Andy Ruse's Weblog

Since I “came out” as an atheist, I’ve been getting lots of questions about why I changed and how I can justify it. This article series is intended to provide a starting point for discussing those questions.

Part One of this series dealt with my story of de-conversion. In Part Two, I outlined the reasons why I reject belief in the Christian god.  In this part, I’ll go a step further and explain why I reject belief in all deities.

This list of arguments is not meant to be comprehensive. A comprehensive list would require enough material to fill up several books. These are just brief introductions to the arguments that I personally find most convincing

1. God has no explanatory power.

Thousands of years ago, humans knew very little about the world around them.  They saw many phenomena that they couldn’t explain.  Lightning, rain, wind, earthquakes, seasonal change, the sun, the nighttime sky, mental illness.  None of these were understood by ancient humans.  The best explanation that these people could come up with was that there were supernatural forces, gods, or a God at work.  If I had lived then, I would probably have believed the same.

But then, our curious nature led us to investigate these phenomena and we began understanding them in naturalistic terms.  Science has pulled back the veil to get at the mechanisms of the world.  We now know why lightning happens.  It isn’t an angry god trying to frighten us; it’s a discharge of electricity in the atmosphere.  We now know that the sun isn’t just a bright light in the sky; it’s a star, powered by thermonuclear fusion.  And so on.

Of course, science hasn’t explained everything yet.  That’s why we still have scientists, working to bring us to an ever increasing understanding of the universe.  Some theists still want to use God as an explanation for those phenomena which have no scientific explanation.  But using God as an explanation is really no explanation at all.  It doesn’t actually tell us anything about the mechanisms behind what we observe.

As time passes, there will be fewer and fewer places where the theist can feel justified in using God as an explanation.  For those areas where we don’t currently have a good scientific model, it’s far better to say that we just don’t know enough to understand them than to invoke God.  An explanation that pulls us away from the underlying natural truth is worse than no explanation at all.

2. Prayer doesn’t work.

A typical theistic claim is that God can be influenced by prayer to manipulate the world in supernatural ways.  However, to my knowledge, there has never been a single case of the power of prayer being confirmed under reasonable experimental conditions.

In 2006, a massive study was performed by Harvard University to determine the effects of prayer on the recovery of 1802 cardiac bypass patients. [1] The patients were divided into several groups, some of whom received prayer and some who didn’t.  Those who were prayed for received daily prayer from multiple Christian congregations across the U.S.    in the 14 days leading up to their bypass surgeries.  The study concluded that there was no measurable benefit to the groups that received prayer.  In fact, the group that was prayed for and knew that they were being prayed for fared worse than average.  This has been attributed to a possible form of performance anxiety.

If there’s no objective evidence that prayer works, why, then, do so many people claim to have witnessed the power of prayer?  The likely answer is that we humans suffer from a number of cognitive biases that distort the way we perceive reality.  Confirmation bias, for example, is a type of selective thinking where a person tends to highly weight positive outcomes and discard negative outcomes.  [2] When applied to prayer, confirmation bias tends to make people remember the exciting times when prayer seemed to be miraculously working, but forget the many more times when prayer had no effect.  In reality, the number of positive outcomes experienced is only what one would expect to see given the normal operation of probability.

3. The soul doesn’t exist.

All of the most prominent religions claim that there’s a supernatural component to the human person – the soul.  The soul is supposed to be the part of us where our mind “lives”.  It continues to exist and have consciousness after our bodies die.  It’s this part that enters the afterlife.  However, if there is actually no soul, then what reason is there to believe in an afterlife?

There has been a huge amount of study into the nature of consciousness by neuroscientists.  As time passes, and we learn more about the underlying mechanisms of personality, there are fewer and fewer places for the soul to hide.  We already know through brain imaging that all emotions have direct physical causes in the brain.  We can even stimulate these emotions electrically or pharmacologically. [3]

Experiments with victims of brain damage have shined an illuminating light on the way the brain works.  There are hundreds of cases where brain damage sufferers have had noticeable changes in personality following their trauma.  Neuroscientists can even predict what kind of personality change will happen based on which area of the brain has been affected. [4] If that’s the case, what purpose does the soul serve in making up our personalities?  The answer, according to neuroscientist Steven Pinker and the majority of his peers, is that the mind is a direct product of physical processes in the brain. [5] There’s no need to posit a soul to explain anything we observe about human behavior.

4. The JREF Million Dollar Challenge.

Since 1964, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) has offered a monetary prize to anybody who can demonstrate supernatural or paranormal powers under reasonable experimental conditions. [6] The prize currently stands at one million dollars USD.

The rules are simple.  Propose a testable supernatural power, and work with the foundation to come up with a reasonable test.  Go through the test, and if there’s no current scientific explanation for the results, you win a million dollars.  Over 1000 people have applied to pass the challenge, but so far nobody has succeeded. [7]

If the supernatural really did exist, why hasn’t anybody been able to demonstrate it?  Miracles are widely reported by theists, yet none of these supposed miracles has ever been substantiated.  If they really did happen, proving them would be easy.  Have a doctor sign a notarized statement confirming that your sick friend has some incurable medical condition.  Pray for it to be cured, then have the doctor confirm that the miracle happened.  You (or a charity of your choice) just became a million dollars richer.

5. Subjective experiences are untrustworthy.

A typical defense of theists is to claim that they have experienced God in some way.  They claim to have witnessed divine healing, seen angels, or felt God’s presence.  I once thought I had experienced all of these things and more.  No matter what rational argument is brought before him, a theist may fall back on his subjective experiences as “proof” of God’s existence.

But how reliable are such experiences?  Optical illusions demonstrate that our senses can be fooled. [8] Drugs, some of which can be produced by our own bodies, can alter our perception. [9] Hypnosis has been widely documented as a way to enter an altered state of consciousness. [10] Errors in judgment due to subconscious cognitive bias are also a well-documented. [11]

The main problem with using personal experiences as a defense for religious faith is that they aren’t testable.  Unless I can directly measure your experience, and observe it for myself, there’s no reason for me to believe it.

Conclusion

Do gods or a God exist?  Nobody can say for certain.  Anybody who claims to know has thus far been unable to provide objective proof.  However, the weight of the evidence (or lack thereof) is strongly on the side that the supernatural does not exist.  All it would take is one single piece of verifiable evidence to make belief in God a viable option.  Since no such evidence exists, the most rational position to take is that of atheism.

I’ve received quite a number of good questions in response to this series, so I plan on writing a fourth installment in which I’ll answer them.  Stay tuned.

Notes

1. Am Heart J. 2006 Apr;151(4):934-42.
2. http://www.skepdic.com/confirmbias.html
3. http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2009/03/neuroscience-and-soul.html
4. http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/brain.html
5. http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge53.html
6. http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
7. http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/component/content/article/37-static/254-jref-challenge-faq.html
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusions
9. http://www.opioids.com/opiates.html
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

Since I “came out” as an atheist, I’ve been getting lots of questions about why I changed and how I can justify it. This article series is intended to provide a starting point for discussing those questions.

Part one of this series dealt with my story of de-conversion. In this part, I’ll briefly outline what I think are the most convincing arguments against belief in the Christian faith. In part three, I’ll go a step further and explain why I reject belief in all deities.

This list of arguments is not meant to be comprehensive. A comprehensive list would require enough material to fill up several books. These are just brief introductions to the arguments that I personally find most convincing.

1. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, chapter 22.

God himself commits an immoral act in this story by commanding Abraham to murder his only son, Isaac. Abraham is given no knowledge of God’s intent. He only knows that God wants his son as a sacrifice. Abraham obeys without questioning, but when Isaac is on the altar and Abraham has the knife in his hand, an angel appears and tells Abraham to abort the sacrifice.

Imagine that a good friend of yours comes to you and tells you about a tough situation that he’s in. He says that he heard God’s voice telling him to murder his son. Your friend loves his son, but he intends to go through with the murder because his devotion to God is greater than his love for his son.

What would be your response? Would you call the police, afraid that a terrible crime was about to be committed? Or would you encourage your friend to go ahead and obey the voice of God that he had heard?

The Abraham/Isaac scenario is only one place in the Bible that we find such amoral behavior by God. Here’s a small sample of others:

• The story of Jephthah (Judges 11). Jephthah similarly is in a situation where he must sacrifice his daughter, but in the end Jephthah actually performs the sacrifice.
• God commands Jerusalem city guards to slay, without pity or compassion, old men, young men, women, and children (Ezekiel 9).
• God gives rules for the sale of daughters as slaves (Exodus 21).
• The spoils of war are to include sex slaves (Judges 5:30).

2. The Bible contains many statements that are at odds with observed reality.

A few examples:

• Paul writes in Romans 13 that governments hold terror only for those who do wrong. Try telling that to the many innocent people throughout history who have been convicted of crimes. Or to those who’ve been victims of government-sponsored genocide.
• Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that his followers will be able to move mountains at a word if they have enough faith. So far, there have been no reports in human history of people moving mountains around.
• In Matthew 24:34, Jesus said that the current generation he was speaking to would not die until he came again to the world. Since Christians the world over are still waiting on Jesus’ return, we can conclude that Jesus made a mistake.

3. Outright contradictions in the Bible.

A small sample:

• Contradictions concerning God’s nature. God’s anger is fierce and endures long (Numbers 25:4, Numbers 32:13, Jeremiah 17:4), yet is at the same time slow and endures but for a minute (Psalms 103:8, Psalms 30:5).
• Moral Contradictions. In Matthew 5:16, good works are supposed to be seen by men. Yet in Matthew 6:1, they are not.
• Factual contradictions. There are two accounts of David’s conquest of Hadadezer, king of Zobah. In one account, David captured seven hundred horsemen (2 Samuel 8:4). In the other account, he captured seven thousand (1 Chronicles 18:4).
• Doctrinal contradictions. Are children punished for the sins of their parents? Exodus 20:5 says they are, while Ezekiel 18:20 says they aren’t.

There are hundreds more of these. [1]

4. The underwhelming nature of scripture.

Imagine that you’re God. You want to reveal yourself to humans, so they can know you and know your plan for their existence. You’re all-powerful and all-knowing. You could just turn on the loudspeakers of heaven, and speak in a language that everybody would understand. “Hey guys, I’m God. Here’s what I have to say.” You could repeat that to every person as he or she comes into adolescence, so that there would never be any confusion about your purposes.

Instead of that nice scenario, what we have is a supposed revelation written down by primitive nomadic shepherds living in the the middle east over a period of a thousand years. It’s written in dead languages, and requires a sensitive understanding of the cultures in which it was written in order to place it in context. The revelation is so unclear on many points that hundreds of groups which believe the revelation to have come from God can’t agree on what exactly it says.

If I had God’s resources, I could have done a much better job at revelation. Why was he unable to?

5. The Documentary Hypothesis.

The Documentary Hypothesis [2] is a a form of higher textual criticism which holds that the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) was integrated from separate sources. The most simple example of this is in the story of creation. There are two accounts of creation in the Bible, one in Genesis 1 – 2:3, and the other in the rest of Genesis 2. The first account refers to God with the Hebrew word Elohim, rendered as “God” in most modern translations. The second account refers to God as Yahweh Elohim, rendered as “LORD God” in most translations.

Any textual critic would point out that this would be very bizarre behavior for a single author. Why would Moses (the traditional author of Genesis) have written one passage of creation, and then written a separate account with different details using a different name for God? The Documentary Hypothesis states that there were actually two separate oral traditions of the creation story, which were fused together into what we now have by a later scribe.

This blending of sources to create the current text of the Torah lends additional support to the idea that the Bible was not divinely inspired. Why would God inspire separate men at different times to write divergent versions of the same story?

6. The Gospels were not written temporally near to Jesus’ life.

The earliest surviving complete copies of the Gospels date to the 4th century. Historical scholars are in general agreement that the earliest gospel, Mark, was written no earlier than circa 65-70. [3] The latest gospel, John, wasn’t completed until around the year 100. Even the most conservative Christian scholars don’t place Mark’s authorship before the mid 50s.

We know that Paul’s letters were written earlier than the Gospels, circa 48-62. [4] However, nowhere does Paul reference the details of Jesus’ life that are recorded in the Gospels. He never talks about Jesus’ birth, or miracles, or details of his life. This indicates that the mythology of Jesus likely evolved over the course of the first century.

Additionally, we can assume that Jesus knew how important his life and ministry was going to be. He could easily have appointed a scribe to follow him around and record everything that he did. Why would he have left such an important task as documenting his life to men who wrote 30 to 70 years after he died?

7. The Jesus mythology is not unique.

Which mythological or historical character had the following traits?

• Conceived miraculously.
• Born on December 25.
• Was the only begotten son of a God.
• Descended from a royal line.
• Performed miracles.
• Was born in a cave or stable.
• Had his birth heralded by a bright star.
• Was killed by crucifixion.
• Was killed along with two thieves.

Would it surprise you to learn that Horus, the ancient Egyptian sky god, shared all of these traits with Jesus? [5] But Horus and Jesus are not alone. Other characters that shared many of the traits of Jesus’ life include Mithras, Hercules, Dionysus, Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana, and Simon Bar Kochba.

Along with the evidence that the gospels were written well after Jesus’ death, the similarities to other mythological characters lends support to the idea that the Jesus story was embellished to fit a well-known heroic archetype.

8. The silence of the historians.

There were at least 41 historians and prominent writers who lived within Jesus’ lifetime or within a hundred years of it. [6]

One of these scholars, Flavius Josephus, wrote a very short passage about Jesus. However, this passage is widely held by historians to have been inserted and/or corrupted by Christians. [7]

Tacitus wrote two sentences in his Annals circa 116 about the religion of Christianity, named after “Christus” [8]. The authenticity of this passage, also, has been widely disputed by historians. [9]

There are NO OTHER contemporary extra-biblical references to Jesus. Surely somebody who supposedly performed spectacular miracles and drew crowds of thousands would have been newsworthy in his day. If Jesus’ birth had prompted Herod to murder Jewish children all over the place and his death caused the sun to go dark in the middle of the day, surely somebody would have made a record of it.  This silence of the historical record points once again to the likelihood that the story of Jesus’ life was largely fabricated long after his death.

9. The failure of Christian marriages.

The divorce rate of Christians is identical to the U.S. national average. [10] When Christians are married, they have witnesses all around them, praying for the success of their marriage. The minister typically ends the ceremony by saying “What God has put together, let no man put asunder.” Why do Christians get divorced, then? Are the prayers of the church impotent? Is God unable to keep two people together who have promised before him and witnesses to stay together?

The typical response to this statistic is to say that the researchers must not have been measuring “real” Christians. Putting aside the No True Scotsman logically fallacy, [11] anybody who has a basic understanding of statistics can see that this response is baseless. Even if only a small percentage of the couples who were studied by the researchers who claimed to be Christians were actual Christians, they would have skewed the results in their favor.

Conclusion

The weight of the evidence points to the conclusion that the Bible was written by men with their own goals, and was not inspired by any supernatural force.  There is nothing in the text that couldn’t have been written by somebody who lived in first century Palestine.  The Bible is the only thing that separates Christian belief from generic belief in God.  Therefore, the relgion of Christianity is false.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, where I’ll make the case that not only should faith in the Christian God be rejected, but that faith in any deity is unwarranted.

Notes

1. http://www.evilbible.com/Biblical Contradictions.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis
3. Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985.
4. Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985. p. 316-320.
5. http://paganizingfaithofyeshua.netfirms.com/comparsison_horus_jesus_chart.htm
6. http://www.holysmoke.org/sdhok/jesus5.htm
7. Alice Whealey, Josephus on Jesus (New York, 2003) p.194.
8. Tacitus, Annals 15.44
9. F.F. Bruce,Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974).
10. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20080404/study-christian-divorce-rate-identical-to-national-average/index.html
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Since I “came out” as an atheist, I’ve been getting lots of questions about why I changed and how I can justify my new position.  This article series is intended to provide a starting point for discussing those questions.

I was raised as a Christian.  As soon as I had a self-image, it included belief in God as an aspect.  I kept that identification through the first 30 years of my life.

My faith took many turns, from the Pentecostalism of my parents, though Calvinism and associated reformed theologies, to non-denominational ecumenism.  I had periods of intense doubt about my faith in my late teens, but I made it through them by reading literally over a hundred books on religion and having untold hours of discussion with Christian friends, many of whom I met through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the University of Maryland.

I’ve read the Bible through from cover to cover, and have made intensive studies of several parts of it.  I was involved in weekly Bible studies, I went on missions trips, I took part in church life, and I practiced apologetics with my non-Christian friends.

All of that is to say that my faith was not shallow.  It was deeply thought-out and held with conviction.  I’d read the apologetics of C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, and others.  I knew about the historical, manuscript, and philosophical defenses of the Christian faith.  I thought that my system of belief was logically sound and nigh unassailable.

Sometime in early 2008 I began having new doubts about my belief.  I started noticing things that I’d never seen before.  I observed that the nonbelievers in my life were as loving and as moral as the believers.  I also saw that Christians, on average, were not displaying signs of the process of sanctification that I expected.

Sanctification is an important tenet of Christianity.  To put it simply, according to Christian theology, sanctification is the process by which God turns bad people into good ones.  If sanctification were true, we would expect Christians, on average, to be more loving, more at peace, happier, more humble, and generally better off than nonbelievers.  This was not my experience.

Sanctification was supposed to be a supernatural process.  While I’ve definitely acquired beneficial emotional attributes and learned behaviors from Christianity, I couldn’t say that those improvements had been miraculous.  I could easily imagine that I could have acquired the same positive attributes by purely natural means.

Then, I started thinking about other things that I had considered miracles.  The creation of the universe, the origin of life, physical healing, visions, feelings of God’s presence, etc.  I realized that there were sound naturalistic explanations for all of those things.

I dived into research.  I listed out every one of my beliefs and tried to find evidence to support holding on to them.  I re-examined the historicity of the Bible with new objectivity and found it lacking.  I looked into cognitive psychology and learned that there was ample evidence against the existence of the soul.  I researched the biological theory of evolution and realized it was sound, beautiful, and explanatory.  I read books by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and found the atheist position to be far more logically sound than the Christian one.

I also did a new study of the Bible through a more objective lens.  I found that the character of God was inconsistent and often vile throughout the story.  I found that the manuscript evidence that I once thought was so strong was actually full of holes.  I found out about the pagan roots of the Jesus mythology.

There was no need to posit a God to explain anything any more.  I really looked hard, but I couldn’t find any place for God to fit in my world view.

This realization scared me out of my mind.  I felt like I was adrift in space without an anchor.  I really wanted to believe in God.  I wanted to think that there was this great loving intelligence out there who had my best interests in mind.  I thought I needed him.  All of my best friends, including my wife were Christians.  I was going to risk all of those relationships.

I lapsed into depression for a few weeks.  I kept holding on to the idea that I could be wrong, that I had missed something.  I opened up to some of my Christian friends and gave them the opportunity to convince me to remain a believer.  None of their arguments were good enough.

I finally resigned myself to accept that there was no God in January of 2009.  I fought my way out of depression and actually acquired new hope for my life.  With the belief that this short time on Earth is all that I had, I realized that I needed to enjoy it to it’s fullest and make the most of what time I had.

As I write this 6 months later, I’m more satisfied with my epistemology and world view than ever before.  Life makes so much more sense to me now.  I always had to make weird rationalizations to satisfy the cognitive dissonance that arose whenever my faith and my observations of the world collided.  Now that there is no God for me to fall back on, the world seems more beautiful, more meaningful, and more full of promise than ever before.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I’ll lay out what I found to be the most convincing arguments for atheism and against Christianity.

About 8 weeks old.

I killed my cat yesterday.

Guildenstern had become increasingly aggressive towards our other cats and us over the past year.  He frequently swiped at us, and continually hissed and attacked the other cats.  We earnestly tried to find him a new home, but nobody wanted a cat with his bad attitude.

He was not happy, and there was no way we could find to make him happy.  Once we decided to have him euthanized (at the vet’s suggestion), we quickly made an appointment and had it done.  It was over quickly.

I know it was the best thing for us to do for him, but I’m still sad.  He used to be a really great cat.  I remember him as a shy kitten 6 years ago who never left his brother’s side for the first several months of his life.  He could be sweet and cuddly, playful and friendly.  I’m very sorry to have seen him go through this terrible change.

Goodbye Guildenstern.

So far, my experiment has been a success, but I’ve had to tweak the formula a little bit. I wasn’t clear about what the “Bills” category of expenses includes. It includes:

• Bills that come in the mail, which if I don’t pay, will cause a collections agency to hunt me down
• Emergency expenses, such as medical bills
• Maintenance of lifestyle expenses, such as vehicle and house repairs

Additionally, I’ve started a spreadsheet of all of the things I want to spend money on but aren’t approved. I note the date on which I decided I wanted to spend the money. My plan is to give myself a 1-month mandatory waiting period between when I decide I want something and when I am allowed to actually buy it. I think that this safeguard will reduce my wasteful spending by at least 80%.

I read a story the other day about a guy who earned a low hourly wage, but was so frugal that he became a millionaire over the course of his life due to the buildup of his savings. I want to be like that guy, but it’s so difficult at times.

Being in debt bothers me a lot, even though all of my debt is “good debt”: mortgage, car loans, student loans, and charity pledges. I’m not sure if charity pledges should count as debt, but if I promise to give X dollars over the course of 3 years, I feel like it’s an additional debt that I have to pay off. I would love to be able to pay off all of my debts and only have my daily living expenses to worry about. It would be like breathing cleaner air all of the time.

So, as an experiment, I’m going to limit my spending drastically for the next month, starting today. Only the following expenses will be allowed until February 17, no exceptions allowed:

• Food (including nutritional supplements, but not including “eating out”)
• Hygiene products (toothpaste, soap, etc.)
• Clothes
• Bills

I think I can live without new video games for a month. And if I can do it for a month, why not longer? It only takes 21 days to learn a new habit.