STA Answers Frank Turek, Part 1

In a recent debate between Christopher Hitchens and Frank Turek, hosted by the United Secular Alliance at VCU in Richmond, Virginia and focused on the question, "does God exist?", Turek employed the oft-used apologist tactic of volume -- that is, listing off as many "proofs" of God as he could in the hopes that at least a couple would stick. While I'm not going to dissect the debate (you can watch it for yourself), I would like to answer Turek's arguments, worn-out and defeated as they may be, for myself.

Turek gave three main arguments (two of which I will separate) and four minor points for why he believes in a theistic universe (note, specifically theistic, not deistic), and peppered Christian theology in along the way. He also offered a list of attributes for this deity: a space-less, timeless, immaterial, personal, powerful, intelligent, moral creator. I shall deal with these throughout my discussions on his arguments.


#1 - The Cosmological Argument
Turek summarizes this as "how could something come from nothing"? Hoping that if no one can answer this question scientifically then his premise must be true by default, Turek offers the idea that time, space, and matter all came into existence at the same time -- effectively, nature was created in the Big Bang -- and therefore the Big Bang can't be explained naturalistically because nature didn't exist to cause it, and can only be explained in supernatural terms.

I have no problem in saying that nature came into being during the Big Bang. I am not a scientist, but I do know that what is said in Big Bang cosmology is that space-time itself expanded. Turek himself has no problems with Big Bang theory at all and even did a fairly decent job in providing some proofs for it. The only difference is that he thinks he knows for sure "who banged it", that is to say, he believes his particular God was the root cause of the Big Bang expansion. As I said, he's fallacy is that since no one can provide the answer as to what was "before" the Big Bang, then it must have been Jesus's daddy. Obviously this does not follow -- you simply cannot move from the question "what caused the Big Bang" to theism. I, just as his opponent in the debate did, will grant deism as a slim possibility, but one requiring evidence to first be put forth as an answer.

Since it created space, time, and matter, Turek apples the first three attributes to his God here including that it must be powerful because "it created out of nothing", yet Turek offers zero evidence for this claim. Turek then asserts the following: "you can't go from a state of nonexistence to a state of existence without making a choice", therefore this God is a personal deity because only personal beings make choices. Yet again, he offers no evidence for this bold-faced claim. The onus is still on you, Frank Turek, to bolster your claim that existence demands choice.


#2 - The Teleological Argument
Turek uses the standard fine-tuning argument to try to prove theism. Essentially he states the various ways at how things seem to be precisely set just for us to exist -- the position of the sun and other planets, the tilt and rotation of the Earth, the force values of gravity, etc. He didn't have time to get into them all, but doing a simple internet search will provide you with these standard Christian apologetics for the argument from design.

Frank Turek is effectively capitalizing once again on the ignorance we, as the human collective, have. We do not yet have full understanding of all the laws of the universe. We don't know for sure that messing with any of the constants would result in complete absence of life. Regardless, even if we did know for sure that no life could exist with any other configuration of constants, the fact that he's using it as an argument for a specific brand of theism misses the point altogether: we wouldn't be here talking about it if it hadn't been the case. Welcome to the Anthropic Principle, Frank.


#3 - Irreducible Complexity
Continuing on his buffet of tired old arguments, Turek cites the complexity of DNA as a reason for the existence of a particular God. This tied in with the argument from design of course, being touted out as a reason for the intelligence attribute Turek ascribed to his God at the beginning. The amazing amount of information contained within our DNA, as well as various quotes mined from Collins, Crick, and Hoyle, was given as a proof for a theistic God that must also be intelligent.

Again, Turek is guilty of capitalizing on the ignorance of his audience (as well as a non sequitur). A simple search through any reputable source for evolutionary biology will yield extensive amounts of research and results that stifle the argument of "irreducible complexity". I won't waste time here, read them yourself.


#4 - Objective Morality
One of the major arguments Turek gave (and indeed a topic that Hitchens spent a great deal of his time on) dealt with morality. Turek made it clear that he wasn't saying that atheists can't be or are not moral people, nor that atheists don't know what morality is. His argument was, "atheists cannot justify morality" because there's no authority outside of them.

I personally think that morality can be justified without the need of a deity, but as an argument for the existence of a specific God, Turek's argument is pretty weak. I've written on matters of morality before, so I won't go into it here. Nevertheless, as Turek is strained to point out, the subject is objective morality. Perhaps in some sense there cannot be objective morality? We don't need an authority to be moral, Turek freely notes that he doesn't need Christianity to be moral. And, as Turek is arguing for the Christian God's existence anyway, wouldn't Yahweh's rules on incest and rape and murder have to be the objective moral standard? If so, count me -- and millions of other sane, compassionate human beings -- out. (This also raises the question of God's morality and the Euthyphro Dilemma, subjects covered elsewhere.)



I'll post Part 2 soon.

-STA

Jesus Thinks I'm Hot

I saw a tee-shirt last week that said something like “Jesus Thinks I’m a Hottie”. The teenage girl it was wrapped around seemed like your typical, average Southern middle-class Jesus-freak teen. But what drew my attention was not the girl, of course, but the style of the message.

It seems that some Christians have found that young girls are attracted to the “boy-band” image, and they have managed to tailor their picture of Jesus to this model. He’s the kind of guy the chicks dig, and the kind of hunk that likes the ladies. He’s compassionate, understanding, and his eyes are soooooo dreamy!

Personal Jesus
Practically any person can have their own, personal Jesus. Conservatives have the holier-than-thou, take-no-shit, obey-or-burn Jesus; the hippies have the shaggy, peace-and-love Jesus; and now the teens and ‘tweens have the boy-band Jesus.

Of course this all misses the point entirely: that no matter what the style, it doesn’t *make* Jesus real.

There is no record of this “Jesus” outside of the New Testament – which seems pretty strange considering all of the things he supposedly did. Walking on water, healing sick, talking to thousands of people (without a microphone, mind you), and raising the dead people of Jerusalem, who then roamed around for a while. And none of this was recorded by anyone?! With all the enemies he supposedly had, none of them kept any sort of record of him either. The Romans had lots of enemies whom they wrote about and kept watch over, but no mention of this “King of the Jews” who vexed them so?

Man or Myth?
There are no ye-witnesses to any Jesus, even in the bible. The authors who wrote the Gospels set pen at least 40 years after his alleged death. Even Paul of Tarsus, the man to whom we can credit Christianity, never met Jesus.

There were historians at the supposed time of Jesus, and none of them mention him either. There is a mention in a document by Flavius Josephus, but it is a known forgery (some Christian followers went in long after he had written, and stuck in some drivel about everyone worshiping Jesus). There are only a few other first-century historians (Tacitus, Thallus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger), but they don’t say anything about “Jesus”, but instead mention “the Christ”, and there were several people running around in that time calling them selves “the Christ”. These historians’ writings provide no independent confirmation of the events of the New Testament. At the very most, they provide evidence of Christians living in first-century Rome.

Perhaps Jesus really did exist; perhaps he is an amalgamation of many different idealistic individuals and stories, passed down by word-of-mouth for generations, growing as legends do. Either way, believers today envision what the want when they conjure up images of their god.

My Kind of Christ
And selling a specially-suited form of a fairy tale to a child doesn’t somehow make it real. It might make it real for the child, but so does the tale of Santa Claus—who, by the way, also takes on many different forms depending on who’s doing the telling. Sometimes he’s a short, fat elf; sometimes he’s a normal sized, daddy-ish old man. Some see him as very old; others think he’s your average middle-aged Caucasian. And that’s just in America! Go overseas to any other country that has a Santa myth, and you’ll get a very different Claus.

So, if you’re sad and lonely, we have a kind, comforting Jesus to be there for you. If you like to party big, there’s a Christ to fit right in (and he’ll even keep the wine flowing!).

Be honest with yourself: when you think of Jesus, are you not imagining what *you* want him to be? I guess you’d have to, since there’s no proof of him even existing at all.

-STA

Monkeys From Nothing

"So lemme get this straight. You’re saying that there was just a big explosion in space that came from nothing, and then we crawled out of the goop and turned into monkeys? That’s how we got here? That’s absurd!"

Disclaimer
It’s extremely disheartening to think that in the 21^st century, where man has accomplished amazing things, kids are not being adequately equipped in the public school system to understand even the fundamentals of cosmology, biology, or history. While the above hypothetical query is a vague generalization of ignorance and a strawman argument, it doesn’t stray too far from what some religious people believe. Therefore, I will attack it for what it is, and take from it what you will.
 

Okay, that’s about as straight as a corkscrew. I agree that what you said is absurd. No, I am not claiming (nor is anyone else, as far as I can tell) that we “came from nothing” or “turned into monkeys”.

What you’re really asking involves three different sciences: cosmology, abiogenesis, and evolution.

You Are What You Eat
First of all, we know evolution happened. It’s a provable fact that we can observe today (by studying microorganisms), and there’s a mountain of fossil evidence for common ancestry. Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project that was completed in 2003 (and an evangelical Christian), said that even if there were no fossils, the DNA evidence *alone* is enough to confirm common decent.

So, we can trace the lineage of every living thing back to some sort of beginning (yes, you and a carrot are very, very, very, very, very, distant cousins). We know that life is here, and we know that it’s changed. Now the question becomes, where did life come from? That’s handled by abiogenesis. There are a number of scientific theories about how life could have evolved from nothing, and some of them have actually demonstrated the possibility of life from non-life. The Miller/Urey Experiment simulated hypothetical conditions present on the early Earth and showed that, given billions of years, organic life can grow out of inorganic material. There are a number of other theories about how life could have came from maybe another planet or at the bottom of the ocean…the point is, we don’t yet know exactly where or how, but we do know that it is scientifically possible for this to occur.

Now we have to go even farther back. We can trace back the history of the universe—using cosmology—to the formation of planets, galaxies, stars, etc. and eventually to the Big Bang, which isn’t a “something-from-nothing” proposition. We don’t know what happened before the Big Bang, we don’t know the state of the universe at the time before time. The laws of thermodynamics state that matter and energy are interchangeable, and that it cannot be created or destroyed.

I Don't Know
You may notice that I’m saying “we don’t know” a lot. That’s actually the wonderful thing about science: you don’t know, so you try to figure it out. You look for an answer. This is also where theistic belief asserts an answer and labels it “God”. Saying “God did it” is just an attempt to solve a mystery with another even greater mystery. It tells you nothing about how or why, and more importantly, it forces you to stop searching for a real answer. Asking “who cause the Big Bang” is a fallacious question, because it assumes a) that there had to be a “who”, and b) that it was “caused” by something, meaning it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
 

To argue against the popular alternative to all this provable, demonstrable, evidence is the theist, who simply states that he, too, doesn’t know how or why, but that “God did it” in his “mysterious ways”.

Reason To Believe
As I’ve shown, we have a plethora of evidence and reason to believe that everything occurred naturally. This is a big question, and I’d advise everyone to read and learn more about what we *really* known and what we’re trying to figure out. But there’s no significant justification or evidence that there was any kind of intelligent, transcendent “force” that caused life, the universe, and everything. Because of this lack of knowledge, I'm agnostic. Because of this lack of evidence, I will not believe.

Will you?

Visit talkorigins.org for more information.

-STA

Fallacy Friday: Burden of Proof

Hey there! I said we'd make this week's Fallacy. This one is again one of the most basic and yet so prevalent fallacy among the dogmatists.

It's My Burden to Bear
Our first fallacy of '08 concerns proof. It should seem obvious that if you make an assertion, you must back it up with some kind of reason lest it be rejected as false. And yet time and again (I'm speaking mainly to theists here, but anyone making any assertion is subject to this "rule") I see religious followers committing this logical fallacy.

"Well, can you prove God doesn't exist?!"

The burden always rests on the shoulders of the person making the claim. ALWAYS. It's not anyone else's job to prove your case for you. Using this logic, one should suppose that since no one can prove that the Invisible Pink Unicorn doesn't exist, then we should entertain the possibility. (As an aside, just because you can neither prove or disprove the existence of God or the IPU, their possibility of existence and nonexistence is not 50/50.)


Innocent Until Proven
Even in our legal systems, we do not assume that something is true unless its proven otherwise. You may be wondering "why do we do this?" Just think about it:

Can you prove there are no tattooed, flying lizard people living in the core of Neptune? No? Then we must therefore believe that there are, in fact, tattooed, flying lizard people in the core of Neptune!

Can you prove I do not have a talking snake in my garden? Sure, look. Oh, he must be hiding under that rock. Not there? Hmm...he must have slithered elsewhere.

Can you prove there is no God? Sure can't! Therefore, God must be assumed to exist.

(See Knowledge and Belief)


The Cheese Stands Alone
Those that frequently use this fallacy also gain some sort of weird bolstering effect from it. At least, they think they do. Just because we cannot disprove something is NOT--in any way--proof FOR it. Your theories and claims must stand on their own two legs, and be proven themselves. There is no "default" winner in the he said/she said debates that some religious people engage in.

Suppose claim 'C' cannot be proven to be true, and it's counterpart, claim 'P' cannot be proven true either. Now, suppose we can show claim 'P' to be false. This does not automatically make claim 'C' true!

More simply, suppose that tomorrow, evolutionary theory is scientifically proven to be 100% false. This would not automatically make Creationism true; Creationism has to be proven for itself, and the burned for that proof lies with the Creationists.

It is for this reason that I am an atheist. Anything "godlike" has yet to be proven, and should therefore be reasoned out of existence.

-STA