Fallacious: Strawman

When I first noticed that Dr. Lisle of Answers in Genesis had published an article on the strawman fallacy, I started snickering before I even read it – mostly because Lisle has committed repeated strawman fallacies in nearly all of his  other  fallacy  articles.

I will readily agree that some people are guilty of strawmanning the theist position. Sometimes it occurs in the context of the argument, and sometimes not. I think one of the biggest mistakes atheist commit is assuming that if you're taking to a self-identified Christian, that they believe a certain thing (such as the existence of hell, for example). Since Christians believe a huge variety of things, it's really important not to strawman your opponent by assuming they believe in even the most basic Christian doctrine – they might not.

So here we go my analysis of Dr. Lisles treatment of the strawman

The straw-man fallacy is when a person misrepresents his opponent's position and then proceeds to refute that misrepresentation (i.e., the "straw man") rather than what his opponent actually claims.
Here's an example:

"Creationists do not believe that animals change. But clearly, animals do change. So, creationists are mistaken."

I have never actually heard anyone say this. It appears that Dr. Lisle is creating a strawman of strawman arguments!

Such a misrepresentation could be unintentional; it could be that a particular evolutionist simply misunderstands what a creationist is teaching. Or the fallacy could be quite deliberate. That, of course, is a dishonest approach, yet it is quite common in origins debates.

It could also mean that the creationist misunderstand what the evolutionist is saying. Really, I've never heard an evolutionist claim this. Lisle says this is quite common, so I sure wish he would back up his claim that evolutionists actually claim this with a link. If I said, "creationists often strawman the atheist position by claiming 'atheists want to kill god with guns, but clearly you cannot kill what you do not believe in'" I would be making a strawman creationist strawman. Nice.

Even in cases where the misrepresentation is unintentional, there is still a degree of liability. After all, the arguer should have done sufficient research and studied what it is the opponent actually teaches. We would certainly be willing to overlook minor misunderstandings, particularly where a position is complex or nuanced (though the critic should still be corrected on the issue). However, there are a number of cases where the creationist position is so clear that misrepresentations by evolutionists are simply inexcusable. The following are a few examples.

Creationists believe in a lot of different things, so I am not entirely sure that the creationist position is "so clear".

If an evolutionist were to claim, "Creationists don't believe in science," this would be a straw-man fallacy. Creationists do believe in science. There are several full-time Ph.D. scientists on the Answers in Genesis staff. I've argued on this website, as in my book, that biblical creation is what makes science possible.

There is a footnote here: "It could also be an example of equivocation if the evolutionist conflates operational science with origins science or science with evolution."

It could also be an example of equivocation to equivocate the AiG "scientists" with real scientists. Sorry, but evolution is a science. I'd explain why this is the case for the umpteenth time,but I trust that my readers are intelligent enough to find reputable sources or search my site for an explanation. Suffice to say, Lisle offers no explanation as to why evolution is not science – instead, he simply asserts that it isn't and that an evolutionist is equivocating by saying it is. If evolution is a science, and creationists do not believe in evolution, than creationists do not believe in science with regard to evolution. It is a strawman to say that creationists do not believe in any science, but to take the words of someone making the claim "creationists do not believe in science" to mean literally that they do not believe in any science whatsoever is another strawman of strawmans.

Someone may claim, "Creationists believe in the fixity of species." However, this is certainly not the mainstream biblical creationist position. There may be a few individuals that hold to such a concept, but it is not the position advocated by most creationists. Thus, the generalization "creationists believe . . ." is false.

Okay, fair enough. It is better to say, "some creationists believe…" but we can at least say, "creationists believe in creation" without being false.

Likewise, the claim, "Creationists say there are no good mutations" is not representative of what biblical creationists teach. Generally, we say that mutations do not add brand-new, creative information to the genome and are thus in the "wrong direction" to make evolution happen. But we do believe that mutations can result in traits that increase survival value under certain conditions.

I'd really like some evidence that this is the entire claim being made. Who says these things? Without that information, this is yet another example of a strawman strawman.

"Answers in Genesis is pushing to get creation to be taught in public schools alongside evolution."

This is definitely false. Answers in Genesis as a ministry is not about political or legal change. Rather, we are about defending the Bible from the very first verse and teaching other Christians to do the same. Although this may eventually result in a changed political and legal situation, we do not (as a ministry) attempt to change laws or get involved in politics.

What? If you desire for creation to be taught in public schools, and you write articles explaining why creation should get taught in public schools, and you advocate in print and on the radio for creation to be taught in public schools, then you are pushing to get creation taught in public schools! This wordsmithing is blindingly transparent. When someone says, "X is pushing for Y" they are not necessarily saying, "X attempts to change laws of get involved in politics of Y". Once again, Dr. Lisle strawmans a strawman –poorly, I might add. It must be false that I am pushing for a rational examination of religion and alternative medicine because I am not about political or legal change – I have not attempted to change laws or get involved in politics either.

"The Bible teaches that the earth has literal pillars and corners and cannot be moved. It is clearly wrong."

This is a misrepresentation of Scripture and therefore constitutes a straw-man fallacy. The Bible uses figures of speech (just as we do when we say, "Tim is a pillar of the community") and poetic language at times. Referring to the cardinal directions as "corners" or the stability of the earth as not able to "be moved"
is not an error. It is entirely inappropriate for a critic to take the poetic sections of the Bible as literal—or the literal historical sections as poetic. Many objections against Scripture turn out to be straw-man fallacies.

The problem with this is that scripture can be represented in whichever way one sees fit. In order to claim that a given argument is a misrepresentation, one has to establish first that it is a misrepresentation rather than simply claiming it is so. Typically when people mention oddball Bible passages, it is not to show that the Bible is utterly wrong – it is to show that some of the Bible is metaphorical, some of it is literal, and people pretty much pick and choose which is which. Most of Biblical interpretation is a tautology – it means what it means when you want it to mean what it means, and means something else when you want to mean something else. I am reminded of a horoscope: it fits because you want it to fit, or it fits because you make it fit, or it does not fit and that is because it is metaphorical or was meant for three weeks ago or forgot to take into account your moon sign or when it said you'd be getting a lot of money it really meant your roommates were going to fill your dorm room with 10,000 sheets of crumpled up newspaper.

The claims that creationists believe in a flat earth, that we deny laws of nature, or that we take every verse of the Bible in a wooden literal sense are all baseless assertions.

Assertions that intelligent people who are arguing against creation do not typically make. I really wish Lisle would use an example of a strawman that is actually common.

Nonetheless, claiming that creationists believe in such things makes the creation position easier to discredit—but it is not a rationally cogent way to debate.

Claiming that evolutionists make such arguments makes the evolutionist position easier to discredit – but it is not a rationally cogent way to debate.

Creationists must also stay educated on both sides of the issue so that we do not commit the very same fallacy. Watch for misrepresentations of creation or other Christian teachings and be ready to point out that such straw-man arguments are fallacious; yet always do so with gentleness and respect.

Footnote: "This doesn't seem to be quite as much of an issue, perhaps because our culture is so saturated with the notion of particles-to-people evolution. Evolution is taught in virtually all public schools in the United States (and usually biblical creation is not); so, most creationists are aware of the evolution position. We should also note that all Christians have at one point been non-Christians; so, we can understand how the unbeliever thinks about things. However, non-Christians have difficulty thinking like Christians (even if they were brought up in the church) because the crucial issues require the enlightening of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the unbeliever cannot understand spiritual issues apart from God's power"

I think that some Christians who do not accept evolution understand evolution, but I have been to several creationist seminars in which the speaker clearly did not understand evolution – such as the case with people like Ray comfort or Brad Harrub, who believe evolution means a "dog can change into a fern". AiG has repeatedly demonstrated that they do not understand inference or value the scientific method – given that they have repeatedly claimed evolution is not a science.

Perhaps this last bit would be slightly truer if all Christians, while being non-Christian, were adults who were familiar with argumentation and apologetics. Most Christians, however, are Christians from an extremely young age – when their capacity to reason is not fully developed. The fact that all Christians were once non-Christians does not support the conclusion that Christians generally can understand how unbelievers think. Lisle leaves us with tautology – we don't get it because we don't believe. My arguments for rationality would not be stronger if I said, "Christians have difficulty thinking like rationalists because the crucial issues require the enlightening of rationality."

Capable

I just wanted to show everyone that I really am capable of writing a post that isn't egregiously long. See? I did it just now.

That is all.

Fallacious: bifurcation

Let's go through another of Dr. Lisle's "fallacies" on Answers in Genesis, a fallacy Lisle calls, "bifurcation". Once again, this is a great example of, "how to commit fallacies without realizing it" and unfortunately for Lisle, the fallacy-committing is right out in the open.

A person commits the fallacy of bifurcation when he or she claims that there are only two mutually exclusive possibilities—when, in fact, there is a third option. For this reason the fallacy is also known as the either-or fallacy and the false dilemma.

Not quite. Bifurcation – more commonly known as the false dilemma, is an unsound argument in which the premise is false due to logical reasons. It typically takes this form:

1. Either P or Q
   
2. P
   
3. Therefore not Q
   

The premise, either P or Q, is logically sound if it is a contradictory proposition – only exactly one can be true. It is logically unsound if the propositions are contrary – that of the two propositions, at most one will be true, but both could be false. We'll use Lisle's example, "either the traffic light is red, or it is green". Lisle says that this is obviously false, because the light could be yellow.

In fact, this is not the only option – the light could be yellow. Or, the lights could be malfunctioning, and none of them could be on. Or, someone could have replaced the yellow bulb with a purple one. Or… you get the point. The example above is an example of confusing a contradictory proposition with a contrary proposition. If we said, "the light is either red or not red" we would have a logically sound contradictory premise.

As another example, Lisle says:

A more realistic example is this:

"Either you have faith or you are rational."

This commits the fallacy of bifurcation, since there is a third possibility: we can have faith and be rational. In fact, faith is essential in order to have rationality (e.g., to make sense of laws of logic).

It is unclear from this context whether or not this is an example of a fallacy. What does Dr. Lisle mean by "faith"? Whether or not this is a fallacy is entirely contingent on that definition. I tried to find a place in which Lisle defines faith, but instead only found articles about how logic can't exist without the Bible. So by "faith" does he mean, "trust in the Bible"? I don't really know. 

If I define "faith" as, "persistent belief without evidence and despite contrary evidence" then there is no fallacy if we're talking about some specific belief. Rational people do not persist in belief even in the face of contrary evidence.

At the same time, I know a lot of people who are rational about some things and apply standard of evidence to other questions besides that of their god, and so these people can be said to both have faith and be rational. Once again, when left without context, we cannot say one way or the other whether or not this is a fallacy. But, I suppose I can buy that it is.

"Either the universe operates in a law-like fashion, or God is constantly performing miracles."

This is also fallacious because a third possibility exists: the universe operates in a law-like fashion most of the time, and God occasionally performs a miracle.

Assuming that "miracle" is defined as "When god causes the universe to not operate in a law-like fashion" than I can buy that this is a false dilemma.

Sometimes the origins debate is framed as "faith vs. reason," "science or religion," or the "Bible vs. science." These are all false dilemmas. Faith and reason are not contrary. They go well together (since all reasoning presupposes a type of faith).

Lisle has not demonstrated that reasoning presupposes faith, and thus I do not find that this premise supports his conclusion that these are false dilemmas.

Likewise, science and religion (the Christian religion to be specific) are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is the Christian system that makes sense of science and the uniformity of nature. Likewise the debate should never be framed as "the Bible vs. science," since the procedures of science are fully compatible with the Bible. In fact, science is based on the biblical worldview; science requires predictability in nature, which is only made possible by the fact that God upholds the universe in a consistent way that is congenial to human understanding. Such predictability just wouldn't make sense in a "chance" universe.

Holy crap, did you see that false dilemma there?

"Either god upholds the universe in a constant way, or science can't work"

Granted, it's implied, but since Lisle says, "The fallacy of bifurcation maybe more difficult to spot when the person merely implies that only two options exist, rather than explicitly stating this," it sees okay to point out implied instances of the false dilemma.

The whole rest of the paragraph is entirely unsupported by anything. The Bible says a lot of things that are not compatible with science. I think one of my favorite examples of Biblical science is in Genesis, when Jacob puts spotted sticks next to his flock of cattle and causes spotted or striped offspring because his flock was forced to look at the sticks:

Genesis 30:37-39 - "Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted."

I agree that science and religion don't have to be mutually exclusive, but parts of the Christian religion are mutually exclusive to science. Is Lisle saying that both science and the Bible require predictability in nature? I would contend otherwise – god breaking the laws of nature means that in the biblical worldview, nature is not predictable. God could at any time cause something contrary and unpredictable to happen.

"The Bible teaches that 'in Christ all things hold together.' But we now know that the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are what hold the universe together."

This is an example of the fallacy of bifurcation because the critic has implicitly assumed that either (1) God holds the universe together, or (2) gravity and electromagnetism do. However, these are not exclusive. "Gravity" and "electromagnetism" are simply the names we give to the way in which God holds the universe together. Laws of nature are not a replacement for God's power. Rather, they are an example of God's power.

So, either the laws of nature are a replacement for god's power, or they are examples of god's power? I smell another false dilemma.

"You must not really believe that God is going to answer your request for healing; otherwise you would not have gone to the doctor."

The implicit false dilemma here is that either the doctor will help the person or God will. But why can't it be both? God can use human actions as part of the means by which He accomplishes His will.

One point for Lisle.

On the other hand, in some situations there really are only two options; and it is not fallacious to say so. "Either my car is in the garage, or it is not the case that my car is in the garage" commits no fallacy. When Jesus states, "He who is not with Me is against Me" (Matthew 12:30, NAS), He has not committed any fallacy because God is in a position to tell us that there is no third ("neutral") option. (An attempt to be neutral toward God is sinful and, therefore, non-neutral.)⁷ The key to spotting fallacies of bifurcation is to watch for cases when only two options are presented (either explicitly or implicitly) and to consider carefully whether or not there is a third possibility.

…

…?

…!?

Oh! So whatever god says is right, even if it seems to be an example of a false dichotomy, because god is in a position to tell us that there are no other options. There are other options: your god is a Bronze Age myth. Sorry, but logically this is a fallacy, even if your god says it's not. You really can't just declare immunity from logic because god says so. Why does the other option have to be "neutral"? Have we established that "neutrality" toward god is a sin? How about an infant, who has no concept of god yet? Is that infant "against god"? What about people who have never heard of the Christian religion?

I officially declare myself to be perfect and always right. I say that you either have faith or reason. I am in the position to say so because this is my blog. So there. What, I can't claim this because I'm not god? Actually, I am god. Just try to disprove it.

Insufficient Christianity 31.1

Holey smokes, after a week-long hiatus from our refutation of C.S. Lewis (so near the end of his book, too) we're finally back. For those of you not in the know, Flimsy and I have been training our skeptical eye on C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, a book heralded by many Christians as a great example of Christian apologetics. If you'd like to read our previous chapters, click on the "C.S. Lewis" label at the bottom of the page.

This is chapter 31 of Mere Christianity, in which Lewis writes about how when you become a Christian, the Christian god will help you become a better person. According to Lewis, god does say that he will not help you unless you're perfect – he will help you all right, and by helping you he will bring you closer to perfection. The Christian god only intends to help you become perfect and he will help you with nothing else.

Because of this, Lewis says his god is like a dentist – fixing all of your mouth when you've only got a toothache in one tooth:

Now, if I may put it that way, Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of (like masturbation or physical cowardice) or which is obviously spoiling daily life (like bad temper or drunkenness). Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment.

So, god gives you the "full treatment" for things like masturbation, and as such you cannot be expected to get away with any bad things – even if you think you're getting away with it, god intends to fix you. Because of this Christianity is really difficult and also has the associated cost of letting god "get this job through". God does not care what kind of suffering you have in life – the goal is perfection in heaven, and so if you let him, god will do everything he can even if it makes your life miserable at times.

What bothers me about this is that life in this case ends up not being particularly important for life's sake – life is important because your behaviors during life will result in eternal glory or eternal punishment. This reminds me of all the educational opportunities denied to Flimsy when he was a child for the goal of hiding him from reality to increase his chances of remaining "saved".

I know I have a lot of Christians who read this blog, so let me put it this way: You're not a Muslim. In many Muslim societies, women are treated like chattel and forced to cover almost their entire bodies in order to keep them pure. To a Muslim, eternal life is more important than being able to freely dress and converse with men with whom you are not related. Should women be denied these rights in favor of the "life" after death? If the answer is some variation of, "no", then you understand how I feel when children are denied any opportunity at knowledge, intellectual pursuit or ethical freedom.

The rest of this chapter is about how god will be pleased with your feeble attempts at perfection and so the goal of perfection should not discourage you. God, however, wants us to desire to be like saints, because even if we cannot actually achieve that goal, the desire can help motivate us to behave. No particular arguments are given, rather we're simply told that whenever illness, money troubles, or new types of temptation come along, it is because god is disappointed with us and wants to "force us up to a higher level". If we don't understand why god is doing this to us, it is our fault for not understanding things:

That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected), he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.

In the end, if we really let him, God will make us awesome:

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were 'gods' and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.

This last paragraph reminds me of that movie and social movement The Secret. If a Christian sees someone having illness or money troubles, can't they conclude that their troubles are not due to circumstance but due to god being angry at them? Is this why my friends who use wheelchairs have all had the experience where a Christian approached them and told them that if they just believed hard enough, prayed the right ways, or acted in a way that pleased god/Jesus, they would be able to walk again? Are there people who walk around and think that those who are unfortunate are unfortunate due to their own sinfulness and immorality?

Lest you think I am jumping to conclusions where no conclusions are warranted, here is a quote from a very famous Youtube Christian, VenomFangX:

"Many people have been bringing to my attention, they feel somehow considered by amputees. You're gonna run into a lot of these, and you gotta be aware of them, and you gotta be able to call it for what it is. So if you don't recognize them as amputees, they could probably throw you for a loop. But when you recognize them for what they are, they're just like, 'Are you joking?' Okay, let me show you an example. I can grab a box: I don't deserve to die. You've been separated from your arm in the first place. You deserve death and the loss of your arms. Amputees don't deserve their arms, they deserve to die; that's what the Bible teaches. Why should God heal amputees? He's the one who allowed you to lose your arm in the first place! So here's the real question: Why do people lose their arms? I'm just gonna take a stab at it and see what I can do. Now, I cut off my arm. So why doesn't God heal amputees? 'Cause they don't deserve their arms. They deserve to die; that's what the Bible teaches. Sorry if you don't like that! Jesus said if you're even angry with someone, you're a murderer in your heart!"

Now, obviously many theists do not believe that people who are ill or having troubles in their life are having those troubles because they deserve them. But, this kind of thinking presented by Lewis can easily cause people to excuse human injustice or other negative situations under the rationalization that those situations are in place because god is disappointed. Think hurricane Katrina.

Mere Christianity online

Fallacious: appeal to authority

I just love Dr. Lisle's series on logical fallacies over at Answers in Genesis because they are perfect examples of how some people can completely misunderstand fallacies while simultaneously making both the fallacy as inanely described and the actual fallacy as correctly described. I'm going to go over each and every one of the fallacies in his list and dismantle his treatment where dismantling is deserved. Today we're going to discuss the "Faulty Appeal to Authority".

I thought that fellow blogger Bing over at Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes did a delicious job with his treatment of this particular piece of Lisledrivel*, so I am not going to reinvent the wheel – merely expand upon his treatment and bring up a few points I think he missed (probably for the sake of not having an extensively long blog post). First, Lisle defines "faulty appeal to authority".

The faulty appeal to authority is, in a way, the opposite of the ad hominem fallacy. Whereas the ad hominem fallacy denies a claim based on the person making it, the faulty appeal to authority endorses a claim simply based on the person making it. Essentially, the faulty appeal to authority is the argument that a claim is true simply because someone else believes it.

This is not quite correct. In philosophy literature, there is such a thing as an "appeal to authority" fallacy. A "faulty appeal to authority" is a very uncommon way of phrasing this, and I could not find this particular fallacy phrased this way in any of my fallacy websites or books on logic.

An appeal to authority is a fallacy in which someone makes the argument that a particular proposition is correct because the proposition is given by a source that is commonly regarded as authoritative. The argument goes like this:

1. Source A says P
   
2. Source A is authoritative
   
3. Therefore P
   

Appeals to authority are quite important in informal logic because individuals cannot be experts on all things. Instead, we rely on the judgment of individuals who are experts in their particular field. The problem arises when an "expert" is not actually an expert in the field for which the claim is being made, or if the argument is treated as deductive logic, i.e. source says p, source is an authority, and therefore p must be true. In other words, an appeal to authority is a fallacy if the "authority" is not actually an authority in that area or if the authority is treated as infallible. Citing an actual authority on a given subject makes the proposition more likely to be true but does not guarantee its truth. An appeal to authority can never guarantee that a claim is true, but if the authority is a legitimate expert on the subject then it can make the claim more likely to be true.

The basic structure of the argument is this:

Bill believes X.

Therefore, X is true.

Of course, it is almost never stated this explicitly. Often, the person to whom the appeal is made is considered highly esteemed for one reason or another. But the truthfulness of the claim at issue is not necessarily relevant to the popularity of the individual making the claim.

Actually, Lisle is missing a necessary part of the basic structure of this argument/fallacy – Bill's status as an authority, or the second premise in my example above.

In the origins debate, the faulty appeal is often to someone who is considered an expert on a particular topic—a scientist or perhaps a theologian. For example, "Dr. Bill has a PhD in biology, and he believes in evolution." The unstated conclusion is that evolution must therefore be true or is at least likely to be true. But such an argument is fallacious. After all, we could equally point out that "Dr. Dave also has a PhD in biology, and he believes in biblical creation." The fact that other experts on the topic draw the opposite conclusion should reveal the vacuous nature of the evolutionist's argument.

It is unclear from the context of this argument that the unstated conclusion is that "evolution must therefore be true". To cry fallacy before the conclusion is given is to assume the conclusion before one is made. If the arguer in this case claimed, "Dr. Bill has a Ph.D in biology and believes in evolution, therefore evolution must be true", then one could claim that this is a fallacy. Otherwise, the statement is just that – a preposition. For all we know, the arguer intended to go on to say, "therefore some biologists believe in evolution". To cry fallacy before an argument is made is to jump the gun. It's really too bad that, "assuming the conclusion of an argument before the conclusion is given" isn't a fallacy.

Another example would be this:

"Jim has a doctorate in theology, and he says it's okay to believe in evolution and the Bible."

Again, we could certainly find many qualified theologians who would state the exact opposite. While it is okay to consider what a theologian has to say about the Bible, it is infinitely more important to consider what the Bible actually states!

The problem with this is that people disagree on "what the bible actually states". What Jim says about the Bible appears in this instance to be considering what a theologian has to say about the Bible. Again, we're given no conclusion, so without that context we cannot assume that the person mentioning Jim intends to say that because Jim believes in evolution and the Bible, that evolution and the Bible are more likely to be true or are irrefutably true.

If an expert on U.S. law claimed that the Constitution does not contain the phrase "We the people," would that make it so? We could easily refute his claim by simply reading from an actual copy of the Constitution. The fact that he is an expert does not override the evidence.

I think part of being an "expert" on U.S. law involves knowing the first words of the Constitution. Though, I will grant that what people say, whether experts or not, does not override evidence.

Next, Lisle explains that not all appeals to authority are faulty, and says that it is legitimate to consider the opinion of an expert. Obviously, I agree with this, but here is where Lisle continues to divorce himself from actual logic:

1. Appealing to an expert in an area that is not his area of expertise. Our hypothetical Dr. Bill may indeed have a PhD in biology—and that qualifies him to say something about how organisms function today. But does knowledge of how things work today necessarily imply knowledge of how things came to be? This is a separate question. The experiments Dr. Bill has done and the observations he has made have all taken place in the present world. He has no more direct observations of the ancient past than anyone else today.¹ The question of origins is a history question that deals with worldviews. It is not really a biology question, and, so, Dr. Bill's opinion on the topic of origins isn't necessarily any more qualified than any other opinion.
   

There is also a very important footnote here, "For some reason, it is common for people to think that paleontologist and geologists study the past. But this is not so. Rocks and fossils exist in the present (otherwise we wouldn't have access to them). Although there is nothing wrong with speculating about past events (e.g., how fossils or rocks formed) and then testing the plausibility of such models with experiments in the present, we should keep in mind that the past is never actually observable or open to scientific investigation

Okay. For some reason it is common for people to think that historians and theologeans study the past. But this is not so. Historical documents, the Bible, and all of its associated artifacts, scrolls and what-not exist in the present. The past is never observable or open to scientific investigation. Therefore, if biologists are not qualified to say things about origins, neither are theologians or historians qualified to say things about origins.

Truth has nothing to do with people's worldviews, and the question of origins is most emphatically not a question of history (which by Lisle's own argument is unreliable) or worldview. If I come home from work and find a large pile of dog shit on the floor, I don't need history and worldview to come to the conclusion that it was my dog, alone in my apartment all day, who shat on my floor rather than a shitgoblin. I can use inductive reasoning to arrive at the most probable conclusion.

1. 
   
   
   Failure to consider the worldview of the expert and how this might affect his interpretation of the data. We all have a world-and-life view—a philosophy that guides our understanding of the universe. When we interpret scientific and historical evidence, we use this philosophy to draw conclusions.² The fact that Dr. Bill believes in evolution means that he is predisposed to interpret the evidence in a particular way. (My point is not to fault him for this; everyone has biases. Rather, we should simply be mindful of what his biases are). A creationist with the same credentials might draw a very different conclusion from the same data. So, while I may put confidence in what Dr. Bill says about the structure of a particular protein that he has studied under the microscope, his bias against biblical creation means it would be unwise for me to trust his opinions on questions of origins.
   
   

   Footnote: "Some evolutionists might claim that they have no philosophy—that our interpretations of evidence should be "neutral" and unbiased. But this is a philosophy in and of itself, albeit a very bad one since it is self-refuting."
   
   

   
   
   

I'll just quote Bing here: "The truth of the matter is independent of what the researcher's beliefs about it are. Either something did happen or didn't happen. The difference between the scientific worldview and that of Answers in Genesis is science starts with a null hypothesis, gathers evidence, comes up with the best explanation and then tests it again, discarding what doesn't work and keeping what does. You write articles complaining about how scientists are playing unfair because they are pantsing you."

The scientific method and skepticism are not worldviews. They are tools. Bill probably also has a "bias" against any of the other religious creation stories. Similarly, I suppose we should fault Dr. Lisle for having a bias against Native American creation stories. A creationist who believes in Biblical creation means he is predisposed to interpret evidence in a particular way. A creationist has a bias against evolution, so that means it would be unwise for me to trust his opinions on questions of origins.

The point is this: how did the biologist arrive at his conclusions about evolution? Hopefully he arrived at them using the scientific method.

How exactly is interpreting evidence using the most neutral and unbiased eye self-refuting? No explanation is offered.

1. Treating a fallible expert as infallible. We should also keep in mind that even experts do not know everything. They can make mistakes even in their own field. Some new discovery may cause a scientist to change his mind about something that he thought he knew. So, at best, appealing to an expert yields only a probable conclusion. It would be fallacious to argue that something definitely must be true simply because a (fallible) expert believes it.
   

I've never met a scientist who treats the opinions of any expert as infallible. This is a deliberate strawman. I do, however, meet creationists who treat the Bible, theologians, or their pastor as infallible. Also, the fact that the body of science is amenable to new evidence is an example of the strength of science, not a weakness. Imagine where we would be if science were unchangeable.

Lisle is absolutely correct that appealing to an expert leads only to a probable conclusion, but this is true about everything – there are no guarantees.

Of course, if the expert had knowledge of everything and never lied, then there would be no fallacy in accepting his statements as absolutely true. In fact, it would be absurd to not do so under those circumstances. The Bible claims to be such an infallible source—a revelation from the God who knows everything and cannot lie.³ Thus, there is no fallacy in appealing to Scripture as absolutely authoritative. Some evolutionists have mistakenly accused creationists of committing the faulty appeal to authority on this very issue.

See how Lisle commits the fallacy of the appeal to authority here? This is quite ironic. Just because the Bible claims to be an infallible source does not mean it is, any more than Bill claiming to be an infallible source means he is an infallible source. We have not "mistakenly" claimed that this is an appeal to authority – it is a primary example of the appeal to authority – treating a fallible expert (the Bible) as infallible.

Another type of faulty appeal to authority is the appeal to the majority. This is when a person argues that a claim must be true simply because most people believe it. But, of course, just because a majority of people believe something does not make it so. History is replete with examples of when the majority was totally wrong. Truth is not decided by a vote, after all.

Creationists do this all the time. I really wish Lisle would provide examples of when creationists commit fallacies alongside "evolutionist" fallacies.

The appeal to the majority is often combined with the appeal to an expert—an appeal to the majority of experts. Evolutionists often commit this double-fallacy; they try to support their case by pointing out:

"The vast majority of scientists believe in evolution. (Therefore, evolution is very likely to be true)."

However, simply adding two fallacies together does not form a good argument! Again, we could point to many historical examples of cases where the scientific consensus was dead wrong. Yet, people

As with a single expert, it is not fallacious to consider the opinion of a group of experts. However, as before, we should consider whether they are qualified in the issue under investigation, be mindful of their worldview and biases, and keep in mind that they are fallible people with finite knowledge.

So in other words, we should ignore the majority of experts if they disagree with the ultimate authority figure – my particular brand of god. Who cares if they start with the null hypothesis, gather information, test, come up with the best hypothesis, repeat, repeat, repeat, change their minds if different evidence is presented which is sufficient to contradict prior conclusions. They are unqualified because they are ignoring the infallible Bible. Is Lisle really making this argument? Yup:

I believe that God gave people different interests and is pleased when they study hard and develop expertise on some aspect of His creation. It is commendable to esteem the opinion of experts, provided that we are discerning and never regard fallible human opinions above (or equal to) the authoritative Word of God.

*I will also throw in a few ad hominems just for fun. In case you're reading this Dr. Lisle, the ad hominems make for more entertaining reading. Screaming that they are not a logical argument is pointless. This is like me saying, "There is a cat." And you saying, "A cat is not a verb!" It will not make you look more intelligent or learned.

Fallacious: Complex Question

I've been seriously enjoying going through all of Dr. Lisle over at AIG's list of "fallacies". Here is the next installment, Dr. Lisle's treatment of the "complex question". Dr. Lisle's series of fallacies can best be described as, "how to incorrectly explain fallacies while simultaneously making the same fallacy I attempted (but failed) to explain, both by making the actual fallacy (correctly explained) and making the fallacy (incorrectly explained)." It is glorious situational irony. Here we go:

Similar to the question-begging epithet is the fallacy called complex question. This is the interrogative form of begging the question—when the arguer attempts to persuade by asking a loaded question. A classic example is this: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Either a yes or no answer would seem to imply that the person did in the past beat his wife, which may not be the case. The question is "complex" because it should be divided into two questions:

Did you ever beat your wife?

If so, have you now stopped doing this?

In order for a fallacy to occur, it has to have context – namely that of an argument. The phrase "have you stopped beating your wife" is not a fallacy by itself, even though it is given as an example of the "loaded question" fallacy. If it were in the context of confronting a man who was known to have beaten his wife in the past, it's just a question: we have established that you beat your wife, so have you stopped?

If, on the other hand, "have you stopped beating your wife" is in the context of confronting a man who we have not established is a beater of his wife, then this question is a trap: if he says "yes" meaning he has stopped beating his wife, then you can "establish" that he had beat his wife. If he says, "no" as in he has not stopped beating his wife, then you can "establish" that he beats his wife.

The "complex/loaded" question fallacy is a fallacy in which a question with a false, disputed, or question-begging presupposition is asked in the context of an argument in such a way as to trick someone into implying something they did not intend. Since a question is not an argument, simply asking a loaded question is not a logical fallacy, though it is often associated with logical fallacies. If it is in the context of an argument and used to establish a premise which is assumed in the question, then it is a fallacy. Example:

Context: *it is not yet established that Bill has beaten his wife in the past, and this is a premise that Ziztur is attempting to establish in the context of an argument between Bill and Ziztur*

Ziztur: "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Bill: "Um… yes?"

Ziztur: "Ah-ha! So you do beat your wife! I asked you if you have stopped beating your wife and you said yes. Therefore, I conclude you have beaten your wife in the past. This proves it."

Here, the fallacy I commit is assuming that Bill has beaten his wife in order to prove that Bill has beaten his wife, which is an example of circular reasoning or begging the question. Lisle gives us no such context:

Here are some common evolutionary examples of the fallacy of complex question:

"Why are creationists against science?"

This loaded question presumes that creationists are against science, which is not the case. It should have been divided:

Are creationists against science?

If so, why?

Since the answer to the first is no, the second question is not necessary.

Again, you cannot simply claim that a question is a fallacy unless we have some context. If it is in a context in which I and Lisle are disagreeing on whether or not creationists are against science, then it is a fallacy. If it is in the context of two individuals who have already established that creationists are against science, then it is not a fallacy. To Lisle, this question is a fallacy because it presumes creationists are against science, and he hides the fact that he has given no context for it by presuming that creationists are not against science! Lisle simply asserts that creationists are not against science and then claims that this "fact" is one of the reasons why this question is a fallacy. Would a good rebuttal to this be, "this loaded question presumes that creationists are against science, which is the case. Therefore, the first question is not necessary"? Not so much. But this is the same structure as Lisle's argument. The question should be divided as Lisle has done if it has not yet been established that creationists are against science. Here is an example of the loaded question in a context that establishes that the question is an example of this fallacy:

Atheist: "I do not think that god exists."

Theist: "I do think that god exists."

Atheist, "Okay, let's present arguments for or against the existence of god. You start."

*argument in which the existence of god is not established ensues until…*

Theist: "Why do you hate god so much?"

The question by the theist is an example of the loaded question fallacy because in the context of this discussion, the existence of god has not yet been established.

"Why is evolution so critical to our understanding of biology?" is fallacious because we should first ask, "Is evolution critical to our understanding of biology?"

Context! What is the freaking context, Dr. Lisle?

Watch for leading questions in evolutionary literature such as, "How were dinosaurs able to survive for millions of years?" This is the fallacy of the complex question because it should be divided:

Did dinosaurs indeed survive for millions of years?

If so, how?

Context? Context is essential to establishing whether or not this is a fallacy. Also "leading question" is also not the same as a "loaded" or "complex" question. Should we "watch out for leading questions" in creationist literature, such as, "What makes Christianity Different?", "Does science need god?" or "What is god's plan for us?" According to Lisle, we should. Moving on…

"What is the mechanism by which reptiles evolved into birds?"

Context?

"If the earth truly is 6000 years old as you creationists say, then why do we find rocks that are over 4 billion years old?"

Context!

"If creation is true, then why does all the scientific evidence point to evolution?"

Context?!

These all are fallacious questions which used biased language to persuade rather than logic.

One time, after I gave a presentation on creation, an atheist came up to me and asked, "Are you aware of the fact that . . . ?" Before he could complete the sentence, I strongly suspected that it was going to be the fallacy of the complex question. Sure enough, what he was rhetorically asserting to be a fact was not true at all. He had misunderstood some of the things I had presented and had committed some errors in reasoning as well. People sometimes use the formula "Are you aware of the fact that X?" to persuade others of X, when in fact X is logically unproved.

This paragraph has no meaning at all without the c-o-n-t-e-x-t of the actual question and I am unable to judge whether or not the "atheist" has committed the "fallacy of the complex question". Did the atheist say, "Are you aware of the fact that a worm, Nereis acuminate, has speciated through host race differentiation" or did the atheist say, "are you aware of the fact that your god does not exist"? Without this context, Lisle is merely making an assertion that he suspected that an atheist was about to commit a fallacy before he even had the chance to commit it. Perhaps his suspicion has led him to believe a fallacy is being committed when in fact one has occurred. We don't know because we do not have enough information.

Saying, "are you aware of X" is not a fallacy. It is the giving of a premise in the context of rhetorical language. In the Japanese language, when the speaker thinks he might be giving someone new information, he ends the sentence with- "yo." and says the "yo" in a higher tone. "This is Ziztur" is said, "Ziztur desu." and, "This is Ziztur, but maybe you didn't know that" is, "Ziztur desu yo." If Lisle said, "Are you aware that Jesus died for your sins" I would not cry FALLACY FALLACY YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID BECAUSE YOU DID A FALLACY I KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO DO THAT! I would say, "Please provide evidence that Jesus died for my sins."

What people judge to be a fallacy often depends on their worldview. Consider this question:

Pardon my French, but are you fucking kidding* me? Before Lisle can complete this sentence, I strongly suspect that this is going to be the fallacy of the complex question…

"Have you repented of your sins?"

A non-Christian may consider this to be a complex question and would want it divided:

Have you ever sinned?

If so, have you repented?

From a Christian worldview, however, the question is not complex because we know that all have sinned (Romans 3:23).

…

…?

…!

So, the question is not complex/loaded once we establish that sinning is a fact. Let's establish that sinning is a fact by quoting the Bible, because the Bible clearly states that sinning is a fact. If we are in a situation in which "we all have sinned" has not been established, then the question is a loaded/complex question. "Worldview" is irrelevant and does not give you a get-out-of-complex-questions-card. You can't claim that you're not begging the question by begging the question.

If Lisle can argue that his "worldview" can be used as a criteria to nullify a fallacy, then I can use my scientific, evidence based, naturalist "worldview" to nullify all of the other instances in which Lisle cried fallacy in this argument. If I argued that from a science based worldview, we know that creationists are against science, dinosaurs survived for millions of years, that rocks are 4 billion years old, and that evolution is a scientific fact and therefore none of the examples Lisle gave above are complex/loaded questions, would I be able to slither** away by saying, "what people judge to be a fallacy often depends on their worldview"? I hope not.

Along with the question-begging epithet, the complex question uses biased language in place of logical argumentation. When the evolutionists commit either of these fallacies, we must gently point out that they have not actually made a logical argument. They have rhetorically assumed what they are trying to prove and have, thus, begged the very question at issue.

Way to rhetorically assume what you're trying to prove using biased language in place of logical argumentation, Dr. Lisle.

If someone asserts a premise, he is NOT making an argument or committing a fallacy. If someone asserts an unproven premise and then uses that premise to prove itself, then it is begging the question. Is it really helpful to say (gently!), "you have not made a logical argument. You are assuming what you have tried to prove. You are begging the question" after I say, "Why are creationists against science?"? No,  because I am not making an argument that begs the question. I am asking a question based on some already assumed premise, but this is not for the purpose of proving said assumed premise. If I were to ask, "Why do some creationists believe the universe is less than 6,000 years old?" I am not trying to prove that creationists believe this. I am asking why they believe this. I am not "rhetorically assumed what I am trying to prove" at all.


*Swearing does not show a lack of creativity with language. I am going to quote my friend SaintGasoline here: Some of the highest forms of creativity have involved curse words.... [S]aying that those who curse lack creativity is so stale and cliched that it itself is an uncreative and dim-witted thing to say, you bloody shit-eating trout fuckers!"

**Slither is a lovely example of loaded language!

P.S. This is our 600th post!

Urban Health Fair, Pt.3

This is part 3 of my blog series on a visit I made to the Urban Health Fair in St. Louis. Here are parts one and two.

After Michael, Micheal's son (I'll call Mike's son Indigo from now on) and I got a book about Indigo Children, the three of us wandered over to a booth featuring a chiropractic organization. They were offering "free scans" using a surface EMG scanner.

The three of us decided that we should all get scanned. While we were waiting, Michael turned to me and said, "Aww look honey, our son is going to get his first chiropractic scan!" which gave us the perfect excuse to whip out our cameras and photograph the momentous occasion.

An EMC surface scanner is a tool used in chiropractic practices as a diagnostic tool. According to this chiropractic website:

"The Surface EMG scanner is a tool that helps [a licensed chiropractor] gain additional inforamtion (sic) about your condition. Your muscles are controlled by nerves. The Surface EMG measures how well the motor nerves are working by readying (sic) the amount of current found in the muscles. Subluxations disturb the function of the nerve causing an abnormal amount of electrical current flowing to your muscles (indicated by colours and /or abnormal patterns). This advanced tool also looks at muscle balance and thermal differences."

After reviewing 2,500+ resources, the American Academy of Neurology concluded that these devices are not an acceptable tool for measuring or diagnosis any neuromuscular disease or for diagnosing low back pain. [1] Basically, surface EMC superficially measures electrical activity an area of muscle territory. Moving a muscle at all, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, will be recorded as electrical activity. Surface EMG cannot differentiate which muscle is the origin of a signal. It does not measure "abnormal current flowing to your muscles caused by subluxations". Chiropractors have yet to show that subluxations are even real or that they cause ailments.


I work in a biomechanics lab where we frequently use EMG to record muscle activity. This involves placing electrodes on the skin at a muscle's origin and at the muscle belly, then we have people move around (typically they walk back and forth across the room). This is admittedly a highly imprecise science, and we have a large fudge factor in our results, knowing that EMG readings vary greatly due to electrode placement and even from day to day with the same placement. If a person is sitting quietly, we get tiny readings – or none, if the muscle is completely still. When they move around, we get much larger readings.

The scanning device was used on the back of our necks – essentially, it measured the muscle activity in our necks as we sat in a chair. Since people use their neck muscles to hold their head aloft, there will always be electrical activity in the neck, assuming the person is sitting up. There will also be lots of electrical activity if you're a young fidgety child.

After the three of us were scanned, we sat and waited for our results. We were first shown an image like the one pictured, that showed "normal nerve function", and then shown "our nerve function". The results made it clear that we were supposed to believe the surface EMC measured the specific nerve function of the cervical nerves from C1-C7. Surface EMG is entirely incapable of producing results this precise – and does not measure nerve conduction. As you can image, our little bars and graphs (which were only on the neck, as this is where we were scanned) showed that we were "maladjusted". In particular, Indigo's readings were much higher than ours. Painstakingly, the chiropractor walked us through our problem, talking inordinately slowly, to make sure we understood the gravity of our results:

"See this picture here? Notice how all of the lines and bars are equal, level, short and green. This is what you should look like if you are properly adjusted." We nodded. "Now, look at your results here. You will notice some differences. What do you see that is different?"

I sighed. "Some of the lines are red and very long, here at C3 on the right and here at C5 on the left. Also, there are some longer yellow lines here."

"Yes! That means that your nerves are not balanced, which could be due to a subluxation. In particular, the red lines are very bad. C1-C3 is often associated with problems in the ears, eyes, throat, and nose. It can cause things like recurring colds and allergies. Do you have a problem with colds or allergies?"

No.

Next, the chiropractor turned to Indigo's results, which showed high levels of activity particularly at C7. The Chiropractor told us that this could lead to problems with Indigo's eyes. As Michael put it, "I guess I forgot from my anatomy classes that the optic nerve goes from the eyes to the spine and then down to C7 then turns around and goes up to the brain." For the record, the ocular, auditory and gustatory systems are innervated by cranial nerves. That is, they are all located in your skull. They do not loop down to the cervical spinal cord and then back up to your eyes, nose and ears. There is no way that a "subluxation" can affect these systems – this is a basic fact of anatomy.

The chiropractor told us that children usually have higher readings because they are very active and young and thus have a high level of muscle and nerve activity. I told him that this made sense, because someone had told us he was an "indigo child". The chiropractor nodded knowingly and said something like, "Yes, I know all about indigo children, I have plenty of experience with them"

As Michael and Indigo ran off to play in the children's area, the chiropractor stopped me and let me know that people who visited them today at the health fair would be eligible for a discounted first visit to the office – something like $40 instead of the typical $120. She asked if I wanted to sign up to take advantage of the special deal. I told her I'd have to think about it, and then I walked off. Too bad they didn't scan my dog too.

I really have a problem with chiropractors treating little children. Their vertebra have not fully developed into bone yet and consist of a much larger portion of cartilage than that of the adult spine. The fact that chiropractors used to believe that polio was best treated by manipulation should be enough to send mothers and fathers running (away, that is). This would not be anything to balk at, except for the fact that many chiropractors are still against vaccines and germ theory.

1. Pullman SL, Goodin, DS, Marquinez AI, Tabbal S, Rubin R. Report of the Therpeutics and Technology Assessment Subsomittee of the American Academy of Neurology. Neurology 2000;55:171-177. Online here.
   

Creation Museum Pt.4

This is part 4 of my series of blog posts on the creation museum. You can find previous posts by clicking the "Intelligent Design" link at the bottom of the page.

As I mentioned earlier, the Creation Museum early on sets up a dichotomy between "human reason" and "god's word" and continues with this theme throughout the museum, claiming that "human reason" leads to errors because it is "arbitrary" and the literal Biblical interpretation of "god's word" leads to truth just because it's "god's word".

I'll be honest with you – it's really hard for me not to just dismiss this poster as pure ignorance and blind faith. Here, a poster with the title "Same Universe" depicts the differences between the "human reason" conception of how the universe came to be, claiming that "human reason" leads us to believe that through a timespan of billions of years, the planets, galaxies, solar system, earth, moon and continents "evolved". This is contrasted with "god's word" which says on day 1 god made light, on day 2 god made the "firmament", on day 3 god made dry land, and on day 4 god made the sun and moon.

 Essentially everything we know about cosmology, astronomy, and geology shows that this is not the way in which the world came to be. Some young universe creationists have gone so far as to reconcile this apparent discrepancy between what the Bible says and what we observe and measure by insisting that their god created the universe to appear very old, when in fact it is not. This really is no different than if I were to claim that god created the creation museum (CM) 5 minutes ago, with the appearance that it looks like it was actually a project that took several years to fund, design and build. Then, I can claim that the AiG people are all sinners for claiming that they are taking credit for god's work. How dare they claim to do god's work! They are all using their "human reason" to determine that they actually donated money to the CM, helped build the building, and laid the tile. They are using "human reason" to observe that people erected walls, designed posters, hired consultants, painted stripes in the parking lot, etc. They are using "human reason" to determine that people lovingly sculpted and clothed the robots and wax figures. Human reason is arbitrary and they need to listen to god's word – god built the museum.

What, you mean you observed all of those things happen? Your observations do not count because you're presupposing that people build museums.

When people claim that the universe is only thousands of years old, they are ignoring facts, plain and simple. But if a big part of faith involves believing despite evidence to the contrary, then the folks who believe in what the CM peddles are actually doing it right according to some religious folks. It does not matter that we observe a universe which is billions of years old, which was formed by natural processes. All of these facts can be ignored with a simple wave of the hand – god deceives some people into thinking the universe is billions of years old by making it appear to all observations and measurement as if it is billions of years old.

Urban Health Fair, Pt.2

This is part 2 of my series on an Urban Health fair that I visited a few weekends ago. The first part can be found here.

After Michael and I were given advice on how to supplement our dog with Glucosamine and fish oil capsules, we headed over to another booth. To be honest, I don't really recall what this booth was showcasing exactly, except that it had a stack of fliers held hostage by a large, smooth rock, which prevented them from blowing away in the gentle breeze. This rock was immediately taken from the table by Michael's son – who was pretty much grabbing everything in sight.

Michael's son is blonde (in contrast to my brown hair and Michael's red hair), so Michael and I exchanged amused looks when a lady behind the table at the booth told us, "Oh, your son is so obviously an indigo child. Congratulations!" I said, "really?" She went on to tell us that if we really wanted to understand our son, we should learn to interpret his dreams – his dreams would be a window into his soul and understanding them will enable us to better harness his indigo traits.

Of course, we played along. I hugged Michael's son and told him, "You hear that kid? You're an indigo!"

I actually wrote a post on indigo children way back in the near-dawn of this blog, which can be found here.

Indigo children are what some new age individuals and organizations believe is the next step in the evolution of our species. Indigo children are supposed to be more creative and intuitive than non-indigo children, and many people believe they possess enhanced capability of paranormal powers such as telepathy or psychic abilities. Some of the traits of indigo children, as described by Olena Gill (An author of books about inidgo children, who is a self-proclaimed metaphysician, life coach and indigo, are:

They:

• Are highly intuitive – can be telepathic and show extrasensory capabilities.

• Will often say seemingly 'profound' statements and have a strong interest in God – they often seem wise beyond their years.

• Are very sensitive to the environment, (can include food & additives), energy fields, electrical currents, as well as emotional sensitivity to what is happening around them.

• Are strong willed – have a determination about them, often 'warrior-like' in their personality.

• Will often 'call them as they see them' and won't hold back from doing so.

• Can have a fiery temper and demeanor – rarely wavers from the one-track mind.

• Can often be confused with having a defiant attitude – will often do the exact opposite of what they are told to do.

• Have a strong need to help others, individually or globally.

• Are often introverted and a loner.

• Like to work alone most of the time or in groups where is there is mutual cooperation and respect.

• Are seemingly antisocial until they meet up with others like them.

• Are very technologically oriented – usually are whizzes at computers or other gadgetry.

• Deal often with depression, insomnia, or bodily issues such as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and in extreme cases – energetic mania or freneticness.

• Can be misdiagnosed as ADD or ADHD.

Amusingly enough, even though I think the indigo movement is silly, in nearly all of the online "tests" for indigo traits, I score positively – what does that mean? If only there were some decent scientific studied on the phenomenon, but alas, there are… zero. Perhaps if there were decent evidence of psychic abilities, I might be inclined to believe that indigos were "evolving", but… There isn't.

Some of the "indigo" traits are vague enough that they can be said to be traits of any child, especially by a parent who already believes that indigo children are a real phenomenon. For example: being strong willed, "calling as they see them", having a fiery temper, being defiant (or "confused" for defiance), wanting to help, yet being introverted and antisocial and liking to work alone unless with their "kind", being interested in technology and experiencing depression. These are all things that children experience as they are growing from babies into adults.

The other traits – having ESP and being "sensitive to environment" are traits that are commonly misinterpreted due to cognitive bias and errors. Testing has shown again and again that psychic abilities, telepathy and ESP are indistinguishable from pure chance occurrences, except for in the all-too common instances in which outright trickery and deception are involved. Testing has also shown that "energy field" sensitivity is bunk – people who believe they are electrosensitive cannot distinguish between the presence or absence of electrical fields when properly blinded to them. Obviously, some people do have food allergies and sensitivities, but this is much rarer than people believe. The rest can be chalked up to wishful thinking – if you believe your child is psychic, you're much more likely to count the "hits", when a child says something that can be interpreted as "psychic" or "intuitive" while ignoring the misses.

A label like "ADD" or "defiant" might mean for a parent that your child is imperfect, damaged or somehow less than his peers. By labeling him an "indigo", a parent can turn this around, labeling him as evolved above his peers.

I think the whole movement is silly and possesses no scientific or rational basis. Everyone wants their children to be special, and parents should obviously nurture the natural gifts that children have – but one should not nurture and encourage defiance. Some indigo parents go so far as to essentially let their children parent themselves, saying things like, "I don't teach him, he teaches me. He leads me. He tells me what he needs".

As we walked away from the booth and grabbed some lemonade, the woman who told me my "son" was an indigo approached us and handed me a book – HOW to RAISE an INDIGO CHILD: 10 Keys to Cultivating a Child's Natural Brilliance by Barbara Condron – it was a gift! I thanked her, genuinely grateful that she wanted to gift me with a book on how to raise a kid – even if the kid isn't mine and I don't see any evidence that "indigo children" are a real phenomenon. I love getting books, even if they are on subjects that I disagree with.

Next up – nerve conduction tests and the wacky anatomy knowledge of chiropractors!

Ye Old 10 Commandments

The following is a guest post by fellow blogger Runolfr, who blogs here, among other places.

Fundamentalists are fond of claiming that the laws of the United States (or presumably any other western country they call home) are based upon the Biblical Ten Commandments. So, what are the Ten Commandments? You may be surprised.

The Ten Commandments are the orders from God that were inscribed onto stone tablets by Moses while he communed with God on Mount Sinai. Moses broke the first set of tablets when he descended from the mountain and found the Hebrews worshipping around the Golden Calf (Exodus 32), but he returned to Mount Sinai to reinscribe the tablets (Exodus 34), and only then do we learn what was actually written on them.

1. Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same.

2. Do not make cast idols.

3. Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread. For seven days eat bread made without yeast, as I commanded you. Do this at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in that month you came out of Egypt.

4. The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem all your firstborn sons. No one is to appear before me empty-handed.

5. Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest.

6. Celebrate the Feast of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year.

7. Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign LORD, the God of Israel. I will drive out nations before you and enlarge your territory, and no one will covet your land when you go up three times each year to appear before the LORD your God.

8. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast, and do not let any of the sacrifice from the Passover Feast remain until morning.

9. Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God.

10. Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk.

Exodus 34:28 specifically calls these instructions the Ten Commandments. Conspicuously absent from the list are some of the commands God shouted in Exodus 20 that fundamentalists are so obsessed with. The following commands are not part of the covenant between God and the Hebrews and are not among the Ten Commandments:

* Honor your father and your mother.
* You shall not murder.
* You shall not commit adultery.
* You shall not steal.
* You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
* You shall not covet.

The Ten Commandments include no rules for living peacefully and morally with other human beings; they are exclusively about worshipping God correctly, observing His holidays, performing rituals, offering sacrifices properly, and not using an especially inhumane method of cooking goats (who was doing that, anyway?). The reason for obeying the commands is also stated clearly: to earn God's aid in an aggressive war of conquest.
For reference, from Exodus 34 (NIV):

1 The LORD said to Moses, "Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.

10 Then the LORD said: "I am making a covenant with you. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world. The people you live among will see how awesome is the work that I, the LORD, will do for you. 11
Obey what I command you today. I will drive out before you the Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 12 Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you. 13 Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles. [a]
14 Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

15 "Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. 16 And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same.

17 "Do not make cast idols.

18 "Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread. For seven days eat bread made without yeast, as I commanded you. Do this at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in that month you came out of Egypt.

19 "The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. 20 Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem all your firstborn sons.
"No one is to appear before me empty-handed.

21 "Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest.

22 "Celebrate the Feast of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year. [b]
23 Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign LORD, the God of Israel. 24 I will drive out nations before you and enlarge your territory, and no one will covet your land when you go up three times each year to appear before the LORD your God.

25 "Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast, and do not let any of the sacrifice from the Passover Feast remain until morning.

26 "Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God.
"Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk."

27 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel." 28 Moses was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.

Urban Health Fair Pt.1

Last weekend, my friend Michael (who is the president of the St. Louis Skeptical Society) and I went with Michael's son to the Urban Health Fair in St. Louis.

The Urban Health Fair was billed as having "educational opportunities with a full day of entertainment and fun activities for all ages". It was essentially an alternative medicine health fair, featuring booths with vendors across disciplines, including chiropractic, acupuncture, Tai Chi, Massage therapy and spas, vitamin supplements, aromatherapy, yoga, the St. Louis school of metaphysics, a "green" cleaning company, Indigo massage, personal training, a bicycle company, and a holistic pet food store.

The fair took place along a closed-off block in the middle of historic St. Louis, adjacent to a park. The event featured live music, which was on a stage far enough away from the fair to be heard easily but not so close that it was louse enough to disrupt conversation. It was also a dog friendly event, so I brought my dog.

Surprisingly, there were not a whole lot of people million about between booths – much less than I expected. The largest concentration of customers was a gaggle of women surrounding a booth selling fair trade handmade purses and bags. It seemed as though there were not many more customers than people doing vending and organization.

The first booth I visited was an urban pet supply store which offered grooming as well as pet foods – the type of store that prides itself in stocking high-end dog foods, including boutique kibble, handmade human-grade dog treats, raw food diet supplies and supplements. Over at the booth, everyone fawned over my dog (who is a massive golden retriever) and a vendor asked me what kind of food I fed him. My guess is that dogs have been domesticated next to humans for thousands of years, fed on diets mainly consisting of table scraps. As such, I feed him table scraps and guy him a different kind of dog food every time a bag runs out. I avoid the cheapest stuff though. The vendor gave me a bag positively filled with samples of various dog foods – probably nearly a week's worth of food – and then asked me about his health and joints.

I knew where this was going. Glucosamine and condroitin anyone? My dog has had surgery on both of his knees – he tore the cruxiate ligaments in both and had to have metal plates put in both of his tibias. I've actually spent five thousand dollars on the bastard's knees, and he can't even get a job to pay me back. After telling this to the vendor, he told me that I should supplement my dog with glucosamine and condroitin to prevent osteoarthritis as well as give him fish oil – the latter because it contained antioxidents and the former for his joints.

First, these supplements – like all other "dietary supplements" for dogs or otherwise, have an incredibly low bar of standardization to follow – nothing even close to the content standardization, safety and efficacy testing that must be done in order to have an FDA approved drug. Natural products vary greatly in the amount of active ingredient they contain for a few reasons – the production and manufacturing process, for one. Because there is really no standardization process, the amount of active ingredient in herbal supplements can vary from bottle to bottle [1]. By, this, I do not mean that different manufacturers have different mg content stated on the bottle – I mean that the actual content of active ingredient differs from what is stated on the bottle. In the study I referenced, it varied from 59-138%.

There don't seem to be any side-effects of using glucosamine supplements aside from spending too much money or the more general instances of toxicity [2] in unregulated herbal supplements due to impurities. Herbal preparations have been known to be imbued with a plethora of unexpected ingredients not listed on the bottles, such as belladonna, salmonella, pesticides, lead, arsenic, anti-inflammatory drugs and corticosteroids [3]. Again, these are largely due to the fact that herbal supplements are an unstandardized, untested industry. Perhaps these costs and risks would be worth it if glucosamine supplements had a beneficial effect on joints (or any other body system, for that matter).

Glucosamine and controitin are both found in joints, and it is one of the things that get worn down when animals with joints made of bone get osteoarthritis. But thinking that eating these two substances or swallowing them in pill form will somehow cause their wear to be reduced in osteoarthritis makes about as much sense as thinking that swallowing semen will increase your sperm count or eating liver will cause your liver to make new liver cells. There is no evidence that glucosamine/condroitin are delivered to the joints from your digestive system. There is no evidence that these substances work any better than a placebo at reducing arthritis [4].

What about this fish oil thing? I don't really have a problem with supplementing with Omega-3 fatty acids, but el-cheapo-cod liver oil works just as well as expensive drops or pills. My dog doesn't need pills! He'll eat anything.

Stay tuned – tomorrow I'll let you in on a little secret – apparently Michael and I have a son, and it's "very clear" that he is an indigo child!

1. Russel AS, Aghazadeh-Habashi A, Jamali F. Active ingredient consistency of commercially available glucosamine sulfate products. Journal of Rhumatology 2009;36:2407-2409
   
2. De Smet PAGM. Herbal Remedies. New England Journal of Medicine 2002;347:2046-2056
   
3. De Smet PAGM, Keller K, Hänsel R, Chandler RF, eds. Adverse effects of herbal drugs. Vol. 1. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag, 1992:1-72
   
4. Clegg DO, Reda DJ, Harris CL, Klein MA, O'Dell JR, Hooper MM, Bradley JD, Bingham CO 3rd, Weisman MH, Jackson CG, Lane NE, Cush JJ, Moreland LW, Schumacher HR Jr, Oddis CV, Wolfe F, Molitor JA, Yocum DE, Schnitzer TJ, Furst DE, Sawitzke AD, Shi H, Brandt KD, Moskowitz RW, Williams HJ. Glucosamine, chondroitin sulfate, and the two in combination for painful knee osteoarthritis. New England Journal of Medicine 2006;354:795-808

Faith Infiltration: Creation Museum pt.3

After my group of friends and I left the Creation Museum bookstore, we headed into the museum itself.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Creation Museum is not laid out in the same way as other museums. In other museums, exhibits are laid out everywhere, typically so people can meander from exhibit to exhibit in an order that pleases them. The creation museum is not like this, Instead, museum-goers are led on a trail that has a clear beginning, flow of events and information, and end. It is reminiscent of a haunted house in setup – everyone experiences the museum in the same order as everyone else, so that the museum can tell a clear story.

Early on, we're presented with a theme: "Same Facts, but Different Views… Why?" and are told that these different views stem from whether or not we approach the universe using "human reason" or "God's word". We are shown through a series of posters that claim even though some people look at the same universe, plants, animals, fossils, and rocks, we come to different conclusions about those things.

The problem is not that we have the same "facts". We don't have the same facts. The universe, plants, fossils, animals and rocks are not facts – they are things that we can either have correct or incorrect facts about.

Here is a poster illustrating the dichotomy that is present throughout the museum:
 

I find this imagery fascinating: god's word is presented as a single, ancient volume of text written on a scroll, whereas "human reason" is presented as a hefty stack of books. I imagine that the designer of this poster chose this imagery for a reason. A believer might look at this and think that God's word is so easy and simple to understand, yet humans have written countless volumes of books to attempt to figure things out on their own, yet they continue to fail.
A closer examination of the text near the bottom of this picture yields this:

"Broadly speaking, "human reason" refers to "autonomous reasoning" – the idea that the human mind can determine truth independently from God's revealed truth, the Bible. Reasoning is God's gift to humankind, but He has instructed us to use the Bible as our ultimate starting point (Proverbs 1:7) and also to reject speculations that contradict God's knowledge (2 Corinthians 10:5). Philosophers and world religions that use human guesses rather than God's word as a starting point are prone to misinterpret the facts around them because their starting point is arbitrary. Every person must make a choice. Individuals must choose God's word as the starting point for all their reasoning, or start with their own arbitrary philosophy as the starting point for evaluating everything around them, including how they view the Bible"

It is interesting how "human reason" is exchanged with "human guesses" and then finally flatly labeled as "arbitrary". "Reasons" are not the same as "guesses".

I have to wonder what exactly the writer of this poster means by "arbitrary". There are four or so definitions of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. To be decided by one's liking; dependent upon will or pleasure; at the discretion or option of any one
   
2. Law. Relating to, or dependent on, the discretion of an arbiter, arbitrator, or other legally-recognized authority; discretionary, not fixed
   
3. Derived from mere opinion or preference; not based on the nature of things; hence, capricious, uncertain, varying.
   
4. Unrestrained in the exercise of will; of uncontrolled power or authority, absolute; hence, despotic, tyrannical.
   

It seems to me that all of these definitions can easily be applied to the typical conception of the Christian god. Does the Christian god decide things based on anyone's liking but his own? Does he decide things based on some other god's will? Aren't his laws supposedly at his discretion? Is the Christian god not described as being unrestrained in the exercise of will? Is it not described as having uncontrolled power and absolute authority?

If human reason is arbitrary, than the reasoning of the Christian god is infinitely more arbitrary.

I have no more reason to use the Bible as a starting point for all of my reasoning than I do any other sacred text. As such, I find the idea of using the Bible as a starting point for all reasoning wholly unconvincing and specious. If one begins with their conclusion already in mind, then one can twist the facts in any way they wish in order to support their already established conclusion. This is exactly what this museum does. Additionally, this sort of reasoning is not amenable to new facts. It is unchangeable. It does not matter what sort of evidence one can present – if it contradicts the bible, it is to be rejected.Why would "facts" matter at all, then?

Faith Infiltration: Creationist Museum Pt.2

I think I will continue to review the Creation Museum by posting pictures of interesting things I found there and then commenting on them. To that end, here is the second picture.

I am not sure what I think of this shirt. It's so… smug. So… authoritarian. So… abrasive.

Now, before you comment and tell me that smug abrasive shirts are favored by atheists all over the place, I must let you know that I am fully aware of this. A cursory search on Cafepress or other custom t-shirt sites will deliver a plethora of in-your-face infidel fashion. We can be bold, mean, crude motherfuckers. We like filthy language, too.

I found this shirt inside the Creation Museum bookstore. The bookstore contained the largest selection of anti-evolution books I have ever seen, the vast majority of which were published by the good folks at AiG. The bookstore is called "Dragon Hall". My group and I did not spend too much time in there, but I did thumb through several children's books about the history of the universe as told by the Bible, and a book about how evolution poisons our youth.

I wonder though, what this shirt is actually saying. It certainly cannot be saying that plastic Darwin fish attached to the back of cars will physically bow when the rapture occurs. It seems clear to me that the message is, "You mock our religion and our Jesus now, but one day he will come back and then you'll know The Truth™."

Insufficient Christianity: 30.1

Onto the final stretches of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.  Chapter 30 is all about Lewis' idea of whether Christianity is "easy" or "hard."

We take as starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else - call it `morality' or 'decent behaviour,' or 'the good of society'- has claims on this self: claims which interfere with its own desires. What we mean by 'being good' is giving in to those claims. Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be what we call 'wrong': well, we must give them up. Other things, which the self did not want to do, turn out to be what we call 'right': well, we shall have to do them. . . .

As long as we are thinking that way, one or other of two results is likely to follow. Either we give up trying to be good, or else we become very unhappy indeed. 

This dichotomy is at the very center of the point that Lewis is trying to make here.  In Lewis' world, you're simply very, very unlikely to give up and/or resist any immoral desires you might have, indulge any benign desires you might have, and manage to end up reasonably happy, all things considered.

This is simply wrong, on the face of it.  If I had to mention by name the one thing that makes me happy, one single concept that makes me personally mentally and physically content, Ziztur is almost certainly it.  I also love philosophy, ethics, politics, and nerdy gaming shit like miniature strategy games and fighting games.  If nothing else, good friends and a campfire, a smoke and a cold soda, etc. is a good recipe for personal contentment.

Yes, I occasionally think that my personal happiness would be well served by stealing money from people.  One could potentially make the argument that my personal, physical pleasure would be served if I simply raped any woman that I find attractive.  I've even contemplated actual, physical violence at times, often while listening to Christian fundamentalists or Fox News.  There's no question that I could make more money if I were dishonest with my customers at work.  I would never do any of these things, because they are flatly, obviously immoral.  I have somehow managed to live a reasonably content and satisfying life, up to this point, while pretty thoroughly denying my most morally repugnant impulses.  Is this really such a bizarre situation?  Have I really beaten the odds?  Really?

This is very important; it's the entirety of Lewis' argument.  His whole point here is that we have only the following likely choices:

1.  Try to be good without Jesus, realize how difficult, virtually impossible, that is, and give up trying to be good altogether (WTF?).

2.  Try to be good without Jesus, realize how difficult, virtually impossible, that is, and manage to come close, but you'll end up being downright fucking miserable about it (again, what the cock is this shit?).

3.  Follow Jesus.  This is somehow both easy and hard:

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says `Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked - the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.'

So . . . Christianity is very hard, because you have to give up your whole self - because Christianity's standard is far more strict than any other.  Christianity is also very easy, however, because Jesus.

It really seems like someone wants to have their cake and eat it too.  Lewis, and any other Christians out there, have to keep in mind that to a skeptic, this sounds like:  "Christianity is just so hard, I mean, look how awesome we Christians are for doing this really hard thing!"  AND "Being a Christian is so easy!  Jesus can do anything!  He does all the work for us, so you may as well punch off the clock and join us, there's nothing to it at all!"

Some Christians have a more internally coherent worldview, and this coherence is far more likely to convince us nonbelievers.  You could set up Christianity as this great and epic challenge, as C.S. Lewis does at times, an incredible task that we puny mortals must rise to meet, or go the route of the Ray Comforts of the world, and declare that ANY attempt at moral goodness is completely worthless to God (admittedly, this latter option is unlikely to convince many non-Christians, being blatantly immoral and all, but it's at least got that little bit of coherence going on).

The next chapter is much in the same vein; all worthless humans and how perfect we are if we let Jesus make us so.  Only three more chapters to go!

Mere Christianity Online

CHUCK NORRIS

. . . fails.

His latest column on World Net Daily describes, in a nutshell, Chuck Norris' greatest fears, entirely concerning the Obama administration.

It's a softer and relational Washington, with whom international bonds are more important than national borders and boundaries.

This is considered a bad thing?  This approach does not preclude the enforcement of international moral directives, it simply makes diplomacy, mutual respect, and peace the highest priorities.  Seriously, if you're going to argue that "national borders" are actually more important than "international bonds," and that a government statement to the contrary actually scares you, it really does sound like you might as well say that conflict or war is more entertaining than peace.

It's a more secular Washington, which says that the country is no longer a "Christian nation."

You all know my response to this.  America is no more a "Christian nation" than it is a "White European nation."  Nobody ever specifies wat they mean when they say that America is a Christian nation.  Do they mean that America happens to contain a majority of Christians?  Nobody is disputing that.  Based on a bill that Chuck Norris links to in another column, however, it seems clear that many people actually mean that America is a theocracy, even if we don't always run our theocracy correctly.  It seems simple to me - The Constitution of the United States of America does not mention Jesus or the Bible (the two defining characteristics of Christianity) one single time.  Nor does the Declaration of Independence (though it does mention a vague 'creator' of some kind, it must also be pointed out that the DoI also has no legal authority whatsoever).  The United States is simply not a theocracy.  Our founding documents declare the exact opposite.  We are, by definition, a secular nation, regardless of the religions that America's citizens follow.

It's a more liberal Washington, which has enacted more Left-leaning legislation in its first year than any previous administration.

No discussion of what this horrible avalanche of Marxist legislation actually contains.  No, really, what's he actually complaining about here?  The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?  Axing some credit card company's bullshit?  What is it?  Really, what's happened so far that's so terrible?  I'm genuinely confused here.

It's a more generous Washington, from whom handouts, bailouts and borrowing are granted and given at record-breaking political speed.

While there is some legitimate debate about some of these items, I have to point out that the bit about "record-breaking" speed is just plain wrong.  Obama is not yet anywhere near inflating our debt as much as Bush managed to accomplish.  Sorry, when you tell us progressive folks to just sit down and shut up when your conservative president blows insane amounts of money on completely meaningless shit, you just don't get to complain when a liberal president spends lots of government money in an honest effort to help people.

This deep concern of Norris' for government spending is all the more hilarious considering his main point:

But my greatest concern, I must confess, is that it's a kinder and gentler Washington, to whom the global war on terror has turned into an "Overseas Contingency Operation."

Yep, his greatest fear . . . is that we'll actually try to avoid war, instead of actively fomenting it.

Look, I do conclude that there are (very limited, extremely rare) circumstances in which outright warfare is the just and rational response, but the "War on Terror" sure as hell isn't an example of such.  All that Norris really says over the course of the column is basically that 9/11 was really, really bad and that terrorists are really, really scary.

What I really don't understand is how he can literally write a whole column about how he's scared that our current president won't attack countries and kill people as much as he'd like, because it's so important to keep our country safe, when the last several columns of his have been all about how terrified he is of national health care.  He's even scared that Obama isn't a citizen of the United States, stubbornly insisting that the president should issue an executive order to Hawaii to release the original copy of his birth certificate, when we already have several copies posted and even clippings from Hawaiian newspapers at the time.

This is almost conscious, willful resistance to an evidence-based worldview.  More about Chuck Norris' logical shortcomings in the future, to be sure.

"Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind."  - Bruce Lee

Faith Infiltration: Creationist Museum Pt 1

A few weekends ago, Flimsy and I, along with some of our friends, drove all the way from St. Louis to Kentucky to tour the Creation Museum

The Creation Museum is a project of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis. I took a bunch of pictures of the displays there, so I will spend a few posts going over some of the interesting things I found there.

I know that the Creation Museum has somewhat been toured to death, but I don't feel bad adding my particular voice to the cacophony of voices describing, cataloguing, and disseminating information about it.

When we first arrived at the museum, we were greeted by a security guard outside the door who asked to thoroughly search my backpack. He wanted to peer into every zippered area and had me remove my camera so that he could make sure no knives or prohibited items went in to the museum. I am told by several people that this is a common procedure. While he was searching, he remarked that he was just looking for knives or glass. I joked with him, exclaiming, "What? I can't bring my scary weapons in? This totally ruins my day" and pretending to turn around. He replied sorrowfully, "I know… I really hate to ruin your day," with a smile.

The museum itself is quite nicely constructed, so I completely agree with other accounts that there was really quite a bit of thought put in to making the museum look beautiful. Once we purchased our tickets, we headed to the lobby, where a large replica mastodon skeleton dominated the brightly-lit space. A plaque at the mastodon read:

"The Burning Tree Mastadon: December 12, 1989, Newark, Ohio – While digging to create a new water hazard on the Burning Tree golf course, the dragline's shovel hit the skull of this buried mastodon. Excavation of the pond halted while a scientific team unearthed the fossil, which turned out to be one of the largest and most complete mastodon skeletons ever found. Mastodons and mammoths are related to modern elephants, and all of them appear to be descendants of the original elephant "kind" that God created around six thousand years ago. This mastodon lived during the ice age, which took place a few centuries after the Genesis Flood."

"More than just bones: a mass of intestinal material was found within the ribcage of the Burning Tree Mastodon. Investigation of the mass revealed the giant's latest meal as well as bacteria thought to be thousands of years old. This mastodon had feasted on swamp grasses, mosses, water lilies, seeds and leaves, as opposed to what scientists believe mastodons primarily ate – twigs and cones from evergreen trees. The bacteria that were taken from the gut were largely enterobacter cloacae, which is common in intestines of other animals. At the time of their discovery, the bacteria were the oldest living microbes ever found, and Discover magazine recognized as one of the top 50 stories of 1991."

There are several interesting claims here which highlight themes that will be repeated throughout the museum. The first I'd like to address is this nebulous term, "kind". When biblical literalists speak of "kind" and then say that "one kind cannot evolve into another kind" they rarely give a precise definition for what a "kind" is. Mastodons and mammoths are related to modern elephants, but what is an elephant "kind" exactly? In the classification of living things, animals and plants are classified using a universal system and language. The classification follows in this order: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Since elephants and mammoths are classified by scientists in the family elephantidae, and mastodons are classified in the family mammutidae , grouping elephants and mastodons together as descendants of the same "kind" means that the approximate equivalent of "kind" to the classification system is close to "order". This is important, because throughout the museum, plaques and videos insist that evolution is unscientific because we have "never observed one kind changing into another kind". What they are claiming is something similar to, "evolution does not happen because we have not seen one order change into another order". The museum claims repeatedly that any differentiation of living things below "kind/order" does occur and did occur after the flood.

The plaque also reads that mastodons lived after the flood and that the ice age occurred after the flood. I wonder how long they believe the ice age lasted? One does not have to look far to find AiG's revisionist history:

"An ice age is defined as a time of extensive glacial activity in which substantially more of the land is covered by ice. During the Ice Age that ended several thousand years ago, 30 percent of the land surface of the earth was covered by ice (Figures 1 and 2). In North America an ice sheet covered almost all of Canada and the northern United States."

How odd that no one mentioned this ice age in writings from "several thousand years ago"…

The other interesting claim is that of the contents of the stomach contents of the mastodon. While the information appears factual, the purpose of the information being given seems to be to show that scientists were wrong about what mastodons ate. This is another recurring theme of the museum, where early on a dichotomy is set up between "gods word" and "human reason". This plaque is just the beginning.

Insufficient Christianity 29.1

 After this chapter, there are only four more chapters of Mere Christianity! I think Flimsy and I have decided to either tackle a Lee Strobel book that has not previously been tackled excessively, or Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, a book recommended by a commenter. Our other option of interest is the Alcoholic's Anonymous Handbook. We're still waiting for the philosophy book to come in the mail before we decide which we'd like to do next. Anyway, onward to C.S. Lewis!

Lewis spends the first part of this chapter explaining that one of the things his god wants us to do is pretend to be Christ-like, despite the fact that we realize Chris is utterly amazing and we are but pieces of trash in comparison. He says that this pretending will make us more Christlike, much in the same way that smiling when you are unhappy might make your unhappiness fizzle away. Children do this all the time – though they are not adults, they play games of pretend where they imagine that they are adults, and this is fodder for future adulthood. Lewis insists that when you do this, the real god will be at your side to show you the right way to be Christian and to turn you into a Christlike being. The reader is told again that Christians who are very faithful are so real and alive whereas non-Christians are shallow, hollow "tin" versions of real people.

It seems to me that this is a version of dehumanization, only instead, non-Christians are mere humans while Christians are a sort of spiritual superhuman. According to Lewis, Christians are "coming alive", they have a life that non-Christians do not have. Non-Christians are but a shadowy and symbolic resemblance to Christians. Christians are like a place, whereas non-Christians are like a photo of that place. Christians are like men, and non-Christians are like statues of those men.

To be fair, what Lewis actually says is that the "spiritual life" is the higher life. The spiritual life, obviously, is the life you get when you're a Christian. But the implication is clear. Lewis believes that when you become a Christian, you go from being a shadow and symbolic representation of real people, to a real and alive person. Of course, perhaps some Christians will say that they really aren't better. I call doublespeak. If you claim that one subset of humans are on a higher plane of existence than another subset of humans, than you are dehumanizing – not in the literal sense of the word but with the same effect – you are asserting the superiority of one group over another and thus asserting that one group s inferior to the other. When people become things, they become dispensable.

Similarly, if I were to assert that when one becomes an atheist, one's mind becomes open to freely think and freely question, my unstated assertion is that people who are not atheists do not have the ability to think openly, freely think and freely question. If I were to assert that when a Christian deconverts and becomes an atheist, it is like turning a stone sculpture of a person into a real, in the flesh person, my unstated assertion is that Christians are mere representations of real people.

To Lewis, even the good works done by humans are only by the power of Jesus. He encourages us to dismiss all of the help we have received from humans as not due to their pure unselfishness but due to Christ:

"You may say `I've never had the sense of being helped by an invisible Christ, but I often have been helped by other human beings.' That is rather like the woman in the first war who said that if there were a bread shortage it would not bother her house because they always ate toast. If there is no bread there will be no toast. If there were no help from Christ, there would be no help from other human beings. He works on us in all sorts of ways: not only through what we think is our 'religious life'. He works through Nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti-Christian. When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going-provided he does it for honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents-the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before. But above all, He works on us through each other."

Apparently Jesus is all around us, mirroring himself whether we are Christians or not, so that we may at times unconsciously leads other people to Christ. This is especially true if you're a Christian, such that "you might say that when two Christians are following Christ together there is not twice as much Christianity as when they are apart, but sixteen times as much." Dude. Christianity can be measured in units! Let's call one unit of Christianity a CU and one Christian a ©. One © following Christ together is 1 CU, but two © following Christ together are 16 CU!

Doing a little math, it seems that Clearly a CU is ©⁴. So one © is 1⁴ CU. Two © are 2⁴ CU = 16CU. Clearly then, three © are 3⁴ = 81CU. A whole congregation of 300 members sitting in pews for Sunday services are a whopping 8,100,000,000 units of Christianity. I wonder what a unit of atheist (AU) is per atheist?

Okay, fine, I'm digressing again. Lewis finishes the chapter by waxing poetically about how when people become Christians they kill that tired old, shadowy natural self and are literally reborn into a new special Christlike person. After this, of course, we start to notice just how sinful and bad we are, which of course means that non-Christians are simply blind and ignorant to how terrible they are. It all sounds very nice and wonderful to someone who is a Christian but I can completely understand how this type of thinking has been used in the past to commit terrible atrocities against non-Christians. If you think you have the spiritual highground because you "realize" how sinful and bad you are, you believe you can reduce your sinfulness of your own accord. Someone who you believe is unaware of how sinful they are cannot reduce their sinfulness of their own accord, because they do not "realize" how sinful they are. If you believe someone's eternal soul is on the line here, then you can be justified in oppressing them in the name of saving their souls and diminishing their efforts at finding the truth as efforts of blind Chihuahua's to climb Mount Everest. The problem is, that there is no reason for me to believe that Lewis, or anyone else, has found the spiritual highground.

To put it another way: Muslims believe they have the spiritual highground too. It is not that they are "evil islamofascists who just hate freedom".

Mere Christianity online

Insufficient Christianity 28.1

Admittedly, I did not so much as analyze the last chapter of Mere Christianity as read it and go off on a random tangent about how our lives really are worth living even if the universe does not have a purpose. Lewis basically spent all of the last chapter (chapter 27) comparing humans to tin soldiers and saying that god created us as tin soldiers who would eventually become "real flesh" and that this was akin to humans becoming Christians.

In this chapter, Lewis answers two questions from his critics. One individual asks Lewis, "why, if God wanted sons instead of 'toy soldiers,' He did not beget many sons at the outset instead of first making toy soldiers and then bringing them to life by such a difficult and painful process."

Lewis says that there are two answers to this question: one is easy to understand, and the other is not. Let's look at the first, easy answer:

"The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away from God centuries ago. They were able to do this because He gave them free will: He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness."

Now, I often wonder why a perfect god would punish his creation for behaving exactly as he planned to have them behave. One could say that if I gave birth to a child, I would certainly punish my child for misbehaving, and god is doing the same thing. However this is not an appropriate analogy because though I "made" my child in the sense that I copulated and then grew and birthed him, I did not "make" him in the same sense that god supposedly made the human race. God punishing the entire human race for using their free will to sin is kind of like me punishing my child for eating with a spoon after I have taught him to eat with a spoon and repeatedly told him that it is his choice to eat with a spoon or not.

Also, since when is it just to punish people for mistakes their great great great great great great … great grandparents did? Basically, the Christian god is punishing us for being human. It's like punishing Lewis' tin soldiers for being unable to be easily oxidized in air. The tin soldier can't help but me made of Sn*, yet without Sn, the tin soldier would not be tin at all.

And the difficult answer:

"All Christians are agreed that there is, in the full and original sense, only one 'Son of God'. If we insist on asking 'But could there have been many?' we find ourselves in very deep water. Have the words 'Could have been' any sense at all when applied to God? You can say that one particular finite thing 'could have been' different from what it is, because it would have been different if something else had been different, and the something else would have been different if some third thing had been different, and so on. (The letters on this page would have been red if the printer had used red ink, and he would have used red ink if he had been instructed to, and so on.) But when you are talking about God i.e. about the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend-it is nonsensical to ask if It could have been otherwise. "

Well that's fine, but when people say, "Could god have done things X way" they are asking for the individual on the other end of the conversation to imagine a hypothetical situation. It is not nonsensical to ask people to imagine a hypothetical situation that is contrary to fact and then take that hypothetical situation to some conclusion. Similarly, even though it is a "fact" that I have been living with Flimsy for about a year, I can easily imagine a hypothetical situation in which that did not occur. That and, Lewis has still failed to establish that his god is an irreducible brute fact.

He goes on to say that it does not make sense of god begetting more than one son, because if he did then we would have to invent some sort of space or distance in order to say that the two are separate things. I don't see how this is a particular problem given that Lewis and other creationists have already invented some sort of eternal time in which god resides in order for the universe to have not existed and then began to exist. There had to, then, be a time before the universe was made. So basically, he is coming up with an ac hoc justification for why there can't be more than one son of god. I think the whole paragraph is pretty silly:

"I find a difficulty about the very idea of the Father begetting many sons from all eternity. In order to be many they would have to be somehow different from one another. Two pennies have the same shape. How are they two? By occupying different places and containing different atoms. In other words, to think of them as different, we have had to bring in space and matter; in fact we have had to bring in 'Nature' or the created universe. I can understand the distinction between the Father and the Son without bringing in space or matter, because the one begets and the other is begotten. The Father's relation to the Son is not the same as the Son's relation to the Father. But if there were several sons they would all be related to one another and to the Father in the same way. How would they differ from one another? One does not notice the difficulty at first, of course. One thinks one can form the idea of several 'sons'. But when I think closely, I find that the idea seemed possible only because I was vaguely imagining them as human forms standing about together in some kind of space. In other words, though I pretended to be thinking about something that exists before any universe was made, I was really smuggling in the picture of a universe and putting that something inside it. When I stop doing that and still try to think of the Father begetting many sons `before all worlds' I find I am not really thinking of anything. The idea fades away into mere words. (Was Nature-space and time and matter - created precisely in order to make many-ness possible? Is there perhaps no other way of getting many eternal spirits except by first making many natural creatures, in a universe, and then spiritualising them? But of course all this is guesswork.)

So what Lewis is saying is that imagining the idea of more than one son creates more questions than it answers and so the idea of multiple sons does not solve any problems or make much sense. But Lewis' god is the same way, as that god brings up tons of questions in order to solve a painful few.

The second criticism Lewis addresses is the idea of individuality. He says that we must remember that we are both part of the human race: "You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. On the other hand when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are 'no business of yours,' remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist."

He goes on to say that the devil will get us if we decide that we dislike one of these two errors in thinking worse than the other, because the devil will lead us to be drawn gradually away from the one we dislike and into the one we don't mind so much. I realize at this point that Lewis is running with Christianity and largely speaking to the converted, but if he wants to provide a more compelling argument as to why dislike of totalitarianism over individualism or vice-versa might lead one to become a totalitarianist or an individualist, a justification other than "the devil will lead you to do this" might make a wee bit more sense. There really isn't any evidence that dislike of individualism will lead you on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.

*Okay, this joke may be a little too obscure for some people. Tin's symbol is Sn, and it is a metal that does not easily oxidize in air.

Chick Tracts: Charlie's Ants

Ah, yes, another Chick tract that unwittingly illustrates the superiority of atheism and secular humanism over Christian doctrine.

In this lovely gospel story, young Charlie is trying to warn his little ant friends that the land on which they live will become flooded, killing them all.  I particularly love the fourth page, where Charlie gets frustrated that the ants don't understand his frantic screeching at them, and beats them to death in dim-witted wrath instead.  I'm always fascinated by the inability of fundamentalists to recognize their portrayal of God as a pathetic, vindictive, tantrum-throwing child, even when it's so painfully obvious that this is indeed their perspective of the Almighty.

Of course, we also have to point out that becoming an ant himself is not "the only way he could warn them."  He could simply put them in a jar and move them himself.  The whole premise on which this story is told is completely devoid of logic.  Is God incapable of doing this?

Obviously, the Christian's response is that God must allow us to have free will, thus allowing us to choose whether we want to spend eternity with him.  This dichotomy must assume that God is somehow incapable of allowing us to live forever in a way that torment us with horrible pain and agony (but also not forcing us to live with him).  Charlie could do this, if he wanted; he could move the ants somewhere safe, and then leave them be, not interfering with them further.  Why is God incapable of this?  Would Charlie really be abusing the ants by moving them against their will, thereby saving their lives, when they obviously don't understand the entire situation?

Which leads us into another interesting fact:  While Charlie wouldn't be willing to become an ant or suffer death for his little friends, he also isn't the one who will flood their home and kill them all.  Despite his fear of becoming an ant and then dying, despite his almost total lack of maturity and self-control demonstrated by his punching of the ants who could never reasonably be expected to understand him, he is clearly distraught over their deaths.  God, as the tract puts it, is the one who "cannot allow sin into heaven."  Presumably God is the one who set up the afterlife with only two places that a "soul" could possibly go, either heaven or hell.

The illustration would literally be far more accurate if Charlie stood over the anthill, declared that all the ants had to believe in and accept their god, Charlie, and their savior, the glass jar, and they would be saved.  He gives them a few minutes to make their choice, and then turns on the hose.

Organic continues to be bullshit

We've got evidence that organic food is not more nutritious and doesn't taste any different than nonorganic food. But nutrition and taste are not the only reasons people support buying organic goods. Organic is said to be a sustainable form of agriculture. It puts less potentially dangerous chemicals into the environment. It reduces fuel costs through less importation of food. It supports independent farmers rather than huge corporations. Taste and nutrition be damned, organic is like recycling: people feel good doing their part to help the environment.

There are emerging issues in the Organic industry which may spell death for another of these particular pro-organic arguments; that organic foods reduces fuel costs though less importation of food and supports independent farmers rather than huge corporations.

Increasingly, large corporations are getting wind of the fact that consumers are willing to pay a price premium for organic foods. Organic foods were once confined to a scant few independently-owned shops or farmer's markets in urban areas and college towns. Less than a decade ago, organic foods were in such low demand that dedicated organic farmers often sold their organic produce into conventional markets. Now, organic foods are in such high demand that there are shortages of supplies for farming.

Now, large corporations such as General Mills, Kelloggs and Dean Foods are gaining access to the organic markets by purchasing and taking over successful organic companies. Organic foods can be found in any supermarket and on the shelves of consumer giants such as Wal-mart.

To meet supply needs and increase profit margins, the large food corporations are turning to overseas markets for organic foods. Nearly half of the organic farmers and handlers with USDA organic certification are from countries other than the US (16,000 in the US and 11,000 elsewhere spread among 100 different countries) and this is especially true for vegetables and soybeans.

It seems as though corporatization of organic foods may spell death for organic foods offering a sure-fire way to support the local economy and reduce food transportation costs.

Insufficient Christianity: 27.1

Lewis spends all of chapter 27 talking about how Jesus died for our sins, and to be honest I don't really feel as though I have anything insightful or profound to say about most of the chapter. He writes again about how dirty and filthy and worthless people are unless they are real Christians and imbued with the Holy Spirit. Suffice to say, Lewis echoes typical Christian theology about not being able to understand or be a part of god without Jesus, though he makes no mention of being unable to be drawn into the Holy Spirit unless you profess belief. I suppose that is coming though.


Lewis says that the "Natural life" which is the type of life that nonchristians necessarily have, "is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right. It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."


Couldn't we say the same thing Lewis says of "dirty people" of "clean people"? That is, people who are brought up unexposed to dirt and always kept clean are afraid to get dirty.


I can see here why some anti-evolutionists get offended at the idea that humans and other animals are descended from a common ancestor. To say that we are descended from a common ancestor is to say that we have the "natural life". It is to say that we are selfish exploiters of everything including fellow humans, that we hate things stronger than we are, that we want to be petted and admired. Perhaps it would be better to show that Lewis and others who think the way he does are mistaken about what the "natural life" means.


To me, the implications of there being no god are that no one is special or chosen above anyone else by an ultimate power. It means that this life is the only life we have and that this life is not a stepping stone on the way to eternity or a switch that leads us to either damnation and destruction or eternal life. Because this life is the only one we have and other people's lives are the only lives they have, exploiting people or infringing on their rights is one of the highest offenses imaginable. Because this earth was not tailor-made with us in mind by a god with infinite power, we have to take care of it as best we can so that those who are born after we are long gone continue to have the best means at a fulfilling life. It means realizing we won the genetic lottery, given that so many possible combinations of DNA will never get the chance at life. It means realizing just how insignificant we are, realizing that there is no ultimate purpose in this universe and then saying, "So what? I'll make my life have a purpose even though one day all of humanity will be gone and the universe will go on ticking perfectly fine without us" rather than expecting something else to hand us some purpose that was decided for us before we were born. Being given a purpose is easy – just find out what it is and do it. Giving yourself a purpose is something I will probably wrestle with my entire life. Making a decision about my own purpose is made more difficult by people who insist that without their god life is meaningless.


Sometimes I look at something beautiful – my relationship with Flimsy, for example – and I realize that in all likelihood, relationships like that have a maximum length of 80 years or less. After that, something beautiful is lost forever. It does not return. It does not live on. We are intricate, complex, amazing creatures, and each one of us is a finite, tiny piece of the world that will one day just… cease. Even things that are more permanent cannot last forever. I look at the city I live in, and I realize that most of these buildings, these roads, these communities – will go on without me. They will stay. A building has more permanence than a human being but is still so temporary. One day, all of those buildings and streets will be gone.


If the earth is to become an inhospitable ball of charred rock, does it really matter if something is there to cry over the annihilation of life and every last visage of human existence? Honestly, I'd love to be there rather than nowhere at all, but wanting something does not make it real, so I intend to make the best of the things I know for certain that I have.


Impermanence is not grounds for exploitation. It is grounds for ensuring that in our impermanence we do not take away the ability for anyone else to make the most of their own impermanence.

Liberal, MO: Atheist Utopia

I live in St. Louis, MO, and have for my entire life (and so have my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great-great grandparents. It's hard to be more native St. Lou than I am). The people here are crazy and so St. Louisans can often be heard saying, "I am not from Missouri, I am from St. Louis", but we do have the best state slogan. Missouri's official slogan is one with which every atheist/skeptic can relate; we're "The Show-Me State". 

Amusingly enough, Missouri is home to the only town in the country founded specifically for the purpose of creating a freethinking atheist utopia.

That town is Liberal, Missouri. 

Believe it or not, Liberal, Missouri (which is in the southwest corner of the state and is .8 miles square with a census of about 800 people) was started as an atheist, "freethinker" utopia in 1880 by George Walser, an anti-religionist, agnostic lawyer. The goal was for atheists to come and live in a churchless and saloonless town where people could raise their children without religion. Walser wanted a place where freethinkers could live to their standards of decency and morality in a quiet, unmolested way, away from missionaries the barrage of religion. Christians were not allowed, and Liberal was advertised as " the only town of its size in the United States without a priest, preacher, church, saloon, God, Jesus, hell or devil."

Shortly after the city was funded, a Christian by the name of H. H. Waggonerbought a parcel of land to be an "addition" to Liberal for the express purpose of "live[ing] unmolested and watch with contempt the doings of their infidel neighbors" and "inducing immigration of Christians who would be strong enough to out number the Liberals and defeat the enterprise." What's an infidel city to do when Christians try to defeat a freethinking city? Why, build a big barbed-wire fence around it, obviously. Apparently the whole town, including the "infidel women" got involved to build the fence. 

From the December 1, 1938 edition of the Sikeston (Missouri) Herald:

"The founder of this unique community experiment, George H. Walser, was born in Indiana in 1834. He went to Barton county immediately after the war, where he was soon recognized as one of the best lawyers in southwest Missouri. He was elected prosecuting attorney there, and became a member of the 25th assembly. With an eye for future developments he purchased 2,000 acres (8 km²) of land and selected the site of Liberal as the home of an experiment in intellectual community living. He was an agnostic and placed himself in open opposition to organized religion. "With one foot upon the neck of priestcraft and the other upon the rock of truth," he declared, "we have thrown our banner to the breeze and challenge the world to produce a better cause for the devotion of man than that of a grand, noble and perfect humanity." In harmony with the purpose for organizing the town a number of unusual institutions designed to promote the ideal community were tried during the 1880's and 1890's. The first of these was a Sunday Morning Instruction School, where children were taught from "Youth Liberal Guide" and from various works on physics, chemistry, and other sciences. In another class organized for older young people elementary experiments in the physical sciences were performed under the supervision of teachers whose avowed function was to encourage and direct free intelligent discussion. In the Mental Liberty Hall lectures were given each Sunday evening, and scientists, philosophers, socialists, atheists, Protestant ministers and Catholic priests were invited to speak—respectable decorum being the only limitation placed upon any speaker. Large enthusiastic crowds gathered each week in the interest of mental liberty. The Liberal Normal School and Business Institute was another institution organized by Walser to promote liberal education free from the bias of Christian theology. This school was well advertised and soon had a large enrollment. According to a tract published in 1885, the Liberal Normal School and Business Institute was "located in the liberal town, taught by liberal teachers and courted only the patronage of liberal patrons." Out of this organization developed Free Thought University, which opened in 1886 with a staff of seven teachers.

There were actually people at the train stations warning Christians that they were not welcome – so Christians barraged the town on mission to convert the heathens:

As news spread about Liberal, Christians came to convert the town. Walser tried to keep them out by posting his followers at the Liberal train station to tell passengers that if they were Christians they were not welcome, according to an 1896 article in The Kansas City Star. They came anyway. Some Christians quietly bought homes and began holding religious services. Walser would interrupt them and even put a stop to it after he proved to a court that the services were being held on properties he still partly owned. The Christians then bought land next to Liberal and moved more than a dozen houses there from Liberal. The last building had a sign attached that said: "And the Lord said: Get thee out of Sodom." Walser then built a barbed wire fence to keep them out of Liberal. (Kansas City Star on Saturday, December 22, 2001)

According to a transcription of a book on the history of Liberal, a pastor described as a "great controversialist" wrote a pamphlet and an op-ed to the St. Louis Post Dispatch (1885):

The boast about the sobriety of the town is false. But few of the infidels are total abstainers. Liquor can be obtained at three different places in this town of 300 inhabitants. More drunken infidels can be seen in a year in Liberal than drunken Christians among one hundred times as many church members during the same time. Swearing is the common form of speech in Liberal, and nearly every inhabitant, old and young, swears habitually. Girls and boys swear on the streets, playground, and at home. Fully half of the females will swear, and a large number swear habitually.... Lack of reverence for parents and of obedience to them is the rule. There are more grass widows, grass widowers and people living together, who have former companions living, than in any other town of ten times the population.... A good portion of the few books that are read are of the class that decency keeps under lock and key.... These infidels...can spend for dances and shows ten times as much as they spend on their liberalism. These dances are corrupting the youth of the surrounding country with infidelity and immorality. There is no lack of loose women at these dances. Since Liberal was started there has not been an average of one birth per year of infidel parents. Feticide is universal. The physicians of the place say that a large portion of their practice has been trying to save females from consequences of feticide. In no town is slander more prevalent, or the charges more vile. If one were to accept what the inhabitants say of each other, he would conclude that there is a hell, including all Liberal, and that its inhabitants are the devils.

Apparently shortly after writing his pamphlet, the pastor was arrested for embezzlement, though he claims he was arrested for libel against Liberal. Also apparently, the saloons did not move in until the churches moved in. Liberal soon dissolved into a regular old town.

This writer from Apologetics Press wrote a piece on Liberal, MO, claiming that the town fell as an atheist utopia because atheists cannot be trusted and that towns can't survive without God:

"It took only a few short years for Liberal's unattractiveness and inconsistency to be exposed. People cannot exclude God from the equation, and expect to remain a "sober, trustworthy" town. Godlessness equals unruliness, which in turn makes a repugnant, immoral people. The town of Liberal was a failure.

How about the fact that Christians were constantly barraging them from all sides? That makes a town pretty damn unattractive. Essentially, Liberal was doomed to failure due to the constant barrage of Christians trying to destroy the town or at least look on as if Liberal was some kind of godless freak show. The authoritarianism probably didn't help either, and one can expect that if you attempt to erect a town based on an unpopular philosophical worldview in a country whose inhabitants believe you are one of the root causes of all social ills, your town is pretty much doomed before you break ground.
 

Of course, the founder eventually converted to spiritualism and then Christianity before he died. Figures.

Liberal, MO - your absolutely astounding history will be well-remembered in the heart of this Show-Me State native. xoxoxoxo

Stuff [group] Likes

I cannot believe I have never seen this website before: Stuff Christian Culture Likes. It's a spin-off of Stuff White People Like and Stuff Christians Like.

Also, there's Stuff Atheists Like!

One of these days, the "Stuff [group] Likes" blogs will be cliche and outdated... It hasn't happened yet though. I suppose I could mark things *I* like with the tag "Stuff Ziztur Likes"...

Insufficient Christianity: 26.1

I'm trying out using Word 2007 to create blog posts. I have no idea how well this is going to work out, but we shall see!

In chapter 25 of Mere Christianity, Lewis writes about "Good Infection", which is his explanation of the Holy Spirit.

"I begin this chapter by asking you to get a certain picture clear in your minds. Imagine two books lying on a table one on top of the other. Obviously the bottom book is keeping the other one up-supporting it. It is because of the underneath book that the top one is resting, say, two inches from the surface of the table instead of touching the table. Let us call the underneath book A and the top one B. The position of A is causing the position of B. That is clear? Now let us imagine - it could not really happen, of course, but it will do for an illustration -let us imagine that both books have been in that position for ever and ever. In that case B's position would always have been resulting from A's position. But all the same, A's position would not have existed before B's position. In other words the result does not come after the cause. Of course, results usually do: you eat the cucumber first and have the indigestion afterwards. But it is not so with all causes and results. You will see in a moment why I think this important.

Apparently Lewis thinks that "eternal" things (which he has failed to establish the existence of) are immune from a cause occurring before an effect. He does this to explain how none of the elements of the trinity came "first". I really don't have a problem with the causality some elements of some nonexistent god, just as I have no problem with the causality of the big bang – cause and effect break down in a singularity, as there is no such thing as time. Which came first: the id, the ego or the superego? Who knows. I don't think this is particularly important or relevant. If one can accept that god exists causelessly, it is not a far cry to accept that god is a causeless trinity either. 


Lewis says that the point of seeing god as an eternal causeless trinity is that "god is love" is meaningless unless you have at least two entities: 

"Notice the practical importance of this. All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that 'God is love.' But they seem not to notice that the words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean 'Love is God.' They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement 'God is love.' They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.

I am one person. I love myself. I think Lewis is actually trying to us this love thing as an argument: 


Love is a thing that occurs between two or more people.

God is love

Therefore god is at least two people

Therefore we have support for the trinity being necessary


Of course, if we accept his argument (which I don't) then we only have support for a trinity and the necessity of dualism. 


Lewis goes on to say that this is a really important difference between Christianity and other religions – god is a "dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance." Once again, Lewis is displaying his ignorance of other religions, as if other religions are mere dead shadows of his religion. He basically spends the rest of the chapter waxing poetically about how stupendous his religion is. He explains that the union of god and Jesus is so concrete that the union itself is a person, and that this person is the Holy Spirit. He says that the Holy Spirit is akin to the "spirit" felt at a community gathering or in a family except that it is much more real and awesome. He says that we all have to enter the Holy Spirit (or have it enter us) in order to have any happiness at all or live forever. Once we enter into the Holy Spirit we become "sons of god" and thus we are "begat" by god instead of just "made". This is what Lewis considers the "good infection" and the whole purpose of becoming a Christian. This is what he means when he says that nonChristians are like mere shadows compared to Christians. 


I actually like Lewis' little description of the Holy Spirit, because I can honestly say that before I read it, I really didn't know what on earth Christians were talking about when they spoke of "having the Holy Spirit in me". I actually learned something from Lewis about Christianity! I still think his description of the difference between the two is rather bigoted, but at least I'll know what people are talking about when they praise the Holy Spirit.

Mere Christianity Online 

We're going to the Creation Museum!

This weekend, Flimsy, Saint Gasoline, myself, and some other friends from St. Louis Atheists and the St. Louis Skeptical Society are going to infiltrate Ken Ham's Creation Museum.

Yes, I will ride the dinosaur. I look about 12, right?

Be sure to check back for pictures and a good story.

Insufficient Christianity: 25.1

Yet another installment of our review and critique of Lewis' Mere Christianity; in this chapter, Lewis deals with an issue that some people apparently have with the idea of God not "having time" to answer the prayers of all his followers.

A man put it to me by saying 'I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.' And I have found that quite a lot of people feel this.

Now, the first thing to notice is that the whole sting of it comes in the words at the same moment. Most of us can imagine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too many things into one moment of time.

Lewis gives an analogy (surprise, surprise!) of himself, writing a book about a character named Mary.  In the book, Mary is herself reading a book, and as she puts it down on her desk, she hears a knock on her door.  Lewis explains that there is barely a moment between Mary putting down the book and hearing the knock on her door, but to Lewis, the 'creator' of this world and the creator of it's 'time,' he can sit and give endless deliberation to Mary, for days even, being completely unbound by the 'time' that he himself created.

I can certainly see how this would be seen as a neat, clean illustration of Christian belief about the nature of God, especially to someone who has a theistic worldview.  As a skeptic, I think that this analogy perfectly illustrates why we should be skeptical of this concept.

There is an actual explanation as to why it is possible for an author to sit and think about a character in one of his or her books, and why this is a rational, comprehensible thought.  Lewis doesn't go into any details, though.  He doesn't even attempt to give an actual argument, he simply gives an analogy, and moves on swiftly from there.  The reason why this thought makes sense is specifically because, between the reality and life of an author and the imaginary world that he creates with pen and ink, only one of these realities (and thus only one of these "times") have a concrete existence.  Lewis can think about Mary for hours without Mary being aware of it, simply put, because "Mary" is a concept that only exists in the abstract, in the mind of the author.  She has no concrete existence.

So I think that the real questions is this:  Which of these options are an accurate model of reality?  A)  All of what we call "reality" actually has no concrete existence, and we are all simply abstractions in a Godauthor's mind, B)  God has no concrete existence, and is a mere abstraction in the mind of human beings, or C)  There is another, relevant explanation for this claim that God is outside of time, and Lewis' analogy has nothing to do with it.  I'm banking on "B" being the most rational of the above choices.

Most of the rest of this chapter amounts to individual assertions without any evidence, like Lewis' claim that time is like a line that human beings must travel straight down, while God is the entire page on which that line is drawn.  Lewis goes on for a bit about how before he became a Christian, one of his chief problems with Christian doctrine were his ideas about time:

The Christians said that the eternal God who is everywhere and keeps the whole universe going, once became a human being. Well, then, said I, how did the whole universe keep going while He was a baby, or while He was asleep? How could He at the same time be God who knows everything and also a man asking his disciples 'Who touched me?' You will notice that the sting lay in the time words: 'While He was a baby'-'How could He at the same time?' In other words I was assuming that Christ's life as God was in time, and that His life as the man Jesus in Palestine was a shorter period taken out of that time - just as my service in the army was a shorter period taken out of my total life. And that is how most of us perhaps tend to think about it. We picture God living through a period when His human life was still in the future: then coming to a period when it was present: then going on to a period when He could look back on it as something in the past. But probably these ideas correspond to nothing in the actual facts.

Lewis doesn't actually argue against this, only stating repeatedly "God is outside of time/God is timeless" in endlessly reworded variations.  He does touch on an ancient argument against an "all-knowing God" and free-will existing simultaneously:

Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do to-morrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Timeline like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call 'to-morrow' is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call 'to-day'. All the days are 'Now' for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not.

I don't find this particularly compelling; do you?  The skeptical argument is not simply that God cannot see the future, the argument is that if he can, then free-will cannot possibly exist.  This problem is not solved by simply claiming that "God is outside the timeline."

Suppose we grant, for the sake of argument, that God does not "remember" yesterday, nor does he "foresee" tomorrow, but that he simply observes all events simultaneously; that God does in fact see everything, and he sees everything as happening "Now."  How does this solve the problem?  Let's try wording the skeptic argument first in the language that Lewis describes as being inaccurate, and then modifying it.

- God knows everything that *has happened, everything that is happening now, and everything that will happen in the future.*
- Thus, every action that you will take in your life *was* known (by some kind of intelligent God-thing) before you were born.
- Thus, it is not possible for you to make choices that differ from the ones that you *will* make.

Example:  On a certain date, on Friday afternoon, you will have lunch at a sandwich shop across the street from your office.  They have both a turkey sandwich and a ham sandwich that you like a lot.  On Tuesday of that week, God knows that you will have the turkey, not the ham.  It is not possible for God to be wrong.  It follows, then, that you do not actually have a "choice," in the commonly accepted meaning of the word, whether you will have turkey or ham.  Your sandwich-free-will does not exist.

- God know everything that *happens,* which human beings perceive as occurring on a linear timeline.
- Thus, every action that you will take in your life *is* known (by some kind of intelligent God-thing).
- Thus, it is not possible for you to make choices that differ from the ones that you *do* make.

Example:  What humans perceive as being a certain date, on what is perceived as being a Friday afternoon, you are having lunch at a sandwich shop across the street from your office.  They have both a turkey sandwich and a ham sandwich that you like a lot. As you are eating your turkey sandwich, God sees you, and thus knows which sandwich you're eating.  Thus, as God watches you eating your turkey sandwich, it is not possible for you to have gotten the ham instead.

Is the thrust of the skeptic's argument affected by Lewis' bullshit semantics?  No, it is not.

I think that Lewis' own analogy hangs his argument out to dry.  Suppose that Lewis, as the author of the book, knows that at the end of the story Mary will choose the scrawny-yet-lovable geek, instead of the dashing, wealthy gentleman (let's even grant for the sake of this already-over-stretched-and-never-completely-functional analogy that Mary has a mind of her own, somehow completely independent of the author of the book).  If the author knows the ending (and it is not possible that he's wrong), then we know for a fact that Mary cannot possibly "choose" the handsome gentleman.

It's simple:  If there exists a god who knows everything about every single event that will ever happen, including the actions of us human beings, and he cannot possibly be incorrect in this knowledge, then human beings do not have "free will" as it is typically conceived.

Mere Christianity Online

Focus on the Family Magazine

If you ever want some good bathroom reading material, check this out: You can sign up for the Focus on the Family Magazine for free.

I did. Expect blog posts on the content of the magazine in the future.

Insufficient Christianity: 24.1

Moving on to Chapter 24 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, we’re going to discuss, refute and offer criticism for the idea of the trinity in Christian theology.If you'd like to see all of the critical analysis of Mere Christianity we have done thus far, click the "C.S. Lewis" label at the bottom of this post.

Lewis says that lots of people believe in god, but they don’t believe in a personal god as they believe god is beyond personality. Christians, however, are the “only people who offer any idea of what a being that is beyond personality could be like. All the other people, though they say that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as something impersonal: that is, as something less than personal. If you are looking for something super-personal, something more than a person, then it is not a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas. The Christian idea is the only one on the market.”

Really. When Lewis makes statements like these, I have to wonder if he knows much of anything about religions other than Christianity. If one is looking for a transpersonal god, it is “a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas”. Brahman is a transpersonal god. Allah is a transpersonal god. Waheguru is transpersonal. Christianity is not unique in this respect.
Moving on, Lewis explains that only Christians know how human souls can be absorbed into the life of god yet remain themselves, and warns that the whole purpose to existence is so that we may one day be absorbed into the life of god, and that wrong ideas about what god is will make this more difficult, so we had better pay attention to this trinity thing. Once again, Lewis is setting up his arguments to be immune from questioning and criticism. If we ask how souls can be absorbed into god and remain themselves at the same time, he can just reply with, “well, you can only understand it if you’re special like me”.

Lewis explains the trinity with an analogy (surprise!) using other occurrences of trinities: 3 dimensions (up-down, left-right, back-forth). God is like this.

Admittedly, trinities are cool. We’ve got the Id-Ego-Superego, Past-Present-Future, Consciousness-Subconsciousness-Unconsciousness,  Here-There-Inbetween, Mind-Body-Spirit (actually there is no evidence for spirit, but I digress from my digression), and more.  I can get how the Christian god is a trinity, though I don’t really understand this Holy Spirit business. Is it like a piece of god that god puts into all of us?

No matter, Lewis says if we can’t quite imagine is, that’s okay as long as we know that we’re interacting with all three all the time.  Lewis also argues that this is obviously not all made up because if it were made up, it would be a lot simpler. The simpler a religion, the more likely it is to have been made up. The rest of his chapter is a several paragraph diatribe about how we can’t know or understand god unless we want to understand him, insisting that god will not show himself to the unwilling or the filthy.

“When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others - not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.

This is the ultimate cop-out. It is totally unfalsifiable and makes Christianity immune to Criticism. I could say that when you come to know metaphysical naturalism, the initiative lies on the side of metaphysical naturalism, and that the naturalistic rational universe shows itself much more readily to some people than others, and that this is because some people are simply thinking wrong.

Apparently though this cop-out is “why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.”

Lewis ends the chapter with this: “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.”

Anyone can be complex if he has no facts to bother about too, so I don't see why this is relevant.  Complexity does not make one thing true over the other.

Mere Christianity Online

Eternal Earthbound-Pets

Petter linked me to this website the other day: the purpose of which is for atheists to take care of your pets after the rapture. The homepage says:

You've committed your life to Jesus. You know you're saved.  But when the Rapture comes what's to become of your loving pets who are left behind?   Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes that burden off your mind.

We are a group of dedicated animal lovers, and atheists. Each
Eternal Earth-Bound Pet representative is a confirmed atheist, and as such will still be here on Earth after you've received your reward.  Our network of animal activists are committed to step in when you step up to Jesus.

We are currently active in 20 states and growing.  Our representatives have been screened to ensure that they are atheists, animal lovers, are moral / ethical with no criminal background, have the ability and desire to  rescue your pet and the means to retrieve them and ensure their care for your pet's natural life. 

We currently cover the following states:
Maine,New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana ... and growing.

Our service is plain and simple; our fee structure is reasonable.
For $110.00 we will guarantee that should the Rapture occur within ten (10) years of receipt of payment, one pet per residence will be saved.  Each additional pet at your residence will be saved for an additional $15.00 fee.   A small price to pay for your peace of mind and the health and safety of your four legged friends.

Unfortunately at this time we are not equipped to accommodate all species and must  limit our services to dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, and small caged mammals.

 I emailed them - who better to be the representative for Missouri than me?

Science offends the religious again, oh noes.

You might have heard recently on the news that a high school band’s t-shirts were taken from the band after parents complained due to the image portrayed on the shirts. Here is an image of the shirt in question.

Parents complained because the shirts depicted a monkey holding an instrument morphing through a series of stages into a man holding an instrument.

Apparently some parents do not think evolution should be associated with the school at all:

“Band parent Sherry Melby, who is a teacher in the district, stands behind Pollitt’s decision. Melby said she associated the image on the T-shirt with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“I was disappointed with the image on the shirt.” Melby said. “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.” 

I contend that actively forcing students to turn in their shirts may be a violation of the separation of church and state. Evolution certainly is controversial, but it is not religion. In this case, we have people causing the district to take action because their religious beliefs are offended by science. Apparently the district is required by law to be neutral where religion is concerned, but this is not being neutral.

In the article, a person makes the comparison of evolution to Christianity:

“If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing,” Brad Pollitt (assistant superintendent) said.

I don’t think this comparison is appropriate. Perhaps a better one would be if the shirts said, “Brass Resurrections” and had a picture of brass instruments burning to ash and rising again like a Pheonix.

An even better analogy might be is the shirts had a depiction of the billion-year history of the universe, with brass instruments occupying a tiny corner of that history, yet making it rich in culture and music. I wonder if either of these images would offend the sensibilities of the religious.

There are a lot of religious views that are offended by or disagree with science. I can’t imagine removing all of those aspects of science from the classroom. For example:

Some people are offended by the idea of being cured by a doctor of an illness rather than being cured by prayer.(Christian Scientists)

Some people are offended by the idea that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. (Young-Earth Creationists)

Some people are offended by the idea that Native Americans have not always been living in North America. (Native Americans)

Some people believe humans all spoke the same language until god confused us at the Tower of Babel. (Biblical Literalists)

Some people don't believe in space travel (Krishna's)

I think the first commenter of the story link I provided illustrated my thoughts well:

“I'm a practicing Christian... Evolution is a scientific theory, not a religious issue. If my religion specifically did not believe in the use of the letter "S", would we now have to refer to our school district as, "edalia chool District #200"? If so, I may adopt that as a new element of my Christian faith and see where we can take that. I hope this is resolved before my children attend "mith-Cotton High chool".

We've broken the 20,000 mark

I just thought I would let you guys know that last month, this blog generated 20,222 visits. That’s almost twice what it was last month. Where are all of you people coming from?

You guys are awesome! Thanks for reading – it really strokes my cute little girlish ego to know that so many eyes are on our snarky attempts at intellectualism.

So I want to know: who are you and why do you read this blog? Are you an atheist, theist, deist, other?

Insufficient Christianity: 23.1

We’re in the home stretch of our review of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis: This chapter is the first of the last of the four books contained within Mere Christianity: on to theology!

Lewis begins his book by telling his reader that lots of people advised him not to include theology in his book, but to simply give the reader the plain practical religion of Christianity. He is ignoring their advice because he thinks that if people want to be Christian they should know something about Theology, defined by Lewis as “The science of God”

In a way, I can see why many Christians reject theology: they feel god, but they don’t want to get caught up in the particulars of religion: like Emily Dickinson, they believe attempts to dogmatize god places the infinite in a finite little box.

Yet, Lewis says, theology is important because many people have “confirmed” it, in the same way that a man experiencing an island feels that in a sense a map of the island he experiences is less real than the island itself, yet the map is based on the experiences of many people who confirmed its accuracy. Lewis believes that theology fits individual experience with collective experience; much like the map of the island fits an individual experience of the island with a collective experience of the island.

This would be a great analogy if god were a thing we could measure as we do an island, but god is not like this. If god were an island, he would be an island that took on different qualities depending on one’s preconceived ideas about it.

Lewis  says:

“Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God-experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion-all about feeling God in nature, and so on-is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.”

If theology is like a map and god is like an island, then what we have in the world are a bunch of contradictory and conflicting maps of an island along with a small number of people who contend there isn’t any evidence for the island because they don’t have a map or have looked at the maps and determined that none of them seem to lead to or describe the island. What’s more, people with map A think that people with map B have got it all wrong, some people think maps A,  B and C both have nuggets of truth about the island so they follow all three maps, people with map A occasionally kill people with map C for having the wrong map, people with map A insist that their map is the only way to the island, people with map D think their revised map is more accurate and that no one should be killing anyone, while still more people think all maps lead to the island. Mapholders insist that their island is somewhere even though it is actually located outside the world and cannot be tested; rather we must have faith that the island really exists. Meanwhile, the world looks exactly as it would look if there were no island at all to people without a map, while mapholders insist that the island has a profound effect on every aspect of the world.

I really don’t see this map analogy working out too well *for Lewis*, but I digress…

Lewis goes on to say that theology is best based on history rather than new religious fads, because a new religious fad might be one that theologeans “tried centuries ago and rejected”. He then goes on to explain some basic theology, starting with the theology of “begetting”

“One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God 'begotten, not created'; and it adds `begotten by his Father before all worlds'. Will you please get it quite clear that this has .nothing to do with the fact that when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin? We are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking about something that happened before Nature was created at all, before time began. `Before all worlds' Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?

We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set-or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set : say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.

“Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.

I’d also like to (randomly) point out that evolutionary biology says the same thing. It really annoys me to no end when silly creationists say, “evolution says a dog can give birth to a cat” or “evolution says that if you put a seed of corn on a shelf for 75 years, if you plant it you could grow a fern” which is the same thing as saying, “evolution says a man can beget little beavers”.  Evolution does not say that. Anyway, the point Lewis is making is that Jesus was different from humans because Jesus was begat and not made. All of the other stuff in the universe is also made by god and not begat by god.

There is also, Lewis says, a different between “spiritual life’ and “biological life”, and once we become Christians, we are like statues coming to life. This is a very interesting, if not bigoted, metaphor. What Lewis is saying is that people who are not Christians are like representations of real, living things: we heathens are like statues or photographs, while Christians are like living people. We non-Christians are merely shadowy and symbolic representations of real things.

Do Christians really believe this? Is this really, “The Science of God?” To say that Christians are the only ones fully alive is to say that non-Christians are... not fully alive.

Faith Infiltration: St. Louis Cathedral Basilica

This week Flimsy and I visited the beautiful Cathedral Basilica, hailed as one of the most glorious Cathedrals in the US.

The Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis is one that must be seen personally. It is impressive and overdone: if Vegas is entertainment on steroids, Cathedral Basilica is Catholicism on steroids. The entire ceiling is covered with gold-flecked murals, marble statues abound, and they have tours after every mass (which is 4 times a day on Sundays and several times during the week). There is probably close to an acre of pews inside the sanctuary, and don’t know if this is an exaggeration.

Because of its size, services seemed very impersonal. Instead of a close-knit community, it felt more like we were at a baseball game, where participants were only united by their common belief but not necessarily a “community” in the sense that most congregants knew each other. In this way, the visit was more of a spectacle (and I do not mean that pejoratively) than anything else. No one so much as looked in our direction.

What is it with sermons at Catholic churches being so short? Granted, we only have a sample size of 2 (having only visited 2 Catholic churches) but both times, the sermon or message was very short. The sermon was delivered by a bishop who climbed a small spiral staircase to an ornate and impressive podium made of carved marble and fine wood – obviously, any podium one must climb a staircase to stand on is impressive.  The general message of the sermon was that we must give Jesus access to our hearts, especially those parts of our hearts that are dark. The bishop gave a very long list of “dark parts” we should let Jesus see, encouraging people to ask Jesus to help with the tough questions and church teachings people refused to follow. Some of the questions included:

Which church teachings to I refuse to follow? Who do I refuse to meet or be nice to? When did I last go to confession? At whom am I angry – god, the church, people who have died? Why do I blame god for not answering my prayers?

If we give Jesus and god access to our hearts and weaknesses, the Bishop said, we will not be afraid of answers to these questions. Instead, asking these tough questions will give people the opportunity to grow with god.

The bishop did not give answers to these questions, but given my limited understanding of Catholicism, I can only assume that the answers to these questions are that the parishioners are guilty and selfish sinners who are putting themselves above god, but I don’t know that for sure.

After the sermon, most of the parishioners took communion, but I was surprised to see that we were not the only ones who abstained: of the several hundred people present, I would say about 20 people did not take communion.

Following this, several prayers were offered, the most interesting being a prayer that the new year of school education and academics work to educate people that life “is sacred and begins at conception”.

As we left, I observed a family with a young daughter who was maybe eight years old exiting the pews. As the mother and father exited, they bowed to the front of the sanctuary and crossed themselves. Their daughter made a move to leave, and her father grabbed her arm: she bowed and crossed herself, facing backward. Looking stern, the father spun her around so she could do it facing the correct direction.

We did not go on the tour because we were starving!