The Dawn Treader

What you have said is true in most public and private schools. I'm glad that doesn't happen at FCS!

My experience was much like MrDawntreader's. 10th grade biology skipped evolution entirely. I didn't get any education in evolution until college (basic survey in Freshman biology followed by more detail in "Evolutionary Biology," "Developmental Biology" and "Molecular Evolution" in junior and senior years.

My high school was a very well regarded suburban HS in a suburb of Philadelphia. Not exactly the buckle of the bible belt. Humanities were excellent. Chemistry and Physics were good. Biology was lame. I doubt that skipping evolution was an attempt to avoid controversy -- more likely just a testament to the general lameness of the class. Since I wanted to major in biology at college, that was annoying.

Rob Ryan,

Are you saying that you never express your opinion on the material that you teach? I mean no offense, but I find that hard to believe.

Paul,

Thank you for stating your belief and restating Rob's belief about science.

As long as we are stating beliefs, I believe that a teacher who is willing to exercise critical thinking and challenge the status quo is a good thing ... kinda like Einstein did when he challenged Newton's long accepted ideas about the laws of motion. That is how we get paradigm shifts and break throughs.

We need to stimulate critical thinking and encourage inquiry, not blind adherence. It will make for better scientists.

One other thought:

Before he could challenge Newton, Einstein had to understand Newton from top to bottom, inside and out.

If you want today's students to challenge Darwin, they must first understand Darwin inside and out, in much more detail then they'll get from even the best high school class. I think you will do more harm than good, if you attempt to engage students in criticism before they really know what they are criticising.

More generally, modern science is both a way of critical thinking AND a massive body of information to be learned. In a class, what is the appropriate balance between the two?

Here's a link to the classic essay "A student, a fish, and Agassiz."
http://www.bethel.edu/~dhoward/resources/Agassizfish/Agassizfish.htm

The website links it to bible study, but we could also apply it to biology. I'm inclined to think that 10th grade biology is a place to learn how to see the fish (which would include the basics of evolutionary biology as accepted by really know the fish.

"Are you saying that you never express your opinion on the material that you teach? I mean no offense, but I find that hard to believe."

In general, I only express positive opinions of the material I teach. Literature is a hard enough sell without trashing it to the kids. Now, I might say that the writing of the Puritans is somewhat plain by the standards of the day, but I always follow up by showing that this was a deliberate style since Puritans were far more concerned with conveying meaning than with entertaining a reading audience by employing a great deal of figurative language. What I have expressed in this case is a fact, not an opinion. I won't say that this literary theory or that is full of bull; I just teach the theory and let the kids decide, assuming they care enough to form an opinion.

I teach the elements of literature and leave the criticism to others. I love everything I teach, religious writing included (Who doesn't love John Donne? Milton? Bunyan?), and I am confident that I convey that when I teach. I doubt any of my students who don't already know I'm an atheist suspect that I think religion is bunk.

It's bad enough to have a science teacher who doesn't believe evolutionary theory (why don't we employ some flat-earthers to teach geography while we are at it?); for her to convey this fact to the students is unconscionable.

"Frankly, there is too little skepticism."

I agree, but that is not the domain of public education. Critical thinking is, but that is only one component of skepticism. I find that many people are very selective advocates of skepticism. If we make teaching skepticism part of the curriculum, we might not like the way some teachers apply it.

"As someone who loves God and science, the assertion that evolutionary theory is so certain is what raises my hackles."

You are entitled to your opinion, as I am entitled to mine. My "flat-earthers" allusion was hyperbole. The point I intended to make was that like flat-earthers, those who don't see evolution as an incredibly robust, clearly valid explanation of the origin of species are, in my opinion (and my experience), either somewhat ignorant of evolution or somewhat blinded by dogma or both. Of course I don't think such people are ignorant or blinded to the same degree as flat-earthers, geocentrists, young-earthers, etc.

I have never met a single person well-versed in evolutionary theory who didn't think that it almost certainly accounted for the origin of species--unless that person were a fundamentalist/literalist Jew, Muslim, or Christian. I do not wish to offend you or anyone else with my opinion, but I should be honest about my opinion. Where is a single deist, agnostic, or atheist who has a problem with evolution?

Nearly all of my friends are Christians, and I don't know of any who can't reconcile their beliefs with the scientific consensus. Therefore, I don't see God-belief as the impediment; rather, I think the degree of religiosity is the primary problem.

you appear to be advocating restricting the access that high school students have to conflicting viewpoints simply because you don't feel they are capable of understanding them.

Steve,

Not exactly. I'm suggesting that in many cases (e.g. based on my experience and MrDawntreader's memory of his biology class), the biology curriculum is so poor that high school students don't yet have the knowledge base to evaluate criticisms of the established theory. It's not that they are incapable of understanding them, just that they aren't ready to. An analogy: any reasonably intelligent high school student can understand calculus, but if you try to teach calculus to students who haven't yet mastered algebra, you'll do more harm than good.

Or look at the most recent discussion between myself and Matt Curtis regarding the intermediate status of Tiktaalik. It was fun but, I think, ultimately fruitless, because neither Matt nor myself had the technical knowledge to critically evaluate the data and different interpretations. Neither of us had spent enough time really studying the details of sarcopterygian fish anatomy.

If you introduce ID before students have really studied the established theory, then I don't think you'll be teaching critical thinking. You'll just be muddying the waters. I'd actually have no problem with a short seminar (a day or two) discussing ID and/or controversies within modern evolutionary biology. But, lets face it, ID is currently a tentative hypothesis espoused by a small group, few of whom are biologists. That may change in the future, but until then, the bulk of time in an introductory biology class should focus on getting a grounding in the established theory. Heck, most of the time that won't even conflict with ID; many, if not most, IDers* accept some variant of common descent with modification or front-loaded evolution, so the basics of speciation, natural selection, biogeography, and evolutionary history should be noncontroversial.

*by IDers, I mean the actual theorists and scientists who support it - people like Michael Behe. I suspect that in the general public there is a larger group of creationists who have some vague notion that ID supports their opinions.

Sorry, keep thinking of additional things after I hit post...

you appear to be advocating restricting the access that high school students have to conflicting viewpoints simply because you don't feel they are capable of understanding them.

I don't believe that restricting a curriculum is the same as restricting students' access to conflicting viewpoints. Any curriculum in any class will be limited in what it presents, but any reasonably intelligent and motivated student has ready access to other viewpoints in libraries, bookshops, websites, etc. The school needs to give the students the educational background to evaluate those other resources, and critical thinking skills are only part of that background.

When I started grad school, I could barely read a scientific paper in genetics or evolution, let alone critically evaluate it. What I needed to learn wasn't critical thinking but a base of factual knowledge and a new vocabulary. In an intro high school biology class, that knowledge base will include a grounding in Darwin's theory, biogeography, natural selection, the fossil records, etc. But ID? Not so much, I think. There's only so much time in a school day, and there is so much to learn.

Rob,

Whether an agnostic or deist has a bias for evolution would presumably have to do with how they came to their belief about God. If they came to their belief first, and then considered evolutionary theory as evidence of that belief their stake in it is not likely to be as strong. On the other hand, if they came to their belief about God as a result of what they believe to be true about evolutionary theory, then they are likely to have a much higher stake in safeguarding the theory.

I'm curious. What would you consider sufficient evidence of God? Do you agree that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God?

Jeff:
In other words, did he/she present it as a fact or a theory?

Argh! Your line of questioning, and the unnamed student's response, hits on a HUGE pet peeve of mine. People tend to confuse the colloquial definition of "theory" (which is actually more like "hypothesis") with the scientific definition of theory. Saying that evolution (or any other scientific theory) is "just a theory" is rather like saying DNA is "just a molecule." And even that comparison isn't really all that good, because even the DNA analogy correctly uses the term applied to it.

Did your teacher mention anything at all about the controversy surrounding this theory

I'd ask a follow-up: Did she mention that the "controversy" is almost exclusively political rather than scientific? In any case, this would be a wonderful topic for a political science class, or even a philosophy of science class. A biology class, not so much.

We need to stimulate critical thinking and encourage inquiry, not blind adherence.

Careful what you wish for! If we truly did that, we'd have a lot fewer Christians. :) [Wait, what? Cain knew a wife? Where the heck did she come from?!?]

Nick:
I think you will do more harm than good, if you attempt to engage students in criticism before they really know what they are criticising.

Give the man a prize!

would include the basics of evolutionary biology as accepted by

Take the prize away! I think you mean >99%.

But, lets face it, ID is currently a tentative hypothesis espoused by a small group, few of whom are biologists. That may change in the future, but until then, the bulk of time in an introductory biology class should focus on getting a grounding in the established theory.

Absolutely correct. And I expect that even most ID proponents would agree with this assessment, if the topic were anything other than evolution. But for whatever reason, ID proponents want to seem to throw rules and order out the window when it comes to their pet project. Presumably because their pet project can't survive by the current rules and order. :)

matt curtis:
This is another meaningless phrase. The number of people who accept something as true has no bearing on whether that thing is true.

No, but when the people we are talking about are well-versed experts in the field in question, it does tend to make an extraordinarily good shorthand. Sure, there are a few examples of the consensus having been dead wrong, but those examples are outnumbered by the affirmative cases by a ratio of literally hundreds to one.

The problem is that you hide behind the possibility that they could hypothetically be wrong to justify your belief that they are wrong. But in reality, I only see three options here: You can accept the weight of expert opinion; you can reject the weight of expert opinion, based on personal beliefs and preferences, in which case you can't fairly expect (much less require) anyone else to do likewise; or you can yourself become an expert in the field in question, and set about proving it wrong, and thus changing expert opinion.

The bottom line is, while scientific consensus is not 100% foolproof, the number is a heck of a lot closer to 100% than it is to 0%, which belies your assertion that the phrase is "meaningless."

This does not quite reflect the point I was making above, but it does bear on the question of whether it is appropriate for a teacher to express her own viewpoints.

Here, I think you're conflating the right of someone to hold a particular opinion with the rightness/wrongness/appropriateness of expressing that opinion in a particular context. A teacher most certainly has a right to hold and express an anti-evolution view. That teacher most certainly does not have the right to teach that view where the official curriculum contradicts it.

Putting it another way, would you want your kid to go to a Bible class taught by an atheist who says "I think this is a bunch of crap, but I'm going to teach it anyway?" Doubtful. How is this different?

And Nick has already stated this, but it bears repeating. We're talking about high school biology here, not a thesis-level course. There's only time to cover the basics; philosophical differences not withstanding, there's simply not enough time to teach about every two-bit challenger to every established theory that comes along. Why even bother opening that door?

Finally, for whatever little it's worth, my belief in evolution predated by atheism by several years, and it had nothing whatever to do with my turn from Christianity to atheism. Ironically, it was my gung-ho acceptance of Christianity that ultimately led to my atheism. I was so enthused about it that I wanted to learn more and more about it, and the more I learned, the less sense it made. One can only make so many excuses for the contradictions and nonsense before the whole thing starts to fall apart (what one philosophy professor referred to as the "eggshell" problem -- an eggshell is really strong, but once the first crack gets in there...).

You are correct that we can neither prove nor disprove God's existence, but that doesn't mean we can't make an informed decision about what to believe. Concerning what might make me believe, and internally- and externally-consistent holy scripture would go a very long way. Ideally such scripture would be consistent with what we see in the real world, would be free of obvious errors (pi=3, rabbits chew their cud, etc.), and would make specific predictions about future events that could later be vetted. We don't really have that, and absent that, I'm not sure what else could convince me.

Anyway, as Rob points out, I don't believe in God for the same reasons I don't believe in gremlins or Leprechauns -- there's simply no rational reason to believe, other than to arbitrarily fill some gap in knowledge.

Matt, you asked:
"Will you agree that if God exists he is, by definition, supernatural (i.e. outside of nature) and therefore would not be detectable in the same sense that the sea and oxygen are?"

No; I don't think that is necessarily the case. In any case, the Bible is bursting with examples of God making himself known. If God exists, he knows what it would take for me to believe.

"Would you not also agree that the two examples above are inherently (in fact, intended to be) silly?"

Yes. Those examples are intended to be silly.

"Surely you would agree, would you not, that there are things from which we could infer the possibility of a God, or evidence which could be interpreted to suggest the existence of God?"

Obviously, many people do just that. If one presumes a god, then that god can always be made to fit as an explanation of whatever one wishes to explain. God concepts are infinitely malleable.

"It appears from your statements above that you consciously chose to reject the existence of God. Is that the case?"

How on earth does one consciously reject the existence of something? I either believe or I do not believe; choice is not involved at all! People can choose to espouse a belief or not, but as for actually believing...I can't think of a single thing that I choose to believe or disbelieve.

Re: Dawkins--It is funny how much your criticism of Dawkins resembles mine of Lee Strobel.

"I'm sorry, but no matter how many billions of chances I have, I'm never ever going to make 20 free throws in a row, let alone fly unaided."

Oh, dear. I'm no athlete, but I have done this several times. Of course, I've thrown thousands of free throws. Sometimes I miss as many as five in a row, and I'm happy to average 65% overall. Sometimes you just get on a roll. I think you should keep trying. I've also had 13 bullseyes in a row in darts on four occasions. I don't know why I can't go over that number at least once; I've been trying for 20 years.

I don't think Dawkins sees the anthropic principal as making it less improbable that life spontaneously generated from non-life. I think he intends to provide perspective with it. The chance of a golf ball landing on any particular blade of grass is vanishingly small, but the golf ball has to land somewhere. It's silly to hold up that blade of grass afterward and exclaim how miraculous it is that it landed on THAT blade of grass. Possibly, the golf ball doesn't even land on grass, but in that case, if our lives are contingent on that outcome, we aren't even here to have the discussion. Is life really that improbable, or is it inevitable given certain conditions? I don't pretend to know, and I don't think Dawkins does, either.

Rob,

You said in response to my question about God being outside of nature, i.e. superatural:

"the Bible is bursting with examples of God making himself known."

I agree that there are numerous examples within the Bible of God making himself known, but I don't believe that answers my question. Let's look at a couple of examples. First, we have Moses seeing the burning bush that was not consumed. How would you test the burning bush to determine it was God taking on some natural form? Dawkins would simply say (and I agree that this is one possible conclusion) that there is some natural explanation for the unconsumed burning bush that we simply lack the present ability to understand or detect.

Second, we have the virgin birth. Again, how would you test whether Mary was truly with child through the Holy Spirit? With DNA testing, we might be able to rule out Joseph as the father, but what test would be used to determine whether it was or was not the Holy Spirit?

In short, if God has periodically revealed himself to man as documented in the Bible, how does that bear on the question of whether God is supernatural?

You also said,

"If God exists, he knows what it would take for me to believe."

While I believe this is true, what is your ultimate point? If there is a God such as the Bible describes - all knowing, all powerful, the creator and savior of all the world - on what basis do you demand that he make himself known to you? Let me ask you this: If there are some things in nature which are beyond our present capacity to understand, why could there not also be a God which is beyond that same capacity for our understanding?

"If one presumes a god, then that god can always be made to fit as an explanation of whatever one wishes to explain."

That is essentially true; as I've stated here before this is one of my criticisms of evolutionary theory. If you presume it to be true, you invariably find evidence to support it. But, what if you approach the question of God's existence without a presumption either for or against his existence? Would you agree that there are things from which we could infer the possibility of a God, or evidence which could be interpreted to suggest the existence of God?

I apparently wasn't clear in my question about choosing to reject the existence of God. What I intended to ask was whether you at one time believed in God and then through some process decided there was no God. While I think that choice is often - maybe always - an element of belief, I don't think that's relevant to my question and probably largely boils down to semantics.

It's been some time since I read anything by Lee Strobel, but as I recall I wasn't particularly impressed by some of Strobel's arguments. The best argument I've seen thus far is C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity which appears to draw heavily from Paul's argument in the first chapter or two of Romans.

Dawkins's discussion of the anthropic principle is simply poor reasoning. The fact that we are here and able to engage in this type of discussion has no bearing whatseover on either the probability or even possibility of life originating from non-life. If you assume that life had to originate from non-life through some natural mechanism, then our existence necessarily implies that it did. If you assume that God exists, then our existence is not dependent on life originating from non-life through natural processes. Moreover, if you assume that life cannot spontaneously originate from non-life through natural means (incidentally what we have thus far been able to observe), then a strong implication is that something outside of nature intervened.

Interestingly, if we take your golf ball example, finding the ball on the green would suggest to us that someone had hit the ball there (or perhaps dishonestly tossed it there).

But, to address your particular point about the golf ball and the blade of grass, it may be that the odds of the golf ball landing on that particular blade of grass are pretty slim. But there is nothing inherent in that blade of grass, compared with the thousand blades within just a few inches of it, that makes it the more likely landing place for the golf ball. Our Earth, for whatever reason, is uniquely suited to our form of life. The only help the anthropic principle provides is that we are here, therefore, our planet must be suited for us being here. It doesn't help explain how we got here.

Matt - along with some others here you seem keen on the idea of circular reasoning, so let me suggest that in your definition of nature: "God is outside nature, because God created nature and can't, therefore, be part of nature". Sounds pretty circular to me. So what's the definition of nature that doesn't involve God?

I'd consider a first-hand account of Christ's miracles, etc. as a good first indicator, though insufficient on its own (perhaps in bulk they might be more convincing, though as we've said before unanimity <> truth). Unfortunately the best I'm aware of is a repeatedly transcribed collection of stories handed down through an undeterminedly long chain of unknown people that purport to relate things seen at first hand, where at each stage the people relating the story have an interest (which may be very honorable) in telling a particular story that may or may not correspond with what actually happened.

My belief, I think, could be arrived at in one of two ways. Either God would have to make himself directly known to me ("Hello Paul, it's God"), or I would have to learn of something that I a) knew to be true, b) could not explain any other way, and c) could not see how an alternate explanation would come in time.

Paul,

I do not understand your application of a circular arguement either. Logically, Nature must exist separate from the Creator much like a clay jar exists outside of the potter. The potter did not have to make the jar, but just chose to. The jar is not the potter and visa-versa. What IS circular is the common approach of my fellow scientists, which is,"Nature made us by evolution, therefore if we look at Nature, we must find evolution." Whether one embraces evolution or not, that stance is circular.

Also Paul, are you aware of Kant's idea of the nounmenon versus the phenomenon? We cannot perceive anything outside of the materialistic world, because we simply do not have the "tools" to do so. So, in one sense, you are correct to say that the only way you can believe is if God were to reach down to make Himself real to you. Kant would very rightly say that a person cannot be a true atheist, because no person has the tools to declare such a thing.

So is agnosticism better? Some call agnostics weaklings because they do not have the courage to come down on one side or other of the fence. What do you think? One thing is logically true: you do not have the knowledge or authority to declare that God is bunk. What about believers? They do not have the tools to break through to the nounmenological world either. Christians believe (uniquely among all religions) that we cannot, in fact, "break through". Rather, God has broken through for us in the person of the Christ so that we can have fellowship with Him now and after time and phenomenon has all passed away. Does this make logical sense to you, even if you do not believe it?

I'm still looking and listening, though, because, like Kipling's elephant, I have insatiable curiosity. ;-)

Are you curious enough to read a NY Times Bestseller written by a Christian? No, the author is not Lee Strobel.

"I don't think I can go along with this type of comparison. The potter makes the jar, but not the clay. The architect builds the house, but his materials comes from somewhere else. If everything comes from God, wouldn't it make more sense to see him as a spring from which nature flows? Wouldn't he then be nature itself?"

Rob,

The point of the two analogies is that either the architect or the potter create something and because they are the creator they exist prior to and outside the creation. For the same reason, if God is the creator of all things, then he is, by necessity, outside of nature.

"The god concept is far more malleable than evolutionary theory."

The truth or falsity of this statement depends upon what you mean by "god concept". If you mean that what people believe about God can change, then I agree for the most part because evolution theory is more constrained by what we can physically see. However, if you mean that what God actually is - or whether he in fact exists - can change, then I disagree with your statement.

My point, however, is that if we approach the question of whether God exists without a presumption either for or against His existence, then there is evidence which would suggest that He does. Similarly, if we approached Darwinism without a presumption either for or against its truth, then we would find evidence both for and against it. If we approach either proposition with a presumption that it is true, then we are more likely to find evidence we believe supports the proposition.

"I found religion in general logically untenable."

What did you find logically untenable about Christianity?

Why should atheism or agnosticism be the default position?

Paul,

I limit nature to the universe because that is the extent of known physical existence. There might be more, but we currently lack the capacity to discover what else there might be. If God, as described in the Bible, is the creator of the universe and anything that may lay beyond it, then God cannot be part of that nature. He prexists it and is outside of it. If we take a different perspective on God and posit that He is not the creator of the natural world, then He would not necessarily be outside of it. But, if He is the creator of the natural world, then He must be outside of nature.

"You said we have first hand accounts of Christ's activities; I merely pointed out that, as a statement of fact, we don't."

You may question whether they are accurate first-hand accounts, but, if true, Matthew, Mark, John, and to some degree Paul's epistles, are first-hand accounts.

"Christianity, and religion in general, is the absolute definition of self-interest; 'life is hard and scary, but don't worry, everything will be OK.'"

I suppose you could take this view, but I don't think it's accurate. Christianity requires only that you believe and accept God's grace (by accepting the divinity, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ) in order to be saved for all eternity. But God asks of us that we act completely against our self-interest during our lifetimes. We are to give to the poor, turn the other cheek, and lay down our lives for our brothers. We are to surrender our will and our wants to God.

Atheism and agnosticism are purely self-interested. That is not to say that atheists and agnostics cannot act unselfishly, but that their worldview requires nothing of them. Either is free to live an indulgent lifestyle, seeking pleasure in the moment with no consequence for the future.

You say God is "pretty darn improbable." Explain to me how the existence of God is even subject to the laws of probability. With what information would you even begin determining His probability?

"The circularity comes in because you're not defining nature except as the thing God created, but that presupposes the God that you've placed outside nature. That feels like a circle to me."

But that is not what either I or Steve has said. I asked you to assume that God is as is described in the Bible, i.e. He created all things. If that is true, then He is necessarily outside of what He created. I am not attempting to prove that God is outside of nature by merely defining the scope of nature. It does mean, however, that if God is as the Bible describes, he cannot be proved by science (or disproved or rendered improbable for that matter).

"But I don't declare the Tooth Fairy bunk either, though I have no more or less reason to believe in either."

Really? I'll call the tooth fairy bunk and I can't believe that you would put God and the tooth fairy in the same category. Your parents acknowledged to you that they had made up the stories about the tooth fairy and that they had been the ones putting the quarter under your pillow all along. I'm certain you have not had the same experience with God.

matt curtis:
My point, however, is that if we approach the question of whether God exists without a presumption either for or against His existence, then there is evidence which would suggest that He does.

This depends a lot on how you define "God." If I squint really hard, I suppose I could see a case for "some sort of superior being or beings," but when one gets to the specificity of the Christian God, I'd argue that the evidence for this (less a presumption in favor of believing) is virtually nonexistent. Among other things, if such evidence truly existed and were strong, I'd expect a lot more than a third of the world's population to believe in that God.

Similarly, if we approached Darwinism without a presumption either for or against its truth, then we would find evidence both for and against it.

Actually, even with a presumption for evolution, we find evidence against it. It's just exponentially outweighed by the evidence for it.

What did you find logically untenable about Christianity?

I can't speak for Rob, but the whole he's-the-son-of-God-no-wait-he-is-God thing is pretty logically untenable. The so-called mystery of the trinity would strike any dispassionate observer without a horse in the race as borderline nonsensical.

That, and as George H. Smith details quite brilliantly in his book, the concepts of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence are to varying degrees mutually exclusive (in particular when coupled with the existence of evil).

Why should atheism or agnosticism be the default position?

One cannot believe in something that one has neither heard of nor experienced. I'm not entirely sure atheism is truly the default position -- people seem to strive for some sort of spiritual something -- but a quick survey of the world seems to show that religions more precise than just a vague sense of spirituality are learned, and without that learning, you wouldn't have anything like Christianity.

If you raised someone on a tropical island with no access to society or scripture, that person would probably invent some vague nature Gods, and would almost certainly not arrive at anything even vaguely resembling the Christian God. I think that belies the idea that evidence for God (as you understand the term) is out there waiting to be found.

You may question whether they are accurate first-hand accounts, but, if true, Matthew, Mark, John, and to some degree Paul's epistles, are first-hand accounts.

Most biblical scholars agree that the gospels were not actually written by those four purported authors, thus making them not first-hand accounts. In fact, it's almost universally agreed that three of the four gospels (the synoptic gospels, less John) are actually at least second-hand copies, all of which pull from a common source or group of sources.

As for the Pauline epistles these are more likely first-hand accounts, but of what? Of what Paul thought? Hardly what most dispassionate observers would classify as a "first-hand account" of God's will.

Atheism and agnosticism are purely self-interested. That is not to say that atheists and agnostics cannot act unselfishly, but that their worldview requires nothing of them. Either is free to live an indulgent lifestyle, seeking pleasure in the moment with no consequence for the future.

I don't think that's a fair characterization, either. To the atheist, there's no praying for help, and there's no last-minute appeal for forgiveness and a Free Gift(tm) of salvation. Life is, as you say, what you make of it, but that comes with bad as well as with good. In fact, as a libertarian, you should like atheism, because it absolutely requires personal responsibility. :)

I'm certain you have not had the same experience with God.

Well, no, but suppose your parents died before they owned up to inventing the whole mess and stashing the quarters. What you end up with, in this simple hypothetical, is a belief that has been taught to you, and for which you actually have more tangible evidence (the quarters) than for a God belief.

Steve C:

That's more than a little bit different. I don't have to agree with Smith politically to agree with his position on atheism. I'm not asking anybody to support him to be the leader of anything -- not the PTA, much less the country -- so I fail to see how the comparison is valid. If you must know, however, I have no problem whatsoever with you excluding George H. Smith from the presidency because of his views. :)

You bring up a point that interests me, however. It seems to me that a disproportionate number of atheists run toward the ultra-Libertarian end of the political spectrum, and I simply have no idea why this is.

And for what it's worth, Lincoln did lay waste to the constitution, but in the service of a cause most of us agree with, so history tends to gloss over that fact. I don't agree that he was our most destructive president, however. Not by a longshot.

Yes, but Paul's racist writings are relevant to character and therefore to his fitness to be president. Smith's political opinions are irrelevant to his logical arguments against theism, and therefore have no bearing on that discussion. You can talk meaningfully about Smith's arguments without mentioning his politics; you can't say the same thing for Ron Paul's racial attitudes.

If Dr. Paul's writings were in no way relevant to his fitness to be commander-in-chief, then I'd agree with you that it would be unfair to hold them against him. But they were directly on-point, and he's never explicitly retracted any of it (he merely tried to say someone else wrote it).

Smith, on the other hand, could be wrong about absolutely everything else, and that would still have no bearing on the rightness or wrongness of his Atheism essay.

matt curtis:

I think the comparison between the three branches of government and a triune God to be exceptionally weak. The judiciary, for example, is part of the US government, but you wouldn't say it is the US government. Whereas Jesus isn't just held to be "part of" God, he is God. Separate, yet not separate.

The appeal to parenthood is similarly weak. I know of no good parent who would willingly allow horrible things to happen to their children if they had the power to prevent those things from happening. Yet God does this all the time. It's one thing to give someone you love some latitude to make mistakes, and quite another to knowingly allow tragedy to befall them -- often tragedy that's no fault of their own -- when you have the power to stop it. Can you imagine allowing your child to develop terminal cancer, when you had the power to prevent it?

I can't agree with you about atheism. It removes accountability.

It removes accountability to God, but it doesn't remove accountability altogether. All that changes is to whom or to what you're accountable. If I embezzle millions from my company, I'm accountable under the law whether or not God exists. If I cheat on my wife, I'm accountable to her, whether or not God exists. The assumption that you're making, and that I find obscenely offensive, is that humans would all invariably be self-serving jerks if not for the threat of punishment from an all-knowing and almighty God. Yet a casual look around belies that idea: there are plenty of true-believing Christians who are self-serving jerks, and plenty of non-Christians (and even non-theists) who aren't.

All you have accomplished is to establish that the Gospel of Matthew is a summary of other first hand accounts.

How is that so? You have no way of knowing whether the source material was actually a first-hand account. And even if you did, what you then have is at least a second-hand account. In no way can we honestly describe the gospels as being reliable first-hand accounts, as you seem to want to.

As to the authorship of the gospels, I don't have a lot of time to dig up details, but here is a good starting point from the Straight Dope, as well as some more from Wikipedia. As noted in the latter link, the oldest complete copies we have date to the fourth century CE, and most scholarship puts the earliest now-lost originals at around CE 70, almost four decades after Jesus would have died.

(It should be noted that I learned about this stuff in required theology courses I had to take when I attended a private Presbyterian college, so it's not as if I learned this from some non-Christian source...)

matt curtis:
I was quite clear in previous posts that there is nothing that prevents atheists from choosing to act rightly and that many do.

See, that's my point, though: there's nothing that prevents anyone from choosing to act rightly or wrongly, be they atheist, Christian, or neither.

I will agree with you, however, that Paul's claim that Christianity (and organized religion in general) serves self-interest is too simplistic. It's a lot more complicated than that. There's certainly an element of that (hence the "free gift" of salvation), but there's also a heavy dose of control in there. Those who control the scripture have a pretty good way of controlling the masses. Of course, as any student of history can tell you, controlling the scripture is easier said than done.

Accepting the Trinity requires faith in something that cannot be fully comprehended. Do you think that exercise is illogical or unfounded?

It's one thing to have faith in something that cannot be fully comprehended, and quite another to have faith in something that is logically impossible. The Trinity is, in my estimation, logically impossible. It's a nonsensical concept. It's the Shimmer of religious doctrines.

But you really only take issue with the degree of "evil" we might permit as a parent. You certainly would not protect your children from all tragedy. You apparently draw the line somewhere between a skinned knee and terminal cancer.

This is all very true, but I think my objection still stands. Because it's one thing to allow our children to live their own lives and make their own mistakes, and quite another to allow horrible tragedy to befall them when we have the power to stop it, and when doing so would not meaningfully circumvent their own free will. Christians, however, are all too eager to look the other way on all sorts of faultless tragedies because "the Lord works in mysterious ways" or "interfering would violate free will" or whatever. I don't buy it. An all-loving God wouldn't let a freak blood clot take away my wife -- still less if my wife hadn't yet accepted Jesus, and therefore would be doomed to eternal hellfire as a result.

but until then they are some degree of evidence that a man named Jesus performed miracles, claimed that He as the son of God, [ ... etc. ]

Well, "some degree" of evidence, sure, but not a terribly compelling degree, I'm afraid. We have similar amounts of evidence that a God named Zeus existed and toyed with the fates of humanity, etc. For that matter, by that standard, we've got a lot of evidence that Minnesota was home to a giant lumberjack who traveled around with a big blue ox.

I wish you could see your double-standard here. If I presented evidence for evolution that was similar on the compelling-o-meter to four Nth-hand documents dating a few centuries after the events they describe, which cull from common-but-now-lost prior sources and routinely contradict one another, you'd rightly laugh me out of the room.

As with any documents, they're documents and nothing else. The proof is in the pudding. We ought to be able to independently verify what the documents say via sources and disciplines that have nothing whatever to do with those documents. But the extra-Biblical evidence for a historical Jesus is very, very sparse.

Friends,

This thread has long since been hijacked and morphed into Tom and Paul's reasons for rejecting Jesus Christ. One of the aspects of God's love is that he allows people to reject Jesus Christ and pursue the true desires of their heart. It is their choice, and God loves them enough to allow them the freedom to make it.

I am shutting down this thread because the discussion has nothing to do with 10th grade biology and has morphed into the apologetics of atheism.

These kinds of threads remind me of what Jesus Christ said in Luke 5:31-32

And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

IOW: If you don't think you are sick, you won't ask for the doctor.

I encourage the participants to pursue this discussion privately through email.

Dawn Treader Establishment.