First Causality

The notion of having a cause for the universe that is outside of the universe is nonsensical. Causality is dependent on the existence of time and space, which don’t exist outside of the universe. So the best way to describe this hypothetical first cause would be ‘non-existent’.

That's it.  A short and sweet argument against the existence of gods, or at least the idea of a transcendent creator god that is a first cause outside the universe.

Why the Christian God would be Stupid if He Existed - Part 2: Special Revelation

I’ve brought this issue up in several venues before but I thought it really deserved its own post. Special revelation, i.e. a god giving its message to specific individuals to relay on to others is an imbecilic system and I’ll try to explain why I think so.

The Weakest Link

The weakest link of a chain is where it is going to break first, so let’s imagine the conveying of God’s message as a chain. At the very least, a special revelation chain has to have 3 links, God, the receiver of the message, and then the rest of the population. In that circumstance the populace first has to have faith in the conveyor before they can have faith in the message being conveyed. This is not an ideal situation, as obviously the messenger is the weakest link of the chain, whether interpreting the message from the deity incorrectly, relaying it incorrectly, or something not being believed by others. This is a faulty chain and a god that would use such a chain should be considered stupid in my books. However, this is not the chain that we supposedly have (given the assumption that the Bible is actually God’s message).

The special revelation chain that we would actually have would be something like this (for the New Testament Gospels).
God/Jesus->First Century Followers->Converts->[insert several decades and who knows how many other transmissions]->Anonymous Gospel Authors->Scribes (who altered the texts)->Translators (for those of us who don’t read Greek)->Us

The number of weak links in this chain is stunning, and many of them have already been broken in the texts, as we have numerous contradictions between gospels and sometimes within the same gospel, perhaps due to interpolations. Any god who would use such a system, where one must place faith in the transmission process before one can have faith in the message and then believe the true religion must be a moron. This is one reason why I think the better explanation is that no such God exists.


Faith in Humans

As I mentioned, in order to have faith in the religion, you must first have faith in the people who transmitted it to you. In some circumstances I am willing to put faith (trust) in other human beings, if they have been shown to have a track record of trustworthiness. For example, a Scientist who has a history of being innovative and ahead of his time, who has later been confirmed to be correct many times over would deserve considerably more faith in their judgment than a John Doe off the street with no credentials.

Surely if a God was dead-set on transmitting his one true religion via special revelation through many people he would at least make sure that the people had an air of trustworthiness around them? Unfortunately for the Christian, that isn’t the case with the Bible. The overwhelming majority of which is anonymously authored. The only books from the Old Testament of moderately ‘certain’ authorship are a few of the prophets (the first part of Isaiah for example). All of the ‘history’ and myth, and law found in the Old Testament is completely anonymous (No, Moses did not write any of it). The New Testament is arguably worse off than the Old, as a substantial portion of that which isn’t anonymous is forged. Half of the letters claimed in Paul’s name are forgeries (2 Thessalonians, Colossians, 1&2 Timothy, Titus, Ephesians) and some of the ones we’re pretty sure were written by him have anonymous interpolations added into them by scribes. 1 & 2 Peter are forgeries; Jude is a forgery and so on. I am not about to go placing my faith in anonymous writers 1900-1800 years ago nor am I going to place my faith in writers who lied about they were. Hell, I’m not even going to place faith in the single identified author of the New Testament (Paul) because I have absolutely no reason to trust him on anything. An Intelligent god surely would have accounted for this, which is why I cannot avoid the conclusion that if the Christian God existed, he would be an idiot.

Part 1

Why the Christian God Would be Stupid if He Existed - Part 1

I decided to start a new post series. I hope you enjoy it.

Creation

There are many aspects of 'creation' that make me think if the Christian God did exist, he would have to be classified as an idiot. The first of these being evidence. If he had created everything, he left no evidence of his activity. Painters generally sign their paintings and manufacturers generally put their logo on their products but for some reason Yahweh felt no need to leave behind any trace. This puts us homo sapiens in a strange predicament, we live in a universe that appears to us as if there is no god, everything we observe happens as a result of unguided natural processes so if the Christian God existed and created everything he would be an idiot based on this alone.

The second aspect of 'creation' that would qualify any prospective creator as incompetent are the many examples of un-intelligent design, I'll list just a few here to demonstrate my point. We breathe through the same orifice we eat with. Our lower backs are poorly constructed for walking upright resulting in widespread back problems. The birth canal is not large enough for fully developed human babies to be born prematurely compared to other mammals, leaving the mother and the baby vulnerable. Many more examples can be found but 3 should suffice for my purposes.

Related to the other two facets is evolution. Evolution is quite possibly the most inefficient way in which a god could create life. Inefficiency isn't one of the attributes you hear Christians worshiping Yahweh for so I assume that was a mistake, which would make him stupid.

If the Christian God did in fact create everything as creationism describes he shot himself in the foot by making all the evidence point towards evolution, which would make him stupid, unless he really wanted to deceive humanity, which would make him malicious. So there you have it, by looking at 'creation' I conclude that if the Christian god existed, he would be stupid or malicious.

Part 2

Faith and Intuition

Many Christians laud faith as a virtue, and value intuition and gut feelings as confirmation of their beliefs. I reject all of this as unreliable, and it is my goal to elucidate why.

I will start by defining what I mean by faith, and then respond to some theistic uses of it. I accept the definition of faith in the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament. "Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." Hebrews 11:1. So the atheistic definition that 'faith is belief without evidence' is accurate to the definition found in Hebrews. If Christians wish to dispute this they should take it up with the New Testament canon and the anonymous author of the epistle, not with us.

When dialoguing with Christians, I am often scolded for not giving faith a chance and that I'm dogmatically accepting scientific naturalism. I would like to point out that I did give faith a chance, I was raised on faith. I consciously followed the Christian faith and bought into its conclusions for years. I read apologetics and debated online with atheists for about 4 years before jumping ship. I also do not dogmatically accept anything. If it became apparent that scientific naturalism was not producing intellectual progress or contributing to the wealth of knowledge that furthers the advancement of our species, I would abandon it just as I abandoned by former religion. The thing is though, that scientific naturalism is making progress, and we are constantly finding out more and more about the world we live in by scientific methods.

The other common thing that I hear from the Christians that I discuss/debate with is that they think faith is a path to knowledge. This is usually coupled with the two statements in the previous paragraph. When I have asked how faith is a path to knowledge, I am only ever met with distractions and diversions. I don't see the connection between faith as defined in Hebrews and knowledge. How can you learn something from having confidence in what you hope for, or from having assurance about what you don't see? In every aspect of my life I learn things by examining the world around me, or by listening, reading or doing things. I have never learned anything by believing something a priori, without evidence. In fact I contend that doing so is the antithesis of learning, and only takes away from potential knowledge, rather than contributing to it as my theist friends insist. On top of the dodging of this question, I have never received an acceptable answer when I ask what knowledge faith has given them. If as they say faith is an alternative path to knowledge than the rational methods I apply, then surely they could point to an example of knowledge that has been revealed by faith? It seems like a reasonable question to me.

When the issue of morality arises I am met constantly with the view that God instils moral values into our intuitions, or something akin to it. No amount of sociological, evolutionary or neuro-scientific reasoning seems to be able to convince them that intuitions are not reliable ways to know anything. Moral ideas are  largely the product of cultural conditioning, and many intuitions come from our evolutionary heritage and are explicable by natural, hormonal or neural means. We have learned so much about how our brain works and the natural world we live in, and as a result we can correct for errors in our cognition and intuition. Similarly, we can correct moral beliefs that are conditioned into us from cultural or evolutionary heritage. Pointing to moral intuition is not a cogent argument for the existence of God, as our moral intuitions are constantly changing as a result of cultural change. Our intuitions and gut feelings are useful tools in every day life, as we often can not afford the time to sit and think rationally about every decision we make, but we must also realise that they are often error-prone and sometimes flat out wrong. If you think God exists because you have a gut feeling that something exists out there it is my opinion that this is but another example of cognitive failure.

Eternal Universe

"Saying the universe is eternal simply is saying that it has no beginning or end, not that it had a beginning an infinite time ago"
—Victor J. Stenger

This quote from Vic Stenger really highlights the failure to understand what the cosmological debate is really about. Mischaracterisations occur on both sides of the debate, from the common atheist quip: "Well who created God then?" to the theist criticism: "You can't have an infinite number of events".

First I will address what I find to be a misguided criticism of theism: "Who created God?". This line of argumentation really fails off the block, because it is a strawman. It doesn't address what theism actually claims, which is generally some sort of eternal uncreated being. By definition this is not a created being, so would not have been created by anything. A much better way to come at this in my opinion is to ask the theist to account for why they point to something undetectable supposedly outside the cosmos to explain the cosmos. What inductions have they drawn to justify an external non-physical explanation for physical phenomena?

The theist argument in this case essentially boils down to an argument from ignorance, they can't explain how the universe came into existence (which is begging the question anyway) so they resort to some generally undefined, mysterious explanation. There is no empirical data that points to this mystical source. Theists will protest that this isn't a god-of-the-gaps argument, but I contend that it is. In fact I contend that it is the ultimate god-of-the-gaps.

Regarding the infinite number of events criticism, I find it to be rather hollow and hypocritical. Any criticism of an eternal universe can be equally be applied to an eternal god. As Carl Sagan said:

In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?

 Before anyone says it, I do not think that Carl Sagan is proffering the argument that I criticised at the beginning of this post. He seems to me just to be asking what the explanation for whatever god it is that is supposed to have created the universe. If that explanation is not based upon evidence, it is not an explanation at all, and the answer is either unknown, or unknowable. Once this is admitted, plausible scientific explanations for the existence of the universe are much more satisfactory, as they are confirmable by observation.

Fabricated Marcus Aurelius Quote

In June last year, I posted a quote that I was led to believe was from Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121-180 CE), after reading Meditations recently, I discovered that quote was no where to be found, and there are no other known writings of Marcus. I must correct my previous mistake.

The quote I posted was this one:

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but...will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

The closest thing to that in my copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is this:

"Now departure from the world of men is nothing to fear, if gods exist: because they would not involve you in any harm. If they do not exist, or if they have no care for humankind, then what is life to me in a world devoid of gods, or devoid of providence? But they do exist, and they do care for humankind: and they have put it absolutely in man's power to avoid falling into the true kinds of harm."
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.11

It seems to me like the former quote was fabricated based loosely on the latter, and I have not been able to track down the source of the forgery. Marcus Aurelius was NOT an atheist, the actual quote should show this quite clearly, though much of his philosophy was very practical, and for the most part disinterested in the supernatural.

EDIT: If anyone finds another translation that is closer to the quote I have decided is a fake, I'd like to know about it.

The Search for a First Cause

There is a huge difference between how religion “searches” for a first cause and how science does it. In the religious paradigm, a position is asserted and that’s that. God did it, their minds are made up. In science however, the answer may never be definite or absolute, but that does not take anything away from the beauty of it, it simply shows the honesty of the scientific method.

There was a time when scientists thought that the origin of the universe was outside the realm of scientific inquiry, when Newton was describing the motion of the planets as God had placed them there. The universe was the way it was because that’s how a powerful deity made it to be. That time is long gone, science has been fearlessly making leaps and bounds over the last century to discover (or at the very least learn more about) the origin and nature of our universe. Theories are devised, calculations performed, observations made, theories revised and so on. The search will probably be never-ending, as we probably can never know everything.

A notable example of this revision in the face of observation is the expansion of the universe as predicted by Einstein. The prevailing view at the time was that the universe was eternal, and when Einstein discovered that his calculations lead to an expanding universe, which implied that at one point in time the universe was smaller, indicating that there must have been a point of origin. He adjusted his theory so it would not predict an expanding universe, observation of the red-shift by Edwin Hubble and later the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation has shown us that he was right the first time round, the universe is expanding.

The religious search jumps on board the scientific train with this discovery, but jumps off again when natural explanations for the ‘Big Bang’ are postulated. This mindset is typical of the religious search for a first cause. They have their minds made up, if a proposition goes against their belief that a god created the universe they will reject it, and when a proposition seems to support their belief (even if just at surface level) they will claim that they were right all along, that science has vindicated religion. Picking and choosing which science you support based on your prior commitments is at the very least inconsistent, and at the worst dishonest.

Might Makes Right?

I have seen a wide range of defences of theism over the last few years, ranging from the delusional to almost sane. By far my least favourite and the most detestable to me are ones that try and defend a theism that includes a hell from a moral angle. In particular, conservative theisms whose gods punish people for very human behaviour, like sex. When pressed as to why their god doesn’t want us to do certain things (like simply being gay), the theist will almost certainly resort to some form of argument from design. At this point I would like to bring up the fact that there is no distinguishable point of origin where our ancestors ceased being ‘mere animals’ and became human, that is the nature of evolution. So any argument that rests on so-called design utterly fails right here.

One aspect of this discussion that I find slightly more interesting than the sexual orientation and preferences of various deities is the justification for not harming one another. I assume that most people regardless of belief would hold some sort of moral system that frowns upon hurting other beings. The justification for this moral principle in my system is that I do not wished to be harmed, and will not harm others because a society that constantly harms each other is not one I would like to live in. This is not really an objective justification, but I find it to be sufficient in this case. What would a theist who believes in god-given objective morals have to say about this situation? I imagine it would be something along the lines of “It is wrong to harm one another because God says it is wrong.” Ignoring the looming Euthyphro Dilemma, I would like to examine the implications of this proposition in light of a belief in Hell.

Assuming a god commands that it is wrong to harm people, what possible justification could a theist give for their god supposedly sending people to hell? Harming them for eternity (or at least a very long period of time)? It seems to me like the only option for them is to adopt some form of ‘Might Makes Right’. Regardless of whether objective moral standards exist or not, what kind of society would we live in if we all lived by this principle? The regimes of Hitler and Stalin, the crusades, slavery, rape, and murder would all be legal and moral actions. If any theist really believes that their god has the right to punish people, simply because “it’s God!” then I am sorry, you are an immoral person.

Quote on Theology from Ambrose Bierce

"Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure"
—Ambrose Bierce (American Writer, 1842-1913)

This quote ties in directly to what I was saying about theology in my post on Sunday. The whole enterprise of theology is built upon presuppositions of divine inspiration of scripture.

Unfalsifiable Beliefs

I was having a discussion with a Christian friend of mine the other day about mind-body dualism and something struck me about the idea. He seemed to be defending it (note: he isn't a staunch dualist, he is undecided) primarily because it is unfalsifiable. This violates all my ideals about how to determine what is true and what isn't.

I put forward the idea that all our observations about the mind indicate to us that it an emergent product of a complex brain. As brain complexity and size increase, cognitive ability increases as a general rule. Compare a fish to a rat, a lizard to a dog, compare a cat to an Orangutan, or a Lemur to a Human. Complexity and brain size directly correlate to mental power, and self-awareness is only apparent in those of the animal kingdom with particular large and complex brains.

My friend then said, that the evidence may suggest that, but it doesn't and cannot rule out that the capabilities of a disembodied mind run alongside and parallel to the physical brain. I was almost speechless, I cannot fathom how anyone could possibly consider that to be an argument for the validity of dualism. The evidence at hand does not point towards something, but because it cannot in principle rule out the mystical explanation doesn't mean that it is a credible answer.

The same principle can be applied to supernaturalism, gods, theistic evolution and any superstition imaginable. Any idiot can come up with ad hoc [ir]rationalisations as to why their belief is still true despite having no supporting evidence.

Say for example someone believes that a black cat crossing your path causes misfortune, and hears that you were in a car accident. They say to you "It must have been because a black cat crossed the path of your vehicle". You reply to them explaining that it was actually because your tire blew out, and caused you to lose control of your car, and that you didn't see any black cats. They then say "Well the tire blowout was cause by a black cat crossing your path, but it was hidden from view, so your crash was still caused by the black cat". Baffled by the inanity of what they're saying you reply and say "Well there is no evidence suggesting that your idea is even remotely true, so I'll stick with a plausible natural explanation". They then proudly state "So you admit you can't prove me wrong then? I'm justified in my belief then".

The only place this analogy breaks down, is that black cats do in fact exist. We have not even established the existence of gods, disembodied minds or a supernatural realm. Besides that fault, this analogy seems entirely accurate to me, and reveals the stupidity of holding beliefs simply because they are unfalsifiable.

Theolology

What is Theology? By pure definition it would be the study of gods. Theos meaning Gods, and ology meaning the study of. Is that what theologians do though? Apparently not.

To me it seems that theologians, and the practice of theology is concerned with how to derive doctrine and dogma from religious texts. You'd not be likely to find a theology class trying to figure out just what the hell a god actually is. Inquiry at the the deepest level seems to be completely absent in this discipline. Indeed thought of this sort generally seems to relegated to philosophers. With any serious area of study, you actually have to have something to study first. Biologists study biological systems, chemists study chemical reactions and molecules, physicists study the physical world, cosmologists study the cosmos. Theologians simply assume that some ancient text written by men was inspired by a god, and then work from there to determine what the text teaches about the supposed god.

Take this for example:

"Before Christian theology can be seriously studied it is necessary to recognise that the Bible is our ultimate authority and that its statements are factually true and without error."
—Carey Baptist College: Introduction to Christian Theology Course Book (page 4-4)

Never mind that the Bible is quite plainly not without error, and many things contained in it are factually incorrect....... They are free to do whatever they want with their theology, but as long as it is based on unfounded assumptions, and blatant falsehoods like the quote above it cannot be considered to be an academic pursuit. I can not even imagine how one would go about trying to demonstrate that the Bible is actually inspired by a god, but that isn't my problem is it? Furthermore, no one has even demonstrated that God itself even exists.

I am bringing this all up, because of a criticism of Stephen Hawking regarding his statement about heaven being "a fairy story for people afraid of the dark", that he was speaking outside of his field of expertise. That lead me to post this as a comment on a friend's link on facebook:

"Whose field of expertise is the existence of the afterlife? Someone who studies ancient religious texts? Someone who studies the doctrines of ancient/modern religions? How do they study the existence of the afterlife?

Physics at its most basic level is all about studying the nature of the universe, and existence itself. If Hawking is speaking outside of his expertise, then so is every single other person who speaks on the afterlife."

After all, theologians such as N.T. Wright, the one levelling the criticism of Hawking, do not actually study the existence or nature of an afterlife, or the existence or nature of gods. To me, they are no different from an expert on The Lord of the Rings speaking of the nature of Magic, or the existence of Wizards. They are basing all of what they know about the subject on texts which were emphatically written by anonymous, fallible men, about things which have not been shown to actually exist.

My Favourite Argument

I would attempt to put this argument into words, but instead I will just show it to you in video form, said by Christopher Hitchens.

Skip to the 8:00 mark of this video.

The Ultimate Cop-Out

When most outlandish claims are made, there is a reasonable method of discerning whether or not they are true. In the case of people making claims to knowledge that they should not have access to, these claims are easily testable and always found wanting. Dowsers, Psychics, ESP-ers, and so forth, have been subjected to double blind tests and failed miserably. This is not the case for people who claim to speak to the god of the Bible however.

When one claims that they talk to Yahweh, we cannot test this claim because of what I like to call the ‘Cop-out’ clause of the Bible. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Luke 4:12). We aren’t allowed to ask this god to verify his existence by manifesting, or by consistently answering prayers, providing believers with accurate foreknowledge of events that no one else could have predicted.

On top of being forbidden to ask for verification of existence, belief without evidence is also praised. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). It seems awfully convenient as a belief system to require that it be taken on faith and not questioned. Doubt is tolerated, but frowned upon, evidence and observation are maligned. I simply cannot accept these positions. Blind faith is a terribly ironic gift to give to the creator of human intelligence.

The Trinity is Absurd

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the Christian doctrine of the trinity is utterly ridiculous. Not only do I find the idea to be unfeasible and nonsensical, but as far as I can tell, it isn’t even necessary for the Christian religion to exist.

These two criticisms are extremely intertwined; I’ll try to differentiate them though. The first relates primarily to the absurdity of it. What is the trinity? How can one god be three persons/people? Does Yahweh have multiple personality disorder? These questions raise interesting concerns, which are never answered by theologians, the only answers we ever receive are statements of overwhelming inanity like “God is mysterious” or incredibly weak analogies. Most of the analogies that are used by Christians actually better demonstrate other non-Trinitarian doctrines that were deemed heretical.

Does Christianity even require the trinity? In my opinion, no it doesn’t. I am not a biblical scholar, but it seems that deriving the doctrine of the trinity from the Biblical texts requires some mental and theological gymnastics. Besides the polytheistic/Henotheistic/Monolatrist vibes one gets from many Old Testament passages, the rest is extremely monotheistic, and there are no hints that Yahweh is actually three entities. The doctrine of the trinity isn’t even implicitly taught in the New Testament, but rather seems to be a poorly constructed doctrine based on a few scattered verses mentioning the spirit of God, various passages from John and Paul’s writings that allude to the supposed divinity of Jesus, and some of the polytheistic references from the Old Testament. The only time they are all mentioned at once as far as I know is in the prescription of the Rite of Baptism, which I suspect may even be a later interpolation.

As many will be aware, some early sects of the Christian cult were not even Trinitarian, and the primary reason that most denominations today are, is because this was the position of the various Catholic councils that deemed other views heretical. Some examples of other views are the Modal view of God, where the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were just different ‘modes’ of God, or expressions. In this view, the deity was still very much singular. Other views included ones where Jesus was either not human, or not divine such as Arianism (Do not confuse this with Aryanism).

What does the trinity even bring to the religion? Nothing. What doctrines are illuminated by God being split into three personalities? Why would an infinite deity require being composed of 3 parts? It is questions like these remaining almost entirely unanswered that makes me more certain that the religion is of purely human origin. Doctrines were invented whimsically to try to explain ideas, but instead they only serve to confuse. Apparently the god of the Bible is the author of the confusion, because the god of the bible is mankind.

Supernaturally Incoherent

The Atheist does not say “There is no God,” but he says, “I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word ‘God’ is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation”
—Charles Bradlaugh

In my opinion the contention in this quote not only applies to the concept of gods but also to the supernatural in general. The supernatural is defined somewhat spuriously, often described as ‘not natural’ or ‘beyond nature’ or something equally inane. These definitions are not useful at all, for nothing has been said about what it is. You cannot define the colour red as ‘not blue or green’. I have seen some others try to define the supernatural as ‘more natural than nature’, I guess you could draw a comparison to Superman (ignoring that he’s an alien). These attempts at defining the supernatural only raise questions and answer none.

For the first definitions I mentioned, the supernatural, and thus gods (if they are defined as supernatural beings) are ultimately beyond our perception, as all evidence points towards the fact that we’re simply natural beings. All our physiological processes including thought are contained within the physical realm. So we cannot observe the supernatural, then where does that leave us?
It could be suggested that we could detect the supernatural through its interaction with the natural; this too however brings up many more questions. As soon as an effect is observed within the natural world, it is of course a natural occurrence by definition. We would observe something real happening, and search for an explanation within our reality. To assert that this event would be beyond nature is absurd, and goes against all reason. This brings to mind another quote.

“Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question”
—Johannes Kepler

A closely related scenario is the manifestation of something supernatural. Let’s say that Yahweh appears and tells the whole earth simultaneously that it’s time for Judgment Day. Yahweh would be in the natural world, and everything that he did would be natural, so we could say definitively that a god would exist, but we wouldn’t know anything about it unless we could perform experiments on it. We could not however say that it was supernatural, because it is happening within the natural world. If the definition of a god is contingent on it being a supernatural being, we wouldn't even be able to say that one existed in this scenario.

Within science, all good hypotheses have things in common, one of those is falsifiability. A prediction is made, and depending on whether observation confirms or falsifies the theory/hypothesis gains or loses credibility. For example Einstein’s Theories of Relativity could potentially be falsified by one single observation, by observing two objects in otherwise empty space stay separated and by observing something being accelerated to the speed of light. A commonly cited possible falsification of evolution is finding ‘fossil bunnies in the Cambrian’. The God(s) hypothesis has no such feature. Any possible supernatural being is just as likely as any other possible supernatural being, as we have no evidence for or against their existence and they are unfalsifiable. Yahweh, Brahma, Baal, Marduk and Ra are just as plausible as each other. If a theist understands why they reject all of these other gods and beings, then they should understand quite well why I also reject their god.

I propose then that supernatural is not only an incoherent concept, but it is utterly useless. If discussion of the supernatural is limited to incoherent philosophical drivel, mere speculation, how can we ever hope to know anything about it? There is a famous (and famously misunderstood) quote from Einstein, which says religion without science is blind, and science without religion is lame. I want to take that quote and rephrase it in the context of reason and evidence.

“Evidence without reason is meaningless, and reason without evidence is mere speculation”
—KJ Moodie

I don’t intend to denigrate pure reason, as some great ideas have been conceived purely through mental processes, but when it comes to matters of fact, without any evidence you have no certainty and have very little with which to convince others. Aristotle used pure reason to arrive at his conclusions about the physical world, and he was wrong, very wrong in fact. The combination of reason and evidence is a very potent one, we call it science.

So, supernaturalists, until you come up with some way of understanding the supernatural outside of imagination, you haven’t said anything meaningful. Any talk of gods, super-nature and anything beyond nature is incoherent, and irrelevant to reality. If you can figure out a way of discovering gods or the supernatural, I’ll be the first person to raise my brow and see what you’ve developed, until then have fun playing in the sand pit.

The Historical Jesus Cannot be Found

Nothing we know about Jesus can be confirmed.

When we try to build up a picture of the ‘Historical Jesus’ in comparison to the ‘Christ of Faith’, we aren’t left with much information. To begin with, it is widely accepted that the gospel accounts weren’t written until decades after the death of Jesus, and they weren’t written by eyewitnesses, nor do they claim to be. The earliest Christian writings are by Paul, and he doesn’t provide us with any biographical information about a Jesus figure that had lived recently. The large majority of Paul’s writings refer to a Christ, a god, who created the world, and will judge it. No details are given of his family, ministry or miracles. The closest Paul comes to anything closely biographical is the mention of the one who betrayed him, which doesn't even necessitate an earthly event.

With that said, if we look at the gospels themselves, the authors of which may or may not have been influenced by the teachings of Paul, we don’t arrive at a coherent picture of who this Jesus person really was. Mark (the earliest) contains no information about the early years of Jesus’ life, we have to rely on Matthew and Luke for that, and they can’t agree on anything: the year he was born, the ruler he was born under, his genealogy and so on. If you find a detail mentioned in Matthew or Luke about the early years of Jesus, chances are, the other gospel says something different. Even if one of them provided us with an accurate picture of Jesus, we can’t tell 2000 years down the line which one is actually true.

To compound the problem even further, the synoptic gospels can barely agree on anything Jesus said or did. Even Matthew, who based his work heavily on Mark, diverges significantly from him on many issues. Names are changed, the order of events is changed, some events are left out, words are changed. These things aren’t even significant discrepancies, and are common types of variations in folklore. The biggest problem that we face in my opinion is that there is no real biographical information. He performed miracles, rose from the dead, had a suspicious number of close followers. His name suspiciously means "Yahweh delivers". There are quite frankly, a lot of things that just do not add up. Don't even get started on the gospel we call John, that thing is in a league of its own in terms of contradictory ideas.

On top of the lack of viable information we have about him, there is a lack of credible historical evidence he even existed in the first place! No contemporary sources even mention him, and the later historians merely mention the beliefs of Christians at the time. Considering Paul had written earlier than these historians, this is not a problem. When it comes to the Jewish Historian Josephus, who wrote extensively about Pontius Pilate, isn’t it suspicious that a later Christian scribe felt the need to interpolate a passage about Jesus into Josephus? If Jesus had existed, surely he would have garnered the attention of Romans and Jews at the time, enough to justify a mention in Josephus? (there is another passage that mentions "the brother of Jesus", but that has most likely been doctored by Christian scribes also, to include the words "was called Christ")

The stories in the gospels place Jesus reading scrolls, and have him making acquaintances with people such as tax collectors, along with what would now be working class people. So amongst his greatly diverse crowd of followers, there would surely be a handful who were educated and literate, and he was obviously literate himself (according to the stories anyway). So why then, if he was literate, and many of his followers were too, do we not have any accounts written by any of them? This is really an intriguing piece of the puzzle. How are we to determine what is actually historical about Jesus, and who he was as a person if we don’t have any firsthand accounts? All of the writings we have are either hearsay, or are merely inventions of the author. Take Paul for example, he says that much of what he teaches comes from his own personal revelation. Why should we take his word for any of it, considering he never even met Jesus?

If you think that the gospels are a legitimate source of historical information about Jesus, and think that the evidence provided by them is better than for other figures, whose existence we take for granted, such as Julius Caesar, I have a few things to say. Firstly, the evidence we have for many figures in antiquity are actually recorded in the works of historians. Regardless of how objective these historians were about the details of the lives of their subjects, this was their job. They wrote down historical works. As I mentioned before, the prolific first century Jewish historian Josephus doesn’t mention Jesus. The mention he gets was certainly added by a later Christian scribe, who was likely perturbed by the fact that Josephus didn’t acknowledge Jesus’ existence. On the other hand, the writers of the Gospel accounts are for the most part, anonymous. The only one we have some idea of who wrote it is Luke, who was supposedly a follower of Paul. Beyond this, we really have no information about them. We have no idea whether they wrote anything else beyond what is contained in the New Testament.

I actually am of the opinion that there was a historical Jesus to start off a movement that eventually led to the creation of what we now know as Christianity. I do not think however that we can really know anything about what he said and did. This is because many aspects of his life are not original, and were essential parts of the mythical stories of various other dying and rising gods and their associated cults. The miracle of turning water into wine for example, sounds remarkably like something Dionysus the Greek god of wine would have done. Dying and coming back to life? That story had been going around the region for centuries! Osiris, Horus and many others for example. Having a divine conception? Herakles had been there and done that hundreds of years before! Don’t even get me started on a god being in human form! That was part of virtually every single one of these myths.

Many details contained in the gospel accounts are not only contradictory, but absurd, take for example the earthquakes and darkness that supposedly happened when Jesus died. This isn’t recorded anywhere besides the (one or two) gospels. It isn’t exactly an un-noticeable event. Another example is the dead rising and walking through Jerusalem. This isn’t recorded anywhere but the book of Matthew. Then we have the star hovering above Bethlehem that apparently wasn’t noticed by anyone but the three wise Arabic men. None of these events are attested in ANY historical accounts, and they even defy common sense. A star in the sky cannot point you to a specific location. You may walk in an around-about direction, but you certainly aren’t going to end up at a small village in the middle of the Judean hill country.

There have been attempts to try and separate the fact from fiction in the gospels, to find the actual historical Jesus, but in my opinion, these events are wholly futile. The best we can do is to distinguish the elaborate fiction from the plausible. Jesus may have lived, been a teacher, the son of a carpenter, executed for heresy and had a following, but we certainly cannot say from the evidence we have that he was god incarnate, rose from the dead, performed miracles, atoned for the sins of the world, ascended into heaven or was born of a virgin. The historical Jesus is simply unverifiable, the evidence is scant and unreliable, much evidence in fact attests to a reality contrary to that of the gospels. So was there a historical Jesus? I think there probably was, but I do not think for one second that we can know anything about him, not even his real name.

Further reading:
'Misquoting Jesus' - Bart Ehrman
'The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man' - Robert M. Price
'The Mythmaker' - Hyam Maccoby
Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to AhistoricityHistoricity of Jesus FAQ
The Testimonium Flavianum
Who Was the Historical Jesus?

The Infinite Regress of Gods

An infinite regress occurs when the solution to a proposition re-introduces the same problem the initial proposition had that required an answer in the first place. It can be explained by the analogy of two mirrors facing one another with an object placed in between, if you look into either one of the mirrors, there appears to be an endless number of images going back into the mirrors.

A classic example of an infinite regress is when asked the question 'Where did the universe come from?' one answers with 'a god created the universe', because then it must be asked 'who/what then created god?', and then 'who/what created the thing that created god?' ad infinitum.
Theists have been arguing for a long time that their respective gods were 'uncaused' or were 'without cause'. They use this as an attempt to avoid the infinite regress. Thomas Aquinas is one of the most prominent figures in antiquity that argued for this position, he put forward the 'Argument from Contingency', which suggests that something must exist to explain the existence of the universe. It basically comes straight back to the 'Prime Mover' or 'Uncaused Cause' of Aristotle. This argument fails before it even reaches the starting blocks, because it is not based on any evidence at all. This entire argument is just speculation about beings which have never had any evidence to even mildly verify their mere existence. How can I take an argument seriously if it seems only to be rooted in the wild imaginations of Theists?
Our knowledge about the origins of the universe is growing all the time, and with every new discovery we make, we are pointed towards the idea that nothing created the universe. But even if we were no closer to solving the problem today than we were 20 years ago, there would still be no reason to make the god assumption. The god hypothesis is stale, no evidence for the Prime Mover or Uncaused Cause has been discovered since the first incarnations of the argument, which date all the way back to Aristotle. Several millennia should have been ample time. It's time to let go of our antiquated fantasies.

"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?"
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos, page 257
See Carl Sagan himself say it in this video.

Here is a lecture given by Lawrence Krauss called 'A Universe from Nothing', which he explains some mechanisms by which the universe itself could be uncaused. Unlike the theistic speculations, these are actually based on observation, and testable science.

Growing up with Christianity

I decided to do something different, so I started a YouTube channel, and made a video.

Hope you enjoy it.

Why Special Revelation is a Terrible System.

If you have ever played 'Chinese Whispers' (sounds a bit racist to me these days), you would know that through multiple transmissions of information, things get changed. The more information being transmitted, the more divergent the end result becomes, sometimes even to the point where it is unrecognisable from the original. I don't think you could find anyone who would accept that this would be a good method for learning anything, except when it comes to religion. In fact there are billions of people worldwide who believe in religions that follow this system.

Special Revelation is typically defined as when a god intervenes in the world to reveal something (or itself) to specific peoples at a specific time. I am going to extend this definition for the purpose of this post to include the teachings of Jesus, since most Christians believe he was God anyway.

In the case of the Bible, a substantial portion of the books were not written by people who had seen the events described, in fact many were written hundreds if not thousands (as with Noah's Flood and the garden of Eden) of years after the events were purported to have occurred. Let's assume for the time being that all of the stories are based on actual events, and see where we end up in terms of the believability and reliability of the stories when we get to the end of the chain.

1. Eyewitnesses, or the receivers of revelation
2. Re-tellers of the story
3. Re-tellers of the story
4. Re-tellers of the story
5. Re-tellers of the story (this should be enough generations to demonstrate my point, there could perhaps be a lot more.)
6. Author
7. Re-tellers of the story
8. Re-tellers of the story
9. Copyists
10. Re-tellers of the story
11. Redactor
12. Re-tellers of the story
13. Copyists
14. Re-tellers of the story
15. Re-tellers of the story
16. Copyists
17. Re-tellers of the story
18. Translators
19. Commentators
20. Theologian/Minister/Pastor/Priest
21. Plebeian.

This is a fairly generic picture of how far removed we are from the original sources of any given Biblical text. The number of generations between each stage will differ for each individual text, and many old testament texts went through several stages of redaction (which is essentially a re-write of the text to include new content). Some Christians assert that each step of the process was 'inspired' by God, not only the authorship of it, but this simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The textual variants of the New Testament alone should be evidence enough to discount the idea that the re-tellers and copyists were inspired to keep the text the same. In fact many popular Christian ideas only appear in variant texts and do not appear in the majority of manuscripts. One key example of this is John 8:6-8, where Jesus says the famous "cast the first stone" line, the oldest and most reliable manuscripts do not have this story.

With the transmission process and textual unreliability out of the way, let us examine the authorship. Many of the books of the Bible were penned anonymously, and we do not have the originals (of any of them). In the case of the gospels, the names were attributed to them over a hundred years after we think they were authored. In the case of the Pentateuch, it was revised and added to many times over its history, with each step being anonymous.

Even if all of the text were completely reliable, and there were no discrepancies or errors, due to the nature of the material in the texts, they still wouldn't be believable. Textual support or 'evidence', or even eyewitness testimony is not sufficient to justify belief in miracle claims. The historical principle of analogy gives us a tool for weeding out probable and improbable events. If something in an ancient text (or a more recent text) makes a claim that an event occurs that defies what we currently know to be true, either through our own experiences, or through scientific study, then that claim is discredited. Even believers use this method (whether consciously or otherwise) when examining claims from other religions. For example, a Christian would not be likely to believe a miracle story attributed to Hercules, or to Mohammed.

An omniscient, or even just an intelligent deity would know these things, and would have an understanding that some people actual understand the nature of evidence and will not believe anything on faith. It is my position then, that Special Revelation, and thus Christianity are incoherent and unbelievable. If a deity constructed a system of religion knowing that the very credibility of his favoured method of revealing truth would come into dispute, then that deity is wilfully condemning all people who are not credulous, and is not worth worshipping. If the deity constructed the religious system, and didn't consider the fact that it would not be believable to people with a reasonable standard of evidence, then that deity is incompetent, and is less intelligent than many humans, and is also not worth worshipping.

I tend to favour the position that no such deity exists that could invent a religious system where people not only have to believe in the god purely on faith, but to know anything about said deity, they have to rely on people, who were relying on people etc. ad nauseum, also with faith alone. If a deity exists at all, it is almost certainly not one that creates a religious system that praises credulity.

Demons and Devils

They don't exist, and to prove it I will write out my challenge to any evil (or good) spiritual entities online. When nothing happens, my point will have been proven.

I challenge any supernatural forces or spirits or anything to come prove your existence to me right now. I will worship the first one that appears, so Gods, Goddesses, fairies, Poltergeists, Demons, Devils, Angels, Djinns, whatever, have a race to prove your existence.

Some time later...

I actually feel a bit silly writing this, but nothing has happened. It just goes to show that either A) no conscious supernatural force exists or B) if one exists, it doesn't want us to know about it.