Victor Stenger’s Scientific Critique of Christian Belief

https://www.scienceandchristianbelief.org/serve_pdf_free.php?filename=SCB+22-2+Bartholomew.pdf

Outgrowing God

One atheist trope is that Christian faith is childish. We have a duty to wean ourselves from immature belief a celestial father-figure. 

To that many things could be said, but for now I'd point out that the very atheists who say this often adopt a paternalistic tone of disapproval. They themselves assume the role of father-figures. If you refuse to heed their fatherly advice, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, Coyne, Stenger et al. will be disappointed in you. Don't you wish to make them proud of you?

Essentially, then, they become substitute father gods. They play on the very psychology they impute to Christian believers. 

Irreligion and violence

I'm going to comment on Keith Parsons' alarmist screed:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2014/09/02/religion-and-violence/

1) When someone challenges your religion, they appear to denigrate your customs, traditions, community, history, and your whole way of living. It feels like they are being ethnocentric and condescending. If someone insults your religion, it can feel like they are insulting your family, and, in a sense, they are. The Apostle Paul spoke of fellow believers as his brothers and sisters in Christ, and the family metaphor is apt. A perceived insult to one’s biological or religious family can provoke a violent response.

This assumes that, as a matter of fact, Christians take an attack on Christian theology as personally as they take an attack on one's own mother. Where's the empirical evidence that, in fact, most Christians make the same emotional connection that Parsons is laboring to make?  

2) Challenging religion can appear subversive, an attempt to dissolve the glue of society and sow discord. The low will be incited to indulge their envy of the high, and the high will be left with no means of preserving their position except by brutal repression. If you take away their pie in the sky, the lowly will fight to get it now by any means necessary, and the high will fight to hold on by any means necessary.

Once again, that's just armchair psychology. In the US, atheists have been denigrating Christianity for a very long time. Take Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Robert Ingersoll, or H. L. Mencken–to name a few. Where's the empirical evidence that they were "brutally repressed"? 

3) Anyone who questions your religion seems to be attempting to relegate you to insignificance. Nobody likes to be made to feel that they do not matter. If your religion is what gives you a sense of meaning in life, then, you will surely bitterly resent anyone who seemingly wants to deny you that comfort.

Unless we respect them, why would we respect their opinion of us? What makes Parsons suppose Christian self-esteem is contingent on the approval of atheists? 

4) Unfortunately, biases are all too often among the beliefs that religion reinforces. Among the comforts that religion offers is the reassurance that God hates the same people you do. Indeed, if God hates, say, liberals, feminists, evolutionists, environmentalists, gays, lesbians, atheists, Democrats, and smarty-pants college professors, then you have a duty to hate them too. I have on my office door a hilarious picture of a horrid Phyllis Schlafly-type woman saying “God told me to hate you.” Religion did not create hatred, but it can make is so much easier and more fun to hate. It makes it easier and more fun by combining the pleasure of hating with the pleasure of self-righteousness.

If Phyllis Schlafly is the worst thing he has to worry about, he doesn't have much to worry about. Does she have a history of fomenting violence against atheists? 

Ironically, Parsons is a stellar example of a self-righteous atheist who despises Christians. 

5) As with every topic, St. Thomas Aquinas was impeccably logical when discussing heresy. In the 13^th Century murderers were always and everywhere put to death. Yet, notes Aquinas, the murderer only destroys the body. The heretic does not destroy merely the mortal body, but leads the immortal soul into perdition. The heretic is therefore far more dangerous and despicable than the murderer, and far more worthy of being punished by death. If you accept Aquinas’s premises, this conclusion is inescapable. If eternal punishment is the consequence of departing from true belief, then must we not oppose the spread of false doctrine by any and all means? If you accept this conclusion, the stake and the rack cannot be far behind.

Of course, medieval Catholicism was very authoritarian. Unquestioning submission to your religious superiors. 

By contrast, Protestant theology accentuates the necessity of personal conviction. External conformity is no substitute for genuine faith. Coercion is not persuasion. 

Religion is the high-octane fuel of ideologies. It touches deep things, like personal and collective identity, fears and hopes, and a fundamental sense of worth and security. Carelessly or maliciously handled, religion can be explosive. A Bible or Koran in the wrong hands has done, and is doing, vast amounts of harm. I would recommend putting a warning label on every Bible sold: "Warning: Use with extreme caution. Do not take literally. Do not take with self-righteousness. Admits of very different interpretations. Misuse can result in symptoms including but not restricted to genocide, persecution, crusade, intolerance, obscurantism, sexism, homophobia, and racism."

i) One could just as well say we should put a warning label on The Communist Manifesto. Consider the humanitarian devastation that wrought. 

ii) Parsons also assumes, without benefit of argument, that "persecution, intolerance, homophobia" &c. are bad consequences of religion. But many atheists espouse moral skepticism, moral relativism, or moral nihilism. So he needs to explain the secular basis for his value judgments. 

Thanks for the comments and clarification, but I think that you are still underplaying the particular potential of religion to incite violence. Of course, John Locke, in "A Letter Concerning Toleration" makes the same point as Lactantius: Force can only make people into hypocrites who say the right things to avoid harm while sill disbelieving. True religious commitment requires an unforced assent.Fine, but I still have to wonder whether the "no coercion" policy is really grounded in principle or whether it is based on an empirical claim that, as a matter of fact, force does not work. As a matter of fact, it might. The most terrifying sentence in Orwell's 1984 is the final one: "He loved Big Brother." The point was that torture, systematically and "scientifically" applied could not only bring about external assent, but change perception. If you are tortured severely enough, Orwell implied, you may be able actually to think that 2 + 2 = 5. Suppose Orwell is right and it is discovered that belief can be coerced. What would the Christian response be?So long as eternal destiny hinges upon a decision--the decision whether or not to accept Christian salvation--just how far can one go in good conscience to make sure that someone makes the "right" decision? If not outright violence, how about extreme persuasion, using all the tools of propaganda and manipulation so artfully developed by advertisers and politicians? We live in an environment where, whatever you do, you can hardly escape advertising. If in doubt, check the distracting and moronic ads running right now on this site. Why not 24/7 hard-sell proselytizing? I understand that there is something now called "The Good News Movement" that aims at evangelizing elementary-school children? Is this OK? Doesn't the logic of Christian theism imply that if one child is saved from eternal perdition, then hard-core propagandizing of kids is OK?

Committed atheists think society has a huge stake in the success or failure of atheism to inform social policy. They think Christian theology poses a clear and present danger to human flourishing or the very survival of the human race: 

When belief in ancient myths joins with other negative forces in our society, they hinder the world from advancing scientifically, economically, and socially at a time when a rapid advancement in these areas is absolutely essential for the survival of humanity. We now may be only about a generation or two away from the catastrophic problems predicted to result from global warming, pollution, and overpopulation. Our children and grandchildren could be faced with flooded coastal areas, severe climatic changes, epidemics caused by overcrowding, and increased starvation for much of humanity. Such disasters would generate worldwide conflict on a scale that is likely to exceed that of the great twentieth-century wars, possibly with nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable nations and terrorist groups. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/the-folly-of-faith_b_863179.html

By Parsons' own logic, atheists have an incentive to suppress Christianity by any means necessary. 

"Science flies us to the moon–religion flies us into buildings"

I'm going to comment on some statements by the late Victor Stenger in The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Reason and Science (Prometheus Books 2009), 59. 

We trust scientific method, logic, and mathematics because they work. They give us answers that we can independently test against objective observations. They give us electric lights, computers, and cell phones. 

i) Is there just one scientific method?

ii) Apropos (i), seems to me that there's a distinction between great scientists and average workaday scientists. The average scientist is methodical. But great scientists operate more from intuition. Flashes of insight. Take Einstein's thought experiments involving clocks, trains, elevators, or riding a light beam. Is that a method? 

A method is reproducible. A set of instructions. Just follow the instructions. Do it yourself. 

But the average scientist can't imitate Einstein. Einstein had a remarkable knack for visualizing physics. That's not a method–that's a talent. Ironically, as Einstein got older, he became more methodical, but less insightful. 

Same thing with Newton's cannon, Schrödinger’s cat, and the EPR paradox. Is that a method? 

What about Feynman's sum-over-histories interpretation of quantum mechanics? In a sense, that's a method. But how did he arrive at that in the first place? Was there a method by which he hit on that interpretation? 

Or take this example:  

I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start figuring out the motion of the rotating plate. I discovered that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! I went on to work out equations for wobbles. Then I thought about how the electron orbits start to move in relativity.

How many physicists sitting in a cafeteria would draw that analogy? Is that a method? Great scientists employ analogical reasoning. They discern parallels which lesser scientists don't notice. Like Newton's bucket. That's a real experiment. A simple experiment. Anyone can do it. What made it special was not the experiment itself, but Newton's extrapolation. He used that as a springboard for a thought-experiment. One which, in turn, proved to be a stimulus to Mach and Einstein. 

Great scientists resort to thought-experiments, in part because that's a short-cut, and in part because the technology may not exist to perform a real experiment. So they have to experiment in their heads. For instance, the double-slit experiment was originally a thought-experiment. When Feynman proposed it, the technology did not exist to do it for real. 

iii) Do we trust logic because it works? How could we tell what works apart from logic? What works doesn't prove logic; rather, logic proves what works. There's no way to "independently test logic against objective observations," for that comparison depends on logic from the get-go.  

iv) Do we trust math because it works? If math didn't work, how could we tell? Not by taking measurements to see if math matches our measurements, for measurement depends on math.

How can we independently test math against objective observations? Suppose I observe some marbles. How many? Are there five marbles or six? Unless I have a preconception of number, I can't count how many marbles there are. Absent math, I can't register their number. How does Stenger think math works in that setting? How could he ever detect a mismatch between math and how many marbles there really are? 

Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings.

That's a catchy slogan. Appealing to the rabble. 

i) From a Christian standpoint, that's a false antithesis. Absent God, there'd be no moon, no astronauts, no rocket scientists. No electricity. God is the ultimate source of science and scientists. God is the ultimate source of logic, mathematics, and the physical world. 

ii) It wasn't religionists in general who flew airplanes into buildings. It was Muslims in particular. A very specific theology. 

iii) Yes, science flies us to the moon. Science also gives us tanks, missiles, stealth bombers, battleships, bioweapons, chemical weapons, thermonuclear weapons, and predator drones. In future, it may give us orbital weapons.   

How to Debate a Christian Apologist

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2014/02/how-not-to-debate-a-christian-apologist/

Christianity And Its Evidence Keep Growing

Alex Tsakiris recently interviewed John Loftus on his Skeptiko podcast. Tsakiris makes some good points, and his comments at the end of the podcast (recounting an email exchange he had with Loftus) are especially worth listening to. Don't just read the transcript. There are significant parts of the program that the transcript doesn't include.

Tsakiris made some of his usual anti-Christian comments. At times, he'll dismiss "Christianity" without qualification. At other points, he refers to something like "fundamentalist Christians". He mentioned inerrancy. Judging by this podcast and his previous comments, I suspect that he's referring to conservative professing Christians in general. It's misleading to refer to conservative Christianity as a whole as "fundamentalism", but I suspect that's what he's doing. He wants to move beyond the disputes between atheism and the type of Christianity he's criticizing. He thinks people are "stuck on stupid" by focusing too much on atheism and traditional Christianity. He thinks work like what Loftus has done has effectively debunked conservative Christianity. He's weary of "silly, empty tomb Christianity kinds of debates". He wants to move on.

Atomic muddle

"Victor Stenger's Atomic Muddle" by M. Anthony Mills.