While looking over the videos for my previous posting on atheism, I saw another video that appeals to “college-educated, intelligent Christians” to use their education and intelligence to scientifically analyze their faith. There are a number of questions asked (your standard “If God loves us all, why do bad things happen to good people?” and “Why are there so many starving children in the world?” as well as a clever one I hadn’t thought of before, but I’ll get back to that one later), and Christians are asked to answer the questions while thinking logically and scientifically. Most of the time, there is no good answer other than your standard “God works in mysterious ways” or “God must have a reason for all the suffering”. However, when you make the initial assumption that God is imaginary and then go through the questions again, suddenly there are answers that make sense. Bad things happen to good people by chance. Children are starving in Africa because they live in a place where it is difficult to grow food and the people and countries are too poor to be able to import enough for everyone — essentially, there is suffering and starvation because not enough is being done to prevent it. The “inescapable” conclusion is that God is imaginary. However, the video isn’t done there. It keeps going and in my opinion, goes too far.

This video attempts to demonstrate by use of logic that God does not exist. (Of course, they have done no such thing here, they’ve just shown that if you assume that God doesn’t exist, all of these particular questions have a logical answer. This isn’t proof of anything.) But the video goes one step further and asks why it is important to do this. They say that it’s important because there are millions (if not billions) of people around the world who believe in God, talk to God, and ask questions of God. If God is imaginary then these people, the vast majority of the world, are all delusional. According to some stats I’ve heard, something like 95% of the world’s population believes in God in one form or another. It’s one thing to say that you believe something different from 95% of the world, but quite another to say that anyone who doesn’t believe what you believe is delusional.

Secondly, by specifically targeting Christians with a college education, the video’s producers imply that anyone without a college degree is too stupid to understand what the video is saying. This is untrue and just a touch insulting.

Finally, the fatal flaw in this video is that it ironically uses exactly the same faulty logic that many creationists do. There are things that happen in the universe that don’t make sense given our current level of scientific knowledge. Creationists frequently point at these questions, saying that because we can’t answer these questions, the underlying scientific assumptions we’ve made must be false, and so God must have done it all. These questions are unanswered simply because we don’t know enough about the universe to answer them all. It’s even possible that human intelligence is simply not capable of understanding some of the intricacies of the universe. This doesn’t mean that what we’ve learned already is untrue. This video says exactly the same thing, but in reverse — here are some questions that we don’t know the answer to, and because the answers we currently have make no sense, the underlying premise behind them must be false. The logic is just as faulty here.

The clever and interesting question I mentioned above was “Why won’t God heal amputees?” You hear about so-called faith healers, who heal the sick with just a touch. But every now and again, you hear about someone whose cancerous tumour mysteriously disappeared, or a blind person who can suddenly see, or some other “miraculous” case of a sick person being healed through prayer. In some of these cases, the medical community is completely baffled, and so many claim this as proof of God’s existence. But there has never once been a case of an amputee miraculously regrowing limbs. Why not? We’ve already got the question of why God would heal some sick people and not others, but now it’s more specific — why will God heal cancer patients and blind people and ignore amputees? Of course, the fact that we don’t know the answer to this question means precisely nothing, but it’s an interesting question nonetheless.

The simple truth is that it is not possible to prove that God does not exist. There’s always the possibility that He’s out there somewhere, fudging test results to keep Himself hidden. Why would He do this? I dunno, but that doesn’t mean He doesn’t have a good reason. It is, and will always be, a matter of faith. I have written on numerous occasions before that I am an atheist. But I don’t think that people who are not atheists are all delusional or stupid, we simply believe different things. I’m a Jays fan, but I don’t think that Yankees fans are stupid, we just believe different things — neither one of us is wrong. Well, I guess either God exists or He doesn’t, so either atheists or theists are wrong, but since we don’t (and probably can’t) know which group is wrong, it doesn’t really matter.

I’ve read two interesting and somewhat related posts in the last couple of days, one on Boing Boing and the other on Slashdot. The first was about how scientists have now actually witnessed evolution in a lab. Scientists have been watching some E. coli bacteria in a lab for twenty years, through over 44,000 generations. They have noticed that around the 31,500th generation, some of the bacteria suddenly gained an ability that E. coli generally doesn’t have (something about metabolising citrate — I won’t even pretend that I understand the details). They managed to “replay” the evolution using saved samples of the bacteria, and found that something happened about 10,000 generations earlier that allowed this mutation to take place. The quote at the end: “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.“

The other is a old video of some nutbag explaining to former actor and current evangelist Kirk Cameron why the banana is “the atheist’s nightmare” because “it is so perfectly suited to the human hand” and therefore must have been designed by God. This is just too funny. Here is another funny video saying that peanut butter proves that evolution is false, because:

1. scientists say that life can sometimes be created by matter and energy,
2. peanut butter is matter,
3. peanut butter is exposed to energy such as light and heat, but
4. we never find life spontaneously being created inside a jar of peanut butter.

Wow, got me convinced. If that ain’t scientific proof, I don’t know what is. Oh wait, a couple of quick questions — has anyone ever examined every jar of peanut butter ever created for any microscopic form of life that was spontaneously created? Because we know that if evolution is true, then the form of life that might be spontaneously created from matter and energy would be a single cell. Evolution does not say that you might open a jar of peanut butter to find a chihuahua or a platypus inside. Also, peanut butter has been around for about a hundred years, while the universe is billions of years old. Have we waited long enough to say that it’s definitely not going to happen? Not to mention the obvious point that even if evolution is true, the possibility of this happening inside a jar of peanut butter is so low that the fact that you haven’t seen it happen is not proof that it can’t.

Speaking as an atheist, I can honestly say I have never had a nightmare involving either bananas or peanut butter. I ate a banana just the other day and quite enjoyed it. Cut one up, pour a little milk on it and sprinkle a touch of sugar, quite a nice little snack. I had an English muffin with peanut butter tonight when I got home from baseball. And ironically combining both nightmares, I used to love peanut butter and banana sandwiches when I was a kid.

Well, folks, here it is — the encyclopedia you’ve been waiting for if you’re afraid of the truth and want to live in your own little everything-is-wonderful world. It’s called Conservapedia.com, “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia”. I don’t even know where to start with this one. It’s wikipedia except they abandoned the Neutral Point of View concept, and decide to write everything from a conservative Christian point of view (which is fine), but then treat that point of view as fact (which is not). Its criticisms of Wikipedia are funny — a Wikipedia article can present all kinds of facts about something like homosexuality, but because it doesn’t explicitly say “Homosexuality is immoral” or “wrong” or “an abomination”, they view this as an endorsement and therefore Wikipedia has a liberal bias. Because you are allowed to describe years and time periods using BCE/CE in place of BC/AD, Wikipedia has an anti-religious bias. Because you are allowed to use British English rather than American English on pages about British topics, Wikipedia has an anti-American bias.

The articles use all kinds of faulty logic — how can evolution be true if smart people like Archimedes, Aristotle, and Isaac Newton didn’t propose such a theory? Plus, Hitler believed in evolution. A quote even hints that Hitler’s evolutionary beliefs caused him to believe that Germans were superior to other races, and that Jews were to be segregated. Ergo, if you believe in evolution, you are evil. Also, atheism is obviously evil because Stalin, Lenin, and Karl Marx were atheists. And of course, the old standby, “If science cannot currently conclusively prove something, it must be false” (eg. evolution, the Big Bang, a genetic basis for homosexuality). Yup, definitely trustworthy.

Here are some “trustworthy” “facts” that I learned from Conservapedia:

• The opening paragraph of the article on homosexuality says “homosexuality has a variety of negative effects on individuals and society at large“
• homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to be engage in promiscuity, violent behaviour towards their partners, homicide, pedophilia, cigarette smoking, and illegal drugs
• most hate crimes against gay people are not actually hate crimes, and hate crimes committed by gay people against heterosexuals are vastly underreported
• abortions cause breast cancer
• the theory of evolution is evil — “a vast majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the evolutionary position since World War II have been atheists“
• “a virgin is a person of either sex who has not married“

Obviously there are going to be articles that have incorrect facts on them; I’m sure you could go through Wikipedia and find plenty of incorrect information. However, the article on homosexuality has thirty-five sections, 290 references, and at least two thousand edits. It’s not like someone added some incorrect or misleading information — many people have. The virginity page doesn’t even mention sex, but to give an accurate description of what virginity is would require actually discussing sex, and we can’t have that, now can we? In order to “protect” people from a description of sex (and come on people, this can be done without an explicit description of how it is performed), they choose to publish something that is patently untrue. And I’m supposed to take this site seriously?

The Conservapedia article on Wikipedia is also particularly “trustworthy”. The following quotes all take place within the opening two paragraphs of the article:

• “Despite its official “neutrality policy”, Wikipedia has a strong liberal bias“
• “It has millions of entries on topics ranging from an explanation for “duh” to singles by obscure rock bands to arcane British royalty.“
• “Initially, Wikipedia was hosted on servers operated by Bomis, Inc., a company that also sold pornographic pictures.“

There’s even a page on how Conservapedia differs from Wikipedia. One of the 16 listed reasons is: “We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts. Wikipedia editors who are far more liberal than the American public frequently censor factual information. Conservapedia does not censor any facts that comport with the basic rules.” This is laughable, since Conservapedia not only allows but encourages conservative censorship of liberal facts, though I suppose they are up-front about it. Also, they treat the Bible and biblical scholars as a source of “facts” and conveniently ignore scientists whose findings don’t agree with their agenda.

Do I want my kids perusing Wikipedia? To be honest, no. There are indeed explicit and disturbing pictures on some pages, as well as explicit descriptions of things that an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old really do not need to have described to them. However, Conservapedia, while family-friendly, presents opinions as facts, and tries to spin homophobia, general intolerance, and anything that disagrees with their beliefs (however misguided) as “faith”. Faith has as much to do with hating gay people as Islam has to do with murdering Americans. A few extremist crackpots ruin it for the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims, and similarly, the people who created this site are simply Christian extremists teaching hate and masquerading it as faith. I won’t let my kids anywhere near this site until they are old enough to be able to distinguish facts from bullshit presented as facts.

Dr. Kent Hovind is the founder of Creation Science Evangelism, which is a ministry that teaches that the Bible is “literally true and scientifically accurate”. He believes that the world was created by God in 6 24-hour days about 6000 years ago, and that dinosaurs (which humans called “dragons”) lived at the same time as humans. He has even offered to pay anyone $250,000 for “scientific evidence” of evolution.

The offer is, of course, horseshit, as this article describes. In essence, the only way to win the money is to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that God does not exist. This is obviously impossible, and so the fact that nobody has yet won the money proves exactly nothing.

It is amazing to me that intelligent, educated people can still believe stuff like “since there is no evidence that life can be generated from non-living matter, then God must be responsible”. The fact that we have not yet discovered the answer to a particular question (indeed, our minds may not yet be advanced enough to be able to understand the answer) does not mean we should just chuck all of our scientific knowledge and go with “God did everything”.

Sherlock Holmes once said “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however implausible, must be the truth”1, and this seems to be the reasoning behind intelligent design / creationism — evolution is “obviously wrong”, and therefore the only alternative is that God did it. First of all, “obviously wrong” is rather vague – there are never any scientific exlanations for why evolution is wrong, just the standard “if evolution is right, then how did X happen?”. Again, just because we don’t know the answer to every question, this doesn’t mean that the theory is wrong. Secondly, even if our current theory of evolution is wrong, why is creationism the only alternative? You cannot prove creationism true by proving evolution false. Proof by contradiction doesn’t apply here – evolution is not the “logical opposite” of evolution.

Here is another interesting article, this one by the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, listing some popular arguments against evolution, and why they are all bogus.

1 – Note that this is probably not a direct quote – I’m quoting Lt. Cmdr. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who quotes Holmes in one episode.