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Atheists Only Attack the Extremes
by Noah Lugeons
I call it the “Straw Messiah” defense; theists will often fault the atheists (and more often the gnu-atheists) for attacking only the “extremes” of religion. Of course, this charge is likely true of some atheists, but it can largely be dismissed simply by asking for a definition of “extremes” within religion. After all, anybody who believes a cracker turns to a dead man-god or that a talking snake is responsible for our expulsion from paradise or even that an intelligent designer was behind the whole scrotum idea is pretty extreme in my book. So where does one draw the line of “extreme”?
Usually the antagonist will draw this line as far from themselves as possible. Often they’ll defend themselves by watering down their beliefs to such a degree that there’s nothing left to argue with. They’ll present such a vacuous definition that there will be no meat to parse. “I believe that god is the sum total of all of us” or “I believe that the spirit of the bible is true even if the words aren’t” are too vague to meaningfully refute.
Many prominent atheists dismiss this charge simply by pointing out how “extreme” the average religious person is. They’ll simply cite some statistics about denial of evolution, literal belief in Noah’s ark or the expectations of Jesus returning within one’s own lifetime as proof that the theist they’re attacking is not a caricature at all, but rather a more representative sample of the religious than the wishy-washy inquisitor. The liberal pantheist is far more to the extreme end of the true spectrum than the ignorant creationist that a gnu-atheist might eviscerate.
This is a valid defense and is usually enough to shut them up for three seconds (nothing I’ve found shuts them up for much longer than that), but it is hardly the whole story. Because there’s plenty to fault in even the most nebulous definition of religion.
So for a moment let us set aside the doctrines of allspecific faiths. Let’s set aside the snake and the wafer and the 72 raisins and let us look only at the most basic claim that all religions share. That is not “god” or “gods” as there are a few non-theistic outliers in the east (which are fast gaining popularity in the west). But even if gods were religious universals, it would be a subordinate factor to the chief issue that I take with religion. The core of my argument against faith is a simple one that not even the most indistinct theist can hide from. It is the notion of revealed wisdom.
Before gods or afterlives or codes of moral conduct can be created, the faith must begin with a prophet. There is no other way for religion to begin. Even the neo-pagan faiths start with writers who veil their prophecy in pseudo-history and unverified appeals to antiquity. Every religion is rooted in a prophet, but what’s more is that a steady string of prophets is needed to divine the intent or mood of the god (or the universe or the chi or whatever). Prophets don’t shout across the ages; they rely on modern day representatives of the faith to continue to speak for them in proclamations that can’t be questioned or invalidated.
And thus the very notion of religion is antithetical to the betterment of humanity. If a feeling or an opinion or a prophecy or a sacred cow is somehow beyond reproach, then it is an obstacle to understanding. If it hasn’t become one yet, it will in the future. The very nature of revealed wisdom demands it.
True wisdom is universal and can be found simply by rejecting all things that prove themselves false under testing. Anything else that claims the title of “wisdom” is harmful. No matter how seemingly good the advice is, by enshrining it on stone tablets you take away society’s ability to re-evaluate it in the future. Revealed wisdom leads to absolutes, which will always lead to problems. After all, at one time all the homophobic verses in the bible were considered “wise” by the majority.
So when I attack some specific thing within this faith or that, don’t defend yourself by pointing out that this particular gripe doesn’t apply to your preferred load of shit. Your random assemblage of antiquated superstitions is no less revealed than the last one. If it started with faith and is immutable to reason, it’s all equally worthless and equally deserving of atheist scorn.
Media Pretends to be Shocked by Anti-Gay Remarks
by Noah Lugeons
Last Sunday some bigoted redneck jackass got behind a pulpit and preached the most virulent anti-gay filth one could imagine. Well, to be fair, a lot of bigoted redneck jackasses did that last Sunday, but one managed to catch national attention. One Sean Harris of the Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina actually went a bit too far when he advocated beating children who exhibited “gay” behaviors.
Plenty has been written about this vile douche-gargler so I’m not going to add to that. He’s since offered a series of halfhearted pseudo apologies and the media has dutifully reported on them right along with the despicable tape of his Nazi sermon. And they can have that. I’m certainly not going to fault the media for putting these foul-mouthed xenophobes under the scrutiny they deserve. But I will fault them for acting like they were surprised.
Seriously? A baptist preacher in North Carolina has something horrible to say about gays and that’s shocking? The church writ large is the only major organized political force in the country that is still willing to state its bigotry toward gays publicly. So why should we be shocked when one of its members is caught stating his bigotry toward gays publicly? And why should we be shocked at all when a Christian endorses child abuse? Just look at what god put his kid through.
The major news outlets can’t distance Sean Harris from the Christian tent fast enough. Every major piece about him eventually includes some reverend or minister there to explain that what he’s advocating isn’t really the Christian way.
The only problem is that it is. The Bible is pretty clear as an ethical arbiter. Being gay is a mortal sin and beating your children isn’t. Hell, even stoning them to death is defensible in certain circumstances. If you truly believe that your child is in danger of going to hell if they try the butt sex, wouldn’t beating them at the first sign of a limp wrist be the lesser of two evils?
Any time a pastor gets in front of his flock and calls homosexuality a sin, he is subtly advocating exactly what Sean Harris was expressly advocating. I for one am not shocked when a Christian acts like a Christian. That’s because when I say “acts like a Christian”, I’m judging that by how Christians act rather than how they say they act.
God is an Asshole
by Noah Lugeons
I sometimes argue with Christians. If my goal was to actually change their minds, I’d consider all of my past debates to be failures. If my goal was to incite virulence and face-reddening anger, I’d consider all of them to be successes. But in truth my goal lies somewhere in between. I don’t argue to change minds or to invoke rage, but rather in the futile hope of someday understanding the opposing viewpoint.
Christians are not generally swayed by logic or reason. They tend to notice logical contradictions without realizing that they fatally handicap an assertion. They seem to think that evidence and the scientific method have validity only insofar as they prop up their own arguments. They love to run to the safe “base” of nonsense terms that place god’s ways far outside our feeble understanding and thus negating any reasonable assessment of His viability as an entity.
I think it’s rather fair to simply say that when logic is applied to god, there can only be two possible outcomes and I don’t see a lot of religious folks embracing either of them. The first, of course, is that god simply doesn’t exist and that he is the remnant of pre-scientific attempts to understand the world. The other and far less likely is that he does exist and he’s a complete asshole.
What else could you say about a deity that empowers us with such noble potentials as love, self-sacrifice and reason but then holds gullibility as the metric for our goodness? What else can you say of a deity that demands our love and then actively orders his world in such a way as to strongly suggest that he doesn’t exist at all? What else would you say about an omniscient, omnipotent being that still chooses childish responses like jealousy, bigotry and vengeance? How else could you describe a beast that would demand the sacrifice of his own son to tamp down his own obsessive and bitter need for revenge? What else can you say about a deity that would give us freewill on the condition that we choose not to use it? What more apt way could you describe a deity that would fill our brains with such powerful sexual urges and then demand that we resist them?
And how else could you describe a deity that would allow such horrid institutions as organized churches to act as his corporeal PR team without smiting the ever loving shit out of them? How else could you classify a god that demands that his loyal flock spend much of their time being invasive assholes about virtually everything anyone enjoys?
So either (a) there is no god or (b) there is a god and he’s a childish asshole who wouldn’t be worth mild praise, let alone worship. Either way, religion is equally full of shit.
How Hubble Saved My Soul
by Noah Lugeons
I’m proud that I was rational enough to reject formal religion at a young age, but must shamefully admit that the shackles of nonsense still weighed heavily on me into my early adulthood. I wasn’t religious, but I was just as irrational in my new-age hippy spiritualism. I was able to dismiss all the doctrines of revealed faith, but I retained a soft spot for ancient wisdom. I wanted magic and eternal life, I just wasn’t willing to get it from a church.
So I alternately identified myself as a Wiccan, a spiritualist or, my personal favorite, a Pangeantheologist. But then, in the mid nineties, something happened that would start to slowly erode the foundation of my misconceptions: I started to see the images being returned from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Like practically everyone, I fell in love with these images. I was fascinated by them and could not possibly see enough. I wanted to know more about what they were and the incredible universe they revealed. But more than that I wanted to know how we got them and what they meant. While a slow gestation would follow, that was the beginnings of my love for science. Somehow underpaid, uninspired public school teachers had failed to instill any real appreciation for something as fascinating as everything in my developing mind and it took seeing the universe in this scale for me to truly appreciate the wonders of human curiosity.
But there was something else gestating right along with this new found interest. It was like a pinhole in the dam that allowed my credulity to slowly start to slip away. As I sat there, enthralled with images like the one above, I could not help but consider their source. Not just the telescope itself and the marvel of technology it was, but also the process that allowed it to come about; the process of science.
Spiritualism had a lot to say about heaven, but they never managed to take pictures. We never glimpsed the earliest stars through the power of herbal supplements. The methods and practiced that all my hippy gurus promoted had been around for centuries and sometimes millenia, and yet knowledge of their deep and mystical secrets had never managed something as stupefying and eye-opening as even the lowliest of Hubble’s observations.
Science, as Carl Sagan said, brings the goods. It is all but impossible to cocoon oneself in the arrogant worldview that places humanity in the center of it all when things like the Hubble images are taken into consideration. The appeal of all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo was rooted in my desire to be part of something larger, but when I glanced at the universe through the eyes of a space telescope, I saw that science was offering me something larger than any new-age guru could dream of. And what’s more is that it was real; tangible; provable. Unlike the “truth” offered by religion, science demands nothing in return.
Merit
by Noah Lugeons
There’s something to be said for a short, succinct blog post.
How Psychics Fool Themselves
by Noah Lugeons
The question seems to arise a lot in conversations among skeptics. The subject of some charlatan faith-healer or soothsayer will come up and someone will inevitably wonder aloud whether or not this person actually believes the bullshit they’re selling. Does the woo-merchant actually believe that the bracelet works? Does the astrologer actually consult the stars or do they just formulate their nonsense freehand? Does the preacher actually believe the sermon?
Clearly there can be no one right answer in all of these instances, which is why the question comes up so often. But I feel that I bring a certain amount of first hand knowledge to the subject and thought it worth sharing.
I was once dangerously close to being convinced that I was a psychic. My drug of choice were the Tarot Cards and I was a full blown, blow-jobs-in-bathroom-stalls addict. I got my first set as a gift from a friend shortly after I’d rejected my families preferred brand of bullshit but before I’d sworn off bullshit altogether. It was a well worn set of cards that my friend had owned for some time and had tired of. He gave them to me along with a small book of about 200 pages that explained how to unlock all their mystical powers.
Under direction of the book, I spent a few minutes each day contemplating one of the cards and getting lost in the beautiful mythological artwork that adorned them. I read up on the meanings of each card and spend several months devoting a single day to study and meditation on each card in turn.
I can’t really say why I did all that. I don’t know why the idea of fortune telling with playing cards seemed any less nonsensical than all the Christian crap I’d so recently shrugged off. I suppose that I must have felt like I was learning something or I wouldn’t have kept it up so long, but I don’t recall any moments of epiphany along the way that would suggest that there was any validity to the whole enterprise.
But eventually I felt like I had them all worked out and set about reading people’s future. It was remarkable to me even then how easy it was to find potential querents. I could simply break my Tarot deck out in a public place and within a few minutes I would have a ready guinea pig completely ready to credulously accept my authority on mystic revelations.
My first few readings were to my forgiving friends and they were disasters, but I likened it to any other talent. The first time you try to play the guitar you’re not going to sound that good no matter how much you’ve studied the theory. So I kept at it and refined my technique. Within another year I’d read several books on the subject and I felt like I really had a hold of the “art”. I was confident enough with them to do readings for total strangers. And what’s more, the strangers would come back for more. By the end of a ten card reading, they’d be asking for my phone number in case they needed to borrow my clairvoyance again.
At first I wrote it off to gullibility. Like a musician listening to a recording of her own performance, I was keenly aware of the mistakes and misses that my subjects were so ready to overlook. I realized that I was batting .500 in a 50/50 game but I just wrote that off as another step toward perfecting the art.
And along the way I started to learn what kind of statements worked and which ones didn’t. I started to learn ways to cloak my language in ever vaguer terms and to broaden the ways of interpreting everything I’d just said. I’d learned to ask questions rather than to make statements. Most importantly, I’d learned to tell people what they wanted to hear. Offering them a damn good future is the easiest way to get somebody on your side.
Keep in mind that I’d never read a book about cold reading. I’d never read anything about faking my way through a psychic reading. I’d simply learned the meaning of the individual cards and the format of the readings. The rest I picked up along the way in a Darwinian process of trial and error. I was conscious of the fact that I my hit rate was only increasing because I was making statements that were more likely to be valid. I learned that when I used a term like “young man” I should never specify an age range, but rather let that mean child or young adult to you. I learned to steer the reading based on what the querent was saying. And I knew that there was nothing clairvoyant about any of it.
But despite that, I was slowly becoming coming to question my lack of psychic powers. Was this simply how the ancient art manifested itself? Did one simply adopt a “fake it ’til you make it” attitude? And, preeminent among the questions, was I getting out more than I was putting in? Sure, I wasn’t all that impressed with my psychic powers, but the people I was doing these readings for sure were. Was I just too modest to recognize my obvious super-human abilities?
So large were my attempts to justify it that I began questioning whether it was arrogance that was holding me back from embracing my telepathic propensity. After all, was I really so much smarter than all these people who I was doing readings for? I thought it was just a bunch of tricks of phrasing, but perhaps I was just denying the Tarot their due. Perhaps there was something to them after all. Perhaps the reason I never had any real insight was that Tarot didn’t work that way. Perhaps the real power was in teasing the insight out of the questioner.
In truth, the answer was always clear to me. These people wanted me to be psychic so if I offered them the slightest glimmer of hope, they were happy to overlook whatever they had to in order to embrace it. I wanted me to be psychic too, but I was never able to make the leap I would have had to before I could charge for my “service” without feeling like a fraud.
That being said, I can see how even a very rational person in my position might have started to believe their own bullshit. There is a frightening symbiotic relationship between the bullshiter and the bullshitee. If the victim of the fraud wants to be victimized bad enough, it is damned tempting to give it to them. And as I sat with a querent long after the reading and listened to them try to find elaborate ways of turning my misses into hits (“Maybe that bit was about my brother’s kids…”) I really wanted to throw away my rational doubts and take the meal that was in front of me. Sorry if I hurt my credibility by saying this, but I was good enough at reading Tarot to make a living at it and had a number of ready customers willing to pay for my service. And this was a damned tempting lifestyle, especially if I could justify even the smallest sliver of belief in what I was doing.
Again, all I can comment on is my own personal experience, but I tend to start with the hypothesis that anyone making money with their bullshit knows exactly what they’re selling. The mere fact that they’re successful serves as potent evidence of that fact; if they didn’t know the “tricks”, they’d be a lot less likely to consistently fool their customers and get the kind of repeat business one needs to make a service like that profitable. I’m sure that there are some people out there making a living selling their herbal remedies and pseudo-science that actually believe everything they say, but the more extravagant the claim, the less inclined I am to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Hooray, I’m Not a Nazi!
by Noah Lugeons
I should start by explaining that I grew up in a small town in rural south bumfuck and thus I wasn’t exposed to religious diversity during my formative years. We had us a few Jews down there and you were vaguely aware that they existed; there was a synagogue and everything. You were taught that they didn’t believe in Jesus, but other than that they were okay.
In fact, I really didn’t start encountering much religious diversity until I moved to the big apple a few years ago and since then I’ve been making up for lost time. I now encounter not only people of all faiths each day, but also people all along the wide spectrum of devotion within each belief. In other words, I meet the moderates and the extremes. The most important thing I’ve learned from these interactions is that in my estimation, regardless of one’s faith or one’s level of faith, people are generally friendly, kindhearted and caring. It seems to me that when evaluating someone’s character, religion doesn’t offer any meaningful variables.
Now, the proper liberal thing to say here is that I don’t treat anyone any differently based on their faith. The little donkey on my shoulder wants me to say that I just see people for people whether they’re wearing a baseball cap, a kippah or a turban. But I’m sick and tired of treading this liberal tightrope at the razor’s edge between multiculturalism and skepticism. I’d like to say that I feel no differently when I interact with an orthodox Jewish family than I do when I interact with a family whose outward appearance doesn’t betray their religion. But that would be dishonest.
When I see an orthodox Jewish boy with his little payos and his shaved head, I can’t help but feel sorry for that child. I think of all the doors that were open to me that have been closed to him. I think of all the choices he cannot make without driving an irrevocable wedge between himself and his family. I think of all the education the happenstance of his birth might deny him. I look to his sister and think of the even more narrow range of socially acceptable choices that await her as she grows up among such arcane sexism.
And if I feel pity for the children, I cannot help but feel pity for their parents who were already denied so much and have simply chosen the path of least resistance and remained tethered to their families and the communities they grew up in. I feel sorry for them for having done what I might well have done and simply swallowed the bitter pill of self-enforced ignorance that is fundamentalism in order to remain my father’s son.
And then I have this little pang of liberal guilt where I say to myself, “whoops… did I just go all Nazi back there?”
It’s hard, with the very visible and unthinkable suffering of the Jewish people so omnipresent in recent history, not to feel that echo of bigotry when you can’t bring yourself to tow the liberal line. When “it’s simply the way these people choose to live” isn’t enough for me; when I look at the sheltered little echo chamber of ignorance they subject their children to, I simply can’t brush aside that offense in the name of multiculturalism.
I usually comfort myself with the fact that I feel the same way about all fundamentalist sects regardless of their chosen brand of nonsense. Whether it’s some compound in middle America subjecting their children to biblical literalism or an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect or a radical Islamic school or some wacky spiritualist cult hybrid I still pity the children who are brought up in a world where the authority figures around them are drawing a shade over reality. It is religion that I despise rather than one particular religion.
Well, if I needed another justification (and I didn’t), I got it on Saturday at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism here in beautiful NYC. Among the all-star lineup of speakers over the weekend was one Debra Feldman. She was raised in the Hasidic neighborhood in Williamsburg by her extremely orthodox grandparents (her mother was kicked out of the community for being gay) and in her early adulthood she mustered the courage to break her ties with that community, go to a secular college and establish herself here in the real world. She gave a riveting and quite self-deprecating talk where she outlined many of the revelations and injustices that would ultimately lead her to this life changing action… and of course she promoted her book a little bit along the way.
Of all the great speakers I heard over the weekend, I think it was her talk that moved me the most. Here was this courageous individual appealing to our sense of humanity when it comes to the children of religious extremists. She said that the real game-changer for her was her pregnancy and the knowledge that she would now be subjecting her child to the same warped, misguided world she felt trapped in. She was looking at her own child (or the swollen belly that preceded him) and she was feeling that same pity for him that I feel when I see a five year old whose religion has already been decided for him in broad and semi-permanent strokes. And it was this pity that called her to action because it wasn’t tempered by that multicultural donkey on the shoulder that far too many of us liberal atheists have.
Now, there are plenty of folks in the Hasidic community that have accused Ms. Feldman of being a Nazi, but in my judgment, she is a courageous freethinker who deserves our respect and support. And from what I’ve seen so far, she seems to be a talented writer as well. She’s also going to help me shut that damn donkey up so that I can hate religious extremism guilt free for a little longer.
Christians are Like Raisins
by Noah Lugeons
I had occasion to visit Dollywood this summer. I was there about four days before the now infamous T-shirt scandal in which a lesbian couple was barred entrance for wearing a shirt with a pro-gay marriage message. To be fair, they were allowed in when the woman agreed to turn the T-shirt inside out. They have a stated policy against clothing with what they consider “offensive” messages and I frankly agree with such a policy in a theme park that largely caters to children. The Disney parks would hardly let me in wearing my “Fuck Jesus” shirt and well they shouldn’t.
The problem, of course, stems from their failure to define “offensive”. The hill billy working the ticket counter was offended by their lesbian-ness and the T-shirt was a reflection of that. God does, undeniably, say that gay people should die (though you can read it as though this only applies to gay men) in the bible so it probably seemed to this bible-thumping centurion that this shirt was against company policy. She was just executing the duties of a Dollywood Ticket Taker and sometimes that includes making the tough calls.
I would submit that the job of deciding which shirts to let in and which to keep out is probably pretty challenging. I often found myself amidst a sea of Christian propaganda shirts and they offended the hell out of me. One offered a Staples-style “Jesus Button”. One helpfully inquired if I “Got Jesus?”. My personal favorite was one that was cleverly disguised as a Mountain Dew logo that actually said “Meant to Die”.
I had to include this or you'd have thought I was making this shit up.
While that one may have earned top honors in my mind, the most popular one in the park seemed to be a plain black T-shirt that proudly proclaimed that “This Shirt is Illegal in 51 Countries” with a little red cross above in case you thought the bible passages on the back were too subtle.
Lest you think I’m exaggerating the ubiquity of these Jesus shirts, I attest that I saw all of the following common corporate logos bastardized to include some ham-handed reference to Jesosity:
- Staples (as mentioned above)
- Mountain Dew (as pictured above)
- Starbucks
- Reese’s Candies
- Dr. Pepper
- Fender Guitars
- Intel
- Arm & Hammer (It was “Armed and Ready” and the hand was holding a cross)
- Coca Cola
Keep in mind that I went before the whole T-shirt fiasco. I wasn’t cataloging the shirts as I saw them. Those are just the ones I remember.
If this surprises you then you’ve clearly never been to Dollywood. It’s a Christian theme park and it must do a healthy percentage of its business in church groups and bible camps. It’s Christian enough to have church slap in the middle of the park… with services. You can actually stop in after lunch and pray that you don’t barf on the next roller coaster.
To be sure, there are plenty of far more religious theme parks out there. The evangelicals already have the “Holy Land Experience” in Orlando (as featured in Bill Maher’s Religioulis) and all of us in the atheist blogosphere eagerly await new reason’s to make fun of Kentucky’s Ark Encounter, but at least these parks are upfront about their religious slant. Dollywood is a “subversive” Christian theme park. It’s not called “Jesuswood”. It’s advertised as simple, wholesome Dolly Parton-themed family fun.
But in the mountains of Tennessee, the word Christian is more or less assumed when the words “wholesome” and “family” are invoked. Along the drive into the park you’ll be greeted by a number of Christian themed dinner theaters, one of which (I shit you not) will allow you to watch a reenactment of Christ’s brutal death while you eat.
I should explain that when I say that Dollywood is “subversive” about its Christianity, I don’t mean that they hide it. If you check the “Core Values” they list on their website, you’ll see the words “All in a Manner Consistent with Christian Values and Ethics” in red, bold letters along the bottom. There’s nothing about Jesus on the homepage, but if you go digging for him, you’ll find him.
And that’s often my largest complaint about Christian intrusion into the secular world. I have no issues with fundamental-cases building their own life-sized ark (though the tax money they’re building it with kind of pisses me off). But if you’re going to build a Christian theme park, make damn sure everyone who walks in knows what they’re in for. Don’t try to disguise a creationist museum as a real one.
Christians are subversive in the way that raisins are subversive. You’ll be eating a pastry and enjoying it when along comes this unexpected was of dead-fly (or whatever they make raisins out of). You spit it out and stare angrily at the pastry, wondering who stuck dead-fly fruit in your breakfast. You check the package and sure enough it says “raisins” on the front in tiny little letters under “Cinnamon Bun”. The information was there if you looked for it, but you had to be looking for it.
I’m reminded of a gift I bought my nephew several years ago at Christmas (yes, even we atheists celebrate buy-shit-day). They were these little plastic things that you slid over your shoes so that you could slide along on the carpet. Of course he could have gotten the same effect by wearing wool socks on tile but the fact that it was a crap product isn’t why I bring it up. As I’m wrapping these little suckers up, I notice that tucked away on a little margin of the packaging was a bible verse. It’s just snuck into the side of an otherwise secular purchase. Only a careful scrutiny of the package would have revealed this discreet attempt at evangelism.
The goal here was to sneak the passage in. The goal was to get it before the eyes of children without their parent’s knowledge or consent. If they were trying to attract more Christian customers, they would have prominently displayed the verse, but instead it was tucked into a corner where only the eyes of a child examining a new toy would be likely to see it.
It is always in the best interest of the atheist activist to remember the mind-set of the Christian. In their eyes something like this is perfectly acceptable. If they can’t sneak biblical passages into your home, your child is in danger of spending eternity in Hell. When the stakes are that high things like respect for your beliefs are inconsequential.
So I implore you to treat Christians just like you treat raisins: Always be on the look out. Always check the package carefully before you commit. Those dry, disgusting, tasteless, shriveled, out-dated bastards are always looking for a way in.
I Don’t Know
by Noah Lugeons
Among the many vapid but beloved tactics employed by Christian apologists is the “unanswerable” list of questions. Kent Hovind seems to have a genetic predilection for it and his questions tend to be predictably vacuous. Here’s a sample of some of the hard-hitting questions he “stumps” “evolutionists” with:
- Where did the space for the universe come from?
- Where did matter come from?
- Where did the laws of the universe come from?
- How did matter get so perfectly organized?
- Where did the energy come from to do all the organizing?
Plenty of scientists and bloggers far more informed than myself have answered these questions for him so I won’t bother treading the same well-worn path in the carpet (although if you’d like some answers, Rosa Rubicondior provides some great ones). I won’t bother pointing out that not a damn one of these has the slightest thing to do with evolution (he eventually gets to that in 2 or 3 of his 10 questions) and I won’t bother pointing out that he kept asking long after the questions had been answered.
Instead, I’d like to look at the assumption behind all of these. Hovind, like far too many zealots, seems to believe that as science fails, magical space-men somehow win by default. The “God of the Gaps” theory (also known as the “Incredible Shrinking God”) rests on this preposterous notion that one guy’s “I don’t know” is somehow trumped by another guy’s “I don’t know”. In their warped folds of gray matter, science’s ability to explain (for example) where the “space came from” for the universe somehow empowers their inability to explain it.
Let’s set aside for a moment what a meaningless inquiry it is to ask where the space that space is in came from. Let’s set aside the fact that there actually are some workable (if not wholly comprehensible) theories that seek to tackle this esoteric question. Let’s set aside the fact that asking where it came from all but assumes the existence of the thing they’re trying to prove to begin with. Let’s suppose that this was a legitimate and intellectually coherent puzzler. Let’s pretend that scientists, when confronted with this query, could but throw their shoulders up and offer their palms with a cocked head and an apologetic “I don’t know”.
So what?
“I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer. It is almost always an intellectually honest answer. What’s more is that it is readily acceptable when the tables are turned on the apologist. Where did god come from? “I don’t know”. Why did god have to kill his son to appease himself? “I don’t know”. Why couldn’t the writers of the gospels get the Lord’s Prayer transcribed with remote consistency? “I don’t know”. Why do so many of the stories about Christ predate his existence and show up in the mythological record or earlier faiths? “I don’t know”. Oh, and while we’re at it, where did the space that space is in come from? “I don’t know”.
Of course, their “I don’t know” is okay because they’re not meant to know. Their “I don’t know” is cloaked in a mystery they embrace. Religion exists to embrace its own ignorance. Science, on the other hand, seeks to answer questions. It’s okay in the mind of the religious to simply chalk up the tough questions to the inexplicable nature of god, but there’s really only a semantic difference between “I don’t know” and “The lord works in mysterious ways”.
The primary difference between the two approaches is one of specificity. Science, by its very nature, is uncertain. The whole point of science is a lack of unalterable dogma. As established as the laws of science are, none of them are incontrovertible. Physicists would agree that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but all it would take to overturn that belief would be an observation of something moving faster than light. It doesn’t matter who told who what. Despite the well deserved apotheosis of Einstein, nobody thinks him infallible. He is not a messiah. His words aren’t the gospel.
People crave certainty but certainty is an illusion. Religion is happy to sell you whatever illusion you’d like to buy, but science refuses to offer it as it would close off avenues of further research and it would stifle the continued growth of scientific knowledge. The price of unbounded inquiry is ambiguity. The genesis of knowledge is the admission of ignorance. Every break through in the history of human thought began with the recognition that “I don’t know”.
My Conversation With God
by Noah Lugeons
Late last night, God spoke to me.
“Noah…” he said in a rumbling whisper. I rolled a bit in my sleep, unsure if I was dreaming or awake.
“Noah…” he said again.
“Ben Affleck?” I asked, hoping against all odds that he was finally abiding by the restraining order.
“No, it’s God,” he explained.
I sighed warily and sat up, glancing quickly to my wife to see if I’d awakened her. “God?” I asked.
“God,” he clarified.
“Look, I don’t mean to be a dick, but is this something that can wait until morning? I’ve been drinking…”
“I had nothing to do with Bieber winning that VMA.”
“What?”
“I actually prefer Bruno Mars.”
“Who?”
“But I’ve got plenty of problems dealing with the drought in Africa. I didn’t even get to watch the VMAs this year.”
“God, I’m really tired,” I complained, but I knew this wouldn’t shut him up.
“Yeah, I guess that’s kind of off topic anyway. Sorry. Just wanted to make that clear. I’m so sick of Justin Bieber that I’m about ready to smite him. Could you imagine? One piece of brimstone… BAM. One more lonely girl if you know what I mean.”
“You know I’m an atheist, right?”
“Yeah, that’s actually why I’m here.”
Convinced that this conversation wasn’t going to end any time soon I reached to the bedside table and grabbed a cigarette.
“I notice that your not blogging lately,” God said, followed by a forced and unconvincing cough as I lit my smoke.
I rolled my eyes. “Give me a break, God, you’re not even corporeal.”
“I know, but smoke still bothers me. It’s a disgusting habit.”
“I know, I know,” I uttered. “Can we just get to the point?”
“I want you to start blogging again.”
“Really? You know I write an atheist blog, right?”
“And podcasting. You need to get back on that.”
“But… I blog and podcast about the fact that you’re just a figment of the cultural imagination. I blog about the logical incoherence of your existence. I talk about the denialism of science and atrocious lapses in morality that are justified under your name. I write about the sheer stupidity of holding bronze age beliefs in the modern-day.”
“Yeah, but the world needs more of that.”
“I agree, but I’m kind of surprised to hear you say it.”
“I want humans to be the best they can be, Noah. I’m not going to get that if people are busy stifling discovery and retarding social progress. I created disease and strife so that humans could come together against a common banner of necessity. I put the obstacles there so that you could climb over them. The idiots that believe in me are, forgive my language, fucking things all up.”
“You’re forgiven,” I said with a hint of irony. “Do you realize how many atheist blogs are on the internet? Do you really think that one more is going to make a difference? Hell, nobody’s really reading it anyway.”
“I’m reading it,” God said reassuringly.
“Yeah, but you don’t show up on Google Analytics.”
“If you tweet it, they will come.”
“Are you stealing lines from Kevin Costner now?”
“I loved that movie. I was awesome in it. Not like Bruce Almighty…”
“So if I promise to start blogging again, will you let me go back to sleep?”
“And podcasting.”
“Fine. I’ll get to it first thing in the morning… or afternoon probably. I’ve got some errands to run in the morning.”
“Okay. So what, Tuesday on the next episode?”
“Sure. Tuesday’ll work.”
“Alright. Night, Noah.”
“Night God,” I said, snubbing out my cigarette and curling back into my pillow. Rudy made a brief nocturnal purr as I threw my arm around her and in an instant I was unconcious once more.
The Scathing Atheist 