See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

“By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.”
~ AnswersinGenesis.org (http://www.answersingenesis.org/about/faith)

Of all the jaw-dropping statements made by Christians, this one takes the cake. Answers in Genesis is one of the biggest and most popular apologetics websites, giving Christian arguments in favor of the flood, the 6-day creation, the 6,000-year-old earth, and dinosaurs living with humans. But I believe that this statement in their “Statement of Faith” completely removes any integrity from its authors.

This quote is saying that before the folks at AnswersinGenesis.org look at any evidence, before they think about or approach the problem at all, they have already decided the outcome. They completely base their findings on their own preconceptions, preemptively plugging their ears and eyes and accepting only what they already assume. Their is no worse way to pursue truth than that.

The criticism I make here has been responded to by some, claiming that going off the authority of the Bible is no different than going off the authority of science. But science doesn’t operate off of authority. Claims in science aren’t true merely because someone said they are. The conclusions of scientists are based on evidence, and the evidence remains for all to see. Scientists know that their ideas must stand to the scrutiny of other scientists, who may not share their preconceptions. The way to do this is to make the case strong enough on the basis of evidence so that preconceptions don’t matter.

The history of science is filled with scientists accepting ideas contrary to their preconceptions. Examples include the reality of extinctions, the reality of meteors, meteors as causes of mass extinctions, ice ages, continental drift, bacteria as cause of ulcers, and of course, evolution. Scientists are not immune to being sidetracked by their preconceptions, but ultimately go where the evidence leads.

Scientists make a deliberate effort to remove subjectivity from their work, and do a good job in general of removing bias. They do such a good job, in fact, that what creationists really object to is the fact that scientists do no interpret evidence according to certain religious preconceptions.

- Evan

On the Supernatural

During the entire history of mankind, there has never been any independently verifiable evidence of the supernatural. Indeed, many proponents of the supernatural realm hardly have any idea what implications such a realm would have in the observable world, let alone any ideas of how to prove its existence. In previous posts, I have insisted that a rational person should have evidence of something before it is believed. This is hardly a novel thought, and I think anyone would agree with it. But due to the supposed non-physical nature of the supernatural, religious people feel they are exempt from having any burden of proof. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone has a reason for believing something, and we can honestly say that with the supernatural, evidence is not it.

As the first basic precept of religion, proving the existence of a supernatural realm should be at the top of the believer’s list of things to do. It should come before any other arguments, because if the supernatural does not exist, nothing in their religion is true. Given the very definition of immaterial, acceptable evidence for may never surface. This leaves argument as the only tool one can use to justify belief, but the arguments I have heard make flawed assumptions.

• Some mysterious or unknown feature of our universe (before the big bang, beauty in nature, physical laws, complexity of life). Things that are unknown are unknown. The ignorance of a cause for something does not make it magic. Things like the stars, the weather, and disease used to be thought to have supernatural causes.
  
• The existence of morality and of abstract ideas and concepts in our brains as being separate from our physical reality. Every one of those thoughts, ideas and concepts we have we have — including morality (view video in previous post) — is a result of known physical processes in a physical brain.
• The authority of the Bible. What if the only evidence for evolution was a book, and not all that observation, experiment, and not the independent lines of verification from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics, molecular biology, developmental biology, embryology, population genetics, genome sequencing, and many other sciences?
  

Skeptics of the supernatural have often been called “closed-minded," and accused of bias towards a particular world-view. This is an disingenuous thing to say. Anyone can agree that it is not close-minded to require evidence for beliefs. If you can’t provide the evidence for something, you shouldn’t malign those who don't believe it. How can you blame them for not believing you? If your position takes faith to begin with, you cannot expect others to follow suit. But more to the point, if your position takes faith to believe it, maybe you shouldn’t have so much confidence in your position.

- Evan

An Open Mind: seeking truth rather than knowing it

It has been commonly assumed that life started in some ‘primordial soup’ of chemicals on the planet, and that somehow these chemicals begat life. How life began was still a mystery, but this ‘primordial soup’ idea seemed the most plausible. However, on February 3rd, the 80-year-old theory involving the origin of life was overturned. Quoting the linked article, the primordial soup idea could not provide the “sustained driving force to make anything react, and without an energy source, life as we know it can’t exist.” The new idea is that life began at hydrothermal vents in the ocean, where there is bountiful energy and already-existing chemical processes that resemble what today’s cells use for respiration.

One goal of reasonable people is to never become attached to your beliefs about the world in any way. If we do this, we can easily and happily accept new and better ideas, discarding the old. This is how science works: being able to converge on truth by letting the evidence speak for itself. It can be a slow process sometimes - in this case an 80-year process - but it is sure and steady.

One reason I reject religion is its inability to find truth. There is no objective guide to what is correct and incorrect in religion; things cannot be falsified. So when someone has a new idea, who is to say whether they are right or wrong? This is why there are so many sects of all the different religions instead of a single unified one. How can we know which ideas are right? There are many competing ideas in science too, but they will be resolved eventually, just like all the other debates before them.

When we compare science to religion as far as a branching tree of ideas, we can visualize that religion, since the beginning, has branched off constantly, wandering about and creating thousands of incompatible and unverifiable ideologies, and has so far discovered nothing about the world. Visualizing the creation and discarding of ideas in science, we can see that science converges on itself, slowly weeding out the incorrect ideas and replacing them with good ones. New branches of ideas are common, but unless observations continue to validate their claims, the branch disappears entirely. If the new idea is validated, the entire scientific community accepts the idea and jumps on the train. Using this objective and evidence-based method, science has been our one and only way of making discoveries about the world.

To me, humbly and slowly approaching the truth by studying the world is better than having a faith-based belief that you already know the truth. Which one sounds better to you?

- Evan

The Appeal to Ignorance: religion's secret weapon

Ever since humanity’s beginnings, religion has been inserting knowledge where there previously was none. Needless to say, so far no religion has ever been correct about the workings of the universe. For thousands of years, science has advanced its understandings, theories, and methods, while religion has retreated. During the heyday of ancient Greece, no one knew what the sun actually was. This was a spiritual question back then, because not only was it a complete mystery, but the sun was the giver of all life. So the Greek religion claimed that it was Helios, the sun god, riding across the sky in his chariot. No one knew what the seasons were, so their mythology said that the goddess of summer and growth had her daughter stolen by Hades every year, causing winter, then returned to her later, reinitiating summer. Christianity is no stranger to propagating incorrect ideas that align with its theology (i.e. geocentrism, young earth, creationism), so why should we trust Christianity’s claims of today?

The only thing that Christians can do is appeal to ignorance in an attempt to increase the validity of their claims. Even a successful dismantling of evolution and the big bang would merely reduce us to a state of ignorance about life and the universe, it wouldn’t validate some other claim. Today’s religious people move from absolute ignorance to absolute knowledge by saying that because we don’t know the answer, it must be God.

The problem is that “we don’t know” should be the end of the conversation. “We don’t know” in no way justifies any claim about the subject, so it cannot justify religion. On top of this, criticisms from the religious against scientific theories more often than not reveal an ignorance of the theories, research, and methods themselves, and are not even valid criticisms. Such statements include:

• evolution cannot produce irreducible complexity

• carbon dating is a lie and shouldn’t be used to tell the age of the earth

• saying that life evolved is like saying a tornado assembled a jet in a junkyard
  

• if crocodiles and ducks are related we should see half-crocodiles, half-ducks today

Not only are these false arguments, but even if they were valid, they would say nothing about whether religious claims are true, only that our science has problems. Christians believe that if science is wrong, then their religion is right.

This also happens at the macro level in Christian theology. What is the meaning of existence? Why is this universe the way it is? It must be God. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. But why must it be God? Is there an actual reason besides “it couldn’t be anything else”? No there is not. The fact we cannot begin to answer some of these questions yet in no way validates belief in God. When it comes down to it, there is no actual positive evidence that God has done any of the things that Christian theology claims. The dependence of Christian apologetics on these so-called “god-of-the-gaps” arguments is staggering, and is one of my main reasons for not being religious.

- Evan

Life After Death

One thing in common with all atheists is disbelief in the supernatural. This disbelief stems from the fact that strong evidence (multiple objective observations of repeatable events) points to naturalism while weak evidence (personal testimony of a single event) points to supernatural explanations. Life after death and the existence of an immaterial soul (two similar claims) are supernatural claims that exhibit such weak evidence.

The main reason for dismissing the idea of life after death is that all the evidence about human beings points to our being biological animals rather than embodied spiritual souls. Consciousness is still somewhat of a mystery to us, but we do know that it relies on brain activity. With no brain, there is no consciousness.

All the experiences, sensations, and emotions we have are dependent on the activity of certain parts of the brain, and when one of those parts is damaged, its respective aspect of experience is altered or hindered for the individual. And if you stimulate certain areas of the brain, you get an involuntary change of experience (if you stimulate the part of the brain that controls humor, everything becomes funny). In fact, damage to certain parts of the brain has been seen countless times to completely change someone’s personality forever. And when someone’s brain stops functioning altogether, they will stop giving any signs of consciousness. Consciousness is the center of our experience, and still having it after death goes against all we see.

Consider if we didn’t need a brain for consciousness. If this were true, then there’s no reason why any object couldn’t be considered conscious, and there’s no reason for us to have bodies in the first place. And as far as near-death experiences, their very name – near-death – immediately disqualifies them as evidence for life after death.

What makes us human is our capacity for conscious thought, reason, and emotion. We see that all of these are completely dependent on brain activity. Why would this dependency cease upon death? Why is it so difficult to grasp that we are mortal, biological creatures? My theory is that believers do not like the idea of dying forever. It makes them feel uncomfortable, and they shy away from the idea. Believers are more concerned with how their beliefs make them feel, and atheists are more concerned with whether or not their beliefs are true.

- Evan