(For previous posts in this series, see here.) Religion has always had its own defenders, called religious apologists, who have tried to find ways to make religious beliefs intellectually respectable and at least somewhat consistent with advances in knowledge in science and other areas. In response to the recent onslaughts on their faith by the new atheists, there has arisen in response what one might call the 'new apologetics', attempts to combat the arguments of the new atheists. But in examining these arguments one is startled to discover that there is really nothing new. While this series of posts has demonstrated that developments in science over the last two centuries have resulted in powerful new evidence and arguments against religion and god emerging thick and fast, religious apologists are still appealing to the arguments of Saint Augustine of Hippo (4th century), Thomas Aquinas (13th century), and William Paley (19th century), and even Paley is just revamping the arguments of his predecessors. As Sam Harris says in his book The End of Faith (2004):

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is at the center of the cosmos, or that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. (p. 21-22)

The only thing that is new about the new apologetics is that the new apologists have taken those very same old arguments and tried to redefine terms and adjust their meanings to respond to the genuinely new arguments and evidence of modern science and the new atheists. Recall that there are still two major unanswered questions in science: the origin of the universe and the origin of life. The new apologetics, as I said earlier, has seized on these to create a God of the Ultimate Gaps as an 'explanation' for these questions. But when we say these two questions are as yet unsolved by science, it has to be realized that it is not that scientists have no idea whatsoever about how the two major events occurred, but that the suggested solutions are as yet somewhat speculative. In the case of the origin of the universe, one suggestion is that our universe may not be unique but just one of many possible ' multiverses'. There has been more substantive progress in the area of the origin of life, suggesting that a credible model is not far off. (I have discussed some of the possible candidate models in an earlier post.) But in both cases, we do not have the level of evidentiary support and predictive capabilities that would elevate these speculations to the level of scientific theories and so scientists would likely label these two problems as yet unsolved. Religious apologists, perhaps sensing that the origin of life is a problem that may be solved fairly soon and thus shying away from depending too much on that being inexplicable, have focused more on the origin of universe as an argument for god and even argued that big-bang cosmology suggests the existence of god. They argue that the anthropic principle (the idea that the properties of the universe seem to be fine-tuned in just the right way for life as we know it to exist) is evidence for god, although that argument makes no sense. John Lennox (in his The God Delusion Debate with Richard Dawkins) even suggests that since the story of Genesis postulates that there was a beginning to the world, this means that the Bible predicted the big bang theory! Dinesh D'Souza in his debate with Daniel Dennett suggests something similar, that Saint Augustine anticipated the big-bang theory and thus this must somehow be seen as a 'win' for religion and evidence for god. D'Souza is correct that Augustine's cosmology

"affirms that the world was created by God from nothing, through a free act of His will. With regard to the manner in which creation was effected by God, Augustine is inclined to admit that the creation of the world was instantaneous, but not entirely as it exists at present. In the beginning there were created a few species of beings which, by virtue of intrinsic principles of reproduction, gave origin to the other species down to the present state of the existing world. Thus it seems that Augustine is not contrary to a moderate evolution, but that such a moderate evolution has nothing in common with modern materialistic evolutionist teaching. . . . For Augustine, God is immutable, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, absolutely devoid of potentiality or composition, a pure spirit, a personal, intelligent being.

But Augustine provides no evidence in support of his belief. He is merely guessing, based on what the Bible says. As Dawkins points out in response to Lennox and which applies equally well to D'Souza, there are only two possible options: either the universe had a definite beginning or it did not and thus anyone has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing it right, which hardly makes it a daring prediction. Furthermore this kind of retrospective elevation of people like Augustine is hardly proof of the validity of religion and clearly demonstrates how desperate religious apologists are. If the scientific evidence that emerged in the mid twentieth century had provided support for an alternative model of the origin of the universe as one that had no beginning (say a static universe or the steady state theory), then Augustine's guess would have been ignored and some other medieval cleric who happened to make the opposite guess would have been hailed as their champion prophet, and the Genesis story would have been reinterpreted in some way to be consistent with that model. The chances are that one can always find some cleric from ancient times who has said something that could be vaguely interpreted as being in favor of some modern scientific theory. To argue that this should count as proof of prophecy and thus of evidence for the existence of god is a real stretch. POST SCRIPT: Equal rights for gays gets a boost The California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that gay couples should have the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples. California thus joins Massachusetts in legalizing such marriages. But this decision has greater implications since opponents of gay marriages in Massachusetts were able to invoke an old law that restricted the practice only to residents. California has no such restriction which means that people from all over the country can go to California and get married. Of course, anti-gay groups are angry and are planning to try and overturn this by putting a constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage on the November ballot. If this challenge can be beaten back and the amendment defeated, this might mark a sea change in attitudes towards gays. I find the opposition to gay marriage really baffling. Why would anyone care if other people get married? It seems to based on nothing more than religion-based prejudice.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) In the previous post, we saw how religious believer try to absolve god for his failure to stop wars and genocide by arguing that god gives us free will and that it is therefore our fault when things like that happens. This is a weak argument at best but it does not address another problem of theodicy: how to explain away the massive suffering caused by natural disasters and disease, where no human agency is involved. Just this week we have immense death and destruction due to the cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China. A few years ago we had the Asian tsunami. And we have had hundreds of millions of deaths over the centuries due to diseases like the plague, malaria, and typhoid. We have horrible diseases even now, afflicting all kinds of people down to the youngest children. Why does an all-powerful and loving god allow such cruel things to happen? No convincing answer has ever been given for this, though some radical clerics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are quick to say that these calamities are deliberate punishments by god for people's sins. Of course they mean the sins of people they disapprove of (like gays) and not their own. But such weird attitudes do not come just from well-known crackpots like Robertson. Even high dignitaries of so-called mainstream liberal churches like the Church of England are not immune from this kind of childish thinking. Take for example the remarks of some Church of England bishops after floods devastated large parts of England a little over a year ago.

The floods that have devastated swathes of the country are God's judgment on the immorality and greed of modern society, according to senior Church of England bishops. One diocesan bishop has even claimed that laws that have undermined marriage, including the introduction of pro-gay legislation, have provoked God to act by sending the storms that have left thousands of people homeless. . . . The bishop [of Carlisle], who is a leading evangelical, said that people should heed the stories of the Bible, which described the downfall of the Roman empire as a result of its immorality. "We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate," he said. "In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as 'the beast', which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want," he said, adding that the introduction of recent pro-gay laws highlighted its determination to undermine marriage. "The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God's judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance."

In some sense, radical clerics like Robertson and Falwell and the bishop of Carlisle are only following to their logical conclusion where a belief in an all-powerful god leads them. If god is omnipotent, then he can prevent any natural disaster and if he does not do so, he must have a reason. The only reason they can think of is that this must be an act of retributive justice. Of course, earthquake, tsunamis, and floods that kill vast numbers of people indiscriminately do not look like the acts of a loving god, but these people tend to favor 'tough love' doctrines, as long as that tough love is applied to other people and not to them. Jerry Falwell died suddenly while in his office last year but I did not hear his good buddy Robertson suggesting that god had killed him because he thought Falwell was a major sinner in addition to being an annoying pest. While one can think of many possible social and economic reasons why god might get mad, for some reason radical clerics tend to get really worked up by the thought of sexual (particularly homosexual) activities, and this is usually the reason they bring forward to explain any natural disaster. Those people for whom the god-is-love idea is more important than the god-is-just idea have a harder time explaining natural catastrophes. They tend to have to resort to saying that god must be having some plan that we mere mortals cannot comprehend. When confronted with the problem of explaining massive numbers of deaths of even infants, believers shrug their shoulders and say the equivalent of "Well, stuff happens, and we don't know why. We have to just assume god has a good reason for letting it happen even though he could prevent it." Some resort to saying that god created the universe and its laws and has simply decided to allow events to unfold according to those laws whatever the consequences (i.e., they invoke the God of the Ultimate Gaps when it is convenient to do so), and that the reasons for his leave-alone policy are inscrutable. This is the infamous 'mysterious ways clause', the get-out-jail-free card that religious people play when they are faced with something they cannot explain away. They do not seem to realize that such a statement of ignorance of god's intent is in direct contrast to their assured statements at other times: that they know that god is loving and just, cares for each one of us, wants us to be good and join him in heaven, and that it pains him when we stray from the path of righteousness. How could they know all that about the mind of god and yet not know why he allows droughts and floods and earthquakes? In other words, popular religious apologists try to sidestep the theodicy problem by shifting between the contradictory beliefs of saying they know and understand the mind of god and god's intentions and nature, while at the same time saying that the reasons for his actions are utterly inscrutable. One cannot avoid the conclusion that these are the justifications of people who desperately want to believe. Some people have a deep emotional need to believe that there is a mysterious, invisible, father figure looking out for just them, and they will make up any story that allows them to cling to that, however irrational it may be. Although the model of god-as-loving-father may look superficially more sophisticated than the god-as-authoritarian-puppeteer believed by the woman in Kansas, they both ultimately spring from the same source. First you decide what you want or need to believe, and then you make up some story that allows you to believe just that. The only way that such people will abandon their beliefs is if they realize for themselves that their beliefs are divorced from reality and that a reality-based belief structure can be far more satisfying. Next: What the more sophisticated apologists are saying. POST SCRIPT: Colbert and O'Reilly Blog junkies have probably seen the clip of Bill O'Reilly (on his former show) letting loose a profanity-laced tirade at his off-camera show producers. Stephen Colbert comes to his defense and reveals a dark secret from his own past.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) In response to the powerful new evidence and arguments against the existence of god brought forward by the new atheists, the defenders of religion have had to regroup and respond. The next series of posts will look at some of these developments on the pro-religion side. Today I will look at the popular arguments in favor of god, those advanced by regular people who are not professional theologians or academics. These people are simply trying to figure out for themselves why it is reasonable to still believe in god while living in a world that seems to be functioning as if there is no god at all. Such people must yearn to return to the days when god would routinely demonstrate his existence and power by burning bushes without them being reduced to ashes, turning water into wine, stopping the sun in its tracks, raising people from the dead, and so on. Alas, those days seem to be permanently gone. The only miracles that seem to occur these days are the occasional reports of a crying statue or an image of Jesus on a piece of burnt toast, hardly the kinds of things to fire the imagination of the devotee. God even passed up the chance to provide evidence for his existence by winning a NASCAR race. At one extreme of the popular arguments are the religious fundamentalists. Their approach is illustrated by what happened to me after I debated the intelligent design creationism (IDC) advocates in Kansas in 2002. A very earnest woman came to talk to me after the session. She was clearly disturbed by my challenge to the IDC members on the panel to provide the kind of predictions that scientists expect of any theory, and my conclusion that since they had failed to do so, IDC did not belong in science. She wanted very badly to have god as part of science, so she had carefully written out on a piece of paper what she felt was a definition of science that would not contradict the existence of god. Her definition said that everything that had ever occurred and would occur in the future was directly due to god and so everything in the world was due to god's actions and thus science could never refute god's existence. She had made god's actions synonymous with everything that happens. And she was absolutely right that science cannot provide evidence against such a definition of god. How could it? But more sophisticated people shy away from such an extreme, and one might even say childish, view of god as it seems to deny the existence of any form of human agency. According to that model of god, we are all just puppets following a rigid script written long ago by an authoritarian puppeteer. The idea of good and evil and free will are casualties of such a model and it is not very flattering to the human self-image as thinking persons. In order to preserve the concept of morality and that we are agents who can choose how we act, other religious believers replace the model of god-as-authoritarian-puppeteer with that of a god who has given us free will to choose how we act. People also like to think of their god as a loving god who is also all-powerful. The catch is that with this new model, you immediately run up against the problem of theodicy: why a loving and all-powerful god allows awful things to happen. When I was growing up as a Christian and struggling with this particularly difficult question, the answer that was offered and that satisfied me at that time (and coincidentally was repeated just this week in a private communication from a reader of this blog) was that while god wants us to do good, he has given us free will and allows us to exercise it to choose whether we do good or evil and some people pick the latter. The lesson we learn from our bad decisions is that we must do better in future. This model of god is that of a parent who can if he wishes dictate to his child what to do but does not do so because that would be stifling to the child's growth to adulthood. Instead god lets people learn for themselves from their own actions and mistakes, even if the short-term consequences are appalling. In such a model, the evil acts caused by humans (like the genocides of Native Americans, Jews, Cambodians, Rwandans, etc.) are not the will of god but due to people making bad choices. In other words, gods don't kill people, people kill people. The model of god-as-loving-parent is not without its own serious problems. It assumes that while god has the power to stop this kind of slaughter at any time, he allows massive acts of evil to occur because he views them as learning experiences. Is this argument really credible to anyone except those who want to believe at any cost? If a parent let his child slaughter the neighborhood children in a playground with a machine gun, we would hardly accept his explanation that he was allowing his child to exercise his free will so that he could grow and learn from his mistakes that guns are dangerous and that it is wrong to kill, and thus become a better person in the future. An interesting feature of this model of god is how such religious apologists are quite confident that they know what god's intentions are, and they seem sure that he is loving, cares for each one of us personally, that he wants us to use our free will wisely and in good ways, and that it pains him when we stray and do bad things. This is quite an extraordinary level of knowledge of the mind of an omnipotent deity. Of course, they have no evidence for any of these assertions. All the awful events named above can be explained as well (or even better) by saying that god is a vindictive and cruel entity who enjoys pitting one group against another, and seeing the suffering that ensues. Next: Explaining away natural disasters POST SCRIPT: Einstein's views on religion Given his well-deserved reputation as a deep thinker and thoughtful and humane person, Einstein's views on religion have always been a source of great interest and his varying statements have been interpreted as being both supportive and dismissive of a belief in god. In a little known letter written in 1954, he seems quite unequivocal in his contempt for religion:

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this." Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people. "For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

(Thanks to onegoodmove.)

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) The previous post in this series raised the question of, given a conviction that religion is a negative influence in almost every area of life, what is the best strategy to persuade people to abandon their religious beliefs? Should we suggest that their religious beliefs are reasonable but that atheism is better (the honey approach)? Or should we come right out and say that religious beliefs are irrational and even pernicious and should be abandoned by any thinking person (the vinegar approach of the new atheists)? Or should we just do nothing at all and let events take their natural course? The last option (doing nothing at all) is probably the most appealing to atheists on an intellectual level and has been suggested by some commenters to the previous post. After all, if you think that belief in god is silly and without any foundation, then why be concerned if others believe it? But doing nothing has resulted in religion continuing to be pervasive and if, as I have argued before, religion leads to bad results, then surely we should try and change things, just as we would for any other belief structure that has negative social consequences, such as racism or sexism or homophobia. I think that in the private sphere, in a face-to-face encounter with a religious believer, directly telling them that their beliefs are silly is not a good thing to do. People tend to respond to direct challenges to their beliefs by finding reasons, however irrational, to support those beliefs. In other words, they dig themselves in even deeper, commit themselves even more strongly, merely in order to save face in an argument. So a honey approach is called for here. One should try to gently point out why atheism provides a far more satisfying approach to life than belief in a god. But the situation is quite different in the public sphere. Then most people are merely third-party observers, watching other people argue, and thus they themselves are not being personally confronted, although their views are. When the new atheists in public discourse, in a debate or in the media, demonstrate that the views of their religious opponents are silly and irrational, this will likely not cause their immediate opponent to back down for all the reasons given above. But the debate opponent is not the real audience for their remarks. It is the viewing or listening or reading audience that is the target. Religious believers who watch the debate, when they see that the views of the person representing their own religious views being subject to withering criticism and unable to respond adequately, may come to realize that such beliefs are truly irrational. But since they are not being directly challenged, they do not have to immediately and publicly acknowledge this and can quietly think it over and slowly change their minds on their own without suffering a loss of face. In some cases, ridicule may be the most effective weapon in countering preposterous claims, since it may persuade the observer that holding such views is embarrassing. In fact, some religious propositions cannot be countered without appearing to ridicule them, and this may not be an altogether bad thing. Take for example the widely held belief in the US that the world is just 6,000 years old. If someone asserts this, the honey approach would be to give them all the evidence from physics, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and biology that are all inextricably linked and point towards the conclusion that the world is billions of years old. This is hardly feasible in a limited time. The vinegar approach is to say that to believe such a thing is to reject all of modern science and to regress to the Middle Ages. Richard Dawkins says in public that believing that the Earth is 6,000 years old and not 4.5 billion years old is not a minor disagreement about a factual detail. It is an error on the scale of asserting that the distance from New York to California is about 20 feet. That kind of argument can be seen as dismissive and ridiculing the beliefs of young Earth creationists, but I think it is more effective in cases like this. As Thomas Jefferson said, "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions." Just as no thinking person today will publicly acknowledge a belief in astrology or witchcraft because it reveals one to be positively medieval in one's thinking and puts one so beyond the pale of science and rationality that it is positively embarrassing, so the new atheists are making the case that to believe in god and religion is no better than holding on to those other beliefs that we now view as pure superstitions. Even if people realize that it embarrassing to hold on their beliefs in god and religion because of the strong criticisms made in the public sphere by the new atheists, and decide to abandon them, there is still some difficulty in having to explain to the people they know personally why they switched. For some time, these people will likely still pay lip service to their prior religious beliefs while slowly distancing themselves from them. But at some point, they will feel confident in repudiating their former beliefs and this is made easier because they worked it out for themselves on their own, in their own minds. I suspect that this process is happening right now in the minds of many people. As a result of the strong arguments put out by the new atheists, many people are probably coming to the private realization that the religious beliefs they have been subscribing to for so long are really rather ridiculous and embarrassing for any rational, scientifically-minded person to hold on to. They may stay silent now, or try to find some intermediate position that is not a total renunciation, but at some point they will repudiate religion altogether and do so publicly. Their path will be made easier the more people adopt the new atheists' approach. Next: But enough about the new atheism, what's new on the pro-religion side? POST SCRIPT: Batman and the Penguin discuss the American electorate (Thanks to This Modern World)

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) An argument that is often made against the new atheists is that their strong rhetoric (such as labeling god a delusion) can alienate people and not win them over to the atheist side. Thus one finds even those who concede that the new atheists are right and that they have all the science and evidence and logic and rationality on their side, still suggesting that the atheists may be losing the bigger public relations war even as they win individual battles. Such people, retrieving the old saying that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, suggest that a softer approach may yield better results. This is a very interesting argument (one that has been made by commenters here too) and is worth examining. The question of what exactly makes people change their minds on anything is an empirical question that, to my knowledge, has not been studied as much as it should. (I would be grateful to any readers who can point me to relevant studies.) What follows are some speculations on my part. Here are my starting assumptions, which I think are reasonable: (1) People can and do change their minds about things. (2) They find it easier to change their minds about some things than others. (3) Beliefs about anything are held in place by emotions, reasons, authority, and evidence, but that the relative weight of the contributions of those four elements can differ widely depending on the nature of the belief. (4) Beliefs are harder to change the smaller the factual content they contain, the longer one has held on to the beliefs, the stronger the emotional attachment to them, the more widely held the beliefs, and the more publicly one has committed to them. The last point is important. Once you can get people to commit publicly to a belief in anything, it is far harder to get them to change their minds. People have an emotional attachment to their stated beliefs and when those are challenged, tend to manufacture reasons to sustain the belief rather than concede that they were wrong. This is why religions are so resilient: they indoctrinate children in their belief structure at a very early age, while they are still under the strong influence of their parents, priests, teachers, and other elders. Religious parents do not wait for children to make their own informed choice about what to believe, sometimes even going to the extent of having public rituals that commit the children as infants by baptizing them (for Christians) and circumcising them (for Jewish and Muslim boys). Once children can be made to see themselves as adherents of a belief, which they do by labeling themselves as Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or whatever, and are then sustained in those beliefs through their adolescence and early adulthood by a community of like-minded believers, it is much harder emotionally and otherwise to persuade them later to concede that they were wrong. Herbert Spencer pointed out this phenomenon in an essay dealing with evolution titled The Development Hypothesis published in his book Essays Scientific, Political & Speculative (1891):

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none. Here we find, scattered over the globe, vegetable and animal organisms numbering, of the one kind (according to Humboldt), some 320,000 species, and of the other, some 2,000,000 species (see Carpenter) and if to these we add the numbers of animal and vegetable species which have become extinct, we may safely estimate the number of species that have existed, and are existing, on the Earth, at not less than ten millions. Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still? Doubtless many will reply that they can more easily conceive ten millions of special creations to have taken place, than they can conceive that ten millions of varieties have arisen by successive modifications. All such, however, will find, on inquiry, that they are under an illusion. This is one of the many cases in which men do not really believe, but rather believe they believe. (my italics)

I believe this last statement is true for religion. I think that most religious people do not really believe, they just want to believe they believe. How many Christians genuinely believe that Jesus was actually born of a virgin and physically rose from the dead? Where would he go? After all, since even many Christians do not believe that there is a physical heaven in the sky where the physical Jesus lives, that means that after going to all the trouble of resurrecting his physical body, Jesus then had to get rid of it again. Why bother? Similarly, how many Catholics really believe that the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus during the communion service? How many Muslims genuinely believe that god directly dictated the Koran to Mohammed and that the angel Gabriel really spoke to him? I suspect that it is only the fanatics who really believe and they are the dangerous ones who can be persuaded to do terrible acts in the name of their god. But all the others who simply believe they believe give the fanatics the license to think that their own delusions are quite reasonable. Given this fact, what is the best strategy to persuade people to change their religious beliefs? Suggest that those beliefs are reasonable but that the atheist approach is better (the honey approach)? Or to argue that religious beliefs are irrational and even pernicious and that any thinking person should be embarrassed to hold on to them (the vinegar approach of the new atheists)? That question will be explored in the next post. POST SCRIPT: The power of prayer Did you know that America has an official National Day of Prayer and that this year it was on May 1st? If you want to start planning your prayers now for 2009, that date is May 7. And did you know that the group behind it sponsored a car at the NASCAR race held at the Talladega Speedway on April 27? So how did it do? Not too well, I'm afraid. Their car ended up 25th. The next time they need to pray harder. Or maybe god was too absorbed watching the basketball playoffs and simply forgot to act in time. It can happen to anyone.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) When all else fails, religious people sometimes resort to utilitarian arguments in favor of god, such as that some people would act worse if they did not believe in a god who would punish them for doing bad things. Other alleged benefits of 'good' religion are that it helps people cope with the stresses of life and deal with the fear of death, that it encourages people to do good acts, and to summon up courage in the face of adversity. While some of these things may be true, they seem rather a weak foundation on which to base one's support for religion. The basic problem is that every one of these benefits is not unique to religion. As I have written before, every benefit claimed for religion can just as well be provided by other institutions.

Provides a sense of community? So do many other social groups. Do charitable works? So do secular charities. Work for social justice? So do political groups. Provide comfort and reassurance? So do friendships and even therapy. Provide a sense of personal meaning? So does science and philosophy. Provide a basis of morality and values? It has long been established that morals and values are antecedent to and independent of religion. (Does anyone seriously think that it was considered acceptable to murder before the Ten Commandments appeared?)

So by getting rid of religion we can still have all the benefits claimed for it while getting rid of the evils that are unique to it. Some try to argue for retaining religion by pointing out, correctly, that science also has been used for massively evil ends so why not call for the end of science? But the fact is that if we get rid of science, there are no alternative ways to obtain all the social benefits it provides, so the only alternative is to try to learn how to use it wisely. This is not the case with religion. It provides no social benefits that cannot be duplicated by purely secular institutions. Christopher Hitchens says something similar in his introduction to The Portable Atheist (2007), p. xiii-xiv):

One is continually told, as an unbeliever, that it is old-fashioned to rail against the primitive stupidities and cruelties of religion because after all, in these enlightened times, the old superstitions have died away. Nine times out of ten, in debate with a cleric, one will be told not of some dogma of religious certitude but of some instance of charitable or humanitarian work undertaken by a religious person . . . My own response has been to issue a challenge: name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer. As yet, I have had no takers. (Whereas, oddly enough, if you ask an audience to name a wicked statement or action directly attributable to religious faith, nobody has any difficulty in finding an example.)

If the foundations of religion are false, then the alleged benefits it provides are merely placebos, devices to make people feel good in the short-run, to allay their fears about death, and to provide facile answers to deep questions of existence and meaning. It is not clear to me why making people feel good on the basis of a falsehood is better than them being able to see the truth clearly. Of course, this does not mean that one should go about destroying people's beliefs indiscriminately. I would not argue with someone in grief who finds consolation in some religious dogma. But that leave-well-alone policy does not extend to public discussions of religion, and the new atheists are perfectly justified and even to be commended in pointing out that religions are based on false foundations. Religion also results in people being required to suspend rational thought and judgment and encourages passivity and tolerance for injustice since provides people with the dubious option of putting their faith in a higher power to redress injustices and looking towards justice in heaven rather than fighting for those goals here and now. In the past I have shown clips of exorcists, mind readers, and people who claim the ability read the thoughts of animals. I argued that such charlatans (and others like faith healers) would not be able to ply their trade without the cover that religion gives them to persuade people that supernatural forces exist. For atheists to not attack religion in order to preserve some façade of coexistence with 'good' religion is to permanently leave ajar the door that enables those who use religion as weapons for evil ends or to exploit the gullible for profit to enter and ply their trade. As Christopher Hitchens says in God Is Not Great, (2007, p. 160):

It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity's great vulnerabilities. No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact.

I believe that it is futile to try and separate bad religion from good religion and to try and eliminate the former while preserving the latter. In my interview in Machines Like Us, I say:

[W]hen one decides to not criticize the thinking of 'moderates', one has shut off the most powerful critiques one can make of extremists, which is that the whole edifice of thinking they adhere to has no evidentiary foundation and simply makes no sense. Trying to counter extremists without hurting the feelings of the 'moderates' is like agreeing to play chess while giving up the right to capture the opponent's queen. You are bound to lose, except against the most incompetent player.

Good religion and bad religion are two sides of the same coin. The only way to end bad religion is to end religion altogether, and the way to do that is to advance as publicly as possible all the powerful arguments and evidence we now have that there is no reason whatsoever to assume that god exists in any form or that any of the supernatural doctrines of any religion have any validity. This is the 'new atheism' and I am proud to be a part of that movement. POST SCRIPT: Baxter again Because you can never have too many photos of a terrific dog. . .

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) One major problem with religion is that it tends to dull the moral sensibilities of otherwise decent people, causing them to justify acts by 'their' people that they would unhesitatingly condemn if done by anyone else. The process starts in childhood. Take for example the study of Israeli children done by George Tamarin. When told the Biblical story of how Joshua and the Israelites ruthlessly massacred every living thing (men, women, young, old, animals) in a battle against their enemies, the children justified this atrocity using appallingly racist reasoning. When the same story was modified to make the perpetrator of the outrages be an obscure ancient Chinese warlord, the children responded the way that one would hope they would do, saying that the massacre was wrong. As Richard Dawkins ( The God Delusion, p. 255) says:

[W]hen their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgments that most modern humans would share. Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks different from a religious point of view. And the difference starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it.

Another example can be seen in the PBS Frontline documentary on the Mormons, available online. Episode #9 deals with the 1857 massacre by Mormons of 120 men, women and children from Arkansas who were passing through Mormon territory in southern Utah, at a place called Mountain Meadows, on their way to California. Judith Freeman (who is a descendent of the Mormons) says that she is sympathetic to the 75 Mormon men who committed the massacre. "I think I became more sympathetic to their plight because of this idea, this Mormon principle of perfect obedience. These men were ordered to appear at Mountain Meadows, so in a way they were victims of their own devotion and obedience." This highlights perfectly the danger of religion. It causes people to sympathize with and even excuse appalling actions simply because the people who committ them sincerely believe they are doing god's work. The idea that one should view the perpetrators of atrocities as somehow victims of their own upbringing and conditioning is not, in principle, an unreasonable proposition. The problem is that people tend to extend this charitable view only to people who share their own faith, and refuse to consider this for actions done by others against them, thus leading to an endless downward spiral of self-righteous justifications of actions done by one's own tribe and condemnations of the actions of the perceived enemy, even though both actions are objectively the same. As Richard Dawkins says:

Religion changes, for people, the definition of good. Atheists and humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. Most religious people think them bad, too, but some religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. For non-religious people, the behavior of consenting adults in a private bedroom is the business of nobody else, and is not bad unless it causes suffering – for example by breaking up a happy family. But many religions arrogate to themselves the right to decide that certain kinds of sexual behavior, even if they do no harm to anyone, are wrong. The actions of the Taliban, their vile bullying of women, their sanctimonious hatred of all that might lead to enjoyment, their violence, their ignorant bigotry, their hatred of education, their cruelty, seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous – really good people. . . . It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds.

While Dawkins gives the example of Islam and the Taliban, the same kinds of examples can be multiplied many times over for any of the other religions. The problem is not any particular religion, or version of religion, it is belief in god that is the problem. The danger is, as Freeman says, "If you can get people to believe they are doing god's will, you can get them to do anything." The sad truth that emerges from the rise of religious extremism is that once you have got people to accept the existence of god, it seems all too easy to convince them that they should do evil actions as part of god's mandate. Or as Voltaire put it, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." I think it is time for the so-called 'moderate' religious people to abandon their belief in god and join the atheists. That would be the best way to combat the negative effects of religion. POST SCRIPT: Pat Condell on the curse of faith He talks about the evil of indoctrinating children in religious faith when they are too young to realize what is going on.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) The most basic problem with almost any religion is the fact that they raise 'faith', which is the irrational acceptance of things in the absence of, or even counter to, credible evidence and reason, to the level of a virtue. This is simply asking for trouble. Once you have said that you believe something just because some book says so or some inner voice tells you to do so, you have lost all standing to condemn others whose own inner voices (or the voices of their priests, rabbis, or imams) tell them to do unspeakable acts in the name of obeying god's will. As Daniel Dennett says:

If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them. . . . Not just rationality and scientific progress, but just about everything else we hold dear could be laid waste by a single massively deluded "sacramental" act. True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things. And - this is the worst of it - religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable. This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should most fear in religion. Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a sacred duty.

In his Letter to A Christian Nation (p. 66-68) Sam Harris says:

The conflict between science and religion is reducible to simple fact of human cognition and discourse; either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Everyone recognizes that to rely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact is ridiculous—that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the archangel Gabriel, or to any other religious dogma. It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still has immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.

As a footnote, Poseidon-worshippers (yes, they exist!) were incensed at Harris's apparent slight towards them. Harris adds that "Truth be told, I now receive e-mails of protest from people who claim, in all apparent earnestness, to believe that Poseidon and the other gods from Greek mythology are real." Poseidon worshippers have a point. Why should their belief be accorded any less respect than belief in Jesus or Yahweh or Allah, just because their numbers are smaller? Once you have opened the gates of such irrationality, all bets are off. The idea that religions are fundamentally good and that those who do evil in its name are misguided and have misinterpreted their respective religious texts simply cannot be sustained. The new atheists might concede that while certain versions of religion might inspire people to do good things, the overall influence of religion is so bad that it is not worth salvaging. Even 'good' religion is bad in that it allows the enabling of bad religion. Once you have allowed irrationality to go unchallenged, you have lost the main argument against fanatics who think that murdering and otherwise acting against commonly accepted human values is doing the work of their god. In many ways, those whom we label as 'religious fanatics' are those who have taken their religious texts and doctrines seriously, at their face value, and have obediently sought to follow them. For example, people whose children die because they prayed for them instead of taking them to the doctor are those who took seriously their religion's claim that if they had faith, god would heal them. After all, it was Jesus who gave this promise (Mark 16:17-18):

"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."

Most mainstream religious people cynically hedge their bets by seeking medical treatment when they fall ill, in addition to praying. But according to Jesus, it is those whom we would consider to be religious fanatics, the exorcists, the hallucinators, the snake handlers, the poison drinkers, and the faith healers who should be considered truly religious. It is precisely because religious people bring up children to believe unquestioningly in absurd religious dogmas that some of those children grow up taking such things more seriously than their parents might like. It is then disingenuous to argue that they have gone too far. The people who do evil things in the name of religion are presumably convinced that they are doing god's work. Bin Laden holds himself up as a true Muslim, upholding his religion's highest traditions. John Hagee and Pat Robertson are similarly convinced that they are the true Christians. And one can find similar examples in other religions. The best way to counter them is to argue that there is no god and that their holy books are merely the work of human minds that carry no more intrinsic authority than today's newspaper. At least that is a position that can be backed up overwhelmingly by evidence, science, and reason. To argue instead, as 'good' religionists try to do, that your idea of god is better than their idea of god is a proposition that is purely religious-text based and can be easily countered by pointing to different sections of the same religious texts. As such, it can never be conclusive and can be easily dismissed by those whom we usually label as 'fanatics' but are better described as 'true believers'. Next: How 'good religion' corrupts people. POST SCRIPT: Those weird Arabs As Matthew Yglesias points out:

It's really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it's not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don't like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.

It takes the Onion to really parody this way of thinking.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) Perhaps the biggest storm raised by the new atheists, and which has even caused a split within the atheist community about strategy, is that they have decided to ignore the polite fiction that there is 'good' religion and there is 'bad' religion. Supporters of this split (which includes even many non-religious people) believe that what should be done is to support the good religionists by aligning with them to combat the bad. This has to be understood as being essentially a political strategy, designed to marginalize the so-called religious extremists and fundamentalists, the people whose religious beliefs lead them to reject all of modern science and to harbor repugnant views on issues of morality and social justice. But while this strategy may generate some political benefits in the short term, its adoption has also resulted in religious beliefs as a whole being treated with kid gloves, by not subjecting them to the same close and withering scrutiny that is applied to other evidence-defying beliefs such as astrology and witchcraft. Although religious beliefs are as irrational as any of those things, this political strategy required that this inconvenient truth not be pointed out, and to maintain the façade that there is a 'true' religion which is essentially good, and that the evils committed in religion's name arise from distortions of the true religion by misguided or evil people. This gentle treatment of mainstream religion was no doubt aided by the fact that many people that atheists were likely to know, even within their close circle of family and friends, are people who are otherwise rational and yet also believe in these religion-related absurdities. It is hard to criticize religion in a fundamental way without implicitly suggesting that belief in it is an irrational act. The desire not to ruffle feathers serves to muffle fundamental criticisms of religion as a whole and resulted in many atheists of previous generations carefully tailoring their arguments to only condemn those whose religion resulted in abhorrent views and actions. The views of such people were said to not represent 'true' religion, though why that is so is never made clear. It is undoubtedly true that there are very many religious people who are decent and humane, even inspirational. It is also true that there are very many religious people who are bigoted, racist, and murderous. But the idea that the good that some religious people do is evidence of a loving god at work while the evil that other religious people do is not evidence of a vicious and hateful god is an argument that is highly self-serving and lacks coherence. Take for example, evangelical (and John McCain supporter) John Hagee, who explains some of his beliefs below: He quotes the Bible to justify his weird views and who has the standing to say he is wrong in his understanding? 'Good' religious believers have the unenviable task of trying to explain why their choice of Biblical passages and their interpretation should be given more weight than Hagee's. (For more of Hagee's ravings, courtesy of Matt Taibbi's new book The Great Derangement, see this excerpt (courtesy of Tbogg).) The argument of mainstream religions that 'true' religion (i.e., the religious doctrines that they happen to subscribe to) is a force for good simply cannot be sustained. What the new atheists are saying is that rather than there being bad and good religion, there is only bad religion (that which makes people commit acts that go against accepted standards of morality and decency and justice) and the enabling of bad religion. After all, those religious extremists who commit appalling acts in the name of religion are as justified in arguing that they represent 'true' religion as anyone else. Religious texts and the history of religion are all over the place when it comes to prescriptions for behavior and one can pick and choose passages to justify almost anything. The very fact that the 'good' religious people feel justified in dismissing or ignoring those parts of the Bible that support evil acts shows that they are not deriving their morality from the Bible but are instead imposing a morality derived elsewhere, from secular humanist values, onto the Bible. The new atheists have a far more consistent argument. They say that it is far more coherent to argue that there is no god at all, that it is pointless to ascribe the actions of people to a god, and that we should reject the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text as authoritative documents in their entirety. In their rejection of the concept of a 'good' religion worth saving or even promoting, the new atheists have split with some scientists who argue for an alliance with the followers of 'good' religion and seek to find an accommodation of science with that religion. I call this latter group of scientists 'Templeton scientists' because the Templeton Foundation has for a long time tried to woo scientists to try and find ways to make religion and belief in god compatible with science. This is, in my view, a hopeless task but by dangling huge rewards, (the annual Templeton prize is larger than the Nobel prize) the foundation has tried to lure some scientists into trying to find ways of doing so. Those who assert that the new atheists are pursuing a bad strategy say that by taking a tack that will antagonize those people who believe in 'good' religion, they are harming the common struggle against those whose religion drives them to words and actions that are manifestly evil by almost any yardstick. This argument reveals a misunderstanding of the basic nature of coalition politics. In a coalition, people come together on one set of issues they agree upon while staying true to their positions on other issues where they could well differ strongly. So it should be quite possible for the 'good religion' group to join forces with the new atheists to combat the bad social and political influence of the 'bad religion' group, while at the same time disagreeing with each other as to whether the concept of 'good religion' is valid at all. Asking the new atheists to not debunk the concept of 'good religion' for the sake of political expediency makes as little sense as asking the members of the 'good religion' group to stop talking about their belief in god in order to avoid offending atheists. Each group should come into the coalition for the sake of an articulated common good (in this case combating the immediate and manifest evils of 'bad' religion) while retaining the right to disagree on other issues. The reason that this fairly obvious aspect of coalition politics is not understood is because for far too long, religion has been granted a privileged place in public discourse. There has been an exaggerated 'respect for religion', which has been interpreted as requiring that one should not critique those religious beliefs that are strongly and sincerely held by 'good' people. This tradition has shielded mainstream religion from the kinds of deep critiques received by other irrational belief structures, like astrology or witchcraft. Because of such criticisms, neither of those beliefs is deemed to be intellectually respectable anymore. But religion, which is no better, still retains its standing as something that reasonable and rational people can believe in. The new atheists have ended that tradition and it is a good thing. POST SCRIPT: Silly Superstitions Sri Lanka is a country that is riddled with superstitions with many people, including political leaders, not doing anything significant until they have consulted their astrological charts and gotten the green light. It always seemed bizarre to me. Now it appears that Republican presidential candidate John McCain is also extremely superstitious. The reason that superstitions flourish is because we tolerate, even venerate, the biggest superstition of all, the belief in supernatural powers like god.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) While developments in science have provided the most powerful arguments against the existence of god in any form, it is not only science that has led to the undermining of traditional religious beliefs. As far as Christianity and Judaism are concerned, other areas of scholarly work, such as modern textual scholarship in the form of the so-called 'higher criticism', coupled with careful archeological studies, have shown that the Bible is very much a human-created document and that there is little or no evidence for the validity of any of the knowledge contained in it. It now seems clear that almost the entire history presented in the Bible (such as the stories of Abraham, Moses, the captivity and exodus from Egypt, David, Solomon, etc.), right up to the period when the Israelites were taken into exile by the Persians in about 650 BCE, is fiction. The present day Bible has been shown to be essentially a political document written in the centuries between 400 BCE and 100 CE, and consists of the codification of documents produced by priests beginning around 650 BCE, very long after almost all the events it purportedly claims to record. (See my earlier series of posts on this topic.) Even for events reported in the New Testament, the evidence is very weak that some person named Jesus lived at the appropriate time claimed by Christians and, even if he did exist, there is no credible evidence for the claims of his followers about his virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, and other supposed clues to his divinity. The idea that the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text is divinely inspired is hard to sustain. Religious people can and do cherry-pick passages from them to suggest that they contain information that could only have come from a divine entity but these arguments are laughably inadequate. For example, at a recent science-religion program sponsored by the Campus Freethought Alliance held at Case, a religious panelist suggested that the Bible must be true since it predicted some things that came to pass later. But the examples he gave were weak, consisting mainly of things that Jesus said or did that were supposedly predicted by the Old Testament prophets. This is the kind of argument that will only satisfy the already devout because even the Bible itself says that Jesus had studied the scriptures and actively sought to satisfy the prophecies. Thus the Bible itself undermined the speaker's case but he seemed to be unaware of this implication. This willingness of believers to suspend rational analysis when it comes to their own beliefs is widely prevalent. Recently two young Mormon missionaries came to my home to try and convert me. They told me the story of Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon based on the golden plates that he supposedly discovered and which subsequently disappeared again after he had translated them using the magic stones. When I asked them why I should believe the writings in their holy book, they told me that it made predictions that had come true. When I asked them to name one, they said that the book had predicted Columbus's voyage to America. When I pointed out that Joseph Smith lived in the 19th century, long after that voyage, and that this could hardly be considered a prediction, they said that Golden Plates had been created long before Columbus. When I asked them how they knew this, they said that Joseph Smith had said so! These Mormon missionaries were young, articulate, and seemingly intelligent people. The fact that they did not seem to realize that they were arguing in a circle and basically claiming authority for a text on the basis of nothing other than the claims of that same text shows just how much religion subverts people's most basic reasoning skills. I see the same thing with Christians who try to convince me about the reality of Jesus and god by quoting passages from the Bible. It does not seem to strike them that this makes little sense. Even on the most basic of facts, the Bible falls short. For example, 1 Kings 7:23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4:2-5 gives the value of pi (as the ratio of circumference to diameter) as 3. As Sam Harris points out in his Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 61), "But the Egyptians and Babylonians both approximated pi to a few decimal places several centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written. The Bible offers us an approximation that is terrible even by the standards of the ancient world." In other words, even by the standards of knowledge available elsewhere at that time, the Bible got it hopelessly wrong. As for making predictions, the Bible is simply terrible. It makes no predictions worthy of the name. As Harris says, "If the Bible were such a book [of prophecy], it would make perfectly accurate predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage such as "In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers – the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus – and this system shall be called the Internet." The Bible contains nothing like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century." (Harris, p. 60, my italics) The idea that the Bible (or the Koran) can form the basis of a moral life has also come under serious attack because the morality that is espoused in it can only be described as appalling. It is all too easy to find passages that indicate god's approval of slavery, prostitution, genocide, and rape, and to find punishment by death being advocated for such absurdities as working on the Sabbath, wearing garments made of different threads, planting different crops side by side, showing disrespect for parents, or for sundry sexual transgressions. As Richard Dawkins says in his narration in the British television documentary The Root of All Evil, "The god of the old testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic cleanser, urging his people on to acts of genocide." Thus the Bible has an awful record when it comes to history, mathematics, science, morality, and predictions. The problem for religious people of how to deal with theodicy (why a loving all-powerful god can allow evil to occur) is also one that will not go away, however much religious people might try to paper over its problems. How can anyone contemplate the unspeakable atrocities committed during the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda and of Native Americans, slavery, (the list can go on almost indefinitely) and still believe in a kind and loving and providential god? All these problems are well known to religious scholars but are not raised so much among the general public. And for a long time, the dubious argument of showing 'respect for religion' prevented even non-religious people from pointing out forcefully all these obvious weaknesses of religion, and that religious texts had had no scientific or historical or moral validity and should be viewed as little more than fiction. But that has changed. The new atheists have not hesitated to highlight all these weaknesses of religion that have come to the fore because of advances in science and other disciplines. Next: The politics of 'good' and 'bad' religion POST SCRIPT: Zinn on the American empire Historian Howard Zinn has a new cartoon book A People's History of American Empire, with voiceover by Viggo Mortensen. (Thanks to TomDispatch.com.) You can read Zinn's views on the American empire here.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) In the previous post, we saw that the idea of the Personal God was dead on the grounds that believing in such a god required one to abandon rationality and the God of the Gaps was dead on the grounds that advances in science have successively closed so many of the gaps that believing in such a god has become somewhat of an embarrassing exercise, requiring one to find refuge in a new gap whenever an old one gets explained by science. The decreasing number of credible gaps has resulted in most religious apologists abandoning this god as unworkable. This left only the Ultimate Creator God, with its underlying assumption that complex things required a more complex creator, as a viable hypothesis. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, arriving in the mid-nineteenth century, was the first major scientific theory that destroyed the need for both the God of the Gaps and an Ultimate Creator God when it came to life's complex systems. In its more modern form of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which incorporates genetics and molecular biology into natural selection, this theory shows that once a replicator that is capable of reproducing or copying itself with fairly high fidelity using the raw materials available to it in its environment comes into being, however simple and primitive it might be, it will be inexorably driven by the laws of natural selection to ever more complex forms of replicators (the DNA molecule being one example of a complex replicator), eventually resulting in the complexity and diversity of life that we now see all around us. (See Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for a clear explanation of how that happens.) Thus with the arrival of Darwin's theory, it was possible to understand how life systems could evolve from simple forms to more complex forms under the dynamic of natural laws. This dealt a serious blow to the Ultimate Creator God. This major advance in our ability to understand the existence of life's complexity and diversity without invoking a designer was followed by modern cosmological theories, developed in the mid-twentieth century, that have shown a similar process at work in the non-living world. We are now beginning to understand how a universe that began as a simple soup of quarks and gluons became, over time and under the influence of natural laws, the vast and complex universe of stars and galaxies that we now have. This growth from simplicity to complexity was again driven by purely natural laws acting on purely material elements without any need to invoke some kind of external intelligence supervising and managing the process. I am by no means asserting that every question concerning life and the universe has been answered. What I am saying is that we now have powerful new theories that are evidence-based and provide a framework for investigating and ultimately answering the fundamental question of how complexity can arise. Thus the modern twin theories of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and big-bang cosmology are now available to convincingly destroy the chief argument of religious apologists for the existence of the Ultimate Creator God, that there was no credible alternative to postulating that there needed to be an ultimate creator to bring about complexity This is knowledge that earlier atheist philosophers did not have but could only hope to one day attain. As Richard Dawkins said, "An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." ( The Blind Watchmaker, page 6) Hume's hope has now become reality. We now have very good scientific explanations for such questions and it is the scientists among the new atheists, such as Dawkins in the field of biology, Victor Stenger in the field of physics and cosmology, and Daniel Dennett in the fields of the mind and consciousness that have made the case for the death of the Ultimate Creator God most forcefully. Of course, it has to be conceded that religious believers can still claim that since science has not as yet convincingly demonstrated how the big bang or how the very first primitive replicator came about (although some speculative solutions have been proposed for both those problems), that it is at least logically possible to attribute these two things to a god. So in a sense, scientific developments have forced religious apologists into a corner and required them to merge the God of the Gaps and the Ultimate Creator God into one, into a kind of God of the Ultimate Gaps, this god serving purely as a sterile answer to questions about the origin of the universe and the origin of life. This God of the Ultimate Gaps is one who has acted only twice in the entire history of our universe, the first time to start the universe and the second and last time to create the first replicator, before handing in his retirement papers for good. While religious believers can claim, if they wish, that such a limited-action god is logically possible, such an austere and remote god is a far cry from the chummy Personal God favored by most religious believers. Trying to bridge the gap between the God of the Ultimate Gaps favored by sophisticated theologians and the Personal God favored by the general public has been a thorny problem for the religious community. The plain fact is that science, while it cannot totally eliminate god as a logical possibility, has for all intents and purposes made god redundant. Next: The end of god due to other causes POST SCRIPT: Baxter, the Wonder Dog Ok, so Baxter may not actually be a wonder dog, but he is still a terrific one. He is now two and a half years old.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.) In the previous post, I discussed the three theories of god: Personal God, God of the Gaps, and Ultimate Creator God. The arguments advanced in favor of the Personal God theory have little intellectual merit and are proffered as evidence only by those who already want to believe. People who believe in such a god are in the grip of powerful emotions and are not going to be swayed by rational arguments. People who argue in favor of such a god or believe in the literal truth of the Bible have essentially declared that they are rejecting science and logic and reason as the basis of their belief. The Personal God causes all kinds of problems for rationality. It is not a serious theory and sophisticated theologians, who appreciate that the idea of an activist, interventionist god creates more theological problems than it solves, tend to dismiss it. Thus we can consider this god to be dead as a serious intellectual proposition, although it is still believed in by a large number of people. I am not going to spend much time arguing against the existence of the Personal God because people who believe in such a god are not doing so on the basis of any argument and hence arguments against this god will have no effect. For example, how can you argue with someone who says that she had a vision in which god spoke to her or a near death experience where she visited heaven? What about the arguments for the Ultimate Creator God and the God of the Gaps? The arguments in favor of these two gods (which I discussed in an earlier post) do have some intellectual merit and the more sophisticated religious apologists use them to underpin their faith. These arguments have been the foundation of religious apologists starting from ancient days, through Bishop Paley's watchmaker analogy, down to the current intelligent design creationism. While these arguments are by no means conclusive, for a long time there did not exist any credible alternative models or theories or conclusive arguments or evidence to refute them. Hence these arguments by religious apologists for the existence of god were tenable (at least in principle) and thus seemed plausible enough to be held on to without seeming to be irrational. Atheists always had the option of rejecting them as sterile explanations without any content and while many did so, they were not able to refute them. That is no longer the case. There is no question that we now have powerful new arguments against the existence of the Ultimate Creator God and the God of the Gaps that were not available to the earlier generations of atheists. They arise from the rapid advance of modern science. The most obvious casualty of these advances in science has been the God of the Gaps. Those things that were once thought to be so amazingly complex that they could not possibly have come about by natural causes (the eye, wings, the colors of butterflies, etc.) are now routinely explained by biological theories and their origins and workings are no longer deeply mysterious, though these things are still marvelous and awe-inspiring to behold. The gaps where this god resided have become increasingly narrow and is so threatened with extinction that more sophisticated theologians have abandoned this god because of the embarrassment it causes. In any high-level discussion involving the existence of god (see for example The God Delusion Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox), it is quite common for religious apologists (Lennox in this case) to start with a disclaimer that the god they believe in is not a God of the Gaps, since they know that advances in scientific understanding have made such a god an endangered species. But although formally disclaiming such a god, some still try to sneak it in under a different name. Intelligent design creationism, by suggesting that certain microbiological phenomena are too unlikely to have occurred by the laws of biology and thus must have been created by a designer, is invoking a God of the Gaps, even if the gap it appeals to is so tiny. But given that sophisticated religious apologists are shying away from admitting to a belief in a God of the Gaps, we can assume that that god, like the Personal God, is also dead, at least as a serious proposition worth debating, although it still has some believers. The demise of the Personal God and the God of the Gaps as viable candidates leaves standing just the Ultimate Creator God. But as I shall show, here too significant new developments in the theories of evolution and cosmology have dealt devastating blows to its credibility and it is these developments that have laid the intellectual foundations for the powerful arguments of the new atheists, arguments that were not available to earlier generations of atheists. Next: The death of the Ultimate Creator God POST SCRIPT: True sporting behavior As I have said before, I am well and truly disgusted with the lack of graciousness, the downright boorish behavior, that occurs in professional sports. This heartwarming story shows how people should approach sports. (Thanks to Jesus's General.)

God is still dead. More than a hundred years after the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put those famous words "God is dead" into the mouth of one of his characters, implying that the Christian concept of god had become untenable, this statement has become even more true, the point driven home with new evidence from science and relentless logic by the advocates of the so-called 'new atheism'. Much attention has been paid to the arguments made by the new atheists who have forcefully pointed out that not only are the evidentiary and intellectual foundations for the existence of god and the afterlife weak and shallow, but that religion is itself more of a force for evil than good in the world, either actively so or as an enabler. This group, whose public faces are Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, and Sam Harris, have managed to bring these arguments to the forefront of the public debate. The basic issue can be identified by the answers to two fundamental questions:

Is there any credible reason to think that god exists in any form? The answer is no. Even if god is a fiction, does the concept have a net positive utilitarian value that makes it worth preserving? The answer is no.

The next series of posts will flesh out the developments since Nietzsche's time that have provided a more empirical basis for his conclusion. To anticipate a common objection, it is perhaps necessary to first acknowledge that it is logically impossible to disprove the existence of a god whose properties are carefully defined so as to avoid detection, so believers can always seek refuge in the tiny loophole that logic provides them. But what has become increasingly clear is that to believe in god today is to make a willful decision to go against reason and evidence, and is clearly an irrational act. The many powerful arguments against the existence of god and in favor of atheism have been around for a long time, going all the way back to the ancient Greek philosophers. (See my series of posts on the history of western atheism). So what exactly is new about the new atheism that has given it so much force that has enabled it to achieve such prominence? To answer that question we need to look at the kinds of arguments advanced in favor of the existence of god. There are three different kinds of arguments, each one implying the existence of a different kind of god. In discussing with religious people about the existence of god, it is important to first clarify which god they arguing in favor of because otherwise, as I will discuss later, religious apologists tend to slide from one god to another, making a coherent discussion difficult. Most of the arguments put forward by most religious people are in favor of the 'Personal God' theory. By pointing to admirable people who happened to be religious and arguing that they were directly influenced by god, by giving personal testimonies of experiencing the presence of god in their lives, by suggesting that singular events (alleged miracles) show god's existence by violating natural laws, appealing to the historical validity of religious texts, arguing that without god there would be no basis for morality or no explanation for altruism, etc., such arguments advance the idea of a peripatetic god who is always active everywhere, listening to each and every person, and responding to some of their prayers. The Personal God is credited with many good things that occur and although allegedly omnipotent, is curiously and inexplicably passive about preventing the many evils that occur on a daily basis. A subset of Christian believers in the Personal God also believe in the literal truth of the Bible, that the Earth is 6,000 or so years old, that Adam and Eve were real people, that Noah's flood was a historical event, and so on. The existence of another kind of god (the 'Ultimate Creator God') depends on the argument that it seems reasonable to suppose that for every complex thing in existence, one needs an even more complex thing to design it and bring it into being. Since many aspects of the world are complex, one could extend this argument up a ladder of ever increasingly complex designers and creators to assert that one needs an ultimate grand designer and creator, which is this particular god. The third god (the 'God of the Gaps') is almost identical to the Ultimate Creator God conceptually, but instead of invoking a chain of causality ending up with god as a prime designer and creator, takes a more direct route by pointing to specific things in nature (such as the human eye, the wings of birds, etc.) that seem (to these believers at least) far too complex to have come about by natural laws and processes, these believers assert that these are exceptions to natural laws and required direct creation by god. In other words, god is not simply an ultimate explanation for all things but is instead an immediate and direct cause for the existence of many things, though far more selective in intervening in worldly affairs than the Personal God. The God of the Gaps is invoked to directly explain the existence of the hitherto otherwise unexplained. The three kinds of god suggested by these arguments imply very different properties. The Ultimate Creator God is one who is very hands-off. After initially carefully creating the universe and its laws with the goal of bringing the present form of life into being, he (for the sake of convenience I am going to treat god as being male) is assumed to leave things strictly alone. It is assumed that the Ultimate Creator God wanted, for some reason, to have humans in their present form eventually emerge from the initial cosmic soup, and thus had to carefully fine-tune the laws and initial conditions so that billions of years later conditions would be just right so that this is exactly what would happen. This is actually quite an incredible feat of planning and reverse engineering, but this is god we are talking about so this task is presumably a piece of cake for him. The God of the Gaps has either inferior engineering skills to the Ultimate Creator God or is one of those perennial tinkerers who is never content with the original plans and ideas and keeps changing things as they go along. Either his initial plans had glitches that failed to produce important developments like the eye or the wings of birds and he had to step in and create them fresh, or such things were not in the initial plans at all and after observing his animal creations crashing into each other, this god suddenly had the brainwave that eyes would be a good eye and retrofitted them. The Personal God seems to be the most inept of the three, a busybody who is constantly interfering in each and every person's life whether they want it or not. This god is the ultimate micromanager, never sticking to a plan but always stepping in to change things, violating his own rules if need be to achieve some immediate end, answering some prayers while ignoring others, preventing some bad things from happening while allowing colossal evils elsewhere, and creating such disorder and anarchy that it is hopeless to expect to find any pattern or reason in his behavior. As a result, many people just declare his intentions to be inscrutable, surrender their freedom and autonomy to him, and pray for him to tell them what to do about everything. Curiously, it is this seemingly most inept god of the three that most religious people seem to find appealing. Next: The demise of each god POST SCRIPT: The scandalous situation in Gaza Juan Cole describes the inhumane sanctions imposed by Israel on the people of Gaza that is threatening over a million Palestinians with greater hunger.

The Israelis already have the Gaza Strip under military siege, carefully controlling what and who goes in and out of it. They have now cut off most fuel, and the United Nations has been forced to stop distributing food aid.

In addition, the Daily Telegraph reports that "The fuel blockade means pumps have already been turned off, causing water shortages and sewage problems, while the vaccination stocks at Gaza's main hospital were spoiled after it had to turn off its refrigerators." As Cole comments, "This Israeli government action is an unvarnished war crime. It is known as collective punishment. There was already hunger and malnutrition among Palestinian children, which will now be worsened."

In the years 2