I received the following in response to my previous post on Bill Donohue (Bill Donohue’s Crazy Crusade):

My biggest problem with you is that you claim belief systems deserve no respect. If that is the case, then you will forgive me for not respecting your belief system, and for not respecting you for having that belief system. [mechwarrior88]

Dear mechwarrior88,

In your effort to turn my own words against me you seem to have utterly failed to appreciate those words in the first place. Let’s break this down.

First, I did not claim that belief systems deserve no respect. Here is a direct quote of what I stated in my previous post:

“absurd beliefs, no matter how many people believe them, do not deserve any respect from rational individuals”

Thus, I did not say that belief systems deserve no respect. I said that absurd beliefs deserve no respect - more specifically, beliefs that cannot be backed up by any evidence. This is a very important difference. Throughout this entire “controversy” over consecrated hosts being “abused,” Catholics have insisted over and over again that such abuse is wrong simply because they “believe” that those crackers are the actual body of Christ. Because they “believe” this outrageous claim, the implication is that we should respect it. However, nowhere are these same Catholics presenting any actual evidence for their claim. My argument, therefore, is that we should not feel any obligation to respect such a belief until actual evidence can be presented.

Secondly, you claim to not respect my belief system but you do not indicate what exactly that belief system is. Atheism is not a belief system. Atheism does not necessarily make any positive belief claims. As an atheist, I do not believe in any god or gods, but that does not mean that I am making any claims about them. I am certainly not making any claims about magically transforming food products.

Finally, you say that you also do not respect me. Perhaps I should call your attention back to a key part of my previous entry:

“Neither Catholicism nor Islam as belief systems deserve any respect. People deserve respect and consideration.”

Beliefs that cannot be demonstrated to be true by any evidence and that are on the face of it quite absurd do not deserve respect. But I can separate the belief from the individual. Individual people deserve respect as fellow human beings unless they cross a criminal line or otherwise do something to damage that respect. Even if I do not respect your beliefs I respect your right as a person to have those beliefs and talk about them.

Could it be that a mere atheist has the moral high ground here?

You might want to think about that.

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Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a self-described “Catholic civil rights organization,” has been particularly vocal in his press releases regarding first the removal of a Eucharist from Mass by University of Florida Student Webster Cook, and then the criticism and desecration of another Eucharist wafer by University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers. That’s not surprising, of course. I have been following Donohue’s reactions with some interest, and here they are, with my comments.

July 7, 2008

Florida Student Abuses Eucharist

“For a student to disrupt Mass by taking the Body of Christ hostage—regardless of the alleged nature of his grievance—is beyond hate speech. That is why the UCF administration needs to act swiftly and decisively in seeing that justice is done. All options should be on the table, including expulsion.”

Disrupting a Mass or any peaceful activity should never be condoned. Nevertheless, this story is good in a way in that it brings to light an important point: absurd beliefs, no matter how many people believe them, do not deserve any respect from rational individuals. Donohue, like most Catholics, really believes that the actual “Body of Christ” was taken from the Church that day (a far more gentler fate, it seems, than consuming him). But, of course, neither Donohue nor any other Catholic can provide any evidence whatsoever that the wafer was actually the body of Christ. NONE. And that’s the point. If Catholics cannot provide any evidence for their weird belief, then that belief doesn’t deserve any respect. It doesn’t matter what Catholics “believe” about consecrated crackers any more than what Mormons believe about the non-existent golden tablets from which the book of Mormon was allegedly transcribed.

So, was Donohue’s call for the expulsion of the student proportional to the actual demonstrative offense - slightly disrupting a Church service? Hardly.

July 10, 2008

Minnesota Prof Pledges to Desecrate Eucharist

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.”

While Bill is right that an association of the blog with the university’s website might be inappropriate (the link was subsequently removed), the rest is just bluster. The university’s code of conduct applies to Myer’s behavior on campus and within his official capacity as a university professor. It does not control his behavior in an unofficial capacity outside of the university.

“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”

Gee, I don’t know, how about eating and digesting the Body of Christ? I can think of a lot more things more vile than taking home a cracker and putting it in a plastic bag.

July 22, 2008

Myers to Desecrate Eucharist and Koran

“The latest threat by Myers only makes matters worse. Instead of treating Catholicism with the respect he has previously shown for Islam, he now pledges to disrespect Islam the way he pledges to disrespect Catholicism (once again!). This is his idea of equal treatment.”

“Much has been written about the moral vacuity that marks the Darwinian vision of society that Myers embraces. He now has a grand opportunity to rebut those critics. Or sustain the perception. So which will it be, Professor Myers? I will let Ibrahim Hooper at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) know of your latest bluster. And I sincerely implore you to drop both threats now.”

Moral vacuity aside, this brings me right back to my same point. Neither Catholicism nor Islam as belief systems deserve any respect. People deserve respect and consideration. In the United States we have freedom of religious expression. But freedom of religious expression does not translate into freedom from criticism. And the fact of the matter is that Donohue actually thinks that abusing sheets of paper and a cracker are somehow threatening.

July 24, 2008

Myers Desecrates the Eucharist

“A formal complaint against Myers has already been made. What he did—in both word and deed—constitutes a bias incident, as defined by the University of Minnesota. The policy says that ‘Expressions of disrespectful bias, hate, harassment or hostility against an individual, group or their property because of the individual or group’s actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion…can be forms of discrimination. Expressions vary, and can be in the form of language, words, signs, symbols, threats, or actions that could potentially cause alarm, anger, fear, or resentment in others…even when presented as a joke.’”

“The University must now take action and apply the appropriate sanction. We are contacting the president, Board of Regents and the Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Office at the school, as well as Minnesota’s governor and both houses of the state legislature; the Catholic community in Minnesota is also being contacted. Moreover, we are also contacting Muslim groups nationwide.”

Here we go again. That’s university policy. Myers was not acting in an official university capacity.

“It is important for Catholics to know that the University of Minnesota will not tolerate the deliberate destruction of the Eucharist by one of its faculty. Just as African Americans would not tolerate the burning of a cross, and Jews would not tolerate the display of swastikas, Catholics will not tolerate the desecration of the Eucharist.”

The burning cross and the swastika are not the same as throwing a Eucharist in the trash. Burning crosses and swastikas are each historically associated with unjustified hatred and violence against certain classes of people. Throwing a cracker in the trash does not symbolize anything more than the fact that Catholics have no evidence that the cracker is not anything other than what it clearly is - a cracker.

July 25, 2008

University of Minnesota Refuses to Penalize Myers

“This is classic: Johnson admits that Myers has violated the UMN’s Code of Conduct and then proceeds to tell us why he is being allowed to do so with impunity—it’s a matter of academic freedom.”

As the same press release notes, however, the Chancellor stated that faculty members are allowed “to speak or write as a public citizen without institutional discipline or restraint….”

“Academic freedom is not the issue: academic malpractice is. For example, Section 10.21 (b) of UMN’s Tenure Code explicitly says that a tenured faculty member can be terminated or suspended for ‘unprofessional conduct which severely impairs a faculty member’s fitness in a professional capacity.’”

“In 2001, this part of the Tenure Code was invoked against a professor at UMN because he had images of child porn on his computer. It should now be invoked against Myers, and that is why we will appeal to UMN’s Board of Regents to do just that. It strains credulity to maintain that Christian students can expect fair treatment by a faculty member who has publicly shown nothing but contempt for their religion.”

If it can be shown that Myers gives unfair treatment to Christian students, that is one thing. However, what he actually did is nothing like having child porn on his computer. The latter, of course, is illegal.

“It is a sure bet that UMN would not tolerate a white professor who worked a comedy club on weekends trashing blacks. Indeed, it would say that such behavior disqualifies his ability to be objective. In many respects Myers is worse, and that is why sanctions are warranted.”

In no respects is Myers behavior worse. Hate speech is one thing. Calling out the fact that Catholics have absurd beliefs for which there is no evidence is another thing - and one that is absolutely necessary. We would not tolerate it if, during a conversation, a person admits that he or she believes that Elvis is alive and his body manifests itself in a bag of Tostitos. So it is time that non-Catholics and non-believers stop tolerating absurd Catholic beliefs during conversations just because ‘they believe’ it and have recruited others to believe it as well.

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I received the following comments in response to my critque of Campus Crusade for Christ’s article on http://www.everystudent.com titled “Does God Exist? Six Reasons to Believe that God is Really There.” The article was written by one Marilyn Adamson, who claims to be a former atheist. You can read Part 1 of my critique here and Part 2 here. Anyway, here are the comments:

You know, you basically just proved Marilyn’s point. No matter how many points lead to God’s existence, you simply don’t want to believe in him, so you aren’t going to. I think it’s kind of silly to demand that God be proven to you through science. If he does indeed exist (and I believe he does) he would be far beyond anything science could explain. -”Slightly Jaded”

As a reminder, Marilyn’s point was this: “If a person opposes even the possibility of there being a God, then any evidence can be rationalized or explained away.”

Slightly Jaded makes a simple but seemingly common mistake. My critiquing arguments in favor of God’s existence somehow implies that I do not want to believe in a god. In other words, she is essentially accusing me of dismissing these arguments not because the arguments themselves are wanting, but because my alleged aversion to believing in God causes me to reject them out of hand. In doing so, she tries to shift the fault from Marilyn’s arguments to myself.

Let me put it this way. If God exists then I want to know about it. If there are good and compelling reasons for believing that God does exist, then I will believe. It is as simple as that. The fact of the matter is, as I explained one at a time in my posts, the reasons that Marilyn presents are not good and are not compelling. By shifting the fault to my alleged doggedness, Slightly Jaded is attempting to avoid addressing head on the critiques that I presented. And I won’t stand for that. So, Slightly Jaded, if you are convinced by Marilyn’s reasons, then please explain why. And then please explain why my critiques fail to sway you. Otherwise your comments are not particularly useful.

Moving on, Slightly Jaded claims that it is “silly to demand that God be proven” to me “through science.” Forget the part about science - it is never silly to demand proof before believing in any claim, let alone an extraordinary one. I can assure you that Slightly Jaded probably does not apply this same lax standard when it comes to most everything else in her life. We don’t think that it is silly to demand proof from a used car salesman concerning the claims he is making about the car he want sto sell us. Why should we behave any differently when it comes to believing in God? If God is beyond what science can explain, then what can explain God? Magic? If nothing can explain God then God is inexplicable and cannot be known to exist. If God cannot be known to exist then God doesn’t warrant any belief.

Slightly Jaded believes in God, though. Why?

I personally have experienced things that have proven his existence to me beyond all doubt. I KNOW he’s real. I can’t back it up with science and I won’t claim that I can. It’s just something I’ve seen for myself.

Seen what? Experienced what? Did you speak to God face to face like Moses did (Exodus 33:11)? Thanks for being so utterly vague and nonspecific!

And finally:

I’m curious…why does it bother you if people believe in God? No one is forcing you to…why do you try to force others not to believe? (I’m not being snooty here, I genuinely would like to know)

I always find the accusation of “forcing” others not to believe amusing but also troubling. I can only wonder in what sense posting some words to the internet which people voluntarily read qualifies as force. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t care much that people believed in God if they kept that belief to themselves. But we all know how visible religion and religious beliefs are in the world today. Beliefs matter because they influence how people think and how people act. If you are not convinced of that just visit Jerusalem, where three religious faiths are all fighting over the possession of a small tract of land. Or you can remain right here in the United States, where the Christianity of the majority of our citizens and politicians on government policies, the way we spend our time, and the way we spend our money (is spending $160,000 on a steeple the best use of that kind of money? or how about $27 million for a musuem that teaches the literal truth of Genesis and that humans and dinosaurs once lived together?). It can also lead otherwise normal people to act absurdly, for example, when Webster Cook took a communion cracker from a Catholic Mass without chewing and digesting it.

Slightly Jaded was not the only one to question my open mindedness or sincerity simply because I critiqued a few arguments and found them to be unconvincing:

Better than most things I read about online for God’s existence. At least it was not a “Jesus touched my life on this date at this time” argument. I am sick of those. IT does make a good point… are you open to the POSSIBILITY of a deity existing or do you consistently seek evidence to the contrary or seek to disprove evidence rather than search for evidence in favor? - “Chess83″

I sought out and found these six reasons, did I not? And if they are better than most of the things you have read online arguing in favor of God’s existence, then, well, I think I will have to pass on those…

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How do you feel, to live in a religious country, where atheism could lead you to jail for 5 years?. Well, I live the first 23 years of my life in such country, Indonesia. Indonesia is a country with a population of 222 million people, and about 90% are Moslems. Its officially not an Islamic country, 5 religion is recognized, atheism is not an option here.

So, how was it possible that I became an atheist?

I was a christian, a real fundamentalist supernatural-believing christian. Its very fortunate that I could read and watch TV shows in English. Discovery Channel is the one that first brought me to science. Just in about 1 year after that the skepticism has grown large. I became christian liberal by reading some liberal books. At that point I actually realized already that I’m a closet atheist. I just use “liberal” as a label to protected me from all my friends.

In 2006 I left Indonesia to study in Germany. Wew, suddenly its free for me to believe/ not-believing anything. Its that time that I first knew atheism from video clips and writings of Dawkins, Harris, etc. Starting from early 2008, I began to say openly to my friends and families that I’m an atheist. I also actively participate in various discussions and debates in the internet about religion & atheism. It is of course very difficult for me at times, to realize that everyone I know is heavily religious, and to explain to them why I’m being an atheist. But being an atheist is not something to be ashamed of, its something to be proud of. And my life has been happy ever since.

(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)

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When I first read this article, “Church set up as a haven for smokers,” I thought that it must be a joke. As far as I can tell, it’s not. A Dutch indoor smoking ban went into effect as of July 1st of this year, however, apparently stepping outside to blow some smoke isn’t good enough. So, what is one to do in a situation like this? Start a religion? I guess so! Hence, “The Only and Universal Smokers Church of God.”

The idea, or so it goes, is that, while smoking may be banned indoors, such a ban should not be applied to Churches where smoking is fundamental to their religious beliefs. To do so would amount to religious discrimination. Wait, what? What does smoking tobacco have to do with religion? From the article:

“We think we have all the marks of a religion,” he said.

“We will have to find out what the secular powers-that-be think. For us the constitution and European rules say we have the right to express our religion and we express our religion through smoking.”

Church members receive a card, for a fee of £3, to prove their religious denomination as a “Holy Smoker” to the authorities. Believers sign up to a creed asserting a trinity of smoke, fire and ash. In terms of holy rites their god is honoured by smoking. The Smokers Church or Rokerskerk has over 2000 members including a “missionary” in Britain, Mr Eijsbouts told The Daily Telegraph.

“For a smoker with a small s it is just a bodily need. For a smoker with a capital S it is a spiritual need, you have to have a religious experience. When you are lighting up you have to think of God,” he said.

“Converting people was not easy until the smoking ban started but now people are flocking to the church.”

…

“We stand firmly behind the church’s teachings and that is smoking,” said Cor Busch, owner of the Lindeboom bar in the northern Dutch town of Alkmaar.

Who would have ever thought that God requires believers to honor Him by inhaling toxic, cancer-inducing substances into ones lungs? Not even in my wildest imagination. Although, perhaps this is the same God who got pleasure from smelling the sweet odor of burning animal flesh (Genesis 8:21).

Anyway, what more needs to be said here? People are flocking to the church, not because its ‘holy trinity’ of “smoke, fire, and ash” make any religious sense, but rather, because this is just another example of people trying to exploit the special status that our society places on religious activities. Or, to put it another way, it amounts to religious people seeking special rights and privileges that non-believers do not get simply because something believers do happens to be labeled as religious (no matter how strange or absurd).

I can only wonder what’s next. Anyone care to hazard a guess?

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Coming out as an atheist today is often compared with coming out as a homosexual in terms of the stresses involved in finding acceptance among ones peers and society in general. What if you are both gay and an atheist? Does that mean that you have two coming outs to endure? Perhaps it all depends on the environment within which you are raised.

Meet Tim West. He is a 26 year old, gay atheist living in Australia. West, fortunately, had a pair of very open-minded parents who encouraged him to form his own opinions and freely develop as a person both religiously and sexually.

Tim’s full story is covered in the SX News article “Keeping it in perspective.” Here are some choice excerpts:

It is often said that gay atheists must face not one, but two coming-outs: once for their sexuality and another for their atheis

Yet for Tim West, a 26-year-old software publisher, the case has been somewhat different.

West grew up in Canberra in a household steered by very open-minded parents. “They weren’t brought up particularly religious but they were really open,” West tells SX. “I was free to make my own opinions in absolutely every way – religious and sexual.”

As a result, he never did any earth-shattering announcements or public denouncements of faith at any point in his life. West was able to form his own views from the ground up with the support of his family.

“There’s no doubt that the way you were brought up has a huge impact on how you turn out. So in my specific case, I wouldn’t be as comfortable with who I am were it not for my upbringing.”

Today, West is an active member of a loose collective made up of non-believers and humanists, known as Sydney Atheists.

…

When it comes to sexuality, West says that the atheist community are totally accepting of gay people, “without even having to ask for it”.

“And there’s none of the baggage you’ll find in any of the churches, even in the more liberal ones. When you build your world view from the ground up in a rational, liberal way, which all atheists I know have, gay rights is a no-brainer.”

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Go back to Part 1

Continuing with the last three of Marilyn’s “Six Reasons to Believe in God.” Her first three reasons were all variations of the God-as-designer argument - deceptively compelling until you stop and really thinkg about them for a moment (or two). Will her final three reasons shift the tide in God’s favor? I wish I could tell you yes, but, I am afraid it gets even worse from here…

4. To state with certainty that there is no God, a person has to ignore the passion of an enormously vast number of people who are convinced that there is a God.

This is not to say that if enough people believe something it is therefore true…There is a much larger issue. Throughout history, billions of people in the world have attested to their firm, core convictions about God’s existence — arrived at from their subjective, personal relationship with God. Millions today could give detailed account of their experience with God. They would point to answered prayer and specific, amazing ways God has met their needs, and guided them through important personal decisions. They would offer, not only a description of their beliefs, but detailed reports of God’s actions in their lives. Many are sure that a loving God exists and has shown himself to be faithful to them. If you are a skeptic, can you say with certainty: “I am absolutely right and they all are wrong about God”?

At least Marilyn for a fleeting moment seems to recognize the fallacy of appealing to the number of believers as evidence of the truth of that belief (the smart sounding latin phrase is argumentum ad populum). However, one must be careful to remember that, in science at least, a consensus among a majority of experts is strong reason to take that claim seriously. In either case, however, it is not the number of people that believe something that ultimately matters but, rather, the actual evidence.

Marilyn gives her readers nothing more than some non-specific examples of subjective experiences that believers in God apparently claim to have. None of this is evidence for anything other than some believers have convinced themselves in their belief. When prayer is subjected to controlled scientific experiments it fails to give any statistical meaningful results, leaving believers to continue counting their hits and ignoring their misses.

As a skeptic, I do not need to say with certainty that “I am absolutely right and they all are wrong about God.” All that I have to say is, “I don’t know if I am right but I am not convinced by any of their evidence.”

5. We know God exists because he pursues us. He is constantly initiating and seeking for us to come to him.

I tried in vain in the paragraphs that follow to find any explaination as to how Marilyn actually knows that God “pursues” us (whatever that means). Presumably, if God is God, He can do anything He wants, and the thought of such a being pursuing us strikes me as a bit odd. Instead, this is what Marilyn offers her readers, based on her own experience:

I didn’t realize that the reason the topic of God weighed so heavily on my mind, was because God was pressing the issue…It was as if I couldn’t escape thinking about the possibility of God…It might be that the underlying reason atheists are bothered by people believing in God is because God is actively pursuing them.

You are free to read the rest, but that is the jist of it. I couldn’t stop thinking about God (or maybe worrying about God’s existence), therefore He must exist! This is about as pathetic an intellectual cop-out as any that I have seen. I suppose God just happens to pursue individuals who can’t stand not having all of the answers laid out in front of them.

6. Unlike any other revelation of God, Jesus Christ is the clearest, most specific picture of God pursuing us.

God has other revlelations? How does Marilyn know that the Bible is God’s revelation? Let’s see if she clues us in:

Why Jesus? Look throughout the major world religions and you’ll find that Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius and Moses all identified themselves as teachers or prophets. None of them ever claimed to be equal to God. Surprisingly, Jesus did. That is what sets Jesus apart from all the others. He said God exists and you’re looking at him. Though he talked about his Father in heaven, it was not from the position of separation, but of very close union, unique to all humankind. Jesus said that anyone who had seen Him had seen the Father, anyone who believed in him, believed in the Father.

He said, “I am the light of the world, he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” He claimed attributes belonging only to God: to be able to forgive people of their sin, free them from habits of sin, give people a more abundant life and give them eternal life in heaven. Unlike other teachers who focused people on their words, Jesus pointed people to himself. He did not say, “follow my words and you will find truth.” He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me.”

We normally consider a person who claims to be God insane or at least deeply troubled. Marilyn wants to grant Jesus an exception here. Why? Why should we believe what He alledgedly claimed to be? She provides two quotations from the gospel of John, but the gospel of John is recognized by most biblical scholars to be a late and unreliable composition. Why should we believe that the author of John is accurately quoting Jesus rather than using Jesus as a mouthpiece to expouse his own theological views? Where in the earlier gospels - Mark, Matthew, and Luke - does Jesus claim to be a God? How about Mark 15.34, where Jesus says, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” Is he talking about himself?

Marilyn attempts to answer some of these questions by giving reasons to believe that Jesus was, in fact, divine:

What proof did Jesus give for claiming to be divine? He did what people can’t do. Jesus performed miracles. He healed people…blind, crippled, deaf, even raised a couple of people from the dead. He had power over objects…created food out of thin air, enough to feed crowds of several thousand people. He performed miracles over nature…walked on top of a lake, commanding a raging storm to stop for some friends. People everywhere followed Jesus, because he constantly met their needs, doing the miraculous. He said if you do not want to believe what I’m telling you, you should at least believe in me based on the miracles you’re seeing.

Even if we grant all of this - is there anything here that a devil in disguise could not accomplish? But we don’t need to grant any of this. The gospels must be shown to be reliable, not simply assumed to be.

Marilyn’s reasons either fall flat or raise more questions than they appear to answer. They certainly shouldn’t compell any thinking person into believing that “a loving God does exist and can be known in an intimate, personal way.”

(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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The website http://www.everystudent.com, maintained by Campus Crusade for Christ, has a page titled “Does God Exist? Six Reasons to Believe that God is Really There.” The page claims to offer “candid, straight-forward reasons to believe in the existenece of God…” Sounds good to me. Let’s see what it has to offer.

The prologue begins thus:

Just once wouldn’t you love for someone to simply show you the evidence for God’s existence? No arm-twisting. No statements of, “You just have to believe.”

Yes! I won’t hold my breath, however.

But first consider this. If a person opposes even the possibility of there being a God, then any evidence can be rationalized or explained away. It is like if someone refuses to believe that people have walked on the moon, then no amount of information is going to change their thinking. Photographs of astronauts walking on the moon, interviews with the astronauts, moon rocks…all the evidence would be worthless, because the person has already concluded that people cannot go to the moon.

Granted. However, if the evidence for God’s existence is as strong as the evidence that people have walked on the moon, then I just might have to change the name of this website from anatheist.net to a-theist.net (or maybe convertedatheist.net!). The author of the article, Marilyn Adamson, claims to be a former atheist who, after a year of questioning, converted to Christianity. If that’s true, then hopefully what follows will be the best case that this converted atheist can make.

On to the first reason:

1. The complexity of our planet points to a deliberate Designer who not only created our universe, but sustains it today.

Many examples showing God’s design could be given, possibly with no end.

This is an appeal to the complexity in nature to argue for a designer. I have no doubt that an endless parade of examples could be given, as was tirelessly and tediously done by William Paley as far back as 1802 in his book Natural Theology (or even earlier, by John Ray in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, 1691). I write more about design arguments in general in my article on that subject.

Of the two examples that Marilyn gives, one of them is water. As she states, “the characteristics of water are uniquely suited to life.” In other words, as this argument goes, water is somehow designed for life. This seems to be the obvious and intuitive conclusion. But it is not a necessary conclusion. Maybe life was designed for water. Rather than water existing for life, maybe life exists because of water. Charles Darwin turned Paley and these kinds of arguments on their head by illustrating a natural mechanism that is capable of generating complexity without the assistant of a design architect and craftsman. That mechanism, of course, is natural selection. Ever since 1859, complexity is no longer a compelling argument for a designer.

The second example that Marilyn gives is the Earth, but her argument takes the form of a classic “fine-tuning” or anthropic argument:

The Earth…its size is perfect… If Earth were smaller, an atmosphere would be impossible, like the planet Mercury. If Earth were larger, its atmosphere would contain free hydrogen, like Jupiter…The Earth is located the right distance from the sun… Any closer and we would burn up. Even a fractional variance in the Earth’s position to the sun would make life on Earth impossible…And our moon is the perfect size and distance from the Earth for its gravitational pull. The moon creates important ocean tides and movement so ocean waters do not stagnate, and yet our massive oceans are restrained from spilling over across the continents.

And so on and so forth. In other words, we exist on the planet Earth because our planet has the perfect conditions for our kind of life. This must be true, obviously, or we would not be here to discuss it. Nevertheless, the implication is that our planet must be designed for our purposes. What is the probability that an Earth-like planet would naturally form that meets all of these conditions? Who knows, but let’s say that it is extremely improbable - on the order of 1 in a billion chance. If our star planetary system was the only one in the Universe, that would have been a remarkable occurrence. But of course it is not. Astronomers estimate that there are some 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. As a conservative estimate, we might say that there are then a billion billion planets. Given the extremely improbable odds of 1 in a billion against an Earth-like planet appearing, with a billion billion planets we might expect to find 1 billion Earth-like planets in the Universe.

That’s right, 1 billion Earths. Given what we now know about the immensity of the Universe, it is no longer a compelling argument to claim that Earth-like conditions appearing are so improbable that the only conclusion must be that a designer crafted this little speck specifically for life to flourish. Rather, it may be that we just happen to live on one of those billion planets that - fortunately - chance favored.

The second reason is another variation of the argument from design, this time using a specific biological organ:

2. The human brain’s complexity shows a higher intelligence behind it.

Marilyn asks:

A brain that deals with more than a million pieces of information every second, while evaluating its importance and allowing you to act on the most pertinent information… did it come about just by chance? Was it merely biological causes, perfectly forming the right tissue, blood flow, neurons, structure?

Well, most (if not all) evolutionary biologists certainly think so. And the wide variety of brain structures spread throughout the animal kingdom certainly give hints at how such a complex structure could have evolved. Marilyn, however, seems to want us to give up trying to figure this question out and simply assume that God must have designed it directly. Maybe He did. But an argument from ignorance will not prove it.

Next:

3. “Chance” or “natural causes” are insufficient explanations.

The alternative to God existing is that all that exists around us came about by natural cause and random chance. If someone is rolling dice, the odds of rolling a pair of sixes is one thing. But the odds of spots appearing on blank dice is something else. What Pasteur attempted to prove centuries ago, science confirms, that life cannot arise from non-life. Where did human, animal, plant life come from?

Also, natural causes are an inadequate explanation for the amount of precise information contained in human DNA. A person who discounts God is left with the conclusion that all of this came about without cause, without design, and is merely good fortune. It is intellectually wanting to observe intricate design and attribute it to luck.

I’ll say first that I am not aware of science “confirming” that life cannot arise from non-life, given the right ingredients and the right conditions. It has by no means produced definitive evidence for how life may have originated on our planet, but this is not the same as saying that it demonstrates that it could not have by any natural means.

Anyway, notice how God is assumed to be an unproblematic alternative. The problem, so the argument goes, is that life appears to be too improbable to have just happened by chance through natural means. Improbable doesn’t mean impossible, of course, but Marilyn wants you to agree that God is a more likely solution. This, however, is simply assumed and never demonstrated. Any God that is powerful and knowledgeable enough to create life, let alone create the planets and Universe in which that life exists, must Itself be highly complex - far beyond our puny imaginations. Using the same argument, one must conclude that the existence of such a being is even more improbable.

Any ultimate explanation for life must involve a bottom up, step by step, explanation, not a top down, poof here is a creator, hand wave. Evolution by means of natural selection is one such explanation. Even if it is not yet clear how “chance” and “natural causes” can explain the origins of life, such an explanation is more probable than an even more complex and even more intelligent (and apparently nowhere to be found) designer-god.

Three up, three down. So far Marilyn has not offered any really compelling reasons to believe in God. Might her final three clinch the deal? Stay tuned!

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Well, sort of…

The University of Central Florida student, Webster Cook, took a consecrated host from a Catholic mass on campus and brought it home. Webster was given the host as a part of the Eucharist ceremony. According to Catholics, the host, or cracker, undergoes ‘transubstantiation’ during the Eucharist. The online Catholic Encyclopedia spills a lot of words over this doctrine, but I’ll simply print Wikipedia’s concise definition:

Transubstantiation is the change of the substance of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ occurring in the Eucharist according to the teaching of some Christian Churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, while all that is accessible to the senses remain as before.

It took until 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, however, for Christians to ‘formally’ establish this dogma as true by verbal and written fiat.

Anyway, Church officials immediately began characterizing Cook’s act as equivalent to a ‘kidnapping’ or ‘hostage’ situation - because hey, that’s the real body of Jesus in there! According to one news source:

Regardless of the reason, the Diocese says its main concern is to get the Eucharist back so it can be taken care of properly and with respect. Cook has been keeping the Eucharist stored in a plastic bag since last Sunday. “It is hurtful,” said Father Migeul Gonzalez with the Diocese. “Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family.”

Gonzalez said intentionally abusing the Eucharist is classified as a mortal sin in the Catholic church, the most severe possible. If it’s not returned, the community of faith will have to ask for forgiveness.

A “mortal sin” is a sin so terrible that it automatically damns the person to hell if not properly confessed to and pardoned by a priest. As Sam Harris noted in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason:

But for sheer gothic absurdity nothing surpasses the medieval concern over host desecration, the punishment of which preoccupied pious Christians for centuries…Christians began to worry that these living wafers might be subjected to all manner of mistreatment, and even physical torture, at the hands of heretics and Jews…Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? Historical accounts suggests that as many as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary crime. The crime of host desecration was punished throughout Europe for centuries. (99-100)

Nowadays I would like to think that we do not consider murder or death the appropriate punishment for imaginary crimes such as Eucharist theft. However, according to another story, Cook received death threats for his actions. Whether or not the death threats had anything to do with it, Cook eventually returned the wafer to the Church:

Minutes before the Mass began, Student Senator Webster Cook returned the Holy Eucharist he was holding hostage in a Ziploc bag ever since smuggling the blessed wafer of bread out of the Catholic Mass service Sunday June 29. Carol Brinati with the Diocese of Orlando said the Catholic community was “concerned about the possible desecration of the Eucharist,” and pleaded for its safe return.

One might reasonably wonder why eating the body of Jesus is less of a desecration than putting it in a protected plastic bag.

Nevertheless, there are two separate issues here with this story that I see and each involves respect. First, there is respect for individuals. Cook was disrespectful through his actions to the people in the Church. There is no doubt about this. I would never condone intentionally disrupting any church services.

Secondly, there is respect for beliefs and ideas. The idea behind the whole issue here, that of the Eucharist, is one that does not deserve any respect from any rational, thinking person. If I believed that my corn flakes miraculously transformed into the body of Julius Caesar while eating breakfast, I would be called insane. And for good reason. However, if I believe that a cracker miraculously transforms into the body of Jesus while in Church, I am just a Catholic, and this is somehow considered either perfectly normal or an idea that must be respected. Yet, both beliefs are inherently irrational and absurd on the same level. The only difference is that we call one religion because it has achieved a sort of ’sanity’ by sheer numbers.

As Sam Harris also pointed out in The End of Faith, “It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes (72).” If one individual believes that food can be invisibly transformed into a deceased person’s body, and that drink can be invisibly transformed into that same deceased person’s blood, then we call that person mad and question his or her sanity. However, if over one billion of the world’s population believe it, then we call it a religion. “The danger of religious fatih,” Harris wrote, “is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy” (73).