Naturally, I was very happy to be given another mention on the 26 December 2009 edition of Unbelievable?, featuring Christian barrister Charles Foster and atheist scientist Robert Stovold. However, I was a little frustrated that the presenter Justin Brierley and the participants didn’t quite get my point about the mystical census in the Gospel of Luke.
While there is some ambiguity over whether a census of any kind took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria and whether he held office more than once, the points I was driving at in my email to Justin before the show was that Roman censuses were:
Based on property ownership of the living, not the dead.
Not based on remote genealogies, let alone false ones.
Local censuses of provinces, not the entire Roman empire.
The reason why I am so insistent is that during my first appearance on Unbelievable? in September 2009, my “scholarly” opponent, Andy Bannister from London School of Fairyology, said that Dawkins, Hitchens etc. had “been machine gunned to the wall by ‘scholars’ of all stripes” by objecting to the apparent nonsense of having the population return to the home town of a distant ancestor because apparently people at that time were not as mobile as they are today we actually have records of such arrangements.
Being a tad green back in the day, I let it go. However, a friend who had listened to the show emailed me to say that Bannister was talking rubbish. I emailed him my friend’s comments and he did not respond. Further research showed that this is actually a common objection by historians (as opposed to “scholars”) of all stripes and not something the Oxford biologist made up off the top of his head.
Despite repeatedrequests on my blog, Bannister has so far declined to cite a source for his assertion. Funny. At first, he seemed like such a straight kinda guy. Rather like Tony Blair…
Justin did actually ask me to do the show but alas, I did not have enough holiday time till the end of the year. Besides, I find biblical scholarship rather dense and unexciting. Robert did a much better job than I could have done. I had no idea, for example, that Josephus referred to Hercules as if he was a real person. Kudos Stovold!
For those of us how can’t be bothered with textual criticism, below are the videos of a couple of excellent can-sized expositions of the Gospels’ historical dating botch-ups.
manicstreetpreacher hopes he’ll be forgiven for spitting his dummy out for a brief moment.
I knew that someday I was going to die. And I knew before I died, two things would happen to me. That number one, I would regret my entire life. And number two, I would want to live my life over again.
The following is the extract of a comment by Edmund Standing on his post about Rage Against The Machine winning the UK Christmas Number One:
I hate the middle class SWP pseudo-revolutionaries who have lived a nice life thanks to capitalism – and most often their parents’ bank accounts – then wank on about class struggle, the proletariat, Marx, Guevara, etc.
RATM are posterboys for that kind of shit. Would they want to live in a ‘revolutionary’ Communist State? In their minds I think yes. Doubtful if it became a reality.
I don’t pretend to be some working class hero – I know I’m not. I don’t pretend to want to live in some Communist ‘utopia’ – I don’t want to.
I believe in social justice and a capitalist society that is more fair. My pay is frankly a disgrace for the work I do (I mean my ‘real world’ work, not writing on the internet), but I’m not going to start pretending to be part of a revolutionary cadre and droning on about Marx. I’m especially not going to think ‘fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’ is anything but stroppy teenage sentiment.
I just hate the fact that a whole load of Facebook junkies are feeling all smug for sticking a group of people who promote an ideology that resulted in the death of millions at the number one spot for Christmas.
This is my response, which I was originally going to post in direct reply to Standing, but I thought it was unfair to scar his blog with such a self righteous whine from a white middle class boy:
My pay is frankly a disgrace for the work I do
So is mine! I probably get paid nearly twice as much as Standing, but I’ve had to spend tens of thousands in obtaining my qualifications with a university degree and a postgraduate professional skills diploma (£8K for what was a nine month course, plus living expenses while being out of work!).
I’m 27 years old. I’ve recently qualified as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. And thanks to the recession and my former employers being a load of ungrateful, callous, twats, I’ve had to up sticks and move to the sticks because it was the only place in the country where I could get a job. It’s about 250 miles and a nine hour coach trip home to see friends and family.
I’m renting a room in a shared house with a thirty-something electrician who has already bought and sold his own houses, runs a Land Rover and goes on holiday abroad about five times a year.
I can’t even afford to run a car and will have to inherit a lot of money or sell internal organs before I can get on the property ladder.
I had a horrible epiphany in the gym a few weeks ago that I am a product of Blair’s Britain: this buy-now-pay-back-whenever culture that has caused the credit crunch.
I feel that I was mis-sold my higher education. “They” all said that you had to have a university education to get anywhere in the world. “They” all said that your earning potential skyrockets if you have a degree that you’ll be able to pay it back no problem.
“They” also said that you had to have few months travelling on your CV, so I racked up £3K on a credit card during my gap year.
No one realises quite what a burden debt is until you have to start paying it back. I now envy some of my former school colleagues who went straight into work after finishing their A Levels or even GCSEs and now have their own houses and cars. Perhaps their earning potential is not as high as mine, but the difference is easily made up by them not having hundreds of pounds coming out of their bank accounts paying off student debts.
And don’t even get me started on the 750 quid that Gordon Brown steals from my pay cheque every month to fund his colleague’s expenses claims, red tape for doctors, teachers and policemen and allowing the NEETs to have as many children as they want free of charge.
I do at least have a private pension which is 5% of my salary after tax of course, and will then be taxed further.
Borrowing money makes you a slave to The Man. The first loan I took out was my student loan for university when I was 18. I accumulated £11,000 over three years to go towards my university tuition fees (another unwelcome invention of the Blair government) and some of my living costs. The remainder was funded by taking crap summer jobs like waiting on tables and packing boxes in factories 8 – 12 hours at a time. That debt didn’t seem to matter because I didn’t have to start paying it back until I was earning over £15,000 per annum.
I then borrowed £5,000 at the start of 2004 to buy a car because I needed one in order to commute to a new job in a location that was inaccessible to public transport. I had worked hard during my third year at university and obtained a 2:1 overall when it looked like I would have to make do with a Desmond Tutu. I felt that I had deserved it. I actually left the job after less than a week after a run-in with another member of staff who is probably the most evil and disgusting person I have every met in my life. The firm were a bunch of cowboys working for the dregs of society at any rate. I was better off without them and found a job with a much more respectable firm shortly afterwards.
But the car loan met I was tied to The Man for good and stayed in jobs I did not enjoy simply because I needed money to keep up the repayments.
Being a male under 25 years old, car insurance was a rip off. The car, a V-reg 1.0 litre Vauxhall Corsa was a bag of shite. It would have been ok for a housewife to go to the shops a few times a week. Practically every service and MOT something had gone on it that needed replacing for hundreds of pounds. Not enough to send it to the knackers yard though. And again, thanks to Blair and Brown, the petrol costs were obscene thanks to all the fuel duty lumped on it.
I was trying to save up for a gap year abroad. I would have been able to travel around the world five star more than once on the amount I wasted on that horrible bucket of bolts.
I did my Legal Practice Course at The Factory of Law which entailed borrowing another £12,000. I was rather hoping that it would be a re-run of university, except this time I would do it the way that I wanted to do it. I would have a proper work/life balance and I would score top marks throughout the year. My fellow-students would be mature and professional and I would have much in common with them.
It didn’t work out like that.
The tutors at the Factory did not care a hoot about you. You were there to fill a seat, pay your fees and get through the course as quickly as possible. I dubbed it the “Factory” of Law because they sat you on a conveyor belt, opened up your cranium and poured as much legal information as humanly possibly within 9 months and moved you on. I was appalled by the attitude of my fellow-students. It was the first time since leaving secondary school that I had to put up with snide comments about my dulcet English tones. There were a few good individuals there, as long as you went out of your way to find them.
During the Legal Practice Course I acquired a training contract with a firm, but it was not due to start for a year after finishing the course. I went travelling to New Zealand and Australia. I had some good times. I came home with a lot of impressive photos of snow capped peaks and red oceans of scrub. I also had to face some of the worst shit that I have ever happened to me in my life. Was it worth the expense and the tribulation? The jury is still out.
Now, just over two years away from thirty I have realised that you are nobody to your employers. A number on a balance sheet. Someone for them to exploit. A slave to the system. Working for your retirement (if I can even save up enough of a decent pension before I’m 70) and then I won’t have to work anymore. That is what the education system prepares you for; not to excel, not to stand on your own two feet. All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.
Little people in little houses
Like maggots small blind and worthless
The massacred innocents’ blood stains us all
Who’s responsible – you fucking are
Who’s responsible – you fucking are
Who’s responsible – you fucking are
Who’s responsible – you fucking are
Who’s responsible
manicstreetpreacher unveils the clip that he has replayed the most in this Year of Our Lord.
It has been a great year for the ‘Tube. I have watched many brilliant lectures and debates and even appeared in one of them myself. Certainly, NonStampCollector is the one YouTube user who has provided me with the most joy. I wish I could include them all. However, the clip I have played the most is the this wonderful “re-edit” of BNP leader Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC One’s Question Time on 22 October 2009 by cassetteboy.
At over a million views, I’m probably not the only one who would class it as the cream of the crop for ‘09.
Many thanks to my friend, the anti-fascist blogger Edmund Standing, for forwarding me the link.
manicstreetpreacher compiles the greatest hits of the Aussie YouTube auteur.
I have referred to and embedded the videos of this YouTube genius who goes by the name, “NonStampCollector”, soooooooo many times that I thought it was high time I posted a list of my favourite videos. Funny, irreverent, yet philosophically brilliant; these videos are a must when you absolutely have to put down vacuous theistic arguments straightaway and make the other guy look like a complete fool.
What Would Jesus NOT Do?
In a similar vein to Christopher Hitchens’ 94,000 – 98,000 Year Wait Gambit, NSC shows just how useless and capricious the Christian myth really is.
Special Investigation – 20th Century Killers
Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot clearly acted they way they did because they didn’t believe in Yahweh, Christ, Allah and Zeus.
Hitler’s Atheistic Regime
“I have studied the Holy Scriptures. I just don’t think they are that good. I think that religious ideas should be given no more respect than the Easter Bunny. We have to learn to think for ourselves and reject dogma. For this reason I want you all to kill six million Jews.” Right…
Jepadah (Judges 11)
Wonderful pictorial re-telling of that Sunday school favourite:
The thing that made the things for which there is no known maker
All arguments from design end here! William Lane Crag: “When considering how all this could have come about, we reach a point where the zeros after the decimal point are too many, it’s all to complex and improbable for my tiny mind, it must have been…”
Free Will – “God Style”: a gift?
“I love you. I want you to make your own choices in life. But if you don’t do exactly what I want, then I’m going to punish you for it, even though I love you and I don’t want to do it.”
manicstreetpreacher takes a brief respite from all things theocratic and gives his take on how the cunning stunt of getting RATM to Christmas Number One has a less amusing side to it.
I just couldn’t believe it. Returning from the gym on Sunday evening checking out my RSS feeds, I saw the news that Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing in the Name” had beaten X Factor winner, Joe McElderry, to UK Christmas Number One. The shock chart result follows a widely publicised Facebook campaign to get the US-based rap punk group to the top of the charts in order to prevent Simon Cowell from ruining the best chart of the year with yet another insult-to-housewives-choice-idenikit-sugar-manufactured-pop-dreck-famous-for-five-seconds-forgotton-just-as-quickly-waste-of-plastic.
My initial reaction was joy. Although I never got round to downloading the track, I morally supported Rage in beating X Factor. It was joyful slap in the face to Cowell, regardless of the fact that he is a part owner of Sony, the record company of both McElderry and Rage and therefore a share of the profits will find their way into his high trouser pocket eventually. However, that is missing the point. As Charlie Brooker in The Guardianput it writing mid-week before the chart was announced:
But profit isn’t the point – or at least it’s not the reason I downloaded it. For one thing, I happen to think Killing in the Name is an excellent song, so I’ve already got something out of it. Most importantly, it contains genuine emotion. Even if the climactic repeated howls of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” put you in mind of a teenager loudly refusing to tidy his bedroom – as opposed to a masked anarchist hurling petrol bombs at the riot squad – there is at least an authentic human sentiment being expressed. Zack de la Rocha is audibly pissed off.
Compare this to the pissweak vocal doodle that is Joe McElderry’s X Factor single. For a song whose lyrics ostensibly document an attempt to gather the spiritual strength to overcome adversity and thereby attain enlightenment, The Climb is about as inspiring as a Lion bar. It’s a listless announcement on a service station Tannoy; an advert for buttons; a fart in a clinic; a dot on a spreadsheet. Listening to it from beginning to end is like watching a bored cleaner methodically wiping a smudge from a Formica worksurface.
But then nobody’s buying The Climb in order to actually listen to it. They’re buying it out of sedated confusion, pushing a button they’ve been told will make them feel better. It’s the sound of the assisted suicide clinic, and it doesn’t deserve to be No 1 this Christmas.
Hear, hear.
However, the my joy had cold water thrown on it rather quickly with this post from prolific secular, pro-Israel and anti-fascist blogger Edmund Standing who pointed out that far from being mere rebels without a cause, RATM are:
[T]he musical equivalent of the Socialist Workers Party – i.e. they’re ‘revolutionary’ loons who hate the West and wish we were all living in some Soviet hellhole.
Let’s have a look at some of their views.
Starting with the band’s official website, we immediately find images of books including Che Guevara’s ‘Guerrilla Warfare’, ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’, ‘The Black Panthers Speak’, and ‘Malcolm X Speaks’. So, that’s a book on Communist revolution by a vile totalitarian, a terrorist manual, and race baiting material.
Che Guevara is of course the icon of choice for every rebellious teenager, lefty idiot, and pretentious pseudo-leftist celebrity going. The real Che was a walking nightmare…
The Che worship of people like RATM is particularly ironic, given he wanted to ban rock music.
In an interview with Chomsky, RATM member Tom Morello proudly stated: ‘I want you to know… Noam Chomsky books are the ones most prominently featured on the rage tour bus’.
Zack de la Rocha of RATM considers Chomsky a ‘good friend’ and cited him in an ‘anti-war’ rant at the 2007 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival…
500,000 Britons have ‘rebelled’ against Simon Cowell’s chart dominance by buying the records of an extreme left-wing band of wannabe terrorists. The only thing that gives me hope in this situation is that the majority of those people probably haven’t got a clue about the politics of RATM, which, of course, really makes the whole ‘campaign’ all the more pathetic.
The words, “down”, “Earth” and “bump” spring to mind. Perhaps if Standing had blogged on RATM sooner he may have stopped the campaign and McElderry would have given us the ninth Simon Cowell/ Louis Walsh manufactured for a TV audience Christmas Number One in a row…
Many of the commenters on Standing’s post have concurred with him. However, many have begged to differ, calling him “po-faced” and that the stunt was “just a bit fun”. Who cares about Rage’s politics? They are a rock group who have some dodgy, hypocritical and inconsistent views. What punk rock group does not? Does Standing begrudge The Sex Pistols very nearly successful attempt to hijack the Jubilee Number One in 1977 for their ridiculous cut n paste ethos?
This reminds me of the occasion in 2001 when my favourite band of all time and whose moniker I have purloined for blogging purposes (so far without being slapped with a copyright action, touch wood!), Manic Street Preachers played a live gig in front of 5,000 fans at the Karl Marx theatre in Havana, Cuba in front of Fidel Castro himself. The album they were promoting was Know Your Enemy (overall rather tepid, still containing some of their best work, quite a few guilty pleasures!) was chocked full of references to Cuba, not least of which was “Baby Elian”, regarding the fiasco in the courts over custody of a little Cuban boy called Elian Gonzalez who was found washed up in Florida following a boat disaster his mother did not survive while she was attempting to escape to America.
Everyone at the time knew that Cuba has an appalling record on human rights (although they have a cracking healthcare system if Michael Moore is to be believed, erm…), but it was the principle of the band speaking out against the relentless Americanisation of the planet in spite of the fact that everyone would much prefer to live in a McUSA rather than a Red Cuba! The Manics have always been the biggest load of self-contradictory, ill-thought-out, slogan-ripping-off-without-actually-reading-any-deeper-into-their-heroes tools, but that’s partly why I love them so much.
I have a biography of the band R.E.M. called Fiction, first published in 2002. Guitarist Peter Buck replied rather well to the apparent contradiction of cash-raking, corporate-cock-sucking rock stars speaking out against globalisation and capitalism. I didn’t have my copy to hand at the time of writing, but he said something along the lines of all of us being guilty of it to an extent. Most music magazines have adverts in their back pages that are essentially selling prostitution. What are the chances that the clothes we are wearing now were stitched together in some Taiwanese sweat-shop by an eight-year child being paid $1 a day? (Although on a balance of probabilities Mr Standing is exempt from this piece of rhetoric…) Al Gore obviously hasn’t given up his 4X4 and jet travel as he is shown using them in An Inconvenient Truth!
The realities rendering us all hypocrites shouldn’t prevent people from rebelling against the system on the odd occasion. If Rage Against The Machine’s politics were more influential, I think the joke would turn sour and people would know where to draw the line.
But this episode graphically demonstrates the inexplicable paradox at the heart of the public’s perception of the left-right divide. As Boris Johnson pointed out in a piece first published in The Daily Telegraph in 2005:
Cycling through London, I check out the words on people’s T-shirts, and I was amused the other day to see the letters CCCP on someone’s chest. Yup, folks, that’s what the fashion-conscious British youth is wearing, a celebration of the great doomed Soviet experiment of 1917 – 90.
Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?
On that occasion, Johnson was commenting on the death of Melita Norwood, a former Soviet spy whose crimes against the British state were only discovered in 1999 when she was aged 87. As a result of her advanced years, the Labour government decided she was too old to prosecute. Compare that to the way that former Auschwitz guards are (quite rightly) hunted down and thrown in the dock when they have to feed through a tube.
I disagree with my father on many political, philosophical, scientific and above all religious matters. However, the one gem of political insight he imparted to me in my teenage years which I have retained ever since is that that you can quite literally get away with mass murder as long as you are left wing.
Why is it that the figures of the far left are deified while those at the opposite end of the political spectrum like Hitler are remembered as history’s monsters? Instead of all those students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “CCCP” a few years back, why didn’t they try wearing a garment displaying a swastika? Instead of the monochrome profile of Che Guevara hanging from a million student dorm windows, what about the corpulent features of Herman Goering or his rather more gaunt counterpart in the Wehrmacht Joseph Goebbels?
It’s disgusting how Stalin is being made into a hero now. Earlier this year, a renegade Orthodox priest displayed icons of him alongside Russian saints outside his church in St Petersburg (or Leningrad as it seems to be called again), which the Communist Party rushed to imitate en masse and distribute. The Communist Party in Russia are petitioning the Russian Orthodox Church to have him made a saint. The man was voted third greatest Russian of all time in a poll at the end of 2008. At this year’s worldwide May Protests, Communists were out in force displaying icons of Stalin.
What on Earth were these people protesting against; too much freedom and democracy and a shortage of gulags and slave labour?
I read an article in The Times a few weeks ago that a school history text book has been produced under the loathsome shadow of the Putin administration which airbrushes (literally) Stalin’s crimes against humanity. In some European countries it is a crime to deny or trivialise the Holocaust. Why aren’t there laws against doing the same in respect of all the millions communism has killed?
But then again, aren’t we in the West slaves to commercialisation? Isn’t that the point of Rage Against The Machine and their ilk? Hasn’t our consumer culture left as emotional emaciated as a gulag prisoner? For all the paradoxes, the latent contradictions, the childish political posturing, the ghastly nightmare that would ensue if they had their way, I can’t help feeling some affection for people who want to prevent society degenerating into this:
But I still know which I would prefer. We need hypocrites like Rage Against The Machine and Manic Street Preachers to remind us how lucky we are and how much worse things could be if we had to live under the heel of Stalin, Castro or Mao.
I came across this article on the website of The Daily Telegraph last week which would have made me tear my hair out if I still had sufficient quantities of the stuff to grab hold of:
The look is part of an exhibition, backed by Barbie creator Mattel, of the doll in multicultural outfits by Italian designer Eliana Lorena.
Two of the Barbies are wearing the burka, the loose fitting robe with veiled holes for the eyes which is worn by some Muslim women.
The collection of more than 500 Barbies is being sold at a Sotheby’s charity auction in Florence, Italy, in aid of Save The Children.
The sale is part of Barbie celebrations for her 50th anniversary this year.
Britain’s biggest Barbie collector Angela Ellis, 35, who owns more than 250 dolls, said: “I think this is really important for girls, wherever they are from they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.
“I know Barbie was something seen as bad before as an image for girls, but in actual fact the message with Barbie for women is you can be whatever you want to be…”
To put the matter at its mildest, I’m afraid that I beg to differ with Ms Ellis. This is yet another example of multiculturalism gone mad. The burka is the symbol of Islam’s inherent oppression of women. It is not a symbol of freedom; it is a symbol of submission, a sign that they are the property of their husbands.
2:222 They question thee (O Muhammad) concerning menstruation. Say: It is an illness, so let women alone at such times and go not in unto them till they are cleansed. And when they have purified themselves, then go in unto them as Allah hath enjoined upon you.
2:223 Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will, and send (good deeds) before you for your souls, and fear Allah, and know that ye will (one day) meet Him. Give glad tidings to believers, (O Muhammad).
2:282 …And call two witness from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not at hand, then a man and two women, of such as ye approve as witnesses, so that if one erreth (though forgetfulness) the other will remember…
4:34 Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great.
12:28 So when he saw his shirt torn from behind, he said: Lo! this is of the guile of you women. Lo! the guile of you is very great.
24:6 As for those who accuse their wives but have no witnesses except themselves; let the testimony of one of them be four testimonies, (swearing) by Allah that he is of those who speak the truth;
66:1 O Prophet! Why bannest thou that which Allah hath made lawful for thee, seeking to please thy wives? And Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
Dealing with these verses in layman’s language as they appear: men should not touch a women when she is on her period, women are men’s property, a woman’s testimony in a court of law is worth half that of a man, a husband may beat his wife if she displeases him, women in general are duplicitous, a husband can accuse his wife of adultery with one witness, and the Prophet can cop off with his wives whenever he likes.
She should stay at home and get on with her spinning. She can go out only in emergencies. She must not be well-informed nor must she be communicative with her neighbours and only visit them when absolutely necessary. She should take care of her husband and respect him in his presence and his absence and seek to satisfy him in everything. She must not leave her house without his permission and if given his permission she must leave secretly. She should put on old clothes and take deserted streets and alleys, avoid markets, and make sure that a stranger does not hear her voice, her footsteps, smell her or recognise her. She must not speak to a friend of her husband even in need. Her sole worry should be her “al bud” (reproductive organs) her home as well as her prayers and her fast (starvation for Allah). If a friend of her husband calls when her husband is absent she must not open the door nor reply to him in order to safeguard her “al bud”. She should accept what her husband gives her as sufficient sexual needs at any moment. She should be clean and ready to satisfy her husband’s sexual needs at any moment.
This piece of theocratic lunacy is not something that Western liberal society should be condoning, let alone replicating, for the sake of political correctness.
Wolpert’s main line of attack is there is absolutely no evidence for God and he doesn’t seem to have done very much since raising Jesus from the dead over two millennia ago. I have to agree with him here: people get all choked up every time a baby falls out of a window and is saved by the soft roof of a passing car – they remain oddly silent at all the ditches that are full of dead babies when no one did a thing. I thought that Cowburn’s objections that Wolpert and the rest of the world’s non-believers ought to believe what was written down 2,000 years ago and it is irrational and unreasonable to expect God to appear in to each and every one of us were very weak.
As Thomas Paine argued in The Age of Reason (First Part, Section 1 – 2), we are perfectly entitled to reject Moses’ account of meeting God atop of Mount Sinai (if such a place even exists; no geographer has ever been able to identify the biblical Sinai from the true geographical location!) then I am perfectly entitled to reject his account, because to me it is hearsay and not direct revelation:
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication – after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.
When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.
Cowburn should also read my disgracefully unscholarly piece about Richard Bauckham’s erm, “arguments” in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses for my full thoughts. That quote at the end from Sam Harris about how the evidence for Christianity would still not be good enough even if we had multiple contemporary eyewitness accounts empties all “scholarly” discourses about the reliability of oral tradition from direct observers and who-first-started-to-believe-what-when.
Of course, the atheist will always complain about the hiddenness of God. Why can’t God just reveal himself in the middle of the World Cup final when most of the humans on the planet will be watching and put the matter beyond doubt rather than appearing to stupefied illiterates in remote parts of Middle East in the pre-scientific past? If you can’t believe what you read last week in The Sunday Times, then fail to understand Cowburn’s scepticism when confronted with a collection of disjointed and contradictory documents from the ancient past.
And I’m still waiting for a convincing response to Christopher Hitchens’ 94,000 – 98,000 Year Wait Gambit as to the Almighty being rather tardy and allowing of a great deal of suffering and death before finally deciding to step in with an offer of salvation:
Perhaps Cowburn can now supply it.
Finally, I would recommend that Cowburn investigates the work of Victor Stenger, American cosmologist, atheist and author of Has Science Found God? and God, The Failed Hypothesis who debunks the idea that “whatever begins to exist has a cause” as the kind of common sense logic that tells us that the Earth is flat. Particles produced by nuclear decay come into existence without a cause. The universe was like a subatomic particle at the time of the Big Bang, so this example could well apply to the beginning of the universe.
Stenger also debunks the fine-tuning argument that carbon-based life in the universe cannot have come about naturally because it was too “improbable”. Firstly, virtually all every day events are “improbable” when you state them a priori and then crunch the numbers, such as a person’s very existence in this world. And secondly, what is the probability that this universe is the result of a divine design? It could be even lower than the naturalistic alternative. What data do we have in order to make the calculation? Not very much, it would appear.
I have recently posted my own analysis of Stenger’s debate against William Lane Craig at the University of Hawaii in 2003, as well as the transcript of Stenger’s three main speeches, which provides further comment and elaboration.
UPDATE: 26 December 2009
I emailed this piece to Lewis Wolpert and Russell Cowburn for their comments. “Lewy” replied saying that he liked the piece and hoped that I liked his theory about the origins of human religious behaviour. I realise now that the piece neglects somewhat Lewis’ book on religion! Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast is less a polemic against the untruths of and crimes of religious faith, but an explanation of why Homo sapiens practise religion if there is no God. I replied to Lewis that such theories come ten-a-penny, but his is as good as some and better than most.
Essentially, Lewis thinks that religious behaviour is an extension of humans’ interpretation of “cause and effect”, such as shaking a tree to make its fruit fall off and using tools to make other objects. The offshoot of this is that we see agency and patterns in practically everything, even whether no such invisible guiding hand (i.e. God!) exists. Lewis says that animals show the seeds of this behaviour to a very limited extent. They know that shaking a tree will get the fruit down, but aren’t intelligent enough to use tools.
However, a few days after posting my original piece I came across this article on the BBC News website which says that certain groups of chimpanzees in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, are now using both stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits:
The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise unobtainable food, say researchers.
Instead, they are actively chopping up the food into more manageable portions.
I emailed the article to Lewis, saying that they’ll be worshipping the sun and sacrificing their cubs to ensure it rises every morning in no time! Lewis replied that the chimps are beginning to learn how to use tools, but it is very limited. Perhaps there won’t be any Blessed Virgin Marys and weeping statutes for a while after all.
For more on the evolution of religious faith, I would strongly recommend watching or listening to J Anderson “Andy” Thomson’s superb lecture at the American Atheists 2009 conference and Thomson and R Elizabeth Cornwell’s paper, “The Evolution of Religion”.
Finally, I have often been asked what evidence that I as an atheist would accept for the existence of God. Up until now, I have jumped in with both feet and then made a bit of a fool of myself. This is partly due to theists always being able to re-invent their God to conform to the empirical data and then accusing me of merely citing reasons not to believe in God.
However, I thought that Lewis’ example of having his departed wife returned to him was a wonderfully moving example of possible evidence for the supernatural that would make a sceptic reassess his or her non-belief. While I have not lost anyone close to me up to now in my life, I might just use that one in future when I am asked the question again.
manicstreetpreacher supplies the video of Sam Harris ending all “scholarly” arguments of the reliability of oral tradition and who-first-started-to-believe-what-when.
Unfortunately, the MySpace video stops after Stenger’s first rebuttal. The YouTube video goes to audio-only for the cross-examination and closing statements.
Make sure you listen to the whole debate including the audience Q & A on the audio.
I found a transcript of Stenger’s three main speeches, to which I have updated and revised for inaccuracies. No need to post Craig’s transcript. He doesn’t say anything you haven’t heard a million times before or since!
Opening Statement: 20 minutes
There Is No God
Well, aloha. It’s certainly wonderful to be back in Hawaii where Phyllis and I spent so many happy years. Our children were both born in Hawaii, both graduated here from the University of Hawaii, and it’s certainly great to be back. In fact, it’s almost exactly forty years to the day that we first landed in Hawaii and this is the first time we’ve actually visited Hawaii in all that time. And so we’re here as tourists and now I can understand why so many people keep coming back to visit Hawaii.
I would like to express thanks to Keli’i and the other organizers and sponsors for inviting of this debate me. It’s certainly an honor to share the platform with William Lane Craig. I’ve read that he is one of the world’s foremost Christian apologists and he’s given ample evidence of that today.
In his opening remarks, Dr Craig has appealed to your common sense. You know what common sense is. Common sense is the human faculty that tells us that Earth is flat. On the other hand, objective observation tells us that Earth is round.
In tonight’s debate, I will argue that objective observation as well as reason and logic lead to the conclusion that a God with the traditional attributes of the Christian God does not exist beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I will give four arguments to support my position.
1. Attributes are self-contradictory
The attributes of the Christian God are self-contradictory. They are like a square circle.
2. Attributes incompatible with what is known
The attributes of the Christian God are inconsistent with what we know about the world.
3. Naturalism is a better explanation than supernaturalism
Supernatural explanations for events in the universe are unnecessary. Natural explanations are simpler, are based on objective observations, and are fully consistent with all we know about the world.
4. God’s actions should be observable but are not
The attributes of the Christian God imply actions that should be objectively observable. But they are not. God has not been detected.
Attributes of God
Let me list a set of attributes that are traditionally associated with the God of the monotheistic religions, but particularly Christianity:
He is the creator of the universe.
He is immaterial and transcendent.
He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good.
He is perfect in every way.
Furthermore, God is a person. He loves humans and wishes us to know him.
He is forgiving and merciful.
He speaks to humans, revealing truths to us that we would not otherwise know.
He answers our prayers, as he sees fit.
He performs miracles, violating natural laws.
Incompatible attributes
Many philosophers have argued that the traditional attributes of God are logically incompatible. Here are just a few of these:
Perfect –v- Creator. If God is perfect, then he has no needs or wants. This is incompatible with the notion that God created the universe for some divine purpose. Divine purpose implies that God wants something he doesn’t already have, which makes him imperfect.
Transcendent –v- Omnipresent. How can a God beyond space and time be at the same time everywhere within space and time at the same time?
Just –v- Merciful. To be just means to treat a person exactly as they deserve. To be merciful means to treat a person better than they deserve. You can’t do both.
Immaterial –v- Personal. To be a person is to have a material body, to have a brain, to have a mouth that you speak with and so on.
So a God with these attributes and many of the other attributes traditionally assigned to him does not exist.
Existence of non-belief
The God of monotheism also has attributes that are inconsistent with what we know about the world. For example, an all-powerful, all-knowing God who also has the attribute of wanting all humans to know and love him is inconsistent with the fact that there are non-believers in the world.
The Problem of Evil
Perhaps the most ancient and strongest of the arguments for God’s non-existence is the problem of evil. An all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God is simply inconsistent with the fact of evil and gratuitous suffering in the world.
God’s reasons for evil and suffering
Theologians have, of course, grappled with the problem of evil for centuries, and they still do. For example, a prominent contemporary theologian Richard Swinburne says of the problem of evil:
If the world was without any natural evil and suffering we wouldn’t have the opportunity… to show courage, patience and sympathy.
Certainly, pain has a role in warning us of illness or injury.
Is so much suffering necessary?
But does God really need so much suffering to achieve his ends? Is there any good purpose behind so many children dying every day in the world of starvation and disease; perhaps one every few seconds? How are they helped by the rest of us becoming more sympathetic?
Logically consistent gods
Dr Craig and many other theologians have spent their lives building models of God that are logically consistent and at the same time in broad agreement with the traditional teachings of Christianity.
This has mainly consisted in trimming God’s characteristics one by one until he is defined mostly in the negative: non-material, not in space or time, not seen or heard. Apologists have reduced God to an almost undetectable background: something like what we physicists used to call “the aether”, until we found that the aether doesn’t exist either.
I have no doubt that a logically consistent picture of some kind of God can be devised and I never claimed to disprove the existence of every conceivable God, that’s why I’ve been very careful to focus on the God with the traditional attributes of Christianity and to certain extent the other monotheistic religions as well. While it’s possible to create a logically consistent God, I seriously doubt that this God can be made consistent with Christianity.
Computer games
In any case, these theologians and their logical consistent Gods remind me of the creators of computer games. Programmers invent whole new universes in which the characters have all kinds of superhuman powers and many of our familiar laws of physics are violated. Yet the rules these games are logically consistent. They wouldn’t run on a computer if they weren’t. But the computer game universes have little connection to the universe we see around us. They exist in what is called “virtual reality”.
God’s actions should be observable, but are not
Just because something is logically consistent, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it exists. For the theologians’ logically consistent God to actually exist, he must have something to do with the observed universe; some attributes that can be objectively observed. Otherwise God is as useless as the aether.
Naturalism is a better explanation than supernaturalism
Even if a God can be devised who is consistent with logic and with observations, natural explanations for phenomena are still better than supernatural ones. They better explain the existence of non-believers. They also better explain the existence of believers. They explain the existence of evil and gratuitous suffering as the unfortunate results of evolution. They better explain the origin and structure of the universe of life, and mind. And these notions are based on objective observations and theories that are testable.
Supernaturalism offers no explanation at all except “God did it”. And to say “God did it”, as Dr Craig does, passes on no more information than to say “Santa Claus did it” or “the Easter Bunny did it” it could be any entity.
Most scientists do not believe
Only seven percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences believe in the personal God worshipped by perhaps 80 – 90 percent of other Americans. Most scientists don’t believe in God because they don’t see any objective evidence for him! When they look at the world around them, they see no sign of God. They don’t see God when they peer through their most powerful telescopes. They don’t detect God with their most sophisticated microscopes and other instruments. Furthermore, scientists find no need to introduce God or the supernatural in any form into any of their explanatory theories.
Here are a few of the famous scientists who have been outspoken in their non-belief: Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Francis Crick; the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Steven Weinberg; perhaps the greatest living theoretical physicist, and the incomparable Carl Sagan. Let me add that none of these scientists would not believe if they were present with sufficient evidence.
Objectively observable actions of God
A God with the attributes I have listed implies phenomena that should have been easily observable by now. For example, let us consider three actions: revelation, prayers, and miracles. Let’s begin with revelation.
Revelation
Most people believe in a God who has a substantial and detectable role in the universe and in human affairs. One common characteristic attributed to this God is that he communicates with humans and provides them with verifiable new knowledge.
The theistic religions have traditionally taught that God speaks to humanity. Their scriptures are widely assumed to be the word of God and he’s believed to have revealed knowledge to religious leaders in the past that they would otherwise not have known. Many believe that God still does this today, speaking even to the average person.
Revelation is verifiable
Surprisingly, these claims can be easily verified if they are true. All we have to do is find some fact supposedly gained by divine revelation that was unknown at the time of the revelation, and then confirm this fact at a later time.
For example, suppose the Bible had predicted that men would walk on the moon in two thousand years. Then we would have a rational basis to take seriously what else is written in the Bible. Unfortunately, we do not.
No revelations
No revelation of previously unknown knowledge has ever been empirically validated.
The scriptures contain nothing that could not have been known to or imagined by the ancients who wrote them. The Bible reads exactly as we would expect it to read, based on existing knowledge at the time it was composed.
Failed revelations
Furthermore, there are many examples of the failure to confirm of Biblical revelations. Consider the failed prophecy of the Second Coming:
In Matthew 24: 30 Jesus says, “They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory.” And a few verses later he says, “I will tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” (Matthew 24: 34)
Well, we’re still waiting. It was supposed to happen 2,000 years ago. It’s time to give up and move on.
All in the head
Those who have claimed to talk to God have provided no knowledge that was not already in their heads. Many people have claimed religious experiences in which they felt the presence of God, but they never return from those experiences with any exceptional knowledge that could easily verify their claim. What I’m saying is that there is a way that God can be detected, and this is one of them and has not been.
Furthermore, religious experiences can be induced in the brain by drugs, electromagnetic pulses, and oxygen deprivation. For example, when pilots undergoing high-G training in a centrifuge, they will often experience a kind of tunneling of their vision, narrowing of their vision with the “light at the end of the tunnel” that is characteristic of the near-death experience that is supposed to happen with the religious significance.
Does God choose to hide?
You might say that God has chosen to hide himself from us. He certainly has – if he exists has – hidden himself from us.
However, Saint Paul makes it very clear that even though God is invisible, his nature and diet have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. In other words, God may be invisible, but his actions are visible.
[Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.
- Romans 1: 20]
In other words, God may be invisible but his actions are visible. Theists might respond that God’s actions are obvious to those who wish to see them. Well, I would love to see them, but they are not obvious to me, or to the millions of other non-believers in the world.
Prayers and miracles
Another commonly believed attribute of God is that he listens to entreaties from humans to change the natural course of events. He can be expected to grant a sufficient number of these requests so that the results should be observable. Otherwise, what’s the point in praying?
Many people will testify that they’ve had prayers answered. But personal testimony is insufficient since it doesn’t rule out other more mundane, simpler, natural explanations. For example, if someone is ill and then recovers after praying, it could be that the prayers had nothing to do with it. After all, the body, sometimes with medical help, does a pretty good job of healing itself. In fact, it works every time except once – the last time.
If prayer had value in healing we’d have doctors prescribing Prayer Aspirin. “Say three ‘Our Fathers’ and four ‘Hail Marys’ and call me in the morning.”
Convincing evidence for a God who answers prayers can, in principle, be scientifically demonstrated – it’s not impossible – with high probability if he really exists. Well-designed experiments on intercessory prayer should turn up solid, statistically significant results on the success of prayer in healing.
In fact, some studies claiming positive effects of prayer have been published in refereed medical journals to great media hoopla. However, you can’t rely on media reports but need to look at the actual published papers. Applying the same criteria that are used in conventional science when testing extraordinary claims, you’ll find that none of the reported effects is significant. Furthermore, most of these experiments are severely flawed and none of the claimed positive effects have ever been successfully replicated.
Mayo Clinic Study (2001)
Perhaps the best study was done by the Mayo Clinic a few years ago. They studied some 800 patients over a period of half a year. The patients – they were coronary patients – were divided up into two groups, some prayed for, some not prayed for, and the results were no significant effect that would suggest that prayer had any good whatsoever.
[The results of 26 weeks of intercessory prayer, a widely practiced complementary therapy, were studied in 799 patients randomized to an intercessory prayer group or to a control group after discharge from a coronary care unit. As delivered in this study, intercessory prayer had no significant effect on specifically defined medical outcomes, regardless of risk status.]
Summary
So let me summarise:
The traditional attributes of God are self-contradictory, so such a God cannot exist.
The traditional attributes of God are incompatible with objective facts about the world. So such a God cannot exist.
Natural explanations are superior to supernatural explanations. No basis exists for anything supernatural.
The traditional attributes of God imply actions that should be objectively observed, but they’re not.
It’s possible to hypothesize a God whose attributes are logically compatible with each other, but it does not follow that such a God exists unless he has objectively observable consequences. And as I said no consequences have been observed.
So if God exists, where is he?
First Rebuttal: 12 minutes
I’m going to respond now mainly to Dr Craig’s opening remarks. However, I will add some further comments on what he has just said.
Carl Sagan said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. He probably wasn’t the first one to say that. Dr Craig has made the extraordinary claim that certain empirical facts require supernatural explanations.
In order to refute that, all I need to do is provide plausible natural explanations for these phenomena. I need not prove these. If he wants to argue that God is required to exist in order to explain the observed universe, Dr Craig must disprove all possible, natural explanations for these phenomena.
Let’s start with his cosmological argument.
Cosmological Argument
Dr Craig argues that:
Whatever begins must have a cause
The universe had a beginning
Therefore the universe must have had a cause
Not everything that begins has a Cause
However, we know from physics that not everything that begins has a cause. Physical bodies begin to exist all the time without cause. Let’s consider radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus, the alpha particle or beta particle or gamma particle that are emitted in a radioactive decay, those particles coming into being, come into existence, begin to exist spontaneously, without a cause. The beginning of the Big Bang the universe was like a subatomic particle, so these ideas could apply. Again, I can’t prove it but I don’t have to prove it. Here is one example that refutes Dr Craig’s claim that everything that begins must have a cause.
Is the big bang is evidence that the universe had a beginning?
But even if everything that begins has a cause, this does not necessary apply to the universe if the universe did not have a beginning.
Dr Craig argues that the Big Bang is evidence that the universe had a beginning. However, the universe need not have begun with the Big Bang. And I’m not just talking about this one particular speculation from my book. There are many prominent physicists and cosmologists who publish papers in reputable scientific journals proposing various scenarios by which the Big Bang appeared naturally out of a pre-existing universe that need not itself have had a beginning. One such recent example is the Cyclic Universe.
Does an infinite universe have a beginning?
Dr Craig also claims that the universe had to begin because if it were infinitely old, it would take an infinite time to reach the present.
However, if the universe is infinitely old, then it had no beginning – not a beginning infinitely long ago. Furthermore, the universe can be finite – and I actually believe that the universe is finite – it can be finite and still not have a beginning.
Universe can be finite and still not have a beginning
Einstein defined time as what you read on a clock. It’s a number, the number of ticks of the clock. We count time forward time: one, two, three, four, five ticks. We never reach infinitive time. We can also count time backward and never reach minus infinity. The notion that the universe had either a beginning or will have an end are theological notions, not scientific ones.
Is the universe fine-tuned for life?
Now, what about this fine-tuning argument? Again, it’s an argument that’s based on the low probability of our kind of life. And that not only means carbon-based life but also life with the existing physical laws as we know them. Even if the probability of a particular form of life was highly improbable to have occurred by natural process, some kind of life could still be highly probably. Probably not silicon – I agree that silicon is a poor candidate – but that’s with our existing laws of physics.
Another form of life might still evolve in a universe with different physical laws or different physical constants. We simply don’t have the knowledge to rule that out. To say that there’s only possible form of life and only one possible set of laws of physics and only one possible set of constants is extremely narrow thinking and not at all required by anything that we know about science.
Argument from improbability
In this argument and other arguments about the design in the universe, Dr Craig claims that the universe and life are too improbable to be solely natural.
The improbable happens
However, this is a fallacious argument. To use probability to decide between two alternatives requires a comparison of the probabilities of each alternative. Dr Craig claims that these natural probabilities are exceedingly low. But he hasn’t told us anything about what the supernatural probabilities are and yet it’s a comparison of these two that must be made.
What’s the probability that the laws of nature are violated? What’s the probability that there’s an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing but undetectable super-being behind all of this? Complex things are common. We see natural events every moment. We’ve never seen a supernatural event.
Furthermore, low probability events happen every day. What’s the probability that my distinguished opponent exists? You have to calculate the probability that a particular sperm united with a particular egg, then multiply that by the probability that his parents met, and then repeat that calculation for his grandparents and all his ancestors going back to the beginning of life on Earth.
Even if you stop the calculation with Adam and Eve, you are going to get a fantastically small number.
To use words that Dr Craig has used before, “Improbability is multiplied by improbability by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.”
Well, Dr Craig has a mind-reeling, incomprehensibly low probability – a priori probability – for existing. Yet here he is before us today.
Modern versions of the argument from design – both the fine-tuning argument and the intelligent design argument – share this fatal flaw. They are based on the idea that natural causes can be ruled out by some arbitrary notion of low probability.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Dr Craig also asks why is there “something” rather than “nothing”, why does the universe exist rather than “nothing”?
Well, why should “nothing” be a more natural state than “something”? Why would you expect “nothing” rather than “something”? In fact, how could “nothing” even exist? If it existed, wouldn’t it be “something”?
And finally, why is there God rather than “nothing”? Dr Craig doesn’t answer those questions.
Genesis confirmed?
Dr Craig claims the Big Bang confirms the Biblical view of creation.
Genesis falsified
But what does Genesis actually say? It says that Earth was created before the sun, moon and stars. This is at odds with modern cosmology which says that the Earth did not form until seven billion years after the Big Bang.
There are many other disagreements. Genesis implies that the universe is only about 6,000 years old. Here’s a picture of a quasar. The light from this quasar left 12 billion years ago. Billions and billions of years before the Earth was even formed.
Every one of the thousand or so religions in the world has a creation myth. Most of them probably resemble modern cosmology as well or better than Genesis. Here we are in Polynesia and some of the Polynesian myths are more closely resembling to the modern cosmology than Genesis.
Objective morality
Dr Craig calls upon our common sense – our inner feelings – to attest that morality is objective and so must come from God.
Subjective morality
Not everyone shares the same morals. So, there is no evidence for objective morality. But, even if morality were objective, its source could be natural: an evolutionary process that aids in human survival and is built into our genes. I don’t see how Dr Craig has disproved that possibility.
Is the Gospel historical?
Dr Craig claims the Gospel stories describe actual historical events, such as the empty tomb.
The Empty Tomb
There is no evidence for this outside the Bible. The story of the empty tomb is second and third hand, written years after the event from the oral testimony of supposed eyewitnesses. Paul did not even know about it, yet Paul regarded the resurrection as very important, yet he didn’t know anything about the empty tomb. Furthermore, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
But even if the story of the empty tomb is accurate, you could have a simple, natural explanation. Dr Craig seems to think most scholars don’t believe, but I don’t see how they can know that.
If you went to the Napoleon’s tomb in Paris one morning, and found that his remains were not in their usual place of honour, would you conclude Napoleon had risen bodily into heaven? Hardly. You would figure that somebody took the body! Dr Craig cannot prove that Jesus’ body could not have been removed by somebody. So that remains a more plausible, natural explanation and a supernatural explanation is not required by the data.
Personal experience of God
On personal experience, Dr Craig says that a personal experience should tell us that God exists. However, that’s subjective and not everyone shares that experience.
No Evidence for God
So plausible natural explanations exist for all phenomena in the universe and God is not required to explain the universe and so Dr Craig has not proved that God exists.
Closing Remarks: 10 minutes
Dr Craig believes in the God of the Gaps. That’s the God who is used as a substitute explanation for something that we don’t understand, until the time comes along that we do. Dr Craig cannot see how the universe came about naturally, so it must have come about supernaturally. He cannot see how the universe became orderly by natural processes, so order must have come about by supernatural processes. He cannot see how objective morality can come from humanity, so it must have come from God. He cannot see how Jesus’ tomb could have been empty, so he must have risen from the dead. And finally Dr Craig cannot see how his inner experience of God could be a simple physical brain process, so it must be a true experience of God.
In each of these cases we can give a plausible, natural explanation that violates no known principles of science and requires no divine action. Dr Craig does not succeed in proving that these natural explanations are wrong; he tries to argue that they are implausible but in fact everything I’ve talked about is consistent with all the knowledge we have in science and is in perfect agreement with existing experimental and theoretical facts. So I don’t think Dr Craig succeeds in proving that God exists.
But even if the goal of the debate were not proof, but simply arguing to the best explanation, Dr Craig fails: secular humanism or materialism is a better explanation than theism or supernaturalism. It’s simpler, more consistent with empirical observations. In fact, Dr Craig offers no explanations at all. It’s not an explanation for the order the universe to say, “God did it”. How did God do it? Where did God come from? All you do when you say that “God did it” is you push the explanation back one level; it doesn’t explain a thing.
I’ve argued that a God with the attributes assumed by traditional theism can be proved not to exist if those attributes of course exist. You can play with the attributes. You can redefine God so that he doesn’t have all these attributes. For example, an all good God might not be all perfect or all powerful let’s say and then is not responsible for evil, doesn’t have control over evil. In fact, that was a line that was taken by Rabbi Kushner in his best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People that God can’t help it – that bad things just happen. However, if you assume that God has the power to prevent evil then the fact that he doesn’t and evil still exists is clearly an inconsistency – a logically impossibility.
A God who reveals knowledge about the universe that was not previously known could have been objectively verified. A God with such properties clearly does not exist. The God who answers prayers and performs miracles that can be objectively verified does not exist. I readily admit that I can’t disprove every conceivable God. But there’s no basis for believing in a God who does not produce objectively verifiable attributes.
I’m sure that I’ve not convinced many of the believers in the audience; I certainly haven’t convinced Dr Craig. You’ll testify as Dr Craig does that you can feel the presence of God in your hearts. Now I’m sure you do. I understand that conviction. I was raised in a devout Catholic family and heard this conviction expressed by almost everybody around me. But as I grew up, I found that I could not share this faith. Despite the importance of religion to my family and friends, I could not believe in God because I saw no evidence that he existed. No one told me about humanism or atheism – I read no humanist or atheist books – I just found that the arguments and evidence that everybody continued to cite to me were unconvincing. Not knowing how all this came about doesn’t mean that it came from God, it just means that we don’t know how all this came about. And sincere personal testimonies of deeply held faith were not the sort of objective evidence that we have come to rely on in modern life. Indeed, I saw so many conflicting religious points of view all based on primitive, superstitious ideas that I knew that they couldn’t all be right. I decided most likely they were all wrong.
Most scientists share my view. Are we being too sceptical? Are we being dogmatically unwilling to entertain the possibility of a personal creator God? I don’t think so. There are many examples in the history of science that demonstrate its willingness accept ideas that challenge conventional wisdom. But the data must require it. In the early twentieth century the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics revolutionised some our most basic concepts about the nature of reality. I think most scientists would be thrilled if evidence were founded for previously undetected materials and forces. Think of all the funding opportunities that would open up. I would come out of retirement. But even if that were to happen, I doubt that the world that was then being uncovered would bear any resemblance to the fantasies from the childhood of humanity that constitute traditional religious belief.
People like what they see when they look in the mirror illuminated by the light of faith. It reflects an image of themselves as fallen angels who sit on this planet with divine purpose to rehabilitate themselves so they may rejoin their fellow angels in paradise. Unfortunately, the universe exposed to the light of science does not reveal a special place for humanity in the cosmos or any prospect for life after death. I would not honest if I tried to sugar coat those facts just because they conflict so dramatically with common yearnings.
Saint Paul said, “When I was a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things, for now we see through a glass darkly.” Humanity has moved beyond childhood. We no longer need to depend on imaginary friends for company or a mythical sky father to provide for our needs. We can take care of ourselves. We can find ways to live our lives that are consistent with the universe revealed to us by science.
Finally, an all good, all powerful, all knowing God – if one existed – he would have the power to comfort a child dying an excruciating death from leukaemia. He chooses not to do so. Is there a person in this room who would not ease that child’s suffering given the power? I would do it. Jesus Christ could appear before me and tell me not to do it because it has some ultimate purpose, I WOULD STILL DO IT! Even if I faced eternal damnation I would do it…
