Talk About Being Bold
Jun 6th, 2007 by Amanda
Rory has articulated a very bold belief fairly well in Everyone Believes In God - Some Children Are Just Angry With Their Parents:
My belief is that even the militant atheist knows there is a God. Just as one cannot ignore the existence of a father - even when a father is absent - so we cannot ignore the existence of God. He looms large in the life of the atheist. It’s just that he is so furious with Him - such a vehement, passionate, blinding fury - that he has made it his life’s work to crush Him, blot Him out, humiliate and belittle Him and all His weak-minded, ignorant minions.
Before you judge the man based on the single quote above, read the entire post first. Then I’d love to discuss this with some of you. I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with his thoughts, but I know that some of you will vehemently disagree with him.
I believe I’ve seen this, too! My late aunt claimed there was no personal God, but she was angry with Him. While she was dying of cancer, she was determined not to believe in a God that she already said did not exist. Now that’s what I call inconsistency.
The link didn’t work for me. I can almost hear a couple people disagreeing with the quote already, though! I’d hate to paint atheists with that broad of a brush.
How odd…the link doesn’t work for me now, either.
First off, I want to thank you for linking to my article. I do appreciate that. It will be interesting to see how this conversation progresses.
Secondly, I am so sorry the link is not working. I have no idea why. Usually it is because there is a power-outage problem at the site where the server is housed. I wish there was something I could do about it. Hopefully it won’t be down for long. And I hate having to use the word “usually” because that implies it has happened before on a number of occasions. Well, guess what…
In response to derifter, if yours is a response to the quote presented here: I wouldn’t paint all atheists with the brush stroke written about here. This quote was particularly with the militant atheist in mind. The proactive atheist who has much to say on the non-existence of God, and how foolish it is for people to believe in a God - how ignorant such believers are.
I’d tend to class myself with the atheists who get called militant. Predictably, I disagree with this post. I think many of us MAs just… don’t really see what the fuss is about religion.
You know how it is when you can see that something’s bothering one of your friends, and you ask them about it, and they clam up, and you probe further, and the conversation somehow descends into a slanging match? That’s where we’re at. All the noise, all the books… at some level I think a lot of us are just hoping that someday, somehow, someone will explain why people believe this crazy stuff in the first place.
It’s the same with all sorts of mysticism. “You believe in creationism? But wasn’t that put paid to by, like, the last couple hundred years of scientific investigation? How do you explain the geological and temporal distribution of fossils? What about the rubidium/strontium isochron? Why, after all this beautiful evidence is presented to you, do you still hold to your original beliefs? What do you know that I don’t?”
I think it is indeed a matter of upbringing. My parents are atheists and, although they never even mentioned it until a couple of years back, although they took me to Sunday School and Church, although I went to a C of E school, I still absorbed the idea that people should have good solid factual evidence for what they believe. Atheists like Dawkins appear to be in the same boat as me.
For people like us, it is incredibly difficult to grasp that creationists haven’t done any more experiments than the rest of us. They haven’t found fantastic new hard evidence. The haven’t uncovered rabbit fossils in Cambrian strata. They just believe because… they believe.
We can’t handle that. And, when we do finally get our minds around it, our emotional response is a sort of mild horror. It’s an itch we have to scratch - by, for example, writing 374 pages of “The God Delusion”.
Hey, no-one ever said it was a small itch
How do you explain the geological and temporal distribution of fossils? What about the rubidium/strontium isochron? …rabbit fossils in Cambrian strata.
I would appreciate it if you could explain more clearly what these discoveries mean to you, and what they prove in connection with God.
But wasn’t that put paid to by, like, the last couple hundred years of scientific investigation?
Am I the only one who doesn’t think this sentence makes any sense at all?
And for Christianity… we started with facts. The first “Christians” were people who walked with Jesus Christ. For them, you can’t get much more factual than that. If I’m standing next to you, it’s a fact that you’re there. Now if I tell someone else that I was standing with you, they’re most likely going to believe me. And so on and so on. 200 years down the road the story is still being told that you and I stood next to each other. But now, people doubt it because they didn’t see it with their own eyes. Seems silly, doesn’t it? It started with me saying that I stood next to you. That’s a fact.
I would appreciate it if you could explain more clearly what these discoveries mean to you, and what they prove in connection with God.
The rubidium/strontium isochron first. There are threee elements involved here: rubidium-87, strontium-86 and strontium-87. Rubidium-87 decays into strontium-87 over a known period.
Your typical rock is composed of several different minerals, each of which will have a different ratio of rubidium to strontium. But, because strontium-86 and strontium-87 are chemically indistinguishable, the starting ratio of these two elements will be constant throughout the rock. There’s simply no way for an unintelligent rock formation process to distinguish between them.
Now, what happens as the rock ages? For each mineral in the rock, the ratio of rubidium-87 to strontium-86 will decline, as rubidium decays away. But the byproduct, strontium-87, will increase its ratio to strontium-86.
If we create a graph of these two ratios against each other, and mark the positions of all the minerals in a rock, we find something interesting: no matter what the starting condition of the rock was, the result is always a straight line, known as an isochron. And the gradient of that line relates to the age (in rubidium-87 half-lives) of the rock.
What happens when we do this for some of the apparently oldest rocks on Earth? We find that the gradient of the isochron corresponds to an age of roughly 4 billion years.
If you accept the assumptions, there’s no conclusion but that the Earth is at least that old. And there are only two assumptions that are easily attackable here. Firstly, the assumption that rubidium-87 half-lives are constant. Maybe they vary. The problem is, they’d have to vary a heck of a lot to produce the required isochron slant in a creationist timescale. If radioactive decay had ever proceeded that fast, the uranium in the Earth’s crust would have melted our planet to slag.
Secondly, the assumption that the rocks were produced by an unintelligent force is attackable. Maybe God did it. The problem here is theological - to produce the required isochron line, rather than a bunch of diverse points, God would have had to be giving the rock the appearance of age. God would have had to be lying to us. And, if He can lie to us in the Book of Creation, how can we trust His words in the Book of Scripture?
The rabbit-in-the-cambrian counterexample, and the geological distribution of fossils, are other examples of the same phenomenon. An old-Earth model of the universe can make predictions that are demonstrably accurate and that follow from no known young-Earth model.
I would class some of this evidence for an old Earth as both true and beautiful. It’s elegant, aesthetically pleasing, and accurate. It bugs me deeply when people seem happy to just ignore it and carry on believing whatever they want to - it’s like they’re spitting on a Picasso, or urinating into a piece of life-saving medical technology. Hence I tend to go on about it at far too great a length
The situation with God is similar. From a rational perspective, God is an incredibly ugly idea - an all-powerful being that leaves no footprints? A Creator that’s even more complicated than His creation? Where’s the parsimony in that? Where’s the elegance? Where’s the reason? Why, despite the complete lack of solid evidence, do people still believe?
And for Christianity… we started with facts. The first “Christians” were people who walked with Jesus Christ. For them, you can’t get much more factual than that.
According to some contemporary reports, the first Mormons were witnesses to many miracles. According to some contemporary reports, Uri Geller can bend spoons with his mind. According to some contemporary reports, a guy called John Frum, who visited the South Pacific a century ago, will one day return and bring them peace and prosperity.
According to some contemporary accounts, there was a guy who turned water into wine, walked on the sea and, after dying, came back to chat with his friends.
According to other accounts, Mormonism founder Joseph Smith was a charismatic fraud, Geller is simply a very good stage magician, and John Frum was probably just an American GI who made an impression on the natives.
We can’t check other accounts for Jesus, because there are none. No newspaper reports about the feeding of the five thousand, no government records about the dead walking in the streets. Only his followers wrote about him. Jesus obviously made less of an impression on the natives…
If I were to accept the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection as convincing, I would be forced to do the same for the Mormon miracles, for Geller’s tricks and for John Frum. I can find no basis for claiming that one of these is better supported than the others. As such, I feel that the only honest approach is to accept that selective eyewitness evidence is very unreliable.
And, if I accept that, the foundation for believing in Jesus’s miracles disappears from beneath me.
Just come across a perfect example of myth in the making.
God would have had to be giving the rock the appearance of age. God would have had to be lying to us. And, if He can lie to us in the Book of Creation, how can we trust His words in the Book of Scripture?
Recognising that I can only speak from my own point of view - I do not speak for the writer of this blog - I would say this. I take it you are assuming that every believer in God believes that he created the earth in seven days, 6000 or so years ago. Personally, I do not believe that. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. God alone knows when that “beginning” was. His reference to “days” in Genesis is simply a stretch of time. By the end of Genesis Chapter 1, he gathers all six days and refers to them all as one day. So, we can’t put a figure on how long those “days” were.
Your final paragraph only hints at a person who doesn’t like God’s way of doing things. Well, that’s fair enough. He doesn’t necessarily ask us to like the way he does things. Some people don’t care much for Picasso - but who’s going to argue that he didn’t exist.
I’m aware that many Christians are not creationists - after all, I got the info about isochrons from Kenneth Miller’s “Finding Darwin’s God”. Reading back, I only raised Creationism as another example of scratching the itch (boy did that subplot get out of hand…).
I guess the point is that, contrary to your essay, I don’t measure my viewpoint against God or the Bible, any more than I’d measure it against Odin or the Eddas. I just wouldn’t think to accept or reject a model of the world based on whether I thought it would make God happy or sad. I’m actually rather freaked out by the idea that some people would.
That freakedness more than anything else is what motivates me to comment on issues like Creationism and God.
Your final paragraph only hints at a person who doesn’t like God’s way of doing things. Well, that’s fair enough. He doesn’t necessarily ask us to like the way he does things. Some people don’t care much for Picasso - but who’s going to argue that he didn’t exist.
“Some people don’t care much for Tom and Jerry - but who’s going to argue that they don’t exist.”
I’m not bothered by God’s way of doing things any more than I’m bothered by Tom and Jerry’s way of doing things: all the senseless violence bugs me slightly, but it’s only fiction.
What I’m bothered by is the attitude of non-sceptics, whether of creationism or of religion. To me, accepting a young Earth or God without solid supporting evidence is bizarre. Accepting either proposition based on forms of evidence that are known to be unreliable is perverse.
In fact, my reaction to irrationality seems very similar to your reaction to disbelief in God. I just don’t get it.