You’re absolutely wrong. Terrible example and you have apparently not read TIA nor understood that Duncan doesn’t even begin to rebut its arguments. He does not show that religion was involved as a pretext in more than 7 percent of the wars in recorded human history. Nor does he explain why no military tactician or strategist has EVER incorporated religion into their military tactics or strategy. His critique is totally invalid.

Now stop making groundless assertions and be specific. Precisely what about that his argument that religion causes war do you find persuasive?

Notice, the primary crime he accuses his critic of is a failure to read and understand the opposing point of view. He then insists that I failed to rebut his argument, and he demands to know what is so persuasive about my argument that religion causes war. Does he have a point? Does my argument—meaning the argument I actually made, not the one Vox attributes to me—fall apart when examined in the light of the evidence Vox cites?

Turning back to the post in question, what I originally wrote is this:

His main point is that religion is not the primary cause of most wars, which is perfectly reasonable and accurate. [Emphasis added.] Unfortunately, he pretends that Harris and Dawkins and company are claiming that eliminating religion would eliminate war, which is a pretty blatant straw man. (He even admits at one point that Harris and Dawkins “[never] state that they believe religion is the direct and primary cause of war.”)

Yep, as usual, Vox has not a clue what he is talking about. He claims that none of my posts rebutted anything he said, but has he even read what I wrote? Or is he the one who is failing to read and understand what the opposing side is saying? He’s so desperate to dismiss me as “unintelligent, ignorant, and intellectually dishonest” that he completely fails to notice the fact that I agree with him about religion as a false cause of war. In fact, I think Vox is overstating the influence of religion by about 7%.

Let’s ignore, for the time being, the issue of battlefield generals using or not using religion as a tactic or strategy. By the time the generals are on the field attacking the enemy, the war has already been caused. There’s clearly no point in seeking the cause of a war amongst the choices generals make after the war is already underway.

But aside from that, Vox and I are pretty much in agreement as regards the role of religion in the events leading up to the wars of history. My chief critique of Vox’s argument was that he failed to spend any time at all discussing the role(s) that religion did, could, or should play in times of national crisis leading up to possible war. I’m not saying that religion does have such a role or roles, I’m merely pointing out that Vox’s analysis failed to document some very important considerations, not to say the MOST important consideration, in determining what connection, if any, exists between religion and war.

If we do take this into account, though, we can begin to document how really impotent and useless religion is in matters of genuine significance. War is a pretty big deal, as far as the real world is concerned. It changes boundaries, destroys people and lands, changes customs and sometimes even languages. We would expect, if any world religions incorporated a deity Who genuinely cared about mankind (or about good and evil), that at least some religions ought to have an unmistakable or even supernatural influence on the course of events leading up to (or away from) a war.

Naturally, there are may roles that religion could play. For example, if there were a genuine deity to pray to, then national leaders would be able to pray for guidance. If divine wisdom were bestowed on them from above, advising them on whether or not their cause was just and their chance of victory secure, then this would indeed put religion in a highly influential role with respect to the circumstances leading up to (or away from) the war. Likewise if there were practical advice/wisdom to be gleaned from a study of the religion’s holy scriptures, either by the leaders or (in a democracy) by the voters.

Another role religion could play would be the very important role of uniting people into a common body, i.e. a united front with which to face the enemy. Religious faith could play a vital role in supplying manpower for the war effort, as people were led by their god to make personal sacrifices and commitments for the greater good of all. With a real god behind it, religion might influence wars by miraculous means, such as, oh, making the invading soldiers all go blind so that they couldn’t fight.

If religion did indeed have any substantial, real-world influence over the course of events, then (a) Vox would be wrong, but more importantly (b) it would matter which religion were the true religion. After all, if we’re going to fight wars over religion, we don’t want to fight for the wrong one, eh?

What Vox has discovered, though, is that in every real-world case, the true power lies, not in religion, but in purely secular, materialistic factors. Religion is a passive, empty symbol, which men invest with whatever meaning or interpretation suits the need of the moment. And, as Vox has shown, the need of the moment is dictated by secular factors, like politics, or economics, or sheer human cussedness. Casual observers might be fooled by the apparent role of religion in war, but to jump to that conclusion is to stop too soon and to fail to apprehend the purely secular factors that are driving and controlling the religious aspect. Religion is the passive puppet of greater, real-world forces.

Ironically, Vox concludes that Islam is the only religion with any significant influence over whether or not nations will go to war. I think it’s safe to say, however, that that’s more an emotional reaction against 9/11 than a serious historical analysis. In the 93% of wars he says were not caused by religion, he cites geopolitical, ethnic, economic and other secular factors as the real causes, yet if we look at the 7% of wars that are allegedly religious, we’ll find the same factors at work, with religion serving merely the same empty, symbolic role as the colors on the national flag.

It’s as foolish to insist that someone must be wrong all of the time as it is to insist that someone must be right all of the time. (I realize that in saying that, I’m rebutting the theme, if not the whole thesis, of TIA, but I digress.) Not everything Vox says is wrong, and in this case I think he’s a lot more correct than even he gives himself credit for.

The circumstances leading up to (away from?) international war are very momentous and vitally important circumstances. Vox is doing a great service both to believers and to unbelievers by documenting the fact that religion plays no role at all—”does not play a secondary contributory role in war. It does not play a tertiary contributory role in war,” as he says. Religion is utterly passive and irrelevant, a sock puppet that merely “speaks” whatever words it pleases men to put into its mouth.

And that goes for more than just war too. Thanks for the help, Vox.

Eh, Vox?

The first point in his presentation says that the New Atheists claim that religion causes war, and that Vox can prove statistically that it does not. As always, his refutation consists of ignoring the role of religion in war, and focusing instead on an oversimplification that distorts the data so badly he can make any claim he wants. Specifically, for each war in the Encyclopedia of Wars, he asks, “Is religion the cause of this war?” Not surprisingly, given his biases, he “discovers” that only 3.2% of wars are caused by non-Muslim religions, and fully 93% are allegedly “Non-Religious Wars.”

Wars, of course, are very complex phenomena with very complex causes. And religion is indeed a significant factor in quite a few of those wars,  It might be useful and informative to examine all the wars in recorded history to ask what role religion played in each. Was it provocative? supportive? indifferent? resistent? disruptive? Such a study, though, would produce results that would lend too much support to the New Atheists’ observations, at least if examined by an unbiased group of historians.

So instead of undertaking an unbiased and instructive approach to history, what Vox does is to take the binary approach of asking whether religion was THE cause of any given war, or not. In his argument, the mere existence of other factors, like economics or ethnicity or personal ambition, is sufficient to qualify religion as not being THE cause of the war. And thus he concludes that, by his standards, 93% of all wars were not caused by religion.

That’s hardly surprising. Indeed, the only surprising result from such an approach is that he ended up with any religious wars at all. A motivated historian could easily cite poverty, illiteracy, and socioeconomic factors behind Islamic aggression, for example, and by consistently applying the same approach, end up concluding that 100% of all wars are non-religious.

Vox doesn’t go quite that far. His weakness is that he secretly agrees with the New Atheists, at least as far as Islam is concerned. For example, he makes a consistent distinction between religious violence in general, and Islamic religious violence, which he admits is at least partially religiously driven. In his eyes, though, the New Atheists are a greater threat, and consequently he trumps up a straw-man argument and a bogus “statistical” refutation in order to declare victory and move on.

We’ve covered all this before, but today I wanted to look at one of the unique features of religion that make it particularly prone to aggravating our inherent tendency to wage war on one another. As I mentioned before, wars are complex and have complex causes, but (unlike Vox) I think it might be helpful to consider the actual role played by religion in important human endeavors like warfare.

The thing is, God does not show up in real life, or at least, the gods of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam don’t. This undeniable fact has an inescapable consequence: our only basis for what we believe about God is what men say and think and feel about Him. But men don’t all agree about Him, and therein lies the rub: because God does not show up in real life, how can you determine which men are teaching the “correct” doctrines about Him?

If it were a question about something that exists in the real world like, say, the diameter of the moon, the question could be settled by making careful real-world observations and measurements. No such mechanism exists for observing and verifying the qualities of deities that are consistently and universally absent from the real world, however. Theological arguments have to be won by force: either force of persuasion, or force of law, or force of arms. The only alternative is not to win at all.

Historically, this fact has had a tremendous impact on people’s willingness to conduct war, because even if religion is not the official “cause” of the war, a common and almost inevitable superstition says that God’s blessing determines who the good guys are and thus who will win the war (as witness the myriad “God Bless America” bumper stickers that popped up after 9/11). As the Bible itself teaches in numerous passages, victory in battle is a vindication of one’s religious belief and obedience.

Even Osama bin Ladin, as he watched the fall of the twin towers, can be heard on the video to be murmuring “Allah is great, Allah is great.” Military victory reinforced his belief that Islam was the true religion of God. And America responded in the same spirit, overthrowing the government of Iraq (who had nothing to do with 9/11) because they were Muslim. By defeating them (and their Allah), we validated our national belief that our Christian God was the true God.

After all, God does not show up in real life, so how else are you going to measure, in real-world terms, whose opinions about God are the most powerful? If you can’t superstitiously assume that material wars are merely the physical extension of a spiritual war between light and darkness, good and evil, truth and heresy, then how else can you know? If physical military strength isn’t the material manifestation of spiritual strength (i.e. righteousness), then how can you measure the true strength and power of someone’s spiritual beliefs?

This mechanism works for the whole spectrum of warfare, from the bomb-dropping, artillery-firing, fix-the-bayonets-and-charge of all out war to the subtler but no less devastating cultural warfare that tries to seize control school boards and that passes laws oppressing homosexuals. Believers lack real-world verification for their faith unless they can “prove” the superiority of their opinions by oppressing and defeating those who do not share their beliefs. Spiritual disputes extend into physical disputes in hopes that physical victory will serve as spiritual victory.

Reality-based conclusions don’t have this problem. This is why, for example, you can have literal bombs being thrown at mosques because of arguments about which branch of Islam correctly perpetuates the original teachings of Mohammed, but you don’t typically find one nation declaring war against another over the question of whether thorium decays into lead. Where real-world answers exist, we can get our answers from the real world. Everywhere else, we get whatever “answers” we’re strong enough to take by force.

In theory, we could avoid this problem if believers would insist on real-world proof of anyone’s doctrines before embracing them. But there’s two problems with this approach: (a) that would be “testing God,” which believers universally abhor, and (b) that’s exactly what the New Atheists are proposing. If you don’t want people using literal or figurative war to try and settle questions about non-real-world issues, then don’t embrace beliefs that have no real-world foundation. Stick to what can be confirmed and verified objectively and realistically, and there won’t be doctrinal issues that need to be settled by contests of strength.

I know, I know. That would make too much sense. Plus it wouldn’t satisfy the desire to believe. I know it will  never  happen. I’m just saying that, you know, the New Atheists have a valid point. War is the ultimate means by which believers conclusively “prove” the superiority of their superstitions over the beliefs of others.  So long as God fails to show up in real life, they really have no alternative.

So despite Vox Day’s over-simplified and hopelessly biased “statistics,” there is a religious component to needless human conflicts, whether these conflicts manifest as overt violence or as the lesser warfare of discrimination and oppression. It’s a problem we would do well to solve, though psychology and sociology offer us little hope of resolving it with our current abilities and understanding. Acknowledging that the New Atheists have a valid point, though, would at least be a step in the right direction.

In addition to seeing the Italians take revenge for their previous defeat with a 2-0 victory, they witnessed Milan’s brilliant attacking midfielder, Kaká, declare his Christian faith with a t-shirt that read “I BELONG TO JESUS”…

The reason Kakà’s prayer resonated so profoundly with Christians and non-Christians alike was because it testified to a higher purpose in life. Very, very few of us will ever know such a moment of complete triumph, almost no one can hope to reach the pinnacle of his profession and know that the eyes of all the world are upon him at the very height of his youth and beauty. In a world full of paparazzi, celebrity magazines, and shallow people releasing sex tapes in a desperate bid for fifteen minutes of fame, it is astounding to see a man reject the mass public adulation he has merited in order to humbly give God the glory.

Yes, that’s right. Humility is the reason he’s flaunting his personal religion, drawing attention to himself apart from his team, and setting himself up for the mass public adulation of millions of Christians who aren’t necessarily even soccer fans, in addition to the acclaim he’s going to collect from sports fans in general.

Vox never quite gets around to explaining what this “higher purpose in life” is supposed to be. Based on the last chapter, I suppose our higher purpose is to serve as Non-Player Characters in the next round of God’s great celestial video game, assuming He can rack up a high enough score in the Material round. And assuming His mom doesn’t make him turn off the computer and go outside to play for a while.

Or perhaps this higher purpose is to demonstrate that the key ingredients for success are not determination, discipline, focus, strategy, and teamwork, because God cheats and gives unfair advantages to His favorite players. After all, if God were indeed responsible for the Italian victory in that 2007 soccer game, that means that one or more members of the Italian team owed their victory to the spiritual equivalent of banned performance-enhancing drugs. Technically, their victory should be disqualified on the grounds that they had too many people on the playing field (assuming that God is a person and was indeed on the field with them assisting in their play).

Or maybe the higher purpose is to prove that God rewards the superstitious and gullible, as long as they use rigged scorekeeping. How many here think that T-shirt would have come off at the end of the game if the English had won the match? There’s lots of Christian athletes who are not champions in their field. Do you think any of them stand up and say, “I belong to Jesus, and that’s why I’m in last place right now”?

Of course not, because the whole point of gullibility is making people want to believe whatever you say. Winners can do that better than losers, and that’s why Vox ends his book with the story of a superstitious winner, even though his victory would be fraudulent and undeserved if indeed it were true that he merely received it from God instead of earning it by teamwork and preparation. But who cares, eh? You’re not supposed to think about it, you’re just supposed to be too over-awed by the celebrity endorsement to realize that God is the one being made great by the sports star, instead of the other way around. Why would a real god even need celebrity endorsements? (And if He did, shouldn’t He just get Himself a sticker on a NASCAR racer?)

Vox follows up that example with another by the famous Christian minister and evangelist, Evander Holyfield.

Not long after I became a Christian, I watched Evander Holyfield walk fearlessly into the ring to meet Iron Mike Tyson, singing “Glory to Glory” and clearly unafraid of the terrible beating every boxing expert was sure he was about to receive. Like millions of fight fans, I watched Holyfield’s confident demeanor before the opening bell with fascination. It wasn’t his unexpected victory, but his entrance that made me want to understand the boldness exemplified by the faithful warrior that night.

Because God cares who punches whom harder, and therefore He fixed that fight just like He fixed the soccer match between England and Italy. If we all end up in heaven, and find the angels passing out boxing gloves instead of wings, that’s why. God likes watching us punch each other. It’s part of our Higher Purpose, keeping God entertained.

One senses that, having finished his book, Vox is vaguely dissatisfied with the result. In compensation, he closes his book by projecting his own feelings of fear and frustration onto the New Atheists.

The Unholy Trinity are deeply and profoundly afraid. They fear faith, they fear those who possess it, and they fear what science has created. They fear everything that cannot be forced to fit within their material reductionist model. They fear the future and they fear God even though they do not believe in Him. And most of all, they fear that which they cannot control and do not understand. The light shines in the face of their dark reason and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

Vox’s own fear, which has flowered since 9/11, is that man is irrational, and now has the power of science, threatening us all with disaster. (Not that his has made him noticeably hostile to global warming deniers, however.) But a fear projected onto others is a fear disposed of, or at least repressed.

Bertrand Russell once said that he had spent his entire life searching in vain for evidence that Man is a rational animal. What the Unholy Trinity have failed to take into account in constructing their collective case against religion is the fact that Man is not, and never will be, entirely rational. Even if it were to be conceded that Man is nothing but a talking beast evolved through Natural Selection from a common ancestor shared with fish, squirrels, and monkeys, observation tells us that human beings seldom, if ever, act on a completely rational basis. Reason is a useful tool, but it will never suffice to define Man in his entirety, nor, by will or by force, can Man convert himself into a being of pure rationality this side of the Singularity. Indeed, for conclusive proof of Man’s fundamental irrationality, one need look no further than The God Delusion, The End of Faith, and god is not Great.

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are living evidence that Man’s dreams will always rule his intellect; he will always possess faith, hope, and love. Reason is no substitute for religion; it can never be.

And with that final, defiant rant, plus a cited but not quoted passage from the end of Revelation, TIA sputters to a close. I’ve read worse books, but not many, and very few that I would have bothered reading through to the end. Fortunately, it’s over now, and if my insignificant contribution spares even one person the time they might otherwise have wasted on it, then it will have been worth the effort.

Vox describes for us a combat video game demo that his game-programming partner, “Big Chilly,” was demonstrating.

During the demo, Big Chilly and the three AI-controlled members of his fireteam had successfully taken out both the wide patrol and the guards, and they were just beginning to lay the explosives to blow the door that held the prisoners captive when there was a sudden burst of bright laser fire that caused him to jump in his seat and emit a startled shriek loud enough to make everyone else in the room jump, too. While his AI squadmates shot down the intruder before anyone’s battlesuits took too much damage, what shocked Big Chilly was that for the first time in hundreds of playings, an enemy AI had taken it upon itself to circle around behind the rescue force and attack it from an unexpected direction.

But how could this happen? How could a lowly artificial intelligence surprise a lead programmer who was demonstrably omniscient and omnipotent in the AI’s world? How can the created do what the creator did not will? The answer, when viewed in this context, should be obvious.

Indeed it is: Big Chilly didn’t know his own game as well as he thought he did. But can the same be said of God?

Vox apparently thinks it can.

If it is not difficult to accept that an omniscient and omnipotent programmer can reject omniderigence, why should it be hard to imagine that an all-powerful God might choose to do the same? Even human lovers know that the lover cannot control the beloved, so it should not be difficult to believe that a loving God would permit His creatures to choose freely how they will live.

Let’s follow that train of thought for a moment. The programmer is not rejecting “omniderigence” out of concern for the free will of the AI’s. The AI’s don’t really even exist. It’s just a computer simulation that applies a complicated set of programmed instructions to an organized set of data stores. The programmer lets the computer figure out what the “characters” are going to do because it takes too long to do all the mental calculations to figure out which random numbers are going to be generated, which decision paths are going to be followed, and which code sections are going to execute. The programmer’s brain, in other words, is inferior to the silicon running the game world in terms of doing the “knowing.”

One interesting consequence of this is that it becomes possible for the “omnipotent” programmer to lose his own game. He may have built “back doors” into the system, and he may be able to turn “cheats” on and force a fake “win” by simply violating his own rules. But if he sticks to his own script, and plays in real time, according to the rules, there’s a chance he can lose (if the game is non-trivial and well-designed, anyway).

Amazingly, Vox takes it even farther than just an analogy. He describes how he and his partner successfully applied evolutionary theory to automatically generate, select and improve their Artificial Intelligence algorithms, and then muses:

This AI development process is remarkably similar to the Biblical description of the harvest of souls, of the separating of the wheat from the chaff. This metaphor is central to the New Testament; Jesus Christ mentions it on several occasions and in several different forms, such as the distinction between sheep and goats. While the “God as game designer” hypothesis might reasonably be described as literally making God in one’s own image, especially when it comes from a game designer, it does offer the potential of explaining the importance of obedience to God’s will as well as the seemingly arbitrary nature of what is in line with that will and what is not. If we are AIs in God’s laboratory, then we cannot expect to have any more understanding of His ultimate purpose for us than those AIs in Big Chilly’s war lab did.

In other words, if it seems like God is playing games with us, that’s only to be expected, because it’s just possible that real life is a video game for some celestial game designer with a Cosmos 2000 mega-core googol-flop processor, quantum RAM (probably more memory than you will ever need), and optional multiverse waveform generator. Vox even supports this conclusion by citing the number of computer generated characters in video games (roughly 10,000 for every individual live player), and concludes that, statistically speaking, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of each individual live human being a mere simulation. (I shudder to think how much beer I would need before that one started to make sense.)

This may be little more than over-caffeinated techno-speculation, but it is, I think, an exciting way to view the universe as well as providing a reasonable solution for those pesky problems of evil and ultimate purpose. If it also happens to be a near mathematical certainty, then so much the better. It is a fundamentally optimistic perspective, because if this is only the 3D war lab, imagine what the real game in all its multi-dimensional glory must be like! Even if we are immaterial simulations, we are immaterial simulations with a genuine purpose and a future more radical than we can possibly imagine in front of us. Accepting the idea that we are not only the gods of the machine, but also the machines of God, gives us the wherewithal to face the prospect of death with enthusiastic anticipation instead of courage, resignation, or even terror.

In a footnote, Vox allows that “both drugs and PS/2 were [probably] involved” in developing the “hypothesis” that we are all just a computer simulation in some larger universe of “posthuman” gamers. And yet, perhaps because it resonates so well with his own particular profession, he seems a bit reluctant to reject it. Or perhaps it’s because he too is vexed by the problem of evil, and by the fact that God, Whom he upholds as the source of morality, seems to fall so far short of His own standards. Perhaps he is keeping the “life is a game” hypothesis around just because he can’t think of any better answer.

There’s an interesting and subtle category error in this scenario. By proposing a metaworld in which the relative “goodness” or “badness” of our actions is decided arbitrarily, Vox is projecting our earthly perception of morality onto an otherworldly system, while still attempting to resolve the moral issue of the existence of evil within the earthly system. If God’s just a game designer, and our system is just God’s game, then He’s morally ok, because we’re His intellectual property, and He’s entitled to write whatever rules He likes for us. But that’s judging God by earthly standards of morality, which according to Vox’s scenario are not valid standards with respect to God, and which therefore cannot justify His conduct. The only moral judgment we can make, using the moral system that is valid within this context, is that God’s actions are negligent, evil, and immoral at least a great deal of the time. Even if it’s “God’s game, God’s rules,” the game score, as calculated by those rules, shows God with a non-zero Sin Total. What happens outside the game console is irrelevant.

Meanwhile, what Vox is doing is not so much solving the problem of evil as he is merely denying that evil is actually real. You don’t arrest someone for murder if all they’re doing is pushing a button on a joystick and turning a few pixels blood red. It’s not real evil, it’s just simulated. And, by the same token, the good deeds are fake as well. Not that it matters to any of us, since we’re not real either. It’s the ultimate in extreme denialism.

Vox has, in fact, wound up in one of a small number of cul-de-sacs that await those who try to reconcile the Christian idea of God with the problem of the reality of evil. Yes, you can deny the reality of evil by denying the reality of everything we experience. It’s an odd form of solipsism, in that not even the solipsist is actually real. Those computer characters are not real, even if they seem to surprise their programmer by behaving unexpectedly. In fact, they don’t even exist—the computer program creates an illusion of independent characters by mimicking the sights and sounds you would perceive if you observed a real (or presumably real) person in action.

There doesn’t seem to be much more that needs to be said. When your defense of God leads you into denying the existence of good, evil, and even your own self, then chances are you’ve divorced yourself from the real-world truth a long time ago.

His excuse for this substitution is that the “capacity” for an action is not the same as the action itself. Thus, since genuine omniscience leads to some intractable problems for theologians, Vox opts to retreat to the idea that God’s omniscience consists merely of the capacity for knowing, not actually knowing. Knowledge, however, is not an action; it’s a state. Learning what you know, and remembering what you know, are actions that involve knowledge, but the knowledge itself is data—a noun, not a verb. To equate knowledge with action is to fall into a serious category error, and it’s an error that Vox uses as the foundation for the next phase of his argument.

Though it may at first seem to be a waste of time to analyze an argument to which Dawkins himself doesn’t assign much value, it is important to remember that all things, even specious and superficial arguments for His nonexistence, may prove useful in serving the greater glory of God. That’s true in this case, for in considering the Contradiction of Divine Characteristics argument, we were forced to draw a distinct line between capacity and action, the confusion of which is also the root of a much more serious theological error. Interestingly, this theological error is committed by Christians as readily as atheists, perhaps even more often, as they trust in God’s plan for their lives instead of making use of their God-given intelligence and free will.

Once again, Vox begins by striking a pose as though he’s going to deal Dawkins a serious blow, but then abruptly swerves and smites orthodox Christianity instead.

There are a variety of phrases that contain the same inherent implication about a certain view of God. Many evangelical Christians often refer to “God’s perfect plan” for their lives. This concept is reinforced with children’s songs such as “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and echoed by sports stars who compete in the assurance that their victory has been divinely secured ahead of time. It is held by American Exceptionalists who believe that God has uniquely blessed the United States of America and has authored a Manifest Destiny for it, and by Christian Zionists who see a divine hand in every violent twist and turn of the Mideast Peace Process.

Gosh, if Christians are so screwed up in their theology, what’s a self-undeclared apologist like Vox supposed to do? Pin the blame on atheists, of course!

These various evangelicals have an unexpected ally in Sam Harris, who declares it to be an obvious truth that “if God exists, he is the most prolific abortionist of all” due to the fact that 20 percent of all known pregnancies miscarry, and then asserts that those who believe in God should be obliged to present evidence for his existence in light of “the relentless destruction of innocent human beings that we witness in the world each day.”

One could carry Harris’ argument ever further by pointing out that, had God taken a more pro-life stance in the Garden of Eden, and denied the woman her freedom to choose what foods to put into her own body, He could have prevented the deaths of all of her offspring, and their eternal damnation as well (or whatever Vox believes in that takes the place of Hell in his more “open” theology). So how does Vox try and answer Harris? By pointing out that Harris is right about orthodox Christian beliefs, and what they entail.

What the evangelical and the atheist have in common here is a belief that because God is omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate, he is somehow responsible for these events, although Harris would qualify that with the necessary “if he exists.” And in fairness, it must be pointed out that when Harris cites Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Asian tsunami as God’s failure to protect humanity, he is really doing rather better than the “perfect plan” evangelical who would assert that these tragedies were sent by God for some ineffable higher purpose intended to benefit humanity.

Indeed, if we want to be really fair, we would point out that, since God allegedly holds us accountable for the good we could have done and did not, it is therefore a valid principle that one is as responsible for a failure to act as one is for the actions.

As an illustration, consider driving a car down a quiet residential street. You are obeying the speed limit, and are driving on the right side of the road. But a small child chases a ball out into the street and stands with his back to you. If you do not act immediately to stop the car and/or swerve out of the way, your car will strike the child and kill him or her. You will not personally get out of your car and murder the child, but if you do not act to prevent the accident, the car will strike the child and cause his or her death. Under the circumstances, would you be morally liable if you failed to act to prevent a tragedy? Could you excuse the fatality on the grounds that you did not commit the action, but merely failed to act to prevent it?

Suppose you had known a week ahead of time that 9/11 was going to happen, knew the names of the hijackers, the flights they were going to be on and the targets they were going to attack. Would you be morally culpable if you failed to warn anyone about it? If you are legitimately and morally responsible for failing to prevent these tragedies when it was in your power to do so, should not God also bear responsibility for His failure to do what He could to prevent them?

The only defense against such moral responsibility is if God, in fact, is not able to prevent the tragedies concerned. It simply wasn’t possible for God to know what bin Ladin was up to. God does not know how to prevent spontaneous abortions, or He has no power to heal the problems that cause them. God lacks the power to prevent earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and so on, nor does He possess the ability to warn anyone about them in time for people to escape to safety. Omnifrailty is the only sure defense against moral responsibility.

Sadly, Vox doesn’t seem to consider this particular solution, opting instead for a new straw man (and another neologism) intended to make the skeptic look unreasonably demanding.

This belief in an all-acting God, who not only guides the grand course of events but actually micromanages them, is the result of the same confusion between capacity and action that we saw in the Contradiction of Divine Characteristics. When God asserts that He cares about the sparrows and knows when one falls from its branch, this is very different from an assertion that He only happens to know about it because He personally struck the sparrow down. An omniscient God knows the numbers of hairs on your head and an omnipotent God is capable of changing their color, but it requires an active Master Puppeteer to personally pluck them, one by one, from your balding head, in the desired order…

Hence the term “omniderigence,” which I define as: “making infinite use of unlimited or universal power, authority, or force; all-controlling; all-dictating.” Less formally, one can think of it as über control-freakdom or ultimate puppet-mastery.

Harris shows how this mistaken belief in God’s omniderigence is part and parcel of the atheist case against God…

So if you even suggest holding God accountable for failing to do the things He allegedly could do, Vox immediately tries to label you as an extremist who is insisting that God must “micromanage” every frickin’ little detail about everything. You un-American you! Don’t you know God gives us free will? By replacing the actual skeptical objection with a straw-man demand that God exercise an unreasonable amount of control, Vox deftly avoids addressing the entirely reasonable observation that, even without micromanaging everything, there’s still a huge number of cases where a real, morally upright God could have a significant positive impact, and would be morally culpable if He failed to do what He could (even given an exemption in the case of infringing on other people’s free choice).

Having blamed an atheist for what is really a Christian failing, Vox goes on to illustrate the problem with the orthodox Christian idea of God’s sovereignty, using the tragic example of a small child who was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 4. Since it was the son of Vox’s cousin, he posted a prayer request on his blog, which prompted a Christian to offer up the consolation that God was still in control, and was allowing this illness in order to further some wise, good, and mysterious end. Vox, however, took issue with the Christian.

There are two possibilities. Either evil is part of God’s plan and has been from the beginning, or God is somehow constrained in his ability to unleash his power upon this Earth. The Biblical account describing how God gave Man dominion over the Earth, a dominion which the Scriptures explain was subsequently handed over in turn to Satan, strongly suggests the latter.

Jesus Christ himself states that Man possesses certain authority over evil in his own right. If evil is from God, then Man must have authority over God, a more fundamentally heretical notion than the idea that God’s hand is somehow constrained. This limited human authority is underlined by the situation in which his disciples complained that they could not cast out certain demons and Jesus explained that only prayer would suffice to address that sort. In other words, the disciples were required to make an appeal to God’s authority instead of simply making use of their own.

Vox’s reasoning is a bit garbled here. He seems, for example, to fail to grasp the difference between God taking evil into account while devising His Perfect Plan, and God being the generator of evil, the director of its actions in His divine Plot. Nor does it seem to dawn on him that, if having power over evil makes man have authority over God, then having power over creation would also give man authority over God, since both creation and evil allegedly come from God.

He does, however, hit on the real solution to the problem of God’s moral responsibility: denying that God has any real power. It’s still a bit garbled, because his example of casting out demons seems to imply that God is in control of evil after all, even though Vox’s argument is that He is not. Internal contradictions don’t seem to bother him much, though, as his conclusion shows:

So, my conclusion is that the leukemia inflicted on Andrew is either a random occurrence or intentionally inflicted by the evil being that both Paul and Jesus Christ recognized as the ruling power of this world. I believe that doctors, secular and Christian alike, are doing God’s work as they war against sickness and disease, just as Jesus Christ commanded his disciples.

Indeed, to assert that a child suffering leukemia is God’s will is to imply that those attempting to heal him are doing evil by defeating it. The problem of evil is not a difficult one, once one is able to accept the notion that God is not a cruel and easily bored puppeteer. Omniderigence leads inevitably to doubt, because it requires accepting the idea that all evil stems from God.

But if everything is in God’s hands and moving according to God’s plan, then what need would there have ever been for Jesus Christ to come to Earth and die on a cross?

So Jesus’ death on the cross shows that things are not going according to God’s plan? Nice work, Vox.

I almost don’t have to comment on this section, since Vox is really doing my job for me here, pointing out the internal inconsistencies and inescapable contradictions that are bound up in the historic Christian concept of God. Nor is Vox’s “omnidirigence” straw man any help for Christians, since even in poor Andrew’s case, God ought to be able to reveal to Christian doctors how to cure leukemia, even if He were unwilling to intervene directly to effect a cure. That would be a tremendous help in the battle against the “evil being” who is allegedly “responsible” for childhood leukemia, but God is either unwilling or unable to lend us that kind of assistance.

Moral responsibility does not require that God do literally everything (thus leaving no freedom for anyone else to do anything), but it does show that there are things far less than “omnidirigence” that an omnipotent (or tantipotent) God can still be held responsible for. God’s systematic, universal, and predictable failure to make any of the interventions He is allegedly capable of are sufficient to show that these moral lapses are no mere oversight, but are the dominant characteristic of His behavior with respect to men. As Vox himself inevitably concludes, God does not, in fact, have the real power to help, does not know everything, and is not in control.

All that remains is to wonder why on earth anybody would bother to be a Christian?

He begins with a cursory overview of the problem of evil.

When one surveys the long list of horrors that have engulfed countless men, women, and children throughout the course of history, the vast majority of them innocent and undeserving of such evil fates, one finds it easy to sympathize with the individual who concludes that God, if He exists and is paying attention to humanity, must be some sort of divine sadist.

Because doubts are reasonable, normal, and inevitable, they should never be brushed aside, belittled, or answered with a glib phrase, for not only does decency demand that they receive a sensitive hearing, but they also can have powerful ramifications that resonate long after the doubter himself has had them resolved one way or another…

But if God exists, it is a basic theological error to attempt to place the blame for earthly tragedies on Him. In fact, it is not only a theological error, but also a fundamental error of logic to conclude that God, even an all-powerful God, must be to blame for every evil, accident, or tragedy that befalls us.

Before we get to Vox’s answer to the problem of evil, though, he spends an entire section trying to belittle and brush aside a related issue, the question of God’s omnipotence.

Vox turns to Richard Dawkins for a typical illustration of the contradictions inherent in the traditional view of God. According to Dawkins, “[i]f God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.” Despite what Vox said before, he tries to rebut this point by first belittling it, then by brushing it aside, then by offering glib answers.

As Dawkins surely knows, this is a silly and superficial argument; indeed, he follows it up with a little piece of doggerel by Karen Owens before promptly abandoning the line of reasoning in favor of a return to his attack upon Thomas Aquinas. While the argument appears to make sense at first glance, it’s merely a variation on the deeply philosophical question that troubles so many children and atheists, of whether God can create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it.

Ooo, “children AND atheists.” Take that Dawkins! And yet, for such a “silly and superficial” argument, it gives Vox a major headache, as he twists this way and that, trying to find some way of calling it “wrong” even though he can see that its logic is so inescapable that he himself has to abandon both God’s omnipotence and His omniscience in order to reconcile the contradiction that Dawkins raises.

First, it is important to note that the Christian God, the god towards whom Dawkins directs the great majority of his attacks, makes no broad claims to omniscience…

In keeping with this interpretation, Dr. Greg Boyd, the pastor at Woodland Hills Church and the author of Letters to a Skeptic, has written a book laying out a convincing case for the Open View of God, which among other things chronicles the many Biblical examples of God being surprised, changing His mind, and even being thwarted. Moreover, it would be very, very strange for a presumably intelligent being such as Satan to place a bet with God if he believed that God knew with certainty what Job’s reaction to his torments would be.

Take that, Dawk—wait, that’s not Dawkins being wrong, that’s Christianity being contradicted! Dawkins is pointing out that there’s an inherent contradiction in the orthodox, historic Christian doctrine of God, and Vox “rebuts” him by admitting that the Church is wrong about God! With friends like Vox, who needs atheists, eh? This is a huge point, because it shows that the people who defined Christian doctrine, including selecting which books were “Scripture” were fallible men who didn’t really know as much as they thought.

That didn’t work too well, so Vox’s next attempt is to raise a quibble about the difference between having the capacity to do something, and actually doing it. It’s a moot point, because Vox has already admitted that Christian doctrine was originally defined by men who got it wrong and who need to be corrected by more modern-thinking, open minded individuals. But Vox gives it a go anyway.

[O]mniscience, or the quality of knowing everything, is the description of a capacity, it is not an action. Likewise, omnipotence, being all-powerful, is a similar description, which is why these nouns are most often used in their adjectival forms modifying other nouns, for example, an omniscient god is a god who knows everything, i.e., possesses all knowledge. But capacity does not necessarily indicate full utilization and possession does not dictate use.

So Vox has saved God. Or has he? The problem is that if God already knows what He is going to do, then He can’t be omnipotent (i.e. He can’t do something different from what He knows He is going to do). Vox’s solution: just have God not use His knowledge. Poof! since God no longer knows everything (i.e. He keeps Himself from knowing the future), there’s no longer any conflict between His foreknowledge and His free will.

The problem is that, in fact, Vox has only invoked the same excuse in slightly different terms: God does not know everything, He merely possesses the potential to learn things He does not currently know. That’s not omniscience (knowing all), that’s only the capacity to discover, and the capacity to discover, even if infinite, is a different thing than omniscience.

Vox’s next stab at it is to construct an obvious equivocation fallacy around the phrase “to possess knowledge.”

Now, as I write this sentence, I am holding the book entitled The God Delusion in my hand. I paid cash for it at the bookstore prior to reading it through in its entirety, so I now possess the book in a very real and legally binding sense, and I feel sure that the reader will readily acknowledge that I therefore possess all of the knowledge contained within it in every relevant meaning of the term. But can I tell you the precise wording of the first sentence on the seventh page? Well, no, not without taking the action required to actually look at it.

Yep, no need to go to college. Just buy the textbooks, and you’ve got all the knowledge other people spend years of study and hard work to acquire. I own a full set of encyclopedias, just imagine how smart I am! I own books written in languages I can’t even read! My knowledge is just amazing—or at least it might seem amazing to anyone silly enough to confuse having legal ownership of a record of knowledge, and actually knowing the knowledge.

Knowledge is information, but merely owning a repository of information is not the same as having integrated that information into your awareness and understanding of what’s true in the real world. To truly know something means to have incorporated that information as an attribute of your mind. It’s the difference between buying a hard drive with the capacity to hold the most expensive software in the world, and actually buying and installing the software.

One major problem that Vox doesn’t mention, let alone try to address, is that the doctrine of God’s omniscience is a doctrine that derives from people’s need for a God Who knows what He is doing and Who is absolutely in control. A God that does not know everything is a God who is continually at risk (as we all are) of having His plans thrown off by unexpected developments. He’s a weaker God, a gambling God, a fallible God. He may be smart, but Satan’s supposed to be smart too, and if God loses both His omniscience and His omnipotence, He’s lost His advantage. He might not actually win.

What’s more, a God who is not omniscient is a God who is Himself subject to time, not outside of it, because time controls how much God knows. Otherwise, if He stood outside of time, there would be no difference between remembering the past and foreseeing the future. Dawkins’ dilemma would still vex Him, because a God who stands outside of time cannot look forward to a future in which He will learn what He did not know in the past. If God is not subject to time, then time-based differences in knowledge do not apply.

Unfortunately, Vox presents us with a God who is outside of time. “Regardless,” he says, “a God who stands outside of space and time and who possesses all knowledge as well as all power is not bound to make use of his full capacities, indeed, who is going to shake their finger at him for failing to live up to his potential?” But “potential” is meaningless outside of time, because it assumes that there’s something you’re not doing “now” that you could possibly do in the “future.”

The doctrine of God’s omniscience is at least partially a consequence of the (extrabiblical) doctrine about God existing outside of space and time, since from God’s alleged vantage point He ought to have equal access to all knowledge. Since the distinction between actual knowledge and potential knowledge is a time-based distinction, He’s either going to be eternally knowing or eternally ignorant. You can’t have a change in the status of God’s knowledge, because change is a difference in state over time, and if God stands outside of time then He does not change (and neither does His knowledge). So ultimately, God has no “potential” knowledge—either He knows, or He is ignorant, for all of time.

But, as we saw before, this is all moot, since Vox has already surrendered the orthodox, historic doctrines of omniscience and omnipotence, substituting instead the weaker notions of “tantiscience” and “tantipotence” (i.e. “lots of knowledge” and “lots of power”)—qualities God shares with Satan, not to mention a potentially large number of other allegedly powerful and intelligent spiritual beings. Vox is not so much defending Christianity as he is replacing it with a variety of polytheism that uses Christian vocabulary to describe unorthodox ideas.

He closes this section of Chapter 15 by comparing mankind to a dog.

When it’s time to feed my Viszla, I don’t magically summon food from the mysterious bag of plenty. But my dog doesn’t know that. From his perspective, there’s no difference between my buying it at the store or my summoning it into material existence by the magic force of my divine will. Likewise, we are incapable of perceiving the difference between a god who knows everything and a god who merely knows a whole lot more than we do…

Unless, of course we’re smarter than a dog. But there is a difference between omnipotence and “tantipotence,” between omniscience and “tantiscience.” That’s the whole point of Vox’s retreat from the former to the latter. The former entails a number of inconsistencies and contradictions that render the traditional, orthodox Christian doctrines untenable, even for a believer like Vox. If omniscience and omnipotence did not have inescapable problems, there would be no need for him to try and invent new theological dogmas that weakened God enough to avoid the dilemma.

What Dawkins said was correct: there are intractable problems with orthodox Christian theology. Perfect knowledge of the future would indeed prevent God from having the power to choose a course of action that would prove His foreknowledge wrong. V0x tries to make Dawkins look defeated, but ends up twisting in the wind, abandoning the historic faith, and straying into ancient dualistic/polytheistic heresies. It’s a vain attempt to find a coherent understanding of a God manufactured out of naive superlatives. For all his glib answers, Vox can’t brush this one off.

There are three variants of atheism that can be considered at least partly rational: these can be described as Somerset atheism, Nietzschean atheism, and Post-Nietzschean atheism.

Somerset atheism is the common practice of moral parasitism described in the previous section. It is a partially rational atheism that functions perfectly well on an individual level but cannot function on a societal level because it depends entirely on the existence of an external morality to support it.

Christianity, of course, borrows its morals (such as they are) from the surrounding cultures, which is why the only real moral innovation in Christianity is the impractical and rarely-practiced notion of loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you. In his haste to do evil to his enemies, Vox accuses them of a flaw that is actually a Christian failing, thus fulfilling the Curse and repeating the stumble that has brought him down so often in TIA. But we still have two more atheisms to go…

Now, it might be worth mentioning, just for the sake of completeness, that atheism is a lack of belief in the existence of genuine deities. It is not a philosophy. It is not a moral code of ethics. It isn’t even naturalism or skepticism or any other “ism” but a simple lack of belief in the existence of gods. Even Christians are atheists with respect to the vast majority of pantheons that have ever populated the temples and imaginations of men. Vox has never quite understood what “atheism” is, and that’s why he makes the mistake of proposing that there are different schools (or “churches” as he snidely calls them—as though “church” were a less honorable term!).

Anyway, as we were saying, Vox turns next to the second philosophy, which he mistakes for atheism, namely the philosophy of Nietzsche (and Crowley). According to Vox, this moral system “takes no account of society’s mores in stating that “do what thou wilt” based on the individual’s will to power is the whole of the law. This is entirely rational from the individual’s perspective and it is the variant to which history’s great killers have subscribed.”

Having tried to tag atheism with whatever discredit comes from being associated with Nietzsche, it’s perfectly understandable why Vox’s next step would be to try and link Nietzsche with “history’s great killers.” But I can’t help but notice how similar Nietzsche’s philosophy seems to be to the philosophy that the Christian God is described as practicing. “Do what Thou wilt based on Thy own will to power” is indeed the whole of God’s law for His own conduct, and He does indeed care little for society’s mores, commanding genocide whenever He feels like it, executing “sinners” for trivial offenses like gathering wood on a Saturday, demanding ritual mutilation of babies, and condoning slavery (including the beating of slaves to the point of death)—God does what He has the power to do, regardless of what society regards as good.

So Nietzsche, and by extension the other “great killers” mentioned by Vox, are really only practicing godliness, imitating the example and moral system of God Himself. In that light, it’s rather amusing that Vox shares with us his personal assessment of God’s manifest philosophy.

This philosophy is rational, but it is literally psychopathic in the sense described by Dr. Robert Hare, developer of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a clinical scale used to diagnose psychopathy.

I can certainly agree with the “psychopathic” bit, given God’s past history. But remember, Vox himself lends this philosophy the endorsement of identifying it as one of only three “rational” atheisms in existence. It might seem strange that Vox would use the term “rational” to describe psychopathy, but then again Vox isn’t striving for coherence and objectivity, he’s just out to twist everything into some kind of anti-atheist slander, whether it makes sense or not.

Two swings and two misses. The last pitch is what Vox calls “post-Nietzschean atheism,” typified by Michel Onfray. Once again, Vox mistakes a philosophical moral system for a simple lack of belief in God, and repeats his habitual error of ignoring the secular roots of morality.

Onfray recognizes that if one rejects the source of a moral system, one has no logical basis for retaining that which derives from it. For example, if all men are created equal, removing the Creator from the equation therefore requires abandoning the idea that men are equal unless another basis for that equality can be provided.

The idea that all men are created equal is a product of the Enlightenment, which Vox claims is the result of atheism. Christianity, meanwhile, springs from a tradition in which all men are not created equal. Kings rule by divine appointment, slaves are to serve as though serving the Lord (another rank of non-equality), the Jews are “God’s Chosen People,” and even the larger group of humanity as a whole is divided into “the elect” and “the lost.”

So it might be nice, actually, to find some other basis for asserting the equality of all men (such as, for example, considering the consequences of doing so, versus the consequences of practicing bigotry). Christian-sponsored anti-gay laws and amendments make it quite clear that basing equal rights on religious superstitions is an iffy proposition at best.

But Vox isn’t interested in finding a genuine, universal, non-superstitious source for human rights, because he does not want such a thing to exist. If we can find a real-world basis for rights, then he loses an opportunity to blackmail unbelievers into converting (“submit to God, or you can NEVER be a good person, vile infidel!”). He does not want all men to be created equal, because if atheists are as good as believers, then what’s the point in being believers? Oh, I suppose you could still believe, but from reading TIA, it’s clear that Vox wouldn’t enjoy it as much if he couldn’t presume the moral superiority Christians supposedly hold over atheists.

But I digress. This “post-Nietzschean atheism” is supposed to be the last of the three “rational” atheisms, so it might be interesting to see what Vox thinks is so rational about it.

It is social psychopathy that is an order of magnitude beyond that envisioned by the most rabidly psychopathic intellectual. Not even Leon Trotsky’s vision of an international communism is as ambitious in its ghastly grandeur as Onfray’s sociopathic philosophy of desire. Nietzsche only wished to slay God and rule over His Creation, the post-Nietzschean dreams of total destruction so that he might build a new creation from the ashes.

Goodness, if that’s what Vox considers “rational,” I think I can see why his arguments so frequently appear to be a bit out of touch with reality.

And with that last spray of spittle, the Chainsaw sputters to a long-anticipated halt. Strangely, most of the casualties that litter the field seem to have been Vox’s allies, plus the remnants of his own credibility. But whatever, we’re past this particular bit of logical carnage. Next week, we get to climb up the gang plank for the first leg of our voyage on the Omnidirigible, Hindenberg II. Stay tuned.

Vox begins with an attempt to twist the facts to make atheists sound both conceited and overly obsessed with reason.

[F]orty-three commenters at the militantly atheist science blog Pharyngula reported the results of an online personality test they had taken. Similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator survey, the test was hopelessly transparent and subjective, but provided a useful means of examining how these predominantly atheist individuals view themselves. They reported an average Rational rating of 94 out of 100, compared to an Extroverted rating of 32 and an Arrogance rating of 49. They do not see themselves so much as champions of reason, but paragons!

Sarah Palin be proud, Vox Day is jumping on the anti-elite band-wagon right beside you. At the risk of making a “paragon” of myself, I’m going to try something Vox apparently disdains: I’m going to think logically and reasonably about what the test actually said (as opposed to the fanciful and slanderous interpretation Vox chooses to give to it).

First of all, if you’ve taken an MBTI-style personality inventory like the ones Vox mentions, you’ll know that seeing yourself “as a paragon of reason” is neither a question on the test nor an indicator reported by the test. The test instead measures your personal “style” across four axes: Introvert versus Extrovert, Sensing (i.e. 5 senses) vs. Intuition, Thinking (using analysis to arrive at conclusions) vs Feeling (drawing conclusions based on how you feel about the people/circumstances), and Judging (getting answers now) vs Perceiving (wait and see what develops).

Notice that this has nothing whatsoever to do with atheists holding exaggerated and egotistical views about their rationality being supposedly superior to everyone else’s. What the MBTI tells you is that if a person scores closer to the Thinking end of the axis than the Feeling end, you’re going to have better luck convincing them with verifiable facts and non-fallacious reasoning than you are with appeals to emotional bonds like “if you disagree, you’re only helping the terrorists.” It’s just their personality type. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re better at reasoning and logic than others, it just means that they trust facts and logic more than they trust appeals to emotion and social connections.

Vox’s goal, of course, is not to try and understand what the MBTI really means. He just wants to set up a straw man atheist who is a goddamn-elitist-convinced-of-his-own-intellectual-superiority-and-wouldn’t-you-just-love-to-see-Vox-take-him-down-a-notch. But stand clear folks, Vox has Occam’s Chainsaw fully revved up at this point, and he don’t care where it swings.

His first swipe is to confuse being rational with being analytical, so that he can try and chop an arm or two off of science. The beauty of science, of course, is that it draws its answers from reality itself, which is the truth, so no matter how complicated science gets, or how much increasing specialization tends to create new and more difficult niches of scientific knowledge, it’s all consistent with itself and with the real world. There’s nothing unreasonable or irrational about having confidence in an approach that yields coherent, practical, and beneficial results on such a consistent basis. But Vox, in his crusade to blemish the atheists, tries to make it sound insane.

[The atheist] is not without faith, because he puts his trust in the scientific method and those who use it whether he understands their conclusions with regards to any given application or not. But because there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, for example, let alone understanding their implications, and because specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in any of the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he himself neither knows nor understands.

What Vox overlooks is the fact that the atheist, in many cases, does understand how science works and why it is reliable. There may be increasingly specialized subdomains to which the scientific method is applied, but it remains fundamentally the same scientific method, and its answers are reliable for the same reasons. Vox is confusing the detailed researches to which science is applied, with the rationality and reliability of the method itself. It’s a blatant appeal to ignorance: “Everyone must be ignorant about a lot of the knowledge that’s available, therefore no one has any reason to believe the answers.” Please, O Mighty Ignorance, protect us from science! But we do have a reason to trust the answers: we know that they were obtained using reliable scientific technique.

Vox argues that the atheist can “be legitimately criticized when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in most circumstances, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most thoughtless, Bible-thumping fundamentalist.” But in fact, Vox is not being what you would call truthful here. It is reasonable to trust that a reliable scientific method, repeatedly demonstrated to be both useful and accurate, would return valid answers when deployed on real-world evidence and facts. The thoughtless, Bible-thumping fundamentalist, by contrast, bases his faith on the fact that somebody told him what to believe, and he believed it, even though (in contrast to science) his approach consistently yields answers that contradict themselves, other fundamentalists, and the real world.

By the way, if there are any “thoughtless fundamentalists” out there with chainsaw wounds, don’t feel too bad. You are by no means Vox’s only intended victims here. Morality is next on the hit-list.

The fundamental irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions, and it is here that his general lack of intellectual conviction is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have rational reasons for attempting to live by their various moral systems, the atheist does not. Both ethics and morals based on religion are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist, he is therefore required to reject them on rational materialist grounds.

As we’ve pointed out before, Vox’s worldview apparently interferes with his ability to understand where morality really comes from. It comes from the consequences of the behaviors that people learn to categorize as “good” or “bad.” If a religious man decides to refrain from saying “hell” because he believes that God will punish him for it, he is deriving his morals from a consideration of the consequences of his actions, just like the atheist does. The only difference is that the believer has a superstitious and gullible expectation of what those consequences will be. But real-world morality, where actions have real-world consequences, work for both believer and unbeliever, and in fact work better for the unbeliever, since the gullible and superstitious notions don’t garble the unbeliever’s ability to correctly distinguish between real consequences and imaginary/paranoid ones.

Believers, watch out, here comes that chainsaw again!

So the atheist seeks to live by the dominant morality whenever it is convenient for him, and there are even those who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them. But even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.

Ooo, nasty cut there. Vox was aiming at the atheists, but unfortunately he missed. Morality comes from one of two places: either it comes from secular consequences (valid morality) or it comes from superstitions (invalid morality). When believers excuse genocide on the grounds that God wants certain ethnic groups wiped out, that’s superstition, invalid morality. When believers want to mutilate their babies’ genitals because they think God will like their babies better after they’ve lost certain parts of their body, that’s superstition, invalid morality. The valid morality happens when believers borrow the atheists’ secular consequences as the basis for judging right and wrong. I wouldn’t use the term “moral parasite” myself, but if Vox wants to chuck that chainsaw at the people who are borrowing someone else’s basis of morality, believers ought to be the ones to duck. Especially since, as Vox admits, unbelievers can and do live morally better lives than believers in some cases.

It’s really a very poorly-thought-out argument, and a rather silly attempt to make atheists look bad, but Vox can sink lower, and does so by citing two atheists, Dawkins and Hitchens, as proof that atheism is “childish” because the two became atheists when they were nine years old. I kid you not, he really tries to argue that:

Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God, both at the age of nine. The idea that there is any rational basis for atheism is further damaged due to the way in which so many atheists become atheists during adolescence, an age which combines a tendency towards mindless rebellion as well as the onset of sexual desires which collide with religious strictures on their satisfaction.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to note that intelligent men of intellectual repute such as Francis Collins and Anthony Flew should have rejected atheism at the tender ages of twenty-seven and eighty-one, respectively. Atheism is not only irrational, it is quite literally childish in many instances.

So based on the ages of a sample population of four individuals who were specifically chosen to serve as examples of atheists being young and believers being older, Vox uses his own unique brand of statistical analysis to conclude that atheism is both irrational and childish. And just in case there was even a shred of credibility left in his little screed, he tops it off with a footnote which reads, “Is there any doubt that most college-age atheists would have no problem believing in a God who permitted them to get laid at will? This is why even the most idiotic forms of paganism compete so favorably with atheism.” Yes, he’s really suggesting that college-age atheists are all secret worshipers of Aphrodite, Venus, and their sisters.

I dunno, clearly atheism is the intended target here, but it looks to me like most of the blood on that chainsaw is Vox’s own, this time. Fear not, though, the chainsaws reign of errorterror is not over yet. Next on the hit list: all mankind.

But the ultimate atheist irrationality is the idea that Man himself is rational. Despite the fact that many of our behavioral sciences are founded on this principle, including the dismal science so dear to me, almost all of the observable evidence, scientific and casual, forces one to conclude otherwise. Consider how the way in which the educated Western voting class manages to combine total ignorance with fundamental misconceptions to achieve a higher state of irrational consciousness that is breathtaking in its delusionary confidence, the miracle of aggregation notwithstanding.

Vox, being human himself, would no doubt cheerfully agree that his own writings give us a fair sample of “a higher state of irrational consciousness that is breathtaking in its delusionary confidence,” given his misconceptions and ignorance about such topics as the secular basis for morality, etc. Nevertheless, he’s committing a fallacy here by arguing that, because people sometimes behave irrationally, therefore Man is never capable of being rational. It’s the old false dichotomy: either Man is 100% rational 100% of the time, or Man is not capable of rationality, and therefore atheists are irrational when they think that it’s even possible for anyone (e.g. themselves) to be rational.

Predicated on an unreliable human attribute that may not even exist, rejecting the foundation of Man’s most successful civilization, trusting a notoriously quixotic institution for a miracle as a means of replacing that foundation and refusing to learn from its past disasters, atheism is not so much the basis for an irrational philosophy as for an insane one. Attempting to build a society on reason is like waging a war on terror; the effort is doomed to failure because it’s a category error.

So let’s all just reject reason, and build our society on a solid foundation of irrationality! Hooray! Thinking was hard anyway.

Let’s see, so far the chainsaw has chopped down fundamentalists, believers with morals, Vox himself, all mankind, and Western civilization. What else can he hack? Maybe take another whack at himself? He prides himself on his expertise in history, so it’s kind of fun to watch him take a swipe at the alleged hypocrisy of ancient unbelievers, especially after having identified some obscure 18th century author as “History’s first confirmed atheist.”

This irrational, if pragmatic, compromise between a public nod to morality and its private dismissal is an ancient one. When Socrates taught his students that knowledge is the only good and ignorance the only evil more than 2,000 years ago, he was fully aware of the potentially dangerous repercussions of this teaching and argued in The Republic that it was necessary to keep such virtuous knowledge to the ruling elite. The knowledge of the nonexistence of morality was the great secret to which only the rulers were to be privy and the justification for keeping their subjects in ignorance for their own good, lest the herd break out into rebellion.

The ever-practical Romans understood this too. Seneca the Younger described religion as being regarded as true by the common folk, false by the wise, and useful by the rulers. But as an aristocrat in a cruel and brutal culture, he may have understated religion’s importance to social stability, because it is more than useful for the peaceful maintenance of a civilized society, it is a downright necessity.

I dunno, saying that “religion is…false to the wise” sounds pretty atheistic to me. Not sure what Jean Meslier could have said in the 1700′s to “confirm” his atheism any more clearly, especially since Vox seems to want to accuse Seneca and Socrates of having that same lack of moral foundation that he attributes to atheism.

Anyway, we’re done. As I said, a longish section, and yet for all the sound and fury, still no substance. It was a waste of Vox’s time to have written it, and a waste of any else’s time to read it.

There are many atheists who live lives that are morally exemplary according to religious standards. This causes some atheists to claim that this exemplary behavior is evidence of atheist moral superiority, because the atheist is behaving in a moral manner of his own volition, not due to any fear of being eternally damned or zapped by a lightning bolt hurled by an offended sky deity. However, this is a logical error, because while motivation plays a role in how we judge immoral actions, there are no similar gradations of that which is morally correct. There are many evils, there is only one Good.

Only one Good? Is this perhaps a reflection of Jesus’ remarks that only God is good? No, it’s not even that sophisticated. There is only one Good because Vox needs an excuse to deny the existence of the Better, and thus make it impossible, by definition, for atheists to be better than believers.

We see this in the shallowness of Vox’s defense of his “only one Good” claim.

For example, the act of stealing a loaf of bread is considered more immoral if the theft was committed by a rich thief who simply didn’t feel like paying for it than if the bread was stolen by a poor man who needed to feed his two hungry children. But the act of driving an injured person to the hospital is no more right when performed by a good Samaritan who just happened to be passing by than by a paramedic team who will be financially compensated for their actions. We may find the one more admirable, being less expected, but it cannot be more morally correct because that would imply that there was some degree of moral incorrectness to a correct action.

A couple seconds’ worth of reflection would suffice to show that, if one action cannot be morally superior to another, then neither can it be inferior, otherwise whatever it was inferior to would be superior. Thus, according to Vox’s argument, Jesus was mistaken when He said that the “widow’s mite,” given out of poverty, was better than the rich donations the Pharisees gave out of their wealth.

What Vox is trying to do here is to pull a fast bait-and-switch. Though he claims to be addressing an “argument from moral superiority,” his rebuttal hinges on substituting “moral correctness” in place of “moral superiority.” This would seem to be an ingenious, if deceptive strategy. After all, if you get the correct answer, you can’t have some other answer that is more correct, can you?

Alas, this is simply not the case. There are many situations where more than one “correct” answer is possible, some answers being better than others. If you see a hungry, homeless man, for example, and he asks you for money, is it correct to give him some cash, or to take him to McDonalds for a free meal, or to secure some training and/or medical help that will equip him to provide for his own needs, or to launch a program that will provide food, housing, rehabilitation, and job placement services for a large number of homeless people?

Contrary to what Vox claims, there’s nothing really incorrect about giving food to a hungry man, even though it’s better if you can take steps that will provide a long term solution to his hunger and homelessness. The person who grudgingly gives to the poor because he doesn’t want people to call him stingy is doing the morally correct thing, but it’s better if he gives willingly, out of genuine compassion for his fellow man. One action can be more morally correct than another, by encompassing a greater context, both in terms of the motivations for the action, and in terms of the scope of the “blessings” that result.

In other words, there are lots of things that we can do to make life better for ourselves and those around us, and there’s no harm or moral stigma if it turns out that not all of those things are the Ultimate Best Perfect Morally Correct Solution. One good deed can be inferior to another simply by undertaking less, without necessarily being an evil deed. Even just minding our own business is a morally correct choice in a lot of situations, though there is usually a morally superior alternative to mere passive non-harm.

Vox, however, makes it clear in the closing lines of his argument that all he’s really after is some way to deny, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, the validity and cogency of the argument from moral superiority.

An atheist can certainly behave better than a theist by the theist’s own moral reckoning. But it is logically incorrect to insist that identical moral behavior on the part of an atheist and a theist is proof of the atheist’s moral superiority.

That’s what Vox would like to accomplish by his pseudo-syllogistic legerdemain, but in fact he’s contradicting both common sense and the teachings of Jesus. A person who behaves in a superficially moral manner just because he fears punishment is morally inferior to the person who voluntarily embraces and advances moral behavior because good is intrinsically better than evil. In the latter case, morality is a reflection of the atheist’s own good nature; in the former case, the virtue does not spring from the heart of the person, but is forcibly imposed from without. There may be goodness in the heart of the person doing the compelling, but the one under compulsion has no right to claim that virtue to his own credit.

And Vox can’t deny it. For all the fluff and bluster about how godliness is supposed to be the source of virtue, study after study finds that non-Christians are not the moral reprobates that Christian haranguing would have us believe. They’re not just good, they’re good without having to be coerced by some superstitious fear of endless torment. Only people who deny the existence of Hell can make a comparable claim to loving goodness entirely untainted by some fear of ultimate punishment. (But without Hell, what need is there for a Savior to save us from it?)

Backed into a corner, Vox cannot think up a better rebuttal than to try and deny the possibility of one thing being better than another. It’s a silly argument, and all the more so in that it “proves” just as easily that God cannot be morally superior to an atheist. But we already knew that atheists were superior, because you can actually see atheists showing up and helping in tangible and meaningful ways. And that’s more good than the Christian God is willing and able to do.

For example, in referring to last Tuesday’s TIA post, “Mike T” writes:

It is a very weak argument, that fails to even understand the point that Vox was making that the Golden Rule is simply not a moral statement at all because it provides no inherent, objective guidance on what we should do. If a psychopath or a sociopath were to follow the golden rule as the foundation of their moral code, it could lead to some extremely *ahem* “interesting” situations. Hence why Vox said that the Golden Rule only makes sense as a means of applying a pre-existing, objective moral system to your actions.

Mind you, Vox didn’t actually say that the Golden Rule makes sense as a means of applying a pre-existing, objective moral system (at least not in Chapter 14 of TIA), but he did say that it was not a perfect basis for determining morality, and I did agree that “Yes, the Golden Rule is not a perfect and infallible guide to morality.” But if agreeing with Vox makes my argument weaker, then perhaps I ought to revisit the topic.

There’s a lot more I could say about the Golden Rule, of course. In my original post, I wanted to focus more on the fact that Vox was using a shallow, 1-dimensional strawman to distract attention from the argument atheists actually use, which is that Biblical morality often falls short of what one would expect from a divinely inspired and supremely good revelation. But if we just want to look at the Golden Rule, there’s lots more we could say.

For instance, while it’s true that you can think up fringe cases (e.g. psychopaths) where the Golden Rule could be abused, it’s still a good moral guide in the vast majority of cases. Jesus did, after all, preach it as a guiding principle, so you’d think Christians would acknowledge that it has some utility in that particular domain. Even in the cases where it can be abused, it’s not as though any other moral system would do better—a psychopath is going to remain psychopathic no matter how many times you read Exodus 20 at him.

Mike T is wrong, of course, about the Golden Rule not providing any kind of practical guidance on what we should do. If you’re considering whether or not to punch someone in the face, ask yourself, “Would I want to BE punched in the face?” If you can answer that question, then you can receive moral guidance from the Golden Rule. Even if all the Golden Rule does is to restrain you from inflicting suffering on others (because you would not want suffering inflicted on yourself), it has served a tremendously practical and specific moral purpose.

In fact, it is revelation-based morality, and not the Golden Rule, that fails to give us reliable guidance as to right and wrong behavior. If right and wrong are determined solely by divine decree, if a thing is good solely because God permits or demands it, and if we assume that God is sometimes willing and able to speak to human hearts, then there is no behavior that is not potentially good so long as it is arguably the will of God. If someone murders someone else, and God spoke to his heart and told him to do it, revelation-based morality gives us no basis for calling his behavior “evil.” We have no way to disprove the claim that God revealed, to that one person, that murder was His will.

Nor can we claim that we know God would never reveal that murder was His will. Even without all the Biblical examples of cases where God did command people to kill each other, if right and wrong are defined solely by what God has revealed, then we can’t assume that murder (or torture or stealing or lying) would be so wrong in and of themselves that God would be wrong to want them. If you assume that there’s a higher standard to which even God’s behavior and desires are accountable, you are making moral judgments about God’s revelations based on a secular, objective moral standard. That means that God’s revelations are not the source of moral standards, since God’s ability to dictate moral decrees is itself subject to a higher, secular standard of morality. But if that’s the case, then it’s the secular standard of morality, and not divine revelation, that is really determining what is right and what is wrong.

There are also some very practical reasons why revelation-based morality actually makes it more difficult to tell right from wrong. An ethicist who defined morality in terms of what God allegedly revealed in the Old and New Testaments would have a harder time explaining why it is wrong to practice genocide, to deny a man his own wife and children, to sell your daughter into sexual slavery, to mutilate babies’ genitals, to put someone to death for the “crime” of working on Saturday, and so on.

By condoning and even commanding such actions, the Bible leaves the revelation-based moralist without any means of declaring that such things are intrinsically wrong, and forces him (or her) to declare that they are only wrong relatively and situationally. There is no objective standard of right or wrong behavior, because the behaviors themselves are neither right nor wrong. They only become right or wrong relative to God’s inscrutable and unpredictable will for a particular time, place, and situation. And since “God works in mysterious ways,” and “His thoughts are not our thoughts,” we can’t really predict what will or will not be God’s perfect will for any given situation. Unless, of course, we’ve got an objective, secular moral standard which rules over the moral decrees God Himself is allowed to make.

So I hope it’s more clear by now that I do not agree with Vox Day’s attempt to portray revelation-based morality as being somehow superior to the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule does not need the Bible to guide people into correct moral behavior (much of which consists of minding one’s own business and not inflicting suffering on others). And, sadly, the Bible does not show much evidence of relying too heavily on the Golden Rule (despite Jesus’ endorsement of it). The Israelites, for example, probably would not want to be wiped out by the Amalekites, so that fact alone ought to have guided them in considering whether or not the prophet Samuel was really telling them to do things that a genuinely moral deity would have endorsed.

There, I’ve contradicted Vox. Is my argument stronger now?

It is often asserted that Christian morality is no different than other ethical systems that are based on the Golden Rule. And it is true that one can find pre-Christian examples of the same concept in the Analects of Confucius, in the Mahabharata, the Dhammapada, the Udanavarga, and even the histories of Herodotus. Still, there are two errors in this argument because Christian morality is not based on the Golden Rule, and because the Golden Rule, which states that a man should not do to others what he would not have them do to him, cannot provide a basis for a functional moral system.

Vox is partly right: Jesus didn’t base his religion on the Golden Rule, and more’s the pity because it would have produced a better moral system if he had. But the standard atheistic argument is more an observation that the best parts of Christianity, the parts worth keeping, are not original with Jesus, but were absorbed into Judaism and Christianity from the moral systems of the surrounding cultures. Vox, once again, is merely fencing with a straw man.

Vox pursues his point that Christianity is not based on the Golden Rule by making an argument that badly confuses ethics with theology.

Jesus Christ’s version of the Golden Rule… is practical advice given in the context of a general admonishment and it cannot possibly be the essence of Christian morality, for in the very same chapter, Jesus informs his listeners that “only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” will enter that kingdom.

Vox is confused here on two counts. First of all, he confuses the moral question (“How do I know what is right and what is wrong?”) with the soteriological question (“How do I get into heaven?”). He also seems to be confused about God’s will, which he apparently regards as being something incompatible with the Golden Rule. But why would Jesus want us to obey the Golden Rule if it were not going to get us into heaven? A more thoughtful theologian would be less likely to perceive Vox’s alleged conflict between obeying God and obeying the Golden Rule.

Vox goes on to give us what he calls “the true foundation of Christian morality, …in Matthew 22:37:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

This time Vox is on more solid ground. Yes, the reference to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a fair rewording of the Golden Rule, but that’s not Rule One. Rule One is to devote yourself completely to God, which in practice means unquestioning obedience to whatever the priests and prophets tell you God’s will is, whether it’s selling your daughter into sexual slavery or beating your slaves or taking genocide to the point of killing every man, woman, child, babe, and beast. This takes precedence over the Golden Rule in Jesus’ eyes, and it’s a shame he had to tarnish an otherwise good moral system with such primitive and barbaric superstitions.

Vox objects to the Golden Rule on the grounds that it’s not perfect. “Obviously, a moral system based on loving the Lord your God and obediently submitting your will to His is a very different moral system and a far more objective one than the Golden Rule, which is not only entirely subjective, but incapable of accounting for either rational calculation or human psychopathy,” he says, apparently oblivious to the ease with which “the will of God” has been construed to mean “Gott mit Uns,” which is German for “we’re right no matter what we do.” Or words to that effect.

In fact, obeying God’s will is not merely difficult, but impossible, since God does not show up in real life to tell us what that will might be. Instead, we are forced to rely on what men say God’s will is—and no, it does not help that some other men have gotten together and voted to declare certain of their brethren to be infallible and inspired prophets and apostles. The leadership and teaching of an infallible and perfect deity might indeed provide us with a superior moral system, if we had real-world access to such a deity. But we don’t, and in His absence men have found it far too easy to their own desires into the words of Holy Writ.

Going back to the original atheistic argument (the actual argument, not Vox’s peculiar straw man), there is very little in Jesus’ personal moral system that is unique to Christianity, as opposed to being a continuation of moral principles that previously existed in various pagan and/or pre-Christian cultures. In fact, Jesus’ only true innovation might be the idea that we should love our enemies and do good to those that hate us. But seriously, is that really such a good idea?

Let’s suppose our Christian president decided to follow Jesus’ only original precept, and respond to 9/11 not by invading other countries, but by sending gifts and financial aid to Osama bin Ladin. Do you suppose Jesus’ moral principles would make the world a better place, if consistently put into actual practice? When you think about it, Jesus’ unique moral innovation isn’t really such a good idea in real life. Yet most of his other admirable moral teachings concern practices that were already old when Abraham was a kindergartner.

The moral history argument is still valid, despite Vox’s attempt to distract attention from it with a bogus straw man about the Golden Rule. Yes, the Golden Rule is not a perfect and infallible guide to morality (but then again, neither is the Bible and its questionable endorsements of slavery, genocide, and having sex with your brother’s widow). But the real point, the point Vox avoids mentioning let alone addressing, is that the Judeo-Christian tradition appears after most of the moral principles it seeks credit for inventing. And if it strikes you as ironic that someone would lie in order to defend morality, then you’ve probably got a pretty good handle on why atheists shake their heads at the moral bluster of Christians like Vox.

This is another superficial argument popular with Low Church atheists, although it pops up from time to time among the more militant High Church breed. It states that even if God exists, the morality He dictates is so abhorrent to the atheist and inferior to the atheist’s own moral sensibilities that the atheist cannot believe in Him. And in the unlikely event that the atheist is ever confronted by God, he will refuse to acknowledge His divine status let alone His right to rule over Mankind.

One is tempted to think that Vox expects most thoughtful and rational readers to have abandoned his book before now, leaving him free to say whatever he likes without worrying too much about whether or not he can get away with it. Surely by this point only his fans are still tuned in, and they’re not going to worry too much about whether he’s really addressing substantial arguments against God or merely breaking rhetorical wind, so long as he talks like he’s refuting the Bad Guys.

But we’re still here, Vox.

Vox’s “argument from God’s character” sounds vaguely like a combination of the argument from the inconsistencies in what men say about God’s character, coupled with a non-propositional reaction to the absurdity and incoherence of the pictures men paint of their God(s). The latter isn’t even an argument at all, of course, since it’s merely an expression of how one might react to the conclusions Vox is drawing. Yet it is the latter notion that is the focus of Vox’s “rebuttal.”

I find it very difficult to take this argument seriously, given how the first words out of every angel’s mouth seems to be “Fear not!” I am as arrogant as anyone (and more than most, I’m told), but on the day when I meet my Maker, the Creator Lord of the Universe, I fully intend to set new speed records in performing a full proskynesis complete with averted eyes. It’s not so much the Biblical confidence that “every knee shall bow” that makes me skeptical about this theoretical atheist machismo in the face of the Almighty, it’s the part about how even the demons believe . . . and tremble. I don’t know what it takes to make a powerful fallen angel shake with terror just thinking about it, but I have a feeling that neither Richard Dawkins nor Bertrand Russell will be wagging their fingers at God and criticizing Him for insufficient evidence on the day their disbelief is conclusively destroyed.

Yeah, I don’t expect Dawkins or Russell or anyone else to be wagging their fingers at anyone on some future Final Judgment Day either, though not for the same reasons as Vox. Vox apparently wants to make the belligerent version of Pascal’s Wager—the threat that “God’s gonna gitcha because you dared to disagree with what I believe about Him!” Only it’s a hollow threat, because Vox is only sharing the things that people have told him and that he gullibly believes just on their say-so. There’s no real-world basis for concluding that God is too darn scary to be opposed, there’s only the stories that Vox heard from the Christians, who heard it from the Pharisees, who heard it from the Persians, who heard it from Zoroaster, who made it up so that people would be afraid to doubt him.

Vox does almost seem to recognize that he’s beating up a non-argument, though of course he tries to make it look like he’s actually accomplished something significant with this little charade.

The argument is totally specious from the logical perspective, of course, because the fact of God’s existence no more depends on the quality of His character than does Charles Manson’s. Things exist or don’t exist regardless of whether we wish them to be or not.

And that, in a nutshell, is Vox’s big problem. Regardless of whether or not he wishes God were true, God does not actually show up in real life, which means Vox has no real-world source for his information. He has only the stories men tell about God, and the superstitions and subjective feelings of believers, and the speculative sophistries of theologians, as the foundation for his faith—and those stories, superstitions, subjective feelings and speculations all say inconsistent and mutually-contradictory things about God and about His character.

We can’t tell what’s real and what’s not just on the basis of what we do and do not wish to be real, yet that’s all Vox has to go on: he wishes God were real, he thinks God ought to be real, therefore God is real. But the infallible and objective standard of truth is that truth is consistent with itself. The Gospel stories about God fail to meet that standard, and therefore, no matter what anyone may wish or not wish, the Gospel is not true and God does not exist, at least as Christians envision Him.

We’ve got room for another blunted link on the Chainsaw, so let’s look at the “Argument from Moral Evolution.”

The idea that morals are not defined by sacred texts but have instead evolved naturally is the subject of much pseudo-scientific speculation and a few books, such as Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, have been written about it. Christopher Hitchens is the foremost advocate of this idea among the New Atheists. While they admit that morality exists, they argue that it has evolved naturally through a material process, therefore it cannot have been acquired through divine revelation.

Apparently, Vox believes that morality is younger than writing, since illiterate people can’t derive their morality from sacred books they are unable to read. Pity those poor savages, having their food stolen, being beaten, sometimes having family killed, and sitting around wondering, “Hmm, I wonder if that was a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t have any Bible to tell me right from wrong, so there’s no way I can tell whether pain and loss and suffering are better or worse than strength and health and satisfaction. Gosh, I sure hope we learn to read and write soon!”

Vox’s rebuttal to the idea of moral evolution is to play stupid, and pretend to believe that the only way morals could “evolve” is biochemically.

There are a number of problems with the idea of moral evolution if we pretend that it is not a metaphor but literal evolution. First, if the mechanism of evolution takes place at the gene level, it is very difficult to understand how one moral would mutate and replicate itself genetically. Second, it is easy to observe that the pace of moral transformation is rapidly accelerating. Less than forty years ago, homosexuality was universally considered an immoral action. Today, there is a substantial minority in the West that insists that belief in either the immorality or the psychological abnormality of homosexuality is itself immoral, a rapid notional transformation that is consistent with neither past moral transformations nor biological evolution. Furthermore, moral evolution depends upon the group selection aspect of evolutionary theory that has largely fallen into disfavor among modern evolutionary biologists.

Either mankind should expect to start sprouting wings within the next century, or the process of human moral development cannot be reasonably described as evolution.

As California’s Proposition 8 sadly showed, morals are not evolving quite as fast as Vox would suggest. In fact, taken in the light of gay history as a whole, it would seem that Californian morals were rather regressing more than advancing. It’s true we’ve at least progressed beyond the point of outright stoning gays, as was the “morality” advanced by the Old Testament. But we’ve still got quite a ways to go before people can relax their homophobic prejudices enough to refrain from punishing people for simply being what they are.

Be that as it may, Vox either does not understand what moral evolution is, or he’s just playing dumb so as to have an excuse to give a flippant dismissal to a very serious problem: The Bible, as a source for “divinely-inspired” morality, has some pretty immoral things in it—things that were supposedly revealed to man by God Himself.

Take ritual mutilation of the genitals of baby boys, for instance. Or animal sacrifice. Or stoning people for working on Saturday, blaspheming, or disobeying their parents. Ok, we still practice the genital mutilation, but a lot of those things we’ve more or less outgrown, culturally. How is it that our morals are better than some of the morals in the Bible, if the Bible is supposed to be the authoritative source for morality?

The answer is that the Biblical writers (and more importantly, the Biblical writings) were the products of their times. That’s a big problem for the inspiration of the Scripture, because if we can discover that the Bible has outdated and inferior moral information, why should we assume that any other information is necessarily true and up-to-date, especially in the face of verifiable evidence to the contrary? Why should we take the Bible’s word for it that God created the world in six days when we manifestly cannot take the Bible’s word for it that slavery and genocide are A-ok with God?

It’s no wonder Vox would rather play dumb than confront this problem squarely. Moral authority is supposed to be the Bible’s strong point, and if we admit that Biblical morality is unexpectedly obsolete, it casts doubt on all the rest as well. And it does no good to say that the bad stuff is all in the Old Testament, because Jesus stated quite clearly that he regarded the OT Scriptures as being genuinely inspired, authoritative, and perfect. That means Jesus was no more morally advanced than the OT writers were, and didn’t point out any moral flaws in the Law of Moses because he couldn’t discern any. We, today, are morally more advanced than Jesus, and how can that be if Jesus were God the Son?

Maybe that’s why believers today feel a twinge of nostalgia for the “good old days” when you could really punish people for disagreeing with your religion. Maybe Proposition 8 was an expression of dissatisfaction with modern moral advances, and a desire to go back to a more primitive system based on “might makes right” and “different is evil.”

Let’s hope it was just a temporary setback, but let’s also work twice as hard to improve our culture’s morals. Unlike biological evolution, moral evolution takes hard work by men and women of conscience. But it benefits everybody in the long run. Even nostalgic people with rusty chainsaws.

This argument takes the possibility of the supernatural a little too seriously for any of the New Atheists, but one probably encounters it more often from Low Church atheists than one hears all the previous five arguments combined. And since it’s a Low Church argument, it is naturally a particularly stupid one that manages to ignore huge quantities of readily available evidence pertaining to human behavior while simultaneously assuming perfect long-term rationality on the part of every individual human being. This argument states that because Heaven is really good and Hell is really bad, the purported choice that God offers between the two really isn’t a choice, because what sort of idiot would choose to go to Hell? Therefore, it would be unfair for God to send anyone to Hell, and therefore neither God nor Hell can possibly exist.

Vox’s rebuttal (if such a such a misshapen argument could be said to provide an opportunity for rebuttal) is that people choose stupid things all the time, like gambling, drugs, promiscuity, and cheering for the Minnesota Vikings. Apparently, Vox’s opinion of the common man is so low that he imagines vast swaths of humanity being sort of people who, when offered the chance to suffer unimaginable tortures for all eternity, would respond, “Sounds great, where do I sign up!?”

Then again, maybe Vox doesn’t have quite so demeaning a view of humanity, and is merely playing along with the constraints imposed by the peculiar shape of his weird little straw man. If you’re going to base your rebuttal on the assumption that God offers people a choice between eternal bliss and eternal suffering, and some people intentionally and stupidly choose Hell, you’re going to end up making some pretty disparaging observations about those who make the wrong choice.

Then again, perhaps that’s the point of this whole section: to imply that atheists are stupid, and that they deliberately choose to go to Hell (and abuse drugs and sleep around and gamble and other stuff). “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like other men: drunkards, promiscuous, self-destructive, etc. etc…”

There’s a fundamental problem with Hell, and one that bothers a lot of people (including Vox, apparently), so he wants to deal with the issue somehow. He just can’t confront the problem directly, so he creates a disfigured mish-mash of artificial objections that he can use to brag about how superior he thinks Christians are to non-believers.

The fundamental problem is that it’s not fair to send people to Hell for their sins. It’s cruel, despotic, unjust, and barbaric—precisely the opposite of the sort of behavior that would be consistent with a loving and fair Heavenly Father Who was willing to do whatever it takes, including the death of His own divine Son, to make sure that none of His children would perish. So Christians have come up with all kinds of schemes to get God off the hook somehow, ranging from the notion that Hell is only a temporary therapy to “burn” the evil out of you, to the notion that sinners not only deserve Hell, but actively pursue it, and reject all attempts by God to rescue them and relieve their suffering.

None of these schemes really work, however. The idea that God would only torture His children temporarily, until He broke their will and coerced them into submission to His demands, is still barbaric, and flies in the face of what many Christians believe regarding free will. God is not a loving father, He’s a vicious bully who gets His way by hurting people until they holler “Uncle” and promise to become His little toadies. Is that the Gospel?

Or you could say that He doesn’t intend it as coercion, He is merely applying it as a therapy, to cleanse you from your sin. That’s a problem, though, because it’s supposed to be the blood of Jesus that has the power to cleanse you from your sins. There’s nothing in the Bible about pain and suffering having this power instead (and if it did, there’s lots of unfortunate people who ought to be getting free passes to heaven, faith or no faith!) But the Bible says God has the power to wash away sins. If God can cleanse you, then let Him cleanse you, but if it takes agony and torment to cleanse you, then let’s not waste our breath on this “blood of Jesus” nonsense.

You also have the problem of the way Revelation, and the parables of Jesus, portray people being thrown into Hell. There’s no mention there of “This is for your own good,” or “Throw them in the fire until they are refined and come out pure,” it’s all about “the smoke of their torment ascends forever.” Smoke, of course, is used in the Bible as a symbol for things that don’t last, just like real-life smoke quickly disappears and vanishes once the source of the smoke ceases. Thus, “the smoke of their torment” means their torment must last forever, since the smoke would not rise forever unless it had an eternal source.

Despite clear Biblical references to people being thrown into Hell against their will, some Christians like C. S. Lewis have salved their consciences regarding Hell by imagining that sinners voluntarily leap into Hell in order to run away from a God they hate. It’s got to be rather difficult to run away from an omnipresent being, but Lewis imagines that they achieve this to some degree by blinding themselves with the agonies of Hell. So it’s all their fault, get it? God isn’t being unfair at all, no matter what it says in Matthew 7 and 25.

The reason Hell doesn’t sit well within Christianity is because Christianity claims a Jewish heritage, but the doctrine of Hell is a foreign import. Read back through your Old Testament, and you’ll find that Moses knew nothing about a future resurrection and judgment in which the sinners were to be cast into eternal punishment. In the Law of Moses, salvation and blessing, and punishment and cursing, are related to this mortal life, not the alleged next one.

Nor did these ideas enter into Jewish thinking through the revelations of any particular Jewish prophet. You won’t read of Samuel or Isaiah or Joel saying, “Hey guys, guess what? God just told me we’re going to live forever, and that there’s going to be a resurrection where He judges all the deeds we’ve done in this life.” Before the Babylonian captivity, neither the Jewish prophets nor the Jewish people show any awareness of this kind of doctrinal thinking.

After the Captivity, however, everybody knew that the Pharisees believed in resurrection and angels and all sorts of doctrines that are strikingly similar to Zoroastrianism and Mithraism. It’s not that any Jewish prophet revealed these ideas, it’s just that, somehow, the Jews who returned from Persian lands were familiar with Persian religious concepts, and treated them as their own.

So why believe in Hell? If it’s a foreign import, and not really part of Mosaic Judaism as originally taught to the Israelites, why not just send it back to Persia and be done with it? Well, unfortunately, Christians are as hooked on Hell as any cocaine addict is on his pharmaceutical weakness. Without a Hell to be saved from, you see, there is no need for a Savior to come and die to save you from the judgment to come. Christians need to say most people are going to Hell so that they can have a threat horrible enough to justify losing their Messiah to capital punishment.

That’s is the fundamental impetus of the Gospel: to explain how God could let people crucify a man that Christians regarded as His special Messiah. It’s backwards thinking: given that Jesus is dead, what story can we imagine that makes it sound like this is all part of some inspired master plan? It doesn’t so much come from analyzing what a loving, omnipotent Father would really do, since a loving Father wouldn’t create a Hell in the first place, or at least not for most of His own children to suffer eternally in. The problem is more immediate: Jesus is dead, now how can we make this sound like God is still in control?

Hell, for all its flaws and contradictions, is an essential part of that rationalization. It doesn’t matter whether Hell makes God look cruel, despotic and unjust, what matters most is dealing with the immediate problem, Jesus’ death. If Hell can be a terrible fate looming before all mankind, then Jesus’ death can be seen as a noble sacrifice intended to save us from that fate. It’s all part of The Plan, you see. Otherwise, Jesus’ death makes no sense, and the Gospel is a non sequitur.

Just because it meets men’s psychological needs, however, doesn’t mean that Hell is actually true. Hell is such a flagrantly inconsistent and irrational knot in the Gospel knickers that most Christians try to excuse it in some way, and some abandon it entirely. Since truth is consistent with itself, we can safely conclude that Hell is not part of real-world truth. It cannot be separated from the Gospel core, however, which means that the whole Resurrection story is in doubt. Christians don’t have a good answer for this one, and that’s why Vox has to invent an absurd and barely-recognizable straw man in order to have something to “refute.”

This argument states that because the Bible and every other sacred text is wholly man-made and as fictitious as anything written by Shakespeare or any other classic from the literary canon, there is no reason to take them seriously, much less base moral systems or societal structures upon them. The problem here is that the Bible has not only proven to be a more reliable guide in many instances than the current state of secular science as well as an accurate historical document, but sometimes a better predictor of future events than the experts on the subject. I bought Euros back when they were worth just over ninety cents on the dollar because of the eschatological interpretations of the Book of Revelation that the European Common Market would one day become a single political entity, the endless vows of the European elite to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, the EUR/USD rate is bouncing around 1.36. Maybe it was just a fortuitous coincidence, but on the other hand, if a northern country shows signs of invading Israel, let’s just say I won’t hesitate to short their currency.

Just for reference, let’s look at the part of the Book of Revelation which predicts that the European Common Market would become a single political entity whose currency would start out low relative to the dollar and then rise in value (again, relative to the US dollar):

Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born.

I can’t help but think that if the Wall Street financiers had only followed the sage financial advice in those two verses from Revelation 12, our economy wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today.

Vox scoffs at the idea that his successful, Revelation-based investments could be the result of mere coincidence, and he’s right, it isn’t. This particular scam leaves nothing to chance, and achieves its “magic” by virtue of a simple ploy: rigged scorekeeping. It works like this: you read what the Bible says, and then you look at the world around you, and pick a “fulfillment” based on your assessment of what’s likely to actually happen. If you’re reasonably astute at predicting trends, you can pick a “fulfillment” that’s fairly certain to happen, and voilà, the Bible wins again.

What makes it a sucker bet is this: if, by some unforeseen twist, your prediction turns out to be wrong, then it doesn’t count. It’s not that the Bible was wrong, you see, but merely that you, as an uninspired interpreter, simply misunderstood what Revelation was predicting. By this simple expedient, you filter out all your wrong guesses, and only count the “hits.” Your scorekeeping is so biased that the Bible is guaranteed a 100% score even if its accuracy proves to be less than the value expected for random guessing. None of the failures count, therefore none of them are included. Poof! a perfect score, every time, no matter what you get wrong.

The Revelation prophecy is a good example. Back in the early days of the European community, there was much excitement among evangelical prophecy buffs that the proposed merger of European states would produce a 10-nation consortium that would fulfill the prophecies in Revelation 12 and Daniel 7 about a beast with 10 horns or 10 heads, which prophecy buffs interpreted as being 10 nations (heads) united into a single “beast” that would join the Antichrist and oppose the Second Coming of Jesus.

For example, in 1970, Hal Lindsey wrote a best-selling book entitled The Late, Great Planet Earth, in which he predicted, based on Revelation and Daniel, that the then-six-member European Economic Community would grow to ten members, acquire the Antichrist as its ruler, and inaugurate the Great Tribulation—probably some time in the 1980′s. Lindsey’s prediction of a pre-2000 Rapture and Second Coming failed to come to pass, and the European community failed to turn into the 10-horned beast of the Antichrist. And, by the way, the EU numbers 27 member nations, not ten.

In short, the evangelical excitement over the European Union fulfilling Revelation was misplaced. The Second Coming didn’t happen, the EU has too many members, and does not follow any single leader, let alone a supernatural and diabolical world dictator. To the uninitiated layman, it looks like the Ten Horns/Heads prophecy isn’t even the right prophecy for the emergence of a united Europe. And yet this is the prediction that led Vox to invest in euros.

Despite their pseudo-prophetic trappings, it’s clear that Vox’s investments were based on his own assessment that conditions were ripe for the emergence of a European union. He gives credit to Revelation for “guiding” his decision (even though the interpretations he was trusting have since proven to be wrong), but if you think about it, it’s clear that something must have been telling him that conditions were ripe for a united Europe, otherwise he would have had no reason to expect that the prophecy (however strained) was in the process of coming true. The clues that led him to expect the fulfillment are the clues that actually guided his investment; if the clues hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have expected the fulfillment until after it had happened (which would have been too late for his investments).

It’s telling that Vox has to appeal to a uniquely personal and anecdotal bit of “evidence” in order to try and bolster the idea that the Bible is not just fiction. If God were actually interested and involved enough in human affairs to predict and control major developments like the emergence of a united Europe, then there ought to be much better evidence available than just one time that some guy with a bit of savvy got lucky speculating in foreign currencies. But there isn’t.

It’s even more telling that, given the “Bible=fiction” argument, Vox would turn to apocalyptic prophecy as his source for “evidence” to make the Bible seem factually accurate. Prophecy is notorious for being easily twisted to whatever meaning you want it to have, and even Christians find prophecy to be one of the most difficult areas in which to try and find some common interpretation that all believers can agree with. It’s also prone to provoking the most extreme behavior, as witness the Millerites of the mid-1800′s, and the Branch Davidians of more recent times.

Vox knows that the evidence for the Bible is weak (to say the least), and he began TIA with a disclaimer announcing that he would not be attempting to prove that God is real. The arguments he addresses in Chapter 14, and the approach he takes towards refuting them, shows that he would very much like to be able to prove the atheists wrong, using hard, verifiable, factual evidence. But he can’t. The evidence that should exist, does not. All he has are these personal stories, which people are supposed to believe for social reasons, i.e. because they like Vox as a person and trust what he tells them.

For those of us who would like to see something real, that’s just not enough.

We’re in Chapter 14 of TIA, watching Vox wield what he calls “Occam’s Chainsaw,” which he seems to prefer to the similarly-named Razor. It’s an apt distinction, as shown by his hack-and-slash approach to trying to craft a rebuttal to atheistic arguments. For example, see if you can figure out why he entitled the argument below, “The Argument from Temporal Advantage.”

One of the obvious weaknesses in the atheist concept of the conflict between science and religion is the fact that many, if not most, of the great scientists in history were religious men. Even the first great martyr of Science, Galileo Galilei, was not an atheist but a Christian. For every Watson and Einstein, there is a Newton, a Copernicus, a Kepler, and yes, a Galileo.

If Vox is following the pattern of the previous sections of Chapter 14, it would seem that the “argument from temporal advantage” is supposed to be an argument made by atheists, which Vox is attempting to refute. Yet as far as I can tell, no atheist is making any kind of argument from temporal advantage, nor does Vox bother to clarify what argument he thinks he might be rebutting. This is apparently a purely fictitious argument which Vox invents solely to create a pretext for making claims like the following:

[N]early all of the great religious scientists were not merely religious, but Christians, and … there were far fewer scientists than there are today. The first fact is significant because it indicates that there is likely a difference between the Christian worldview that supported a search for scientific truth and the various non-Christian worldviews which did not. The second fact is even more interesting, as it suggests that the non-Christian worldview of today’s science may in fact be hindering the pace of scientific development rather than helping it… [T]here are far more scientists [today] accomplishing far less in terms of significant scientific developments.

Vox is apparently looking at the world through Jesus-colored prisms—his view of science and history is not merely colored by his preconceptions, but seriously distorted. It’s going to take some work to put things back in their proper perspective, so we probably won’t get past this particular argument today.

Let’s start with the Christian worldview, and what it contributes to science. Once upon a time in the West, there was no separation between Church and State, and political, economic, and social factors made sure that virtually every responsible member of society was a Christian, at least in name. So yes, it’s true that famous scientists of the past were Christians. But did their Christian faith give them a worldview that led to a greater aptitude for scientific discoveries?

If that were the case, we ought to see believing scientists continuing to keep up the same pace. Granted, religion has rather fallen by the wayside as science has become more advanced, but nevertheless there are still institutions remaining that are specifically devoted to promoting the Christian worldview in the scientific domain—places like Discovery Institute and the Institute for Creation Research and the science departments of various denominational colleges and universities.

If, as Vox suggests, the Christian worldview gives a competitive advantage to the believing scientist, and lack of a Christian worldview actually inhibits the unbelieving scientist, then we ought to see a remarkable thing: a continuing succession of Galileos and Newtons emerging from the Christian communities, and leaving their handicapped, unbelieving fellow-scientists behind. But we don’t. As Vox himself argues, the days of one man inventing calculus, or discovering genetics, are gone for good, for both believer and non-believer.

How, then, do we explain the dramatic decline in significant discoveries made by scientists? We don’t, because we don’t have to. This alleged “decline” exists only behind Vox’s Jesus-colored prisms; in real life, science is continuing to make profound and significant discoveries. Newton and da Vinci and Galileo made discoveries that seemed more significant, but that’s because they stood out, due to the rarity of such advances in those days, and because (being made in the early days of modern science) they were breaking new ground.

Take aviation science, for example. You don’t hear about modern scientists being the first to create a heavier-than-air flying machine, but that doesn’t mean that design developments have declined since the days of the Wright brothers! We all know who the Wright brothers were, but I’m guessing not as many can readily identify who invented the helicopter, the SR-71, or the Space Shuttle. Not because science is declining under a non-Christian worldview, but because science has moved past the days when one man (or woman) could do it all, and has become a field where many individuals work together to produce significant results.

Then there’s the fact that science has advanced so far in some areas that the average layperson won’t necessarily recognize the significance of new discoveries as they are made. String theory, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, and so on, are only a few of the areas that could end up having a tremendous impact on our lives and our understanding of the physical world around us, but relatively few people have more than a pop science idea of what these fields even are, let alone which discoveries would be significant, or how you would know.

One of the big things science has accomplished in the present generation is to discover enough about the universe to begin to ask the right questions—questions undreamed of by the Galileos and Newtons of the past. Vox tries to make it sound like science is in decline because we now are beginning to grasp just how much there is out there to discover: “Oh, we don’t know what dark matter is, so science must be making us ignorant!” No Vox, Galileo and Newton didn’t know what dark matter was either. We’re learning more, not less.

Naturally, he fails to address the fact that scientists today are making these discoveries by applying the same sort of scientific principles and methods that Galileo and Newton used. These scientific principles and methods—and not their beliefs about the supernatural—are what enabled the great scientists of the past to become the great scientists of the past. And if you doubt that, just ask yourself: what new discoveries have Christian theologians made in the past 500 years? You want to see what a Christian worldview gives you, look at the progress of theology. Arguments yes, but discoveries?

Vox tries to make it sound like a Christian worldview is friendlier to science than a non-Christian worldview, but that’s a claim that owes more to tribalism than objective fact. You’ll notice he never explains why you’d be a better scientist for believing distinctively Christian dogmas, like the one that says that God raised Jesus from the dead. Nor does he detail any of the significant ways in which a Christian worldview differs from a secular, scientific worldview. The latter would be a good first step in explaining why a Christian worldview would be better, except that it just won’t work.

The Christian worldview, you see, is based first and foremost on the assumption that we already know all the right answers to all the important questions. Theologians don’t make new discoveries, they merely reinterpret the “discoveries” (or rather, “revelations”) of the past. Whatever facts we may find in the real world, we already know that somehow, some way, these facts can and must glorify God, and our task is to find ways to make the evidence fit our inherited, traditional conclusions.

That kind of attitude is not helpful in scientific research, which is why it has competed poorly in the academic marketplace. Those who employ a secular worldview, who pursue knowledge with the attitude that truth is dictated by the real world, and not by any ancient writings, are the people whose minds were open to discover new answers that didn’t necessarily agree with what the Scriptures were telling us. Discovering new answers made these secular scholars more successful in their careers, and inspired others to imitate their approach, and that’s the answer to the question Vox doesn’t dare ask: Why is science becoming such a godless field? The secular approach works better, because it doesn’t burden you with the handicap of needing to make every answer agree with some predetermined list of “correct” ones.

Some have proposed that if Galileo and Newton were transported to modern times, and shown everything that science has learned since their day, they would discard their Christian faith and embrace the discoveries of science. Vox, in order to ensure that every chapter contains a full day’s supply of irony, responds:

To assert that the greatest minds of the past, the original thinkers who weren’t afraid to challenge either orthodox dogma or the intellectual conventions, would automatically abandon their faith in favor of a status quo professed by the masses of over-specialized, under-achieving scientific mediocrities of today is not only a completely baseless assumption, it is egotistic wishful thinking.

Vox could have made this section a good deal shorter, and more accurate, if he reduced it to the last three words, which pretty much sum up his whole ignorant and antipathetic rant.

The first atheist argument is what Vox calls the Argument from Authority. (Any relationship to any fallacy of the same name is thoroughly intentional, if misleading).

There are three versions of this. The first is based on the partially accurate but misleading claim that atheists are more intelligent than theists, a claim which depends on altering the definition of atheist from “an individual who does not believe in God” to “an individual who calls himself an atheist.” This is an implicit argument from authority because there is no point to making any reference to this theoretical superiority except to put pressure on the non-atheist to stop thinking for himself and accept the view of his intellectual superiors.

Vox offers no explanation for his bizarre claim that it alters the definition of atheist to say that someone who calls themselves an atheist is an atheist, nor does he offer any kind of support for his claim that atheists make this argument. He simply throws it up there so that he has some kind of pretext for accusing atheists of making some kind of fallacious appeal to authority. He seems to imply that it is indeed true that atheists are more intelligent, but obviously this does not imply God’s non-existence. Vox might have had a point, if there were any atheists who were actually making this fallacious claim.

Vox claims that a second version of the Appeal to Authority is when Sam Harris points out that “93 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science do not accept the idea of God.” This is indeed an appeal to authority, but it’s not a fallacious appeal in this case because the appeal to authority is not offered as a logical proof of a syllogistic proposition, it is merely cited as empirical evidence supporting the conclusion.

The National Academy of Science is made up of men and women who have acquired legitimate expertise in the fields of natural science, through their study and research into the verifiable facts one can observe about the world around us. This study has not made believers out of most of them, and that is a testament to the nature of the data they have observed.

This does not prove, of course, that no God exists. It does, however, serve as a counter to numerous theistic arguments which claim to possess real-world evidence of God, through various bits of information like the cosmological constants and questions like “Who caused the Big Bang?” Since theists (and particularly theists with little or now scientific background) do make scientifically-founded claims of evidence for God, it is reasonable and significant to note that the experts in the various fields have not found this evidence to be valid.

Vox’s third version of appeal to authority is to simply mention the fact that people quote Albert Einstein and Richard Dawkins, but since Vox makes no attempt to rebut this claim, we won’t deal with it either, except to note that it is really just a variation of the second version, with the same caveats about legitimately-acquired authority.

Next, we jump to the Argument from Lack of Evidence.

This argument is particularly superficial, given the obvious impossibility of personally examining all of the evidence relevant to the matter and the equally obvious reality that every individual unquestioningly accepts information without demanding supporting evidence every single day…

No normal individual actually examines more than a very small percentage of the authoritative information that they are provided on a daily basis, as evidenced by the explosion of low-fat foods that were soon followed by the ongoing obesity epidemic…

The fact that you may not have seen any evidence of God is meaningless; you probably haven’t seen any evidence of evolution or quantum mechanics either, and aside from a very few highly intelligent, well-educated exceptions, you’re not capable of accurately judging the evidence even if you did examine it yourself.

The real answer to the Argument from Lack of Evidence ought to be, “You’re wrong: here’s the evidence right here, and here’s how you can verify it.” Vox can’t make that argument, since he doesn’t actually have the evidence, so instead he makes an Appeal to Ignorance and Agnosticism. “You’re right, I can’t show you any evidence that God exists, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t Out There hiding somewhere where you and I can’t get to it.”

The problem with the Appeal to Ignorance is that the evidence is not actually missing, it’s just inconsistent with what Christians claim about God’s nature, abilities, and desires. God having the ability and desire to cure incurable diseases and raise people from the dead and appear visibly, audibly and tangibly to people—that’s not something you would need a PhD in theoretical physics to be able to verify or understand. The Gospel presents some very simple, straightforward, and readily-verifiable claims about Who God is, what He can do, and what He wants to do. It’s not that the evidence would be hard to find, it’s just that the evidence we do find is not consistent with the Christian claims.

This is not too surprising, since the Christian claims are not consistent with themselves. A good, loving, all-wise and all-powerful God Who wants all of His children to be saved is not the kind of God who creates an eternal fire of hell and torment and then hides Himself so that most of His children will fail to perceive His existence and thus be inevitably (and unfairly) damned. The evidence is not consistent with Christian claims about God because there is no way that it can be. The claims contradict themselves.

Another indication that the evidence is against God’s existence is the behavior we see in Christians who claim to have evidence supporting God’s existence. Here’s Vox arguing against what he calls “The Argument from Hallucination.”

Being one who has personally experienced both what appears to have been a supernatural phenomenon as well as a few chemically induced hallucinations, I can testify that the two are about as likely to be confused as Halloween and Christmas. And by Halloween, I mean the movie, not the holiday.

Remember back in Chapter 7, when Sam Harris made his Red State/Blue State argument about conservatives having higher crime rates? Remember how Vox suddenly got all coy, and made vague references about having seen “some statistics,” which he would not name, that allegedly proved Harris wrong?

Of course you don’t, because that didn’t happen. When Vox has hard evidence that disproves what atheists are saying, he quotes the figures and cites the sources and lays it all out in the early chapters of his book. It’s only when it’s time to demonstrate actual evidence of God’s existence that Vox suddenly goes all mysterious, alluding to some unspecified “supernatural phenomenon” without offering any description of what it is, let alone any way of verifying that this “supernatural” evidence exists in real life.

It’s not just atheists who support the claim that Christians have no evidence for their beliefs. Christians themselves know that the excuses they use to justify their faith are not really the same kind of solid, verifiable evidence as what Vox offered when refuting the Red State/Blue State stuff. It’s subjective, superstitious, wishful thinking. The kind of self-justifying rationalization that you keep to yourself, because deep down you know it’s not good enough to convince anyone who doesn’t already want to believe it.

Plus, when you look at the testimony you get from people like Vox who claim to have “personally experienced” a supernatural phenomenon, you get results that not only vary widely, but that are inconsistent and mutually contradictory. Truth is consistent with itself; hallucinations are not. When skeptics point out the illusory/delusional characteristics of such personal experiences, they’re not making fallacious arguments against God, they’re merely observing. The “evidence” you get from personal experience is just the sort of fanciful, subjective mishmash you’d expect to get in the absence of any genuine supernatural reality.

We’ll have to stop there for this week, but stay tuned: the chainsaw is still revving and there’s more splatter in store. (Hmm, I wonder if Vox lives in Texas. There’s a certain cheesy video title I’m thinking of…)

Why should a belief in the non-existence of God cause one individual to kill another, much less make it possible to predict that it will cause political leaders to liquidate large numbers of their own citizenry? How was it that Bertrand Russell was able to foresee the inevitable bloodshed to come in 1920, two years before Stalin became General Secretary and four years before he consolidated his power by banishing Trotsky? And even more importantly, why did the atheist Russell believe that the civilized world not only would, but should, risk a descent into barbarism by following the awful Soviet example?

Gosh, it seems like it was just a few pages ago that Vox was assuring us that government was the source of all that is evil in the world, and now here he is blaming blaming atheism again. And not just a lack of belief in God (or Santa), but a positive, declaratory assurance that God does not exist, is what Vox appeals to as being an active motivation for mass murderous behavior. Given the number of gods which even Christians believe do not exist, the potential for mass destruction must be truly terrifying!

But I digress. Let’s hear what Vox’s answer to the question is.

The answer is that without a belief in that which transcends the natural, Man’s ambition is limited to the material. These ambitions take many different forms, but intellectuals seem particularly drawn towards the idea of modifying human society according to their personal preferences. It may only be a coincidence, but it is interesting to note that many totalitarian rulers were not merely intelligent individuals, but intellectuals and the authors of what at times are still surprisingly insightful books.

Wait, what? He starts off as though he’s going to blame the material world (aka God’s Creation) for lacking the attributes which would inspire reasonable men to good behavior, but then he swerves into the peculiar insinuation that smart people want to hurt you just because being smart makes them want bad things. And his “evidence” is that Stalin and Lenin and Hitler, along with other smart people, declared that they had a desire to make the world into a better place.

Eh?

The logic gets even more twisted. After beginning by asserting that these evil materialistic intellectuals are harmful because they are too focused on the material world, and not focused enough on the immaterial, supernatural things, Vox abruptly flip-flops and declares that the trouble with intellectuals is that they are too focused on the abstract, immaterial theories, and don’t pay enough attention to the material realities.

In his book Intellectuals, the British historian Paul Johnson observes that intellectuals tend to focus on the abstract rather than tangible reality. While this is a useful and positive attribute when one is developing an entirely abstract concept such as string theory, constructing evolutionary stable strategies or creating a virtual world out of mathematics, art, and C compilers, it is rather less harmless when the abstract vision intersects with the harsh reality of human behavior. Human behavior seldom makes sense.

Much as I hate to contradict someone who has so much obvious expertise in not making sense, I have to say that Vox is greatly exaggerating the problem here. Human behavior may not make much sense to someone who fails to perceive and understand all the factors involved, but neither is it the irrational and unpredictable mish-mash that Vox portrays. He has to make it look like it is completely out of control, however, so that he can make his next point.

Christianity teaches that this is because man is hopelessly prone to evil, and that war and poverty will always be his curse due to his fallen nature. The Christian cannot hope to end these things, so he is content to work to ameliorate them where and when he can, according to the Biblical commands.

So just to recap, Vox is claiming that you can predict that belief in God’s non-existence will lead to mass murder because if you don’t believe in that which transcends the material, you’ll be so focused on physical realities, while simultaneously ignoring those same realities in order to focus on the abstract, that you’ll fail to grasp the transcendent reality in which all men are hopelessly prone to evil and unable to improve their own situation. Mmmm.

In contrast to this fatalistic and hopeless scenario, Vox gasps in horror at the atheistic notion that some people think it might be possible for us to make things better.

The atheist knows no such limits. Where the theist sees the inherent restrictions of human nature as created by God, the atheist sees nothing but the potential for human progress. What this progress is ultimately directed towards depends entirely on the particular vision; the ambitions of Pol Pot were certainly different than those of Lenin, Russell, or Harris, but regardless of what the final end is, the means and the stages through which the atheist visionary progresses will tend to be very similar, if not entirely the same.

Anyone who believes in the potential for human progress is obviously godless and evil, since he has rejected the inherent restrictions on human nature as created by God. If God had wanted us to improve, He would have made us better, gosh darn it! But He created us to be evil, and poverty-stricken, and constantly at war and killing one another. In fact, even though he started out by making the claim that belief in God’s non-existence is what causes massive loss of human life, the real cause (if what Vox says about human nature is true) is that we can’t help it. God made us to be evil, and there’s nothing we can do to make ourselves any better, and all Vox is doing by blaming atheists is trying to distract attention from God’s causative role in making us the way we are.

Vox follows up this bizarre claim with a 6-step plan, based on what he perceives as a pattern in various ideologically-motivated atrocities, for turning an attempt to better the human condition into a human rights disaster in which millions suffer and die needlessly. But more importantly, he makes the accusation that this pattern must be followed by atheists, because of their atheism.

The particular deadliness of Communism is not due to any peculiar aspect unique to Marxism, but because it requires retrofitting humanity to suit its atheist, utopian vision. Any creed or ideology that similarly violates the long-established patterns of human behavior in the name of progress will bear a high probability of leading to the same bitter harvest. Due to their ability to think in the abstract, their rejection of religious and societal traditions and their total focus on the material, atheists are uniquely susceptible to embracing utopian visions that conflict with these historical patterns.

What Vox manages to overlook is the fact that all his argument actually accomplishes is to make an accusation against atheism, without showing any actual reason why lack of belief in God ought to be to blame for mass murder.

Take his first claim, “that without a belief in that which transcends the natural, Man’s ambition is limited to the material.” There are two errors in this statement. One is that belief in God’s non-existence is necessarily a belief in the non-existence anything which transcends the material. Vox assumes that anyone who fails to believe in God also denies the existence of the supernatural and/or metaphysical, but in fact there are many people who believe in various transcendent/metaphysical “truths” that don’t happen to include any particular gods.

The second error is that Vox assumes, with no basis, that there’s something wrong or harmful with limiting one’s ambitions to the material. The material world is all we have to observe and to learn from; all of our experiences of pleasure, satisfaction, anticipation, reward, and so on, are experiences that we have had in and through the material world. The best things we can imagine, the qualities and virtues we treasure most highly, are all things that we have conceived of and learned the value of in the context of material reality. Vox himself accuses atheists of going astray, not because they’ve paid too much attention to the objective realities of life in the material world, but because they’ve allegedly spent too much time pursuing insubstantials that don’t correspond to material reality. If that’s the problem then the cure is to be more careful to limit our ambitions to the material.

More problems in Vox’s analysis: he tries to link lack of belief in God with a belief in the utopian perfection of man, on the grounds that atheists do not accept the Christian doctrine of human sin. This is a question, not of God’s existence, but of Man’s nature, about which even different religions have different ideas. One does not need to believe in the existence of any deity or deities to know, just from observation alone, that man is not perfect. And even Christians, according to Vox, “work to ameliorate [evils] where and when [they] can,” despite their belief in the futility of their efforts.

Vox fails to explain why atheist attempts to make things better must necessarily follow his 6-point disaster plan, while similar Christian efforts would not. (Probably for good reason: Christian utopias have had similar failings and would seriously undermine his argument.) One cannot help but note, in passing, how much hopelessness and despair there is in Vox’s fatalistic view of man, and contrast that with the common Christian claim that their faith gives them a sense of hope and purpose that atheists allegedly lack! Yet if you want a reason to hope that things can be better in our lifetimes, you’re necessarily more likely to find it among unbelievers than among those who, for theological reasons, use words like “futile” and “hopeless” to refer to human progress.

The very last sentence of the chapter, though, sums up what may be Vox’s most insightful and revealing comment in the whole book.

Man requires God, whether He exists or not, because in His absence Man becomes a devil.

It’s not that the Christian God actually exists outside of human imagination. The reason for believing in Jesus is because you’re afraid of what might happen if you don’t. People are scary. People hurt you. If a little superstition can make you feel safe enough to remain a member of human society, what difference does it make whether or not your superstition is actually true?

This ultimately is why people like Vox write books like TIA. No amount of rational argument, no well-ordered list of verifiable facts, can make the fear go away, because the fact is that people are scary and do hurt each other. So long as that fear exists—and it will always exist because the danger is real—people will believe.

We’re in the last section of Chapter 12 of TIA, in which Vox tries to deny the charge that Aztec human sacrifices is an example of religion leading to a needless loss of human life. Here he is giving us Step One of the three-step tactic.

If one looks at the history of the world, there are two facts which no reasonable man can deny: first, that people do bad things, and second, that religion has been central to people’s lives for as long as history has been recorded. The centrality of religion in past societies means that it has been a mechanism for an amount of these bad things people have done, which occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source of the evil behavior.

Despite the weasel-words (“occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source…”), this is a fair concession that religion and violence do go hand-in-hand at times, and that, far from being an irrelevant fantasy that has nothing to do with how people behave, religion is actually central to many people’s lives and how they live them. Halfway through the second sentence of this section, however, we’re already easing our way into Step Two.

The centrality of religion in past societies means that it has been a mechanism for an amount of these bad things people have done, which occasionally makes it appear that religion is the source of the evil behavior. And while it pains me to make use of a much overused expression, in this case, it is absolutely true that correlation is not causation.

The Unholy Trinity makes no effort to provide any evidence of a causal relationship between religion and the various evils they cite as proof of religion’s historically deadly and venomous nature.

You might think that, since Vox accuses the New Atheists of neglecting to take a detailed look at the relationship between religion and bad behavior, he would rectify the problem by exploring the relationship between religion and bad behavior, in order to see if it was indeed a causal relationship. Instead, what he does is to offer us the fallacious assumption that things only have one cause, and therefore if anything else exists which can be called “the cause,” then religion is not the cause. For example, he excuses Aztec religion from any responsibility for human sacrifice (that is, from causing the practice) by suggesting that it was necessary in order for the minority rulers to keep the majority subjects under control.

A ruling people surrounded and outnumbered by their subjects require a mechanism to enable them to maintain their position of primacy. There is a need to prevent the ratio of the population delta between rulers and ruled from getting out of hand as well as a necessity to inspire enough fear in the subjected populace to prevent it from rebelling on a regular basis.

As in Chapter 5 of TIA, he presents the secular aspects of the situation as though their mere existence proved that religion played no causative role in fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were ritually slain by priests in order to secure the favor of the gods. No mention is made of the influence exerted by the religious beliefs of the people (whether they were watching, performing, or being the sacrifices), nor is there any consideration of the question of whether the secular factors would have been sufficient, in the absence of religious support, to enable the deaths. Vox wants us to jump to the conclusion that complex sociological phenomena only have one cause, and that cause was, well, government.

There is an institution that has caused great harm to humanity, which is responsible for nearly all of the wars, all of the mass atrocities and untold human suffering throughout history, but it is not religion. That institution is government. And regardless of whether you consider government to be a necessary evil or the source of all that is good in society, it cannot be denied that it is the institution of government which bears the direct responsibility for every tangible evil that the New Atheists have accused religion of committing.

Forgive me, but I can’t help comparing Vox’s opinions to those of the Apostle Paul:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

This is one of those aspects of religion that Vox studiously ignores: the way religion encourages people to do what this allegedly evil government tells them. If it is true, as he has already conceded, that religion is central to most people’s lives, and if this central, influential religion is telling people to go along with the institution that Vox has identified as being responsible for the evils, then the causal relationship Vox is trying to obscure does indeed exist.

This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as religion’s political influence is concerned. How many states so far have passed democratically-engineered, Christian-sponsored laws and constitutional amendments designed to deny gays the right to marry their true loves? How many Christians based their presidential votes on their perception of God’s will (and the need to show the heathen God’s wrath on anyone who would dare attack a “Christian nation”?) How many terrorists turn to Allah for the strength and courage they need in order to risk and/or sacrifice their lives in the name of their brothers and sisters in the faith?

Even the most obvious modern example of religion-inspired harm is ultimately a matter of secular power. Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorists have attacked the West to achieve a specific military goal, the withdrawal of Western troops from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. And the Muslims now inhabiting the former Christendom are not agitating for the right to practice their religion, but rather to achieve greater political influence in those countries to which they have immigrated.

Once again, if bin Ladin stands to achieve any secular benefits, then Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with why he pursues terrorism, because complex sociological phenomena only have one cause. Or so Vox would have us believe, because he never bothers to explore the deeper question of why bin Ladin finds it so objectionable to have non-Muslim armies on Muslim soil. Bin Ladin is not a government, he is (pardon the expression) a crusader for Islam, and his goal is the glory of God. Even if he could achieve secular dominance in any particular area, he would be pursuing it in order to give Allah the dominion. Vox’s detailed exposition of all the secular aspects of the situation is merely a hand-waving exercise, attempting to distract attention from the religious factors driving bin Ladin’s agenda.

I’ve quoted you step one and step two, but I’m going to spare you the irrelevant details of step three. Vox jumps from the Aztecs to the Mongols to Caesar to the French Huguenots to Sargon II to Alexander the Great to Sherman’s March through Georgia, in a vain attempt to dazzle us with how many secular circumstances he can appeal to. And of course there are a good number, but it’s all a red herring, a way of not looking too closely at the real-world relationship between religion and loss of life. Religious and secular factors do often combine to produce a given result, and where those results are evil, it would be to our benefit to understand the real role religion has played, especially if religion is contributing that extra little something that makes it all happen.

Vox closes with a repetition of Step Two, the fallacious assumption that bad things only have one cause, and therefore that cause was not religion.

Whether God exists or not, whether people believe in the concept of a deity or not, religion is simply incapable of causing great harm to humanity. It can only be a scapegoat, because it does not provide the primary motivation or the means for crime, for war, or for repression and massacre. One might as reasonably blame plate tectonics for creating the physical geography that has played such a significant role in determining historical patterns of conflict. Even on the rare occasions when religion can be positively correlated with the incidence of great harm, a closer examination will usually show that it is neither the controlling nor the causal factor. The individual will to power does not exist because of religion, nor does the institution of government. In neither case is religious motivation required to inspire them to murderous action and there are more historical examples of religion acting as a mitigating force on their lethal proclivities than as an exacerbating one.

Just last week we were looking at Vox’s claim that the Crusades offer Western civilization its only hope of surviving the Muslim onslaught. Whether he meant that in military terms, or whether he meant that the West needs to change the religion of the Muslims, it’s clear that he really does know better than to pretend that “religion is simply incapable of causing great harm.” The existence of secular tools, and secular resources, and secular motivations, does not imply that all religious contributions are insignificant or non-existent. Vox is simply putting on his faith-based blinders, and not allowing himself to see the actual connections between religion and evil. And some would say that that sort of thing, in itself, is an example of religion “causing great harm.”

This is Vox Day we’re talking about, of course, so even this relatively mild discussion has its own special character. He manages to avoid blaming Hitler on the atheists, but he spends far more time trying to convince us that Hitler was a non-Christian than he spends acknowledging that Hitler was, indeed, a theist, albeit a neopagan one. And yes, the Spanish Inquisition did torture and kill people, but not nearly as many as you might suppose, and in fact was such a model of restraint and objectivity (for the time) that it almost seems that Vox wouldn’t mind seeing it revived again. There is no doubt that he thinks we need to revive the Crusades, since he comes right out and says it’s the West’s only real hope of resisting the Muslim onslaught.

There are a few details that Vox rather glosses over. Concerning Hitler, for example, Vox alludes briefly to the fact that some writers see a link between Christianity and the German death camps, but avoids any overt mention of Luther’s notorious anti-Semitism or the role of the German churches in helping to foster a general attitude of antipathy and suspicion towards Jews (and atheists, homosexuals, and other minorities as well). While it would be nice to say that these things are mere cultural and even secular manifestations, one does not need to skim very far through the New Testament before one discovers a certain deeply-rooted and enduring animosity between those who followed Jesus and those who (the Bible tells us) rejected him. Nor can it be denied that historic Judaism, rooted in the Old Testament, is a large part of what gave the Jews their distinctive, exclusionary ethnic identity. While many secular and political factors were also involved, one cannot reasonably deny that, in the Nazi concentration camps, the chasm between guards and prisoners was a canyon eroded away by centuries of religious tradition.

Vox is conscientious enough to concede that Christians can learn certain lessons from the Holocaust, not the least of which is that Christians can be fooled, even to the point of supporting atrocities (in case the past seven years hadn’t made that clear already). The larger question, though, is why this particular weakness should exist among Christians who allegedly possess not only God’s eternal and absolute moral standards, but the wisdom, strength, and guidance of His indwelling Holy Spirit as well. If the moral quality of Christians’ real life behavior is truly dependent on the individual moral strength and wisdom of the (mortal) Christians themselves, why should credit for their good deeds (and only their good deeds) go to God? It is their own moral strength that makes the difference, and their own wisdom which lends them as much or as little insight as they manage to possess. Is it so wrong, then, to conclude that Christians are only human, and are not some special class of supernaturally inspired and enabled servants of an Almighty?

But I digress. On to that splendid and wonderful era known as The Spanish Inquisition. Vox has discovered that this infamous period of Spanish history is actually not as bad as has traditionally been thought. The people running the show were actually surprisingly even-handed, honest, and objective jurists and investigators, who acquitted more people than they executed. And, though it’s true that the Inquisitors did use torture, Vox excuses them on the grounds that everybody was using torture back then (which is quite a statement coming from a guy who calls atheists “moral parasites” just because they live lives as upright as their godly neighbors).

Vox found out all these good things about the Inquisition because he read an article in The Guardian about some research that has recently been released by the Vatican. Yes, if you want accurate, first-hand information about abuses and atrocities, who better to ask than the successors of the ones responsible for committing the abuses and atrocities? Everybody always believes the sob-stories the victims tell, but what about giving the perpetrators a chance to tell their side, eh? As other Catholic sites will tell you, the “Black Legend” of Inquisition atrocities was just so much Protestant propaganda, spread by poorer and less-powerful neighbors of Spain who were jealous of Spanish prosperity (and who, by the way, were cruelly toasting tens of thousands of “witches” in sham trials that never would have stood up to the rigorous judicial standards of a real Inquisition).

Well, seriously, I expect that legends of Inquisition atrocities may indeed be exaggerated, though I suspect an impartial investigation will find the real Inquisition was not nearly as mild and rosy as Vox and the Vatican would want to paint it either. Reducing the Inquisition to a mere body count, however, fails to truly convey what was so fundamentally wrong about the government putting people on trial for not being sincere enough about the beliefs they professed to have. It’s bad enough that you could be condemned to death for not being Christian enough, but one of the documented abuses of the Inquisition was the ease with which you could be sent up for trial without even any evidence against you.

The atmosphere of fear and—dare I say it?—terrorism was so bad that many Christian converts would simply flee rather than stay in the same town as the Inquisition, regardless of the lost of property, profession, and personal connections. And this is how Christians were treating each other, in the Body of Christ. Small wonder that critics would indeed use the Inquisition as evidence against the claim that Christianity was somehow uniquely distinguished as a superior and/or divinely-enabled religion.

That said, though, the witch trials were very likely much worse, and were certainly more widespread, and it’s rather surprising that Vox forgot to mention them. Instead, he turns next to the Crusades, the textbook case of why mixing church and state is bad for the state and even worse for the church. Here is where Vox really shines, and if you read no other part of TIA, you might want to take a quick look at Vox’s historical review of the sad, sordid story of the Christian war against the Muslims (and/or each other). It’s a very good, if cursory summary, and manages to convey the tremendous irony of the tragedies that resulted from the “noble” effort to “free” the land where Jesus’ feet once trod.

It is indeed a gloomy and almost absurd history, but what is even more astonishing than the obstinate and derelict maraudings of the Crusades is the fact that Vox seriously proposes that we should bring them back.

But although the Crusades will likely remain the model of Christian holy war for the foreseeable future, the reason that they are no longer at the forefront of atheist attacks on Christianity is because it is difficult, and growing increasingly harder, to shake a disapproving finger at the actions of men who were faced with the challenge of a militant and expanding Ummah at their borders. Overconfident due to its success in running roughshod over a wealth-sapped Western Christianity, modern secular society is simply not conceptually suited to dealing with a faith of the sword…

A better answer can be found in the Crusades, in the very failures pinpointed by Runciman. It is faith, but combined with wisdom this time, that can provide what was once Christendom with the spirit that it needs to survive and allow the civilization that it spawned centuries ago to thrive again.

Vox doesn’t have a specific plan for eliminating the Muslim threat to Western civilization, but it seems to involve converting all Muslims to Christianity (since Christians never have wars against each other).

The battle is already being waged, by men such as Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, who leads the fast-growing Anglican Church in Africa, and whose answer to the violent and unprovoked attacks on Christians in his country is as simple as it is astonishingly effective: “Make the church grow.”

Speaking of not being “conceptually suited to dealing with a faith of the sword”…

It should go without saying that Vox’s “solution” is really just a shallow attempt to claim that Christianity is the solution to all the world’s problems, without actually grappling with the problems themselves. As even a casual student of Islam knows, converting Muslims to Christianity is itself a provocation, in Muslim eyes at least. Calling their reprisals “unprovoked attacks” merely demonstrates an unwillingness to acknowledge the issues involved and to admit responsibility for one’s own role in the conflict. Nor does Vox spell out exactly what role the military would play in his Crusades.

In Chapter 5, Vox spends a good bit of time exploring all the secular factors that also contribute to wars between religious groups—factors such as poverty, competition for resources, threats to national and ethnic identity, and plain old ambition. These factors also play a significant role in the conflict between the Islamic nations and the Western world, and would not go away just by converting everybody to Roman Catholicism, I mean Lutheranism, I mean Anglicanism, I mean Mormonism, erm, well you get the idea.

Vox’s answer to the Muslim “problem” is simply a matter of burying his head in the sand of his own wishful fantasies about a world where God really does show up to make a difference in people’s lives. That’s not the world we live in, however, because if it were, there wouldn’t even be any Muslims to worry about. A God who really and truly interacted with His people would, by that very interaction, give His religion an advantage that other, non-divine religions would not be able to compete with. Ongoing competition between religions requires that they all be about equally matched, which means they must all be equally the product of human superstition, imagination, and politics. For this reason, it is unrealistic (and possibly suicidal) to launch a new Crusade whose success would depend on the power of a non-existent God.

• Vox Day does not like Michel Onfray.
• Vox also does not like the French.
• He does like the Jews, and thinks that in general they are superior to virtually any other race or ethnic group, at least intellectually.
• He does not, however, like Michel Onfray.
• Hitler was an atheist no matter what he said about God, because he killed people and real theists don’t kill people.
• It’s not the Catholic’s fault that they didn’t do more to save the Jews, who after all were non-Catholics, and why should any Catholic care about the Holocaust?
• Vox is only too glad, however, to insinuate that guilt for various “atheist atrocities” ought to be associated with atheists in general and Michel Onfray in particular (whom Vox apparently doesn’t like).
• The Enlightenment was evil, and did only bad things, and is in some way Michel Onfray’s fault.
• Vox would like to blame the Enlightenment for sexual slavery, and thinks that Michel Onfray would enjoy forcing a woman to have sex with several men at the same time
• Michel Onfray wants to burn Western civilization to the ground and worship Satan.
• And oh yes, I almost forgot—Vox does not like Michel Onfray.

Vox has at last succeeded in writing a chapter that is difficult to respond to, not because of any sophisticated reasoning or indisputable evidence, but because he lets his invective run so far away with him that it borders on hysteria. Vox has been biased, and selective, and super-supercilious before, but this time he lays it on so thick that it’s almost impossible to believe that he honestly expected anyone to take him seriously. One wonders why he’s not calling for a halt on the hunt for bin Ladin, so as to devote more resources to the battle against Michel Onfray.

But let’s let Vox speak for himself:

Onfray’s spectacularly absurd assertion that all monotheism, including Judaism, is inherently anti-intelligence and anti-science fits well with this French tendency towards anti-Semitism, which has flared up periodically since the Dreyfus affair in 1894. Philosophy is not science, of course, but one has to wonder just how detached from reality Onfray must be to ignore the undeniable fact that Jews possess the strongest intellectual tradition in human history, have been repeatedly found to possess the highest average intelligence, and account for a much higher percentage of scientific advancements than would be statistically indicated by the small fraction of the global population they represent. I have already shown that it is absurd to claim that Christianity and Islam are intrinsically anti-science in light of the amount of evidence to the contrary, but until reading In Defence of Atheism, it never occurred to me that it might be necessary to defend Judaism from the charge as well…

Onfray’s hedonism is the explicit articulation of Harris’s fumbling towards a happiness-based ethic and the realization of Dennett’s moral democracy, but what the Frenchman makes clear in a distinctly Nietzschean manner is that he will brook no weak-minded influence of the enervating Judeo-Christian disease in tempering the illuminated way towards Enlightenment and the new secular utopia. Nothing is forbidden, no action is unthinkable, and needless to say, if an unpopular minority happens to be in the way of the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number, that minority will simply have to go…

He complains that the Vatican has demonstrated “a commitment, a militancy, and a vigor” criticizing Marxism and Communism that he believes would have been better spent discrediting the Third Reich. But how can the Catholic Church be held responsible for failing to defend those who reject its authority over them? And what government has ever failed to focus on its openly declared enemies instead of those enemies willing to declare truce?…

It would be interesting to ask Onfray if he sees any causal connection between the European post-Christianity he celebrates and the rise of sex-slavery throughout Europe. Of course, he might not take exception to the latter, after all, what is the abject misery of one woman who is bringing orgasmic delight to ten or more men every night?…

Onfray claims that democracy thrives on reason and the active use of communication. Economists have proven the former to be untrue, due to how the vast majority of voters in all democracies combine ignorance with irrationality…

Onfray complains of the apparent logical contradiction between the Fifth Commandment and the later commands in Deuteronomy to smite, destroy, burn, and dispossess. Setting aside the obvious fact that the Fifth Commandment is generally considered to be “Honor thy father and mother” and that neither burning nor dispossessing can be inherently equated with killing, he is obviously unaware of the consensus that the term “kill” in “Thou shalt not kill” is understood in the sense of a murderous killing… [Note: Vox mentions in a footnote that he knows Onfray is referring to the Roman Catholic version of the Ten Commandments, in which “Thou shalt not kill” is #5, but he still accuses Onfray of failing to recognize the “obvious fact” that “Honor thy mother and father” is the real Fifth Commandment.]

Like Hitchens, Onfray is bizarrely fascinated with the uncomfortable subjects of castration and male circumcision, to which he devotes a veritable torrent of text. The book all but shakes with his outrage at what he considers to be mutilation based on nothing more than the monotheistic fear of sexual pleasure. Onfray is the anti-Puritan; he is furious at the thought that someone, somewhere, might not be enjoying himself to the full extent possible. However, his fury is wasted here, as the loss of a thousand nerve endings and 250 feet of nerves that he cites don’t actually reduce male sensitivity in any way.

(Um, right. 9 out of 10 Jewish men surveyed say they do not remember experiencing greater sexual stimulation during the 8 days between birth and bris, therefore it’s ridiculous to use the term “mutilation” to refer to taking a knife to someone else’s genitals without their consent.)

And so it goes. The few times Vox can bring himself to quote actual snippets of text from Onfray’s writings, he uses them as mere subtitles for the section headings. His actual discussion of Onfray, by contrast, consists of Vox putting unflattering words in Onfray’s mouth, Vox making snide insinuations about how Onfray would “probably” enjoy various vile things, and Vox descending into such hysterical rants as this:

Michel Onfray demands nothing less than an atheological auto da fé, burning Western civilization on the fiery stake of a New Luciferian Enlightenment. This would not be worrisome if it were only more inane insanity on the part of a French philosopher, the problem is that Onfray’s proposed new order is not merely the logical extension of the secular utopia sought by Russell, Dawkins, and Harris, it is the stark, rational articulation of that which the New Atheists do not dare to admit, either to themselves or to the reading public.

Try as I might, I can think of no better rebuttal to such a rant than to simply quote it and let the reader see for himself what a spittle-flecked whackjob Vox can make of himself when he really puts his heart into it.

Theists have a perfectly logical and objective basis for the application of their god-based moralities that even the most die-hard rational atheist cannot reject, given the theistic postulate that God actually exists and created the universe. In short, God’s game, God’s rules. If you’re in the game, then the rules apply to you regardless of what you think of the game designer, your opinion about certain aspects of the rulebook, or the state of your relationship with the zebras.

Vox’s goal is to show that his idea of morality has a solid foundation, and Daniel Dennett’s doesn’t. But not only is Dennett’s system far stronger than Vox seems to realize, the “God’s Game, God’s Rules” morality he espouses has so many flaws that it’s hard to know where to start.

But start we shall. To begin with, “God’s Game, God’s Rules” (or GGGR, from now on) is a system that makes morality entirely arbitrary. What is morally good? Whatever the rules say is morally good. If the rules say, “Mutilate your baby’s genitals,” then genital mutilation is a good thing. If the rules say you lose points for wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day, then wearing green is a bad thing. If you get chilled on a Saturday, and light a fire to warm up a little, and the rules say you deserve to die for breaking the Sabbath, then you deserve to die. Nothing—not genocide, not torture, not rape, not terrorism—is wrong in and of itself. It’s only wrong if the rules say it’s wrong. Which they don’t have to do, because morality is arbitrary–God’s game, God’s rules. If the rules tell you to rape puppies, then that’s what you gotta do. Our own intuitive sense of morality has nothing to do with it.

Second, GGGR is virtually useless in a world where God does not show up in real life to tell us what the rules are. If it’s God’s game and God’s rules, then none of us have any basis for saying that it would be wrong for God to publish one set of rules for the general public, while privately applying a different set of rules on a case-by-case basis. If a pregnant girl knows in her heart that God is ok with her having an abortion, who are we to forbid it? You can quote bible verses to her if you like, but if God has given His blessing to the abortion, who are you to tell Him He can’t do that? If God wants to publicly forbid homosexuality, but privately assure homosexuals that they’re an exception because He made them that way, who are you to say it’s wrong for God to make exceptions to His own rules, and to convey them privately to the homosexuals?

Third, GGGR tells us nothing about what those rules are. Since they’re arbitrary to begin with, we cannot deduce them, and even if someone stands up and claims that God told him what they were, we have no way to evaluate what he says, to see if he got the rules right or not. Even if he did get them right, nothing says God can’t make exceptions, or make changes, or have different sets of rules for different people and/or circumstances. And even if God gives us a list of rules, it’s not always clear how the rules are to be applied in various situations (hence Jesus’ frequent accusation that the Pharisees were obeying the Law of Moses in a way that was spiritually wrong despite being technically correct).

GGGR is not a valid moral system or even a valid foundation for a moral system. GGGR is simply a ploy for claiming that one’s own moral system is “God’s Rules,” and therefore must be applied to non-believers whether they want to accept it or not. It’s a justification for Christian supremacy, as well as being an excuse for why so many of God’s “moral” rules turn out to be actually immoral (like mutilating genitals, or selling daughters into slavery, or wiping out entire ethnic groups like the Amalekites). It might sound good to Vox, but real life is not a video game, and real-world morality is more than just a pre-programmed set of rules.

In the real world, morality is an imperfect system based on our fallible (but usually reliable) ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions. Even in a theology-soaked morality like GGGR, the ultimate standard of right and wrong is based on our expectation of consequences: if you play the game by God’s rules, you win, and if you break the rules, or oppose them, you lose. So the moral is, if you want the good consequences (i.e. winning), you will play by the rules. The morality of your actions is defined relative to the consequences your actions will return to you.

Vox does not seem to grasp this point, insisting instead that there is no secular basis for moral authority.

Atheists, on the other hand, enjoy no similar logical basis, no objective foundation or universal warrant, which leaves every individual playing his own game and making up his own rules as he goes along. So Dennett finds himself caught in the seemingly senseless act of lauding atheists for behaving in a moral manner according to a morality that he considers groundless and in need of democratic modification.

Dennett’s morality, however, is not groundless—it has the same foundation as every other moral system. It’s perfectly legitimate to praise atheists for behavior that has positive consequences for themselves and those around them; no omnipotent deity is needed to decree that the desirable consequences are more desirable than the undesirable ones. Whether or not you write everything out in terms of a formal list of Shalt’s and Shall Not’s, the connection between morality and consequence is always there, and provides the foundation for all moral judgments.

Vox has a tendency to fall into the All or Nothing Fallacy: you don’t have any answers unless and until you have all the answers.

And yet, not only do we know these reason-based moralities don’t exist, we are informed by an unimpeachable source that it is ‘‘quite obvious’’ that they do not exist and have never existed:

“I do not intend this to be a shocking indictment, just a reminder of something quite obvious: no remotely compelling system of ethics has ever been made computationally tractable, even indirectly, for real world moral problems. So, even though there has been no dearth of utilitarian (and Kantian, and contrarian, etc.) arguments in favor of particular policies, institutions, practices, and acts, these have all been heavily hedged with ceteris paribus clauses and plausibility claims about their idealizing assumptions.”

The latter quote is from Dennett himself, and Vox uses it to try and say that Dennett is denying the possibility that anyone could derive a moral system based on reason. That’s not at all what Dennett is saying, however. Dennett is saying that you can’t reduce morality to a programmable set of rules that can be mechanistically applied to arbitrary real-world situations (which is why GGGR can’t work, by the way). There are exceptions to every rule, including moral rules–circumstances in which the the consequences of rigidly and legalistically applying the “moral” rule would actually be more detrimental than the consequences of breaking the rule. Hence, no system—not even “divinely ordained” systems—have proven to be foolproof guides to morality, in practice.

Just because it’s not possible to draw up a list of rules that covers all situations, however, doesn’t mean we don’t have secular moral principles to guide us in many situations. Dennett is far from “fall[ing] into the very trap he previously had described so eloquently.” On the contrary, Dennett’s observation, which Vox found no problems with, is an observation that blows away the “God’s game, God’s rules” idea, because what Dennett is showing is that no system of rules (i.e. of Shalt’s and Shalt Not’s) is going to be workable in real life ethical problems. You can’t reduce real-world morality to a list of IF/THEN/ELSE statements, which means the rule set that God would supposedly have defined is a non-existent set.

The closest we can come to a workable system is to realize that all of our moral principles are based on how we feel about the consequences that are likely to result. This works well in cases where one alternative leads to consequences that are noticeably better or worse than another, but it becomes problematic when the expected consequences are all bad, or are unknown. And yet, any system that is not based on the consequences is bound to be an arbitrary system, like GGGR. You can arbitrarily pick one undesireable outcome over another, and say that one is “good” and the other is “bad,” but really they’re both bad, and you’re just making choices for which there is no solid basis for moral certainty.

And that’s the end of Vox’s discussion of Dennett. Dennett seems to have done remarkably well, especially at the end, where Vox’s moral argument falls flat due to his failure to understand Dennett’s point in anything more than a video game sense. No moral system can be perfect, because morality is a choice between outcomes, and there’s no guarantee that every choice is necessarily going to offer us an option that is unambiguously “correct.” We do the best we can with what we’ve got. But ultimately, Reality itself dictates what’s right and what’s wrong, by the consequences our decisions entail. The sooner we abandon our superstitious and arbitrary lists of “God’s rules,” and deal directly with the true source of morality, the better off we’ll be.

[W]hile Breaking the Spell is unquestionably superior in almost every way to the Unholy Trinity’s four books on religion, the scientific-sounding speculation that fills it is nothing more than that, speculation. The literary editor of The New Republic underlined this point in an utterly brutal review of the book which appeared in the New York Times, reminding the reader that at the end of the day, Breaking the Spell is not science, but a book of speculative philosophy written by a science-fetishist.

There is no scientific foundation for its scientistic narrative. Even Dennett admits as much: “I am not at all claiming that this is what science has established about religion. . . . We don’t yet know.” So all of Dennett’s splashy allegiance to evidence and experiment and “generating further testable hypotheses” notwithstanding, what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.

So desperate is Vox to discredit Dennett’s questions about theology that he accuses them of being “just…speculation.” And yet, since God does not show up in real life, theologians have nothing to study but their own speculations, and the speculations of others, about the meaning of things that still other men have written, that have “no scientific foundation.” In fact, Vox could have condensed his argument a great deal by simply accusing Dennett’s book of being little more than abject theology. It wouldn’t have been entirely true, but at least this would have captured the essence of Vox’s rebuttal: it’s wrong because it’s too similar to what Vox thinks is right.

Now for the morality.

[W]hen asked where society will find its moral foundation, if not from religion, Dennett responds with a tautology:

Rules that we lay down ourselves. . . . Now we can continue to expand the circle and get more people involved, and do it in a less disingenuous way by excising the myth about how this is God’s law. It is our law.

As evidence that moral democracy is theoretically functional, he asserts without evidence that the prison population is distributed according to religious affiliation in the general population, an incorrect assertion that was belied in Chapter I.

Yes, we’ve already seen how Vox massaged the statistics to make it look like atheists were disproportionately represented in prison populations. Unfortunately, Vox never quite manages to explain how Dennett’s response is a “tautology.” Instead, he casually tosses around various studies that, he asserts, contradict Dennett in some way. Except of course for the ones that don’t. But they’re “flawed.”

Dennett further claims that “brights” have better family values than born-again Christians based on “the lowest divorce rate in the United States” which depends on the flawed 1999 Barna study instead of the 2001 ARIS study he makes use of later in the book, a much larger study which reaches precisely the opposite conclusion. It is certainly a quixotic assertion, considering that these family values atheists are half as likely to get married, twice as likely to divorce, and have fewer children than any other group in the United States.

According to Vox’s footnote, the Barna study is flawed because it compared all Christians to all atheists instead of comparing all married Christians to all married atheists. Vox says that the ARIS study shows almost half of all atheists never marry, and thus are not going to be reporting divorces even if their relationships break up. I haven’t looked at the two studies myself, so I’m going to reserve judgment here. Vox’s argument sounds plausible, but he’s proven less than reliable in his descriptions of the actual statistics in the past, and there may be more to these two studies than meets the eye.

In any case, divorce rates can be a misleading indicator of “family values,” since there are (for instance) cases where incompatible couples, or marriages with abusive spouses, remain together legally even though this produces an emotionally toxic environment for the kids to grow up in. Let’s go on and see what else we can find in Dennett’s discussion of morals, and Vox’s attempts to discredit it.

Vox argues that “moral democracy suffers from the same structural weakness as its political counterpart, an inherent mandate to appeal to the lowest common denominator,” and that this invalidates Dennett’s claim that we can make our own moral laws. He overlooks the fact, however, that in God’s absence, we’ve been making our own laws about things like slavery, women’s rights, drugs, mail fraud, software piracy, and other moral issues. What’s more, we’ve been reviewing the moral laws that were handed down to us by our superstitious and dogmatic ancestors, and in some cases making improvements. Like Dennett says, the only thing we’re really changing is that we can now do the same thing without second-guessing ourselves about the purported will of an absentee Authority.

Vox, naturally, has to drag in the Nazis and Hamas and anyone else he can think of to try and poison the well, but it’s no use. Though Vox claims that it would be “insane” to even consider “moral democracy,” it’s not only possible, but it’s the system we’re currently living under right now. It may not be perfect, it may not even work all that well, but as Dennett says, freeing ourselves from irrationalism and superstition can only help.

Vox next makes a rather puzzling observation:

The biggest problem is that even if Dennett is correct and there is no magician behind the moral curtain, the positive consequences of revealing this absence may well outweigh the negative ones.

The “problem” is that the positive consequences may well outweigh the negative ones? Why is that a problem, exactly? I rather like positive consequences myself. I’m supposing that Vox got tripped up in his typing, and meant it the other way around, but even so, he’s actually hitting the real roots of morality: the positive or negative consequences of a proposed course of action. The purpose of morality is to maximize the positive consequences and minimize the negative ones—no deity required. In arguing that Dennett may be wrong (in the moral sense) to question religion’s roots, Vox is inadvertently exposing the true roots of real-world morality.

And with that, we come to the real heart of the issue. I hate to stop here, but I have a feeling this next bit is going to get a little involved. Stay tuned!

I have on two previous occasions written in my blog about the principle of health care provider conscience. Federal law is explicit and unwavering in protecting federally funded medical practitioners from being coerced into providing treatments they find morally objectionable…Today, HHS will file a rule in the Federal Register aimed at increasing compliance with existing federal laws protecting provider conscience. The proposed rule clarifies that non-discrimination rules apply to institutional health care providers as well as to individual employees working for recipients of certain funds from HHS. It requires recipients of certain HHS funds to certify their compliance with laws protecting provider conscience rights. The HHS Office for Civil Rights is designated as the entity to receive complaints of discrimination addressed by the statute or the proposed regulation.

Now, this sounds good to the Religious Right. All the code words are there: this is supposed to be a law designed to allow doctors to deny medical care to women seeking abortions, to gays and lesbians, and to whoever else might be contrary to conservative Christian approval. The problem is, this proposal opens the door to all kinds of abuses that might not be what the Christian supremacists want.

For example, a doctor could decide that diseases are caused by sin and demons, and could legally deny people legitimate medical care in favor of more “spiritual” alternatives like prayer and confession. Or a doctor could uphold an extreme quality-of-life ethic by denying life support to a critically-ill patient. Leavitt’s Loophole could, in fact, open the legal doors for a particularly nasty form of passive euthanasia, by protecting the doctor’s “right” to let a patient die of starvation, dehydration, and oxygen deprivation, with or without the patient’s consent, if in the physician’s personal opinion it would be immoral to allow the patient to continue a pain-filled and hopeless existence.

Leavitt’s Loophole would conclusively settle the Terry Schiavo case, not just for patients as bad off as Terry, but for those who are a lot better off than she was. Passive euthanasia could be effectively legalized, by removing the penalties for doctors denying care, in all 50 states, without a referendum. And the Religious Right is solidly (and blindly) supportive of Leavitt’s Loophole anyway.

Reality-based policies are your best insurance for making sure the laws you pass really serve your best interests. Faith-based government is just a wish and a sigh, and an eventual, inevitable, “oops.”

[Dennett] raises [the] possibility that religion is merely a by-product of evolution, otherwise known as a spandrel. It’s here that the philosopher finds himself in logical trouble. Both of Dennett’s memetic proposalsand [sic] his subsequent argument against Starke and Finke’s economic case for the rational value of religion directly contradict his assertion of the way that evolution’s remarkable efficiency means that a persistent pattern amounts to proof—”we can be quite sure”—that the pattern is of benefit to something in the evolutionary currency of differential reproduction. How, one wonders, does Dennett fail to grasp that a creed which explicitly states “go forth and multiply” is likely to be inordinately successful in evolutionary terms, genetic or memetic?

Vox seems to like the argument that religious people are more likely to reproduce than non-religious people—as though nobody really cared much one way or another about sex until Moses came along and showed them in Genesis 1! This kind of silly, superficial thinking suggests that Vox hasn’t really put much effort into trying to understand how religion and evolution would interact in the real world. All he really seems to be interested in is mining the idea for talking points he can use to make religion sound better than atheism.

For instance, here’s Vox elaborating on the above idea. After quoting Dennett’s example of how a lancet fluke can cause an ant to climb a blade of grass, looking for a passing sheep to infect, Vox writes:

It somehow escapes the professor’s attention that it is not the religious portion of the population that is having trouble doing what every other species on the planet does, but rather, the irreligious one. If there is a metaphorical lancet fluke to be blamed for anti-evolutionary human behavior, then it is atheist secularism that most accurately fits the analogy now that the Shakers and Skoptsi are no more. Indeed, the demographic performance of secular post-Christian societies over the last fifty years suggests that from a grand historical perspective, modern atheist secularism will be seen as a fluke indeed.

What escapes Vox’s notice is that Dennett is talking about the origin and propagation of religion, not about the relative behaviors of religious and non-religious populations under circumstances where the dominant population has saturated its environment and is beginning to suffer shortages of food and other resources. (He’s also playing fast and loose with statistics by lumping all the social, economic, and cultural factors together under a simplistic dichotomy of religious vs. secular, but we’ll let that pass.) What Dennett is looking for is a reason for the emergence of religious beliefs and behaviors, at a time when overpopulation was not really an issue—a question Vox ignores in favor of trying to score a few anti-secular talking points.

Vox also castigates Dennett for holding that people ought to trust scientists without necessarily understanding all the scientific details, while at the same time holding that people are wrong to trust in priests to make moral decisions for them.

Dennett attempts to justify these contrary stances by stating that the difference is that the scientific priesthood really know what they’re doing, that they understand their formulas and use them to achieve amazingly accurate results, while the religious priesthood does not.

But Dennett is demonstrably incorrect on both scores. Dennett’s two favorite sciences, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, are primarily distinguished by the way in which no one understands exactly how anything works nor has managed to construct any significant formulas, let alone achieve any results demonstrating the precision of the quantum electrodynamic calculations cited in Dennett’s example. Dennett himself confesses that human consciousness is a mystery, a phenomenon that people don’t even know how to think about yet, and while he is rather more sanguine about the achievements of evolutionary biology, he admits that the science which began with the Origin of the Species [sic] still regards the way in which species begin to be a mystery too, albeit one with more of the details filled in.

Here again, Vox tempts us to conclude that he does not really understand the issues that Dennett is talking about. No understanding of how evolution works? No formulas for calculating mutation rates, genetic drift, and other evolutionary mechanisms? Vox is only highlighting his own ignorance of biology when he attempts to refute Dennett with that argument. It’s true that there are unanswered questions about how consciousness works, and how life first began, but—and here’s the distinction Vox fails to address—science does not claim to know more than it knows, and is prepared to demonstrate the objective, verifiable basis for what it claims it does know.

Priests can’t do that. When you trust a scientist, you are practicing the principle that the truth is consistent with itself. You may not know particle physics personally, but you know there are people who do, and that there is constant dialog between scientists about which possibilities are most consistent with the evidence. Science is reality-based, and interacts with the real world in countless ways, all of which would conflict with and expose any attempt to pass of non-science as science. You can’t fake science and get away with it.

With priests (and prophets and other religious authorities), you just have to take their word for it, and the word of their predecessors. You not only can fake religious truth, at least most of the religions out there are faking it, and getting away with it. There is no real-world verification for what they claim, and wherever their claims interact with the real world, the discrepancies between their claims and the actual evidence only gives job security to the rationalizers and apologists. People have to just take their word for it anyway, which is the practical definition of gullibility. And here’s the real catch:

So while some sciences have proven themselves worthy enough of our complete confidence that we need not trouble our pretty little heads about them, to claim that we are justified in placing blind trust in cognitive scientists, evolutionary biologists, and sociologists because physicists really know what they’re doing is absurd. It’s a bait-and-switch worthy of Dawkins. And Dennett offers absolutely no evidence that any religious faithful are any more prone to unquestioning obedience of their priesthood than science-fetishists are of the various secular bulls issued regularly from the archbishoprics of Oxford, Cambridge, M.I.T., and Stanford.

The catch is that even if you do question the priests, you have no real-world basis for proposing any better alternative. It all boils down to whatever seems right in your own eyes. Faith in scientists is justified, firstly because they can back up their conclusions by showing the objective evidence which led to them, and secondly because of the way all the sciences are interrelated, being studies of the same cohesive, consistent, objective reality. If you’re going to pick and choose which sciences you trust and which you don’t like based on non-scientific criteria, you’re going to lead yourself into a bunch of contradictions and inconsistencies in your own conclusions. But religion has no real-world basis, and even a cursory survey of the religious landscape will confirm that Vox is correct about how easy it is to break with the theological leadership. What’s to stop you? It’s not like there’s any way anyone could come up with real-world evidence that your interpretation of the Bible was inferior to someone else’s.

In short, Vox’s objections to Dennett’s observations are shallow and irrelevant, being based chiefly on Vox’s failure to grasp the real issues Dennett is addressing, coupled with Vox’s apparent ignorance of biology and other sciences. But does this mean that Vox is ignorant, or stupid? I don’t think either term would accurately describe the reason why Vox argues the way he does. It’s not that he can’t grasp and grapple with the issues, but that he simply won’t. He’s got an axe to grind, and some talking points he wants to raise in “rebuttal” to Dennett’s essays, and he approaches each issue seeking only what he needs to reach his own goals. Which, to be fair, is his prerogative. He’s got his job to do. And I’ve got mine.

Between the two of us, we just might get to the heart of the matter.

This book did not proceed exactly according to plan. Originally inspired by a trilogy of columns entitled “The Clowns of Reason,” it was supposed to be devoted to dissecting the anti-theistic arguments of Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, and Sam Harris. However, when Christopher Hitchens appeared on the scene and began wreaking such a wide path of intellectual devastation by trouncing noted theologians such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and Chris Hedges, the author of The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism, it became clear that Hitchens was an atheist tour de force that must be addressed at all costs!

And thus was Dennett bumped down to fourth place. Let’s see if Vox has any more luck with Dennett than he did with Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins.

Alas, Vox’s ostensibly favorable impression of Dennett’s works does not keep him from resorting to the same sort of ad hominem polemic as has been his wont thus far.

Despite being every bit as ignorant of the theological, historical, and demographical basics as Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, Dennett’s book is far from a polemic, even if he can’t quite resist giving in to the customary atheist chest-thumping. I suppose if one shouldn’t condemn a man who believes he descended from apes for behaving like one; at least the feces-flinging is kept to a minimum.

Yes, one shouldn’t, especially if the condemnation would becoming from a man who routinely thumps his own chest, gleefully flings feces or whatever else lays ready to hand, and ignorantly mocks others for having a clearer understanding of the scientific evidence for evolution than he does. Nevertheless, Vox insists that he is greatly impressed by Dennett’s writing, even if he cannot resist the temptation to make Dennett’s good writing into a criticism of the writing of others.

Whereas the Unholy Trinity attempt to browbeat the unthinking reader into unquestioningly accepting their assertion that Man is on the verge of vanishing in nuclear fire unless billions of idiots can be forcibly stripped of their belief in non-existent sky fairies, Dennett calmly asks the thoughtful reader to consider why religious faith exists in the first place, why it persists so stubbornly, and why so many individuals place such a high value upon it.

Unfortunately, Vox forgot to mention which page, and which book(s) of the other New Atheists proposed “forcibly” stripping “billions of idiots” of their beliefs, let alone browbeating anyone into unquestioning acceptance of their conclusions. But we get the point: Vox likes the way Dennett asks questions without arguing in favor of any particular answer.

And while Dennett’s declaration of unabashed atheism leaves no doubt about his personal opinion regarding the existence of the supernatural, which he equates with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, he is at least open to the possibility that there are numerous aspects of religion that neither he nor anyone else truly understands. It is this recognition of the near-complete scientific ignorance on the matter that inspires Dennett to propose that scientists make a serious effort at investigating religion instead of merely insulting it. His confidence that the evidence collected will eventually support his hypothesis appears to ebb and flow throughout the book, but it is to his credit that he never asks his reader to accept it at face value or on the strength of his rhetoric.

Gotta love the way Vox sneaks in that little jab about “near-complete scientific ignorance” regarding religion. Vox would like to imply that science knows virtually nothing about whether religion is true or not, even though that’s hardly Dennett’s point. Dennett’s curiosity concerns questions about the mechanisms of religion, and how it sustains itself in the face of so many real-world inconsistencies and obvious superstitions—quite a different sort of ignorance than what Vox would like to attribute to science! But Vox plants his little seeds anyway. Meanwhile, Dennett explores some of the more scientific possibilities concerning the mechanisms that keep religion afloat.

His first suggestion is to consider the way it can bring out the best in individuals. Religion may not be the only phenomenon to do so, but Dennett does not question that it does. While he suggests that it could be possible to design a synthetic replacement that would do so even more efficiently, the suggestion is weakened by his incorrect insistence that atheists are more law-abiding, more sensitive to the needs of others, and more ethical than others. While this may be true if one cherry-picks the data and looks only at the High Church atheist, there is a plethora of evidence that a comparison of all atheists to all Christians will not favor the former, whether one looks at crime rates, divorce rates, birth rates, democratic participation, or charitable giving.

We’ve looked at Vox’s statistics before, and if I were him, I wouldn’t go around drawing too much attention to the problem of “cherry picking” and other questionable statistical practices.

His second suggestion is that religion could be a memetic symbiont or parasite, which benefits itself at the expense of humanity. This is an intriguing concept, but largely a pointless one since there is absolutely no evidence that memes even exist and the idea smacks of confusing metaphor with reality.

That’s an interesting argument, considering that a meme is just an idea that can be passed from one individual to another. No evidence that ideas exist? I wonder what sort of evidence he’s looking for?

His third suggestion is that if religion benefits any human group, the important question would be to determine whom. He suggests three possibilities: all the individuals in society, the members of the controlling elite, or societies as a whole, and while he doesn’t answer the question himself, he expresses a certain skepticism of the last one due to his doubts about evolutionary group selection. The evidence, however, suggests that his first and third options are the strongest here. The idea that religion exists to benefit the elite is weakened by the fact that the ranking members of one of the eldest and most powerful religious elites, the Catholic Church, are neither allowed to have genetic heirs or enjoy many material benefits from their elite status, whereas the competing concept of societal benefit is supported by the evidence that irreligious individuals and societies do not show much enthusiasm for propagation.

You can always count on good old Vox to say stuff like this with a straight face. Here he is, mocking the idea that evolution might be true, while at the same time claiming that religion has evolutionary advantages because religious people out-breed (he says) non-religious people, in the same sentence as he points out the priestly celibacy of the Roman Catholic Church (as though priests don’t have sex).

Where to begin? Does religion benefit the elite? Vox seems to think that the answer must be “no” unless the elite that receive the benefits are the religious leaders. But religion is a set of beliefs that influence (or attempt to influence) social behavior, so we’re not looking for benefits that are strictly biological here. If religion creates an environment that keeps the ruling elite in power, and thus produces social stability in place of anarchy and conflict, the result could indeed be beneficial, biologically, for the religious society, the religious leaders, and the ruling elite. One would think Vox himself would be in favor of such an argument, since it would make religion a good influence on society. But no, he wants to call this the weakest of the three possibilities. Perhaps he just hasn’t thought things through?

Besides, there are other ways to create “heirs” for a religion without direct procreation. Priests and bishops do not need to directly father children in order to generate their own successors. The memetic influence of religion, coupled with the availability of married believers (not to mention ecclesiastical prohibitions against birth control), is more than sufficient to create a cycle that benefits the clergy directly and sustainably. When was the last time you saw the Pope go begging for a handout because he didn’t have a family to support him in his old age?

If you can excuse me for indulging in a bit of a tangent, I have my own idea about the question Dennett poses: religion thrives because it’s the brain’s natural response to the sensory overload we would experience if we tried to understand the world through reason alone. Analysis works well for the details, and for finding definitive answers to specific questions. Reality as a whole, however, is too complex and too full of uncertainties. The human mind is never going to be able to complete a detailed analysis of the whole thing, because once you’ve completely analyzed one part, something else has changed.

What we need is the ability to quickly detect broad patterns in large amounts of data, to perceive trends, hints, and approximations, in a way that’s reasonably meaningful and reasonably reliable. And we’ve got it: our social instincts let us recognize moods, intentions, and attitudes, from a million and one subtle hints, like the arch of an eyebrow, or the slightest tightening of the lips. It’s not always reliable of course, not 100% anyway, but it works well enough often enough that we can form cooperative societies that benefit us all, protecting us from harm and from want, extending our lifespans, and promoting the survival of our species.

What religion does is to take the pattern-processing power of our social instincts, and apply them to the larger problem of “reading the signs” of the world around us. The very earliest humans had no meteorology or medicine or vulcanology, but they lived in a world with storms and diseases and volcanoes. So what did they do? They mentally created spirits to personify these forces so that they could use social instincts to warn themselves about changes in the spirits’ “moods.” They learned the moods and habits of the “spirits” the same way we learn any person’s moods and habits: by experience, using our social instincts as a guide. Fallible? Sure, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to work well enough, often enough, that it benefits the believer.

Even if all it does is give the believer some sense of reassurance, so that he can get up and face the world instead of cowering in a den somewhere, it has provided a benefit. It has tamed the unknowable, harnessed the unpredictable, putting it behind a personal face that may be stern and may even be terrifying, but can at least be given a name. The alternative—complete and utter chaos—won’t even let you grovel.

Science tends to displace this function of religion by reducing the incomprehensibility and unpredictability of the world around us. That’s why atheism tends to be more prevalent among the more scientific and/or more highly educated individuals. And even then, let some personal tragedy shatter your confidence in how much we know, let some sudden vision remind you of how much more there is to life than what we really understand, and the pull of religion can be felt again, the mind’s natural and instinctive reaction to the complexities and uncertainties of life. Social instincts are there, and work well enough often enough to be a net benefit, so why not use them? (But if you must be religious, worship Alethea!)

Well, I’ve wandered off a bit. Let’s pick up where we left off next time.

In discussing the Bible, Hitchens claims that the four Gospels were not in any sense a historical record and claims their multiple authors “cannot agree on anything of importance.” His only source is Bart Ehrman, an apostate former evangelical whose Misquoting Jesus is an interesting and respected textual criticism of the inerrant inspiration of the New Testament. But Hitchens is apparently unaware that Ehrman has been forced to admit that the Gospels are in accordance that 1) Jesus was crucified and buried, 2) his tomb was discovered to be empty, 3) his disciples believed they encountered him after his death, and 4) his disciples sincerely believed that Jesus had risen from the dead.

That’s an interesting rebuttal, considering that the earliest and most reliable manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end at chapter 16 and verse 8, which mentions an angel and an empty tomb, but not any actual encounters with the allegedly risen savior, or subsequent belief on the disciples’ part. So of the 4 areas of broad general agreement that Ehrman was “forced to admit,” two of them aren’t even in the originals of one of the four Gospels.

But fair’s fair, so let’s admit that, while there are problems with some of the New Testament documents, it’s a bit much to claim that there isn’t any agreement between them. If that were the case, scholars wouldn’t be suspecting that Matthew and Luke, at least, might have copied from some common source (aka the “Q” document). But granted that the authors do agree to some extent, the New Testament documents still have a problem in that they disagree on certain factual details, a point which Vox attempts to explain away by claiming that “eyewitness accounts tend to vary greatly when it comes to the particulars.”

Now, let’s pause for a moment and recall that Vox originally told us, back in the preface to the book, that “my purpose in writing this book is not to defend God, or even to argue for the truth of my particular religious faith.” Apparently, what he meant was that he did not intend to defend the Christian faith except when he thought he could get away with it. Or maybe he meant that it was not his purpose to argue apologetics—it just kinda happens by accident. Regardless, he is making an apologetic argument here, and we should take a look.

Vox is quite correct that eyewitness accounts can vary greatly. Most eyewitness accounts, however, don’t claim to have divine, supernatural inspiration guaranteeing that their writings will be infallibly inerrant. It’s not surprising that we would find fallible, mortal men and women making factual errors based on misperception, unintentional “memory editing,” or other human flaws. The presence of such flaws in the Bible, however, argues strongly for the conclusion that the New Testament texts are more consistent with a human origin than a divine one. That’s a pretty important point to note when the book in question is routinely described as “the Word of God.”

Vox goes on to offer the discovery of Nineveh and the Hittites as giving believers reason to hope that we will one day find archeological evidence of the Exodus as well. Much as I hate to burst Vox’s bubble, I think we should remember that early skepticism about Nineveh and the Hittites was due in large part to the lack of archeological knowledge about that era and region. Such is no longer the case, especially with regard to Egyptian history, which seems surprisingly unfamiliar with the notion that at some point they lost a Pharoah, an entire army of chariots, and a few million slaves—a combination that would not only have left an indelible mark on the civilization, but that would also have left the rich, fertile farmlands easy prey for any of Egypt’s more aggressive neighbors. Vox can keep hoping, but I rather doubt he’s going to see the good news he’s hoping for on that front.

Next, Vox lists 15 factual errors in god is not Great, as documented by a Dr. Mark D. Roberts. According to Dr. Roberts, scholars now state that Jesus was most likely born in 6BC (not the 4BC I was always taught, hmm). He also lists such errors as “Bart D. Ehrman’s name is not Barton.” Mmkay, gotta get to a multiple of 5 somehow, I guess. “Fourteen errors” just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Dr. Roberts also asserts that “The Nag Hammadi ‘Gospels’ were codices, not scrolls, and they were not written in the same period as the canonical Gospels, but later.” That one I’m not so sure about. The nag-hammadi.com web site refers to these texts as “a fabulous treasure with its Coptic translations, dating back to the 2nd century AC, of religious and philosophical texts that were even older, initially written in Greek.” That is, the Nag Hammadi copies may have dated back to the second century, but this doesn’t mean the originals weren’t written around the same time as the Gospels.

But let’s drive on and assume, for the moment, that Vox and Roberts are correct about Hitchens saying factually incorrect things in his criticism of the New Testament. What does this mean for us? Before we answer that, let’s look at the last error listed by Roberts.

Hitchens invents and exaggerates disagreements about the Gospels. The “disagreement” about Peter’s denial is whether the cock crowed once or twice; it is not a matter for scholarly theological debate.

It seems to be the general principle here that picky little details don’t matter. Well, that’s not quite true: it matters if Hitchens is the one getting a picky little detail wrong, and indeed the bulk of TIA is devoted to finding some picky little detail that Vox can claim some atheist got wrong. But when it’s the Holy Bible we’re talking about—when it’s the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God—then the inconsistent details don’t really matter. Go figure, eh?

And that’s about it. Hitchens, for some reason, gets off easy. Vox seems to like him, for all the flaws Vox sees in his arguments (or perhaps because of the flaws—it’s easier to be a gracious winner than a gracious loser). Vox even suggests that he might like to buy Hitchens a drink someday. He closes the chapter with this noble thought:

If God, whose power is infinitely greater than my own, does not see fit to force Christopher Hitchens to worship him, then how can I, or any other Christian, fail to do other than follow that divine example? Free will is at the heart of the Christian faith. To follow or not to follow is a choice, and I would not, indeed, I could not, rob Christopher Hitchens of his right to make that decision on his own.

I wish Vox could get these “Marriage ‘Protection’ Amendment” yahoos to see things from that perspective. But he’s right about one thing: he can’t rob Hitchens of his right to freely decide whether or not to follow God. Only God can do that, by failing to show up in real life so that Hitchens (and the rest of us) might make a free and informed decision.

If these four objections are truly the basis for Hitchens’s hostility towards God and religion, then the irrepressible atheist may be much closer to returning to the faith of his fathers than anyone suspects, because one of these objections is trivial, one is irrelevant, and the other two are simply wrong.

Hitchens on the verge of seeing the light? This should be interesting.

Let’s have a look at each of these four objections, and Vox’s corresponding response.

1. It wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos.

Hitchens might as reasonably reject science on the same petty basis, considering the wide range of abiogenetic hypotheses, cosmological creation myths, and astrophysical fiction currently on offer. Is he similarly opposed to DNA because Francis Crick subscribed to the Directed Panspermia hypothesis and an X-Files variant of Intelligent Design dependent upon space-traveling aliens?

Vox falls into two errors here. The first and most obvious is that science does not embrace a “wide range of abiogenetic hypotheses, cosmological creation myths, and astrophysical fiction[s]” as being the definitive answer to the origins of man and the cosmos. Scientists are considering and investigating a wide range of possibilities because we don’t yet know what the true answer is. And that leads to Vox’s second error: assuming that you can’t know which answers are wrong until you know the answer that is right.

Quick, what’s the exact value of the square root of pi? To the last decimal place? It’s an irrational number, it doesn’t have a last decimal place. But you don’t need to know the exact value of the square root of pi to know that it is not seventy-two. Likewise, you don’t need to be able to trace out the precise sequence of chemicals leading to the origin of life on earth to know that a story about talking snakes and a magical worldwide flood is clearly not a historically-accurate account of how our planet became what it is today. Truth is consistent with itself, and an objective, scientific investigation into real-world truth consistently reveals characteristics of reality that are more consistent with the scientific hypotheses than with any Bronze Age myth. (There, I used “Bronze Age” correctly this time.)

2. It combines the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism.

This is alliteration, not a genuine objection. And it is incorrect. Orwell’s “boot in the face forever” is arguably the best conceptual expression of the maximum of servility and it is a secular one, given religion’s preference for eschatological scenarios over steady-state theories.

Vox seems (or pretends) not to have noticed that little word “solipsism” there. Even if he had, Orwell’s “boot in the face forever” is merely an external, physical coercion. You can use physical force to demand both “right acts” and “right thoughts,” but no dictator, not even Hitler, has ever had the power to invade the secret, inner thoughts of the heart, the way God supposed to be able to do. While the worldly dictator can demand outward servility, only religion can carry this subjugation all the way into a person’s private thoughts. So Vox’s rebuttal is, in fact, not true.

His omission is even more telling, because no worldly dictator can demand solipsism. It would be counterproductive; it’s hard to persuade someone to submit by convincing them that they’re real and you’re not. The peculiar nature of the Christian faith, however, is that it forces the believer to give their allegiance to a “higher” truth, a truth that is not bound to the “mere” constraints of mundane reality, but that is finer and more spiritual than this coarse and unredeemed matter. Divorced from the constraints of observable and verifiable reality, however, the Christian “truth” is of necessity a subjective reality, and one that draws the believer into a functionally solipsistic world view, even if it is not explicitly and intentionally defined as such. Indeed, the Republican war on science is just one outward manifestation of this Great Divorce.

What Hitchens is highlighting with this objection is the insular and self-referential pattern of religious thought that manifests itself when gullibility displaces true faith as the measure of spirituality. Define “spiritual maturity” in terms of the things a person can drive themselves to believe despite all real-world evidence to the contrary, and you cannot help but end up with a mind that is not only wrong about the real world, but that is thoroughly and invincibly immunized against it. This is the kind of self-contained reality in which blowing up innocent men, women and children can become a virtuous and pious act of service to God, and that makes it a fitting target for Hitchens’s objection.

Now, I disagree with Hitchens quite a bit on the topic of whether “religion” really poisons everything. I blame superstition and militant ignorance, not religion, though I grant you it’s a distinction that is often difficult to make. The innocuous religious beliefs are made largely irrelevant by their very inoffensiveness—it’s the offensive and intrusive ones that dominate the debate, and it is these against which the wrath of Hitchens is directed. And with that I quite agree.

3. It is the cause of dangerous sexual repression.

There is loads of evidence that it is not sexual repression, but the absence of sexual repression that is dangerous. Abstinence never killed anyone, but AIDS certainly has. Male homosexuals are the least sexually repressed humans on the planet; they also happen to enjoy the shortest life expectancy. While sexual repression might explain the horrific history of sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergymen, it does not explain the much greater incidence of sexual abuse by secular educators in the public school system.

Apparently, Vox isn’t too clear on the difference between sexual responsibility and sexual repression. Nor does he show any signs of understanding the psychosocial consequences of sexual repression. Our culture is the product of centuries of Christian repression of normal, natural sexuality; its values and censures have insinuated themselves into the Western mind to the point that words like “dirty” and “sinful” and “nasty” are glib euphemisms for “sexual.” Is it really so hard to see the connection between centuries of treating sex like something wrong and unacceptable, and the emergence of predatory sexual practices based on secrecy and the exploitation of the easily-intimidated?

And please, let’s not have any smarmy lectures about gay promiscuity from anybody who thinks “marriage” should be legally defined in such a way as to discourage committed long-term gay relationships. Amend the US Constitution to protect the right of gays to marry each other, and then we can discuss how immoral a lack of marital fidelity is, gay or straight.

4. It is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

This is an irrelevant and tautological statement. “I object to something in which I don’t believe because it is not true.” All human action is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking, indeed, all technological advancement is. It is not a reasonable basis for an objection to religion; the statement might as easily be applied to the airline industry.

Once again, Vox completely misses (or pretends to miss) the point Hitchens is making. Truth is consistent with itself. When believers prefer to believe what is inconsistent with reality instead of accepting the self-consistent real world sort of truth, they are embracing conclusions that are grounded on wish thinking instead of being grounded in verifiable reality. When people claim, as the Bob Jones home school “science” curriculum claims, that in every case where the evidence contradicts the Bible, it’s the evidence that’s wrong, then people are basing their conclusions on wish-thinking instead of on the real world. It is precisely this displacement of real-world truth with contradictory and inconsistent beliefs, which Hitchens finds objectionable. Airlines have nothing to do with it.

So sorry to disappoint, but when Vox claims that Hitchens is surprisingly close to returning to the faith of his fathers, it just goes to show Vox’s poor depth perception. Hitchens’s objections are solid and well-grounded, and Vox’s replies merely flippant and insubstantial.

Last week we saw Vox accuse Hitchens of evading the questions of one Doug Wilson, despite the fact that Hitchens gave succinct and accurate answers to Wilson’s “bombshell,” while Wilson studiously avoided making any substantial response to Hitchens’s. Vox’s next major punch is to accuse Hitchens of “self-evisceration” for having said “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” According to Vox, this gives Hitchens’s critics “carte blanche to legitimately dismiss the greater portion of Hitchens’s own book.” Nicely thrown, but does that one really land?

Vox tries to document his argument by citing “a table of fifty-one assertions made by Hitchens, each made completely sans evidence, taken from every single one of the nineteen chapters of god is not Great.” In quickly reviewing this list of assertions, however, it is quite plain that Vox has failed to distinguish between propositions for which the evidence is not specifically presented, and propositions for which the evidence is not even possible. Rather than trying to understand the point Hitchens was actually making, Vox merely seeks to exploit the quote as an opening he can throw a punch at.

The Hitchens quote is simply saying that if you can’t come up with any evidence for the conclusion (God) you believe in, then a rational person does not need to provide any evidence against your conclusion (God) in order to be justified in rejecting your conclusion. The list of 51 assertions, however, are not propositions for which Hitchens would necessarily be unable to provide any evidence. It might perhaps be tedious to go through and build a detailed analysis of the evidence for each and every point Hitchens makes (and no doubt Vox would like nothing better than to see skeptics and atheists bog down in endlessly boring detail), but whether or not Hitchens presents the evidence for his statements, they are not assertions for which no evidence is possible. Indeed, Vox himself admits this when he claims to be able to refute Hitchens’s assertions by examining (ta da!) the evidence.

Vox has pulled this tactic fairly frequently in TIA—feigning an innocent and overly-literal misinterpretation of the particular wording of a particular quote in order to flail away in endless detail at the resulting straw man. I’m not a boxing fan, so I can’t say for sure whether the judges would give a fighter points for landing hits on a home-made effigy of the real opponent, but Vox certainly seems to think he’s landing big-time punches with this approach. Let’s have a look at a sample of some of the 51 assertions that Vox claims can be “dismissed without evidence.” (Numbers as originally given in TIA.)

2) What we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

The quote, of course, is from Hitchens, and by listing it as an example of a claim that can be dismissed without evidence, Vox is giving us a good example of simply ignoring evidence which is both abundant and readily available. Atheists and other skeptics do indeed respect free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. Indeed, the reason Vox was claiming earlier that science was such a terrible threat to mankind is precisely because it is, in his opinion, too free, too openminded, and too enamored of pursuing ideas for their own sake.

Vox wants to disqualify this openmindedness on the grounds that they don’t accept his conclusions about God, but openmindedness doesn’t mean you have to agree with every idea you encounter. True skepticism requires that you compare each idea to the available evidence, and then prefer the conclusions best supported by the facts. A preference for truth is not a lack of openmindedness. But I digress. The main point to note here is that Hitchens is citing a fact for which even Vox himself has provided supporting evidence (despite the spin he tried to put on it).

(7) Nothing optional is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting have a repressed desire to participate.

This one is, in fact, an assertion made without evidence, and it’s doubtful that objective evidence ever could be found to support it. Hitchens is simply voicing an opinion, and would cheerfully apply the dictum “what is asserted without evidence can also be rejected without evidence.” Nobody is saying you have to just take Hitchens’s word for it, and if you want to reject it without evidence, that’s perfectly fine. Vox’s punch in this case consists of accusing Hitchens of (*gasp!*) daring to express an opinion in his own book, as though that were some kind of self-contradiction (or self-evisceration, as Vox calls it).

(9) It is a certainty that millions of other harmless and decent people will die, very miserably, and quite needlessly, all over the world as a result of this obscurantism [AIDS denial].

This one is, once again, opinion, and yet not entirely unrelated to the evidence. Indeed, it seems amazing that Vox would suggest that one could look at the evidence related to AIDS, and to the consequences of AIDS denial, and still reject the conclusion that AIDS denial has the potential to cause untold loss of innocent life. If Vox wants to dispute the actual statistics, and (for example) claim that AIDS denial will only result in the loss of a few thousand innocent lives, well, let him produce the evidence to support that conclusion. But if he rejects Hitchens’s conclusion on the basis of lack of evidence, he’s only demonstrating that “what is asserted without evidence” can indeed be “dismissed without evidence.”

(19) The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

Vox includes this quotation, not because there is no evidence to support it, but because he wants to quibble with Hitchens over what a “warrant” is. It’s true that the command to eradicate the entire Amalekite people (and their animals!) is not a blanket permission for Christians to commit genocide whenever they feel like it. It is, however, a Biblical example of God allegedly commanding His followers to commit genocide, and it was indeed written by “human mammals” who, by modern standards were crude and uncultured. The references to slave trafficking and bride price are even more serious, being bound into the ordinances of the Law which Jesus himself declared to be God’s perfect law. Even if modern Christians feel that they do not live up to that standard in order to be saved, it is still the standard of righteousness—including the slavery and selling daughters for sexual purposes.

And so on. The bulk of the “assertions” Vox claims to reject are primarily Hitchens’s opinions, and yes, you are as entitled to your own opinions as Hitchens is to his. Many of these claims, however are subjective guesses as to the degree and/or probable consequences of things that are factual and evidentially-based. Never one to leave a baby behind if there’s some bath water he can dump, Vox wants to discard both Hitchens’s opinions about the facts and the facts themselves, as frequently noted in his footnotes. For example:

(10) The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile.

[VOX'S FOOTNOTE] This historical antipathy for medicine is no doubt the reason so many religious individuals and organizations founded hospitals.

In other words, if Hitchens is somewhat excessive in his opinion about the degree to which religion and medicine have been at odds with one another, we’re supposed to reject the whole thing. So, for example, the whole Middle Ages incident where the Church forbade dissection of cadavers, leaving medical knowledge essentially where Galen left it (mistakes and all), never happened. We’re just supposed to give religion full credit for the medical knowledge obtained by those who finally dared to defy the Church’s teaching that dissection of human cadavers was a sacriligious violation of the image of God.

In summary, this section of Chapter 9 consists of Vox Day rejecting 51 assertions made by Christopher Hitchens, without regard to the evidence which would properly apply to each assertion, solely on the grounds that Hitchens did not explicitly enumerate the evidence for each point as he made it, which Vox justifies on the basis of a wooden and tendentious misinterpretation of a single Hitchens quote sans context. This is not a search for the truth, nor is it a serious attempt to engage the actual issues. It is Vox Day, throwing whatever literary punches he can, and proclaiming himself the winner by a knockout because he pushed over his own straw man.

From the very first of his six responses to Hitchens, Wilson is forced to repeatedly ask Hitchens for his atheist basis of respect for the individual, for the reason why an individual should care one way or another about what Hitchens, or anyone else, happens to believe is good or evil, and exactly what the fixed standard by which Hitchens declares Christianity to be not good happens to be. After initially ignoring the question, followed by evasive digressions into everything from etiquette to Epicurus, from Spinoza to innate human solidarity, from slavery to stem cell research, Hitchens finally breaks down under the unrelenting pressure and answers

The debate was published in Christianity Today, and is arranged (not surprisingly) so that the theologian gets the last word. On the other hand, this arrangement also gives Hitchens the initiative in posing the questions and raising the points that his opponent will need to address. And he raises a number of cogent issues:

1. Though Christians claim morality comes from God, there is no evidence our moral standards originated with Jesus or with Moses or with any other Biblical figure
2. Early moral teachings in the Bible are often barbaric and immoral themselves, including the notion that sacrifice can absolve the guilty and the practice of infant genital mutilation
3. Christianity uses rigged scorekeeping, taking credit for the good works of good Christians, but disclaiming responsibility for the bad actions of bad Christians, in order to create an artificial facade of virtue

Wilson’s response to the first point is to essentially concede the point that morality does not come from Christianity (a concession that Vox fails to mention for some reason). All men do have a certain innate moral sense, Wilson admits, but he echoes C. S. Lewis’s superstition in ascribing credit for this moral sense to God. Not a bad answer, rhetorically speaking, nor is his answer to the third point, in which he compares Christianity to a professor who has some students that pass and some that fail. Not really good answers, either, but at least they’re answers.

In response to the second point, however, Wilson makes the first dodge. “Why should you care?” he asks Hitchens, seeking to turn the Old Testament accounts into the atheist’s problem. But this is a red herring. Suppose the atheist can’t answer. Suppose he does not know where morality comes from. Does this change anything at all about the fact that the Old Testament God commanded infant genital mutilation, and gave instructions from Mt. Sinai to His people on how to sell their daughters into sexual slavery? Whether or not the atheist understands psychology and sociology well enough to explain the origin of morality, the fact remains that a God who was the source of moral standards ought to be moral Himself. It doesn’t matter whether He delivers these standards by writing them on stone tablets or directly on human hearts; if His own actions are not moral, He is either not the source of morality, or He is a liar.

Hitchens, naturally, spots this evasion right away, but he gives Wilson’s point a concise and elegant answer.

The existence or otherwise of an indifferent cosmos (the overwhelmingly probable state of the case) would no more reduce our mutual human obligations than would the quite weird theory of a celestial dictatorship,whether Aztec or Muslim or (as you seem to insist) Christian. The sole difference is that we would be acting out of obligation toward others out of mutual interest and sympathy but without the impulse of terrifying punishment or selfish reward.

Vox’s claim notwithstanding, Hitchens did indeed give Wilson a direct and accurate answer to his question. Mutual interest and sympathy are indeed the basis from which all human morality is drawn. An individual is better off being part of a society in which the participants assist each other and refrain from doing harm. The moral rules which promote social harmony are thus in everybody’s mutual interest. And if that were not enough, we all have a certain instinctive sympathy for one another, providing us with an additional, powerful motivation not to cause or allow harm. As we accumulate more experience over time, we may learn better which behaviors are helpful and which are harmful, thus leading to an ongoing refinement of our moral sense. But the morality itself is rooted in ordinary sympathy and mutual self-interest.

Wilson’s reply, amazingly enough, is to accuse Hitchens of avoiding the question. Having successfully changed the subject from the morality of the Old Testament God to the subject of Hitchens’s ability to explain where morality comes from, Wilson clings tenaciously to his original evasion, despite Hitchens’s answers, and plays the role, at least, of the victorious debater, despite his inability to address Hitchens’s original point.

Vox is partly right. Wilson was indeed driven to repeat his argument six times. Not because Hitchens had no answer, but because Wilson didn’t. Only by continuing to pretend that Hitchens had no answers could Wilson maintain the pretense that he’d out-argued the atheist. Even though Hitchens repeatedly answered his questions, Wilson simply could not, or would not, understand the simple point of the answers he was being given. Ignorance, it seems, can indeed be more useful than understanding—for certain purposes.

Vox, of course, is all over himself cheering for Wilson, and especially for the “hammer” that Wilson supposedly dropped at the end of the debate.

Wilson’s correct response is that a constantly evolving standard is, by definition, not a fixed one, and moreover, the less-evolved cannot be reasonably held to the same standard as the more highly evolved.

One need only look at Old Testament morality, with its polygamy, genital mutilation, and slavery, to see how Christian morals have indeed evolved over the past few thousand years. One thing hasn’t changed, though. Apparently it is still ok with God to lie, to mislead, and to obfuscate the truth, as long as you’re doing so for the benefit of the Gospel. Faced with the fact that Hitchens directly answered Wilson’s point, and Wilson persistently evaded Hitchens’s, Vox simply lies about the debate, and claims that Hitchens dodged the issue. And isn’t that a great way to discuss the results of a debate over morality? [Update: Nah, strike that. I can't eliminate the possibility that Vox simply has a blind spot when it comes to understanding the secular basis for morality. It's not fair to accuse him of lying when there's a possibility that he simply fails to grasp the significance of Hitchens's answers. I withdraw the earlier charge.]

As we saw before, the flaw in the anthropic principle, as an argument for an intelligent Creator, is that it fails to distinguish between imaginable alternatives and those which are actually possible in the real world. As Vox correctly points out, there is not—so far—any conclusive scientific reason for supposing that any other configuration of the fundamental physical constants of the universe could actually occur in objective reality.

Only by postulating a potentially infinite number of universes can our wildly improbable universe become mathematically probable. Of course, there are no signs of any of these other universes, nor did science ever take the idea of parallel universes seriously until the alternative was accepting the apparent evidence for a universal designer.

If, however, the total number of actual possibilities is limited to one, then it is at least an exaggeration to refer to the 1:1 probability as “wildly improbable.” By Vox’s own argument, the anthropic “problem” is not so much an improbability as a misperception.

There’s another problem with Vox’s use of the anthropic principle as an argument for the Designer: the “wildly improbable” combination of conditions is only considered to be improbable because the constants involved have the values they would need to have in order for intelligent life to arise naturally, without the intervention of a supernatural Designer. (I believe it was PalMD who first pointed this out to me.) Creationists ought to pick a horse and then ride it. Are the laws of nature contrary to what would be required for intelligent life to evolve, or are they, as Vox argues, exactly consistent with what Darwinian evolution would require?

Yet another problem with Vox’s attack on the multiverse concept is that it has theological implications. An alternate universe would be a realm somewhat similar to this cosmos, but independent of it and with different laws. Clearly, heaven and hell are not part of this cosmos, so if they did exist, they would have to be alternate universes. Though Vox does not realize it, his defense of the anthropic argument is not just an attack on Dawkins, it makes a mockery of heaven and hell as well. With his typical flair, Vox draws our attention to the fact of how “utterly non-scientific” it is (at this point) to claim to know that there are other realms besides this natural, material universe.

Perhaps the most serious error Vox makes, though, is when he claims, “The anthropic principle is an explanation for the great mystery of physics: the improbable coincidence of various fundamental constants being set at just the right levels in order to support life in the universe.” The anthropic principle, as Vox defines and uses it, is not an explanation but is instead merely a superstition. It does not describe a verifiable and specific chain of events from the proposed cause to the observed effect, it merely attributes the observed effect to some indetectable, arbitrarily-selected, and unverifiable cause, without showing any actual connection between the two, or even proposing what such a connection would look like if it did exist.

Vox’s anthropic argument is, in fact, a reversion to a very specific and primitive form of superstition known as animism. When an animist encounters a natural phenomenon he does not understand, he leaps to the conclusion that some kind of invisible, magical personality must have intentionally produced it. The anthropic argument “explains” how the cosmos got its constants the same way animism “explains” how evil spirits cause disease—by magical attribution instead of by scientific and verifiable explanation.

Vox argues that, if a Creator is improbable on the grounds that (as Dawkins points out) He would have to be more complex and improbable than His creation, then the multiverse concept is even more improbable. If there’s a one-in-a-million chance of one universe arising, then there would have to be a one-in-a-trillion chance of two. Of course, this kind of math assumes that God only created one of the many different universes, and that heaven and hell, for example, were not created. Otherwise Dawkins’s original argument would still apply. But I rather think that Vox’s math is way off, by failing to take into account that these alternate universes (a) would not necessarily have to produce intelligent life and (b) would likely arise as a result of conditions that would make a wide range of universes all but inevitable. (A full discussion of this will be left as an exercise for the reader.)

Vox mocks Dawkins for suggesting that “We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics” and for saying that “the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.” In particular, Vox picks out the adverb “self-evidently,” which he takes as an admission of lack of proof (instead of understanding Dawkins’s point as being that a weak argument is self-evidently better than a self-defeating one).

“Lacking any means of proving his conclusion, Dawkins simply throws up his hands and declares it to be self-evident! I ask you this, dear atheist reader, would you accept an argument this poorly constructed as conclusive and irrefutable evidence of the existence of God?” The difference, of course, is that Dawkins is precisely not appealing to the notion that his conclusion is self-evident. He made his argument for why Intelligent Design contradicts its own premise in arguing that complex things need a more-complex (skyhook) Creator, and in fact he argued his point so well that the only way Vox could dispute Dawkins’s conclusion was to reject the ID skyhook. Dawkins’s <i>conclusion</i> was demonstrated; the “self-evident” is merely referring to the superiority of a weak argument over a self-defeating one.

And that pretty much does it for this chapter. Dawkins made some brilliant arguments about how ID assumptions lead to untenable conclusions, and the only point Vox could find to dispute with Dawkins was that he could avoid those conclusions if he rejected the idea that complex things need intelligent (more complex) creators. Thus, Vox avoided being defeated in battle through the simple expedient of ceding the territory to the opposition and withdrawing before combat could be joined. True, the field is littered with carnage and destruction. But those were Vox’s allies—he slaughtered them on his way back from the front.

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

The evidence argument. It’s proven to be rather difficult to refute since the vast majority of atheists have a very poor understanding of what evidence is – their tendency towards science fetishism often causes them to believe only scientific evidence is evidence – and quickly find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to deny the existence of things they quite clearly believe.

Notice what he’s doing here: he’s claiming to have evidence (“difficult to refute” evidence, no less), without ever offering any actual examples. I can well believe that this sort of empty boast is Vox’s favorite argument, as we’ve seen him use it before.

The nice thing about not revealing your evidence is that keeping your evidence secret also keeps it safe. As Vox himself has stated (by projection onto PZ Myers), empty boasting is a successful strategy precisely when “attempting more would banish the illusion of his intellectual expertise and reveal the paucity of both his knowledge and his intelligence.”

Vox is even kind enough to admit, indirectly, that his boast is indeed empty. When he says “their tendency towards science fetishism often causes them to believe only scientific evidence is evidence,” what he’s saying is that his own evidence is not scientific, otherwise atheists’ dedication to scientific evidence would not be an impediment. All that is required for evidence to be scientific, however, is that it be independently verifiable as true. So Vox, in his own mind, is “triumphing” over those poor saps who base their conclusions on evidence that is verifiably true, whereas his evidence has been liberated from that troublesome requirement.

The only downside to having secret, unscientific evidence is that when somebody like PZ declines to waste his time on you, you can’t honestly claim that he ran away from your evidence, since you never produced any for him to run away from. I might go out of my way to avoid walking through a pile of dog doo, but the pile isn’t any less crap because I “ran away” from it. Let’s see if Vox’s evidence is really as great as he claims. Let’s see if even he thinks it worthwhile to mention in public. Then we’ll see who runs away.

I only mention this because Vox is not the only believer whose favorite argument for theism is to make empty boasts about some secret superior knowledge that allegedly proves them right. A lot of people make that argument, especially since Dawkins, Dennett and the rest have been out-selling their detractors. More and more, people are seeing the inconsistency and irrelevancy of traditional Christian arguments for God, and since the defenders of the faith really have nothing more than hearsay, superstition and gullibility to build on, more empty boasting is the best they’ve got to offer.

Dawkins makes three even more serious mistakes in attempting to demonstrate the improbability of divine complexity when he argues that a designer capable of not only designing, but continually monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe must be complex, especially if the designer’s consciousness is also occupied with the activities of every single sentient being across the billions of galaxies, answering their prayers, inflicting suffering on them and so forth. But here he is confusing the design of the universe, which is the topic under discussion, with the active management of the universe, which is not.

Notice that it’s not Dawkins who is confusing things here. Dawkins said IF the Designer is also supposed to be the kind of sovereign deity who controls every detail of His creation, then He’s going to be more complex than the details he manages. Why would Dawkins bring this topic into a discussion of creation? Simply because many Christians do argue that the Creator is indeed just such a sovereign God. And we see that Dawkins is right on target when Vox responds to this challenge by discarding the Christian idea of God.

The designer of the universe need not monitor it, in fact, the concept of a hands-off Creator God has been around for centuries, it is the deity of the nineteenth-century Deists whom today’s atheists regard as spiritual ancestors. A distinction between the divine designer and an active divine monitor is not only inherent to the Gnostic heretics, but to Bible-believing Christians as well. The common, but misguided, concept of divine puppet mastery, or omniderigence, is addressed in detail in Chapter XV, but for now it is sufficient to state that because Christian and other theologies do not require any belief in ongoing divine monitoring or active control (even if they permit it), that particular aspect of God’s supposed complexity does not belong in any argument from improbability.

Notice, what Vox is discarding here is the notion that the Creator “is also occupied with the activities of every single sentient being across the billions of galaxies, answering their prayers, inflicting suffering on them and so forth.” Vox tries to make a pointless distinction between theologies that require divine control and those that merely permit it, but that’s irrelevant, because Dawkins is speaking of a deity who would be capable of that kind of control. Thus Vox must reject the idea that God even could answer prayers if He wanted to. In order for Dawkins to be wrong, Jesus must have been wrong when he portrayed God as caring for even birds and flowers, and as numbering the hairs on your head. Either that or Jesus was wrong when he referred to the Genesis creator as God.

It’s rather amusing in a way. Creationists take it for granted that God is an unimaginably complex being, much more sophisticated and incomprehensible than the visible universe, and they make the argument that the universe requires this kind of complexity as a necessary and sufficient cause. Dawkins points out the rather obvious flaw that God Himself would thus require an even more complex cause, assuming that complex things require more-complex causes. Vox’s double-barreled rebuttal is to reject both the creationist assumption that complex effects require more-complex causes, AND the creationist assumption that God is a being complex enough to create the universe, direct the course of Nature, and hear and answer the prayers of mankind. Vox has not so much refuted Dawkins’s argument, as made it moot through abject surrender.

Vox wraps up this particular tour de force by comparing God to a network packet sniffer, a tool used by network engineers to monitor network reliability and/or to inspect the data being transmitted. According to Vox, God does not need to be as complex as the data He monitors because a packet sniffer is less complex than the data it records. Of course, a packet sniffer is useless by itself—to actually understand and interpret the data requires interaction with something more complex, like, say, a human engineer. But never mind; reducing God to a brainless tool is sufficient to serve Vox’s purposes at this point, so he’s more than happy to make that concession in order to provide himself with another pretext to claim to have refuted Dawkins. Poor God!

If there’s one thing that comes through more clearly than any other in this section, it’s that Vox himself does not seriously believe the Christian faith. Oh, sure, he believes IN the Christian faith, in some form. Or something similar to a Christian faith. But realistically, he doesn’t believe that all those dogmas are actually true. They’re just ideas, concepts, beliefs that you appeal to when it suits the need of the moment. If they every get in your way, you simply discard them. It’s not like they’re actual facts or anything.

“Dawkins, you villain,” shouts Vox, “you’ve messed with me and my friends for the last time!” And with that, he pulls out his trusty six-shooter—and shoots poor old ID in the back. “Take that, Dawkins, you loser!” crows Vox, capering around the body of his fallen comrade, with a bemused Dawkins standing there wondering whose side Vox is really on.

As Geisler and Turek have taken some pains to explain to us, and as leading ID proponents have repeatedly tried to convince us, one of the arguments against evolution (and thus, allegedly, in favor of ID) is that evolutionary phenomena are too simple to have produced the incredible complexity and sophistication we see all around us. Those who are not ashamed to call themselves creationists are even bolder: the world we see, with all its complexity, could only have been produced by something even greater and more complex. And even if there were a natural explanation for all this complexity, that explanation itself would require an even more complex cause, because complex organization cannot arise spontaneously from simple causes.

Now, there are at least two problems with this argument. One is that it fails to define exactly what “complexity” is. The other is that if you claim that every complex phenomenon requires an even more complex cause, you’ve got a problem. Oh, sure, it works well as a rhetorical device for leading people to conclude that some Ultimate Complexity must exist. Logically, however, you’re going to have to contradict yourself sooner or later, because if there is an “Ultimate” Complexity, it’s going to violate your own principle that every complex phenomenon requires a more-complex cause. What caused the Ultimate Complexity?

Dawkins has taken some time to explain this problem in greater detail, and now Vox is going to try and refute him.

His first mistake is the assumption that the designer is inherently more improbable than the design, based on the assumption that the designer of the universe must be more complex than the universe itself. But because Dawkins does not define complexity, he provides no means of calculating the statistical improbability of the designer

Whoa, nice shootin’ there Tex. Vox is correct that the failure to define complexity is a major flaw in attempts to argue for the probability that a Creator exists. He seems to have missed the point, however, that it’s not Dawkins who is claiming that the complexity of the universe is sufficient to prove statistically that a Creator ought to exist. Dawkins is simply pointing out that creationists are being inconsistent when they claim that the “creation” is improbable and the Creator is not.

Vox tries to salvage this argument by making the irrelevant and erroneous claim that we can calculate the probability (or improbability) of fundamental physical constants being the values they are today.

But because Dawkins does not define complexity, he provides no means of calculating the statistical improbability of the designer, whereas the statistical improbabilities of the design are clearly defined in no little detail in the cosmological applications of the anthropic principle, as Dawkins concedes in his citation of the six fundamental constants examined by the physicist Martin Rees.

As we have discussed before, there’s more to calculating real-world probability than simply enumerating the imaginable alternatives. Vox Day is a person. A person can be male, female, hermaphroditic, or neuter, and can also be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. We can combine these characteristics in twelve different ways, but that doesn’t mean that there’s realistically less than a 10% probability that Vox is a genuine heterosexual male. The fact that we can imagine alternatives does not mean that each of those alternatives is equally likely or equally consistent with the available real-world evidence. So Vox is simply wrong when he claims that he can accurately calculate “the statistical improbabilities of the design.”

It’s also irrelevant, because the alleged “improbability” of the universe is only an argument for God if you assume that complex phenomena require even more complex causes. As soon as you allow the complexity of the universe to arise from less complex phenomena, you’ve opened wide the doors for the evolutionary explanation, in which simpler causes give rise to greater and more sophisticated effects. Vox, however, seems to have overlooked this issue completely.

While Dawkins’s complaint that the theistic answer to the design’s improbability is unsatisfying because it leaves the existence of the designer unexplained is fair, his subsequent assertion that “A God capable of calculating the Goldilocks values for the six numbers would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself” is not. This is his second error, as the statement is certainly true of Rees, who is both capable of calculating the numbers and is a part of the design, but it cannot be true of the designer because the latter fact does not apply. Third, does Dawkins seriously wish to argue that Martin Rees is more complex than the universe? We know Rees calculated the Goldilocks values, so if he can do so despite being less complex than the sum of everyone and everything else in the universe, then God surely can too.

Notice the misquote: Dawkins didn’t say that you would have to be more complex than the universe in order to calculate the “fine-tuned” combination of numbers that would allow for human life; he said a being capable of calculating those six precise values would have to be as improbable as the combination of the numbers themselves. And ID proponents would heartily agree that human beings are as improbable as the six so-called “Goldilocks numbers,” so it’s particularly ironic to see Vox pulling out the Six-Gun of Sarcasm to blaze away at the notion.

He follows up this gaffe with the final, fatal blow to his poor friend ID.

There is no reason why a designer must necessarily be more complex than his design. The verity of the statement depends entirely on the definition of complexity. While Dawkins doesn’t specifically provide one, in explaining his “Ultimate 747 gambit,” he refers to the argument from improbability as being rooted in “the source of all the information in living matter.” Complexity, to Dawkins, is therefore equated with information.

He’s got the right idea, though he misattributes the source. It’s not Dawkins who is pushing the idea that complexity equals information, but creationists. The whole point of the Ultimate 747 argument is to get people to realize that at some point, there has to be a fatal breakdown in the principle that says complex effects require more-complex causes. Vox’s “rebuttal” is essentially an admission that Dawkins is correct. I’m not sure how many creationists will realize that Vox has just shot their argument in the back, but by admitting that the “designer” can be less than his/her/its “design,” he has pretty much shut down the whole apologetic of intelligent design. If a bacterial flagellum can be “designed” by something that isn’t even as smart as a germ, there’s not much support for Genesis in biology. Poor ID, another casualty of friendly fire!

Vox goes on with examples of simple, non-supernatural phenomena which easily produce highly complex designs without being complex in and of themselves, and indeed without even being intelligent. But we’ll skip over that part, as abuse of a corpse is always rather disgusting, especially when the person doing it hasn’t yet realized it’s his own team-mate he’s abusing. The chapter’s not over though: tune in again next week, when we’ll hear Vox say:

A distinction between the divine designer and an active divine monitor is not only inherent to the Gnostic heretics, but to Bible-believing Christians as well.

See you then.

Right, it’s a trick question. There’s an infinite number of answers: 48, 823, 1, “walnuts”, and so on. But there’s only one correct and relevant answer: 4. In other words, there’s a difference between the number of imaginable possibilities, and the number of valid possibilities. We need to keep that in mind, because today Vox is going to try and take down Richard Dawkins by appealing to the anthropic principle. Let’s see if he makes out any better than Geisler and Turek did.

The anthropic principle has been an embarrassing problem for secular scientists in recent decades due to the way in which the probability of the universe and Earth just happening to be perfectly suitable for human life is very, very low. The extreme unlikelihood of everything being not too hot, not too cold, not too big, and not too small, to put it very crudely, has often been cited as evidence that the universe has been designed for us, presumably by God.

“Presumably” is right. This is an argument that is built on presumptions, but more significantly, it’s built on a failure to distinguish between imaginable possibilities, and valid possibilities.

For example, if I hold a ball above the ground, and drop it, what is the probability that it will fall down? According to the law of gravity, unless that ball is acted on by some other force, the probability of falling down is pretty much 100%. It doesn’t matter how many different possible directions you can trace out from the ball’s original position, the number of valid possibilities is 1, and therefore the odds of it falling down are 1:1 or 100%.

How many possible universes are there? Well, we can imagine quite a number of them, simply by varying the parameters that describe this universe. We might, for example, imagine a universe in which pi is an even 3 instead of an irrational number starting with 3.14159 and so on. Or why not 2? or 5? or 57,684? On the other hand, how many of those “possible” universes would actually be valid? Could we make any of them actually work?

For example, how exactly would you go about producing a universe in which the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is greater (or less) than pi? Would the distance around the circle increase while the distance across the circle remained the same? If space curved in such a way as to make the circumference longer, wouldn’t it also increase the diameter by the same amount, thus maintaining the ratio?

Many people have speculated about a range of “possible” universes, but so far the only possibility that has been shown to be a valid possibility is this universe we’re in now. I’m perfectly happy to keep an open mind here, and to listen to any new discoveries that someone might make, but by my count, we have one anthropic universe out of a total of one known valid possibility. That’s a 1:1 ratio, hardly a low probability. If we discover another valid possibility, then the odds will drop to 1:2, and then we can start to explore whether or not there are any factors that make some possibilities more likely than others (the way gravity skews the odds in favor of falling down). Vox’s gloating about the anthropic “problem” is both exaggerated and premature.

But Vox has another agenda here: once again, he’s looking for some pretext he can use to disparage Dawkins’s intellect. In this particular case, Dawkins tries to convey, to a non-technical audience, some sense of the unbelievable range of valid possibilities within which life might arise spontaneously. He poses a hypothetical example, using familiar large numbers like “billion,” in order to communicate the idea that the odds are not quite as unfriendly as we might naively suppose. That’s all the pretext Vox needs to accuse Dawkins of mathematical ineptitude:

Now, Richard Dawkins is arguably not an individual particularly well suited to play around with probability. He may not be quite as mathematically handicapped as Sam Harris, but he is known to have some issues in this regard, being openly mocked for his “comic authority” and “fatal attraction” to mathematical concepts by the French mathematician Marcel-Paul Schützenberger.

In a footnote, Vox refers to this interview in which Schützenberger begins by admitting that “Biology is, of course, not my specialty,” and then goes on to prove what a serious handicap this is by making the ludicrous mistake of assuming that, because a gene can be “on” or “off,” its information content is equal to a single binary computer bit.

Schematically, a gene is like a unit of information. It has simple binary properties. When active, it is an elementary information-theoretic unit, the cascade of gene instructions resembling the cascade involved in specifying a recipe. Now let us return to the example of the eye. Darwinists imagine that it requires what? A thousand or two thousand genes to assemble an eye, the specification of the organ thus requiring one or two thousand units of information? This is absurd! Suppose that a European firm proposes to manufacture an entirely new household appliance in a Southeast Asian factory. And suppose that for commercial reasons, the firm does not wish to communicate to the factory any details of the appliance’s function — how it works, what purposes it will serve. With only a few thousand bits of information, the factory is not going to proceed very far or very fast.

It’s easy to see why Vox would embrace Schützenberger as a fellow traveller along Smug Road. Not only does Schützenberger chastize Dawkins for failing to stick to his specialty, he immediately turns around and pontificates about what biology means even though, by admission and demonstration, he clearly does not understand the material he is talking about. (Hmm, where have we seen that before?) And lest we suppose that we might excuse Schützenberger on the grounds that he was speaking of “bits” in the sense of “small pieces” rather than in the sense of computer bits, his very next sentence proves that he is indeed speaking of binary 1′s and 0′s: “A few thousand bits of information, after all, yields only a single paragraph of text,” he says. A few thousand binary bits are about a paragraph; a few thousand “small pieces of information” would be a small book.

A gene, of course, is much more than just a 1 or a 0. How could we recognize so many different types of gene, after all, if each was no more than a single binary digit? Even a mathematician should be able to see how far off base Schützenberger’s error is. Not only does a gene contain much more “information” than a single boolean, it’s a functional biochemical prototype whose chemical properties are part of the manufacturing process that ultimately builds the proteins and other cell components. Rather than just “a paragraph of text,” giving an organism the genes for an eye is like giving a factory the molds, dies, templates, and rigs needed to build the product–essentially giving them most of the production line, with the remainder being parts known to be readily available in the vicinity already. Schützenberger is just out to lunch.

Notice, too, that Vox seems to have overlooked this glaring flaw in this supposed “expert testimony” against Dawkins. He so fixated on discrediting Dawkins that he’s willing to go along with anything Schützenberger says. Sure, a gene is nothing more than a nucleotidal 1 or 0. Anything you say boss. If it makes Dawkins look bad, it’s good enough.

Back to Dawkins. As I mentioned before, when Dawkins talks about “one in a billion” chances of DNA arising spontaneously, he’s not going into the actual research into abiogenesis. Life does not arise by chance, scientifically speaking. If DNA just happened by a lucky, random event, then research into the origin of life is pointless, because you’ll never re-create a purely random occurrence. And that’s not what scientists are trying to do.

Science works by tracing back the chain of causality, the operation of cause-and-effect, which is the opposite of “by chance.” What researchers are doing today is studying the natural forces that affect the combinations of organic molecules. Just as gravity influences dropped balls to skew the odds in favor of falling in only one direction, the laws of chemistry influence undirected chemical interactions in order to increase their chances of moving in one direction rather than any of innumerable other directions. The interactions are sometimes subtle and complex, which is why it is such a tricky question to answer.

This makes the question difficult to discuss for lay audiences, because the average listener would need quite a bit of time and training to come up to speed on the technical details. For popular presentations, it’s more time-efficient to sacrifice detailed technical accuracy for analogies that convey the general sense of the matter without getting bogged down in minutiae. The “one in a billion” is a very rough oversimplification intended for a non-technical discussion with a non-technical audience.

It’s typical, and revealing, that Vox chooses to attack Dawkins about the alleged mathematical “inaccuracies” in Dawkins’s simplified, “layman’s terms” illustrations, rather than finding (or even seeking) any significant problem in Dawkins’s more technical and rigorous scientific work. Dawkins isn’t really wrong here. Vox is just looking for excuses to gripe about Dawkins. But that’s par for the course.

Vox isn’t done with Dawkins by any means, nor is he finished with the anthropic argument. But that’s enough TIA for one week. We’ll pick this up again about 7 days from now, assuming the cosmic constant for the value of a week doesn’t change before then.

It has been established that Christians give three times more to charity and are less criminal than the broad spectrum of atheists; experiments at the Economic Science Laboratory suggest that this might be because they believe that their actions are known to God. In variations on an envelope experiment designed to test random charity on the part of a subject who was given ten dollars as well as the opportunity to share it anonymously, the knowledge that the experimenter was watching increased the subject’s likelihood of giving by 142 percent and the amount given by 146 percent.

We’ve looked at Vox’s statistics before, and it’s no surprise that he brings up the same spurious interpretations he’s been using all along. “Correlation is not causation,” as they warn you in Statistics 101 in your freshman year. Even if we take Vox’s reported studies at face value, we don’t know whether religious people are more generous, or whether generous people, being more socially oriented, are more likely to attach themselves to peer groups like the Rotary Club, the Lions, or the local church. But we can see that his preferred interpretation—that people give more when they think they are being watched by God—is not really supported by the evidence. People give more when they’re being watched by someone they can see watching them. And that ain’t God, brother!

I’m not going to look too hard at these statistics, though, because regardless of whether the Christian God exists, Christian people do exist, and are indeed responsible for doing a number of good works, at least when they know they’re being watched by someone real. So let’s move on and see how Vox tries to wrestle with Dawkins’s views on morality.

Dawkins erroneously states that behaving in a traditionally moral manner in the absence of policing is somehow “more moral” than the very same behavior when it is witnessed. This confuses action with intent and reveals a basic misunderstanding of the nature of Christian morality.

Hmm, so Christian morality means you’re only refrain from sin when you think you’re going to get caught? That would certainly explain a number of newspaper headlines in the Religion section, but I don’t think that’s really what Christians have historically taught. In fact, when I was a Christian I was routinely taught that your true character was shown, not by how you behaved when people were watching, but by how you behaved when you believed yourself to be unobserved. This was particularly likely to be a theme when the sermon text was based on any verses containing the word “Pharisee.”

Seems to me that Dawkins is closer to traditional Christian morality than Vox is here, but let’s move on. Wait, what? Vox is done with this section already? Either he really is in a hurry to get this over with, or else Dawkins didn’t leave him much room to argue. Let’s go ahead and see how Vox reacts to Dawkins’s claim that America would become a “fascist” state if it were rebuilt to embody “God’s Law and the Ten Commandments.”

Dawkins claims that the goal to have a Christian nation built on God’s Law and the Ten Commandments “can only be called a Christian fascist state” and claims that it is “an almost exact mirror image” of an Islamic fascist state. This is preposterous on several levels….

Fascism is not merely a word that means “scary,” it is a specific historical ideology no less readily identifiable than Marxism or Communism. While there were avowedly fascist governments in the Christian nations of Italy and Austria, there is no such thing as Islamic fascism. Islamic fascism does not exist and it has never existed, either as a political ideology or a practical system of government. The concept is a meaningless term of propaganda used primarily by American neocons and third-rate political pundits seeking to stir up public support for the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism during the lead-up to the Iraqi invasion; it is already falling out of the political discourse.

Notice how Vox subtly shifts from “fascist,” an adjective meaning “of or like fascism,” to the noun “fascism,” which in one of its definitions does indeed have the specific technical meaning Vox ascribes to it. Dawkins compares a theocratic state to a fascist state based on common factors such as defining national identity in terms of some authoritarian standard like religion or ethnicity, and in order to make Dawkins work out to be wrong, Vox has to pull a word switch, substituting a technical term (noun) for Dawkins’s original comparison, and then claiming that Dawkins misapplied the noun.

Then again, even if Dawkins had used the noun, the experienced reader will recognize that Dawkins is making a comparison highlighting the objectionable characteristics of such a state. He’s not, as Vox would have it, claiming to have given it an expert classification based on its political and sociological taxonomy. But Vox needs to make his accusation and then quickly change the subject, because the last thing he needs at this point is to get into a discussion of how individual liberties in America would have to be curtailed or revoked in order to bring us all under someone’s interpretation of what God’s Law is. I’m not sure what church Vox goes to, but somehow I suspect he might feel differently about Dawkins’s assessment if it turned out that God’s Law meant America tithing to the Pope.

Naturally, Vox is outraged, in the following section, by Dawkins’s suggestion that being raised in a Catholic church is more damaging, psychologically, than being abused by the priest. I’ve got some sympathy for Vox here: in terms of the classical concept of psychological damage, sexual abuse is of course more damaging. I believe, though, that Dawkins is chiefly alluding to psychological harm of a sort that is not generally recognized as being real damage, namely, the crippling of the ability to distinguish between what actually is true, and what you only wish were true. To Dawkins, the fact that you believe in God, despite all the evidence, is a very serious and horrible form of damage in and of itself.

Vox, of course, wades off into more statistics and does his usual number waving, and indulges himself in a few tasteless jeers at what he sees as Dawkins’s presumably inferior parenting skills. (This is, after all, a book frankly and enthusiastically dedicated to ad hominem.) I won’t belabor the point, because it’s really all an exercise in semantics: Vox is going to use his definition of “psychological harm” as though it is the only possible definition, and a consideration of what Dawkins actually meant isn’t even going to enter into the picture.

My own personal assessment of Dawkins’s point is that it is not likely to sell well, because when someone suffers, and knows they are suffering, the harm is readily apparent. When someone is harmed, and the nature of the damage is such that it renders the victim insensitive to the suffering, then our dismay is less visceral. It’s not unlike drunkenness: the one who is very drunk does not feel as drunk as the one who is only slightly “buzzed.” We may be offended and repulsed that anyone would stun their own brains like that, but we don’t necessarily feel the same kind of empathetic suffering as when we see an abuse victim suffering bouts of suicidal depression. On a purely cerebral and moral basis, one might judge the harm to be nearly equal in both cases, but we feel more sympathy for the one whose suffering is obvious. So I can see where Dawkins is coming from, but I don’t expect much popular support for his opinions in this particular area.

And that about does it for this week. We’ll pick up in Chapter 8 again next Tuesday. See you there.

Of course, this speculation is as improbable as it is untestable, given the centuries of evidence demonstrating that science is totally incapable of providing the inspiration for passable poetry, much less the sort of great art that religion has reliably inspired for millennia.

Well, ok, it’s true that, say, the ancient Greek myths have inspired more poetry, sculpture, and art than quantum physics has. And this proves…?

Dawkins, naturally, is not suggesting that science ought to inspire poets to write scientific treatises in rhymed couplets, or that scientists ought to write poetry. He’s agreeing with Carl Sagan and many others that a scientific exploration of the natural world reveals such wondrous splendors as ought to inspire the praises of poets and musicians and artists of all kinds for generations to come. But no, Vox wouldn’t address such a reasonable and obvious observation directly. He prefers instead to mock the whole idea that science could be in any way poetic or beautiful, for anyone.

While one can, with some effort, envision Byronesque epics dedicated to the tortile beauties of the DNA helix or dolorous quatrains lamenting the darker aspects of apoptosis, it would require Oscar Wilde’s proverbial heart of stone to do so with a straight face. Consider an actual example of science-inspired poetry: Edmund Halley’s unforgettable “Ode on This Splended Ornament of Our Time and Our Nation, the Mathematico-Physical Treatise by the Eminent Isaac Newton”

I’ll spare you—it’s the kind of poetry only a Vogon could love. Instead, let’s look at the poem with which Vox opens:

Looking for art in science
Is a peculiar aspiration,
For there is little wonder
Once Man denies Creation.
And his reduction to mere numbers
O’er the passing of the years,
Leaves us with naught but the aesthetics
Of damned chess club pamphleteers.

Is this Vox’s own composition? He doesn’t say, but let’s consider the ideas that it expresses. No possibility of aesthetics, once you realize that the Christian God did not create the universe? No Giuseppe Verdi? No Voltaire? No George Bernard Shaw? No beauty in the Horsehead Nebula, or in fractals, or in the sea? Hardly. Vox can sit and pout and refuse to acknowledge natural beauty if he wants, but he’s going to have a heck of a time convincing anyone besides his own cheerleaders that Dawkins is wrong about the wonders of nature being inspirational.

Consider evolution. Using only a relatively simple set of natural laws (natural variation, and the feedback effect of environmental conditions on the perpetuation of individual characteristics), evolution manages to be endlessly innovative and diverse. How much of human art is merely copied, more or less directly, from the designs and patterns and forms that evolution has generated? Creativity flows from nature, as do beauty and form and proportion. Yes, speculation and fantasies have lead to lots of human creativity, and Dawkins does not deny that. All he’s saying is, “Look over here! Isn’t this cool too? And it’s real!” Truth is not only stranger than fiction, sometimes it’s more beautiful as well. And that’s way more cool, because it’s beautiful and real.

Ironically, Vox invokes Camille Paglia, a columnist at Salon.com, as supporting his claim that only religion can inspire art.

The inadequacy of science and other secular replacements for religion has not escaped the notice of one of the more enthusiastic champions of the arts, Camille Paglia, who despite her atheism insists that religion is an artistic necessity. She explains that whereas the first generation of secular artists, such as James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Proust, achieved greatness through their rebellion against religious tradition, it is their very success that has crippled their successors. She complains that “today, anything goes, and nothing lasts” before declaring that secular humanism has reached a dead end and that religion must be taught in every school.

This is ironic because Paglia’s original column is about how the iconic modernists like Bergman achieved their artistic successes by rebelling against the “authoritarian traditions” in which they were raised.

The premier modernists — from James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf to Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and Martha Graham — were rebelling against a hierarchical, authoritarian tradition that suffocated their youth but whose very power energized their work. They became larger from what they opposed and overcame. Today, anything goes, and nothing lasts.

Paglia wants all world religions (notice, not just Christianity, or “religion” in general) to be taught in public schools, not so that artists will become more superstitious, but so that artists will get a deeper understanding of the human experience, and thus be enabled to produce more perceptive and probing art films. Indeed, one of the consequences of God’s absence from real life is that religion necessarily ends up telling us more about man than it does about god(s), since it becomes man’s responsibility to make up for God’s deficit. The study of religion, and especially the study of comparative religion, is a study of man, and is indeed a good curriculum for a humanistic course of study in the film arts.

This, of course, is pretty much the opposite of the point Vox would like Paglia to make. Vox wants to say that all truth and beauty come from one and the same God—that one religion gets all the good art because it alone has the divine Source of inspiration. But neither in Paglia’s commentary nor in real life do we find this to be so. Art is the fruit, not of an exclusive Holy Spirit, but of the human spirit, springing from our appreciation for the things that give pleasant stimulation to our minds and senses. And the original source of our inspiration is the natural beauty that scientists encounter all the time in their exploration of nature.

As Dawkins observes (and Vox petulantly refuses to observe), the natural world offers such unexpected splendors as to provide the human spirit with endless inspiration—if, of course, the artist has eyes to see. Vox doesn’t, and therefore he completely misses (or avoids) the point Dawkins was actually trying to make.

Unsurprisingly given my own background, it was on the subject of history that I found Day’s critiques of the New Atheists – and of anti-Christian arguments in general – to be most convincing. Not only does Harris in particular get it wrong when it comes to understanding the relationship between religious beliefs (or the lack thereof) and warfare, but atheists in general often distort such events as the Crusades, the Inquisition, Adolf Hitler’s personal faith, and the Aztec practice of human sacrifice in their zeal to demonize all religious believers as troglodytic and potentially homicidal maniacs.

Vox is quite right to be proud of this accomplishment. Though it stands to reason that imaginary Friends would be of little use in a real crisis, Christians are generally quite reluctant to admit this, preferring instead to offer prayers “seeking God’s wisdom in this time of trial,” and claiming to have received comfort, support and guidance from their faith. Such postures are purely empty gestures, as Vox tirelessly demonstrates. In war after war, and conflict after conflict, it is the purely secular forces that really matter.

Dawkins and Harris and the rest could, of course, have produced the same facts, but it is doubtful they could ever have been as successful as Vox in convincing Christians that these facts were correct. Yet perhaps they deserve some credit, because if it were not for atheists observing the religious pretenses with which believers have clothed their true, secular influences, Vox would not have had the context he needed to drive home his point so forcefully. The obvious objections—that God did indeed care, that He chose to work in and through believers to turn the tide of war according to His will—are effectively silenced by the fact that raising these objections would mean that Vox was wrong and the atheists correct. You can’t argue that war is entirely free from religious influences, and that it was also being supernaturally controlled by and through Christians and their God. Well, not without contradicting yourself anyway.

So hat’s off to Vox. Whatever else might be wrong with TIA, he did at least slip that one past the critical review of his peers.

But if rabbit fossils found in a Pre-Cambrian strata would suffice to disprove evolution, then surely a brilliant scientist like Richard Dawkins should easily be able to come up with a few propositions that would suffice to falsify a specific religion such as Christianity. I suggest a few possibilities:

• The elimination of the Jewish people would falsify both God’s promise to Abraham and the eschatological events prophesied in the Book of Revelation.
• The discovery of Jesus Christ’s crucified skeleton.
• The linguistic unification of humanity.
• An external recording of the history of the human race provided by aliens, as proposed by science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke and James P. Hogan.
• The end of war and/or poverty.
• Functional immortality technology.

Setting aside the obvious fallacy of demanding that Dawkins prove a negative, it might be fun to take a look at these “evidences” and how they actually relate to the question of whether or not Christianity is true.

Number one, would eliminating the Jews really disprove Christianity? Hardly. First of all, we’ve got Matt. 3:9 as a backup in case the Jews ever are absorbed into the ethnicities of their neighbors. But more importantly, we already have examples of falsified Biblical prophecies, like Ezekiel’s prophecy that Nebuchadnezzar would destroy the city of Tyre such that it would never be rebuilt, or Jesus’s prophecy that at least some of the people standing with him in Jerusalem would not die before seeing the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom. Far from admitting that failed prophecy falsifies their religion, Christians simply insist that the prophecy has not failed, we have merely failed to interpret it correctly. That’s a universally useful rationalization, since no matter how explicitly the Bible predicts something that fails to come to pass, we can always claim that its “true” meaning is a spiritual one that ordinary mortals cannot easily grasp.

The discovery of Jesus’s skeleton? Right. And if we did find Jesus’s remains, exactly how long do you think it would take Vox and other Christians to simply deny that they were the bones of the real Jesus? It’s not like we have DNA samples or Jesus’s dental records to allow for a positive ID. And that’s assuming Jesus’s remains did survive for 2,000 years. Most don’t.

Even if they did, and if we could positively ID the body as belonging to Jesus, one trip to 1 Cor. 15 would give Christians all the Scripture they need to claim that the spiritual body that is raised is not the physical body that is buried. (In fact, that sort of view is very likely how the resurrection rumor got started in the first place.) Believers who think Jesus is truthfully in their heart would have no trouble believing he truthfully rose in the kind of spiritual body that could live inside someone’s chest without medical compromises.

The rest of the “evidences” get even sillier. A “one world language”? That might actually happen some day, given the Internet. What would that have to do with Christianity being false? Maybe Vox is thinking it would somehow disprove the Tower of Babel story? But Genesis says nothing about God decreeing that men would henceforth and always be confused in their languages.

Aliens with an external history of the human race? Why not propose a simple time machine instead? I mean, as long as we’re thinking up possibilities that we can safely assume will never happen, right? But even then, an alien history of the human race would, at best, make old-earth creationism sound more plausible than young-earth creationism. The True Believer could (and undoubtedly would) insist that God was as involved in past events as believers claim He is in current events, whether or not He showed up on newsreels from Btoghetkitmaku in the Orion nebula.

The end of war and poverty? Again, might happen someday, but not likely in our lifetime. Functional immortality? Ditto. But what would either of these have to do with Christianity being false?

What’s significant in Vox’s list is that he is plainly avoiding the obvious criteria (i.e. is Christianity consistent with itself and with observable objective reality) in favor of a bunch of fake criteria that have little or nothing to do with the truth of the Gospel, and are merely contrived to be virtually impossible to find. He’s not even being terribly subtle about it: he’s creating a pretext for claiming that Dawkins cannot prove a negative (i.e. God’s non-existence), despite the transparent flimsiness of his “suggestions.”

Why is he avoiding the obvious tests of Christianity and trying to distract us with fluff and feathers? I think the answer to that one is also obvious.

While Dawkins incessantly complains about the lack of evidence for God, he never quite gets around to explaining precisely what proof, presumably scientific, would be sufficient for him. He poses no potentially falsifiable experiment that would suffice to prove or disprove God’s existence nor does he even consider the question of whether any such experiment would conceivably be possible.

Notice the subtle shift from Dawkins’s request for evidence of God, to Vox’s insinuation that Dawkins is insisting on an arbitrary, unspecified, and unreasonably stringent proof of God. God consistently and universally fails to behave as though He believed the things men say about Him, but instead of blaming God’s behavior on God, Vox wants to claim that it is men who are behaving badly, by making impossible demands.

Now, I can’t speak for Dawkins, but there are a couple of obvious reasons why he might not bother to spell out what sort of evidence he’s looking for. One reason is that it doesn’t matter what evidence you might seek if there isn’t any to find! Vox began this book, which is supposed to provide factual proof that atheists are wrong, with an explicit admission that he is not going to be offering any evidence of God’s existence. And yet that would be the most direct and obvious way to prove that atheists were wrong, wouldn’t it? If Vox really had any genuine evidence, wouldn’t he do better to begin by presenting it?

Dawkins points out that there is no evidence of God’s existence, not because he’s being unclear as to what sort of evidence he would accept, but because Vox has nothing to offer. It’s not as though Dawkins said, “There is no evidence,” and Vox said, “Here is some evidence” and Dawkins said, “I reject it because it’s not the right kind of evidence.” Dawkins is saying “There is no evidence,” and Vox is trying to complain that Dawkins isn’t being fair.

The second reason Dawkins doesn’t need to spell out what sort of evidence he’s looking for is because it’s fairly obvious: if what men say about God were true, God ought to be behaving as though it were true. That means, among other things, that He ought to show up to spend time with us in that personal kind of tangible, two-way interaction He allegedly wanted badly enough to die for. He ought to be behaving as though He believed in the Gospel Himself. Yet He doesn’t even show up in His own churches on Sunday mornings! Why should I bother showing up if He doesn’t?

Vox makes the common mistake of assuming that scientific evidence must necessarily consist of some kind of beaker and test-tube lab experiment, as though science were only done in labs. Science is the practical application of the principle that truth is consistent with itself. Scientific evidence for God need only consist of God behaving in a way that was self-consistent, consistent with the Gospel, and consistent with what we actually find in the real world.

Notice, however, that human superstition—ascribing things to God even though you can’t show any real connection between Him and whatever you’re trying to explain—is not evidence. Autosuggestion and subjective feelings about the idea of God are not evidence. Human imagination about God is not evidence. Unverifiable hearsay is not evidence. Fallacious arguments—e.g. you can’t prove He’s not real, therefore He is real—are not evidence. And neither are self-contradictory and mutually-contradictory arguments. Evidence is that which is verifiably consistent with itself and with the real world.

Genuine evidence would be quite simple: God showing up in the real world, behaving as though He really could do all the things the Bible says He can do, and as though He really did want all the things the Bible says He wants. The Bible portrays God as being willing and able to have an intimate, personal, eternal relationship with each of us, face-to-face, having removed the barriers raised by our own sinfulness, by virtue of His atoning death on the Cross.

Well ok, if that’s what He wants and that’s what He’s succeeded in doing, then we should see Him here with us enjoying the rewards of all His careful planning, sacrifice, and hard work. It’s not that God is failing to do what we want, He fails to do what men claim He wants. Believers are therefore necessarily wrong about God’s ability or God’s willingness to act like He believes the Gospel. Quite possibly, they’re wrong about both.

Vox tries to make Dawkins look ridiculous and unreasonable for noticing the inconsistency between what men say about God, and what we actually observe. But God’s behavior is not Dawkins’s fault. Christians need to come to grips with the fact that God’s behavior is God’s responsibility, and God’s alone. Either that, or they need to admit that God is just a sock puppet, saying whatever words men put in His mouth and performing only those actions which men’s hands do on His behalf. Then it would be appropriate to blame men for God’s choice of actions. But in that case, the guilty ones would be the believers. Neither Dawkins, nor any other unbeliever, is setting God’s agenda for Him.

A California researcher has estimated that the mean age of a biologist’s first noteworthy contribution to science takes place when he is 29.4 years old. So, at sixty-six, three decades after publishing the controversial bestseller The Selfish Gene, it’s clear that Richard Dawkins is well past his scientific expiry, and his latest book, The God Delusion, offers copious evidence that Dawkins has become as careless as he is crotchety in his old age.

You read that right: Vox Day, ad hominem virtuoso, is seriously suggesting that Dawkins’s work has gone downhill because he’s over 30!

A reasonable person might suppose that, barring evidence of actual senility, Dawkins’s age would be entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not his ideas have merit. But Vox is eager, even desperate, for any and every argument he can use to try and discredit Dawkins’s claim that God does not exist. Is it not noteworthy, then, that from the very first chapter of TIA, Vox has specifically declined to present any actual evidence of God’s existence?

One would think that such evidence, if it existed, would be the most obvious and effective way to counter The God Delusion. And if Vox is willing to stoop to such a silly argument as “over 30″ ageism, he would certainly be willing to use a better argument if he could. (Indeed, the same could be said for his response to any atheist, not just Dawkins.) In his opening slur against Dawkins, therefore, Vox is inadvertently supplying us with evidence that suggests even he cannot deny the truth of Dawkins’s observation that we have no evidence for God. Or at least, not for the Christian God.

Naturally, Vox is shocked, shocked, that any writer would be so bold as to express opinions outside of the limited field of his or her official, accredited college degree(s).

Dawkins is not only operating outside of his area of professional expertise, he is actually pitting himself directly against it. Whereas he describes himself as a “passionate Darwinian” as an academic scientist, he calls himself “a passionate anti-Darwinian” with regards to the proper conduct of human affairs. This naturally puts Dawkins in an untenable position, as he not only lacks both education and professional experience in the academic fields which relate to human conduct, such as history, philosophy, political science, literature, psychology, and theology, but it also renders his book somewhat of a fraudulent bait-and-switch.

Vox, of course, would never dream of addressing any topics outside of his own field. He’s what, a video game programmer? Oh well, at least he’s psychic, so he can read Dawkins’s mind and know exactly what Dawkins has and has not learned outside his primary discipline. What? He’s not psychic either?

At least he’s gifted in the field of double-talk and misdirection, introducing a long discussion of The Courtier’s Reply by claiming that is “largely irrelevant,” and then going on to give it a spirited advocacy anyway.

While there have been a number of critical books written about Dawkins, including The Dawkins Delusion, Dawkins’s God and Letter to an Influential Atheist, most of this criticism revolves around Dawkins’s ignorance of Christian theology rather than his anti-science. It is true that the criticism is well-founded, … but it is still mostly irrelevant regarding the question of God’s existence as well as the substance of Dawkins’s case against religion.

Vox does make this amusing charge:

Trying to debate the existence of God with Richard Dawkins is ultimately pointless, because for Dawkins, not even Jesus Christ’s triumphant return in front of a crowd of tens of thousands would suffice to prove anything to him, not with his “familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.”

That is, simply put, a lie, and if Vox would be so good as to produce an actual, real-world return of Christ, in front of a crowd that includes Dr. Dawkins and some reliable videographers, I will be happy to demonstrate Dr. Dawkins’s willingness to be persuaded by the actual evidence. His reluctance to just take Vox’s word for it is entirely due to Jesus’s failure to behave as though He himself believed what men are saying about Him, so it is dishonest to pretend the same would hold true if Jesus actually started living up to what men claim.

Vox inadvertently admits (again) what the real source of Christian faith is:

Dawkins is not actually interested in genuinely considering the question of God’s existence, as evidenced by his cursory perusal of a few of the less complicated arguments for the existence of God…

The only reason Dawkins even bothers to go through the motions is because without providing at least a nominal pretense at addressing a few of the many reasons religious people believe in God, not even his most mindless cheerleaders could find his case convincing. But he’s knowingly setting fire to strawmen, for as he admits at the end of the three pages nominally dedicated to attacking Aquinas’s Five Ways, “the argument from design is the only one still in regular use today.” This causes the observant reader to wonder: If he’s so terribly upset about why people believe in God today, then why is he attacking the reasons some people used to believe in God more than 700 years ago?”

Notice, the reason given for why people believe in God is because of the more or less complicated arguments of men—many of which even believers no longer find credible. The claim of the Gospel, however, is not that men decided God must exist because of centuries of abstruse philosophizing. Biblical stories are about the existence of a type of concrete, objective evidence that you don’t need a Thomas Aquinas to elucidate for you.

That evidence, however, consistently and universally fails to exist outside of the stories, superstitions, and subjective feelings of men. It is absent even from the experience of believers like Vox, which is why he must appeal to complicated (and fallible) human arguments as being the justification for Christian faith. And if even Vox must dismiss as irrelevant “the reasons some people used to believe in God 700 years ago,” imagine how irrelevant the 2,000 year old arguments must be!

Truth is consistent with itself. The evidence Vox appeals to, and which he castigates Dawkins for not considering, and which he lacks the courage to offer as a defense of God’s existence, is evidence which is not even the same type of phenomenon as the purported evidence the Bible claims as the basis for belief in God. There is one type of evidence in the stories, and an entirely different sort of “evidence” in actual experience, even among believers. The Bible stories simply are not consistent with what we see in real life, which is why Vox has to grasp at bizarre straws like the “over 30″ ageism he opened with. Thus, he “refutes” atheism by demonstrating its fundamental correctness.

Well done!

As we’ve seen before, Vox is more than willing to take any pretext he can think of to claim “proof” that atheists are evil, malodorous, inferior, unpleasant, and otherwise unfit for the respect one human ordinarily ought to grant to another. But that’s not enough to satisfy Vox’s thirst for vengeance. Nor is it enough to make the spurious accusation that atheism is to blame for the worst atrocities in human history. No, Vox must somehow implicate Harris himself in the actual, or at least potential, commission of similar atrocities.

[I]t is important to recall that Harris repeatedly defines atheism as being a lack of a belief, primarily a lack of belief in the existence of God. This allows him to inoculate atheism against the historical crimes of known atheists and blame them on the religious faithful in the following manner.

1. Belief is required for action.
2. Atheism is a lack of belief.
3. Therefore, an individual’s atheism cannot cause him to act in a harmful manner.
4. Belief is synonymous with faith
5. Therefore, all negative actions stem from faith

It’s a truism! It is self-evident! Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. may have all been atheists, but because they are known to have taken action, they must have believed in something besides their atheism that caused them to act, therefore atheism cannot possibly be blamed for the actions of these so-called atheists. Hallelujah, peace on Earth is in our grasp! Of course, the only way to achieve it is to somehow get rid all of those troublemaking believers . . . now how would one go about doing that?

And this is where Harris ceases to be an amusing figure blundering about taking incompetent and illogical potshots at religion and becomes something ominous, something malicious, in which the shadowy seed of the atheists whose monstrous crimes he disavows can be discerned.

Wow, eh? From the “smoking gun” of Harris’s admitted tendency to define a lack of belief as a lack of belief, to the hysterical conclusion that Harris is secretly plotting “to somehow get rid of all those troublemaking believers,” thus “proving” himself to be a carrier of that same “shadowy seed” which, Vox insists, inevitably compels those who do not believe in Invisible People to commit the very worst deeds a human can commit.

Well, in for a dime, in for a dollar, I guess. If you’re going to pretend that people are motivated to commit genocide, cannibalism, ritual torture, and so on, just because of their lack of belief in Santa Claus or some other magical character, then you might as well leap to the conclusion that anyone who points out the religious motivations of 9/11 and abortion clinic bombings must be another mad atheist out to destroy the world. And if you need proof, why, Harris even recites the terrifying mantra of all true homicidal maniacs: “world government.”

Given his declarations that a diversity of religious beliefs cannot be tolerated, that every human being should not be free to believe whatever he wants and that the killing of those who harbor intolerable beliefs can be ethically justified, the following statement betrays the evil root of his hatred for religion, for the U.S. Constitution, and for the very concept of America itself.

“We can say it even more simply: we need a world government. . . . The diversity of our religious beliefs constitutes a primary obstacle here.”

A conspiracy nut’s wet dream, eh? Look, he actually came right out and said we need a world government (even if he never actually said any of those other things Vox attributes to him). Therefore he has an evil hatred of religion, of the U. S. Constitution, and of America itself, since of course none of those things would exist if mankind ever did succeed in building a united civilization that eliminated wars, poverty, and various other injustices and inequities. Harris is…is…is…well, maybe not the Antichrist in person, but gosh, could the real thing be worse?

While Vox goes and wipes the foam from his mouth and cleans up whatever other personal fluids might require his attention, let’s think seriously about his arguments here. Suppose Vox were right about Harris’s allegedly “evil” nature. Suppose we all agreed that Harris were a very bad man. What would that change? Would Al Qaeda wave politely and go home and stop bothering people? Would the Taliban start allowing women to go to school and to wear comfortable clothing in the hot weather? Would Christians give in and grant gays the freedom to marry the ones they love?

Of course not. Vox’s argument has nothing at all to do with the ways religion really does impact practical everyday life in God’s absence. It’s nothing but an ad hominem, a personal attack that aims no higher and that accomplishes no more than the simple, mean-spirited attempt to be hurtful. Like many others, Vox’s feelings were hurt by what atheists have written (not the least because no matter what their mistakes may be, they’re demonstrably right about the most important things). So what Vox wants more than anything else is to hurt Harris back.

He fails, of course. Such hysterical paranoia provokes more pity than pain. But sometimes it does one good to vent one’s frustrations. Perhaps, in some small way, Vox feels better now that he’s gotten that out of his system, and perhaps those who share his frustrations will experience a similar, vicarious catharsis. I hope so, because then this book would not be a total loss.

Obviously Vox Day was not seriously considering this a proof as he worked through the numbers. Having not expanded that entry on my first read I didn’t know how silly the reviewer was as I developed my first thoughts about the matter. One would think that perhaps after reading the entire entry the reviewer would be acquitted. Unfortunately, it turns out the incompetence of the objection to Vox Day on this point is even worse than missing the stated intent because the reviewer actually addressed that quote from Vox later in the post.

Yet another Vox supporter who, like Vox himself, accuses me of failing to give Vox the benefit of the doubt, without ever giving me the benefit of the doubt.

In the first place, I’m not the one who called Vox’s Red county/Blue county statistics “definitive proof” of beneficial Christian influence on society. I’m not inventing the marked change in tone between the beginning of the argument and the end. Those are Vox’s words, quoted straight from his book. And as the commentator above admits, I did acknowledge that Vox began with a classic devil’s advocate, reduction ad absurdum approach. I even stated, in my original post, that I was suggesting a possibility which could be wrong. Yes, that’s right, the first person to express skepticism about this possibility was me, not Vox, and not any of Vox’s supporters. I bent over backwards to include both the evidence supporting the possibility, and the evidence against it.

Of course, for Vox and his supporters, this is just a free pretext for claiming that I’m allegedly “silly,” “incompetent,” “dimwitted,” “biased,” etc. etc. That’s fine, a certain amount of ad hominem comes with the territory, and in any case, my point does not depend on any particular personal authority on my part. I noticed a specific, objectively verifiable set of characteristics in Vox’s writing, which I think are (or may be) significant, namely that Vox explicitly mentions the fallacious nature of the argument only when he’s not discussing the conclusion that Christians are more law-abiding than non-believers. When he is talking about Christians committing fewer crimes, he uses different, more positive terms (like “definitive proof”) to describe the results. It’s a consistent pattern, even in his defensive “rebuttals,” and I think it bears watching.

Bear in mind, this is not the first time Vox has addressed Harris’ Red State/Blue State argument. Writing in 2006, Vox says:

Consider Florida, which went Republican in 2004. It has 67 counties, and the ten which supported John Kerry most heavily, (thus, by Harris’ reckoning, the least religious), were home to 367 murders in 2006. The ten counties wherein Bush found his strongest support, on the other hand, had only 19. Even taking population differences into account, the murder rate per 100,000 in the “blue” counties was more than twice that of the “red” counties, 4.7 to 2.0. And the two most murderous counties in the state, Gadsden and Madison, averaged a murder rate of 13.9 to go with their 60 percent support for the Democrat.

It is clearly perverse, bordering on the intellectually dishonest, to attempt charging these godless “blue-county” murders to the religious “red-state” account.

Nor are American statistics the only means of demonstrating a godless proclivity for crime, the inherent problem of equating legality with morality notwithstanding. A comparison of a 2000 survey of the British prison population with the 2001 national census revealed that whereas individuals claiming atheism or no religion make up only 15.5 percent of the British population, they comprise 31.9 percent of those imprisoned. [Emph. added.]

Now again, I’m willing to concede that Vox might believe it is bogus and dishonest to use red-state/blue-state or red-county/blue-county crime statistics to draw conclusions about the so-called “godless proclivity for crime.” He certainly does not go out of his way to draw attention to the bogus nature of the conclusion, though–or at least, not when the conclusion is “Christians are less criminal than unbelievers.” I suspect that, his protests and defenses notwithstanding, he might have a lot more sympathy for this conclusion than he’s willing to admit.

Be that as it may, Vox does deserve kudos for one significant accomplishment. Atheists have been trying for years to debunk the idea that Christianity produces a healthier society. By writing Chapter 7 of TIA the way he did, Vox has set up a situation in which he and his supporters must loudly and conclusively refute the claim that county statistics support a link between Christianity and decreased crime. Maybe with Team Vox on their side, atheists will finally be able to lay this one myth, at least, to its well-deserved rest.

As we’ve mentioned before, Vox Day has been most generous in the frankness with which he acknowledges the ad hominem nature of his attacks on the New Atheists, notably Sam Harris in Chapter 7. Last time, Vox accused Harris of intellectual incompetence, based on his use of an argument that was indeed spurious, as others have agreed. Unsatisfied, however, Vox closes out Chapter 7 of TIA with a clumsy and rather heavy-handed attempt to accuse Harris of intellectual dishonesty. Let’s watch.

Sometimes such deception is easy to detect. While talking about the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases in The End of Faith, Harris cites a study showing that abstinence-pledged virgin teens were more likely to engage in oral and anal sex in an attempt to create the impression that those teens were more likely to contract an STD. What he neglected to mention was that while the study showed that 4.6 percent of the abstinence-pledged teens contracted an STD, this was 35 percent less than the 7 percent of non-pledged teens who also acquired one.

What Vox fails to mention is that abstinence programs typically downplay condom use (when they mention condoms at all) and that unprotected oral and anal sex is indeed riskier than protected intercourse. Assume that abstinence-pledged teens were indeed more infection-free during the study period: how long will they stay that way if their sex life is mainly oral and anal sex without condoms? (And if they are using condoms, why the predilection for oral and anal sex?)

Vox takes the fact that this particular study found a 2.4% difference between the pledged and non-pledged infection rates, and tries to make it sound like Harris is “deceiving” people into believing that the pledged teens were more likely to contract STD’s. Only it’s not a deception. Riskier sexual practices do make you more likely to become infected if you have sex with an infected partner. People who really care about teen health should be concerned by this trend, and should, for example, investigate whether this isolated finding is a fluke, a real trend, or a case of under-reporting among the pledged teens. (Personally, I’d tend to suspect the pledged teens in the study come from a more protective environment, and thus have had partners with less exposure to STD’s.)

In any case, it’s clear that Vox is deliberately manufacturing this alleged “deception” on Harris’ part. Nothing Harris said was actually wrong, and even the implication which Vox attributes to him is an entirely valid and reasonable concern. Those pledged teens are eventually going to leave home and meet people from outside their usual social circle. Will their sex education prepare them to protect themselves adequately against STD’s? For their sake, I hope more people listen to Harris than to Vox.

Because the historical record of atheism is so bloody, so recent, and so well known, Harris is forced to construct a No True Atheist argument in a preemptive attempt to ward off the inevitable response to his assertion that religious faith causes murder and genocide.

. . . the most monstrous crimes against humanity have been inspired by unjustified belief. This is nearly a truism. Genocidal projects tend not to reflect the rationality of their perpetrators simply because there are no good reasons to kill peaceful people indiscriminately. . . . Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion.

In order to deflect attention from the obvious fact that Stalin and Mao, both undeniably atheists, killed tens of millions of people despite a complete lack of the religious faith that Harris claims is necessary to commit such monstrous acts, Harris constructs a No True Atheist argument.

Harris: Atheists don’t kill people because they have no good reason to do so.

Response: Stalin and Mao were atheists and they killed millions of people.

Harris: Then Stalin and Mao were No True Atheists.

Notice the accuracy level of Vox’s version of Harris’ argument. Vox claims that Harris says religious faith is necessary in order to commit atrocities. But that’s not what Harris says. Vox claims that Harris says “Atheists don’t kill people.” But again, that’s not what Harris says. Vox claims that Harris says Stalin and Mao were not true atheists. Strike Three: Harris didn’t say that either.

Remember, this is the section where Vox is supposed to be proving that Harris is dishonest. But if Harris were really as dishonest as Vox claims, would Vox have to lie about what Harris says in order to build a case against him?

The reason Vox has to put words in Harris’ mouth is because he wants to build a straw-man version of Harris’ argument, which is actually quite a good one. Too good, in fact, which is why Vox has to substitute a different version based on denying that atheists ever kill anybody. He even has to make his straw man into a “no true atheists” argument, to distract attention from the fact that his own defense of the Inquisition and such things is that No True Christian was ever involved in any such atrocities. Yet he accuses Harris of making a dishonest argument!

Vox goes into detail in his attempts to distort what Harris is saying in the short paragraph quoted above.

Harris surreptitiously substitutes “unjustified belief” for “religious faith.” Now, “unjustified belief” is one of his many descriptions of religious faith, but obviously there are many unjustified beliefs that are not related to religious faith in any way.

He doesn’t “surreptitiously” substitute anything, he’s making a point about the underlying common factor that ought to concern reasonable people who are looking into the causes of large-scale atrocities like the Inquisition and the Communist purges. Vox, however, is not interested in understanding, he’s merely looking for pretexts to accuse Harris of dishonesty, so naturally he misses the point completely.

Harris states there are no good reasons to kill people indiscriminately, just twenty-six pages after writing that “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”

Again, a blatant distortion of what Harris actually said. Harris said there is no good reason to kill peaceful people indiscriminately, which is a very different thing from taking pre-emptive action against those who are deliberately and maliciously advocating the proposition that God wants us all murdered. Now, I think this is a debatable proposition, and I wouldn’t advocate it myself, but it is only honest to acknowledge the difference between killing those who are actively threatening you and indiscriminate killing of peaceful and innocent people.

Harris states that Stalin and Mao only paid lip service to rationality, but their murderous actions were perfectly rational given their goals.

Vox once more takes a picky disagreement over interpretations and claims to have proven overt dishonesty on Harris’ part. It’s one thing to say that Stalin and Mao took logical and efficient steps to carry out their goals, but it’s quite a different thing to assert that it is rational to value one’s personal benefit above the fundamental human rights of millions of innocent people. If Vox wants to claim that such selfish (and short-sighted) arrogance is “rational,” then that’s his opinion, but Harris and I disagree. That’s not dishonesty on Harris’ part, it’s simple respect for human rights.

Harris claims that Communism was a religion. But however convenient and necessary to his argument this claim might be, it still isn’t true.

Another misrepresentation. Harris compared Communism to a religion, in the sense of being an ideology leading to fanatical devotion and obedience on the part of its followers. Vox himself compared atheism to a religion when he divided atheism into three separate “churches,” even though atheists have no churches. Does Vox’s reference to non-existent atheist churches prove that Vox is too dishonest to be trusted in expressing any opinions about God? That’s the standard he judges Harris by.

Stay tuned, it gets even better…

Not all Nazis were atheists, but they were all asantanists. Not all Crusaders were Christians, but they were all asantanists. Communists under Stalin, Lenin and Mao? Asantanists all. Witch-burners, inquisitionists, defenders of the faith in whatever form: asantanists. Every mass-murderer, everyone who became famous for the cruelty and inhumanity of his or her atrocities, was an asantanist. Of all the people whose names have become synonymous with injustice and evil, not one of them believed in Santa Claus.

I mention this because you so often hear Christians blame atheism for things like the Holocaust and the gulags, as though lack of belief motivated people to do evil things. But when you look at the history of evil, you will notice that the common thread is not a lack of belief in God, but a lack of belief in Santa. If you’re going to blame unbelief for the actions of unbelievers, therefore, you ought to be blaming asantanism, not atheism.

But that’s rather silly, isn’t it? People are motivated by what they do believe, not by what they don’t. Indeed, the whole point of religion is to change how people behave, by changing what they believe. Motivating people to good behavior, and to abstain from bad behavior, is what religion is all about. That’s why religion has weekly meetings at which believers are exhorted to turn from sin and to produce the fruits of faith, and why religions have full-time paid clergy to counsel with people and encourage them and rebuke them when they’re wrong, and why they have Scriptures and other teachings about how man ought to live to be pleasing to the deity or deities involved.

It’s perfectly appropriate, therefore, to look at the behavior of religious people to see if the religion is producing the changes it is supposed to produce. It’s no different from someone on a diet weighing themselves to see if the diet is producing the weight loss it promises. When you look at the behavior of religious people, you’re just checking to see if the religion is really being effective at what it claims to do. And if it doesn’t, if we see religious people burning witches and holding Inquisitions and leading Crusades and so on, then we’re justified in taking that as an indicator that religion is ineffective at best, if not an outright fraud.

When people blame unbelief for bad behavior, what they’re really claiming is that the person’s behavior would be better if they believed. When we look at the actual behavior of believers, however, we do not find this to be the case, because the believers’ record is no better. And even if the unbeliever’s behavior was worse, how would we know which unbelief to blame for their behavior? Lack of belief in God can be linked to only some of the notable crimes of history, but lack of belief in Santa is common to all of them.

Religion is designed to make a difference in people’s behavior. Atheism isn’t; it’s just the absence of belief in God. That’s why atheism does not have churches or preachers or Scriptures or any of the other things religion uses to guide and motivate people’s behavior. And that’s why it’s appropriate to evaluate religion in terms of the behavior of believers, and irrelevant to try and blame the behavior of unbelievers on their unbelief. And if you can’t agree with that, it’s probably because you’re one of those evil, lying, murderous asantanists. So there.

There are several layers of problems with this apparent proof of Christian immorality. The first is that political identity is a very poor substitute for religiosity… [I]t is absurd to credit all of the supposedly law-abiding behavior of “blue” voters to the 16 percent of them who lack religious faith…. If this isn’t sufficient evidence of the foolishness of trying to equate Democratic votes with atheism, the ARIS 2001 survey reported a higher percentage of Democrats among Jews, Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Pentecostals, Episcopalians, Buddhists, and Muslims than among the not religious, of whom only 30 percent reported a preference for the Democratic Party…. So while the data may be striking, the argument based upon it can only be described as strikingly stupid.

and

What is much more important is the way in which using the more accurate county data demonstrates that Harris’s conclusions are precisely backward. Thirteen of the twenty-five safest cities are situated in RED counties and twenty-one of the twenty-five most dangerous cities are located in BLUE counties. This provides precisely the information that Harris claimed to have sought in vain, it is definitive proof that the social health of Red America is significantly superior to that of Blue America by Harris’s own chosen measure.

Did you catch that? On page 115 and following, Harris’ technique for correlating social health with Christian conservativism is “strikingly stupid.” Yet just four pages later, it’s a “definitive proof” (and not just “a sign,” as Harris called it). What made Vox change his mind so completely? Simple: he found a way to make the voting record say something that he wanted it to say.

Let’s get one thing clear right from the start: as seductive as it might seem to those who think it supports their side, the Red State/Blue State argument is utterly bogus. As Vox correctly observes (before realizing it could be used to support his own claims), it’s wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. Vox already pointed out the non-equivalence between Republicans and Christians, and between Democrats and atheists. Add to that the influence of 9/11, and the fact that many of those who voted “red” were not even Republicans, plus the dirty tricks of the Swift Boat Veterans for “Truth,” and it’s doubtful that the 2004 results are even a reliable indicator of the actual liberal/conservative ratio, let alone anyone’s religious affiliation.

Likewise, Vox has pointed out the non-equivalence between the population of those who were voters in the 2004 election, and those who committed the crimes that were tallied in the 2005 statistics. He could also have mentioned (though he didn’t) that the Red State/Blue State argument completely fails to take into account other, more significant variables like population density, unemployment, poverty levels, education, social involvement of Christians vs. non-Christians, and so on. This is not to say that it would be impossible to investigate the statistically-relevant variables looking for a positive or negative correlation between “conservative Christianity” (whatever that is) and social metrics like crime rates, divorces, teen pregnancies, and so on. But if anyone ever does do such a study, it won’t be a matter of merely counting the colored polygons on the CNN map of election results.

Vox seems to have been under no illusion that Red State/Blue State was anything but a thoroughly bogus metric, at least when it was being used to deny a correlation between Christianity and social health. He even seems to have held onto that idea as he moves into the “devil’s advocate” portion of his rebuttal.

But just for kicks, let’s pretend that it is not a measure so ridiculously inaccurate as to be completely useless. Let’s imagine that Harris’s metric really is relevant, that an American voter’s 2004 presidential vote truly is indicative of his religious faith, or the lack thereof, and that statewide criminal statistics are a reasonable measure of an individual’s predilection for immoral behavior. This exercise in imagination is necessary, in fact, because only by accepting his measure at face value and examining it in detail can one fully grasp the true depth of Harris’s exceptional incompetence.

The irony here is absolutely delicious: according to Vox, the true depth of Harris’ incompetence is demonstrated by the fact that his methods lead to the conclusion that conservative Christianity promotes good social health! Talk about your shooting yourself in the foot! He starts by setting out to prove that Harris’ method leads to brain-dead conclusions, and ends by showing that the brain-dead conclusion is, in fact, an oft-repeated Christian claim.

Of course, Vox might be tempted to reply that Harris did indeed create a valid measure, and was incompetent only in applying it to the wrong set of figures. But if that were the case, why did Vox begin by (correctly) pointing out that the method is “a measure so ridiculously inaccurate as to be completely useless”? By trying to have his cake and eat it too, Vox ends up ridiculing the myth that Christian influence is a benefit to society as a whole.

I rather doubt that Vox intended to build such an incongruous case against conservative Christianity, and I think that what may have happened is that Vox began his argument with every intention of constructing a classic reductio ad absurdum, and gradually found himself seduced by the results he started getting when he used a different set of numbers. Instead of the intended “absurd” conclusion, he was getting an argument in favor of Christian conservativism, at which point he suddenly stopped mentioning the flaws in the method, and started crowing about the “definitive proof” of the results instead.

And to put the icing on the cake, Vox goes on to accuse Sam Harris of intellectual dishonesty, on the grounds that he should have known about the figures Vox cited in building his own “proof.” Not that he necessarily did know, but that he should have known. Vox has only just finished building a “definitive proof” of the benefits of Christian influence, using a method that he knows is bogus and that he explicitly said was completely useless, and now he’s going to accuse Harris of being intellectually dishonest. Call it what you will, that’s high-grade chutzpah.

Then again, I could be mistaken. Vox has promised to respond to this series as soon as I’m done with it. Let’s see if he does indeed publicly acknowledge that his version of the Red State/Blue State argument is at least as bogus and dishonest as he accuses Harris’ version of being. Anyone want to lay the odds?

Let’s look at an example. Here’s Vox trying to prove that Harris is both ignorant and unwilling to study.

Reading Harris, one would never know that the evidential problem of evil, or reconciling the idea of a benevolent God with the fact that evil exists, is considered to be one of the principle intellectual puzzles of Christianity and has been for centuries…

It’s clear from both the nature of his arguments and the absence of any relevant references in his bibliography that Harris has never bothered to examine these specific and, in some cases, incredibly detailed responses to the old dichotomy; instead, he merely repeats it and prances away congratulating himself for having posed what he declares is an “insurmountable” conundrum. But how can he possibly know that, considering that he clearly hasn’t even looked at most of the proposed answers?

Here’s a spare clue for Vox: if someone had found a coherent, reasonable, and self-consistent answer to the theodicy problem, it would no longer be “one of the principle intellectual puzzles of Christianity.” Or of any other religion, for that matter. Yes, we could hare off on a wild goose chase, spending years, if not decades, studying all the attempts men have made at untangling the fundamental inconsistency at the heart of Christianity and other religions. But why bother? We know how it is going to turn out, because Christians, who are more motivated than anyone else to find a satisfactory answer, have yet to find one they can all embrace without embarrassment or dispute. If Christianity is self-admittedly unable to resolve the problem even with the aid of divine revelation, Harris is perfectly entitled to point out the existence of the conundrum.

On to what Vox proposes as his “hypothesis:”

Sam Harris is an ignorant, incompetent, and intellectually dishonest individual who attacks religious faith because it stands in the way of his dream of the ultimate destruction of America.

Again, it is most generous of Vox to be so open about the exclusively ad hominem nature of his attack on Sam Harris. We know right up front that Vox is going to be willing to do whatever it takes to make Harris sound like a nasty fellow, inventing or distorting or omitting whatever serves as a pretext for concluding that Harris is “ignorant, incompetent, and intellectually dishonest.”

Harris begins The End of Faith by strongly implying that almost all suicide bombers are Muslims. Jane’s Intelligence Review reports that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who are not Muslims but a Marxist liberation front that committed 168 of the 273 suicide bombings that took place between 1980 and 2000, have historically been the leading practitioners of suicide bombing.

Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, did you notice the way Vox carefully cited only statistics from before the Iraq war? He has omitted 400 suicide attacks in Iraq alone between 2003 and mid-2005 (and the attacks didn’t end in 2005). Nor does he quote what Harris actually wrote at the beginning of The End of Faith, which is not too surprising, since the complete text cites a number of factors, including the reaction of friends and neighbors, as indicators that a given suicide bombing is likely the work of a Muslim. Vox picks and chooses his “facts,” leaving out significant and relevant details in order to try and make Harris look “ignorant,” while at the same time accusing Harris of intellectual dishonesty.

Vox also tries to argue that the Tamil Tigers are a “secular” organization, as though that was of any relevance. But so what if the organization is secular? It’s not the organization that believes, it’s the members of the organization, who are largely Hindu and whose willingness to abandon this life might very well be affected in some way by the belief that death is only a crossroads on a long journey of immortal existence. As Vox himself says, “there is no definition of “secular” that precludes a belief in improbable things about the nature of life and death or anything else, including the Labor Theory of Value, String Theory, or multiple universes.” Religious people can and do participate in all kinds of secular organizations, and hold all kinds of religious, superstitious, and otherwise idiosyncratic beliefs. The secular nature of the organization, therefore, is entirely irrelevant to the religious beliefs and behaviors of the members.

Vox does slightly better in accusing Harris of failing to understand why Christians reject Islam. Harris mentioned the “One Less God” argument, which states that Christians and atheists both reject the existence of the vast majority of gods that men have ever worshipped. “I simply believe in one less God than you do; when you understand why you reject the other gods, you’ll understand why I reject yours.”

It’s a nice sounding argument, but unfortunately it’s not true. As Vox points out, many Christians reject other gods for entirely superstitious reasons (though of course Vox does not call it that). In some variants of Christian theology, Allah and Vishnu and Thor and so on are actual spiritual beings—they’re demons, impersonating gods in order to lead men astray. Those who reject other religions on the basis of such superstitious gullibility are, unfortunately, no closer to understanding the real reason why atheists reject theirs.

Of course, Vox has to make this simple misunderstanding into proof that Harris is incompetent, so he calls it a “logical” error when in fact it’s nothing of the sort. Harris’ error is not that he failed to correctly apply the rules of logic, it’s that he was unreasonably generous in assessing some Christians’ willingness and ability to evaluate pagan religions on the basis of the evidence. The “One Less God” argument would work if Christians would approach the topic of religion objectively and with a view to verifiable fact. But sadly many of them don’t. They simply take the word of other Christians (and/or Jews) that demons were responsible for belief in other gods, and that’s good enough for them.

Vox claims that Harris is in error in claiming “millions” of deaths explicitly caused by religion in the past 10 years, and that one I can’t evaluate at the moment because I haven’t seen the original quote from Harris. It’s possible Harris was exaggerating and that, as Vox calculates, we’re only talking about 750,000 deaths (if it’s ever fair to refer to “only” 750,000 needless deaths). But given Vox’s past record regarding quotes and contexts, I’m going to remain skeptical until I can see the actual details.

Vox continues by asserting that Harris is guilty of several “factual errors” that are in fact mere differences of opinion. For example, Harris expressed the opinion that certainty regarding the “next life” is incompatible with tolerance in this one. Vox obviously disagrees, which is not surprising since he explicitly said he doesn’t care who goes to hell. I suppose that counts as “tolerance” somewhere, but meanwhile Harris’ opinion has quite a lot in its favor as well. Many people do care whether or not their fellow man is going to suffer horribly as a result of his beliefs, and are therefore highly motivated not to sit quietly by and let people go to Hell through the silence and inactions of believers.

Vox next disagrees with Harris’ opinion that Christians use human standards of morality to establish God’s goodness. Strangely, Vox’s rebuttal consists solely of denying that human moral standards apply to God, as illustrated by commandments regarding adultery and parental authority. But is that really an answer? If human moral standards do not apply to God, does that mean God could lie and murder and rape and steal, and still be “good”? Can God deceive Christians by promising them heaven and then sending them to Hell, and still be “good”? It seems to me that Vox is the one making the factual error here. Humans judge “good” and “bad” in terms of consequences, and how they feel about those consequences. If we did not use human standards to judge God’s goodness, it would be meaningless to call God “good,” since “good” as applied to God would mean only “whatever God is.” The expression “God is good” would therefore mean “God is whatever God is,” i.e. a mere tautology.

Vox further disagrees with Harris over whether questions about morality are questions about happiness vs. suffering. In Vox’s opinion, morality is about what behavior is or is not correct in a given moral system. Notice, however, that Vox’s opinion is not inconsistent with Harris’, since Harris is talking about how we decide what the standards themselves should be and/or whether we want to obey them, whereas Vox is only describing how to compare an individual’s behavior to those standards once they’ve been determined. Regardless of how you measure whether or not someone is behaving morally, it’s ultimately true that the reason people want to be good is because they expect to benefit from it, and/or to suffer if they’re bad. So Harris’ point is perfectly valid, and Vox’s “rebuttal” doesn’t even address the issue. But for Vox this is yet another factual “error” in his list of accusations.

Vox disagrees with Harris’ opinion that religious moderates deserve a share of the blame for the behavior of fundamentalists. Vox tries to counter this by saying nobody can be held responsible for the actions of someone else (hence his accusation of logical “error” on Harris’ part), but in fact Harris isn’t doing that. He’s holding moderates responsible for their own behavior, i.e. supporting the notion that religion is a perfectly valid source of life-changing “truth,” and failing to exercise any substantial restraining influence over their more extreme brethren. Granted, moderates are not guilty of terrorism just because they fail to restrain terrorists, but Harris is justified in pointing out the consequences of their actions and/or inactions with respect to the fundamentalists.

Next on the list of opinions Vox disagrees with: Harris’ opinion that religious doctrines have divided the world into separate moral communities, and for good measure, his opinion that morality is based on seeking better ways of achieving happiness and avoiding suffering. Oddly, Vox tries to refute this by pointing out that different religions tend to seek happiness in similar ways (not counting various injunctions and prohibitions based on superstitions and dogma). That, however, is precisely the situation which we would expect if Harris were correct about morality being based on seeking happiness and avoiding suffering, so it’s not clear what point Vox was trying to prove (except perhaps that this chapter does include at least one logical error).

Number 9 on Vox’s list is Harris’ opinion that religious prudery contributes daily to the surplus of misery in the world and particularly to the spread of AIDS in Africa. In rebuttal, Vox offers the opinion that it serves them right for having sex outside of marriage, but neglects to explain why the Bush administration’s ABC policy has resulted in an increase in AIDS cases in Uganda (for example).

For number 10 on Vox’s list, he disagrees with Harris’ claim that slavery is now recognized as an immoral institution worldwide. Sadly, Vox tries to rebut this claim by pointing out the amount of slave trafficking that is still occurring today, as though nobody involved had any idea they were doing anything wrong. One might as well deny that murder is recognized worldwide as being wrong; after all, people are murdered all the time. But ask yourself this: if murderers do not know that murder is wrong, why do they try to hide the fact that they’ve committed the crime? The fact that something happens does not mean those involved fail to realize that it’s wrong.

And so it goes. Vox plainly declared for us the ad hominem nature of his goals for this chapter, and is to be commended for the pure and undistracted zeal with which he pursues that goal, regardless of what a more unbiased and reasonable analysis might have suggested. Vox’s writing gives me a renewed interest in reading all of Sam Harris’ books, just to find out for myself what genuine facts lie behind the awful things Vox seems driven to spew out. And if this tendency proves as true for others as it has for me, perhaps some good will come out of TIA after all.

As an example, consider this analysis of war in the 1400′s.

To cite a more recent example, historians record that all of Europe anticipated that Charles VIII of France, upon coming into his own in 1491 (he had been subject to an eight-year regency upon inheriting the crown at thirteen), would launch a military campaign because that was what was expected of young, energetic kings with armies. And within three years, Charles had invaded Italy and laid the groundwork for thirty years of war on the Lombard plain. This was not war caused by religion or even economics; it was simply war for war’s sake.

The best that can be said about this analysis is that it accomplishes Vox’s rhetorical goals by allowing him to deny that religion had anything to do with this war. But notice, he gives no consideration to the role of religion in defining the culture that set those warlike expectations for kings: no discussion of the concept of “the divine right of kings,” no consideration of the Church’s cooperation with and support of these cultural standards, no examination of how much an individual soldier might be influenced by what he saw as God’s attitude towards disloyalty, or by the idea that death is just a gateway to a new and better life, etc. After his earlier discussion about how great the Middle Ages were and how enlightened medieval society was (religiously and scientifically), it seems like it would be worth asking how European society, dominated by Christian theology for 1,000 years or so, could have arrived at the place where it was regarded as normal and natural for kings to launch unprovoked wars simply for the sake of waging war. But Vox never asks this question, because his goal is not to consider how religion did influence war, his goal is to prove that it didn’t.

Vox lists 123 wars which the authors of the Encyclopedia of War “saw fit to categorize as religious wars for one reason or another.” Compared to all the wars that have ever been fought, 123 is a fairly small number, just under 7% by Vox’s calculations. And yet, is it even that high? Had he wanted to, he could easily have taken each of these wars and found other, non-religious factors that were also involved, thus “proving” that none of these wars was really caused by religion. He even gives us an example in his footnotes on this list:

Ironically, the Seventh War of Religion was not a religious war. The Encyclopedia of Wars has this to say: “The Seventh War of Religion in 1580, also known as the ‘Lovers’ War’ had little to do with hostilities between the Catholics and Protestants. Instead fighting was instigated by the actions of Margaret, the promiscuous wife of Henry IV of Navarre.”

What Vox is doing is not investigating the role of religion in war, but instead creating an artificial definition of “religious war” that is so narrow virtually no war qualifies. But of course, as he himself says on page 97, “it would be foolish to insist that religion never causes war.” If he applied the same analysis to these 123 wars as he does to all the other wars where he says religion was not involved, it would give away his game, because he’d have to insist that none of these wars were “caused by religion” either. 6.92% is a low enough figure to make it sound like the New Atheists are ridiculous when they associate religion with war, but still high enough to sound reasonably plausible (at least if you want Vox’s argument to be right). Therefore he does not apply the same standards consistently to all wars, because he needs to keep a few around for appearance’s sake. It’s all about plausible deniability.

Another example of a straw man argument is Vox’s mischaracterization of the New Atheists’ observations of religious discord as being merely an “ontological argument.”

An ontological argument is one that depends solely on reason and intuition rather than observation or evidence…

[O]ntological arguments boil down to the idea that if something can be conceived, it therefore must exist. No supporting evidence is necessary, mere reason and intuition suffice to prove the matter…

It is curious, then, that Dawkins, like Sam Harris, so blithely subscribes to an ontological argument in support of the idea that religion is the implicit cause of war.

He goes on to admit that this is not what either man is actually saying, and then accuses them of meaning it anyway. Amazingly, after defining an ontological argument as being one that eschews observation and evidence in favor of pure reason, he then cites several quotes from Dawkins & Co, and then cites the observations and evidence on which their quotes are based.

[T]here is a certain amount of truth in each of the assertions which lead up to the final conclusion. It cannot be denied that religion HAS been known to divide friends and families as well as entire nations. Religion HAS provided a marker by which opposing groups identify each other. War IS fought between divided groups of people bearing different labels; it takes two to tangle. The problem is that merely stringing together three statements that are factually true in some circumstances does not always lead to a logical conclusion.

Let’s play that back in slow motion. Vox claims that the New Atheists are making an ontological argument, i.e. they are claiming to be able to prove, by reason alone without evidence or observation, that religion causes war. He concedes that they do not, in fact, claim that religion causes war, but insists that they mean to imply this because of the evidence and observation they cite as part of their no-evidence ontological argument (which, in fact, is an argument that the New Atheists never actually make). And even though these observations and evidences are “factually true,” you shouldn’t use them to reach the conclusion that religion causes war—which Vox agrees is a conclusion that the New Atheists are not actually stating. In fact, his whole argument here is that he can tell what they mean by the factually-true observations they cite. Only he denies that these facts really do lead to the conclusion he says they lead to. But if that’s so, how can he say that merely citing these observations means that the New Atheists are trying to imply that conclusion?

The problem is not that the factually true observations lead to a false conclusion, but rather that they lead to an undesirable one. Hence Vox’s desire to wave his rhetorical magic wand and turn the atheists’ observations into an ontological argument, in which the evidence and observations simply do not exist. Poof, they’re gone. An ontological argument doesn’t have any. Once you’ve disposed of the facts, the conclusion becomes a non-issue. Vox (and many of his readers) feel much better.

He then proceeds with a further demonstration of his “oversimplify, contradict, and declare victory” strategy.

Consider the same argument, only this time substituting three similarly valid assertions.

1.Pelicans eat sardines.

2.Pelicans improve the sardine species through aiding natural selection.

3.Natural selection is the mechanism through which evolution occurs.

4.Therefore, pelicans are the implicit cause of evolution.

Now, I’m no evolutionary biologist, but I’m fairly certain that human evolution is not dependent upon pelicans. Or elephant evolution, penguin evolution, or even, for that matter, the intelligent machine evolution that will lead us all into joyous mental union with Gaia in the next three decades. The fourth statement cannot be logically concluded from the preceding three assertions, no matter how much these great rationalist champions of reason would like to pretend it does.

Notice how carefully he chose his words for statement 4, and how he further twists his conclusion in applying it to human evolution. And remember, the atheist quotes he cited correspond only to statements 1, 2, and 3—the conclusion “religion causes war” is an “implied” argument that he’s putting into the atheists’ mouthes, so he gets to make it as contrived and ridiculous as he likes. A rational response to the 3 observations about pelicans and sardines would be to conclude that pelicans play a significant role in the evolution of sardines (and vice versa, if you understand how evolution works). And likewise, even Vox himself can see (though he is quite loathe to admit it) that atheists are making factually correct observations that are consistent with religion having a significant and meaningful role in human behaviors such as war and lesser conflicts. But he doesn’t want to draw reasonable conclusions from factual observations, which is why he deliberately makes statement 4, above, into an unreasonable conclusion. And likewise, he does not worry himself overmuch about what reasonable conclusions might be drawn from the evidence cited by the New Atheists. His sole concern is to find some pretext for rejecting the conclusion as unreasonable, which he does by re-casting their observations as an evidence-free ontological argument.

Vox tries a few other tricks over the course of Chapter 6, such as citing cases where religion was not the cause of various divisions, as though this proved that religion is never the cause of divisions. That’s like observing that Highway 40 does not go to Chicago, and concluding that therefore no highway goes to Chicago. Again, it’s a strawman: Vox is disproving the claim that nothing other than religion ever causes divisions. Well of course there are other causes of division, nobody is claiming differently (except Vox’s straw atheists)! But he needs to be able to defeat something, so he invents arguments that atheists aren’t actually making, and that are only superficially similar to what the New Atheists really say.

One last point I’d like to address: Vox frequently makes the claim/rebuttal that, ok, religion does sometimes cause or contribute to violence, wars, and death, but other factors are worse offenders. It’s as though he thinks that a certain amount of bloodshed and loss of life is acceptable and reasonable in order to enjoy the benefits of living in a world where Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism continue to guide the values and behavior of a large majority of people. I’d say that’s a debatable proposition that has too long been held to an inappropriately low standard of justification. If more people die in car accidents than in air crashes, that does not mean that we should simply accept a certain number of air travel fatalities without subjecting aircraft maintenance and operation to high standards of scrutiny and safety. The question of whether wars can be caused by non-religious factors is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether needless death and suffering can be reduced or eliminated by subjecting religion to more careful and conscientious examination. The death toll is the same for everybody: one each. If religion causes or contributes to even one needless death, good men of conscience ought to find that a matter of deep concern.

TIA: a deeply clueless critic

As I mentioned previously, I’m going to let Evangelical Realism finish his review of TIA before responding to it in its entirety, but since I had a request to respond to one of his more amusing attempts, I shall do so here. It should demonstrate the truth of my battleground aphorism: the best strategy is an incompetent enemy.

You know, he just might be right about that, though perhaps not in the way he expects…

Not surprisingly, Vox opens with his usual ad hominem, just like he did at the opening of Chapter 5 of TIA. He defends this tactic by claiming that he’s only making “[a] truthful statement relevant to the matter under discussion”. But an attack “against the man” (which is what ad hominem means) is an attack against the man. He claims his attacks are true and relevant, but who wouldn’t? It just means he is trying to convince people he’s right. But if he can demonstrate, via the evidence, that his claims are both true and relevant, then we can reach our own conclusions without needing his say-so. And if he can’t, then we would be foolish to just take his word for it.

Apparently, I’ve become even more evil in Vox’s eyes than Harris and Dawkins, however, since he accuses me of not only ignorance, but “deep dishonesty.”

Second, notice that Evangelical Realism is a deeply dishonest reviewer. He repeatedly attempts to hold me to a completely different standard than he holds Harris, Dawkins and the others, moreover, he is too ignorant of military history to understand the way in which their errors demonstrate their obvious lack of knowledge about the subject. ER makes no attempt to demonstrate that Harris and Dawkins possess any knowledge of military history or military science whatsoever…

This is because the question of religious influence, in the context of wars and other conflicts, is primarily a psychological and sociological question, not a question of military history and tactics. Vox’s argument is like trying to prove that opposable thumbs contribute nothing to cooking, on the grounds that he’s read six ancient cookbooks which fail to mention opposable thumbs, and that restaurant critics for the past umpteen years have only rarely cited thumbs as playing any kind of notable role in the culinary results. In attempting to divert the discussion into a debate over tactics, strategies, and the complex (and oversimplified) historical causes, Vox is ignoring the truly relevant questions, and merely throwing up a murky smoke screen. (But remember, he wants you to think that I’m the dishonest one!)

Vox’s goal is quite simple: to create a pretext—any pretext—for claiming to have found something he can prove wrong, thus giving him another pretext for claiming to have proven his opponent wrong. For example, he says:

First, I conceded no such thing. I merely admitted the apparent logic of the argument.

He’s got me, right? I said he admitted something that he didn’t actually admit, and he caught me. Or did he? Look at what I actually said (which he even quoted).

He begins by conceding the visible merit of the assertion that it does make a difference whether your soldiers sincerely believe in an afterlife and in glorious rewards for those who die in battle. But even though Harris and Dawkins are actually correct, they’re still wrong.

So all I actually stated is that he was conceding (or admitting, if you prefer) the visible merit of the argument—what Vox calls the apparent logic. And I then pointed out that (for Vox) this argument is nonetheless wrong. I alluded to the fact that the argument is a valid point, though I did not attribute this view to Vox, and in fact immediately pointed out that he treats it as “wrong.” But that doesn’t matter to him—he didn’t like how I said it, and that’s all the pretext he needs for pretending I got it wrong.

But let’s look at the rest of Vox’s statement.

I merely admitted the apparent logic of the argument – which is merely a variant of the “no atheist in foxholes” that so many atheists angrily deny.

Oo, nice dig. The argument—which he claims to refute—is just a variant of the “no atheist in foxholes” argument which atheists object to, so atheists who want to contradict Vox are, so to speak, damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

But let’s look at those two arguments. The “no atheist in foxholes” argument is an appeal to the self-congratulatory theistic idea that all atheists secretly know God exists, and admit it when their life is in danger. But what was Vox’s argument?

The religious soldier is only risking a part of his existence, a rather small and unimportant part in the case of the Christian soldier who confidently expects eternal life awaiting him in the New Jerusalem. The shaheed finds courage in the prospect of seventy-two virgins and the delights of paradise. The pagan Norse warrior fearlessly anticipated endless feasting and battle in Valhalla…

Even the Hindu soldier risks nothing but a single turn of the wheel, whereas the atheist stakes the totality of his existence. There is, then, an economic argument to be made in logical support of this claim of religious war-enabling, since the perceived cost of war is obviously much greater for the atheist than for the theist…

[Footnote] One wonders if atheists would be so swift to embrace this logic if they understood it could be used to assert an atheistic inclination towards cowardice just as easily as it supports a hypothetical theistic inclination for warmongering.

Even a casual look at these two arguments ought to show that they are fundamentally different both in their premises and in their conclusions. The foxhole argument essentially asserts that there are no real atheists, whereas Vox’s asserts that atheists are both real and more likely to be cowards because they have more at stake. The only connection between the two arguments is that they both mention atheists in the context of war. Neither one is a variation of the other.

But more than that, look at Vox’s reasoning: an atheist who volunteers to fight in defense of his country is more “inclined towards cowardice” because he’s willing to risk more than the believer? Risking a greater potential sacrifice for your country is less brave? What kind of reasoning is that? And does Vox understand the difference between bravery and suicide? For someone who makes such a big deal out of other people’s familiarity with military science, you’d think he’d have some awareness of General Patton’s assessment of the value of giving your life for your country. (I trust he won’t mind if I hold him to the same standards as he seeks to impose on Harris and Dawkins…)

But again, Vox’s goal is not to enhance our understanding of the issues involved. It’s simply to make atheists look bad, using whatever pretexts he can contrive towards that end—even if he has to go to ridiculous extremes.

Religion does not play a secondary contributory role in war. It does not play a tertiary contributory role in war. It plays virtually no role in war at all, it is not even involved in any way more than 90 percent of the time.

[V]irtually no religion has historically had much to do with war, if anything, except one.

So desperate is Vox to deny what Harris and Dawkins have said that he does not pause to think about the implications of what he is saying. So let’s do it for him. Let’s take a moment to imagine what it would be like in some parallel universe, on a planet Earth in the Vox Zone, where religion is so impotent and irrelevant that it has indeed made no meaningful contribution to any war.

In this parallel Earth, God has never blessed any nation with victory, because no believer has ever been influenced enough by his religion to pray about it. No car on Vox Earth sports any “God Bless Our Troops” ribbon or sticker, nor has any believer prayerfully considered whether or not he ought to enlist. No believer has ever felt any “call of God” to go to the battlefield to render aid to the sick and wounded, nor has anyone felt that religion ought to lead men to pursue peace by becoming conscientious objectors (or draft dodgers). When the Nazis and Japanese were defeated at the end of World War II on Vox Earth, God deserved no credit for blessing the Allies, or turning the tide of battle in their favor. He couldn’t even claim to have inspired any meaningful effort on the home front in support of manufacturing, rationing, food drives, and so on. Religion made no primary, secondary, tertiary, or any other -ary contributions to the war effort at all.

The same applied, of course, to Joshua’s conquest of Canaan in the Bible, as well as the revolt of the Maccabees. Obedience or disobedience to the will of God has never influenced the outcome of any battle. What victories either side won, were won by purely secular efforts, since God was irrelevant. During the US Civil War, the Battle Hymn of the Republic was never written, because neither side saw the conflict as involving God in any perceptible way. Nobody in post-WWII America ever supported Israel on the grounds that the Jews were God’s Chosen People, so it was wiped out in just under 20 years after its establishment, confounding a series of prophecies that, people had to admit, didn’t have a whole lot to do with real-world politics and warfare anyway, despite their references to wars and rumors of wars. Sure, it proved the prophecies wrong, but that was a small price to pay for genuine peace in the Middle East. Then again, without religious reasons for “God’s Chosen People” to return to “the land God promised to Abraham’s seed,” would there even have been a Middle East conflict in the first place?

The more I think about it, the more I rather like Vox Earth, where religion does indeed have absolutely nothing to contribute to significant human endeavors like war and politics. I expect Harris and Dawkins would find it a bit appealing as well. Imperfections would remain, but in many ways life would be nicer if, as Vox seems to argue, religion were so pointless and irrelevant to human culture that merely identifying ethnic factors in a conflict would be sufficient to eliminate religion as a meaningful influence. Meanwhile, though, back to real life, and Vox’s continuing polemic.

ER gets it wrong again here. The Harris claim I am rebutting here is not “the claim that religion plays a contributory role in violent group-vs-group conflict”, but rather the specific claim that “conflicts that seem driven entirely by territorial concerns, therefore, are often deeply rooted in religion.” In these four cases, none of the conflicts are rooted in religion at all, let alone deeply.

Vox originally quoted an entire paragraph from Sam Harris’ book:

[F]ar greater numbers of people fall into conflict with one another because they define their moral community on the basis of their religious affiliation: Muslims side with other Muslims, Protestants with Protestants, Catholics with Catholics. These conflicts are not always explicitly religious. But the bigotry and hatred that divide one community from another are often the products of their religious identities. Conflicts that seem driven entirely by terrestrial concerns, therefore, are often deeply rooted in religion.

Once again, Vox creates a pretext for claiming I “got it wrong” just because I paraphrased the larger paragraph and he chose (for this specific rebuttal) to pick just one sentence out of that context. But look at his response. Harris is saying two things: (1) There are conflicts that seem to be driven by terrestrial concerns (e.g. politics, ethnicity, economics), and (2) some of these conflicts are fed by underlying factors rooted in religion. Vox’s rebuttal is to cite the very same “terrestrial concerns” that Harris has already acknowledged as part of the equation. Vox is contributing nothing new to the debate, he’s only zeroing in on one over-simplified set of causes as “the” basis (singular) for the conflict, and claiming to have thus disproved what Harris said (even though Harris already pointed out the existence of these other factors).

Vox is so intent on oversimplifying the problem of war, he actually goes to the extreme of denying that religion has anything to do with the Middle East conflict! And he accuses Harris and Dawkins of having an ignorant approach to the history of war?

Vox makes a few more amusing points. For example, when I used the 50 United States as an example of a nation annexing new states without invading and conquering them (i.e. militarily), Vox asserted that we did grow from the original 13 states to a nation of 50 by a process of invasion and conquest. I know he’s probably thinking about the various conflicts between Old World immigrants and the original Native American nations, but still, it’s rather funny that he would make an ambiguous and inaccurate reference to 37 states being added through military invasion and conquest, given the abuse he has showered on Harris and Dawkins for not spelling out every dotted i and crossed t in all of the history of military operations.

Perhaps it’s just that he’s deliberately missing my point in order to create yet another pretext for claiming I “got it wrong.” Then again, I did have a public school education (which Vox seems to associate with bad things), so perhaps my teachers simply failed to mention the war between the United States and the Republic of Texas, and similar military invasions and conquests of the territories of Alaska and Oregon and Missouri and so on, eh?

Vox follows that one up by suggesting that the historical conflict between the nation now known as France and the nation now known as Germany is a conflict that historically had only one side, and not the two sides normally required for confrontations.

I am using this example to rebut the idea that group identities come from religion, as Harris and Dawkins claim. In this case, they cannot have, since the identities predate the religious divide…

[T]he group identities stem from the slaughter, the slaughter doesn’t stem from the group identity! They were all Franks, brother fighting brother and uncle fighting nephew. The Franks subsequently called French didn’t hate the Franks subsequently called Germans for being not-French, they hated them for being prone to invade them no matter what they were caleld [sic]. ER’s reasoning is circular.

I’m not sure what Vox thinks the “religious divide” is between the French and the Germans, but it’s pretty funny that he’s so entrenched in denying whatever Harris says that he can no longer recognize that the two sides in the conflict were still two sides, regardless of what they might have had in common genealogically. Two opposing armies (or one opposing army versus one group of overpowered civilians) are two identifiable groups. You know who your friends are, and you know who your enemies are. You don’t say, “Oh, we’re all Franks, therefore there’s no way we can perceive any kind of distinction between the group we belong to and the group we’re fighting against unless our great-great-great grandchildren come up with unique names for each group.” Before either group could say, “Hey, why don’t we go invade them,” the concepts of “we” and “them” have to have distinct, identifiable meanings. The existence of the groups is a prerequisite for conflict between the groups. How else could the participants have known who was doing the invading, and who was being invaded?

Oh well, at least he acknowledges the essential correctness of one of my primary arguments, which is that there is more to military science, and to armed conflicts, than just strategy and tactics.

Not every aspect of the military has anything to do with strategy and tactics, while the chaplaincy has its place but no one with any knowledge or experience of the military would consider it to be of of any strategic or tactical importance.

Not that this stopped Vox from trying to “prove” the non-role of religion in warfare by noting its absence from ancient books on military tactics and strategy. Pretext pretext pretext. Vox knows that there’s more to the military than what Sun Tzu wrote about, but if he can make the observation that Sun Tzu didn’t mention any gods, he can use that (entirely irrelevant) fact as a pretext for claiming that he’s proven Harris and Dawkins wrong about the role played by religion in the lives and conduct of soldiers and civilians.

He closes with one final update:

He’s now trying to make the bizarre point that admitting the obvious existence of chaplains in some Western armies somehow excuses the complete ignorance of Dawkins and Harris of all things military as they attempt to argue that religious faith is somehow dangerous to mankind.

Those who have read my posts will recognize that I have never remotely said that Dawkins and Harris are completely ignorant about all things military, let alone claiming that the existence of chaplains excuse such a thing. But remember, Vox wants you to think that I am a dishonest reviewer. I’m sure he won’t mind if people judge him by the same standards as he judges me.

Religiously motivated violence, including arson, threats and intimidation, has been escalating unchecked in the volatile eastern district of Ampara for some time. On 17 February 2008 Pastor Neil Edirisinghe (37), who was leader of The House of the Lord fellowship in Ampara, was fatally shot in the chest while his wife Shiromi (31) was shot in the stomach and critically wounded. Their young son received minor injuries and shock. Investigations exposed this as a contract killing organised by a local Buddhist nationalist angered by Pastor Edirisinghe’s ministry.Also on 17 February, a mob of some 50 angry locals attacked believers attending Sunday worship at King’s Revival Church, Mathugama (in the south-west), with Tamil Christians singled out for more severe treatment. The following Sunday the attackers returned and stopped the believers meeting. On the evening of 2 March, ten students of the Believers Church Bible College, Lunuwila (north-west), were walking from the railway station when they were ambushed by a group of about 10 masked men who kicked and bashed them mercilessly. On 3 March, Zion Mount Prayer House in Mulaitivu District (south-west) was set on fire while the pastor, his family and guests were inside — fortunately they all escaped.

This of course has to be wrong, after all, Vox Day has already proved that the violence in Sri Lanka is purely secular. Or at least, that’s what he says in The Irrational Atheist, in the course of trying to make Harris and Dawkins look ignorant for suggesting that religion has a role in violence and war. Perhaps TIA isn’t yet a real big seller down in Sri Lanka?