"I'll Pray for You."

Iron Apologetics

The following post contains spoilers for Iron Man 3 and, possibly, the existence of God.

If I believed in a benevolent creator, I could see myself being a huge fan of the guy. Not only would I owe my own existence to him/her/it, but also would I credit him/her/it for the existence of my friends, my family, my planet--basically everything that matters to me. Religion understandably has it’s share of fanatics, but for those who see no reason to believe, we direct our fandom elsewhere...like movies.

I saw Iron Man 3 this weekend. Robert Downey Jr. really owns the role and the inclusion of Guy Pierce as the villain was a great choice. As with most summer blockbusters, it is an explosive spectacle with a passable story as long as you don’t think about it too hard. I, unfortunately, thought about it too hard. I can’t help myself. (If you haven’t seen the movie and like the film of Marvel Studios, go see it. Spoilers begin now.)

Tony Stark spends the lion’s share of the movie out of the armor. This isn’t THAT surprising. Downey Jr’s ability to convey emotion is severely limited when he has a metal hood over his face. And, hey, why cover the cash register? The result of this choice puts the character in harms way pretty much the entire flick. I doubt the audience is worried that the most popular Avenger in the franchise will die, but, in theory, he is almost always killable to any guy with a gun. This leads me to what takes me out of movies most often--characters not acting like real, intelligent people. Tony Stark is always the smartest guy in the room, so if he is forced to MacGyver weapons out of groceries, I assume it’s because he has no other choice. Later in the movie they show that this was never the case--revealing the biggest plot hole of many plot holes. Tony Stark simply calls upon an army of automated Iron Men. Sure, it allows for a big climax, but it also throws into question why Stark never called upon just one or two Iron Men armors much earlier.

Here you may ask: are you going to bring this back to religion or are you turning this into a movie review blog? It’s the former. I’ve found that movie franchises, especially those catering to the demographic I lovingly call geeks, inspire a kind of irrational loyalty at times. I’ve mentioned this plot hole to Marvel fans in the past 48 hours and have been met with rationalizations that are far too charitable to what was actually shown on screen and hostile toward any critical views. Here are some reasons I heard as to why this plot hole is not a plot hole.

1. The armors were trapped under the ruble of Stark’s demolished home.
2. Tony couldn’t summon the armors because he had no way to contact JARVIS.
3. JARVIS couldn’t connect to the home server.
4. Tony was trying to stay under the radar when he was presumed dead.
5. It never occurred to Tony until the moment he used the protocol.

Each of these are grasps at straws to rationalize an emotional belief that the franchise they love is perfect. An critical assessment of these rationalizations shows they break down quite quickly.

1. If the armor was buried, then Tony also couldn’t summon them when he eventually did. If they weren’t buried, then he could summon them anytime.
2. Tony could have asked JARVIS to summon the armor before JARVIS went offline. He could have asked JARVIS when Tony got him online again, which happened long before he finally called on the armor,
3. Tony sent a message to Pepper very shortly after his disappearance showing that either his home server was accessible or that Pepper could have made it accessible.
4. Disregarding the fact the no one should have presumed Tony dead considering Iron Man shot into the sky not far from the attack on his house where news coverage was present, Tony openly admitted who he was to anyone who saw him. Also, he obviously had more desire to have an armor than to stay concealed since he was working on fixing his suit from the moment it was disabled.
5. Tony Stark isn’t an idiot.

Weak reasoning based on assumptions to defend what is an emotional faith in a franchise is essentially secular apologetics. This is just one example. Last year, negative reviews for The Dark Knight Rises prompted death threats from fanatics who hadn’t yet seen the movie. In the tech world, the Apple/Android/Windows faithful refuse to see design flaws in their favorite gadgets; instead, they are "features."

Am I over thinking this? Perhaps. Next week I’ll explore the theological implications of The Fast and the Furious 6.

An Abortion of a Post

A Catholic apologist I follow recently said that “religion isn’t required to show that an unborn child is a human being.” The particular phrasing of this statement makes it obvious. A child of a human is a human. No need for debate there. The less clear question is this: is an unborn zygote or fetus a child? For the sake of argument, let’s say yes, but that still isn’t entirely the point. After all, the corpse of a human is still a human. The morality of abortion must take into account more than black and white definitions.

Killing cells isn’t a morally wrong act by anyone’s standard. If it was, everything from sun tans to common medical procedures would be stigmatized or illegal. A fertilized egg is a very active collection of cells. In my opinion, the main distinction between human cells and human people is consciousness. While the moral argument of aborting a mind cannot be made until the brain develops, the moral argument for aborting a soul can be made at conception...providing one accepts that the spiritual enters the material during orgasmic climax or shortly thereafter. I know breeders tend to say “on my God” in bed, but I’m not sure that’s exactly what they mean. It’s magical thinking, and it’s the foundation for religious pro-life reasoning.

This post is probably painting me as a bleeding heart pro-choice advocate. I don’t consider myself as such--my view is more nuanced. Unlike religious pro-life reasoning, there is valid secular pro-life reasoning that takes into account the terms of the pregnancy as well as other factors. When the brain and nervous system develop and the unborn child begins to think and feel, I am far less comfortable with abortion. Watching the ultrasounds of my twins, I learned that this development happens surprisingly early. It’s hard to say exactly when my feelings on the subject change. As a rule, I am pro-choice for the first trimester and pro-life for the third, with my opinion during the second trimester contingent largely on the situation--but still leaning pro-life. I think this is a common take on the moral dilemma of the issue. The religious pro-lifers tend to defend their position with images of near-fully developed kids cut out of women’s bodies. This is always gruesome and, at least in my case, a straw man pictorial. In a way, it’s also misrepresenting their own position, considering Catholics focus the lion’s share of their propaganda  on late term abortions while they feel the exact same way about morning after pills.*

*This may be a generalization, but it’s a well informed one. I’m representing the Catholic Church’s position and very few Catholics defect from the Church’s position on anything much less a hallmark like abortion.

Rebuttal, Part Four

For this to make sense, please check out my post exchange with Dr. Luke Conway here and here. You might as well check my Rebuttal, Part One, Rebuttal, Part Two and Rebuttal, Part Three also.

Dr. Conway’s wraps-up his post venting his frustrations on a misconception about Christians--that they are stupid. I feel his pain. I spend much of my time correcting generalizations and perverse stereotypes about atheists. Christians, as a whole, are no more stupid then atheists are amoral. That said, it is also a generalization to say that atheists think Christians are stupid. No atheists I know think Christians are stupid (well, maybe Cephus.) More common is the belief that Christians are intelligent people who accept a relatively small set of stupid beliefs. This doesn’t sound like a charitable assessment, but when I hear someone say that a forgiving God is still blaming us for something a distant ancestor did at the dawn of time; or that one guy built a planetary-flood-worthy vessel to house two samples of all life on earth; or that morality is woven into the fabric of the universe--it’s all I can do to not assume that person is stupid.

Christians are not stupid. They didn’t come up with this crap on their own. They are gullible. This tradition of delusions has been passed down and added upon from pagans to Jews to Christians--so it’s obviously hard to shake. Many atheists like myself take care to not be overly hard on believers, seeing how we were once one of you. I don’t want to be stupid retrospectively, but I recognize that I was certainly gullible. As alluded to before, I had a child’s trusting instinct, but this isn’t about me. Let’s assess the Apologetic Professor’s claims directly.

Secular historians credit Christianity with creating the very icon of intellectualism, the modern university system.

They do? If so, great, but lemme guess, in the cases that Christianity is credited, they closely tied religious education to the program. The university system is a by-product of what is ultimately organized indoctrination. I’m glad the more secular landscape of academia took over.

A large number of intellectual disciplines (e.g., chemistry, a lot of mathematics, genetics, existential philosophy) were founded (and understood by everyone to be founded) by Christians.

No examples are made so we’ll just have to take your word for it. Again, this shows Dr. Conway isn’t used to a skeptical audience. There are significant problems with this kind of claim in that these alleged Christians are no longer with us to clarify their beliefs. Hell, Christians and atheists still argue about who can claim Einstein when he wrote more clearly about his religious beliefs then most other academics or scientists of which I’m aware. Regardless, if Dr. Conway’s claim is true, I’m not surprised. Most of the people in the developed areas at the time when these disciplines could be developed were Christian. It’s a numbers game--odds are Christians would do a lot of the developing if the intelligence of the people belonging to various religions and secular belief systems were roughly the same, which I imagine is the case.

Christianity has spread literacy and education pretty much everywhere it has ever taken root.

Christianity gaining popularity and staying popular in the last 2000 years just happens to coincide with all kinds of advancements in modern civilization. I see it as hitting the sweet spot between cultures ignorant enough to seek religion for answers and cultures advanced enough to not need religion for answers. For whatever reason, Christianity has been the preferred faith for cultures valuing equal rights and freedom than, say, Islam. I suppose it deserves a little credit (but, really, look at the competition.)

Contrary to the idea that “faith” is unintellectual, all thinking people recognize that some elements of their most cherished beliefs require faith in something unseen that cannot be directly proven.

Faith is firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Depending on your requirement of proof, I have faith that the rotation of the earth will make the sun appear to rise in the morning. Since I can't see the future, I have no proof. I do, however, have extraordinary evidence--I have personal data for over 30 years; eye witness accounts with a sample size of the planet's population; historical records going back to cave paintings; and the knowledge that if the earth's rotation ever did stop, we'd all be dead or never born. It's a far cry from faith in the bible--which, coincidentally, does mention the sun rise being delayed at some point. Look it up. Faith in the sun rising is in no way unintellectual. Faith in the bible, well...

The Rebuttal: Part Three

For this to make sense, please check out my post exchange with Dr. Luke Conway here and here. You might as well check my Rebuttal, Part One and Rebuttal, Part Two also.

I’ve covered the moral argument for God multiple times on this blog and consider it the worst argument in the long, sad history of apologetic arguments. The only way I can address this again and remain sane is if I break up Dr. Conway’s post and address it in segments. The bold bits are the words of The Apologetic Professor. Here it goes.

Theism provides a more coherent view of morality than atheism.

No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. It. Does. Not.

If you are an atheist, you believe in a universe that has absolutely no moral will.

This part is true. I believe the universe has no will, moral or otherwise.

The materialist must assume that I have a moral will for the same set of reasons that I have blue eyes or a love of the Indigo Girls, or that the sky appears blue or rocks are solid substances – they are the result of a long chain of purely physical events guided by physical laws or chance or what-have-you. I presume none of you believe that, at the Big Bang (or whatever), the atoms there assembled in the way they did so that someday they could produce the thought I should not kill my neighbor for fun inside my head. Such a thought exists because of chance physical processes.

This harkens back to Rebuttal, Part Two talking about instincts. It could be said that we have a moral instinct brought to us by the very same long chain of physical event that which Dr. Conway takes issue. Think of aspects of morality as adaptions that are selected for survival. The survival of the altruistic can be simplified to a generational game theory. Like the famous prisoner’s dilemma, two socially interacting creatures share a larger net gain by cooperating, even at the cost of personal loss by not defecting and claiming an individually larger gain for themselves. This defection could get the creature killed or made an outcast--taking it out of the gene pool either way. In addition, by leaving the increased gain on the table by continuously acting selfishly ends with the result of less resources than those held by cooperating creatures.

This is an example of how everything from instinctual sharing to general empathy could have evolved. I also find it difficult how one couldn’t see that cooperation is the best policy from the experience of just a single lifetime. This is, in part, what apologists argue when morality comes up.

Now, if the professor is saying that thought in general couldn’t have evolved through “a long chain of purely physical events,” that is a actually a better argument than saying moral thought specifically could not. Still, that is an entirely different debate. I’d like to know that he admits the moral argument is bunk before delving into cognitive sciences.

The atheist universe isn’t an immoral universe, as some have claimed. It’s an amoral universe. Morality isn’t bad in the atheist universe; morality doesn’t exist in the atheist universe. Morality has no meaning in that world.

Dr. Conway, I don’t think morality means what you think it means. Seriously, this is a fundamental conflict of definitions that is an insurmountable hurdle in every atheist/theist debate I’ve ever had. Morality as defined by God’s nature is invalid in my book and morality as defined by human culture is invalid in theirs.

Pretty much every atheist I know actually believes in morality (including all of the “new” atheists, e.g., Dawkins, Harris, etc.). And they don’t just believe in it in a “well, that’s nice” kind of way; they don’t believe that it’s wrong to kill people for fun is just a chance-y neuronal deal and they’d be fine if it had turned out the other way around. No; they really believe in it – like it matters that it turned out this way. In fact, they believe in it so much that they often use moral arguments against theism, as a reason to get rid of it.

Yeah, for two reasons. One, most of us have a high degree of empathy--a trait selected for survival (see above.) And two, because morality works. What’s the alternative? Killing fellow humans on sight? Most of us are intelligent beings who can see that would result in living in fear and constant danger. The Golden Rule is the best thing in the bible, yet pre-dates it. If you see moral acts as those that benefit others and immoral acts as those that harm others--pair that with reasoning to weigh the scales of a given situation fairly and our desire to be benefited and avoid harm, ta-da! Morality. I really don’t see why this is so hard. Yes, it allows for some things to be morally ambiguous, which it distasteful, but some things are morally ambiguous. That’s why we are constantly debating things like capital punishment and abortion. It’s objectively clear that at least some moral issues have no objectively clear answer. Saying that you believe you are right on a divided issue is fine, but saying that you are absolutely right because it was written in a book in another language from a less civilized culture over a thousand years ago is crazy. Doesn’t it sound crazy? I think it’s crazy.

My philosophy says that God built morality into the fabric of the universe.

Do rocks have morality then? Do tornadoes strive to be nice? Or is this only evident in intelligent, social beings who have a vested interest to act civil, all things being equal?

Theists attempt to show that morality without God is arbitrary. On the contrary, I can think of multiple reasons why any given moral choice is right or wrong. To apologists I ask, does God have reasons for what is right and what is wrong? Is there a reason His nature is how it is? If so, let’s say we can come to the same reasoning and cut out the middle god. If not, then it’s the theist's morality that is arbitrary. Even if the Christian God exists, we face the exact same pointless morals...except, y’know, my perceived source of morality doesn’t occasionally commit genocide.

The Rebuttal, Part Two

For this to make sense, please check out my post exchange with Dr. Luke Conway here and here. You might as well check my Rebuttal, Part One too.

"Religious Instincts."

Dr. Conway says that one of the few things atheists and theists agree on is that we have religious instincts. Judging from the original post’s comments, this certainly doesn’t seem the case, but I’d be willing to let the professor’s cited studies do the talking...if he only cited any. He merely mentioned that studies have been done. Dr. Conway should know that an audience of skeptics won’t take his word for it. As it is, there is nothing for me to address here. I have no studies, no interpretations of studies, nor specifics on what said studies were studying. Eventually, even the professor states he doesn’t care about this alleged research, nor will I.

It seems that an unjust jump must be made to say that the instincts and tendencies we may have are religious in nature--although it’s impossible to say not knowing exactly what specific instincts are in question. To fill out this post, I’ll guess.

Most of us have an innate barrier to sexual attraction toward those with which grow up, especially siblings. Looking at this tendency from the perspective of our culture, it appears like a moral instinct. Apologists claim moral instincts are evidence of God. Is this one of the religious instincts to which Dr. Conway refers? If so, I can explain this example without be pointing out the clear evolutionary benefit to incest aversion--seeing how it usually doesn’t bear offspring or increases the risk of birth defects. I’ll explore other seemingly moral instincts in my Rebuttal. Part Three dealing with morality.

I mentioned in my post to The Apologetic Professor that some people are naturally more trusting than others. We could call this a trusting instinct, which is highest in children. Parents know, kids will believe all kinds of crap. This is why I am opposed to religious indoctrination. It’s not fair to the kids. Their cognitive faculties aren’t completely online and will accept any answer to whatever basic inquires they may think up. Dr. Conway mentioned Santa, which largely works against his argument. Kids believe Santa not because they have a Christmas instinct, rather because they have a trusting instinct. A near defenseless youngster believing his or her world-wise parent is a survival trait that would be continuously selected from an evolutionary standpoint. Most people think Darwin set back apologetics only in regards to the Argument from Design, but evolutionary biology acts as a valid hurdle for many a theist assumption.

Finally, Dr. Conway states that he thinks probabilistically. As a poker player, I approve, although I wonder where faith comes in when one thinks God is only probable and not certain. I also question the probabilities the professor assigns to the variables. Just because two things are possible, doesn’t make them equally likely. This, again, will be a common thread as the rebuttal continues.

The Rebuttal, Part One

For this to make sense, please check out my post exchange with Dr. Luke Conway here and here.

First and foremost, thanks go out to The Apologetic Professor. It takes a high level of confidence in one’s beliefs to offer it to an entirely new, and let’s face it, less-than-receptive audience. Luke has this confidence. He also was willing to lend his audience’s eyes to a point of view contrary to what he believes. This is not common, not at all.

Here’s were it gets mildly insulting, Luke, but bare with me. The Apologetic Professor wasn’t my first choice for this meeting of the minds. I contacted the authors of other apologetic blogs first, most notably Apologetics315 and Truthbomb Apologetics. My motives were selfish to a degree. I knew these sites had a page rank higher than my own which would translate into my words reaching further into the interwebs. I got a lot of “thanks, but no thanks.” I pressed on researching other Christian blogs, finding few I liked, but many that were reputable within their community. I reached out those who were my peers in popularity. No takers. At this point I was going to cut my losses and write a post about how Christian apologists are so insecure about their own arguments that they’d rather preach to their choir than potentially save souls. I couldn’t deal with rejection any other way than to assume they were worried my words would topple the house of cards they built for their flock.

I never wrote that post. A last scan of Google brought me to The Apologetic Professor. At this point I was more concerned with content than metrics and his content was far more appealing than what I saw up until then. I found that Luke was an actual Professor of Psychology, which didn’t worry me nearly as much as it normally does when I find an outspoken believer in the education system. Sure, he’s well spoken and intelligent, but he also injects humor into otherwise dry and polarizing material. I’m a sucker for humor.

Thus ends my back-handed compliment. On to the the first part of my rebuttal.

“Seek and you will find.”

The Apologetic Professor offers decent advice, but not great. We see things through our own subjective lens developed by both conditioning and experience. Every story I've heard about signs from God are dripping with confirmation bias and superstition. We tend to find what we want to find, especially when the experiment is uncontrolled. So seek away...using the scientific method.

The whole point of the scientific method is to strip away biases and take the observer as much out of the equation as possible. Praying for a sign, seeing a white bird fly past at some point throughout the day, and interpreting the bird as the requested sign is pointless. Praying specifically for a white bird to fly past at high noon and recording the results is a much better start to ascertain the power of prayer. Find a way to objectively test your hypothesis, then test it, then repeat the test. Otherwise it's all just good vibes and vapor miracles.

And please, apologists, never assume the atheist you're speaking too hasn't sought God. Some haven't, but most have. I don't have stats for this other than anecdotal evidence and the fact that most people in the world are born into religious families and cultures. The topic of God comes up, often, and most of us pursue it. After all, who wouldn't want a personal relationship with a supreme being? I sought a few variations of the God Luke believes in. I didn't find him.

I will continue the rebuttal to the Apologetic Professor's post in three more parts to cover the three major points of the piece. Until then, check the comments from the original post. They are doing my job for me.