Chariots of Iron

Episode 16 is in the can and will be posted shortly. I know I’ve been pretty quiet with the blog posts recently, but I chalk this up the the weather and the holidays. Now that it’s officially 2009 and the family isn’t calling on a near-daily basis I can turn back to wasting the time of complete strangers.

After recording this past weekend Bo and Luke were discussing how they’d like to spend a bit more time on the show ripping apart religious arguments. As I’m all for this I thought I’d jump the gun a bit and post here soliciting arguments from our readers and listeners. So if you’ve heard/read or have your own arguments please post a link to or the full text of the argument you’d like to hear us shred to this post, or alternately you can email it to us (if you listen to the show, you know the address), or even post it over on our group at Atheist Nexus (where this message will be cross-posted).

Hopefully, with the combination of our listeners and the google-fu of the Charioteers, we will have enough inanity to fill years worth of shows in the span of a couple months. We will of course choose the more recent and novel arguments above the old and tired ones.

As we talked about in the last podcast Australian students in religious education classes are going to be given some education about Humanism and it will be pointed out that “there is no evidence for god. Of course Ken Ham has a bit of a reading comprehension problem, and this explains a lot about Mr. Ham, in his recent blog post he claims that Australian Students are to be taught “there is no god”.

Allow me to be the first to point out that “there is no evidence for” and “there is no” are two distinctly different statements. It is further into Mr. Ham’s inanity that I take a certain level of umbrage, he claims that “religious education” is the place for this discussion because “atheism is a religion”.

This old one again, and frankly one I’m a bit sick of. Atheism, is specifically the absence of religion, in the way that “darkness” is not in itself a “thing” but merely the absence of light, so is atheism an absence of religion. Humanism could be thought of as a religion in some ways, however a more proper definition would be that Humanism is a philosophy as most religions deal with supernatural claims and are most marked by some form of worship, and philosophies are not.

Of course where atheism and religion cross is when secularists point out that freedom of religion, in order to be truly a “freedom” must include freedom from religion. If I told you that your “freedom of being punched” meant you got to choose wether I punched you in the face or in the gut, I do not believe you’d think very highly of such a “freedom”.

Over on my favorite blog (well besides my own) PZ Myers was kind enough to post some hate-mail he’d received over the recent Zoo/Creation museum controversy.  While Professor Myers does not respond to these directly, there was one comment I wanted to call out, and decided, since I’ve been lazy this week, that I’d do so here, as it is representative of a common claim from fundamentalist religious types.

Scientist thought the universe revolved around the earth about 1000 years ago,they thought the earth was flat 500 years ago and 200 years ago man couldn’t fly so as we progress we find science is very fallible.

What the author of this statement fails to realize is that the above three statements were believed by early “scientists” because the religious institutions at the head of most civilizations said that these things were so.  I also think the authors dates were a bit off… but all three are examples of dogmatic truth overthrown by scientific inquiry. While it is true that as more data is collected by scientists theories are revised, overthrown and corrected. But that is the strength of science not it’s weakness. The ones holding onto outdated beliefs are the religiously faithful. Here they chide scientists for being wrong in the past centuries yet somehow holding onto beliefs over 2000 years old is “correct”.

News flash, you were wrong 200 years ago, get over it, while scientists may have been wrong in the past, they’ve at least the intellectual honesty to change thier beliefs in concert with the facts rather than railing against the facts in order to hold onto thier beliefs (although there have been individual sceintists who have held onto overthrown theories, this is speaking of the scientific community in general, not individual scientists). Let’s also add that scientific methods and the introduction of peer-review and widely distributed (at least amongst the professionals) scientific journals have added much to the accuracy of the scientific method, no longer are authorities allowed to dismiss arguments when evidence is presented that all can see and experiments are easily replicated and predictions confirmed. The internet has made this process more efficient but has also caused some data to get out to the general public before the peer-review process is complete, hence my common detraction of popular science websites in favor of established scientifc journals.

A very depressing story form South Africa came to my attention this morning. Apprently former South African president Thabo Mbeki and his administration had adopted a fringe belief that AIDS is not caused by a virus. South Africa’s AIDs epidemic is one of the largest in the globe, but to deny that this disease not caused by an infection of some sort (and thus denying it’s communicability) is literally a death sentence for those under his administration.

The stance by Mbeki’s administration caused them to turn down free drugs and grants to help deal with the problem. Ignorance of science is by no means isolated to those with strong religious convictions, but such beliefs as held by the Mbeki administration do require similar leaps of logic.

You will hear me say this a lot in the blog, but religious belief is just another species of a much bigger problem and that is one of ideology over reality.

I found this interesting link over on Intelligent Design The Future, it’s a further link to an Amazon page for the book “Billions of Missing Links”. It is billed as a rational look at the mysteries science cannot explain, however I would never use the word “cannot” how about “has yet to explain”, this would be an accurate, however less sensationalist description.

It’s true science has yet to explain everything, and each discovery in turn raises more questions, this is how knowledge advances. The book essentially complains that each fossil we find creates more “missing links” it is apparent that the Intelligent Design crowd will never be satisfied unless every living thing on this earth has fossilized and we’ve uncovered all these non-existent fossils. They’ve completely bypassed any version of “reasonable” evidence and will use even the tiniest gap to shoehorn their views in. This is the “god of the gaps” argument taken to an irrational extreme.

The fact is that every fossil is transitional, evolution doesn’t stop (although evidence does show that it may slow down for periods of time), and every species is on it’s way to becoming an entirely new species guided by the forces of natural selection.

To take a quote from the post,  “Every “link” discovered brings many more questions (missing links) than answers”. Of course it does! This is how science works, each discovery leads to more questions which leads to more discoveries. This isn’t lik escripture where you write it down, close the book and it’s done. Knowledge is continously being uncovered, questions being answered which lead to new and better questions. If a discovery ended all questions than science would grind to a halt. We’d know all we could ever possibly want to know about the universe. Of course this is what the ID movement and it’s theist backers want. They want science to come to a halt, as we’ve entered a dawn of discovery that has already squeezed thier bronze-age myths into irrelevance.

Due to a recent decision by the UN, the atheist bloggers are in a bit of a stir. Pharyngula, of course, raised my attention to this article over on Ottawa Citizen. We covered this in the upcoming episode when the UN resolution was only being proposed… but now the damned thing has passed. Fortunately the resolution is non binding, but as the Canadian says it does provide international validity for governments imprisoning people for that heinous crime of blasphemy. I wonder if the American religious right will grab onto this?

This resoultion, even in its non-binding form is a major blow to freedom of speech and religion everywhere.

Blogging like a madman today, I wanted to point our readers to the latest On Faith column in The Washington Post. This one by CFI Chairman and Founder Paul Kurtz. He nicely summarizes just precisely how one can be moral without a religious foundation. As we plan out our future shows it’s a topic we intend to visit and revisit (hey, there’s a lot to it!).

Oh wait, that’s James Ensor… damn you They Might be Giants!

Well Micheal Egnor is actually one of those intellectually vacant members of the Discovery Institute. He wrote a sour-grapes piece complaining why he wasn’t invited to some evolutionary symposium attended by noted biologist and blogger PZ Myers.  You can read his inanity here. Now PZ Myers has the good sense to point it out over on his blog, which is where I got my exposure to this ridiculous piece. One statement in Mr. Egnor’s rant stuck out to me.

“Darwin’s positive legacy to real medical science is non-existent.”

Really Mr. Egnor? I hope you haven’t taken any moden antibiotics, got a flu shot, and I hope that no one you know or love is ever infected by the AIDS virus. Why? because evolutionary biology has been integral to humanity’s triumph over such ills. Of course you’d not know this from scientific papers of the last eight years…

Today has been one of ups and downs and it’s not even noon yet. As every morning goes for me I check the blogs of fellow humanists and skeptics, as well as giving a glance over to the dozen or so science news feeds delivered straight to my iGoogle homepage. Today I spot this lovely post on PZ Myers blog, as well as this little gem on yahoo news. The latter is just one of those, “SCIENCE! It works, bitches!” moments that makes me marvel in the achievements achieved in the human pursuit of the workings of the universe. The first though is just another example of a disturbing trend going on in the editorial sections of the nations newspapers and magazines and reflected nightly in the pundit and other “talking heads” programs on cable television. That is “atheists are the cause of just about every horrible thing going on right now”.

Let’s face it folks, Atheism, for what it’s worth, is very “in vogue” at the moment. It is the topic of bestsellers, it is on the cable news shows (usually given a token “few words” in between some outspoken theist’s inane rambling) and, of course, all over the internet. While the Charioteers here are all long-time atheists we’re just jumping on the bandwagon of internet atheist activism, popularized by the aforementioned PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, The Infidel Guy, the Atheist Experience/Non-Prophets, and dozens of others. Atheist videos, and those by more liberal theists, refuting biblical literalism or the problems with god arguments are some of the more popular offerings on YouTube. In a sense, we here at Chariots of Iron are standing on the shoulders of giants (giants we’ve been standing next to, silently, for years).

We are part of a growing wave of atheists, vocal and proud who want our views to share an equal place in the national spotlight as those of theistic organizations. The big issue is, of course that atheism says very little about a persons stance on any issues other than the existence of a deity, thus we’re not a “camp”. I think the one thing most atheists can agree on is that they don’t want to see a public policy based solely on a religious text telling us it is right or wrong. It is not much, but at least it is something. However it hardly warrants the level of reaction coming from the other side, there has to be more to it than that.

For a long time theism, especially in the USA, has had a free ride. Their beliefs not held up to examination and held “sacred” even by those who did not follow them. However it is in this writer’s opinion that one thing changed all that. That thing folks, is the internet. For a long time priests and preachers have been a huge repository of religious information and people could easily be isolated from competing religious views. People would most often only associate with members of their own congregation in social gatherings and the information about their faith was carefully dispensed by the religious leaders. The internet makes keeping people ignorant a nearly impossible task. No longer does a curious individual need to go out of thier way in order to find opposing viewpoints. A theist website could get “pharyngulated” and all of a sudden a once insular community is inundated with opposing viewpoints. While many will reject them out of hand, some will become engaged, and of those some others may also become convinced.

The conversions and “deconversions” to and from atheism happen all the time, we hear about them and both sides like to prop them up as examples. There is a propaganda war going on between the new atheist movement and the established theistic juggernauts. The only thing the atheists have going for them are the facts. The theistic organizations know that demonstrable reality stands in opposition to their teachings so they have pulled out the lowest card they could possibly attempt to play, attempts to change the facts.

Lamar called me up last night, he and a friend had just finished watching one of the most deceptive and despicable pieces of motion picture dreck ever to crawl out of a camera and onto the screen, that is the Ben Stein delusion that is “Expelled”. I personally have not watched the whole thing beginning-to-end. I don’t think I’m capable of doing so, my propensity to shout at the screen, bouts of nausea and constant hair-pulling would make such a task nearly impossible. I think I have seen the whole movie though, in clips and excerpts, thankfully with some kind scientists pointing out the errors of the film along the way for me. The film is probably the biggest swing in the theist arguments against science and atheism. Yes, I said science, this is not just a war on atheism, but a war on science itself.

The theists are taking a Rovian “kitchen sink” approach to attacking atheism, that is throwing everything they can at atheism and seeing what sticks. The most common, and most despicable of this is blaming the horrid actions of Hitler, Stalin to their atheism.

There’s a couple of big problems with this, of course, the first being that Hitler wasn’t an atheist, his actions against the Jewish people were taken directly from his personal interpretation of scripture. This aside they will attempt to pin the eugenics programs of the Third Reich to evolution, and specifically to Darwin. Once again we run into a major problem. The idea of evolution had been around long before Darwin and his theory, animal breeders were using such methods for thousands of years prior to Darwin’s theory. As a matter of fact what Darwin’s theory proposes (and has held up to a century and a half of scrutiny and attack) is that natural competition for survival could produce the same type of results (and even more extreme results given enough time) that breeders produced artificially. While, On the origin of Species was (and still is) a widely popular book that injected these thoughts into the mainstream conciousness and thus inspired such horrid ideas as both eugenics and “social darwinism”, both these phenomenons are quite removed from Darwin’s theory. The truth of the matter is that Hitler himself rejected Darwin’s theory and was a avowed creationist.

Stalin was a horrible man, driven by a lust for power and control. Theist and atheist alike are not immune to the corruption that comes with power. Stalin’s murderous rampage was based on many factors many the struggle attempting to being the farmlands into collective control and the elimination of political rivals. Now, there are some killings of clergy in the Soviet Union, however historians agree that those churches in the soviet union were subject to forced destruction were also those that were critical of the Communist Party. In fact in 1943 Stalin came to an agreement with the Russian Orthodox Church which established it as the official church of the state. This was a great boon to the ROS who used its new influence within the party to help remove rival teachings.

For more on hitler and staling I’m going to reccomend a great book, that is Dr. Hector Avalos’ Fighting Words. I’ll also encourace you to keep listening to our podacst as we’ll be covering these topics in depth in future episodes.

So lately i’ve been going back and watching many old debates (mostly featuring two of my favorite people Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens) on the existence of god. More and more I find that the theologians who debate fall back on some common apologetic arguments, and ones that I feel are complete and total bunk. While much of this information may come out on the show I thought I’d give a brief on each of them and tell the readers why i personally feel these arguments are fundamentally flawed. These are my personal stances on these arguments and do not necessarily represent the views of my fellow charioteers, although if they’re willing and have the time I’d love for them to join in and have them post their takes on each of these arguments. The short summaries of these arguments are taken from wikipedia

• Cosmological argument – Argues that the existence of the universe demonstrates that God exists. Various ancillary arguments from science are often offered to support the cosmological argument.

The age old question “Why is there something, instead of nothing?”. The answer to this one is pretty basic, if there was nothing, we would not be here to ask why is there nothing. This argument is ridiculous on it’s face and it’s support usually falls into a “god of the gaps” argument with the theologian assuming that since science does not have an answer (yet), then the answer must be god.

• Teleological argument (argument from design) – Argues that there is an intricate design in the world around us, and a design requires a designer.

Another classic, and the refutation can be as simple as for the Cosmological argument. But I’ll give this one a little more credit than that, it’s a very interesting proposition. The scientific hypothesis on this one is an interesting one, a multiverse theory where alternate universes exist in which all of the possible “settings” for the physical laws are represented. But once again, I say If the laws of the universe were different enough that formation of life was not possible then we wouldn’t be here to ask such a question. The basis of this argument has gained some momentum as computer simulations have apparently been run where these laws are modified and it seems that the tolerances are extremely low when it comes to fiddling with the universal constants and getting anything we recognize as our present universe.

• Ontological argument – Argues that the very concept of God demands that there is an actual existent God.

More patently ridiculous, I can conceive of a wide range of things that do not exist, it in no way affects the existence of such things.

• Moral Argument – Argues that if there are any real morals, then there must be an absolute from which they are derived.

This one always grates on me as it is so patently obvious that the paradigms for moral behavior have shifted radically just within the bounds of recorded history. There is also incredibly strong evidence that instinctual behavior is something that evolved, and much of what we consider “moral” could fall into this category (a revulsion to killing our own young for example). I would easily argue that there are very few “absolute” morals and those that do exist could easily be explained by evolutionary instinctual behavior.

• Transcendental Argument – Argues that all our abilities to think and reason require the existence of God.

I’ve never got this argument, it’s incredibly anthropocentric. it is quite possible that a wide range of species can think and reason and that this is a mere evolutionary development shared by many creatures with advanced brains. The restriction is the bounds in which humans think and reason is incredibly wide, we’ve got the “giraffe’s neck” of brains.

• Presuppositional Arguments – Arguments that show basic beliefs of theists and nontheists require God as a necessary precondition.

I relate this one to the Ontological argument above, it’s flawed at it’s base. Beliefs in a condition do not require that condition to actually exist. People believe in Aliens and people do not believe in aliens does their actual existence affect this belief, is the belief dependent on either condition? What about the earth being flat? Or earthquakes being caused by the wrestling of giant Minotaurs beneath the earth, do the basic beliefs of Minotaurists and non-Minotaurists require the Minotaurs as a precondition?

I would also like to point out that not a single one of these arguments back up any single set of holy texts as an argument, at their very best they could only be used to support a deist-like claim of god’s existence. Of course most theologians will take any failed attempt to refute these arguments as a win for thier specific theology. For a theologian to have any credence for me you must not only win the debate that god exists, but that your particular scripture is the correct one, over and above any other religions scripture. This is where a lot of other arguments fall flat, the Argument in defense of Miracles falls flat when you consider that miracles have been reported as coming from people of a wide variety of faiths, most of which are dogmatically and scripturally incompatible with one another. in fact when this argument is brought up it tends to make me lean toward a polytheistic view as the only possible supernatural explanation.

Of course, the naturalistic explanation always wins out over any supernatural explanation, and “we don’t know” is another acceptable answer. One thing I’d like to see these theologians say is “I don’t know”, they usually tend to attribute things they don’t know to thier dieties in order to cover thier ignorance while attempting to bolster thier arguments.