like that.

When I was a child, we used to play a game in my dad's car. We pretended that we were racing all the other cars on the road behind us. When another car seemed to be gaining on us, we pushed on the back window to get them to fall back. And damned if it didn't work some of the time. How exciting to push on the glass and see the competing vehicles respond to our efforts by slowing down! It was a feeling of such power and control. Oh sure, a lot of the time it didn't work, but that was OK, as long as our method was successful some of the time.

Need I say more? Obviously, pushing on the glass had nothing to do with the acceleration or deceleration of the other cars. But we quickly built a connection in our minds when it seemed to work. Just like prayer. We have a ready explanation for the gobs of times it has no effect, and we take great delight whenever it seems to be effective. Oh, to be a child again.

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Christianity, and by that I mean the brand of it that is sincerely trying to follow the Bible, runs so counter to rational human behavior and thought, that its adherents must subject themselves to regular doses of indoctrination in order to remain steadfastly within its dictates.

What other aspect of life is in such dire need of periodic brainwashing just to continue to exist? And the more radical the brand of religion, the more frequent and intense must be the services.

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The Christian Science Monitor - March 10, 2009, by Michael Spencer

An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.

Oneida, Ky. - We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the "Protestant" 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Continue reading>>

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I like this definition of skepticism:

-a method of intellectual caution and suspended judgment.

The opposite of this is gullibility, or credulity, simply believing what you are told without the slightest attempt to verify or absent even a hint of critical thinking.

People who fail to think critically are prone to being taken in by liars and scammers. They seem to believe what makes them feel good, rather than what is demonstrably true.

Getting back to the definition cited above, intellectual caution is being careful about what you give credence to, what you accept as true. You need evidence. Young children lack this capacity, accepting at face value what their parents say. But a necessary part of groing up is learning to require more than the mere say so of a parent. Santa Clause may be a comforting character, but that's not enough to make him real.

The second part of the definition, suspended judgment, is the ability to withhold one's acceptance of a claim until after the relevant facts are acquired.

I am heartened by an apparent increase in critical thinking among Americans, as evidenced by the recent study showing that fewer people claim to have a religion than ever before.

What I find difficult to understand is the fact that, no matter how absurd the claim, there will always be people who will believe it.

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This is why the claims of science should be treated respectfully and those of Christianity should not: Claims that cannot be tested and be proven either true or false do not deserve respect.

This point was brought home to me in dramatic fashion as I watched an excellent TV program on the work of Albert Einstein. In particular, the show dealt with his general theory of relativity. It was a breathtaking theory that, if correct, would turn the Newtonian law of gravity on its head.

Not only was his theory buttressed with brilliant mathematics, it could be proven either true or false. You see, along with the theory, Einstein had a way of testing it. The test involved a total eclipse of the sun and the measurement of a very specific prediction as to the deflection of light from distant stars as they passed the sun.

As you might imagine, he was proven right. But do you know that, until accurate measurements could be taken, a feat that required arduous travel and many years to acquire, the scientific community would not grant his theory acceptance? And that's as it should be.

Now, in sharp contrast, consider the vaporous, unfalsifiable predictions/claims of the religious:

We do miracles! Really? Why is it that your so-called miracles and healings alll have to do with medical conditions that we can't verify? Either because we can't find the so-called healed or because their so-called healing can't be seen. One leg shorter than the other, a pain in the belly, cancer of the duodenum. whatever. A person in Africa. Give me a freaking break.

We predict the future! Really? Just the other day we learned that a "respected pastor, best-selling author and founder of a major ministry to teens predicts an imminent "earth-shattering calamity" centered in New York City that will spread to major urban areas across the country and around the world – part of what he sees as a judgment from God." Wow! When? When will this happen? "I do not know when these things will come to pass, but I know it is not far off." Oh, thanks.

Prayer works! Really? And if what you pray doesn't happen? Oh, God's just saying no. Ah, I see.

God exists! Really? And if it really really seems like he doesn't? That's because he wants you to have faith. Yes, that makes sense.

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I found this excellent and thought-provoking transcript of a debate between Aubrey de Grey and William B. Hurlbut on Future Current. Excerpts:

Aubrey:

Persuading people that we can actually get somewhere in this is hard, because people tend to start out with what philosophers have called the argument for personal incredulity–which means, I can’t believe that this is possible, and therefore it’s impossible. And also the argument from selective, superficial, self-serving authority, which is that such and such a person who appears to be respectable says it is not true, and therefore it’s not true.

Now the ways I feel are effective in getting around these problems are first of all to make it difficult to maintain incredulity, simply by showing that it’s common sense. And the second thing is to show results, the progress that’s being made in the first steps of achieving the overall goal, and thereby also undermining the incredulity aspect.

This is the sort of thing that gets me into an enormous amount of trouble. I tend to go around the world saying this sort of thing. If we were able to implement Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence we might be able to achieve what I have called longevity escape velocity, which I will get into in a moment. The bottom line can be described by the fact that if we get to the point where we can extend people’s lives in something in the region of thirty years with interventions that are initiated when people are already in middle age, then it will be all downhill from there. It will get easier after that. We will be able to extend people’s healthy, and therefore useful, lifespan indefinitely, essentially. So, that means the first 1,000 year-old may not be that much younger than the first 150 year-old.

William:

What is this thing called aging? Do we have a clear understanding of what it is? And is it something indeed that is worthy of the word “cure?” That’s a very loaded word. Galen, the 1st century Roman physician, said that the physician is nature’s assistant. That goal was the one I was trained around, to restore the patient so that the natural life processes could be optimalized. But now there is a new paradigm in medicine: technological transformation in the quest for happiness and human perfection. Increasingly we’ve come to expect from medicine not just freedom from disease, but freedom from distress, struggle, and even the constraints of life’s natural processes. All that’s unattractive, imperfect, or just inconvenient. This is the medicalization of natural life. Biomedical technology gives not just new powers of comprehension and control but a transformation in our conceptual and ethical outlook, a vision of nature and human nature and the role of human desires, transformed and inflated by new powers and new possibilities.

The hegemony of this is the dominance of technology over our traditions–what we might call our spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic traditions. I guess the first thing I would say about this is, to put it simply, “Mother Nature always bats in the bottom of the ninth.” There is a lot to be said about this from a physical, medical, biological standpoint. The main points I want to make are there’s a relationship between mechanism and meaning. Our minds do not somehow hover over our bodily being. We are our bodies. What we do to our bodies will affect the entire psycho-physical unity that we are. But is it not our nature, part of who we are, to intervene in nature? Are we not the creature who is also a creator?

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Since I left faith behind I've been fascinated by the stories told by others who have taken the same path from faith to reason. This account in particular struck m as similar to mine in that the author finds himself drawn to to Calvinism and ultimately to unbelief.

I was drawn to Calvinism as an intermediate stage in my transition to unbelief simply because it was more logically consistent with the scriptures than the wish-fulfillment of evangelicalism. Whereas contemporary Christian thought went through illogical contortions to dismiss the plainly biblical idea that God chooses to save some and condemn others, Calvinism faces it, accepts it, and ultimately lays it at the feet of God's sovereign right to do whatever he wants. In other words, might makes right.

And, like the author, my need to be rational and logical, to go where the evidence would lead, led me to accept that science proves faith to be irrational.

My favorite quotation from the account:

By the time I finished reading the book...I sat down and realized that there was nothing left for me to believe. The overwhelming evidence for biological evolution, the natural history of the world, and the historical critical problems with the Bible left me dumb founded. I came to the conclusion that I was no longer a Christian and that I had to reject the faith that I had believed, loved and cherished for so long.

Why I Left Christianity

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FoxNews.com - March 9, 2009

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.

"No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state," the study's authors said.

In the Northeast, self-identified Catholics made up 36 percent of adults last year, down from 43 percent in 1990. At the same time, however, Catholics grew to about one-third of the adult population in California and Texas, and one-quarter of Floridians, largely due to Latino immigration, according to the research.

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Listening to Albert Mohler on the radio, he answers a question by a caller about whether the earth is old or young, and I'm reminded of my own irrational thinking as a minister attempting to defend the Bible.

But I will give him one thing: he's at least honest about what an old earth does to the Bible's credibility. It destroys it.

According to Mohler, if the earth is old, as science tells us it surely is, then the Genesis account is wrong, and nothing in the Bible can be trusted. Further, if human beings existed and died before Adam and Eve sinned, then "we have a gospel problem," since the gospel declares that death came into the world because of sin. If death existed before sin, then again, the Bible is wrong and the gospel is a fantasy.

So how does Mohler get around the science? He cannot dispute that the earth "appears" old. The evidence of fossils and geology is overwhelming on that score. He merely concludes that the earth was created mature, as were Adam and Eve.

Yes folks, God made the earth and everything in it and on it only a few thousand years ago, but he made it with fossils of animal and plant life that never really existed, and with geologic strata than never saw the light of day, etc.

You see, Christian apologists begin with an assumption that the Bible is true, then work like crazy to find a way to make such an irrational view seem rational. It's not a pretty thing to witness from the outside.

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Looking at Christianity from the outside is a revelatory experience. Almost every day brings with it a fresh perspective, not to mention a fresh happiness at being free of it. It has struck me recently, for example, how many of the beliefs of Christians are simply a form of wishful thinking.

On an online forum the other day I marveled at a discussion of hell. One poster opined that he would have great difficulty believing Hitler would get away with his crimes against humanity by ending his existence quietly and in the comforting company of his new wife, Eva. Hence his belief in the existence of hell.

Another poster believed in God because she found the idea of someone watching over and protecting her at all times very soothing.

This is where I part company with such sentiments. I won't believe something merely because doing so makes me feel better and in spite of overwhelming evidence against it. I would rather face the world as it is, not as I would like it to be.

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Minnesota Public Radio, March 4, 2009

Richard Dawkins says atheists should be just as forthright in their views as those who believe God is real.

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Since I realized I was an atheist, I have welcomed all efforts to persuade me that the God of the Bible exists. Truly there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to arguments in favor of his existence, but the one that forms the basis of such efforts is this: We don't know, so it must have been God.


Much is made of the fact that science does not have an explanation for the existence of the universe, or of the origins of life. So it must have been God.

By this same logic, there must be aliens flying around, since science cannot explain every UFO sighting. Seemingly, it's not acceptable to admit ignorance, one must have an answer, and one must have it right now. By contrast, science admits its ignorance and diligently seeks answers.

Here's one way science and religion can get in sync... Let's all agree that we don't yet know the answers. Let's admit that "God did it" is not an explanation.

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Blogger's Note: Today I heard a snippet of a radio sermon. "If there is no God, then life is without meaning and the existentialists are right," said the preacher. But doesn't that logic (or lack of) just indulging in wishful thinking? The question shouldn't be which way would make life seem more bearable, but if something represents reality or not. Hence this article...

NewScientist - March 2, 2009, by Ewen Callaway

Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest.

No matter what their religious beliefs, college-educated adults frequently agree with purpose-seeking yet false explanations of natural phenomena - finches diversified in order to survive, for instance.

"The very fact of belief in purpose itself might lead you to favour intelligent design," says Deborah Kelemen, a psychologist at Boston University, who led the study

Kelemen has documented the same kind of erroneous thinking - called promiscuous teleology - in young children. Seven and eight-year olds agree with teleological statements such as "Rocks are jagged so animals can scratch themselves" and "Birds exist to make nice music". These mistakes diminish as kids take more science classes and learn causal explanations for natural events.

Continue reading>>

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Guardian - February 22, 2009, by Colin Blakemore

When I was a medical student at Cambridge in the Sixties, I walked to lectures past the forbidding exterior of the Cavendish Laboratory, as famous for Crick and Watson's unravelling of DNA as for Rutherford's splitting of the atom. One day, scrawled on the wall, was a supreme example of Cambridge graffiti: "CRICK FOR GOD".

The process of Christian accommodation is a bit like the fate of fieldmice confronted by a combine harvester, continuously retreating into the shrinking patch of uncut wheat.

No surprise that pivotal advances in science provoke religious metaphors. Crick and Watson's discovery transformed our view of life itself - from a manifestation of spiritual magic to a chemical process. One more territorial gain in the metaphysical chess match between science and religion.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly a vital move in that chess game - if not checkmate. In an interview for God and the Scientists, to be broadcast tonight in Channel 4's series on Christianity, Richard Dawkins declares: "Darwin removed the main argument for God's existence."

That wasn't, of course, Darwin's intention. In 1827, he scraped into Cambridge to study for the church. But by 1838, with the wealth of experience from the Beagle's voyage inside his head, Darwin had conceived the idea that natural selection - survival of the fittest - had created new species. Even after she accepted his marriage proposal, Darwin's cousin Emma, a strict Unitarian, fretted that his heretical theories would lead to their separation in the afterlife!

Continue reading>>

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