Category Archives: Atheism

The Guilt Legacy

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A couple of nights ago I watched a programme called Jehovah’s Witnesses and Me fronted by Rebekah Vardy. I know nothing about Rebekah apart from the fact she’s a footballer’s wife who was recently involved in a social media scandal, but her reflections on being brought up in a Jehovah’s Witness household were honest and sincere. She said one of the legacies of her mother being ‘disfellowshipped’ when she, Rebekah, was 8 was that she felt, and still feels, guilty about much in life. The teaching of the organisation was, as it is in many evangelical churches, that the individual is a hopeless sinner who cannot please Jehovah, though must nevertheless endeavour to work out their own salvation. For JWs this involved (and still does, as you may know from personal encounters with them) going door to door and standing for hours on end in public spaces with a trolley-full of Watchtower publications.

I could relate to Rebekah’s feelings of guilt. While not a Jehovah’s Witness (I was never that gullible) my years as a Christian left me with a legacy of guilt. For many years it was the dominant emotion of my life. While a Christian I constantly felt I was letting God down: not as good a Christian as those around me, not witnessing enough, listening to pop music instead of worship songs – practically anything could trigger my not-good-enough feelings. I also felt responsible for anything that went wrong, even when I couldn’t possibly be, and guilt about my secret sexual feelings and, most especially that I wasn’t been a good enough father. To this day, I feel awful if I’m unable to help with my grown-up children’s problems. I am moving away from such fruitless thinking, and recognise that possibly I am naturally inclined to blame myself for events both within and outside my control. Christianity nonetheless exacerbated the problem, with its emphasis on the sinful worthlessness of the individual who is nothing without Jesus. I have, I’m pleased to say, got a lot better since abandoning its negative anti-human philosophy.

What scars has religion left those of you who are escapees from religion with? I’d be more then pleased to hear it’s none, but most of the ex-Christians I know have not come away unscathed. Feel free to share in the comments.

What Happens Before We Die (according to me)

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Did you ever go to a party when you were a child and your parent told you it was time to leave before you were ready? That’s how I feel about death. I’m enjoying the party too much to want to leave. Although my ‘parent’ hasn’t told me it’s time to go just yet, I know they will before I want to. I can’t see me ever being ready really, though perhaps whatever cruelty nature visits upon my body and mind in years to come will change my mind about that. But as things stand, despite my fibromyalgia (a constant painful companion) and the levels of anxiety I allow myself to feel over trivial matters, I really have too much to live for. My partner Dennis and the adventures we have together; my family with my lovely grandchildren; my friends with whom I spend many good times; the many, many simple pleasures of life; everything I still want to do and try.

So, as the days, months and years roll by at an alarming rate – there’s definitely more of life behind me than there is front of me – it’s these things that matter in my life. 

All of this might suggest I’m afraid of dying. While I doubt the process of dying will be much fun, having so much to live for – enjoying the now – dispels, perversely, the fear of death itself. I’ll face it when I get to it, raging, I hope, against the dying of light, throwing a shameful tantrum because the party will go on without me. I’ll die, though, in the knowledge I actually got to it when so many didn’t. I’ll have enjoyed it too, for the most part, with a only a few bad times, fewer regrets and many more memories.

As Christians often tell those of us who are delusion-free, I am without hope. Of course I have hope – in continued days and achievable happiness – but none that there’s existence beyond death. I am confident there isn’t. Consciousness is completely dependent on the brain; when my brain dies, so do I. That will be that. The fantasy promoted by the New Testament, that there’ll be eternal life in a new body, is nothing but hopeless wishful thinking, that in spite of overwhelming evidence we go on. There is instead serenity and purpose in accepting the reality of death. It’s part of the deal, after all.

So let’s all eat, drink and be merry, as Ecclesiastes says. Enjoy life and help others, where we can, to enjoy theirs.

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Dennis and I will be on one of our adventures when next I’m due to post. While I’ll set WordPress to publish it, I can guarantee it won’t. If I can do it manually (depends on whether I have a signal) I will. Otherwise I will see you on my return.

10 Reasons Why

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I wonder what are the reasons those of you who were once Christians gave up on faith? Believers who know me far better than I know myself have attributed to me a whole range of motivations. Here’s a top ten of the reasons I rejected Jesus according to these spiritually astute know-it-alls:

In at 10 it’s…

You must have been hurt/had a bad experience of Christians. To which I answer, not particularly, though I did find the people I encountered in churches to be much like those I encountered in any other organisation I’ve been involved with. No different. Certainly no better, and in some ways worse when they squabbled or were petty and judgemental. Not sufficiently worse to make me abandon faith, but perhaps enough to make me ask whether Christianity really ‘worked’. Shouldn’t Christians who are new creatures, reformed in the image of Christ. be so much better than the rest of us?

At 9… You went to the wrong church. If so I must’ve attended several ‘wrong’ churches as I moved around the north of England with work. My wife and I always sought out churches with sound biblical teaching, so it wasn’t the lack of solid food that caused me to backslide (to use the Christian jargon.)

8. You wanted to wallow in your own sin. As I’ve said facetiously before, I like a good wallow as much as the next man and preferably with him. Back in the days of my struggling with faith, however, I didn’t find myself drawn to ‘sin’. I was trying to raise three children, do a demanding job and deal with the fallout from my boss’s affair with a colleague. My own sin was the last thing on my mind.

Related to this is the accusation that an apostate such as I wants, in some unfathomable way, to be God. Certainly I want to be fully human and to take charge of my own life, but aren’t these laudable intentions? It doesn’t mean I aspire to be God; I don’t want to be worshipped, don’t want to laud it over others, blame them for my deficiencies or send them to hell. That’s what God does, right? But it’s not me. 

7. You rejected Christ because you’re gay and didn’t like the constraints faith placed on your sexual behaviour. See above. I didn’t admit I was gay until several years after I ditched faith and it was several more after that before I came out, yet more until I did anything about it. But okay, if you want to reverse the order of events, I gave up on religion because I was latently gay. But not really, though certainly the abandonment of faith was a liberation; I could think for myself and was free, over a long period of time, to finally become myself.

6. You read the wrong books. I certainly did: C. S. Lewis (I still have my collection of his books), John Stott, John Piper, John Bunyan, Bonhoeffer, Joni Erickson, Corrie Ten Boom, Billy Graham, David Wilkerson… and the Bible. So yes, I wasted a lot of time reading this sort of thing, but I’m guessing that’s not what my Christian accusers mean. I read more widely as I moved away from faith which helped me break out of the Christian bubble, but this wasn’t the reason I left the faith. I was well on the way by this time.

5. You were never a true Christian. Your faith was intellectual or habit or emotional but not deeply personal. Of course I was a true Christian. Just ask Jesus. Oh… you can’t. I’ve written about this before as you’ll see here. I was as real a Christian as those who claim they’re the real deal now.

4. You were in thrall to non-Christian writers. Not in thrall, no, but these writers – Ehrman, the so-called New Atheists, science writers (Dawkins’ science books particularly), Pagels, Barker, Loftus, Alter and, yes, Carrier – make a lot more sense than those who write from the perspective of faith. These authors don’t seem to mind, indeed they relish that their readers think critically about the evidence they present. Mumbo-jumbo isn’t passed off as erudition.

3. You have no awareness of the spiritual; you think that only that which can be measured is real. This is true, but it is not why I gave up Christianity. It is a consequence of doing so. I have seen no evidence of a spiritual realm that exists outside the human imagination. If anyone is able to present evidence that it does have independent existence, I’m open to it. Until then I will continue to live with the understanding that angels, devils, demons, heaven, hell, celestial saviours and gods, like unicorns, dragons and Shangri-La, do not exist. It follows that as non-existent beings they cannot communicate with us nor await us as our final destination.

2. Your heart has been hardened by Satan. See above; there is no Satan. Hardening of the heart is a metaphor for those who don’t fall prey to Christianity’s fraudulent claims or at last see through them.

1. You gave up on faith because you realised none of it was true. Yes. Finally. This is why I rejected Christianity. It simply isn’t true, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate on this blog for the last 12+ years. Its third-rate fantasies, fake promises and failed prophecies are all evidence of its falsity.

But wait. None of the telepathic Christians who ‘know’ why I’m no longer a believer ever make this accusation. They would never concede that most (all) of what they believe simply isn’t true. But my life experience and my reading as I began to suspect Christianity was nothing more than a con have borne this out. Christianity is demonstrably untrue, theChristian God a fraud and supernatural-Jesus a fiction. This is why I abandoned Christianity.

How about you?

This time it’s personal

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Desperately searching for another reason to dismiss recent critiques of Christianity, Don has suggested that my views and those of commenters here are somehow invalid because they’re ‘personal’. (I declined to publish Don’s latest comment in which he elaborated on this theme; not only was he already on enforced rest but he also decided to have a rant about ‘sexual depravity’. This would appear to have been directed  at my own happy same-sex relationship, as well as all other forms of consensual sex that God Don disapproves of.)

So what’s wrong with ‘personal’? My faith, when I had it was personal. I’d prayed the sinner’s prayer in which I confessed I was a sinner and I received Jesus into my heart (or so I thought) and began to live my life in accordance with what he required of me. This personal relationship with Jesus, as it was usually described in evangelical circles, was reinforced by the preaching I heard in church, by prayer meetings and Bible studies, by the devotional books I read, C. S. Lewis’s writing and the notes I used alongside my personal Bible reading.

I’ve written before how I abandoned all of this when, in a time of crisis, God wasn’t there, and I eventually came to realise, in what I can only describe as a moment of personal revelation, that this was because he didn’t exist.

I then set about discovering what it was I had believed for the previous 30 years; what were these beliefs that had shaped my life, determining what I did, who I married, my morality, my sense of guilt and failure… essentially all that I was. That quest, which began with my broadening my reading well beyond the bounds of devotional Christian books (how treacherous I felt when I first picked them up!) was personal. It was fuelled by the reaction of some Christian friends who attacked me personally when, still later, I came out not only as an atheist but as gay too. My dealings with one particular zealous and homophobic friend led to my first book and ultimately, over 12 years ago, to this blog.

RejectingJesus is a personal working out of my love-hate relationship with Christianity. It is, I hope, informed by my reading but it is first and foremost personal. The posts are my analysis of Christianity as it is practised and my own dissection of the Bible. I’m not a historian nor a theologian (thank god); my Masters is in English Literary Research and it is these skills, together with my knowledge of the Bible from my Christian days, that I apply in my sometimes irreverent analyses. Nothing is sacred, though I’m aware of the importance of providing evidence for my claims and, where relevant, in citing appropriate sources, which is why I provide links and reference relevant verses from the Bible. Perversely, Don also accuses me of being in thrall to the scholars I cite; the opposite of his complaint that posts are ‘personal’.

Do I then, as Don implies, try to discredit the Bible because I’m gay? Am I, as Don suggests, motivated by the ‘constraints’ the Bible places on my sexuality? I don’t believe so. Once I recognised that God didn’t exist, it followed that he could not have any opinion about homosexuality or indeed anything else. Like any other fictional character, his views were created by those who presumed to speak for him: ‘I am so mysterious and my ways unknowable. Oh, but by the way, I really don’t like those depraved gays. Feel at liberty to stone them.’ God’s self-appointed homophobes have to be challenged because of the damage they do.

Am I as an atheist predisposed to being critical of both faith and the Bible, as Christian readers sometimes say? Undoubtedly, but I’m no more predisposed than as a Christian I was predisposed to see God everywhere. As Nan put it in a recent comment:

Any individual who allows him/herself to put aside the centuries-long teachings of Christianity … and read the scriptures without bias and/or preconception … cannot fail to see the multitude of inconsistencies.

Nor can they fail to see the Bible’s flights of fancy, its reliance on dreams and visions, its make-believe and pretend fulfilment of prophecy, its forgeries and false promises, its disconnect from reality and magical thinking, its supernaturalism and sheer cultishness. Critically evaluating scriptures at face value, without making excuses for them or trying to guessing what the original writers might have ‘intended’ or deciding that unpalatable parts are ‘really’ symbolic/metaphorical is, however ‘personal’, by far the more honest approach.

To insinuate with a personal slur that having ‘personal’ reasons for criticising Christianity is a weak ad hominem. It does not address the arguments in question nor the issues at hand. Anyone who wants to demonstrate that what I say about the Bible, Christian belief and practice is wrong needs to provide evidence of their own. Insult, screeds of Bible quotation and ‘a legion of “work arounds”’ (Nan again) is not how to go about it.

 

A Christian Writes

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A Christian commenter writes –

…there is only one issue of primary importantance. That is is Jesus the Son of Man and the Son of God and my/your Savior. If so, every other issue pales.

Neil, you and many other atheists seem to think Christianity is broken up into a multitude of pieces that do not agree and do not get along because of disagreements on doctrine and practice. That is actually untrue. When it gets right down to it, only the one issue is important. And that means there are billions of Christians in fellowship. That is the church.

If you missed that in your time as a Christian, I wonder if you really were or whether you were merely religious. Now, among the religious there are significant differences and divisions. Religious Roman Catholics disagree with religious Baptists, and Pentecostals with Greek Orthodox and so on. But that is religion. Christians in all those denominations agree and can have wonderful fellowship when it is about Jesus.

And I respond –

This is nothing more than the No True Scotsman fallacy: ‘those who don’t practise Christianity in the way I (or my sect/church) approves of are not true Christians; they’re merely ‘religious’.’ Having thus discounted those who ‘disprove’ the rule, the rule now gives every impression of working. Brilliant!

You assert that ‘only one issue is important… is Jesus… my/your Savior?’ No, he’s not. He’s nobody’s. Just because Paul and those who came after him decided he was doesn’t mean he is. He’s long gone. Dead. Even so, he doesn’t claim in the synoptic gospels that he came to be anyone’s personal Savior. For synoptic Jesus the only thing of ‘importantance’ was working towards the Kingdom of God on Earth. ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and his righteousness, and all these other things shall be added unto you.’ For some in the early church, the ‘only issue of importance’ was obeying Jesus’ commands, including, presumably, seeking first the Kingdom on Earth (1 John 2:3-6).

The evidence shows, however, that Christians have never managed to do this (not even after discounting those they disagree with). Just look at Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The church has been an unholy mess since the very beginning. It continues to be to this day: take a look at Christian Research Network, which denounces fellow Jesus-lovers on a daily basis.

You delude yourself if you think the ‘true’ church, then as now, is in complete harmony, enjoying blissful love-ins with Jesus while everything else, differences in doctrine and practice included, conveniently fade away. But then, you’ve already bought into one of the most perfidious delusions ever foisted on human beings so I don’t suppose another one matters all that much.

 

Don’s Dynamic Lie-Detector

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But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth.

1 John 2:20-21 as quoted by Don Camp.

Our resident, regularly banned God-botherer, Don Camp, claims that he has a special way of reading and interpreting spiritual writing. No, he hasn’t got a pair of magic rocks, but an inner ‘anointing’ with what Don calls his ‘lie-detector’. (You might have a similar device yourself, known more commonly as a bull-shit detector. Its alarm may well have been a-ring-a-ding-dinging when you read Don’s comment.)

Anointing, if you’re interested, is the ancient Jewish custom of initiating a king or priest by daubing oil on their head. Don has no evidence that he has been inwardly ‘anointed’ by an unseen spirit that helps him understand scripture better than anyone else. There is no evidence, outside of subjective feelings and one tautological bible verse, that any religious believer has had this done to them. (Read 1 John 2.20-21 again, Don, and you’ll see that a tautology is what it is: ‘the truth is the truth is the truth,’ is really all it says.)

On the contrary, we find that different Christians interpret given scriptures in a variety of different ways (I’ll get to examples in a minute). They differ too on which bits of the Bible are relevant to them and their church or sect. They disregard or explain away verses that don’t suit their purposes.

Don does this himself. His anointing Spirit doesn’t lead him to interpret verses like Matthew 16:27-28; 24:27, 30-31 & 34, Romans 13, 11 & 12, 1 Peter 4:7, 1 John 2:18, Revelation 22.20 etc at face value. He cannot countenance the fact that Jesus, Paul, John and all those other early fanatics were wrong about when the end of the age would happen – they are all very clear they thought it was imminent – so he reinterprets what they say to mean something they clearly and unequivocally do not. Don’s interpretation has them meaning, despite what they say, that the end of the age and all that goes with it would be thousands of years in their future. Should you challenge him on this, Don tells you that how you see it is wrong because you don’t have the special anointing he has. As he puts it in his comment, you’re lacking the right ‘dynamic’ (ring-a-ding-ding!) and as a result, you are incapable of interpreting scripture in the right way (i.e. his way).

In fact, Don does not have a way of understanding scripture that he can call his own. Rather, he interprets it with preconceptions he’s acquired elsewhere; that it is God’s Word, that it is Truth, that the spiritual world it describes is real, that it relates an historical resurrection, and so on. He comes to it with these presuppositions that he has learnt from preachers, teachers, commentaries, devotional books and other Christian propaganda he’s been exposed to. He is completely unable to take a step back to look at what he’s reading objectively. He knows what it says before he reads it – ‘truth’ as far as the Bible is concerned, ‘lies’ when it’s the Book of Mormon – and imposes that meaning onto it. This ‘dynamic’ enables him too to smooth over all of the Bible inconsistencies and allows him to see it as one seamless garment when it evidentially is not. He’s not alone in doing this, of course. Most evangelical (‘anointed’) Christians do it. I know I did.

Now for those examples, and a challenge for Don:

1. A few days ago, Holy Spirit anointed, preacher Dillon Awes used his dynamic lie-detector to interpret the Bible’s declarations about homosexuality like this:

What does God say is the answer, is the solution, for the homosexual in 2022, here in the New Testament, here in the Book of Romans (1:26-27)

That they are worthy of death! These people should be put to death!

Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with the crime, the abomination of homosexuality, that they have. They should be convicted in a lawful trial. They should be sentenced with death. They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head! That’s what God teaches. That’s what the Bible says.

2. Similarly, over the weekend, Ken Ham interpreted Genesis 1 to mean that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. After all, he ‘reasoned’, Genesis says God created ‘everything’ in those first six days, so that must include dinosaurs as well as Adam and Eve.

3. Pastor Douglas Wilson who featured recently on Bruce Gerencser’s blog, interpreted the assertion in Ephesians 5:22-24 that wives should be submit to their husbands, even if it entails rape:

…We have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them… However we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage.

My question to you, Don, is: do you interpret Romans 1:26-27, Genesis 1 and Ephesians 5:22-24 the same way as these other Holy Spirit directed interpreters of scripture? If not, why not, when it’s the same Holy Spirit that equips you with your dynamic lie-detector, that also leads them into all truth?

These is not a rhetorical question; we all want to know. But be warned, Don, our bullshit detectors are primed and ready.

 

God’s Megaphone?

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from his book, The Problem Of Pain

Does the Christian God use pain to draw people to himself? Assuming for a moment that such a God exists, does he use human suffering to make followers for himself?

There is no evidence in the Bible to suggest he does. To be sure, the Bible has a fair amount to say about pain. It claims that suffering is a means by which God either chastens Christians (Hebrews 12.7) or strengthens them (Romans 5.3-5), but this is exclusively for people who already believe. The Bible does not say non-believers are afflicted as a means of drawing them closer to God; the idea is unbiblical.

Let’s assume then that while this notion finds no support in the bible, Christians have learnt over the centuries, perhaps though extra-biblical revelation, that God does use pain in this way. What does this tell us about God? That he’s a being whose principal way of making human beings pay attention to him is by causing (or allowing) them to suffer frequently unbearable pain and anguish.

What sort of God is this? Not one who loves the world and cares for humans far more than he does mere sparrows (Matthew 6.26). He’s more an unpleasant, sadistic bully: the jock who backs you up against the wall, grips your balls and squeezes hard.

Maybe that’s how it is. The God who created the universe is just such a being; a moral monster, as commenter koseighty puts it. It’s easy to see how he might be: human beings suffer, yet there’s (supposedly) a God who loves them; therefore pain and suffering must at the very least be sanctioned by God, or, more likely, delivered by him. This, after all, is the story of the Old Testament. The God so arrived at though is a thoroughly human creation, a means of minimising cognitive dissonance by reconciling human suffering and a God who supposedly cares.

One more assumption is needed. Let’s assume this time that despite the odds, this character really exists. Does his strategy work? Does inflicting pain and anguish on people make them, as Lewis suggests, cry out to the One doing (or allowing) the inflicting and compel them to love him? It seems unlikely; I can’t find any evidence online of anyone claiming that pain or anguish brought them to God. From a personal perspective, I can honestly say that in times of distress or suffering I have never, post-deconversion, called out to God or any supernatural entity for help. I’ve never interpreted my suffering as his calling me closer and have never, since escaping Christianity, succumbed to his malicious charms. (What I did do occasionally, following my deconversion, was to convince myself that my suffering was a punishment from God – for leaving him behind, being gay or something I’d done. These feelings disappeared when I embraced fully the fact that the Christian God isn’t real.)

Where does this leave the Christian with, as Lewis puts it, ‘the problem of pain’? How do they reconcile a loving God who allows or even causes human beings to suffer? They can’t. Instead they spout empty platitudes that they think let their indifferent, imaginary God off the hook. Just look at the meaningless theo-babble religious leaders came up with in 2004 after a tsunami hit Indonesia, killing 227,898 people.

Leave God out of the equation, however, and there are far better explanations for why humans suffer. ‘Shit happens’ is far more convincing than anything the religious have to offer. Physical pain is the body’s reaction to damage. It is an imperfect system that frequently overreacts or fires up even after damage is repaired (I know this having fibromyalgia). That’s what it is to have, to be, a physical body. Anguish comes from random acts of nature, the violence and cruelty we inflict on each other and the death of loved ones, much of which is beyond human control. ‘Thoughts and prayers’ are useless in ameliorating this kind of suffering. Measures to restrict people’s access to weapons undoubtedly helps, as it has in countries with politicians with sufficient strength and intelligence to enact gun-control legislation. Without it, as in Ulvalde recently, more children will die, more parents will experience terrible anguish and another massacre is inevitable. God won’t stop it.

Suffering is not symbolic of something else; it is not ‘God’s megaphone’ or an opportunity for others to point those afflicted to Christ’s light (or any other bullshit that involves the supernatural.) Pain simply is. It is our lot as physical bodies to endure or alleviate it as best we can.

Christians’ Favourite Delusions 36: The Universe Is Fine-Tuned For Life.

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  1. The return of an old favourite(?)! Christians’ Favourite Delusions. The other 35 posts in this series start here. 

The vast universe, almost infinite in size, was created, according to Christians, with the sole purpose of bringing us humans and the other creatures who share this planet with us into existence. This fine-tuning argument is used to ‘prove’ that the God of the Bible really exists.

According to Ken Ham, we’re the only life forms in the universe, while other Christians speculate that there may be other intelligent creatures out there somewhere. If there are, then, so says the late Larry Norman, ‘(Jesus) has been there once already and has died to save their souls.’*

The fine-tuning argument proposes that the universe exists so that this minute, insignificant blue dot we live on, and possibly a few other tiny specks, could produce life of some sort. But what of the rest of the universe: the other 99.9999% that doesn’t have life, because it is entirely hostile to it; the vast bulk of the universe that is made up of nebulae, gas clouds, lethal radiation, black holes, anti-matter and lifeless planets?

Taken as a whole, the universe is cold and dead; not finely-tuned for anything, let alone life. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Richard Carrier debunking the whole fine-tuning argument:

‘[T]he only way we could exist without a God is by an extremely improbable chemical accident, and the only way an extremely improbable chemical accident is likely to occur is in a universe that’s vastly old and vastly large; so atheism predicts a vastly old and large universe; theism does not …

Likewise, if chance produced this universe, we should expect it to be only barely conducive to life, indeed almost entirely lethal to it (as in fact it is), since there are vastly more ways to get those universes by chance selection, than to get a universe perfectly suited to life throughout. … Design predicts exactly the opposite.’

And here, several more scientists, philosophers and other interested parties do the same thing:

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/non-fine-tuned-universe/

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2011/01/18/260556/evidence-emerges-that-laws-of-physics-are-not-fine-tuned-for-life/amp/

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2015/12/31/sean-carroll-debunks-the-fine-tuning-argument-for-god/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9O5wXsgqrc

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/fine-tuning-argument-debunked

https://www.answers-in-reason.com/religion/christianity/fine-tuning-debunked-holy-koolaid/

Life is remarkable, it is true (but then we would think that, wouldn’t we, when we are it) but it is no more remarkable than any other of the phenomena the universe has produced in its 13.7 billion years of its current existence. No God has been required for any of it. No fine-tuning = no fine-tuner

*In his 1972 song ‘UFO’.

Assertions

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Don likes to take me to task for what he says are assertions in my arguments. I do make assertions, as do we all, because not all points in an argument need to be demonstrated every time they’re used. Indeed, not all assertions can be.

There are assertions that we all accept are likely to be true: the sun will ‘rise’ tomorrow; the Earth is a sphere; evidence is better than no evidence and so on. There are those who dispute these assertions but the onus is then on them to provide the evidence or argument that their counter-assertion is true. Yes, there may come a day when the sun doesn’t rise but it is statistically improbable; the Earth is demonstrably not flat; faith is not an reliable substitute for evidence. There is abundant evidence and sound argument why these things are not the case. But – and this is my point – this evidence does not have to be trotted out every time an argument relies on such probabilities; they can be asserted.

I write, and indeed live my life, on the basis of the fact (‘assertion’) that the supernatural does not exist. Over the last ten years, I’ve posted several arguments why this is the case. I frequently provide a link to these arguments when asserting that, outside of the human imagination, gods, spirits, angels, devils, demons, powers, principalities, ghosts, avatars, heaven and hell do not exist. These arguments form the backbone of any subsequent assertion that the supernatural is not real.

Nonetheless, the onus to ‘prove’ that this is the case does not rest with me. First, because it is impossible to prove a negative. Consider, for example, the Christians challenge to prove their God doesn’t exist. While there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that this is the case, there is no absolute ‘proof’ of God’s non-existence (as I’ve argued before, it all comes down to probability, or, in God’s case, improbability.) Absence of evidence is invariably evidence of absence.

The onus instead lies with the one making the incredible claim. Those who take it as fact that the supernatural and God are real need to demonstrate to the rest of us that this is the case. They have, in my long experience, failed to do this. The best they can do are the various arguments (the ontological, Kalam cosmological, teleological, fine-tuning and the argument from design) that suggest the possibility of the supernatural but fall far short of convincing evidence that the supernatural is real, and further still that the Christian God exists. They depend in the end on the feelings they have in their heads and the Bible (or some other holy book.) This is wholly inadequate. 

Consequently, I’ll continue to operate from and make my assertion that the supernatural does not exist until such time as Don or any other of his co-religionists demonstrate the probability that it does.

From my assertion, backed up, remember, by earlier arguments, a number of other facts follow:

With no supernatural, there are no gods; YHWH in all his incarnations is a God, therefore YHWH does not exist.

Much follows from this:

If YHWH does not exist, Jesus cannot have been either his avatar, Son or incarnation;

Jesus cannot have been raised from the dead by a being who doesn’t exist;

Stories that he did so must therefore be merely that: stories;

The celestial, eternal Jesus who sits at the right hand of God in heaven is not real;

Any experience people have of this being is entirely within their own imaginations;

The Bible is based on such imagined encounters with these imagined characters;

There is no after-life or judgment;

The Christian faith, including my own, cannot be explained in terms of the supernatural;

Only explanations that are rooted in naturalism, as in science, have any validity.

There are more implications that can be drawn from the premise that there is no supernatural, including the fact that the world makes much more sense (if it makes any sense at all) without drawing gods and demons into it.

Consequently, I shall continue to make my assertions, like those above, supported as always by previous argument. Any religious believer who wants to challenge them is welcome to do so, but must do more than point out the obvious, that they are assertions. They must provide the evidence for the supernatural, and all that follows from it, independent of the goings on in their heads and without reference to holy books written by those with similar subjective feelings.

Responding to a Christian

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I responded to comments by our resident cultist, Don Camp, who replied with the following (and more: see comments). I want to pick up (in blue) on some of the points he makes:

I originally asked Don: why is it that whenever anyone asks you to provide evidence for your beliefs, or to confirm what those beliefs actually are, you invariably side-step the issue.

Don: That seems to be the procedure (your procedure, Don?) here and on most atheist blogs, I might add. I really think that I have answered that question clearly enough to be understood (you’ve responded to some questions but have provided evidence for very little of what you’ve claimed. Bible quotes are not evidence.) If not, there is my blog post. But I would ask the same and have of all of you. What do you believe to be true about life and reality? And why or what evidence do you have to support that belief?

Don, there’s ten years’ worth of blog posts on Rejectingjesus, many of which are about what I believe and the evidence I have for those beliefs. I’m not going to reiterate all of them here for your benefit. If you’re interested you could read the posts here, here, here, here and here. I suspect you’re not though; this is just another tactic to deflect the question away from yourself. Don’t you think it reasonable when you launch your sermonettes on other people’s blogs that they ask you to supply evidence for the beliefs you’re promoting? 

Don: I usually get what, I believe, Ark said when I asked about his evidence for Materialism: Everything we know has natural causes, so to presume that the whole universe has a natural cause reasonably follows. (My paraphrase) That is honest and clear. But that is the very same kind of evidence I’ve provided for my worldview. You, Neil, have not provided even that much. Usually I get something like: Atheism, is about what we don’t believe, and we don’t believe there is evidence for God. The trouble is that is negative that conveniently sidesteps the question.

So you do get answers to your questions (so what you moaning about?) I concur with Ark. However, you do not provide the same sort of evidence. You generally rely on the argument from incredulity: I can’t see how something so amazing as the universe could have come into existence on its own, therefore God must’ve done it.’ This is not evidence. You then make the further unfounded claim that this God must be your God who magically created everything via the agency of his Son. Whatever this means, it is not evidence. (Before you say you don’t do this, just check out your further comment below.)

Neil: How about answering my question: do you subscribe to Paul’s first century view that ‘the world’ is governed by wicked powers and principalities that hover around us causing all sorts of mayhem…

Don: No and Yes. No, I don’t think that people are governed by those powers, but they are influenced by them. Yes, I believe there are powers that influence people. And I believe that people can so give themselves to that influence that I would say they are governed by them. (my emphasis). So no prevarication here then! Now how about answering mine. Do you believe that reality is purely material? See above and the posts I directed you to. There is no evidence for the supernatural.

Neil:  Could only a blood sacrifice, in God’s eyes ameliorate (the effects of these demons)?

Don: No. Those powers do not cause sin. We do. (And that I believe is really Paul’s view.) Right. So you know what was really Paul’s view, which, it turns out, is not the one expressed in Ephesians 2:1-3 & 6.11-13. (Addendum: it’s widely acknowledged that Paul didn’t actually write Ephesians. It’s a later forgery based on Colossians.)

Don: No. I believe that only forgiveness can ameliorate sin. The sacrifice of the Lord Jesus is the act of forgiveness made visible. Does your believing make it so? Where does the bible actually say this?

Neil: where is your evidence that this (Paul’s worldview) is reality?

Don: I am not sure what “this” means. There are too many possible referents. If you replace that with a specific, I’ll answer.

It’s clear and specific, Don. We were discussing Paul’s worldview. I asked if you believed it and if so, what evidence you had that ‘this’, Paul’s demon-infested world, was real. You’re side stepping again. 

Me: Or how about answering Ark’s question about whether you believe Jesus was the creator of the universe and what evidence there is for such a belief?

Don: I don’t recall that question exactly (!) But the answer is I believe that God created the universe through the agency of his Son and the earth within it. (And I think that is the crux of our differences). You’re not kidding. 

Don: Evidence “succinctly” is, to use a metaphor, his fingerprints are all over it. Is a metaphor evidence? I don’t think so. It’s a literary device. In any case, every other religion that claims a creator God says the same thing. 

HOW DO YOU THINK THE UNIVERSE CAME TO BE, AND WHAT EVIDENCE IS THERE FOR SUCH A BELIEF? AND HOW DO YOU ACCOUNT FOR THE DYSFUNCTION OF HUMANITY THAT CAUSES ALL THE CHAOS AND DESTRUCTION MORALLY AND SOCIALLY? AND FINALLY, WHAT IS THE REMEDY?

My God. You’re gone all caps lock. In answer to your very important questions, see my response above. To summarise:

It is largely irrelevant what I THINK about the origin of the universe. It’s possible, however, that the universe has always existed in some form. You claim this for your God when there’s no evidence he exists; assuming those same qualities for something that does is a more realistic prospect. It is indeed what a number of scientists think. (I expect you’ll know better).

The ‘dysfunction of humanity.’ Is it dysfunctional? Many of us are kind and decent. Humanity is what it is, and it is what it is because we’re evolved primates.

The remedy for what, Don; for what we are? It’s quite likely there isn’t one. Jesus certainly isn’t it. History teaches us that Christianity has only provided some of us with an excuse to behave even more reprehensibly (Putin claims to be a Christian albeit a Catholic; he says one of the reasons he’s invaded Ukraine is to impose traditional Christian values on the country.)  If anything is going to improve us, it’s education; it has civilised us to a significant extent but still has a lot to overcome. 

That’s it. Now go and read those old posts before writing your next sermonette.