Intelligent Design: Dembski responds to MSP

manicstreetpreacher just needs to clear something up.

ID proponent William Dembski continues to give me a free readership on his Uncommon Common Descent blog by attacking my post on his appearance on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? (700 views and counting!  😮  ).  Firstly, Denyse O’ Leary vilified me for my take on the importance (or lack!) of probabilities in biology.  Now, Dembski himself has posted a response denying that Darwin knew about the complexities of the cell, accusing your humble servant of “re-writing history”:

A blogger who goes by “Manic Street Preacher” sent me three unsolicited emails about his reaction to the debate, which was not positive…

I finally had a look at what this blogger wrote. I can’t say I was impressed with the argumentation or erudition, but I do have to credit him for chutzpah…

I don’t mean to be argumentative, but the insides of the cells depicted here do look to me like blobs.  But qualitative interpretations like this aside, the fact is that Darwin had no conception of molecular biology or the intricate nano-engineering that Michael Behe, for instance, describes in the cell.  Moreover, it’s straightforward to examine the actual history of the scientific understanding of the cell to realize that the cell in Darwin’s time was conceived as simple, indeed so simple that it could spontaneously generate.  Jonathan Wells and I describe some of this in HOW TO BE AN INTELLECTUALLY FULFILLED ATHEIST.

But perhaps the easiest way to see that “Manic Street Preacher” is blowing smoke is to do a search on “Bathybius Haeckelii” – slime dredged up from the ocean floor thought to be the primordial living matter.  This proved to be a big embarrassment to Huxley and Haeckel.  The details here are unimportant.  What is important is that biologist of Huxley’s and Haeckel’s stature thought that life could be so simple as to be the result of this slime.

“Manic Street Preacher” reminds me of Joey Bishop in the movie A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN [IMDB].  Bishop, caught in flagrante delictu with another woman by his wife, denies all wrong doing (and, if he were a Darwinist, would accuse his wife of infidelity).  Eventually, the wife, suitably cowed, accepts the denials and agrees that nothing happened. Well, here at UD we don’t let Darwinists get away with such nonsense.  Darwin and his contemporaries didn’t have a clue about the complexity of the cell.  History bears this out, Darwinian revisionism notwithstanding.

Aside from being somewhat bemused at being compared to a member of the Rat Pack and an email spammer, I have two retorts to this.  Firstly, Dembski ought to have scrolled down to the comments section, where he would have seen that I had linked to this page on zoologist and theistic evolutionist Wesley R Elsberry’s blog which contains excellent references both to creationist and IDiots’ claims that Darwin knew nothing about that complexity of the cell:

Antievolutionists make lots of claims about Charles Darwin, seeking to impeach the authority of someone born 199 years ago today.  Given that science moves on and leaves no one’s ideas untouched, one would think that they would stick to negative claims that would stand up to some scrutiny.  Again and again, though, we find that they continue to espouse negative claims that are just plain silly, at least to those with even the slightest familiarity with the actual record that Darwin left.

[A] common antievolution claim about Darwin, simply put, [is] that Darwin considered the contents of cells to be “black boxes”, comprised of a simple or homogeneous protoplasm.  This is expressed in similar ways by a number of antievolutionists.  The following is just a sampling of the available instances.

Michael Behe:

To Darwin, then, as to every other scientist of the time, the cell was a black box.

And again:

Scientists use the term “black box” for a system whose inner workings are unknown.  To Charles Darwin and his contemporaries, the living cell was a black box because its fundamental mechanisms were completely obscure.  We now know that, far from being formed from a kind of simple, uniform protoplasm (as many nineteenth-century scientists believed), every living cell contains many ultrasophisticated molecular machines.

Casey Luskin:

There were other things that Darwin did not know.  For example, Darwin assumed that the cell was like a primitive blob of protoplasm that could easily evolve new biological functions.  As Behe explains, “To Darwin, then, as to every other scientist of the time, the cell was a black box…  The question of how life works was not one that Darwin or his contemporaries could answer.”

Nancy Pearcey:

To be fair to Darwin, he proposed his theory when scientists knew next to nothing about biochemistry.  Living things were “black boxes,” their inside workings a mystery.  The cell itself was thought to be nothing more than a blob of jellylike protoplasm.  It was easy to draw large-scale scenarios about fins gradually turning into legs, or legs into wings, since no one had a clue how limbs and organs work from the inside.  As Behe writes, it is as though we asked how a stereo system is made and someone answered, “by plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier and adding a CD player, radio receiver, and tape deck.”

That’s pretty rich, that “be fair to Darwin” phrase.  As Jeffrey Shallit, Professor of Computer Science at University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, commenting on Stephen Meyer’s recent book, Signature in the Cell points out, “This claim has been repeated again and again by creationists, but it is not true.  Fergodsake, the nucleus was discovered in 1833.”

Elsberry continues with the opinions of Jay Richards:

In addition, biochemists and biologists have discovered a microscopic world of mesmerizing complexity belying the simple blobs of protoplasm that Darwin imagined.

Elsberry frames matters bluntly:

Antievolutionists don’t go looking at the primary sources to come up with these nuggets; one of them creates a “magic bullet”, and the rest pass it around like a game of “telephone”, sometimes resulting in a garbled mess.  As Casey Luskin’s contribution here indicates, the likely source of the BS in this case is Michael Behe.

Why call it BS?  Because anybody can disconfirm the claim in seconds with a modern Internet search, and only moderately longer using the past technology scholars have long relied upon for substantiating claims about prior work.

Wesley correctly recommends the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online website as an excellent resource:

One finds there Darwin’s work on pangenesis, his hypothesis that there existed small particles that he called gemmules, each of which contained the heritable information for some particular trait, and which would combine, somehow, into the gametes.  His continued advocacy of this wrong idea was a major failing on his part, but along the way we can see that even though Darwin was wrong about gemmules, he did hold an antithetical view to the claim that everything was simple at the most basic levels of life’s organization:

Notwithstanding the astounding complexity of the processes implied by this hypothesis of pangenesis, yet it seems to me to comprehend the several leading facts better than any other view.  On this hypothesis we may fancifully look at each animal and plant as being compounded of many beings, in the same manner as a tree or coral is compounded of many similar beings; but in neither case have these so-called beings had a separate existence.  Each of these beings, or parts, is supposed to be capable of throwing off gemmules, which whilst within the organism are capable of self-increase, and which can be separately developed at the part or organ whence they were derived, and can be united, as in the case of hybrids, with other gemmules into a single germ or bud, which reproduces the complete parent form.  On this view, each organic being may be looked at as a little universe, formed of a host of different self-propagating organisms, almost as numerous as the stars in heaven, and as minute as they are immense.

Darwin clearly understood the complexity of the cell in this paper:

As, however, a cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus, a gemmule, as Mr G H Lewes has remarked in his interesting discussion on this subject (Fortnightly Review, Nov. 1, 1868, p. 508), must, perhaps, be a compound one, so as to reproduce all the parts.

Two papers by Darwin published in 1882 demonstrate Darwin’s readiness to experiment in resolving sub-cellular processes, using chemistry and microscopy to aid in the work.

Darwin, C. R. 1882. The action of carbonate of ammonia on chlorophyll-bodies. [Read 6 March] Journal of the Linnean Society of London (Botany) 19: 262-284.

Darwin, C. R. 1882. The action of carbonate of ammonia on the roots of certain plants. [Read 16 March] Journal of the Linnean Society of London (Botany) 19: 239-261.

These papers in the primary literature demonstrate vividly that Charles Darwin not only was aware that protoplasm was not homogeneous, but was at the end of his life working toward elucidating exactly what differences within cells existed.  As Wesley concludes:

The antievolution “magic bullet” intended to dismiss Darwin is a dud.  Sub-cellular structure elucidation was another part of science in which Darwin was an active participant.  Darwin’s own preferred hypothesis of heredity, though now discredited, presumed the sort of immense complexity at small scales that antievolutionists falsely claim Darwin had no “imagination” for.  Many antievolutionists have willingly participated in passing along this falsehood and urging changes in public school curriculum policy based, in part, on their false and ignorant claims.  I find it significant that I have yet to encounter any instance of an antievolution advocate pointing out the actual facts of the case and remonstrating with their colleagues, even though the disconfirming evidence is easy to locate and describe.  I can only conclude that antievolutionists in general have no concern for the truth nor for fact-checking even the simplest of their claims.  Trusting antievolutionists to help guide policy and form curricula for public schools would be malfeasance, plain and simple…

Secondly, the charge that Darwin did not know anything about the inner workings of the cell is purely an academic point and I corrected Dembski mainly to preserve Darwin’s reputation and correct him on this bogus canard that he and his ilk keep trotting out.   There was a great deal that Darwin did not know about and/or where he was plain wrong.  Dembski is correct in pointing out that he had no idea about genetic mutations, DNA and molecular biology.  However, his theory has been revised, updated and indeed strengthened by the subsequent 150 years of scientific research, experimentation and peer-review by scientists who have had far greater knowledge and far more advanced technology at their disposal.

This is the science that has rid the world of smallpox and flown us to the moon.  Even if Dembski and Behe had their way and people accepted that there was an extraterrestrial intelligence behind the complexity we see in nature, even if the unthinkable happened and the designer actually revealed himself in the middle of an international event with the entire world watching and told us directly to be nice to each other, nothing whatsoever would change about the way we do science.  We could not even confront the designer and ask him to repair what he makes, like Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner.

We would still have to search for cures to cancer and AIDS as well as updating our vaccinations against constantly evolving viruses (funny how you never hear creationists and IDers shout about the wonderful design of these particular organisms!).  Creationism and Intelligent Design contribute nothing to the advancement of science and medicine.  If an IDer has ever won the Nobel Prize, they must have hidden it from the judges.  If the Discovery Institute is leading the way in the fight against deadly diseases, they are keeping it awfully quiet.  Instead, they are concerned with preserving ancient myths in the vain hope that adhering to such beliefs sometimes makes people behave better, as the opening paragraph of the DI’s “Wedge Strategy” document (download PDF) well attests:

The proposition that humans beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.  Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise and progress in arts and science.

One piece of scripture that has stuck with this manic street preaching heretic is something St Paul said: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  For now we see through a glass, darkly.”  (1 Corinthians 13: 12 – 13).

Time to put away childish things, guys.

Intelligent Design: White Noise

Non-scientist manicstreetpreacher presents his case against “Intelligent Design Theory” following William Dembski’s debate against Lewis Wolpert – Unbelievable?, Premier Christian Radio, 2 January 2009.

Lewis Wolpert (whose discussions with Russell Cowburn I reviewed here) sounded rather irate in last Saturday’s edition of Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? and frankly, who can blame him?  The South African born atheist embryologist and author of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast was in conversation with William Demski, American fundamentalist Christian who is also a leading proponent of “Intelligent Design” and author of The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.

I won’t give a blow my blow account of the debate itself, but there are a few points which Dembski needs to be hauled up on (no doubt for the umpteenth time which will not make the slightest difference, but it’s the principle that matters!).

Firstly, “complexity” and “improbability” appear to be Demski’s favourite words in the English language, which of course make him no different than all other creationists or people who argue from design.  Apparently, the complexity that we see in biology is just so incredibly complex, that there comes a point when the zeros after the decimal point become too many and we can infer that it was The Thing That Made The Things For Which There Is No Known Maker.

So what if it’s all enormously complex and improbable?  I have heard it said that the probability of the first self-replicating carbon based cell arising on Earth is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe.  Fine.  What the hell, let’s say that it’s TWICE the number of atoms in the known universe.   It’s no use ruling out natural events on the arbitrary notion of low probability.  You have to compare it with the probability of the alternative you contend is more likely.  What’s the probability that the laws of nature are violated? What’s the probability that an invisible and undetectable designer – natural or supernatural – created it?  I’ve never heard a creationist or “design theorist” answer these questions and Dembski disappointed me yet again.  Perhaps the improbability of design is even greater, and what data does Dembski have to make the calculation?  None I would say, because there is no evidence of a designer whatsoever.

This reasoning also fails on the basis that low probability events happen all the time.  If you crunch the numbers in relation to your own birth (i.e. the probability that a particular sperm united with a particular egg multiplied by the probability that your parents met and repeated the calculation back until the beginning of time), you will get a fantastically low probability.  Theistic evolutionary scientist Francisco Ayala reinforced the point during his recent debate against Christian apologist William Lane Craig on whether Intelligent Design was a viable alternative to evolution.  Ayala remarked that there’s no need to argue against Dembski and Co, because their very existence on this Earth is so mind-bendingly improbable that they were never born!

For the Bairnsfather view of Dembski’s thinking, I can do no better than the introduction to P Z Myers’ lecture at the AAI Conference 2009.  Dembski, Behe, Simmons etc.: “Here is biology.  It’s very complex.  Incredibly, unbelievably complex in fact.  Complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity…  DESIGN!!!!!!”

Brilliant!

Secondly, Dembski repeated the common straw man that scientists in Darwin’s day knew nothing about the inner workings of the cell, and thought that they were mere “blobs of protoplasm”.  Well, Dembski should take a look this drawing out, which was made by Darwin himself:

See, they show the inner workings of the cell and clearly show its complexity.  Scientists in Darwin’s time, in fact, had quite a good understanding of what cells were, and they were not simply “blobs of protoplasm”.  This is yet another creationist hoax which is easily debunked.

Shame on you, Billy!

Third and finally, some ID theorists out there may resent my description of Demski as a “fundamentalist Christian” or think that this has nothing to do with his “science”.  However, they may wish to know that Dembski teaches at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas.  Below are a series of extracts from assignments and exam papers that are set for students which came to my attention after a thread was posted on RichardDawkins.net.

Christian Faith and Science Take-Home Final Exam:

Make your best argument against theistic evolution.  In other words, if you were in a debate situation and had to argue against theistic evolution, how would you do it?

Lay out your own view of the relation between science and theology.  Are they in conflict or consonance?  Should they be compartmentalized?  Do they support each other?  Is it important to harmonize them?  Etc.

Have advances in the natural sciences over the last 40 years made it easier or harder to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist?  Explain.

Trace the connections between Darwinian evolution, eugenics, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.  Why are materialists so ready to embrace these as a package deal?  What view of humanity and reality is required to resist them?

You are the Templeton Foundation’s new program director and are charged with overseeing its programs and directing its funds.  Sketch out a 20-year plan for defeating scientific materialism and the evolutionary worldview it has fostered if you had $50,000,000 per year in current value to do so.  What sorts of programs would you institute?  How would you spend the money?

Christian Apologetics Take-Home Final Exam:

You just learned that your nephew or niece is going off to study theology at a liberal seminary.  You suspect the place is teeming with “Homer Wilsons,” i.e., professors intent on eroding any real faith of the seminary students.  Write a letter to your nephew or niece outlining the pitfalls that they are likely to face and how they should protect their faith from eroding.

According to Richard Dawkins, faith is believing in the absence of evident [sic].  By contrast, Nancy Pearcey argues that the attempt to remove Christian faith from the realm of knowledge and evidence has led to Christianity’s cultural captivity.  Make the case that Christian faith is a matter not of subjective opinion but of objective knowledge.

No amputees are recorded as having been healed in the New Testament (i.e., no one with a missing limb is said to have grown back the limb in response to a prayer by Jesus or one of the Apostles).  Indeed, throughout Church history it appears that no such miracle has occurred (if you know of a wellconfirmed [sic] case, please cite it).  Atheists therefore argue that if miracles really happened and gave evidence of God, God would have performed a healing like growing back the limb of an amputee.  Do atheists have a point here?  How do you maintain that miracles are real in the face of such criticism?

For more academic travesties on a par with Liberty University’s natural history museum labelling dinosaur fossils as being 3,000 years old, including online debate forum postings comprising a substantial proportion of students’ final grades (!), click here:

AP410 This is the undegrad [sic] course.  You have three things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 40% of your grade); (2) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 40% of your grade); (3) provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).

AP510 This is the masters course.  You have four things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 30% of your grade); (2) write a 1,500 to 2,000-word critical review of Francis Collins’s The Language of God – for instructions, see below (20% of your grade); (3) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 30% of your grade); (4) provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 3,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).

Aside from this, Wolpert correctly pointed out that Dembski’s reasoning is a mere language game.  Even if the designer was eventually discovered and observed, this would not change the way Dembski carries out his science one iota.  The man hasn’t proved anything and never will.  Even if Darwin’s theory is completely wrong, even if the evolution of Homo sapiens we observe today is more improbable than the number of atoms in a billion universes that is still not evidence for either design or a designer.

The Intelligent Design movement is nothing more than racket and a Wedge Strategy (download PDF) to bring creationism into school science classrooms by the back door.  As a wise man has observed of late, it may be designed but there’s nothing intelligent about it.

Listen to the debate in full if you must.

Lewis Wolpert and Russell Cowburn debate “Can science tell us anything about God?”

manicstreetpreacher analyses a debate between two scientists at opposite ends of the spectrum of religious belief.

I have listened to the 19 December 2009 edition of Premier Christian Radio’s sceptical debate programme Unbelievable? featuring atheistic embryologist Lewis Wolpert of University College London, author of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief and theistic physicist Russell Cowburn of Imperial College London on their recent debate “Can science tell us anything about God” held at Gunnersbury Baptist Church on 8 November 2009, as well as the audio of the full debate from the Gunnersbury website.

UPDATE 08/01/2009

I have found a video of the full debate:

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: 26/12/2009

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.

William Lane Craig Provides the “Scholarly” Basis for Holy Horror

manicstreetpreacher finally has his answer as to what one of America’s top Christian apologists has to say about the butchery of the Old Testament.

Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the gods?

– Plato

Earlier this year, I reported on the Craig/Hitchens debate at Biola University.  I had been wondering about Craig’s views on evolution for a while, but during the debate he finally revealed that he did not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.   According to Craig’s “science” based on John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, evolution was so “improbable” (surely Craig’s favourite word in the English language) that the sun would have burned out long before Homo sapiens could have evolved.

Craig has stiffened his position in the last couple of years.  During his 2007 debate in London against embryologist Lewis Wolpert, author of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Craig stated  that he “neither believed nor disbelieved” in evolution, but had reservations over it on the grounds of improbability.

In the Hitchens debate, however, Craig rubbished evolution completely.  I suppose it was the only way he could overthrow Hitchens’ “98,000 Year Wait Gambit” that in order to believe Christianity in the light of what we now know about the origins of the human race, you have to believe that Homo sapiens crawled painfully on their hands and knees for tens of thousands of years with low life expectancy and massive infant mortality with God watching with folded arms before finally intervening with a human sacrifice in a very remote part of the Middle East, the news of which still hasn’t permeated large parts of the civilised world.

As I wrote at the time, even to me as a non-scientist this was “a load of anthropic bunkum”.  Richard Dawkins convincingly argues that the Anthropic Principle is similar to evolution: it is an alternative to the design explanation.  We on Earth just happen to be lucky that our planet possesses the right “Goldilocks qualities” of being “just right” for life to emerge.  After all, physical parameters ought to be irrelevant to an omnipotent God; he could have designed us to survive in a cold, hard vacuum if he wanted.

In addition, Craig appears totally ignorant of the fact that evolution is about small steps producing gradual, but ultimately massive change over very long periods of time.  Improbable, my foot!  Far from Craig “following the evidence wherever it leads” as he is so proud of saying, he is massaging the scientific evidence to ensure that his fantasy of the universe being designed with him in mind can remain in tact.

My other great Craig-curio was what he thought of the atrocities of the Old Testament.  Craig teaches at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University where I understand that the students are taught that the Bible is free from error in all its words.  I’ve always wondered what Craig made of the God-ordered massacres of the Old Testament, however, in the debates I have seen up until now; he has always cordoned off that topic.

I was mildly disappointed that Hitchens did not tear Craig in half like he usually does at the lectern.  Craig smugly declared himself the victor of that clash.  However, as good as it would have been to see Hitchens wipe the floor with his opponent he showed Craig as a right-wing fundamentalist.  It was almost like watching Ted Haggard or Pat Robertson adopt the guise of a “serious scholar” as Craig harped on about the Gospels’ promise of eternal life as embodied in the resurrection of Jesus.

Continuing this gradual breaking down of Craig’s shell, I recently came across this audio clip of Craig on YouTube replying to The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation author Sam Harris (homepage / The Reason Project) and his objections to the barbarism of the Old Testament:

You will note that Craig says that rather than being an argument against the existence of God, the violence in the Old Testament that was apparently mandated by God is a question of whether the Bible is inerrant.  It is open to debate as to whether the Israelites correctly interpreted the word of God in slaughtering all those poor Canaanites.

However, Craig well and truly lets his veil slip by stating that the Israelites were carrying out the will of God in dispensing with his enemies after emerging from 400 years in Egyptian captivity!  Craig admitted that their acts would have been immoral but for the fact that they were ordered by God.  The acts of murder and genocide became moral because God had ordered them.

Craig even admits that God has the right to end the lives of everyone on Earth this second if he so chooses.  Talk about self-imposed slavery!

I couldn’t believe my ears and wanted further proof that this really was Craig’s view.  After all, this is a man who argues that objective moral values such as the wrongness of rape and torturing a child can only come from God and therefore the existence of objective morality is an argument for the existence of God.  As Craig puts it:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist;
2. Objective moral values do exist;
3. Therefore, God exists.

Seeking further evidence, I came across this article on Craig’s ironically titled website, Reasonable Faith, written in response to a couple of email questions on the violence of the Old Testament and discovered that it just keeps on getting worse.

For your shock, if not your consideration:

[T]he problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives.  The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them.  Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder?  No, it’s not.  Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder.  The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.

God can do anything.  Even make genocide morally right:

On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command. [My emphasis]

This segment clearly demonstrates that Craig knows that murder, rape and torture are wrong independently of any divine command.  But he says that they can be morally right if ordered by God as per Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma quoted at the head of this article.

Do you see what Craig has done there?  He has totally undermined his own argument that without God there can be no objective morality!

Craig goes on to explain that the destruction of unclean races by a super-race favoured by God is a virtuous thing (three guesses who tried to put that one into practice in the last century?):

By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable.  It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity.  God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel.  The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.

The murder of children is all fine and dandy as long as we think that God wants it.  It was for their own good and they’ve actually gone to a better place:

Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.  We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy.  Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

But please spare a thought for those poor child murderers:

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites?  Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement.  Not the children, for they inherit eternal life.  So who is wronged?  Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves.  Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children?  The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

Someone please pass me a bucket.  I’m about to blow chunks over all this moral relativism:

But then, again, we’re thinking of this from a Christianized, Western standpoint.  For people in the ancient world, life was already brutal.  Violence and war were a fact of life for people living in the ancient Near East.  Evidence of this fact is that the people who told these stories apparently thought nothing of what the Israeli soldiers were commanded to do (especially if these are founding legends of the nation).  No one was wringing his hands over the soldiers’ having to kill the Canaanites; those who did so were national heroes.

It always brings a smile to my lips when apologists claim that God can be the only source of objective morality, yet when a sceptic pulls out a nasty passage from the Good Book, they go all relativist on you and say things like, “Well ok, but things were a lot different back then.  Genocide, rape and slavery were the norm…”

No, genocide, rape and slavery were not morally right, even for people living 3,000 years ago.  Perhaps books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy were the Universal Declaration on Human Rights of their day when simply compiling a short list of reasons to kill your enemies was an improvement over the general barbarity of the time.  But values such as self-sacrifice, charity and love were still admired while murder and rape were reviled.

If we are unable to say that it was morally wrong of Moses to issue an order to his troops, as Thomas Paine put it in The Age of Reason, “to butcher the boys, massacre the mothers and debauch the daughters,” (Numbers 31: 13 – 18) then conversely, we cannot say that him leading the Children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt was morally right either!

Craig’s response continues by contending that Osama bin Laden has it soooooo wrong:

Now how does all this relate to Islamic jihad?  Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith.  Islam divides the world into two camps:  the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War).  The former are those lands which have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations which have not yet been brought into submission.  This is how Islam actually views the world!

No, Dr Craig, those nineteen pious men who showed your pious nation the social benefits of this level of blind faith on 11 September 2001 were not trying to convert anybody that day.  They were exacting what they saw as retribution from their god for America’s decadence and moral depravity.  Rather like the Israelites exterminating the Canaanites in fact.  If you are in any doubt as to this, perhaps you should take a look at this clip from two men whom you worryingly resemble:

Craig’s final conjecture can only be settled once and for all by force of arms:

By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgement upon those peoples.  The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism!  War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith.  Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior.

The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God.  If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him.  But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature.  Christians believe that God is all-loving, while Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims.  Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners.  Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately.  Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature.  He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind.  By contrast Christians hold that God’s holy and loving nature determines what He commands.

The question, then, is not whose moral theory is correct, but which is the true God?

Why don’t you and the Muslims settle it once and for all by stepping outside, Dr Craig?  This has clearly been the approach of certain Jewish rabbis in the upper quarters of the Israeli Defence Forces which continue to this day, not least during Israel’s military strikes against the Palestinians at the start of 2009.  As Hitchens reported in March this year:

I remember being in Israel in 1986 when the chief army “chaplain” in the occupied territories, Rabbi Shmuel Derlich, issued his troops a 1,000-word pastoral letter enjoining them to apply the biblical commandment to exterminate the Amalekites as “the enemies of Israel.”  Nobody has recently encountered any Amalekites, so the chief educational officer of the Israeli Defense Forces asked Rabbi Derlich whether he would care to define his terms and say whom he meant. Rather evasively – if rather alarmingly – the man of God replied, “Germans.”  There are no Germans in Judaea and Samaria or, indeed, in the Old Testament, so the rabbi’s exhortation to slay all Germans as well as quite probably all Palestinians was referred to the Judge Advocate General’s Office. Forty military rabbis publicly came to Derlich’s support, and the rather spineless conclusion of the JAG was that he had committed no legal offense but should perhaps refrain in the future from making political statements on the army’s behalf…

Now, it’s common to hear people say [that violent passages in the Bible are] not intended to be “taken literally.”  One also often hears the excuse that some wicked things are done “in the name of” religion, as if the wicked things were somehow the result of a misinterpretation.  But the nationalist rabbis who prepare Israeli soldiers for their mission seem to think that this book might be the word of God, in which case the only misinterpretation would be the failure to take it literally.  (I hate to break it to you, but the people who think that God’s will is revealed in scripture are known as “religious.”  Those who do not think so must try to find another name for themselves.)

Possibly you remember Dr Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron.  He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath.  Now read Ethan Bronner’s report in the March 22 New York Times about the preachments of the Israeli army’s latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also holds the rank of brigadier general.  He has “said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath … is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.”  Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist.  Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest…  The latest news, according to Bronner, is that the Israeli Defense Ministry has felt compelled to reprimand Rontzski for “a rabbinal edict against showing the enemy mercy” that was distributed in booklet form to men and women in uniform (see Numbers 31: 13 – 18).

At least Craig is correct when he says at one point in the article that many Old Testament scholars are sceptical that the conquest of Canaan was an actual historical event, but that’s hardly the point.  The Bible is supposed to be a document containing timeless social and moral codes while portraying the actions of people we ought to admire.  In this exercise, it fails miserably.  As he and Hitchens discussed in their Biola debate, Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov wonders whether “without God, all things are possible.”  But as Hitchens argued, surely the corollary is true: that with God, all things are thinkable as well.

If one of the world’s foremost Christian apologists can issue such a grotesque defence of Yahweh that contradicts all of his own arguments for the divine source of human morality at a stroke, then it is unsurprising that PhD graduates in the 21^st century will fly aeroplanes into buildings believing that they are morally right to do so and will be rewarded by God in the afterlife.

I don’t say that all religious people are mad, bad or sad per se, but they very often can be when it comes to their religious beliefs.  As the Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg famously once said, “With or without religion, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

William Lane Craig is living proof of this.

UPDATE 06/04/2010:

Since publishing this piece, I have come across a podcast on this topic as part of the “Reasonable Faith: Conversations with Dr William Lane Craig” series that Craig’s website produces  if you can bear it.  Lukeprog over at Common Sense Atheism has posted an excellent discussion.

I have also found this comment by Richard Dawkins posted on the debate forum of his website:

Theological justification for genocide Part One

Richard Dawkins >> Mon Apr 21, 2008 8:22 am

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5767

One of our commenters on another thread, stevencarrwork, posted a link to this article by the American theologian and Christian apologist William Lane Craig.  I read it and found it so dumbfoundingly, staggeringly awful that I wanted to post it again.  It is a stunning example of the theological mind at work.  And remember, this is NOT an ‘extremist’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘picking on the worst case’ example.  My understanding is that William Lane Craig is a widely respected apologist for the Christian religion.  Read his article and rub your eyes to make sure you are not having a bad dream.

Richard

That just about says it all.

(H/T: Steven Carr)