Upcoming Apologetics Book Review

I have agreed to trade books with a Christian family member, I will be giving them 'Why I Became an Atheist' by John W. Loftus, and in return I will be getting 'The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism' by Timothy Keller. Don't expect anything great, I'll probably write a chapter-by-chapter summary of my thoughts and then write some final words. It will probably be up at the end of November or the beginning of December.

Chris Hedges on the New Atheists

I have been reading quite a bit of stuff by Chris Hedges lately, he's a (very) liberal Christian author and what he says about politics I find very lucid and insightful. He has some pretty harsh things to say about the New Atheists, and in the name of honest inquiry I thought I'd have a listen to what he says. In this video, he is mainly targeting Hitchens and Harris and I have to say I tend to agree with him. Hitchens and Harris do not do their homework, their arguments for atheism are criticised strongly by more intellectually vigorous atheists.

Watch the video for yourself, try to watch it with no predispositions.

The Death of Religion

Before someone jumps on this post thinking "Religion is not dead!", I realise this. I'm not saying religion has died, or that it will ever cease to exist. What I think is happening to religion, is that it is fading out of relevance. The social relevance of all religions is dying, and in many places around the world it is already dead. People do not need to turn to religion to answer the 'big questions'. People do not need to turn to religion as a basis for morality.

Many religions constantly have to evolve to keep up with societal trends or else they face an extinction of irrelevance. Some try to stick to their old ways, like the subservience of women to men and homophobia, but these groups are more often than not shunned from modern society for being bigoted. The last nail in the coffin in my opinion is the idea that one must be a member of a particular religion to attain salvation (whatever that might mean in a particular religious tradition). Once this idea is abandoned by more and more members of religions, and all that is required is to live a good life, religion will die a slow death into irrelevance. If one can attain Nirvana, or get to heaven without following a religion, why follow it? If people can free up more time in the day to go about my business and to improve the world they live in rather than practice religion, they are likely to do so.

Christianity and Revolution

There is something that I would be interested to see happen around the world and here in New Zealand. I would like to see Christians mobilise and support the 99% movement. Most Christians I know are strongly supportive of helping the poor voluntarily, but most are also political conservatives and support parties that reinforce and grow the wealth inequality around the world (I'm looking at you National party voters, Republican voters, Tory voters etc.). If you are really supportive of making our planet a fairer, better place for all of its citizens, I implore you to join the revolution, and at the next election vote for a party that is serious about change. No more voting to make your comfortable life more comfortable, vote on behalf of the poor, needy and exploited.

There will be a revolution regardless, but we would like you there alongside us as we strive for a better world.

Update on the Occupation

As threats of being arrested kept coming in our numbers slowly diminished and eventually the police outnumbered those inside the clocktower, so we marched with our friends that were supplying us with food and blocking the doors from the outside down to the permanent occupation site in Auckland central.





You can see me in the video during the protest.

University of Auckland Occupation Demands

Right now I am currently with a group of students staff and taxpayers occupying the Clocktower administration building at the university I attend (The university of Auckland).

We are in the process of finishing a meeting to formulate a list of demands from the university administration and government.

These are our current demands:

1. Unconditional Free Education
2. Sack McCutcheon and Walsh (Vice Chancellors of Auckland and Victoria Universities respectively) and restructure the university administration to be based around a public forum.
3. Remove trespass orders on Marcus and Wikitane.
4. Ask (not demand) for approval from the land owners, Ngati Whatua
5. Decisions on courses based on scholarly and social benefits, not on profitability.
6. Security guards employed for the safety of students, not for surveillance of students.
7.. That the university administration will by bound by the government to the facilitation with the TEU in November
8. That the university will work to revoke the Voluntary student membership bill.
9. That the government will fund student unions unconditionally.

Note: This is not the exact wording of the proposals, but just a summary of them.

You heard it here first!

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.