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ROY MOORE

9/28/2017

Roy Moore, the controversial former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, famous for his refusal to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building, is now a nominee for the U.S. Senate. In case some here aren’t all that familiar with him, here are some of his views:

The “pursuit of happiness” refers to following the commandments, since “you can’t be happy unless you follow God’s law.”

Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress.

Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” is something that can be said of America today, since among other things we now have gay marriage.

“Homosexual conduct should be illegal.”

9/11 was God punishing America.

"Religion" in the constitution means "Christianity," since that is what the framers meant by it. (This implies that the freedom of religion is exclusively about Christianity, though Moore denied claiming such a thing.)

He also claims to have a “personal belief” that Obama was not born in the U.S.

It’s a sobering thought that he won his party’s nomination, not in spite of such views, but because of them.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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EMPIRICAL PROOF THAT CHRISTIANITY IS FALSE?

9/19/2017

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Split-brain patients are individuals who have had the corpus callosum (which connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain) severed. This causes the individual to have two centers of both perceptual and motor activity. Each side of the brain may give a different answer to the same question.

In the video clip below, neurologist V. S. Ramachandran discusses a split-brain patient whose right hemisphere believed in God and whose left hemisphere did not. Now, I don’t know if the individual in this case was Christian. But it is not at all unlikely. After all, he was a patient in the United States. And if he was and what he is saying is true, then “standard” Christianity (at least) cannot be true. For according to that view, (1) each human being is/has exactly one soul; (2) anyone who accepts Jesus is saved; (3) anyone who knowingly fails to accept Jesus throughout their entire life isn’t saved; and (4) anyone can continue in their non-acceptance of Jesus as long as they live. But if this patient is Christian, then he has accepted Jesus and can continue to knowingly reject Jesus until he dies. And then what will happen to his soul?

Even if this patient is, say, a Hindu, his case provides strong evidence against the standard Christian view. For the fact that he exists means it must be possible for the same thing to happen to a Christian.

Split brain with one half atheist and one half theist

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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SMART PEOPLE SAYING STUPID THINGS

9/13/2017

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Loftus’s observation that faith makes smart people say stupid things ["Don Camp is Our Gullible/Deluded/Anti-Intellectual Person of the Day!"] reminded me of two instances of this I’d previously come across. The first involves Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. As some here may already know, Collins, a geneticist and defender of evolutionary theory, “knelt in the dewy grass… and surrendered to Jesus Christ” as a result of seeing “a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall” while hiking in the Cascade Mountains. That he considers a purely emotional reaction like that as a reason for accepting the claims of Christianity shows just how unscientific a scientist can be. (How would he respond to someone who denied evolution based on nothing more than emotion?)

Collins was also convinced by C. S. Lewis’s “liar, lunatic or Lord” argument. Most readers here are probably familiar with this very weak argument: Lewis says that one cannot call Jesus merely a great moral teacher. For, if he wasn’t who he claimed to be, then he was either lying or deluded. “Either this man was and is the son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.” So the only options are liar, lunatic, or Lord. But of course there is a fourth option: that Jesus didn’t claim to be God at all. Thus the choices really are liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend (and in fact, probably a mixture of three of these).

Lewis’s argument is obviously flawed and very easy to refute — and yet Collins fell for it. Why? I think the answer is clear: because he wanted to believe it.

My second example comes from William F. Buckley’s Nearer, My God. Buckley, father of the modern conservative movement, was — whatever you may think of him — obviously very smart. It is therefore fascinating seeing him try to defend claims that are clearly unfounded.

One such claim is that of miracles at Lourdes. Buckley points out that nonbelievers (like one reportedly sent by a French “anti-religious organization") have attempted to discredit the process by which miracles are verified — sometimes even by faking illnesses and then claiming cures. And yet, they all have failed, he informs us, for the process is very strict: “there are no tribunals in existence more skeptical than those through which you need to pass if your claim is to have been cured of illness at Lourdes.” In fact, although millions of pilgrims have visited the sanctuary, “fewer than one hundred ‘cures’ have been certified by the Church as miraculous.” So you see, the verified ones must have been the genuine article.

It never appears to have dawned on Buckley that odds this bad, though supporting the argument that the process of verification is strict, completely fail to support the claim of miracles in the first place. A "miracle" here just means that “there is no known or hypothetical scientific explanation” for what the doctors have observed. The patient simply got better. But since cases of spontaneous remission of disease do occur from time to time, the fact that some of these occurred to people who visited Lourdes — and at a rate that does not appear to be greater than for others — proves exactly nothing.

And why did Buckley fail to see this? Once again, it seems the reason is that he wanted to believe. Buckley admits that his visit to Lourdes left him “profoundly affected” — maybe as much as Collins was by the frozen waterfall. In other words, his emotions got in the way of his better judgement.

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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"GOD CAN DO ANYTHING"

9/3/2017

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As a sort-of follow up to my previous post, one more comment related to the problem of evil:

According to some believers, God can do anything – and that means literally anything. He can make square circles, married bachelors, and even non-Catholic Popes! In these people's opinion, to say that God is omnipotent is to say that logical impossibility is no obstacle to his power.

And it’s often hard to convince them otherwise. I used to teach philosophy, and I remember several former students who were adamant on this point – including two who became visibly upset when I argued that not even God could make a married bachelor. Their suspicion that I was an atheist probably had something to do with it (though my pointing out that it’s common for Christian theologians to agree with me didn’t help).

It’s instructive to ask these people what they think of the problem of evil. Usually, they will offer one of the standard replies, such as the free-will defense. In other words, they will say that there is evil in the world because God gave us freedom. But of course if God can do what these people claim, then, even if it is logically impossible, he can give us freedom and make it the case that no one ever does the wrong thing. And the same goes for any other reason God might allow evil. Whatever the believer offers as an excuse (“evil exists because of X”), the reply can be, “according to your view, God could have made the world both with X and without evil.”

Even after having this pointed out to them, many of these true believers refuse to change their minds. One of the two students who had initially became upset, however, did admit a few weeks later that God could not create married bachelors after all: he had asked his pastor about it!

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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ROY MOORE

EMPIRICAL PROOF THAT CHRISTIANITY IS FALSE?

SMART PEOPLE SAYING STUPID THINGS

"GOD CAN DO ANYTHING"

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