Does God Exist: The Debate - Part two of two

I believe that there is no supreme being with human attributes - no God in the Biblical sense - but that all life is the result of timeless evolutionary forces, having reached its present transient state over millions of years.
-Charles Templeton, preacher turned agnostic.


In my previous entry I gave a brief outline of the debate between Dan Barker of the Freedom from Religion Foundation and Peter Youngren of the Niagara Celebration Church.

What I want to do here is examine a couple of the arguments presented by Peter, by way of my own personal analysis.

Through the debate, Peter made a repeated asseration regarding believing big brain types: Albert Einstein and Anthony Flew. Both deists - which to Peter's credit he acknowledged. But Peter's point, was clear: Here are two men of extraordinary intelligence an insight, and they are convinced at the very least convinced there must be some kind of ultimate force behind the universe. It doesn't interact with us in the biblical sense of God coming down with a burning bush or genocidal flood, but they nevertheless believed there must, logically, be some kind of universe force that got everything in motion.

The connection Peter was trying to make was, if they can accept a god, deist though they were, they surely we of lesser minds cannot argue with them. As Peter said "Anthony Flew says he is convinced by the evidence. Well, that is good enough for me."

This is not a particularly new argument, and one that is often used by believers, albeit often by those lacking Peter's capacity for public discourse. It fails for two reasons. First, the deist view is not the Christian view. Although Peter was, by way of an unspoken inference, trying to link the god of Einstein and Flew to his own Christian god, no such link can be made. Even if one concedes that that there must be a "first cause" behind the universe, that is not evidence for the Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or Hindu or whatever) version of god. This is because, as I have noted before, the Christian god has very particular attributes. He has a definite personality - a temper, a willingness to heap favors on those he likes, and destroy those he hates. He describes himself as jealous. And he defiantly has an ego: Just check out the number of times god describes himself in the Old Testament. When he isn't threating to blast someone out of existence, he heaps upon himself all manner of praise. The Greeks would have instantly recognized the hubris in him. Or to put this another way, Dr. Phil would have a field day with God.

Anyway, I digress. The point is one simply cannot look to the deist mode of belief as evidence the Christian god is real - as Peter was doing often during the debate - because the god of Einstein and Spinoza and Flew doesn't have a personality. It doesn't even have a consciousness really. Or if it does, it has never expressed to our species. It NEVER performs miracles or hears prayers. It is really only a kind of universal force that gave order to the whole ball of wax. But that's it.

I think Peter understands this, but tried to make the connection anyway almost as if to say, "Well, if one can accept this deist notion, then its only a small jump to get to Jesus." That just doesn't follow.

Still, Peter Youngren would not be Peter Youngren if he didn't possess the gift of gab. Frankly, Peter is the most talented and convinced preacher I have ever met. And I've met many. He is able to make things seem to fit together - even if in the cold light of logic they do not.

It's worth noting as an aside that Peter is not a fire and brimstone preacher. He isn't threatening anyone with hell fire (although he certainly does believe hell is a real place) and that was demonstrated in a moment at the end of the evening. The last question of the night was asked by a fairly hostile woman who attacked Dan Barker with both guns. She was a health profession, she claimed, and said she sees miracles all the time. She even went so far as to claim that she healed a cancer patient of a tumor!! Well, at this point I was forced to step up, as moderator, and ask her to ask a question. Her reply was as strange as it was shocking:

"Ok my question is to Mr. Youngren, can you be gay and be Christian?" she said before hurriedly sitting down in the nearest seat.

The bait and switch had left the audience shocked for a moment. Dan replied to her by saying that if she had evidence of such things she ought to present it to experts who can examine it. When Peter spoke, he said he was not into, what he called "a ministry of behavior modification." Anyone is welcome at his church, he said, and its not up to him to judge them. Gay people are as good and decent as anyone else he said. It was a moment that had even non believers such as myself nodding our heads in agreement. It was a brilliant bit of preaching and politics, frankly, that spoke both to human solidarity and need to treat everyone with respect.

I bring it up because of what came next in the closing remarks for the evening. Peter closed by saying it was fascinated by Dan Barker: an ex-evangelical turned atheist. In some ways, Dan's story is similar to that of Canadian preacher and former peer of Billy Graham Charles Templeton. In fact for a time, Templeton was the evangelical star and Graham the opening act. But Templeton lost his faith, as Dan did, and began to speak out against what he saw as the cruelty of the Christian doctrine and unlikelihood of a god existing at all. He did not become an atheist as Dan did, but an agnostic.

Templeton wrote a book called "Farewell to God: My reasons for rejecting the Christian faith." It is a deeply personal book, although not the best written, and it was one of the books that got me thinking seriously about the unsoundness of the entire Christian thing. It is, therefore a book I know well and my ears perked up when Youngren invoked Templeton's name.

Peter related a story about Templeton in his final remarks. He read from part of Lee Strobel's book The Case For Faith. Strobel is an apologist who claims to have been a former journalist and atheist. He has a whole series of "Case for..." books purported to "objectively" investigate the claims of Christianity. Generally speaking, these books have all the substance of flash paper. They are not objective at all, and Strobel almost never speaks to experts in their fields or to skeptics. He interviews other believers and accepts their conclusions with a monolithic credulity that no journalist worth his salt should ever display. They are basically apologist tracks thinly dressed up as journalism in the same way Intelligent Design is creationism dressed up in drag.

Still, Strobel occasionally presents an interesting interview or two, and his interview with Templeton is one. Peter read in it part to the audience, and I have to say, his reading was both powerful and moving. Like I said, Peter isn't an excellent preacher by accident. He knows his craft.

In the interview, Strobel asks Templeton what the thinks about Jesus and God. Templeton, now suffering from the slow brain rot of Alzheimer's, sickly and near death, dismissed with the entire idea of a loving god. But for Jesus, he appeared to show some genuine emotion. Strobel, shockingly displaying real journalistic instincts, pressed the issue and asked directly what did Templeton think about Jesus:

"Everything good I know, everything decent I know, everything pure I know, I learned from Jesus. Yes...yes. And tough! Just look at Jesus. He castigated people. He was angry. People don't think of him that way, but they don't read the Bible. He had a righteous anger, and He cared for the oppressed and exploited. There's no question that he had the highest moral standard, the least duplicity, the greatest compassion, of any human being in history. There have been many wonderful people, but Jesus is Jesus."

Peter now had the audience in rapt silent attention. He lowered his voice a bit and read the final lines from Strobel's interview.:

"And if I may put it this way," (Templeton) said as his voice began to crack, "I...miss...him!"

Peter then noted that Templeton waved Strobel away saying "Well, enough of that," and then he ended the story. He went on to say that even Templeton knew Jesus in the end and hoped that Barker would come know the true faith soon.

Being the moderator, I couldn't say anything. My job was not to inject my own thoughts to the debate, but rather to keep it moving in an orderly and fair manner. My own views were not relevant. But I knew something that perhaps Dan Barker, and probably Peter Youngren, did not. The interview with Templeton might be as Strobel reports it. But it is certainly not any evidence that Templeton was near to some kind of death bed conversion.

And this is why I often say "Fact matter!". Because knowingly or not, Peter was not presenting Mr. Templeton's views fairly or accurately. Let this be a lesson to anyone willing to rely on Lee Strobel for information. As a preacher, the guy makes a lousy reporter.

The fact is that yes, Templeton DID miss Jesus. He missed Christianity. He missed the whole religious thing. But this was not shocking or even new. In Farewell to God, Templeton writes about how he missed the certainty religion provides, the easy comfort of believing Jesus and a god that loved him and had a plan for him. And while he could not longer bring himself to believe it anymore, he missed being a believer and could not ignore the impact the figure of Jesus had on his life in a positive sense. No one every said learning was easy or that enligthenment came cheaply. Change is always painful and often filled with regret. Templeton wrote:

"You find yourself rethinking the story of Jesus of Nazareth and, for all its intrinsic fascination, it is not the same. You almost feel that someone you love has died and that you are bereft. And little wonder: no one in Western history has so laid claim to the hearts of men and woman as has Jesus of Nazareth. How memorable his brief life. How fascinating his personality. How insightful his teaching. How inspiring his courage. How shattering the horror of his death. How - perhaps more than any other's in Western history - his life has stimulated the potential for goodness in those who take him seriously.

I miss all that, and more. But, analyzed, the feeling is not unlike the occasional yearning to return to one's earlier years when life was simpler. In the end, one must follow the truth as one perceives it. Not to do so is to live a lie.

Growing up isn't easy, but is there any valid option?"

This is what Peter Youngren and Lee Strobel fail to mention. That Templeton's missing is former faith had nothing to do with believing Jesus was the son of god, sent to save his soul. But it was a a regret at losing something that once gave him such powerful purpose in life.

Templeton, like Einstein, like Flew, ended up as a kind of deist. He believed there might have been some kind of force that got everything going, but it never interfered with human life. His missing his former faith didn't change that.

Which brings us full circle. Youngren's argument was to say "look at these smart guys, they believe in a god, so should you!" But no only is the deist god nothing like the Christian one, not only was Peter not presenting the whole truth about Mr. Templeton, but it makes a final, fatal error in logic. He appeals to authority - a view that certainly Einstein and probably Templeton would have regarded as unwise an an abdication of our own ability to examine evidence and make up our own minds.

Sam Harris at AAI 07

Defend Freedom of Speech.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
-Salman Rushdie


Take a look at the cartoon posted here. Last year this was one of several cartoons printed in Danish newspapers that triggered violent riots in the Muslim world.

The problem for the faithful was twofold. One, in Islamic culture depictions of the prophet Mohmmad is a big no-no. Second, being commentary on the on going problem of the religiously motivated terrorism of Jihadists, they weren't the most flattering depictions of the prophet.

Of course some people will find this cartoon offensive. That is their right. But in a society with freedom of speech, it is also the right of the cartoonist to make such a drawing. However, in North America the cartoons were not republished out of fear of Muslim backlash. When newspapers and TV stations should have shown the cartoons as part of their coverage, and to stand on the principle of free speech, they trembled like cowards. Not long afterward, the United Nations began to consider adding blasphemy as a violation of human rights. This is effectively saying freedom of speech should bow to religious authority, when the fact is freedom of expression means we have the right to blaspheme all we want. And it shouldn't be any other way.

The violent aftermath of the images,' publications, an aftermath that included the burning of churches and the death of people caught in the wake of the enraged mobs, lead several influential writers to sign a manifesto declaring the importance of freedom of speech.

Although a year old, the world hasn't changed much, so I am posting the manifesto here on the Atheist Handbook. Please take the time to read it. Add your own comments if you like or just repost it on your own blog or webpage. I won't comment further on the manifesto because it speaks for itself:

"After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject cultural relativism, which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical intelligence out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatization of its believers. We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical intellect may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism."

The original 12 signatories to this manifesto were Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val and Ibn Warraq.

More information can be found here

Oh, weep for the poor atheist....

Fundamentalists: believe 2+2 =5 because It Is Written. Somewhere. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.

“Moderate” believers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4. but go regularly to church to be told that 2+2 once made 5, or will one day make 5, or in a very real and spiritual sense should make 5.

“Moderate” atheists: know that 2+2 =4 but think it impolite to say so too loudly as people who think 2+2=5 might be offended.

“Militant” atheists: “Oh for pity’s sake. HERE. Two pebbles. Two more pebbles. FOUR pebbles. What is WRONG with you people?”

-From Planet Atheism

Apparently I am missing out.

So declared an old friend mine who, when she discovered this blog and recent declaration on this little corner of the web that I am an atheist, promptly had a little freak out.

The odd thing about it is, my being an atheist bothered her to an enormous degree. To the point where she spent the better part of two hours during the wee wee hours a few days back, trying to convince me I was leading a cold,miserable existence because I refuse to believe in the supernatural.

Although I have encountered this kind of reaction before, it was the most vitriolic I have received from a friend. Strangers, bible thumpers, angry Muslims, sure. But not from a friend.

It started with a simple enough question from her: "Why are you an atheist?"

My answer to her was the same as it is to anyone who asks that question:"Evidence." An atheist is, as I have noted on this blog before, simply someone who does not believe in things for which there is no evidence.

My own rejection of my former belief in Buddhist cosmology - that is the physical reality of reincarnation - is predicated entirely on the same reasons I don't believe in any god or gods. No evidence. And the fact is there isn't any evidence for god, gods, goblins, Thor, and other supernatural critters great and small. There isn't evidence of an immortal soul, or "soul-stuff" that gets physically reborn into another body life after life. There just isn't.

This answer, it became very clear, was profoundly disturbing to my friend. To the degree where she became, it seemed to me, rather angry. Let me explain. She attempted to say there are things I have "faith" in that I can cannot personally explain. Like the theory of gravity, she suggested. I have "faith" that gravity works, and the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of the theory are beyond my intellectually capabilities to understand. So therefore, I just have "faith."

However, as believers are often wont to do, they apply the term "faith" too broadly. Faith in the religious sense means to believe without evidence.This is the message of Jesus when he clobbers Thomas for demanding evidence of the resurrection. Believe, don't think. Accept without evidence. This is blind faith, and in the context of religion there isn't any other kind.

Do I have this kind of faith in gravity? No.

For one thing, I had to take physics in school and learned to do some of the basic maths. I am the first to admit I am no Isaac Newton, and math is not my strongest suit. However, I understand the basic maths - my friend's little insult to my intelligence notwithstanding.

However, even if I had not taken physics at all, would I have to have religious faith in gravity? Not at all. And the reason is that one can trust in the specialized authority of the physicists who do the math and the theoretical work. This is the same kind of trust you would place in your doctor to find out what is making you ill.

For instance, I trust in Albert Einstein's work on relativity. I most certainly cannot do anything but the most elementary mathematics when it comes to do this, so I have to trust that the science is right. However, and indeed as advances in science are showing us, that trust is not and should not be absolute. Einstein might not have been 100 per cent right. So I have to trust in the scientists who find new conclusions and change our knowledge.

This is not blind faith. Because I do not hold any of these fields of science that lay outside my own education and skill as absolute. As any good rationalist will admit, our knowledge changes all the time. Blind faith, such as the faith in a god, is absolute and unquestioned.

Finally, even if one does not understand physics, you can always learn. One of the great joys in a life my friend regards as bereft of meaning, is to take the time to learn some bit of science I didn't know before. It does take effort and sometimes hurts my brain, but it is also wonderful to learn something new. As an educated woman, my friend had to concede this last point at least.

So she then said a very curious thing. Science, she said, cannot explain love.Well, a bag of tail and all that, of course it can, I said.

But she declared the "funny feeling in your stomach" when you see a child do something cute, or fall in love with someone, cannot be identified and explained by science. Well of course it can. Our emotions are products of our minds and can have the most staggering physiological effects. Stress can make us sick. Laughter can release chemicals in our brains that make us feel good. Love can make us both feel good, and awful. Our emotions and our bodies reaction to them do not come from the ether, but are the result of how our brains work.

Well then, she declared by fait, you cannot observe love - like a mother's love for a child, so you have to have faith in it. It is such a transcendent kind of love, it cannot be understood but through some of kind of blind, religious faith. Not all I said. First, once can observe how a mother behaves toward her children (and this is a common trait in many mammals by the way). That is a pretty good indication. And it is interesting to note that while many mammalian mothers, including humans, will fiercely protect the life of her child, it is not universal. Just read the headlines and you find cases of mothers killing their babies, often in fits of depression. Some women just don't have much of a maternal instinct at all, even after the child is born.So much for the transcendent "mother's love."

A mother's love for a child is a product of our brains, and there are very good evolutionary selective reasons for that emotion to be there. However, my friend then declared my life was cold and meaningless, and that I am missing out, if I accept that something love is the result of activity in our brains. Ridiculous.

Her statements implies that if love is a material product of our minds, then it is somehow not "real." When the opposite is true. Just because I understand where our emotions come from that does not make them "unreal" or make me any less captive to their impacts. I don't experience love or hate any less than anyone else does. I just don't give it a supernatural gloss.

Still she said, she has experienced the hand of god in her life. Fine, I said, how? When? How do you know it is real? I got no answer, but she was getting increasingly upset. She knows god is real, she said, that is enough. Fine, I said. I actually don't care. You are free to believe whatever you want to believe. But you cannot then turn around and tell me my life is devoid of meaning because I do not worship something you simply "know" to be true. It all came back to my original answer to her question - evidence. There isn't any evidence. What had happened was really I provided an answer she didn't like.

What was very curious about this entire exchange, and I have only provided a glimpse of it here, is that my atheism bothered her a great deal. That I am happy, and unbothered by it wasn't enough. More than once she repeated the phrase "but you are just missing out" because I don't believe. Maybe I am missing something because I won't believe blindly in a sky god for which there is zero evidence. But would much rather face reality for it is, than to believe in something that is not.

Then came what I usually hear from believers who are bothered, deeply, by the people who reject that which they profoundly believe in. I have long suspected, although I certainly have no evidence for this, so take it with a grain of salt, that believers need to have other people believe in what they do. Or at the very least, not reject it out of hand. I suppose this might be because if someone can reject it, then that opens the possibility that their belief in Jesus or Allah or reincarnation or whatever, might be wrong. And that is something they simply do not want to consider. I mean, my friend was not bothered when I accepted the whole Buddhist deal. By believing in karma and reincarnation, I believed in SOMETHING supernatural. Daniel Dennett calls this "believing in belief." Even if it was not the same supernatural vagaries she believed in, it was still something. And that was fine. Rejecting the supernatural on the basis of evidence was not fine.

Anyway, what came next was "Well, what do you believe then?" By which she meant, what religious thing do I believe in. And when the answer was "nothing", I got the empty life thing all over again.Yet an atheist's life is not empty. Rather than be guided by the often cruel and unjust morality of the bible, I turn to philosophy, to Spinoza,Decrates, Plato, Epicurius and even the Buddha (although I certainly do not believe anything supernatural about him, assuming he was real at all).

I have family, friends, and a career. I have no empty hole in my life because I do not believe. The meaning of my life is whatever I decide it to be. As Bertrand Russell said, in so far as we not at the whims of natural forces, the purpose of our lives is for us to decide. That is the responsibility and the challenge of being human.

I rather think there is something uplifting about accepting our lives as they are without belief in an invisible god who requires us to worship at its feet like groveling minions. Our life is the only one we get. There is nothing afterwards just as there was nothing before. That being the case, we have only one chance to try and make something of it. No mulligans. The choice to do something, to try and contribute something, is ours.

So to my friend should she be reading this, and to those who think atheists are "missing out", rest assured I do not suffer because of my disbelief. My life is full, busy, and as satisfying as anyone else's. Above all, I do not require blind faith for my life to be fulfilling and happy.

My disbelief bothers you, not me.