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Dave’s Mailbag: Who is a true follower of Jesus Christ?
tl;dr: Below is a 1,500-word No True Scotsman fallacy I received. I replied with nothing but a simple link to a YouTube video explaining what the No True Scotsman fallacy is.
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Received this today; below is my response.
i dont wish to write alot. but i have watched some of your videos. i just wanted you to know that i heard you were a worship leader for yeras before walking away. First of all i wish to note, that i dont know what this means. Were you a protestant Holy Spirit filled Christian who had HOly Spirit and sat under a church that preached against sin? Or were you a part of a church that believed we are all Gods children and that God doesnt wish for sin to be preached against? I just wanted to note that it depends on where your start was because anyone can call themselves a minister. Even atheists can call themselves a minister because the christian term for minister has been taken out of context so much that even atheists, gay advocates all call selves minister.-Question is who is a true follower of Jesus Christ, following way disciples did in book of Acts where they were led by Spirit, preaching at all times. I dont know where your beginning came as a minister, but if your christian upbringing was in Universal Church, here lies beginning of issues. Number 1, people have to be under solid teaching, people tend to fall away because narrow road get very hard, they dont like to hear truth about what in bible about homosexuality being a sin so then people fall away because of that or well they choose to walk away because things get very difficult in there life, or they have really dont know real character of Lord, a God who is Love and Just, a God who loves all mankind, hates sin but loves sinner. This does not exclude Gods nature though that He is Just. God never made hell for people, he made it for the demons, but because man chose to rebel and themselves make satan there god, well they send them selves into hell now. Gods purpose for hell was never meant for humans and he does not take delight in humans going to hell. He weeps for souls that choose to go to hell. For God wishes no man to perish. He wishes no man to perish. But if they choose to make satan there god, they are choosing for themselves to go to hell because there is a choice, choose whom this day we must follow Jesus or satan. Either one or other.-Now if you truely know you received Holy Spirit in your life and didnt grow up in under a church where they taught you things that contradict bible and you were truely told how to come to Christ and what true christian life consists of, such as perseuction, open air preaching, etc etc etc, and you fell away cuz the walk got very hard, then i would say dear one come back. Go forth confess all known sins (james 5:16). then go forth and preach gospel openly NONSTOP. be willing to be arrested for sake of Christ and let your whole being and energy be given into preaching message of salvation to the lost.-Now if your scenario is that you were raised under a church that preached surface stuff and never told you truth and alot of time people just are raised under religiousness and never told how to be saved, then you only can go to God and make sure you were truely saved, that you understand you are a sinner, that there is a parallel, in order for truth to be truth it can only be one thing, it can not be a thousand thing or else it ceases to exist as truth. Cuz truth is not a thousand things. Christianity is parallel, ther is a God and satan, heaven and hell, good and evil. its orderly cuz God is order.-that is why true christians i guess in many nonbeleiver eyes is that we are “narrow minded” well, if we beleived in a thousand beliefs then it would cease to exist as truth and have order, you cant be open minded and it still be truth cuz open mindedness allow a thousand thing to be considered as truth and a person then is not stable or orderly in there belief system they are ike house on a rock that has no foundation. our foundation is not knowledge itself. it is HOly Spirit who is real God inside of us when we chose to surrender our heart to Jesus Christ, beleiving that He is only way truth and life. He became ultimate Lamb on cross. Jesus is God for only God can save man, not just any “man” could die for sins of world. He rose on third day defeating sin on cross.-When aperson comes to Jesus Christ and they truely recognize there sin, the evil deep evil deeeds of there heart they have done, the deepest depravity of there heart, i mean the kind of guilt in your heart that you let no one see but if exposed youd go running behind a curtain, you cannot wash away that guilt, the deepest deeds of the heart, the deepest addiction a person cannot be delivered of those deep embed demons on the heart, in the heart, and growth in the heart. Only one who has power to save a person from this is Christ. He is one whose blood has power to save. So if you once truely received HIm then He still is in your heart. If you have not received HIm then it is pretty hard for a person to know what it like to have Holy Spirit when you are tryin from the outside to always figure out GOd when He wants you to come as you are, in al your sin and dirtyness and see all evil deeds of the heart and how you cant redee your heart and you cant wash away the guilt or shame, and He can do it for you and come in your heart and then you go forth and live out truth faith by Preaching his name openly all the time, confessing sins and nonstop to preach his name. our warfare is against demons.-So if you are a true christian who fell away you can return to Lord. if you never truely received him then it is hard for you to know God cuz you stand outside of HIm instead of humbling self like a child, surrender head knowledege, and come as you are in all depravityand receiving what He did for you on cross and receivng HIs love into yoru heart and go forth and living out Christian walk. And many that fall away is not cuz God has left them it is cuz tey have chosen to leave God which bible said many would fall away cuz they are ashamed of HIm. God weeps cuz He cares but God will still always be Lord no matter what man does or thinks of HIm. What right do we have to raise our fist to a God who didnt deserve to die on a cross for our sins, we deserve to die for sins WE COMMIT. God never forces us to sin. we are ones that choose it. yet in his Love hE said i will go down and save them, wow what a Savior to wanna do that so we could have him in our heart. we can have a new victorious life in Christ if we receive what He has done and then actually live it out. reason why a person isnt victorious is cuz a person has to live it out also, confess sins all known sins, and then be filled with HOly Spirit, and go forth in power to preach repentance and salvation to others ALL THE TIME.-Anyways, i dont wish to do alot of email bak and forth. i only wish to do one. Im not here to fight against al bible knowledge you have stored up i just only wish to share a little bit because i cared. Reason why sometime peopel dont always get into debate with those who are filled with all bible knowledge trying to persecute Christ is because you have already made up in you mind. You have knowledge set before you how to receive HIm, and what do to to live out a victorious life, now you just have to live out vicoriously. if you have in your heart then begin to turn back to HIm and preach openly HIs wonderful name and repetanc and dont stop. Wish you best Sir
by the way i do want you to know that some of us do truely care. we really do. i would hae never written to you cuz it hought maybe he is just a christian who cried out ot GOd and was really try to find his way back to Lord. it could be thator only you know if you were truely received him. but if you did receive him and fell away it cuz your battle is demon inside of you and on heart and you have to go forth and produce fruit with repentance and preach salvation openly all the time. Why not try preaching salvation openly and be serious about it and trying to read bible openly in seriusness With care if you wish to be a true christian.
Dave Muscato is the Public Relations Director for American Atheists based in Cranford, New Jersey. An atheism activist, blogger, and public speaker, he is also a board member of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday; twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard, and monthly or more on SkepticFreethought.com. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com
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Dave’s Mailbag: BB wants to save my soul
This is from a comment thread on a YouTube video of mine. This fellow, BB, posted 14 comments back-to-back due to character limits. I told him I’d respond in a blog post rather than leave a huge string of comments in return. Here are his posts reconstructed into one block, and my response:
BB:
have you accepted God into your life and turned away from sins and shared the gospel with everyone you care about and know?
Dave:
Um, I’m the Public Relations Director for American Atheists.
BB:
Well, you probably make a living selling books on the philosophy of Atheism. Which is a motivation for thinking you might be intellectually dishonest as your living relies on selling this philosophy, which makes it hard to ever convince you otherwise.
If not then we can have an honest and open discussion based on just logic without any agenda behind it from both our parts.
Dave:
No, I don’t sell books for a living. I’m not a bookstore. I do public relations.
BB:
You seem like a cool intelligent guy. I can convince you that no religion, no church can ever cleanse you of sin, only sincere repentance, and trusting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.
If it’s true we just go in to the ground when we die then you can’t say ‘See, I told you I was right’ and I can’t tell you ‘I’m sorry I was totally wrong’. But if it’s true there is a heaven and you can go there, wouldn’t it be logical to find out how to get there?
Dave:
There’s no such thing as sin. It’s an imaginary concept. Sin (i.e. “transgression against divine law”) doesn’t really exist, because “divine law” is imaginary.
Yes, IF it were true that there is a heaven and you can go there, it would be logical to look into it. But there isn’t, and you can’t. If you want to claim otherwise, you have the burden of proof. Good luck.
BB:
ok well the burden of proof is actually on you as you claim to have proof that God doesn’t exist. If you’re not saying that you have proof then I respect your intellectual consistency and honesty. This is because the best we can do is follow the evidence, because nothing can be proved.
You can’t prove that you walked the earth yesterday. We have to go by evidence such as eye witness testimony.
So we’ve recognized that proving anything is impossible. So the next step is to trust Evidence. We can only trust Evidence if it is shown to be reliable.
So the only thing stopping you from investigating heaven and grabbing the only ticket that will get you there is because you are unsure if there is such a thing as sin.
Well I can tell you that there is such a thing as sin.
There is such a thing as sin because sin is defined outside of culture. Everyone refers to a moral code outside culture because if we lived in a culture where gassing jews or slavery was ok, it still wouldn’t make it right.
That’s why Ghandi and Martin Luther king and others like them existed. They went against their culture because they put objective moral law on top of cultural laws.
No one can live atheism out in real life consistently. For example if you found your wife in the arms of another man you wouldn’t say hey it’s your right to believe unfaithfulness is wrong so I’m not gonna judge you for it.
Loyalty is right not because anyone defines it, it’s right because that’s what we know in our hearts to be true.
God says he has written these moral codes in our hearts. These objective moral laws are intelligently and lovingly created by an intelligent and loving being.
God respects our free will to choose to do right or to do wrong, that’s why people choose to be unfaithful and others choose to be faithful.
So if there is no God then morality is subjective, it’s all relative so Hitler was right in his opinion and I am right in my opinion. Then chaos erupts.
No God, no harmony, no justice. Just chaos and destruction.
Which speaks allot to the condition and the reason for the condition of some parts of the world today.
So once we’ve deduced rationally that there is a God who gives us objective moral values and we can choose or not choose to follow these, then we can go on to find out what happens if we choose to follow these or not.
If we don’t then God grants us our desire. Eternity away from him. If we do then God grants us our desire. Eternity with him.
I’d say I wouldn’t want to find out what eternity is like without him, why? because Satan is without God by his own choosing and he rules hell. Would you want to meet Satan and find out what kind of gastly things he would do to you?
I’d prefer heaven where everything is awesome.
Also I want to take as many people with me to heaven cuz I love my fellow human being. 100 years is nothing vs eternity.
If someone gave me a billion dollars to be without God I’d rather be a homeless person with God because this life is so short anyways.
Okay, so we’ve defined how God exists, what’s good and evil, free will and what sin is.
Now we have to find out what God wants from us. 1. Put your trust in him to guide your life. 2. To show loyalty, love and trust, then turn from sin, otherwise you become a hypocrite.
No sin is worth going to hell over. Remember Jesus spoke more about hell then he did about heaven. He described it as a lake of fire. I would assume that it’s a place of total destruction and chaos. Maybe the equivalent of a dentist poking your nerve for eternity.
Not paradise. lol
In the end, not sinning and praying sincerely from forgiveness isn’t hard.
I don’t think if someone offered you 100 women to pleasure you sexually outside the blessing of God, but you had to site in a dentists chair and take him touching your nerve for 8 hours, you would absolutely deny it. Why? Because it ain’t worth it.
That’s just 8 hours. lol imagine forever. So in perspective it’s good news.God offers you a free ticket to heaven, just take it man and share it with as many people as possible, especially those you wanna see in heaven with you such as your loved ones.
Dude, I’m pleading with you just do it. Any reputation or wealth in this life is not worth it. Now why would I sit here and write a 13 comment reply to you, not asking for money, not to join a religion or to even go to a church, spending my own time?
I don’t believe in silly things. Please for the love of God, do it.
Thanks for listening. Any other questions you might wanna ask?
Dave:
You’ve got to be kidding me. First of all, just, wow, 14 comments back to back. I’m strongly considering banning you, except that skimming them, it appears you are sincere. I’m going to respond to this, but not here; I have a blog and I’m going to do it there. The blog is at muSASHA . o r g. I can’t do it tonight but I’ll get to it when I can.
And here’s my full response:
If you are making the positive claim that a god exists, you have the burden of proof. Same goes for sin.
I agree with you about your stance on evidence and our inability to prove things with 100% certainty. It’s called the problem of induction and I’m totally with you there.
I’m not “unsure” about the existence of sin. I mean, in a very technical sense, I’m agnostic about it, but for all practical purposes, I don’t believe sin exists, because I don’t believe in divine law, because I don’t believe in anything supernatural. If you want to convince me sin exists, you first have to show me that divine law exists. In order to do that, you have to convince me that a divine lawgiver exists. So really, being “unsure” about sin is NOT the “only thing” holding me back. I don’ t believe in your god, either.
You speak of objective morality. Objective from what? You mean, outside of culture? It seems like that’s what you’re saying. If all life in the universe were to be wiped out at the same instant, would slavery still be unethical? I don’t know if we can really answer that. It wouldn’t matter at that point. Ethics, the subfield of philosophy that prescriptively tells us how we ought to act, is a human invention—and we are the only species that has them, that we’re aware of—but morals (a subfield of ethology, that descriptively tells us how animals interact) evolve in cooperative species all by themselves. There’s a lot of game theory involved but this is not a mystery to science. If you’re interested in how morality evolved, I recommend Matt Ridley’s wonderful book, “The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation.” Other good books are Robert Axelrod’s “The Evolution of Cooperation” and Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis’ “A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution.“ The last two are pretty math-heavy but they do an excellent job of explaining how this works, and Richard Dawkins wrote the forward of the former.
Slavery is wrong because we decided that people have rights and shouldn’t be owned by other people. That’s not objectively provable, and it wasn’t always the case. Our society has progressed ethically from the time when slavery was the norm (although by raw numbers, not per capita, there are more slaves in the world today than at any point in history). I disagree with your conclusion that sin exists and we can know this because everyone “refers” to a moral code outside of culture. I don’t, for one. Moral codes are inextricable from culture from an ethology perspective.
On to your next point: You say “no one can live out atheism consistently” because, for example, if I found my wife in bed with someone else, I wouldn’t be okay with it. What?…
First of all, that’s a non sequitur. Atheism is the simply the lack of belief in the existence of all gods. This has absolutely nothing to do with sexual ethics?… You seem to be missing about a dozen premises between your first premise and your conclusion there. Second of all, you don’t know me. I would be fine with that; I’m polyamorous. I would hope that she’s being safe about it, but I wouldn’t begrudge someone for having consensual sex. My wife is not my property and as an adult, she can make her own decisions about who she has sex with. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s none of my business, but I would not be mad or jealous. Please note: I’m speaking hypothetically because I’ve never been married, although I was engaged for awhile once.
Then you go on to say that loyalty is right not by definition but because “we know in our hearts” that it is. Yeah, that’s the evolved morality thing we were talking about earlier. See 3 paragraphs up. By the way, loyalty is not always right; it depends on your system of ethics. Hitler’s troops were following orders when they gassed Jews. I think we’d both agree that what they were doing wasn’t ethical, even though they were being loyal when they did it.
Next you claim that God has written these moral codes in our hearts. A couple of major problems here: You jumped right into “God has…” without first showing that a god exists in the first place. What is your argument for god’s existence? Secondly, what do you mean he has “written in our hearts” blah blah blah? I assume you don’t mean that literally; a heart is a muscle and I’m pretty certain there’s no classical Hebrew etched in there, although I haven’t physically checked because that could prove rather tricky 
If you mean that God has imprinted a gut feeling of these moral codes, then we can work with this. First of all, I try not to think with my gut; I try to think with my brain. The reason I try not to think with my gut is that my gut and your gut can disagree and there’s really no good way to resolve that as far as knowing who’s right and who’s wrong. Only with evidence and logic can we systematically rule out wrong answers and settle on right ones. Second, again, we have this problem that you haven’t shown your god exists at all, let alone that he has done any such thing as imprint moral codes into us. Citation needed!
You wrote:
These objective moral laws are intelligently and lovingly created by an intelligent and loving being.
Bare assertion. Citation needed.
You wrote:
God respects our free will…
I’m not even remotely convinced that humans have free will. Free from what, anyway? The laws of physics? First define “free will,” then convince me that we have it, and we can go down this road. And you still haven’t explained how you know a god exists at all, nor how you claim to know that he respects our free will, even if we have it.
Next you go off on a spiel basically saying that if there were no god, then there would be ”no harmony, no justice. Just chaos and destruction.”
Well, that pretty much seems to be the case. The universe doesn’t know or care that we exist. Nature just does what it does, following simple patterns, or as we call them, laws. Complexity can come out of this, e.g. life on Earth as we recognize it. We have perfectly adequate, natural explanations for all of this. What makes you think there IS justice? Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes good things happen to bad people. Lots of people in the world are dying of starvation and elsewhere in the world, someone is tying $4,000 to some helium-filled balloons and letting it float away just because he can afford it and he’s bored. Look around, man. There’s no justice. The world is what we make of it.
Reading through the rest of your post, I don’t even really see the point of continuing from here. Your argument is a mess and since your later premises depend on your earlier ones, I think you need to go back and revisit them before we can move forward.
Feel free to try again! Thanks for your message(s).
Until next time,
Dave
Dave Muscato is the Public Relations Director for American Atheists based in Cranford, New Jersey. An atheism activist, blogger, and public speaker, he is also a board member of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday; twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard, and monthly or more on SkepticFreethought.com. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com
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Dave’s Mailbag: Accommodation vs. Confrontation; Avoiding activism burnout; The internet as a source
Hello all! Dave Muscato here. It’s time again for one of my favorite types of posts: Reader mail!
I received the following about my previous post about the Vatican and youth culture. Hang on tight, folks; this is gonna be a long one!
Dylan C. writes:
Hey Dave, hope you had a pleasant day at the courthouse. [NB: I had jury duty the other day]
I’m curious about something. It seems to me from a great number of your recent postings that you have grown increasingly paranoid and irrational in your analysis of information and subsequent conclusions. I assume that as a self-identified activist, you have taken the time to search out and discover things that are important to keep in mind as an activist. In other words, what are some of the key principles that an activist ought to follow in order not to allow their identity as an activist to become all-consuming and deterministic? I ask this because I am concerned for you, for your health, for your sanity, and for your reputation.
“It becomes very difficult for a pastor to get away with lying for Jesus, when anyone—especially young people—can whip out a smartphone and find real answers on Wikipedia faster than you can say the Lord’s Prayer.”
I’ve noticed that you enjoy coming up with and using catchy one-liners such as this to add humor and emotionally-charged content to your posts. But I’m going to have to challenge you on this practice. You of all people should know the significant dangers and limitations inherent to the use of Wikipedia and Google for discovering the “truth”. And young people especially tend to be completely ignorant of how to avoid these dangerous pitfalls. Anyone can post information on the internet, and for just a little bit of financial investment, they can also utilize search engine optimization to make their information more highly visible. A lot of this information is of course from activist groups, some much more biased than others, but all significantly biased nonetheless. The fact that we have labeled this the “Information Age” is a horrible joke to me at best. In fact, from the internet, equally as much as from the “pulpit”, young people are told what to believe. This is REALITY, and I dare you to disagree with me.
Here’s my response:
Hey Dylan! I really appreciate your feedback. It is true that I have shifted more toward a “confrontationist” approach to religion, as opposed to an “accommodationist” approach. There is actually a division within the secular movement about this: There was a debate/panel discussing the topic at the Skepticon 3 conference that’s worth watching if you’re interested.
Many atheists believe, although we disagree about the existence of gods, that churches have a lot to offer and the best course of action is to work together on “interfaith” activities to make the world a better place. Confrontationists, on the other hand, see religion as dangerous, and see religious moderates as enablers for fundamentalists. The accommodationists dislike that confrontationists add to the stereotype of “angry atheists,” and the confrontationists dislike that the accommodationists give irrationality a free pass.
I’m reminded of the conflict between hellfire & brimstone preachers versus welcoming congregations. The hellfire & brimstone preachers dislike that the welcoming congregations permit gay people, etc, while the welcoming congregations see the hellfire preachers as turning people away from religion and not teaching the “loving” aspects of Christianity.
The infamous “hellfire” campus preacher (and friend of mine), Brother Jed Smock
I feel I must stress that my natural inclination is to be an accommodationist. It feels right to me, and it’s difficult for me to criticize religion as a whole, when I have personally enjoyed so many positive experiences as a formerly religious person, and considering I have many friends whom I love and who are religious.
However, the more I research religion, the more I come to realize that religion is the root of virtually all of the things I consider wrong. The Biblical theme that some God “gave” humankind dominion over the the whole of the Earth and all the animals on it, along with the idea that this God is “in control” of the environment and would not allow us to perish before Jesus returns, is directly at odds with the urgency of the global environmental crisis, and with vegetarianism/veganism. The Biblical theme that woman are subservient to men is directly at odds with feminism. The Biblical theme that souls exist and life begins at conception is directly at odds with reproductive rights, abortion access, and stem cell research. The Biblical theme that there is an afterlife is directly at odds with the secular humanist priority of making this life count for everything it’s worth because you only live once. The Biblical creation mythology is directly at odds with the science education and the teaching the scientific fact of evolution by means of natural selection. The Biblical theme that a man should not lie with another man is directly at odds with LGBTQ rights. Etc, etc.
In fact I am hard-pressed to come up with a cause I care about that DOESN’T have its root conflict in religion. I care about a lot of things and wish I could be an activist for them all, but I understand the prudence in picking one’s battles. Fortunately, it’s not a hard choice: By choosing to focus on atheism activism, I am in effect also fighting for LGBTQ rights, women’s right to choose, birth control access, stem-cell research, science education, vegetarianism, secular humanism, and critical thinking.
I’m curious as to what you mean by “increasingly paranoid and irrational in your analysis of information and subsequent conclusions.” Correct me if this isn’t what you meant, but I assume in effect you mean my increasing willingness to blame religion for social ills. As I stated, it is true that it’s becoming easier for me to criticize religion as a whole. I assert that this is because I am learning more about the pervasiveness of religion in society as the source of many twisted beliefs. These beliefs cause people to do many terrible things out of ignorance and just plain indoctrination.
I am intolerant of bigotry and make no apology for this. If that makes me a confrontationist, so be it. Because I have a conscience, I cannot stand by idly when I see violence, whether physical or structural. I cannot stand by idly when I see irrationality guiding moral decision-making and public policy. These things are just too important.
You ask:
…What are some of the key principles that an activist ought to follow in order not to allow their identity as an activist to become all-consuming and deterministic?
This is an important question and I’m glad you asked. This applies to activists of all stripes, not just within the secular movement. Here are what I consider key principles to avoiding burnout:
- Make a conscious effort to separate your work and your life. For most professional activists I know, their activism began as a volunteer passion. Sometimes, it is difficult for them to turn that “off” when they go home at night. If you are accustomed to spending your free time doing activism, and you then find yourself doing it professionally, you have to make the decision to spend your free time NOT doing activism. This means having hobbies, and making time for them. For me, this is photography, playing music, and taking road-trips. I always make sure to practice my guitar or bass at least a half-hour a day, to keep up my chops but also to take a break from the computer.
- - Have some friends who are not part of your cause. I make a conscious effort to make sure my relationships with my religious friends stay strong. It’s also good to have friends who share your values but simply aren’t activists about it. It gives you some perspective.
- - Read/watch fiction. This is very difficult for me personally but I think it’s good advice. It’s important to have an escape. I tend to read only non-fiction, and I like to watch documentaries, but I make an effort to watch funny TV shows and occasionally read a novel.
- - Regularly study the opposing point of view. Understand that other people do not share your perspective for a reason, sometimes even good reasons. I make every effort to read apologists’ books when they are recommended to me, if for no other reason than to critique them and practice the name-the-fallacy game.
Now on to our third and final point: the internet as a source.
Of course, I do not recommend that anyone interested in atheism or secular history use Wikipedia as their sole source. Wikipedia is very good for certain subjects and less good for others. But what I love about Wikipedia is that hard sources are provided at the bottom of every article, and information without solid citations is flagged and removed.
It is equally important, if not more so, to read proper history books from credible historians. But I disagree with you about using Google to find sources. Google indexes not only blogs and interest-group websites, etc, which may be heavily biased and contain factual errors and logical fallacies. Google also indexes accredited university websites, peer-reviewed academic journals, and fact-checked magazines and so on.
These are legitimate sources for correct information and I completely disagree that people searching on Google are being told what to believe equally with what comes from the pulpit. Not believing what comes from the pulpit brings with it the threat of “Hell,” for one thing. Not believing what comes from the pulpit, for many young people, comes with the threat of losing internet privileges, games, toys, etc, and sometimes even food. In extreme cases, though unfortunately not all-too-rare, not believing what comes from the pulpit comes with the threat of being disowned and being homeless.
It is simply not true that people are being told what to believe equally on Google and at church.
With regard to Internet sources, the information is simply there. People choose to read it or not, and choose to accept it or not. They can choose to explore opposing points of view with just a few clicks, and just as readily access training on how to think critically and examples of various logical fallacies.
So-called “Internet literacy” is a skill that must be learned—fact-checking information from one site against other sites, using logic and critical thinking to see if the information is coherent with what you already know, and making sure what you’re reading is internally consistent and contains no fallacies. There is a very famous example of teaching Internet literacy regarding a fictional “tree octopus” that’s worth a read if you have time.
I think the most important thing, when it comes to claims of any kind, is to be skeptical. I consider myself a skeptic—SASHA stands for Skeptics, Atheists, Secular Humanists, & Agnostics—and skepticism is an important part of my worldview. Skepticism is, in my experience, NOT taught or encouraged in religious settings. In fact in my experience, I have seen it actively discouraged, painted as the work of Satan, trying to trick people into losing their faith in Jesus. Frankly, I find this ridiculous, although I more-or-less believed that myself at one time in my life.
As I mentioned above in #4, it’s important to regularly study opposing points of view. It expands your mind and forces you to think critically, which I think is never a bad thing. As Sam Harris wrote in Letter to a Christian Nation, “I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.”
I hope this article has been helpful to you. Thank you again for your message, and please let me know if there is anything you would like me to clarify.
Until next time,
Dave
Dave Muscato is the Kansas/Missouri-Area Volunteer Network Coordinator for the Secular Student Alliance. He is also a board member of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A non-traditional junior at Mizzou studying economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday and twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com
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Dave’s Mailbag: “A question about your skepticism…”
B writes:
I just watched your 2 hour debate video and really enjoyed it! I thought you made some very rational arguments and definitely made your arguments more credible by giving sources and such. Overall a very thorough and superb debate on your part.
How far you take your skepticism? The part of the video when the kid said there is more evidence of the resurrection of Jesus than there is of Julius Caesar. You disagreed and argued that there are books written by Julius Caesar, so his existence is more credible. Would you be skeptic that the books were forged? I mean there would be no apparent reason as to why someone would forge the books, and a document in religion to promote an agenda would be more likely forged, but would you still be skeptical? At what point is it logical to say that something is true? How much and of what kind of evidence is needed?
Thanks for your time.
My response:
Hi B! Thanks for your message. I appreciate your comments.
It’s certainly possible that Julius Caesar’s books are forgeries, but it’s highly unlikely. We have no reason to suspect that they were, unlike, for example, the many irreconciliable contradictions in the New Testament about the details of Jesus’s alleged resurrection. Caesar’s books are, for the most part, lost to history—all we have today is his journals from war, which don’t make any unlikely or outrageous claims. Contrast this to the fact that a resurrection as alleged would contradict everything we know about biology, medicine, etc. The whole thing is just dripping with obviousness as mythology.
So in a technical sense, I am open to the idea that Caesar’s books are forgeries. Being skeptical means being open to the idea that you’re wrong, and never claiming 100% certainty in your conclusions. I feel comfortable saying that I believe to a very high degree of confidence that Caesar’s books are genuine, although I wouldn’t claim that zero editing has taken place, nor that I claiming certainty about these things. Hand-written copies of ancient documents have a tendency to change bit by bit, but that’s okay: Nobody is claiming that there is divine truth in Caesar’s books.
As far as the point it’s logical at which to say something is true, I’m not sure we can ever really say that with total certainty. In discussions of epistemology, I tend to side with this position:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
in basically saying that any knowledge about the universe at large, or indeed anything outside one’s own mind, is by definition an uncertainty. It’s all subject to the filter of our senses, and it’s clear that those aren’t perfect, or magic shows would be no fun at all!
The one thing I’m absolutely certain about is the fact of my own existence. Everything else, if we’re going to be precise, is technically a belief. I believe that evidence and the scientific method are the most accurate approach to knowledge on the basis that they are the most consistent and logical approach to knowledge. I believe that faith, because it is inconsistent and unfalsifiable and by nature not bothered by things like lack of evidence, is really a fundamentally useless approach to finding out what’s true about the world. To quote Carl Sagan, “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it’s a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.”
Science is the best tool ever discovered for drawing up a consistent and clear picture of the world around us, but it’s still a picture, not the world itself. The problem of induction will always stand in our way of reaching 100% certainty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
So to answer your final question, within the system of empiricism, no amount of evidence is ever sufficient to say that something is true with 100% total certainty. That’s just not how evidence works, unfortunately. The more evidence you have that suggests a certain conclusion, and the better quality evidence you have, the more confident you can be in saying that it’s probably correct. But, there is always the possibility that you will discover additional evidence and find out that you were wrong all along. You can approach 100% confidence in statistics… 90%, 95%, 99.99999%, but under the banner of empiricism, 100% certainty is just not possible. That only works under the umbrella of rationalism (mathematical proofs), which are deductive, rather than inductive, and under the banner of faith, which—if you ask me—is just plain incorrect, because it incorrectly equates belief (a prerequisite for knowledge) with knowledge itself.
This article may also be helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology#Belief
I hope that this helps!
- Dave
Dave Muscato is the 2012 Writing Intern for the Secular Student Alliance in Columbus, Ohio. He is also Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou studying economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday and twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com. Opinions posted here do not necessarily reflect the views of MU SASHA, the Secular Student Alliance, nor the Humanist Community at Harvard.
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SASHA now has a video camera!
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Hey folks!
I’m really excited to announce that I got an actually decent video camera that we can now use for SASHA events. Expect lots more video coverage of our meetings/talks, tabling events, and other stuff in the future!
Here are two fun videos to get you started. The first is a talk by Alex Papulis, one of our members, about Sam Harris’s newest book, “Free Will,” from our last weekly meeting. The second video is some outdoor fun with street preachers on the Mizzou campus, Brother Jed among them. Enjoy!
For now we are using my own personal YouTube channel, but soon we will have a SASHA channel set up. You can subscribe to mine if you’d like, but FYI that is my personal channel, not the official SASHA channel, which is coming soon.
First video:
Second video:
Until next time!
- Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
A Christian and an atheist break down an argument for design
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I received a comment on a previous blog article of mine about the argument from design, and wanted to respond to it more thoroughly than a simply reply comment. Below is the submitter’s comment copied-and-pasted, with my full response.
Submitted on 1/25/2012 at 3:27 AM
Unklee writes:
Nice sounding arguments Dave, but which of the following premises do you disagree with?
1. The character of our universe is determined by physical laws and constants.
2. If these laws and constants had been different, life would probably not have arisen.
3. The laws and constants which led to this suitability for life must have been determined by either physical necessity, chance or design.
4. The laws and constants have not been determined by physical necessity.
5. The laws and constants have not been determined by chance.
6. Therefore our universe was designed.
Hi Unklee, thanks for your comment. I’m just going to address this one after another:
1. The character of our universe is determined by physical laws and constants.
- Physics “laws” are just observed patterns of interactions. I don’t think it’s accurate to say “determined by.” The universe has them, from what we can tell, but that’s all we can conclude from that directly. We don’t know if they’re constant everywhere and we don’t know if it’s always had them the way we observe them now. We don’t even know if our observations are ultimately correct, because the only way we can check our work is by repeating the same method we used the first time (i.e. by trusting that information from our senses is a reliable path to knowledge about objective reality, under the condition that this information is consistent or within acceptable margins of error on repeated experiment, otherwise known as science). Also, what do you mean by “character”?
This came up when I googled "character." I don't know why.
2. If these laws and constants had been different, life would probably not have arisen.
It depends on how different those constants had been. It’s certainly conceivable that life would have grown up differently or possibly even not at all, depending on the chemicals available, the amount of time (if a hypothetical universe were to exist for only a few seconds, it’s pretty unlikely life would be able to develop in it), and other factors. I disagree with using the word “probably” here, as we only have a sample size of 1 observable universe and one planet with life that we know of. Since we can’t see outside of our universe, we have no one way of knowing otherwise, and can only speculate.
Even on this single planet we have everything from bacteria and archaea to fungi, blue whales, pterodactyls, humans, beetles, and trees. One study published last year estimates that 86% of species on this planet have yet even to be named. Who knows what kinds of life could be on other planets or indeed other universes? Perhaps there is even non-carbon-based life waiting to be discovered even within our own universe. Just pulling straight from Wikipedia: “While the kinds of living beings we know on Earth commonly use carbon for basic structural and metabolic functions, water as a solvent and DNA or RNA to define and control their form, it is possible that undiscovered life-forms could exist that differ radically in their basic structures and biochemistry from that known to science.”
"ALF" stands for Alien Life Form, although suspiciously, he breathes air, gets around just fine in Earth gravity, and they apparently have cats on his planet, too.
3. The laws and constants which led to this suitability for life must have been determined by either physical necessity, chance or design.
- What’s the difference between physical necessity and chance?
4. The laws and constants have not been determined by physical necessity.
- Need an answer to #3 before I can respond to this one. Do you mean that our universe would not have existed or lasted as long as it has if the laws were vastly different? I agree with that. We don’t know why our universe displays exactly the patterns of behavior that we observe it does, or indeed if these patterns have always been constant or even if they are constant everywhere now. We simply have no way of knowing that.
5. The laws and constants have not been determined by chance.
- I don’t think we have any decent way of ruling this out, but I’m very interested in your reason(s) for thinking that we do, as it seems to be the crux of the design argument in general.
6. Therefore our universe was designed.
- While it’s a possibility, I think it is remote at best, and has the major flaw of introducing an even worse question: If our universe is designed by some intelligence, then where did that intelligence come from? Now we are really getting into ad-hoc territory, speculating about the origin of an entity for which we have only circumstantial evidence of its existence in the first place!
If we’re assuming design, we’ll need to address this question of origin regarding the designer, too: Either this intelligence created itself, has always existed, or was itself created. If it was itself created, than we’re back to square one. If it has always existed, then we are violating parsimony by adding an extra, unneeded step in our logic, rather than the more-reasonable solution: that the universe itself has always existed. (Side note: We have to be careful about using terms like “always existed,” because time itself doesn’t exist without the expansion of the universe, which didn’t start happening until the Big Bang).
The Big Bang (click to enlarge)
Since the always-existed hypothesis doesn’t agree with observation—the universe appears to be about 13.7 billion years old—we can more-or-less rule that out. So, the only answer that’s parsimonious, fits observation thus far, and doesn’t answer the question with an even bigger question, is the provisional belief that the universe “created” itself, although I prefer a term more like “originated” or “initiated,” as these are fittingly less anthropomorphic.
I think the best answer to the question, “Where did the universe come from?”, based on what we’ve covered here, is this one:
“We don’t know, and we may never have enough information to say with absolute, 100% certainty, but the answer that fits all our observations the best so far is that the universe simply came from nothing.”
Lawrence Krauss recently wrote a book explaining why (and how) he believes the universe came from literally nothing, a position with which Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow, and many others agree. Seeing as they are all qualified astrophysicists, I’m inclined to take their word for it until or unless new evidence comes along that they’re incorrect, which is what I meant above when I said provisional belief.
I think ultimately, the argument from design boils down to what’s known in logic as an argumentum ad ignorantiam, or appeal to ignorance. This is a logical fallacy. Although the argument is generally stated something like, “The universe could not have come about the way it is unless some intelligence did it,” I think a more-accurate wording is, fairly, “I don’t understand how the universe could have come about the way it is, unless some intelligence did it.” In order to conclude that it must have been an intelligence, we would first have to rule out all other possibilities, including a conspicuously more-parsimonious one, which I don’t think we can do at this time.
I encourage you to read the book by Lawrence Krauss linked two paragraphs up, or watch him give this talk (see video below) about the same hypothesis. It should help you understand how the universe could have come from nothing. If, after watching it (or reading the book), you think that you have a way to disprove it, PLEASE post your reasoning in the comments below.
Something to note: As good scientists seeking the truth about how our universe works, we would never say that we accept a hypothesis, only that thus far, we have failed to reject it. This is because of the problem of induction. So even if we were able to absolutely rule out the a-universe-from-nothing hypothesis, that does NOT prove intelligence design nor even suggest it as the next-best possibility. All it would do is narrow down the possibilities from (at least) 3 hypotheses to (at least) 2. Our options are: 1) the universe originated itself through some natural, non-intelligent process 2) the universe has always existed 3) the universe was created by some intelligent entity. Again, there are problems with both #2 and #3: #2 doesn’t fit with observations and #3 just raises the bigger question of where that intelligence itself came from. Additionally, there could be even more hypotheses than these 3 that we haven’t thought of yet. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: Right now, we have a hypothesis that’s parsimonious, fits the data, and doesn’t introduce more questions than it answers. I think that’s about as close as we can get to knowledge in this area unless or until we find strong evidence that we’re wrong. Ball’s in your court, Unklee!
Aforementioned Lawrence Krauss talk:
Regards,
Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
Why I’m Not Donating to Jessica Ahlquist’s Scholarship Fund
Or, “It’s good to be generous, but don’t forget to think critically”
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Hello all,
First off, I’m thrilled for Jessica’s victory.
I met Jess at the CFI Student Leadership conference earlier this summer, and again at the SSA Conference, where we had a good half-hour conversation about her situation and her plans in the movement. We’ve been Facebook friends since then, and I’ve chatted with her online many times. She knows I am supportive of her efforts, and I’ve even written before on this blog about that—twice—and how proud I am of her. My family even popped open a bottle of champagne when we got the news about her victory. Jess is dear to me, and in no way is this article intended as an attack on her or her family; merely some honest feedback from a fellow critical-thinking advocate, an economics student studying altruism, and a friend.
The aforementioned bottle of champagne, pre-popping.
Bloggers Hemant Mehta (the Friendly Atheist) and JT Eberhard, among many others, are promoting a scholarship fund for Jessica’s college expenses, based on the precedent example of Damon Fowler’s scholarship fund last year, which last I checked had surpassed $30,000. (NB: Neither Jess nor her family initiated the creation of this scholarship fund; they are merely the beneficiaries of it). Recently, JT suggested expanding Jessica’s fund to include selling T-shirts with the slogan, “Evil Little Thing” (as a reference to Rhode Island State Representative Peter Palumbo’s faux paus), the money from which would also go toward Jess’s scholarship fund. As of today, her fund is up to around $25,000 US (not including forthcoming T-shirt sales).
I know that supporting one of our own is very exciting and feels like the right thing to do. And it is the right thing to do—Jess deserves and indeed has earned our support.
But there are plenty of ways to support someone: financially, emotionally, morally, etc. Financially, I want to make clear, is only one way to do that.
I do not support the creation of a monetary scholarship fund for Jess, and I mean this in the best possible way, but we—as rational, skeptical, critical-thinkers—should pause for a moment and consider the priorities for our donation dollars.
Before making any donation, for ethical reasons, there are certain questions we must first ask. Among them:
1) Will this donation change someone’s life for the better?
If a donation changes no one’s life for the better above and beyond what they already had, and there are other ways to use that money that would instead, it is unethical to use resources in this way. This is true whether you’re talking about donating to an animal shelter (with the goal of changing those animals’ lives for the better), or an environmental preservation fund (allowing future generations of animals and people to enjoy that land), a scholarship fund (with the goal making college more accessible to someone), etc. Surprisingly, money is often not the “bottleneck” in achieving charitable goals. Take public schooling in the USA, for example: We spent about 3 times more tax dollars per student per year, adjusted for inflation, in the 2007-8 school year than we did in in the 1961-62 school year, yet we are falling further and further behind other countries when it comes to test scores and graduation rates. Clearly, there is something else going on besides just money.
2) To what degree will this donation improve someone’s life above and beyond current conditions?
There are many inefficient charities in the world. In fact, most charities accomplish very little. Charities that demonstrably improve people’s lives are the exception, not the rule. This is because fundraising for charity is nearly always based on emotional appeals, which is a type of informal fallacy, not on demonstrated accomplishment of their goals. This is something we, as skeptics, should recognize, and something for which we should be on the look-out, when we notice our heartstrings are being tugged.
As an analogy, take, for example, this 2-minute video, which makes me cry every time. Turn on your speakers (BC = British Columbia, Canada):
As a vegetarian, animal-welfare activist, former animal-shelter employee, and shelter volunteer, my heart breaks for these animals, and it’s not easy for me to put my emotions aside when I watch a video like this one. Makes you want to get out your wallet and pick up the phone, doesn’t it?
However, the critical-thinking side of me knows that the best thing to do, when making any economic decision, is to consider both my emotional AND rational reasoning. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, by all means let’s allow our intuition to guide our ethics, but not so much that our brains fall out.
The question we should ask ourselves when we’re considering donating money is one of efficiency. We have an ethical obligation to ensure that our donations are being used as wisely and efficiently as humanly possible.
The video above quotes a statistic of 3,000 animals saved last year, and goes on to say that for hundreds of others animals, help came too late. The implication is that our (collective) donations can save other animals like these in the future. As critical thinkers, it’s our responsibility to ask, at what cost per animal? Are you doing everything you can to keep costs down (making all possible use of volunteers, foster homes, etc)? Are hard dollars your most urgent need? If our goal is to stop animal suffering, is this organization the most efficient one at actually accomplishing that goal? Is money even your bottleneck? (It could be things like lax local breeding laws, insufficient city services as far as animal control, insufficient legal penalties for dog-fighting or animal neglect, or lots of other things besides lack of hard dollars).
By way of example, our local animal shelter here in Columbia, MO took in over 5,000 animals last year, quite a few more than the 3,000 cited in the video. How many of these were euthanized? I don’t know; the website and donor FAQ don’t even say. From my experience there, I would guess roughly 1/3, but that is entirely speculative. Why were they euthanized? Was money even the bottleneck? Vicious animals (e.g. most of those recovered from dog-fighting operations) or fatally-injured animals cannot be put up for adoption, so money would not have helped them. Is the problem that people are bringing in their animals because they are destructive to their households? Maybe we should try to persuade local dog trainers to offer discounts and work with the shelter, if the problem is lack of training, etc. Critical thinking is how we solve problems like these, and as it turns out, money is often not really the root of the problem.
If your goal is to save animals from euthanasia, the fact is that we aren’t even given enough information, by looking at this own shelter’s website and donor FAQ, how much they need to save an animal’s life. So how on Earth can we compare the efficiency of this shelter with another animal charity with similar goals, competing for our donations? We can’t.
The reason charities don’t supply information about their efficiency is that nobody ever asks for it. In most cases they don’t even collect this data at all. This is especially true of charities who primarily solicit large numbers of small-figure donors (i.e. the ones that advertise for donations), versus those who focus on small numbers of large-figure donors.
Large donors tend to be more discriminating, and someone giving away a million dollars wants some quantifiable evidence, preferably significantly so, that their donation made a real difference. But why should a charity bother spending lots of money and time putting together all that data, when you can instead make one commercial and focus on getting 100,000 people to each donate $10, just by showing them sad pictures and providing two rather useless statistics? Especially when you consider that when a charity DOES put together all that data for a big donor, they are now in the position of having to make promises to that donor about results, which they now must keep or face some very bad PR and no donations in the future. Small donors tend not to check up on how much of a difference their donation made a year later when deciding whether or not to donate again, so it makes sense to invest in appealing to them, instead.
I am not saying that charities who focus on smaller donors are malicious nor manipulative. Most of the time, they in fact have very good intentions. But as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This goes for charities as well as donors. By being MORE discriminating in where we donate our money, we can in fact do even greater good with the same amount of funds. (NB: This emphatically doesn’t mean we should donate less of our money to charity, rather, just that we should ask more questions when deciding where to donate it).
This is not to say that I don’t support my humane society’s mission in terms of moral or emotional support, but it is why I don’t donate money to them, and support them in other ways instead.
There is a calculation used in charity evaluation called “room for more funding.” In other words, we want to know, to what degree would additional donations advance the mission of the fund, over and above its current assets?
As I said above, there are many ways that we can support Jessica’s future: financially, morally, emotionally, and so on. I left out perhaps the most important one, because I want to discuss it here in more detail: Networking. This is an asset Jess has in spades, one that we can help her grow even more (for free!), and, in my opinion, the reason that her scholarship fund probably does not actually have room for more funding.
The goal of ANY scholarship fund is simple: To make a college education more accessible to its beneficiaries than it would otherwise be. That’s it.
So, the first question we need to ask ourselves is, “Is a college education indeed inaccessible to Jessica right now?” In other words, will she even need help paying for college in the first place?
I propose that the answer to this question, as I say this with all due respect and love for my friend Jess, is probably “no.” I’ve no doubt that the extra money wouldn’t hurt, but is “well, it wouldn’t hurt” really the highest & best use of the limited resource of atheists’ donations?
When Jessica is ready to apply for college, one of her (and her parents’) concerns will undoubtedly be finances. It is for nearly everyone who goes to college. It’s obviously less of a concern for some than others: I doubt the topic so much as crosses the mind of Jennifer Gates, the daughter of Bill & Melinda Gates, who is 16 years old, the same age as Jessica.
However, I submit that this isn’t for the reason you’d think: I’m willing to bet that Jennifer Gates will get scholarship offers from at least dozens of schools. The reason for this is not that they think she needs help financially affording tuition (clearly she doesn’t); it’s because many schools want to be able to tell other, future applicants, as well as alumni, that “Jennifer Gates is a student here.” These schools know Jennifer Gates can afford to go anywhere she wants, and that she will not make her decision based on cost, but rather, which school she thinks is truly the best for her.
In order to so much as stand a chance at recruiting Miss Gates, all but the very top schools in the world will have to offer her a full-ride. And even among those top schools, they must still compete with each other. They know that, whatever school she chooses, she and her family will be donating many millions of dollars there for many years to come, so it is in their best interest to attract her as a student in any way legally possible.
I think that Jess Ahlquist is actually in a better bargaining position when it comes to her choice of colleges than even Jennifer Gates. The reason for this is that Miss Gates, although I’d assume she’s a credible student, has not made a name for herself in the world yet. A quick perusal of Google doesn’t turn up anything particular newsworthy outside of the fact that she’s Bill & Melinda Gates’ daughter. The only thing I could really find about her at all personally is that she rides horses.
Jessica Ahlquist, on the other hand, has her own Wikipedia page (something even Jennifer Gates lacks). Jess has appeared on ABC News, in The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, etc. She has spoken at multiple major conferences already, done a Reddit AMA, and she will speak alongside Richard Dawkins, Dave Silverman, Lawrence Krauss, Dr. Greg Graffin (of Bad Religion), Tim Minchin, PZ Myers, James Randi, and others at the Reason Rally in March in Washington, DC. She has the explicit support of thousands and thousands of people around the country and the world. And she still has another year to go before applying to colleges!
When Jessica is ready to apply for colleges, she will have something even more valuable than $25,000. Consider her circumstance if she decides to apply to, say, Oxford: She will likely have little trouble getting an enthusiastic written reference and personal introduction & tour from none other than Professor Richard Dawkins himself. If she decides to apply to Harvard, she will have no trouble whatsoever getting a written reference and personal introduction from James Croft, or any number of others, and so on and so on. This list could go on for quite awhile!
There is a concept in economics, called opportunity cost, with which (I hope) everyone reading this is already familiar. The idea is simply that when you make a choice about how to spend your money (or time, or any scarce resource), the cost of that choice is not only what you pay for it, but also what you’re giving up by not spending your money (or time, etc) on your next best alternative.
There are a limited number of dollars available for donation by those supportive of separation of church & state issues. It’s important that we think critically here and ask ourselves how much help Jess really needs affording her college of choice, and if additional dollars from us is the absolute best use of our finite resources.
With Damon Fowler’s scholarship fund, his situation had some important differences: Damon’s parents were NOT supportive of his efforts, and as I understand it, he was kicked out of his parents’ house after coming out as an atheist, and had to leave the state to live with his brother. With the exception of the scholarship funds raised by his supporters (myself included), he is on his own as far as paying for college. In Jessica’s case, we don’t even know her parents’ financial situation (not that it’s any of our business), but we do know that they are supportive of her efforts (as I understand it, her father helped file the lawsuit), and as people who value critical thinking, I think it’s only appropriate that we consider whether or not her family has a true, pressing need for this money, above and beyond Damon, or the ACLU, American Atheists, the SSA, CFI, or other worthy causes to which we could donate, instead.
By donating to Jessica’s college scholarship fund, we are not donating to other organizations or young activists who may need it more. There are a lot of people, young campus leaders in the atheist movement, who cannot afford to attend the Reason Rally, or promote quality events on their own campuses.
If you want to support the future of the atheist movement in the United States, and again, I mean this in the best possible way to Jess and her family, please considering donating to the Reason Rally, American Atheists, the Secular Student Alliance, or the Center For Inquiry in honor of Jessica’s victory. The last two of these routinely help fund local events for campus skeptic groups, things like bringing in guest speakers, and setting up regional conferences to help spread awareness of atheism and introduce a younger generation to a lifetime of critical thinking and freethought. If you are interested primarily in supporting separation of church & state issues, please consider donating to the ACLU, or the Freedom From Religion Foundation, again in honor of her victory. NB: To my knowledge, donations made through all the links in this paragraph are tax-deductible; to my knowledge, donations made to Jessica’s scholarship fund are not, just FYI.
As I said above, I think that what Jess is doing is deserving of the highest praise, and of our support, but remember, support can take many forms. While it is certainly important to have nationally-renowned spokepeople for atheism like Jessica Ahlquist, it’s also very important to have well-funded local and regional leaders putting on events on their campuses, too. My only hope is that our financial support can go to where it’s not only most needed, but best used, whether you ultimately decide that is Jess’s scholarship fund itself, or another related, deserving fund.
Thank you for reading.
Dave
P.S. For an excellent series of articles on “smart giving,” I highly recommend this page: GiveWell’s “Giving 101.”
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
Medicine: Where Real Miracles Happen Every Day
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This came up when I googled "kidney stone." I don't know why.
Why is this man’s partner upset at him? Although she lets him in on the mystery at the end, imagine if she was an imaginary, invisible god instead of his partner. Lacking any surefire way to communicate with her, the best he could do would be try to apologize or offer sacrifices whatever he might have done to offend her. This is more or less the basis of the practice of sacrifices in various world religions, from the Aztecs and Mayas of the ancient Americas, to the deserts of the ancient (and current) Middle East, to the “offerings” of cash in churches, mosques, and synagogues around the world.
Deep down, even though we may do our best to live ethical lives, we’ve all done at least one thing we’re not proud of. Naturally, we’re seeking forgiveness for the things we wish we hadn’t done. We want to be told that we’re still a good person and that life goes on. It’s easy to anthropomorphize nature, and once you cross that line, it’s even easier to believe that some agency is keeping track of our wrongs, if we don’t know better. At that point, all we’re “waiting” for is someone to come along and tell us that this “God” is pissed, and you can make it all better by giving your money to “God” (although, of course, in practice, it really goes to the person claiming knowledge about how to make it all better). I consider this tactic the height of immorality. In the words of John B. Hodges, “Religion… gives a moral blank check to those bold enough, dishonest enough, to claim to speak for God.”
And it does feel good to do something to pay back our wrongs. When we hurt someone, we want to make it up to them. When we’re not able to do that, it feels wrong to just shrug and say, “Guess I’m off the hook then.” Somehow, it feels more moral to do something to say we’re sorry, even if we know, rationally, that they’re independent.
As humans, we like having answers to our questions. We like being right and having a sense of understanding about our environment. This makes sense – what we don’t understand is scary and potentially dangerous, so it’s in our best interest to try to figure it out as best we can. When it comes to detecting patterns in nature, evolution designed us to be paranoid, not accurate. This is, I think, one of the most important realizations in all of scientific inquiry. We have this desire to “just do something” when bad things are happening, even if our actions are useless or even when they actually worsen the situation. We don’t like feeling powerless and the idea that “things just happen” can be scary. I understand that.
But that doesn’t mean that karma is real, that fate is real, that everything happens for a reason, nor that there is a pattern to everything. We are excellent at detecting patterns – too good at it, actually.
I think as a society, we could make amazing progress on a vast array of social, political, and economic problems if we required all high school students to take introductory statistics, probability, and philosophy of science. I am continually dismayed at how few people, scientists even, understand the problem of induction, or understand basic concepts in epistemology and the philosophy of science like the difference between a fact, a theory, a hypothesis, a law, a model, and a proof. This is something we can fix, if we decide to.
In closing, I want to thank everyone out there who has paved or is paving the way for science to help us solve our problems. I certainly appreciate the knowledge and abilities of the medical staff who have helped me the past few days, and I sincerely say, thank scientists for painkillers. You guys are awesome.
- Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
Dinesh D’Souza: Three god-awful minutes
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Today’s article is a guest post by Brandon Christen of the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Central Missouri.
With a little over an hour to kill before going to work, I decided to watch some debates on YouTube to pass the time. A good friend of mine mentioned he was watching a speech by Dinesh D’Souza, and since I had never listened to him or read any of his works before, I looked him up. Upon finding a debate between him and Christopher Hitchens, I listened for a while. I’m sad to say, I could only make it about three minutes in before taking time out to write a blog post about three horrible stupid things he said within those three minutes.
Moving at breakneck speeds to drop an average of one bad argument per minute, D’Souza began with the claim that “The universe is rational!” (paraphrasing). “How odd,” he says, “that the universe operates rationally? How could this have happened!” To answer his question, D’Souza claims that the only way a universe could embody rationality is to have been created by an omniscient (which he claims to mean “hyper-rational”) being, such as God.
He then pointedly asks why it is that the universe obeys laws. He claims that for an electron to “know” where it is supposed to be is unfathomable in a universe without an all-knowing, all powerful creator behind its creation. He also says that there can be no laws without a “lawgiver” and, thus, the universal laws of nature demand that there be a lawgiver reigning over them.
Finally, rounding out his list of bad arguments (again, after only three minutes) is D’Souza’s claim that Atheism leads to crimes against humanity. He starts by saying that the Inquisition only killed 2000 people over a 300 year period and that the Salem witch trials only killed 18 people. He compares these 2018 deaths to the millions killed in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia (all of which, he claims, were results of national Atheism) and says that Atheism kills more than Theism, so is therefore worse than Theism.
I see no better way to take this than point by point, in order. So, here we go…
A.) As taken from the Miriam-Webster Dictionary, the word rational means 1.)” having reason or understanding” or 2.) “related to, based on, or agreeable to understanding.” Neither of these things have anything to do with unconscious matter, only with how conscious minds deal with the world. Saying that the universe behaves rationally is an improper usage of the word “rationally”. It’s like me saying that a glass of milk that gets spilled was “misbehaving.” It’s intuitively ridiculous if you think about it for more than a moment.
What can be said about the universe is that its constituent parts seem to act in certain ways under certain circumstances. How does rationality fit in to this? Well, rationality (by my view of it) is how well the human mind corroborates with external reality. A person who thinks that the glass of milk spilled because it was feeling feisty and just wanted to is thinking irrationally (given that the glass of milk is inanimate), whereas a person who sees the glass of milk spill and then figures out what physical events (such as, say, a dog bumping into the table) caused the milk to spill. I feel I should point out that it is also perfectly rational (and honest) to, absent enough data, simply say “I don’t know why the milk spilled,” instead of making a reason up.
B.) D’Souza then goes on the claim that the universe “obeys laws,” and that the presence of laws demands the existence of an external law giver. Again, D’Souza is conflating terms. In the realm of physics and biology, “natural laws” are not the same as laws in a human legal system. Human laws do indeed demand law givers; human laws are decided upon, enacted, and enforced in various ways. You might have a committee agree on a certain law, then pass it. Or you could have a judge give a ruling that is then taken and used as a legal precedent.
However, natural “laws” are merely terms used by science to describe the orderly operation of matter and energy. They are by no means asserting that these laws were clearly made by any intelligence, and you could easily call them “natural habits,” “natural ways,” “natural operations”, or “natural predictable circumstances and events” and they would be just as accurate.
The problem is that the word “law” is an emotionally laden term, as for most people it does indeed carry the idea of a lawgiver. Speakers like D’Souza use that emotionality to their advantage; they speak to an overly simplified way of thinking that does direct word-to-reality translation of events, so when he says “It’s a law” the crowd he appeals to automatically thinks “That implies a lawgiver!”
C. The last thing D’Souza throws at the audience is the ancient, tired, sagging straw man of “Atheists societies lead to mass murders!” He uses all the traditional boggy men for this argument; Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany. He says that each of these societies was atheistic and that is the reason they were able to throw morality out the window and launch into mass killings and genocides. I say: bullshit.
First of all, any armchair History-channel-watching historian (like me) can easily say that Hitler was not an Atheist. The honest answer to Hitler’s specific spiritual beliefs is “I don’t know,” because there is (as far as I’m aware) no resounding historical consensus on what he believed. He at various times advocated Christianity, then a weird, ultra distorted racist version of Christianity, then some paganism (perhaps thrown in for good measure). [Editor's note: Hitler was a member of the Catholic church, and was never excommunicated]. Many other Nazi higher-ups were big into paganism and bizarre spiritualism, and I feel it tragically necessary to point out for any confused readers that neither of those things are Atheism.
Second, the nations that committed these atrocities weren’t nations of Atheists. I’m not so sure on Cambodia, though I would assume the same, but I do know that the idea that Russia was brimming with Atheists is false; most Russians maintained their religious beliefs and the Orthodox Church was still alive and well when the official state ban on religion came tumbling down. Germany in the 30s and 40s might have had leaders who looked down their noses at Christianity, but the nation itself was by no means filled with Atheists, either. Many Germans were Catholic or Protestant (like most everywhere else you go in the West) or some form of neo-paganism that was all the rage at the time. At any rate, they weren’t all Atheists.
Furthermore, even if they had been Theists, that wouldn’t have stopped the genocides or atrocities. A casual glance through the Old Testament features plenty of God-sanctioned destruction, war, pillaging, and homicidal insanity. Offhand, I can think of God ordering Moses to order his brother, Aaron, to slay several thousand Israelites just because they worshiped the wrong god and God ordering the people of Israel to kill men, women, and children and seize their lands when they reached Canaan. If we are to believe the tenets of the Bible (setting aside whether they’re historically true or not) then clearly a belief in God won’t stop mass murders so long as that’s what you think God is telling you to do.
And on that point, what does D’Souza have to say? How does he refute the notion that Theism can just as easily lead to innocent deaths if the Theists in question get an unction that God wants them to kill? Well, as you’ll recall, he simply says that Theism kills less people; remember, he defended the Inquisition and Salem Witch Trials by saying that only a total of 2018 people.
….Really? Fucking really? We’re boiling down the value of belief systems (as compared to mass murder) by how many get mass murdered? This may not be the most intellectual thing I can say, but go fuck yo’self Danish D’Souza.
However, all that actually misses the point. It’s just fun side dressing, so to speak. The real point of order I’d call here is that Atheism didn’t lead to those people being complicit in genocides and mass murders. Idealism did. An Atheist (and Atheism as a “system”) simply doesn’t believe in any gods or supernatural entities/locations. Period. That is not an ideology, it’s simply an epistemological position. Now, human beings have a tragic habit of desperately wanting to play follow-the-leader. Any leader. Even one so disgusting as Adolf Hitler. Those who throw themselves into the mindless obedience to a certain ideology or leader also lose their ability to make their own decisions; they become the nameless, oblivious henchmen from old James Bond movies. It is those who mindlessly obey a certain leader or ideology that commit horrible crimes, regardless of whether or not they believe in God.
And by the way, Secularism (and the New Atheist movement) advocate, along with a deemphasizing of religion, an abandonment of all forms of mindless ideological adherence. Really, it is only natural that a bunch of free-thinking, humanistic types would despise such thinking; it is dangerous as well as insulting to the potential we human beings have evolved. To an Atheist like me, someone saying “I have absolute total faith that my leader is right in all things, and I would gleefully kill or die for him” is only three words off from “I have absolute faith that my God is right in all things, and I would gleefully die for him.”
So in the end, the short answer response to all three shitty arguments D’Souza advocated is:
1.) The universe isn’t rational, it’s predictable. Rationality is a term to describe human minds that line up with how reality really is.
2.) No, the universe doesn’t obey laws in the legalistic, social/moral way. It is, again, predictable. Scientists call them laws because at the present they seem immutable and they needed a good, strong word to get that point across.
3.) No, Atheism doesn’t breed monsters. Mindless obedience to one leader or ideology breeds monsters. Atheism just breeds a propensity for doubting outrageous bullshitty claims. (Which, by the by, is a great ingredient for preventing mass murders and genocides.)
Brandon Christen was born and raised in Missouri. He grew up in a religious family, and joined a far-right conservative church when he was a senior in college. For almost six years, the church dominated all facets of his life and thinking until, in early 2010, he began to openly question its steadfast rejection of science and philosophy. After a protracted struggle with his convictions, Brandon became an Atheist in September of that year. These days Brandon remains intensely interested in religion, though now he views it from a secular perspective. One of the chief problems he sees between Secular Society and Religious Society is the presumption that religion takes the high ground on moral and ethical issues. To combat this problem, Brandon frequently engages in conversations with as many religious individuals as he can in a “grass roots” effort to spread awareness about secular morality. He also acts as a strong voice in the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Central Missouri. While he still sees debunking religious falsehoods as important, Brandon’s ultimate focus is on becoming a professional philosopher and emphasizing in ethics so as to lend his voice to the attempt to heal the moral divide between believers and non-believers.
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
Dinner with Brother Jed
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Hello everyone!
SASHA’s “WWJD? – Ask him yourself!” event was featured in Mizzou’s student newspaper, The Maneater, this week. You can read the article here and my take on it here (with more photos). James Pflug (the SASHA member who portrayed Jesus during the event) had this to say about his experience. Even more photos are here.
On Friday, Brother Jed had his twice-annual open house and invited students on campus, religious & atheist alike. Although Jed travels throughout the country and preaches on various campuses most of the year, he and his family actually happen to live right here in Columbia, and so I’ve had the opportunity to have dinner with him and his family a few times now.
Jed Smock and I at Jed's open house
There were about 35 of us there, and after we all ate, there was some good discussion. I was only able to stay until about 7:30, but I did get to hear Jed reading out of the Bible a bit (Romans 1, more on this in a moment), and some discussion with my friend Michael Acuff, a Young Earth creationist & medical doctor who specializes in rehabilitation and spinal injuries.
Jed’s Bible reading was, as he put it, “food for thought.” He wanted to explore “why, according to the Bible…” – in his words, “Whether you believe in the Bible or not is another issue” – “… [atheists] don’t believe.” I did record a video of his reading, but since I did it with my cell phone, the audio is pretty hard to make out. You can watch it here if you’re so inclined; I got a text message around 11 minutes in and my phone automatically stopped recording, sorry about that:
Jed’s basic point, from Paul’s letter to the Romans, 1:16-20, is that God has made it plain to us that he exists, such that all men are “without excuse.” We (atheists) “know [that God exists] because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath [shown] it unto them” – but we are willfully resisting the truth, and this makes God angry.
Let’s take a look at this critically. The argument here, according to Jed, is that even if you’ve never heard the gospel preached to you, you are without excuse for knowing that God is real, because, in Jed’s words, “he has revealed himself through his creation.”
This is an unbelievably easy argument to knock down. I’m frankly surprised that Jed thought it was worthwhile enough to lead with during the after-dinner discussion. Let’s dig in.
First problem: It’s not exclusive to any particular god. Before we continue, I want you to take a moment and look at this link. Seriously, right now, click this, glance it over, and then come back. I’ll wait.
Okay, back now? You may have noticed that there are over 100 names listed on that page. There are 111, in fact. Yahweh is among them, the third from the last, right where you’d expect to find the ol’ fella, alphabetically under “Y.”
The reason Paul’s line of reasoning fails as an argument in favor of Yahweh’s existence is that you could just as easily make this argument in favor of any creator god – any of the 111 listed on that page, or any other you might care to make up on your own, and indeed, throughout history and up to today, people do just that. You could just as easily make the case, “People are without excuse for not worshipping the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who is clearly real, because he has revealed himself through all of creation.”
Even if it were true that “creation” necessarily means a creator (it doesn’t), that doesn’t tell us WHICH creator. The teleological argument, as it has been called, only gets us to Deism, not to Theism, and certainly not allllll the way down the spectrum to Christianity specifically:
In order for a hypothesis to be credible, it has to fulfill a few minimum requirements, for example, internal consistency, external consistency, and elegance. By internal consistency, I mean that the explanation you’re offering can’t be logically impossible nor contradict itself. A hypothesis is no good if it depends upon an assumption that can’t logically work. For example, if your explanation requires an omnipotent being, we can easily show that your explanation is flawed. An omnipotent being cannot exist, and we can easily prove this using “the paradox of the stone,” employed by Aquinas and others, which dates back to at least the 12th century. The paradox of the stone asks, simply, “Can God make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it?”
If he can, than he fails at being so powerful that he can lift anything, no matter how heavy. If he can’t, than he fails at being able to make something he intends to make. Either way, he’s not all-powerful. So we can be sure than an all-powerful god does not - cannot – exist. Though the Bible doesn’t make the claim internally that God is all-powerful in the first place, Christians sometimes do, so it’s a good point to keep handy. Christianity does not depend on belief in an all-powerful god, just a very-powerful one.
The Bible does make other claims that are logically impossible, though. John 1:1 is a good example. In the Gospel according to John, the opening line states: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Well, which is it? Was the Word with God, or was the Word actually God? This violates the logical principle called the law of non-contradiction: Something cannot logically be A and not A at the same time and in the same context (in this case, the contradiction is that Christianity is a monotheistic religion, as the 1st Commandment requires, and that Christianity is not a monotheistic religion, as Christians worship Jesus as a separate entity from God the Father). You can’t put forth the statement that Jesus was a separate person, who sits at the right hand of the Father (God) and who is the “way” to God the Father, and that Jesus is God the Father simultaneously, just as you cannot logically put forth the statement that your went for a walk with your dog, and that you are your dog, simultaneously, if you want to make sense. (For a video explanation of why this is nonsense, click here.) In several places in the New Testament, Jesus makes it clear that he is not God the Father himself, yet if Christians worship him, this violates their own “greatest commandment.” You could argue that the trinity is a paradox – an argument that appears to be self-contradictory but is in fact sound – but I would say to this, explain! In what way is this argument actually sound, aside from the Bible’s mere say-so?
Just stating, “God works in mysterious ways” is another way of saying “I haven’t the foggiest.” If you don’t know, just say so. It’s okay to say “I don’t know”! What’s not okay is saying, “I don’t know, therefore it must be God.” If you don’t know, the default is that you reserve concluding either way and err on the side of caution (that is, you refrain from believing it until you have better evidence one way or the other). To do otherwise is to think fallaciously.
Another example of internal inconsistency would be if two separate statements contradict each other (rather than one statement contradicting itself, as above). As just one example, let’s take the year of Jesus’ birth:
In Luke 2:1, the author says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, despite the fact that his parents lived in Nazareth. According to the author, Joseph and a very-pregnant Mary traveled the roughly 70 miles to Bethlehem in order to register for the census, while Quirinius was governor of Syria. When they got there, there was no more room at the inn, so Jesus was born in the stable and placed in a manger (a livestock feeding trough), where the shepherds came to pay tribute to him.
However, in Matthew 2:1, the author says that Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem (they were not just visiting), and Jesus was born in their house there, while Herod was client king of Judea. According to the author of Matthew, the astrologers (“kings”) from the East, following a star, came to Jerusalem to pay tribute to him, and stopped at Herod’s first to ask for directions to Bethlehem, 5 miles away. Herod asked them to come back afterward and tell him all about it, so they he, too, could worship the newborn king (although he secretly wanted to kill the kid). But the astrologers were warned in a dream about Herod’s plan, and so they didn’t go back to Jerusalem as Herod requested. Joseph, too, was warned in a dream, and so he, Mary, and baby Jesus ran away to Egypt (the Egyptian border at the time was about 75 miles from Bethlehem). Herod, unaware of this, ordered the slaughter of all the babies 2 years and under in that town to try to get the kid anyway. According to Matthew 2:19-21, after Herod died, Joseph was told in yet another dream that the threat to Jesus’ life was abated, and so they could return to their home in Bethlehem. But when they got back into Israel (Bethlehem being a city in Judea, which is another name for the southern, mountainous part of Israel), they found out that Herod’s son, Archelaus, was now on the throne, and so they went to Nazareth instead (70 miles north of Bethlehem, in Galilee), and raised Jesus there.
Therefore, the Bible cannot be correct about where Jesus was born, because it is internally inconsistent: One writer says Joseph’s house in Bethlehem; another says in a stable in Bethlehem, because having traveled there from their home in Nazareth, there was no room at the inn.
So, what do I mean by external consistency? In this specific case, we also have an external, bigger historical problem with the reliability of these two accounts: We know from extrabiblical historical & archaeological records that Quirinius wasn’t governor of Syria during the same time period that Herod was client king of Judea. In fact, Herod died in 4 BCE, and Quirinius wasn’t governor until 6 CE, about a 10-year gap. It’s not just that they didn’t rule at the same time; Quirinius was Herod’s son’s replacement, after Herod himself died and was succeeded by his son, and his son was removed from power 10 years after that. There is no mistaking this: Herod ruled from 37 BCE until he died in 4 BCE. Then, Herod’s son, Archelaus, ruled after his father’s death from 4 BCE until 6 CE. Then, Archelaus was replaced by Quirinius (the Roman government got rid of the client-king arrangement and placed the area under direct Roman rule, with Quirinius in charge).
If Matthew is correct, Jesus must have been born before 4 BCE. If Luke is correct, Jesus must have been born after 6 CE. So we can be certain that (at least) one of these two accounts of Jesus’s birth is incorrect. But we already knew that, because of the internal contradictions.
So, that’s internal consistency, and external consistency. What about elegance?
By elegance, I don’t mean that a hypothesis has to be attractively refined in its appearance, but rather, it must be precise, neat, and simple. (Easy and simple, by the way, are not interchangeable.) An elegant hypothesis leaves no glaring holes in its explanatory power, but at the same time, it is not unnecessarily complicated: It is parsimonious, meaning that it refrains from making unnecessary assumptions in reasoning: It follows Ockham’s Razor.
By way of example, natural selection is an elegant explanation of evolution because it is simple, precise, and neat. (Natural selection and evolution, also, are not interchangeable.) Natural selection is pretty easy to sum up: Over multiple generations, random mutations in genetic code occasionally give rise to fitness advantages, which, under conditions of scarcity, naturally lead to non-random, increased competitive proliferation of the better-equipped specimens. That’s it. There are no glaring holes in this hypothesis – we know random mutations occur, we know conditions of scarcity and competition are present, and we can easily see how these fit together to explain what we observe (i.e. changes in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next). It’s elegant; it’s internally consistent (non-contradictory), and it’s externally consistent (it fits the evidence without leaving any glaring holes).
God, in contrast, is not an elegant hypothesis. To say, as Jed does, that we know God exists because he is revealed “through” his creation, is basically arguing that the universe exists, and someone “must” have created it: Ergo, God. If you’re going to argue that everything that exists must have had a creator, than we’re left with the “glaring hole”: Who created God?
Some theists, Jed among them, attempt to get out of this one, by arguing that God does not “need” a creator; it’s not simply “everything that exists must have had a creator,” but rather “everything that was created must have had a creator,” and God, by the way, wasn’t created. If faced with this argument, I simply argue that the universe, too, wasn’t created. Ask also, how do you know God wasn’t created? Is that just an assertion? Well, then I assert that the universe does not “need” a creator, either.
When asked who created god, a theist might argue that he either always existed, is beyond our ability to explain at present (“supernatural,” “metaphysical,” or simply “mysterious”), or that we cannot know where he came from (beyond our comprehension).
If you are presented with this argument, just turn it right around, substituting “the universe” for “God”: Does it not make equal sense to argue that either the universe has always existed, or is beyond our ability to explain (so far at least), or that we may never be able to explain where it came from? Or if a theist wants to argue that God created himself, just say, “I argue that the universe created itself” (which, by the way, is what Stephen Hawking argues in The Grand Design).
Either way, this argument falls apart rather rapidly as any sort of proof for a god’s existence. At best, God is an unnecessarily middle-man when it comes to the existence of the universe, and barring other evidence, we should strike the God hypothesis on grounds of parsimony.
I must pause here to stress that yes, God is a scientific hypothesis in this context. Some people – particularly theists but also fans of the agnostic Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria – might be tempted to say that God exists outside the natural realm and therefore cannot be explored or understood with the tools of science, which can, by definition, only examine the natural realm.
That’s fine with me, so long as you understand that this line of reasoning makes you a deist, and you understand that your assertion that “God exists outside the natural realm” is by definition unsupported by evidence, and, therefore, not rational due to its departure from parsimony. Allow me to explain.
If you want to argue that we can’t see beyond the natural realm with the tools we have, whether scientific or cognitive, that’s fine – but then you are effectively barring yourself from making any further claims about what’s out there, as well. If you are arguing that the metaphysical realm is not available to us for natural inquiry, then the most we can say about what’s beyond the natural universe – by that I mean, metaphysical ideas like God(s) – is that we can’t say anything about them. By definition they are outside of our realm. So much for what God wants, heaven, hell, souls, prayer, etc!
If you want to argue that something outside of our realm exists in the first place, I think the only way you could possibly do it is by committing the fallacy of attempting to shift the burden of proof.
Jed likes to argue that we can’t explain the metaphysical using the physical. He argues that God is a metaphysical being, and therefore off-limits when it comes to physical (natural) examination, explanation, or criticism. I say, if you want to postulate the existence of something metaphysical at all, two things:
1) You understand that such a postulation is not parsimonious
2) The moment you try to argue that God has ever interacted with the physical universe (including the initial creation!), you are no longer arguing that God is purely metaphysical. A purely metaphysical entity cannot interact with the physical because in so doing he/she/it/they would no longer exist purely in the metaphysical realm (if such a realm even exists).
In the very instant that a purely metaphysical God crossed over into our (natural) realm to interact with it – to answer prayers, to work miracles, or to come here himself… pretty much anything credited to “the holy spirit” – he would once again be on the table for natural, critical examination. This line of reasoning, by definition, excludes belief in Christianity, since a purely metaphysical god cannot, by definition, perform miracles, and this would knock belief in the resurrection off the table.
I think that an illustration might help make this point more clear. Consider the following:
Say that we live in the “natural” realm, which for sake of this example is two-dimensional. We’ll call this place “Flatland.” We can only see, interact with, measure, and know about objects that have width and/or length. We have no concept of, nor process or technology of measuring, height (read: metaphysical beings). The third dimension, height, is simply not visible to us and it is outside our comprehension, much like Jed purports the metaphysical realm and metaphysical beings like God to be.
Here is what Flatland looks like:
Here is a “side view” of Flatland;
______________________________________
Notice that there are no mountains, hills, or even buildings in Flatland. There cannot be any, since Flatland exists only in 2 dimensions.
Now, imagine that a sphere, which exists in 3 dimensions, visits Flatland. It comes down to Flatland from above, but citizens of Flatland can’t see it, because they can only perceive things which exist in two dimensions. Since they can’t “look up,” they have no way of even knowing that it’s there so long as it remains in the sky and not touching the ground.
If God exists in the metaphysical realm, the sphere is like God. It may, in fact, be there, but we would have no way of knowing this. Since we don’t have the ability to “look up,” we can’t see him, measure him, or interact with him. Until, that is, he interacts with us.
Imagine now that the sphere “touches down” in Flatland. Since the citizens of Flatland live in two dimensions, they don’t see a sphere; they can only see a dot, which grows and grows into a big circle (a cross section) as the sphere travels deeper into the ground, and then once it passes its widest point, the circle gets smaller and smaller, until it turns back into a dot, then “disappears” altogether. To the citizens of Flatland, it appears as though this thing just came out of nowhere. They can’t explain where it came from or where it went without postulating another dimension or some kind of other realm:
So, back to our analogy: It is possible that there exists another realm, beyond ours (meta-physical), and that’s where God exists or existed. It is possible that we are unable to see or measure that realm using the tools we have, since those tools only seem to work in our realm. But it is incorrect to say that we cannot apply science, which only measures “the natural,” to God, who is supernatural, so long as you also want to make the claim that God has ever interacted with the natural world (as Christianity necessarily does).
The reason for this is clear in our analogy: While the sphere is floating above the 2-dimensional plane, it’s true that we can’t see or measure it, or even tell if it exists. But the instant it “touches down,” we can! We have that little dot where it’s touching our realm. And we can see and measure that dot as it grows into a big circle, and as that circle shrinks, and as it turns back into a dot. This sort of measurement is within our realm and is possible using the tools of science. I have no problem (except for Ockham’s Razor) with postulating a purely metaphysical God, but that necessarily excludes belief in miracles, including the resurrection.
If Christians want to argue that Jesus resurrected, simply saying he was able to do this supernaturally is not an explanation. We still want to know how, and since Jesus’s body existed in this realm, this is a question that medical science can explore. If Jed wants to argue that we survive our deaths (via souls), simply postulating the existence of souls in another realm is not an explanation. We still want to know how our personalities are transferred across that threshold, and because that transfer occurs (at least halfway) in our realm, medical science can ask – and answer – these questions. The fact that there is absolutely no evidence that this happens on our side is evidence that we, indeed, likely do not “survive” our bodily deaths. Further, we can examine exactly what does happen to the energy and matter in our bodies at the moments of and after our deaths, and we can see that nothing unexplained is going on: The activity stops, and the energy that made up our bodies goes on to do other things. Our bodies get cold when we die, because the heat dissipates into the surrounding air, for example.
The point here is that we can understand the supernatural, because all the supernatural has ever been is simply “stuff we haven’t been able to explain yet.” This is otherwise known as the god of the gaps argument. Lightning is scary! A god must be doing it! Therefore, Zeus. The sun moves across the sky! A god must be doing it! Therefore, Apollo. People get diseases! A god must be doing it! Therefore, demons. There are a bunch of different kinds of animals! A god must be doing it! Therefore, Yahweh.
The fact of the matter is, we have excellent scientific explanations for lightning, sunrise/sunset, and why we see diversity in the animal kingdom. These were once mysteries, but so far, it has never been the right answer to say that a god was doing it. Why start now?
Lacking a time machine, we may never be able to fully answer where our universe came from, but in the immortal words of Tim Minchin, “Throughout history, every mystery, ever solved, has turned out to be not magic.”
I think we’re on the right track.
Until next time!
- Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin. Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
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Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too! 
