We managed to stay on topic for a while, but then he asked me why we left New York. While it’s certainly not the primary reason, September 11 is always a part of the answer to that question. He started explaining his thoughts on the causes of Muslim terrorism, but he left out one fairly important little detail… Islam. He was talking about the desperation of poverty as the sole cause for terrorism. I pointed out that religion could not be excluded from this conversation, and that faith invariably leads to violence. I used Richard Reid and Eric Rudolph as examples of citizens of affluent nations who became terrorists because of religion. At this point, ignoring Eric Rudolph entirely, he launched into the 24 hour news networks’ party line talking points about Islam being a religion of peace. I’ve had about all I can take of this from the media mynah birds running around our society avoiding thought and attempting to sound informed by simply repeating whatever Wolf Blitzer or some other talking head tells them as loudly and frequently as they can. I asked him if he’d read the Qur’an; he had not. With a triumphant tone in his voice, he asked if I had read the Bible.

“Three times.”

“Oh,” he said, “I’m on my second time through.”

It was at this point that I informed him he was picking a fight with a heavyweight. He was unintimidated by my religion major, so we continued. I spoke of an Episcopalian friend of mine, and he volunteered that he too was an Episcopalian. After I got in a quick, snide comment about Henry VIII, he asked about my background. I told him I was raised Roman Catholic.

“But you’re not one anymore?”

“No, I’m an atheist.”

That’s usually the end of this type of conversation, but he pressed on. He asked me the difference between an atheist and an agnostic.

“An agnostic is an atheist who’s afraid that god’s going to be pissed off if he’s wrong,” I quipped, and then dealt seriously with the question. It was my certainty that god does not exist that he couldn’t deal with. I explained that not believing in something is the default position and that I have found no compelling evidence that god exists. He assured me that the evidence is everywhere.

Then we started the scripture phase. He started throwing out passages (mostly NT). While he consistently made good arguments (considering), he was a poor speaker, and he became frustrated that I was finishing most of his points for him whilst he hemmed and hawed. Then it was my turn to use the Bible. I started asking how he could believe in and love a god that did such awful things, citing many of the passages I used in the erstwhile God is a Dick series. As is typical, he hid behind metaphor and did his best to avoid discussing the OT.

Then we talked about good and evil. Unlike many members of more extreme churches, he readily admitted that Christianity is not a prerequisite for being a good person. His position is that some people really need Christ to find the way, while others find it on their own. I am a naturally good person. That’s not just my claim; he said he could see it in my aura! I don’t recall the Book of Auras, but I may have to brush up on that. Anyway, he said he had been living a wicked life, and that he was turning to religion to be as good a person as I am. He said he trusted me, and that he could tell me anything. I had no idea yet what that would mean, but keep reading.

“So,” I said “if I can be a good person without Jesus, and good people go to heaven, what would happen if I died today?” Well, as it turns out, there’s a catch. He said that Jesus would come to see me and that he would understand my doubts. Jesus would then ask me to accept him, and I would get into heaven if I did so. I’m sure you’re all thinking the same thing I was. “What, then, is the use of faith?” I don’t know about you, but if Jesus showed up and gave me some proof of his existence and power, I’d go back to church in a second. If you died, and Jesus asked you personally to believe in him, you’d have to be a total jackass to say no. So, where does faith come in? We talked about Paul, and how he had no need of faith. We talked about Thomas, and how he demonstrated a total lack of faith. We talked about Francis and how the little fleshy nail heads on his palms pretty much removed all doubt. Well, as it turns out, my associate also had no need for faith.

So far, he had been impressing me. I had never before met (in person) a Christian so capable of competently defending his faith. His skills as an apologist were admirable. However, never confuse smart with sane. I find more and more in life that if one constructs a Venn diagram of the two, the shaded area is far smaller than expected. He then told me that he had had a personal encounter with Jesus.

I nearly got up to leave, but I had to hear this one. He told me about a time when he was a very young child. He was in bed at night, alone in the dark. Satan™ had come to claim his soul.

“Did you see him?”

“No, but it was him.”

So far this doesn’t exactly stand up in court, but he continued. He called out to Jesus, and Jesus saved him.

“Did you see him?”

“No, I felt him. It’s far more powerful.”

Right. Either that, or it was gas. Now, I had kind of started to like this guy, so I didn’t want to bring down the hammer of logic too hard.

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, and I don’t want to belittle your experience, but when I was a child, I was in bed one night and saw the Easter Bunny. I didn’t really see the Easter Bunny.”

“This wasn’t visual. I felt him. It was him.”

Where does one go from there in an argument? This man will always believe in god because he had indigestion once as a tot.

Then he started talking about other “evidence” of god, including the story of The Blue Nun. If you don’t know the story, follow the link. It’s a hoot.

Anyway, I walked out of there with homework.

1. Read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis – I asked if there was more to it than the trilemma, and he said there is. I’ll have to check it out when I have time.

2. Read Don’t Throw Away Tomorrow by Schuller – Has anyone else read this? I don’t know anything about it.

3. Research a painting of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane that supposedly emits light. – I asked him if he’d ever heard of Thomas Kincaid. He got the joke, and didn’t seem to appreciate it.

So, that’s it. Shortly thereafter, the check showed up. I paid because the conversation was well worth the cost of a couple of salads. I hope you enjoyed this chance to be a fly on the wall.

~I AM~

1. Miracles happen.
2. Therefore, god exists.

This leads to a few obvious questions. First, what is a miracle? Second, how would we identify a miracle if one were to occur? Third, do miracles actually happen?

The first answer is easy. For the purposes of this argument, a miracle must be defined as something that cannot be satisfactorily explained except through divine intervention. Unlikely isn’t good enough. It has to be something impossible according to the laws of science. If I take an event that is merely improbable as evidence of god, then god must exist because improbable things must happen. If I flip a coin 25 times, it might come up heads every times. It wouldn’t happen often, but once every 33,554,432 times I try it (on average) it will happen. 25 heads = god? No. So, to continue the analogy, what we’re looking for is an event in which I flip a fair U.S. coin once, and it comes up “arms” or “spleens” or some such thing. THAT would be a miracle.

The second answer is also easy. How would we identify a miracle if one were to occur? We can’t. It’s impossible. We can’t prove a miracle any more than we can disprove the existence of god. I know many of you disagree with me on this point, but so be it. The theist says that if I haven’t experienced god, I just haven’t looked in the right place yet. Since I can’t check everywhere at once, I can’t prove that he doesn’t exist. Similarly, to prove a miracle, one must disprove not only every scientific explanation available to us based on our current understanding of the universe, but we must also check the events against all the things we don’t know yet. In other words, to prove a miracle, one must know everything. One must have a complete understanding of every scientific principle by which the universe operates. If it were even possible to have this total understanding, it still wouldn’t be enough. You would have to prove that there was nothing else left to learn. Good luck with that.

So, based on that, the third question is moot. Do miracles happen? I don’t know. Prove it to me. You can’t? OK. Then they don’t happen.

That about does it for the argument from miracles if one is to look at it logically. However, the actual argument as made by theists looks more like this: “My step-niece had Ebola, and she was cured. Praise Jesus.” Allow me to respond to this pedestrian and uninformed version of the argument, also. Back in October, I posted after learning that I had a potentially fatal medical condition. The echocardiogram showed an aortic aneurysm that could suddenly pop and drop me like John Ritter. Not only that, though. It also showed a thickening of the muscle in my left ventricle. This condition (LVH), which I didn’t even talk about, could also be suddenly fatal. Well, after three months in the care of a cardiologist, which included two more EKGs, another echocardiogram and an MRI, I just learned on Tuesday that there isn’t a damn thing wrong with me. None of these other tests showed a problem. The measurements of my heart and aorta were normal. So, is it a miracle? I assure you that I didn’t pray. In fact, for those three months, I’ve been verbally kicking god in the nuts on a regular basis on this blog. Hell, I call him a dick every Sunday. Did he cure me to reward me for this behavior? Obviously. Well, I suppose it could have been a problem with the initial test… Nah. God cured me. Praise Jesus.

~I AM~

The Transcendental Argument, in a nutshell, tries to prove the existence of god by stating that some basic properties of the human experience can’t be explained any other way. It claims that logic, the laws of nature and morality can’t exist without god. I will deal with this in two parts because I have two different arguments. This first post will talk about logic and the laws of nature.

Before entering into an argument, one must accept the laws of logic. Otherwise, using logic to construct said argument is absurd. The transcendental theist apologist claims that we only have logic on which to rely because it was provided for us by god. In laying out this case, the apologist is accepting the validity of logic by trying to construct an argument. However, in stating that logic is the creation of god, it is implied that god would not be bound by logic. In other words, logic is contained within god instead of the other way around. Therefore, based on this assumption, it is impossible to prove the existence of god through logic. If god is bound by logic, and was preceded by it, then there is no need for him to explain its presence and necessity.

Similarly, in studying the universe, we must accept that there are laws of nature. Without that assumption, it is pointless to try to understand anything at all from a scientific perspective. The idea, here, is similar to the cosmological argument. It is an attempt to eliminate infinite regress. Each natural law is based on simpler principles. This implies that there must be a fundamental principle from which every law arises. That would be god. However, there are a few problems here. First of all, this “reducibility” is based on our scientific observations of nature. So, as with the logical argument, if we take the laws of nature as creations of god, then we can’t use them to make any kind of statements about him because he would not be bound thereby. However, if the laws of nature are bigger than god or bind him, then we have no need for him to explain them.

Furthermore, if we use laws of nature in any kind of argument about god, we accept that said laws exist. Scientific laws are laws. If there is an exception, then we have the laws wrong. So, if there are laws, then nothing can occur outside them. This precludes miracles. It takes god’s omnipotence and makes him no more powerful than any other particle in the universe. As with any given electron, he must follow the rules, and he is therefore impotent if he exists at all. Does that sound like a god to you?

So, that pretty much does it for two-thirds of the Transcendental Argument. The next part of this series will deal with the morality problem. Hopefully it won’t take a couple of months this time.

~I AM~

Hey, it’s better than some of the arguments I’ve heard.

~I AM~

We might as well start at the beginning… of the universe. Thomas Aquinas, building upon some of the writings of Aristotle, gave us what is now known as the cosmological argument, also known as the “first cause” argument. Stated in the most simplistic fashion, the argument says that since the universe exists, something must have caused it to exist, and that something is god. There are three possible solutions to this problem.

1. The universe is infinitely old.
2. There is a creator god.
3. There was a Big Bang.
4. I don’t know.

I find this to be the thorniest of all the arguments for god because of a particular bias that I have. I despise infinities. If I were prepared to accept an infinitely old universe, this would be much easier to deal with. A universe with no beginning has no place for a creator. However, I can’t accept this limitless past. Not only does the very idea make me dizzy, but it also violates the second law of thermodynamics. A closed system of infinite age would have reached the point of heat death. Aquinas claimed that even a universe of infinite age needs a creator, and that this is possible if time is a property of the universe and the creator exists outside of time, but he rejected the idea of an infinitely old universe just as I do.

That leaves us with three choices: god, Big Bang or “I don’t know.” Let’s say for a moment that the answer is god. God predates the universe and created it at some point in the finite past. OK, then what created god? A bigger god? You can follow that back as many levels as you like. So, if the answer is god, then god must be infinitely old. However, if I’m willing to accept that something can be infinitely old and not destroyed by the second law of thermodynamics, then I can eliminate god and just say that the universe has always been there. “But god is magical,” becomes the best possible argument for this point of view, and the person making said claim has “proven,” at most, Deism.

The Big Bang is a good theory. There’s a lot of evidence that it’s an accurate model. It looks right on paper, but it’s an unsatisfying answer. It’s not enough. “How did the universe start?” “There was a big bang.” That doesn’t make me feel any better than “God did it.” Why was there a big bang? What triggered it? How long had the singularity been sitting around without exploding? Where did all that stuff come from in the first place? Was that really the beginning, or was there stuff before that? We don’t know. So, while a very Big Bang, worthy of capital letters, was very likely involved, it’s not a good enough answer.

And so, our terribly unsatisfying answer is “I don’t know,” but that’s OK. Unless you’re talking to your boss, it’s always better to admit ignorance than to make something up. Allow me to offer an analogy. You’re standing on a street corner in an unfamiliar city, trying to get your bearings. You ask a stranger for directions to Elm Street. He has no idea where Elm Street is. Do you want him to tell you that he doesn’t know or make something up? Once you believe you have an answer, you might wander around for the rest of the day looking for Elm Street, trying to follow his directions. You might wander around for the rest of your life looking for god, trying to follow his directions. If you know you don’t have an answer, you can move forward, searching out a map or someone else to ask. You can move forward, searching out a clue or running experiments.

We will probably not learn the truth about the origin of the universe in any of our lifetimes. In fact, our species may never learn the truth. I know one thing for certain, though. If all of the priests, rabbis, ministers, imams, gurus, etc. had become scientists instead, we’d be a hell of a lot closer to knowing the truth. If all of the money donated to religious organizations and wasted on waging religious wars had been spent on research, this discovery, and so many others, might have already been made.

~I AM~