Why The Christian God Cannot Be Proven Without The Bible

A thought experiment: Image you’ve never read or heard of the Bible and don’t know anything about religion(s). Now think about yourself and the world around you. Also think about the breadth of the entire universe while you’re at it. Is there anything about your body, the planet Earth, and the universe at large that SPECIFICALLY points to a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being that created the universe who also exists outside of the universe? Moreover, is there anything about your body, the planet Earth, and the universe at large that SPECIFICALLY points to the plans or desires of this entity? 

No.

The greatest problem facing the validity of the creator-god myth is something that doesn’t get brought up enough, if at all. 100% of the time, knowledge of a such a god precedes the alleged evidence found in nature for such a deity’s existence. No one ever in their right mind* with no knowledge of religion has ever looked around themselves and at nature and said, “This is all so incredible, a single entity of some sort must’ve created everything.” No one would say this having any knowledge of how complex things are created and built. While some complex objects can be built by a single designer and engineer, we know that this is no small feat and requires lots of time; typically more than six 24-hour days. There is also every indication that the more complex something is to design and build, the more people are required to complete that task. The Empire State Building in New York City had four architects and required hundreds of people to build it. No one, not even a person who knows next to nothing about erecting buildings would say of the Empire State Building that it looks like something a single person designed and built.

[*By ‘in their right mind,’ we should say ‘in possession of analytic skills’ as primitive men obviously possessed little in the way of reason. Modern man still doesn’t.]

Every single time, knowledge about a religion exists prior to viewing one’s self, the Earth, and the universe through that lens to conclude what one sees aligns with and affirms their beliefs. Here, we should ask why, then, are scriptures the only thing that establishes the existence of a creator-god? Why isn’t the existence of any such deity (and their plans) obvious from our existence and the world around us. A person left to their own devices, growing up alone and never coming into contact with another person would not come to the conclusion of the biblical god, for example. There is absolutely nothing about our bodies, our minds, the world outside of us, or the universe beyond Earth that specifically states that we should obey the 10 Commandments or accept Jesus as our Savior, for instance. No one is born with that specific knowledge. While Christians are fond of saying everyone is born a sinner (thanks to Original Sin), at the same time atheists are fond of saying everyone is born an atheist, the only difference being is that the atheist can’t be disputed and that’s no small thing.

It might be objected that, well, a book is just the way a monotheistic god goes about teaching people about his existence and the need to be saved. I can’t help but think, though, that imprinting his existence and desires directly into our minds without the need for other people’s input would be a much better idea, especially considering you risk eternal damnation for not believing in him. Considering that, God does not seem too wise to me when I can think of a better way of doing things, and particularly in the creation of humans. In creating a person, I would also re-design the knee, which is a poorly ‘designed’ joint. I would dispense with much of the universe as well, seeing how humans will never traverse most of that space. So why would I worship a deity I can outsmart on matters of design? Why would I worship a deity whose own book is the only way to ‘truly’ know them be so obtuse as to lead to numerous sects of Christianity that all profess to be the One True Religion? If this deity did exist, I wouldn’t have much respect for their intellect.

So the challenge to apologists stands: Is there anything about your body, the planet Earth, and the universe at large that SPECIFICALLY points to a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being that created the universe who also exists outside of the universe? Moreover, is there anything about your body, the planet Earth, and the universe at large that SPECIFICALLY points to the plans or desires of this entity?

I already know (because I’m omniscient) that at least one Apologist will chime in with DNA as their proof. Only, the complex structure of DNA does not speak to a single creator as I’ve already pointed out, nor does the complexity of DNA tell us anything about the plans or desires of any deity beyond the proclivity to reproduce.

I’ll be waiting a long time for a good answer because all apologists are already tainted by and biased towards their belief, unable to be objective. Meanwhile, I am willing to be objective because I am rational, open to the possibility a creator-god exists given the appropriate proofs, those proofs being arguments or evidence of that single creator as described in the monotheistic traditions that do not fail, that cannot be objected to.

Come, Watson, come. The Game is afoot.

People Have Rights Ideas Do Not

“Why won’t you die?”

“Beneath this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea...and ideas are bulletproof.” – V in V for Vendetta

I’ve been coming across a recurring theme when perusing the social media of New Atheist who are desperately trying to seem compassionate while dismissing the foolhardy beliefs of theists; the theme that people deserve rights or respect but that their beliefs or ideas do not. I seem to keep hearing, “People have rights. Ideas do not.”

My first question is this: How do you divorce beliefs or ideas from the people that hold them particularly when beliefs or ideas make up the core of a person’s identity? Many people identify themselves along the lines of their beliefs, such as being Christian, Jew or Muslim but also along national, ethnic or social lines. If you give no rights to ideas or have no respect for the ideas a person holds, exactly who or what are you extending rights or respect to? Should we have extended rights or respect to Adolph Hitler the being as divorced from his genocidal tendencies? ‘Cause that’s where the argument winds up going.

The problem is this: Once you try to divorce people from their beliefs and ideas, the rights and respect left to bestow are upon the shell of a human being. As long as more than one person is around, there exists a social construct from which people set themselves apart from the other person (that is, identity). If that ability to form an identity is removed, all that is left is a biological human being who for all intents and purposes might as well be an empty shell. In trying to deny identity – or at least an identity New Atheists do not like – is to deny an aspect of humanity that people often use to position themselves in a special place within the animal kingdom. I find it peculiar that (liberal) New Atheists want to bestow rights and grant respect to the biological entities that people are while at the same time denying that a fetus is a person or that it is okay to terminate a brain-dead patient. What is a person? we are inclined to ask New Atheists. There appears to be an inconsistency in the New Atheist line of reasoning regarding rights and respect (at least when the reasoning is taken to its fullest extent).

I contend that beliefs and ideas are equally important if not more important than the people who hold them.* First, because as I’ve implied, people are their beliefs and ideas so long as there are social interactions. Moreover, when people put their beliefs and ideas into action, beliefs and ideas exit the realm of abstraction and into the realm of recorded history. We also tend to remember people for their beliefs and their ideas instead of the people as mere biological entities.

[*But not by necessity since people are not important by necessity. Refer to my blog Why I Am Not A Humanist for clarification.]

Second, I have to wonder, where would the world be without beliefs and ideas? The answer to that question is a double-edged sword, of course, as without beliefs or ideas, human beings would have never invented the wheel or religion. In the case of religion, look at what happens when some people, such as ISIS, with particular beliefs or ideas do not afford any rights or respect to the beliefs of others; personhood is withheld from a victim and a beheading or sexual slavery is the consequence. It is easy for New Atheists to say that they don’t have to grant rights to or respect theistic beliefs and ideas, but granting a person rights and respect is surely a difficult thing to do when the theist’s beliefs and ideas are dismissed. Kindly reference pretty much all of recorded history if you don’t believe me.

Granted, it seems obvious that some beliefs or ideas are more valid than others but how do we choose which are important and which are not? We can easily say that freedom is a good idea that should be granted some rights or respect, but most of us are saying that from the position of relatively free people with no one to club us for agreeing. Naturally, we also have to ask exactly how free we are supposed to be to retain any hope that freedom is indeed a good idea. But, you never see New Atheists – or anyone else for that matter – getting down to these kinds of nitty-gritty details. If there are any difficulties in the New Atheist assertion that beliefs and ideas should be formed only when there is suitable evidence for them, they are such that beliefs must always be open to revision (easier said than done) to say nothing of the difficulties in trying to determine exactly when an inference based upon evidence is deemed justifiable. I would also challenge any New Atheist to prove that all the beliefs they hold are warranted by evidence. To this New Atheists will likely reply that most of the beliefs or ideas people hold are harmless until certain – particularly theistic – beliefs or ideas are put into action. But as I’ve said many times before, there is no historical evidence that indicates a global community of atheists would be any better than the world such as it is now. So why is this belief being held onto to fiercely by New Atheists? But I digress.

I’m not saying rights or respect should be granted to ideas out of hand; certainly ideas – all ideas – should be open to examination and criticism. But New Atheists need to concede that when they criticize ideas, they are criticizing a person. That person may become offended, which is fine since there is no legislation or unwritten societal rule that prohibits all offensive criticism. People don’t have a right to not be offended.* Oh, so I guess sometimes people don’t have rights. Hmph!

[*At least not in the U.S.; the EU is working on it, though.]

“People have rights. Ideas do not,” is in itself an idea which in no way need be granted any rights or respect. It’s one of quips that looks cute at first glance but loses meaning if you think about it for more than a second. There certainly isn’t any evidence for what New Atheists are trying to assert here. Better luck next time, gang.

The Asshats of Philosophy

Philosophy has a major problem, namely, the number of people who consider themselves capable of doing philosophy with any amount of integrity. I’ve got news for those of you who think you’re doing philosophy when you’re reading jokers like Aristotle or Kant: You’re not doing philosophy. Doing philosophy is reading Aristotle or Kant and thinking about why they are right or wrong (Aristotle or Kant are both wrong on several accounts, but what philosopher isn’t?). Instead, what appears to happen is that a person reads something from someone like Aristotle or Kant that sounds clever or that they agree with (because they already thought the same thing) and end their thinking at that point. In cases where they don’t end their thinking about a given philosopher’s assertion or general idea on the table, their thinking is routinely searching for arguments to strengthen what they already agree with, dispensing with the skepticism that is necessary to do good philosophy since any amount of skepticism will probably undermine what they are comfortable believing. Presumably this is due to the need to believe something at some point, which often results in sloppy thinking.

I routinely challenge the assertions of so-called rational atheists on atheist-related threads and what happens on a routine basis are ad hominem attacks against me simply because I choose to challenge what they believe or the reasons why they believe certain things. Basically, if you don’t kowtow to the party’s line, you’re evil in their view. As we all know, this is what theists do to outsiders and what many atheists proclaim to hate about theists. Meanwhile, many atheists do the exact same thing and don’t even seem to realize it. Not a socially uber-liberal femi-Nazi supporter? Evil. Support a single viewpoint with an opposing political party? Evil. Don’t think theists are necessarily worse people than atheists? Evil. But, people are arrogant and love nothing more than to proclaim their righteousness no matter how wrong they may be; atheists are no exception. And like the attitude of theists atheist claim to hate, so-called rational atheists are just as pig-headed and stubborn, unwilling to budge on their beliefs.

If you don’t believe me, ask a so-called rational atheist what it would take to change their mind about the existence of God. (Atheists often employ this kind of question against theists. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, someone once said.) Their answer is always the same as a theist’s when such a question is posed to them: nothing. Why? One answer would be that they have no way of telling a god apart from a sufficiently powerful or knowledgeable alien. That is, if the god in question appeared to violate the laws of physics in some way, we as a species do not possess sufficient enough knowledge to know whether the laws of physics have actually been broken (which harkens back to not knowing how much a knowledgeable alien knows). Another answer would be that even if said being could prove they created us, creation does not entail that the entity in question is a god. (Do we program or even expect robots to view human beings as gods because we created them? Only in the movies.) The point is, you cannot call yourself rational if you are unwilling to change your mind.

This is where any so-called rational atheist will roll their eyes because no one is willing to change their mind that one plus one equals two. It’s a stubborn belief because it appears so rational to the point it is intuitive, but one can easily think of counter-examples if one takes one plus one out of its prevailing mathematical context. Sure, one plus one equals two, but one has to rely on context to make that assertion true. Not changing one’s mind on the existence of God is much the same way as many atheists view God existence in the same context, as that of a (supposedly) physical being like you or me. Myself? I am willing to change my mind on God’s existence, which upon internal examination would have more to do with me wanting to believe in a god than the arguments for God’s existence, almost all of which I find specious. Perhaps as an exercise in critical thinking, a future blog will try to come up with arguments in favor of God’s existence. You will not see any so-called rational atheist taking on such an assignment, though. It’s because they are not the philosophers they think they are.

Here’s a quick test that strengthens my assertion. Ask a so-called rational atheist if they are a Humanist. (Some will answer “yes,” some will say “no.”) For those that answer yes, ask them if they subscribe to the Humanist notion that all people have inherent worth. (They must, if they identify as a Humanist.) Now ask them where that inherent worth comes from. They cannot say; their belief that all people are born with inherent worth is simply what they wish to believe. Or are they going to say that worth is inherent from the mere act of being born? Really, says who? Is that some kind of instinctual desire, not unlike the instinctual desire to beat stupid people about the head? It’s a nonsensical belief backed by no scientific evidence or rational reasoning. But, like the theist who will not admit they’re pretending to know something they do not, the so-called rational atheist does the same thing, just with a different belief.

This is what makes some people asshats. Take George W. Bush for example, when asked who his favorite philosopher is, answers, “Jesus.” Jesus was not a philosopher – he said such-and-such is the way it is and there is no room for doubt. That’s not philosophy and that’s why GWB is an asshat. So the next time you think you’re doing philosophy and you think you’ve come to some concrete answer, it’s no longer philosophy; you’ve either entered the realm of science or are completely wrong. My money is on the latter.

Does Religion Make People Bad?

The latest wave of atheism – New Atheism – has come together as a functional unit within the last few years to actively promote reason and science (but mostly science because there must be evidence for scientific beliefs) over superstition. New Atheists seek to eradicate religion based on the assertion that people who hold religious beliefs are essentially harmful to society, if not themselves. Ask any militant atheist why they would like to see religion abolished and you’re likely to get an answer to the effect, “Just look at all the wars that religion has started!” or “Religion is just a means by which people control one another.” To these charges I say first of all, the evidence is not there that most wars are religious in nature. That is a positively false assertion. Second, religion is no more a means to control people than most forms of government. There is also the unwritten social contract; is that not a mean by which to control people? Just because one doesn’t like the form of control in their given culture (Christianity in the U.S. for example) doesn’t lend any weight to assertions about religion being used to control people. Take away religion and people will surely think of other ways to control each other. That much is obvious.

You may also hear words such as these from Portland State University’s Dr. Peter Boghossian on why religion is bad, “Faith is pretending to know something you don’t know,” meaning, there is no evidence for religious beliefs and we shouldn’t hold any belief without evidence. I’d surely agree with Dr. Boghossian except that people – including Dr. Boghossian – hold beliefs without evidence all the time; this is another assertion that isn’t exclusive to religious beliefs. At any rate, Dr. Boghossian believes being religious means you cannot reason correctly and if one cannot reason correctly, one is likely to visit their irrationality on the rest of society. Essential, he is saying that religious beliefs make for bad people. 

Is that true, does holding religious beliefs make people behave in a way that is harmful to society? It may be true that countries that are less religious appear to score higher on surveys about happiness, but is this actually due to the fact that such countries are less religious or are there other factors at work? The U.S., for example, is often cited as the most religious industrialized country and scores somewhere in the middle of countries surveyed on happiness levels. However, there is great economic disparity in the U.S. as well as political divisions and racial tensions, to name several factors that may be contributing to the country’s mediocre happiness level. Thus, one cannot simply state that the U.S. is an unhappy country because most of its citizens are religious; that’s absurd. Of course, New Atheists will be quick to say religious beliefs are the primary contributor to political divisions and racial tension in the U.S. (even though religion would once again not be the sole contributing factor and cannot be shown to be the primary cause). Even if such a defense were true, religion doesn’t explain the U.S.’s incredible economic disparity.

Moreover, it would be reasonable to assume that if everyone in any given culture or country believed and followed the tenets of one single religion where that religion dominated the culture or country both socially and economically, the culture or country would score reasonably high when their happiness level was surveyed. (Granted, it is possible some people may answer they are happy when they are not out of fear, but we cannot possibly know they are lying without brain scanning/imaging.) The people insisting that religion is harmful to society are the people who do not want to be subjected to or live by the tenets of religions because said religious beliefs conflict with the way they want to behave. The struggle for New Atheists is to gain individual freedom by abolishing the beliefs that stand in their way. (Theists do have a point when charging atheists with wanting to behave in whatever manner pleases them, but we must note that such a charge is not a defense since theists likewise want to behave in a way that suits themselves.) I do believe New Atheists are correct to raise such an issue when states like Texas are explicit in their charters that atheists are not allowed to hold office. However, is religion really to blame for Texas’ law or do Texans simply fear people too much unlike themselves? Fearing people outside our circle, group, clan, etc. is again something that is not particular to religious belief. Non-U.S. citizens cannot hold the U.S. presidency; that’s not a matter of religious belief. 

I can see how people with religious beliefs can come off as bad people based upon observing them bluntly insist that their religion is the one true religion and if you don’t believe it you’re going to Hell. (That or they insist you must believe because they believe it.) Once again, again, shouting at people that the belief you hold is the one true belief is not particular to religion; conspiracy theorists come to mind. Religious people can also seem particularly horrible if you grew up with them and your individual freedoms were infringed for a good part of your life. We get it; you’re bitter. Fair enough. But I must insist that religion is not what made such parents or siblings control another family member. If I may cite my own childhood experience, my father certainly tried to control me but he never used religion to do it. It’s not religion at work. Religion is not what makes people want to control each other or what makes them irrational. The desire for control, whether over the world or over other people, and the ability to be irrational is as old as the human race. Our species pre-dates religion. There is no “chicken or the egg” riddle here. People have to already be irrational on some level prior to accepting religion.

If New Atheists want to be respected on the basis of having evidence for their beliefs, they should try actually analyzing their evidence, asking questions that do not simply confirm their bias, and give up their beliefs where the evidence is lacking. Religion is obviously not what makes people bad; if you took away religion people would still treat each other with contempt, if not something worse. A recent article in Time magazine (Dec 2013) highlights something of a gender war in the happy, non-religious country of Sweden, where gender pronouns are being done away with while male-bashing is becoming a cultural norm. Is it too early to tell if this is good or bad for society? The point is, in this instance, religion isn’t responsible for the suppression of a group of people. 

I don’t like being the bearer of bad news for New Atheists, not since their primal instincts will drive them to insist I am wrong and drive me out of town for not believing what they believe. They can believe it all they want, but being free of religious beliefs doesn’t make someone any better for society than anyone else.  All evidence suggests that multiple factors are responsible for whether a person behaves beneficially for society or not. Leave it to so-called “smart people” to oversimplify the issue.