timeimmortal

The professor who briefly appears in the segment, Denis O. Lamoureux of the University of Alberta, is a former theology professor whom I still keep in touch with. He was briefly quoted, as the Reader can see, in a discussion with Richard Dawkins on TVOntario’s “Agenda” program.

Dawkins has his opinions, and I have mine. What I wanted to remark on in the video is how trapped, how very stuck, Dawkins is in his view of the relationship between science and Religion as being a dichotomy. He cannot grasp that an excellent science would believe in God not out of some kind of desperation, but by conscious choice that emerges out of reasoned consideration. Dr. Lamoureux (or Dr. Dr. Dr. Lamoureux — he holds three PhDs, two of them in scientific fields) was an atheist for no small length of time.

Dawkins is so trapped in this dichotomy that he can’t help but attempt to pigeonhole Dr. Lamoureux by essentially declaring that Denis uses his religion to explain away gaps in the evolutionary process. Perhaps Dawkins can be excused for not having gotten to know Dr. Lamoureux as well as he should have — suffice to say that anyone who knows Denis knows that the last thing he believes is a “God of the Gaps” model of creation.

When Denis talks about God being “behind” the science, he’s not talking about a God who simply guides the process past the rocky spots and yet-unexplained gaps in its record. Instead, he’s talking about the sort of God I discuss in this article here — a God who created all things out of His endless love, who continues to pour our His love upon creation, and to whose love creation responds in a multitude of amazing ways…including the emergence of life itself.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

A friend of mine once put to me an example concerning the orientation of hypothetical magnetic dipoles in a hypothetical box. From within the box, it appeared that the orientation of the dipoles was randomly shifting; from the outside of the box, it was apparent that no such thing was transpiring, as one could plainly see the small toddler with the magnetic toy playing on and near the box.

I tend to think of this example when people talk of evolutionary developments as being unpredictable products of mere chance. I do not contest that such things are unpredictable; I contest, very sharply, the notion that pure chance alone had a hand in the developments. We are inside the box; we cannot see if anyone is playing with a magnet outside of it. Perhaps, on that basis, we can be forgiven for reaching the wrong conclusion. Nevertheless, it’s still the wrong conclusion.

I say this to preface a mention of this rather fortunate discovery of direct evidence of evolution in action, because while I lament the attribution of the event to purely random chance, I nevertheless acknowledge that it’s an exciting discovery, and a bit of a shot in the arm for those who oppose the theory of evolution on some principle (especially my fellow Christians who do so):

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

…

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

…sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

…Lenski turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations. These allowed him to replay history from any starting point he chose, by reviving the bacteria and letting evolution “replay” again.

…The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.

Discoveries like this affirm my faith in God, I find, because they carry with them a profound sense of wonder and amazement at the subtle, yet profound, intricacies upon which all of creation is constructed. In a sense, I pity those who assert that God must have made things in the exact manner suggested in the Book of Genesis, because the God of such a literalist interpretation of the Bible is so much smaller, so less magnificent. The God who knows each created thing down to its tiniest detail, and (moreover) who envisioned and breathed into being each such detail is so much larger, and so much more personal as well.

And it is staggering, to me, to think that God still so loves the world that He is willing to again make the processes of His creation apparent in even the tiny bacteria of the lab; indeed, His love is poured out on them too, and they respond in magnificent ways to it.

Discoveries like this, to me, don’t speak of chance; they speak of revelation — natural revelation, to be specific. They speak of a God who continues to desire to reveal His ways and mysteries to an inquiring, open human mind. As David Warren and others have pointed out, the whole ideal of science — that rational inquiry will be rewarded by way of evidence and discovery — has at its core a very Christian sensibility, echoed in the words of Christ: “And I tell you, Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”

Another wave of atheists seems to be upon me; while I can’t quite set my watch by them, at least I can be assured that there will be periodic sources of content not related to doings on any other blog save this one, which I appreciate.

In this case, the amusingly-handled Aspentroll writes in with a few thoughts on this article.

“Atheism will endure, as it has for many ages now. But it will never dominate a free people, and in due course gives way to the spiritual. Falsehood must necessarily give way to truth in the end, or at least to a less severe falsehood.”

The word “atheism” above could be replaced by the word “Religion” or “Christianity” and the rest of the quote would be just as true.

Atheists believe that the Bible is a huge falsehood and to pattern your life on such a nebulous writing is in most cases dangerous. You cannot govern a country using the laws of the bible which seems to be what some “fundies” want. We would all be up in arms if Sharia Law was allowed in the US, because it is archaic and discriminatory against women and free thought.

Atheism, agnosticism and free thought is the only check and balance we have to keep overly zealous delusional people from taking over and spoiling what is a normal modern way of life.

Did the reader note the tacit suggestion that religious people are necessarily delusional? The footnote to this more recent article seems relevant to mention here.

A good first question I might ask is: what checks and balances exist to keep overly zealous atheists from taking over and spoiling what is a normal, modern way of life that, in the West at least (though it perhaps does not always realize it), benefits greatly from reserves of Christian moral capital built up over the centuries? History has demonstrated that those states which have made atheism an explicit policy of the state have inexorably become brutal and bloody-minded, and several examples of the trend persist to this day.

The Mark Shea article I cited previously addresses this point rather directly: it is within human nature to desire to believe, and when force of will fails to ensure that the populace does not stray back toward the spiritual, force of arms is a necessary recourse of the atheistic state. It might be easy to laugh this off as fallacy, but one observes that in the explicitly atheistic regimes in places such as the Soviet Union, Burma, China, and North Korea (an incomplete list of examples, but sufficient for our purposes) did have something of a penchant for murderously cracking down on spiritual movements and religions within their borders. Certain exceptions to the trend exist, of course, but only in those cases where the religion(s) in question — the Orthodox Church in Russia, the “Catholic” Church in China — has allowed itself to be co-opted by the state.

One possible objection is that the generally secular regimes in many Western nations do not actively persecute the religious faithful in their midst. While the statement about persecution is up for debate, it is generally true that secular Western states do not, at least, murderously persecute their religious citizens. But then, even in various Scandinavian nations, the secularism itself is not explicit state policy, and most of those states still acknowledge that there is a Christian aspect to their origins.

As to the quote of mine that Apentroll cites in opening his message, it should be observed that his attempt to gainsay it, in the first sentence of his response to me, really amounts to little more than saying “I know you are, but what am I?” Although it sounds more reasonable than that on the surface — heck, it even sounds somewhat rational — the statement itself can be revealed to be something of a patent falsehood, on several levels, upon closer examination.

First off, Christianity’s aim — and the aim of true religion (as opposed to the various false teachings one can stumble across from time to time*) — is freedom. And by freedom, I don’t mean being free “from rules of conduct or social constraints” (as the all-too talented authors of the character of Durandal in the Marathon series of games so eloquently word it). I do, however, mean being free “to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.”

Freethinking, a misnomer if ever there was one, actually ruins freedom. “Freethinkers supposedly want “the pursuit of ideas for their own sake,” but no one pursues ideas simply for their own sake, but in order to understand, to act or to believe, or to have some combination of these. Men pursue ideas so that they may understand the world, and they seek to understand the world to have wisdom. Men desire wisdom in order to live well, and part of living well is to pursue and know the Good, and the Good is that which fulfills human nature and causes it to flourish. The desire to know is a natural desire, one implanted in us as part of our created being; we yearn to know and to enter into the unknown because we yearn for unity with the One Who desires that all things be united in Him. If no religion had ever caused men to live virtuously and flourish, religion would have disappeared ages ago. If no religion had produced saints and cultivated the finest aspects of human nature, very few would adhere themselves to it and even then it would only be the mad and obsessive. There is nothing interesting in rehearsing the catalogue of crimes that religious adherents have committed against each other, since men have always been slaughtering and oppressing one another and they have tended to do more of it when they are less in thrall to their religious tradition than when they are strictly obedient to it. What is remarkable is how much at least some religions have contributed to the civilisation and edification of men, which would hardly seem probable if they were not much more than elaborate exercises in self-deception and nonsense.”

One point, in particular, that can be taken out of the above quotation is that “we yearn to know and to enter into the unknown because we yearn for unity with the One Who desires that all things be united in Him.” It is the result of no accident that science and discovery flourished in the Christian West after ending up misfiring almost everywhere else in the world (historically speaking). As David Warren notes, “[to] those who know some history, the modern sciences emerged in an unambiguously Christian milieu. They flourished, over centuries in the West, as the direct result of the Judaeo-Christian teaching that “God does not contradict Himself.” The whole notion of unalterable physical laws, and thus a universal order that will repay inquiry, is the product of a theological position unique to the West. It is a view that has been glimpsed in other civilizations, but could only be doggedly pursued in this one. Science was stillborn in all other civilizations.”

And the same is true of the wider concept of freedom. Nowhere else in the world, save in a West born out of Christendom, did the concept of human freedom, individual liberty, and human rights genuinely flourish. It did not, certainly, flourish in the Islamic world, nor in the castes of Hinduism in India, nor in any of the places where Buddhism took hold, nor in…any other place, really, save for the West that Christendom birthed. Indeed, the ideas that man should be free and that all men are “equal” is, ultimately, only defensible from within a teleological framework, and then a Christian teleology.

And in the numerous examples one could draw out of the 19th and 20th centuries, one can observe that in those regimes where atheism has, so to speak, become the law of the land, not only has human freedom been impaired and/or outright trampled on, but so too has science, to say nothing of human rights.

Now, I will grant that I stand in agreement with Aspentroll’s objetion to governance by “fundies” — fundamentalism leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Equally, though, I don’t think that society has any right to demand that a politician leave his Christianity at the door when he takes office.

Atheists are welcome to consider the Bible a book of falsehoods; I consider it God’s inerrant, infallible revelation to the world**. Who is to say which of us is right? I will grant that many, many people have a poor understanding of exactly what the Bible teaches, and fundamentalists seem especially prone to this unfortunate reality. But is it genuinely dangerous to pattern one’s life on the core teachings of Scripture? Exactly how terrible a place would the world be to live in if we all actually followed what Christ taught? Exactly how terrible a place would the world be to live in if everyone followed, as a bare minimum, the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, and patterned their lives on the concepts articulated therein?

I very much doubt it would be a perfect place to live in…but I’ve no doubt that it would be a much better world. But then, Chesterton had it exactly right when he noted that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.”

I also agree with Aspentroll that it would be horrible if Islamic sharia law became the law of the land, in Canada or anywhere else. I suspect that Aspentroll, however, has temporarily taken leave of reason and erroneously assumes that because some types of religious law are brutal and evil, all forms of religious law must necessarily also be brutal and evil. It’s a rather common logical fallacy among atheists to assert this — Christopher Hitchens is particularly vulnerable to it.

The main problem with the assertion is that a thing may be true even if certain individuals don’t accept it as being true. This is easily understood in the case of the fundamentalist objection to e.g. the theory of evolution and the geological research that has revealed the approximate age of the Earth. Young Earth Creationism insists, passionately, that Earth is a mere 6,000 years old, and most creationists of this bent do not accept as truthful or valid the various discoveries made in the fields of geology, astronomy, and evolutionary biology (among others). That doesn’t mean that the theories and discoveries aren’t true, however.

The same is true in regard to atheistic assertions regarding religions. Aspentroll would hardly be the first atheist to look at, say, the evils perpetrated in the name of Islam and declare that all religions are murderous death cults obsessed with paedophilia and suicide belts. That might come as news to Buddhists, and indeed to most Christians, but not everyone can be counted on to let facts get in the way of good rhetoric, especially if it sells books with provocative titles. And yet, a more reasonable, rational person would notice that there are many critical differences between, say, Islam and Catholicism, visible both by a close analysis of doctrine and by taking an honest, objective look at the actions of the followers of each respective faith on a global scale.

As previously noted, the creature we call a human being is wired to be a believer, and the only real question is what said human being will believe in. We’ve seen this played out through history, and we see its logical consequences played out in that movement which denies this very aspect of human nature: atheism. In individual atheists like Sam Harris or Andre Comte-Sponville, we see the beginnings of post-atheistic spiritualism beginning to creep in. The same trend can be observed in Russia, in the wake of the collapse of an explicitly atheistic regime. It’s regrettable that the spirituality that such people are gravitating towards is, quite often, some new form of paganism (or “new” in that Roger Daltry “same as the old boss” sense of the word), although it is good that people are also finding, or rediscovering, the Church.

There seems to be a rather pernicious lie going around that religion and freedom are antithetical to one another; this is not completely true. It is true in regard to specific religions (e.g. Islam), but not in regard to the Christian truth. Indeed, it was a particularly Christian sense of telos that informed the very constraints, concepts, and ideals which enabled the West to value freedom. By contrast, the application of atheistic ideals as the formative values of a state has tended to be the true antithesis of freedom, of science, and of human rights.

And in perhaps the most amusingly ironic twist, I just realized that if I re-worded Aspentroll’s message to me and flipped the references to religion and atheism in every instance (and substituted the title of any New Atheist tract for “the bible”), the message itself would not only be a lot more truthful, but also a lot more historically defensible.

* this statement said with tongue firmly implanted in cheek

James McGrath writes in to provide some alternative commentary on the issue of Battlestar Galactica’s Theology, which I discussed in this article.

I thought I’d draw attention to some of the posts on my blog about BSG and theology (I’m a religion professor who is also a fan), such as :

http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2008/05/gospel- according-to-gaius.html

http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2008/04/bartlestar- theodica.html

I’d welcome your comments!

While I could say more for Professor McGrath’s opinions regarding Bart Ehrman (my own views on the “problem” of evil and theodicy are well known; I don’t see the existence of evil and/or suffering in the world as any kind of challenge to the Christian conception of God, and regard those who use said issue(s) as an objection to Religion as being, shall we say, rather deluded themselves), some of his views on BSG and the theology of Gaius Baltar’s new religious movement (itself a derivation of the Cylon religion) are rather interesting.

For example, McGrath remarks thusly concerning the first episode of the latest, and final, season of BSG:

In the BSG Season 4 premiere, entitled “He That Believeth In Me“, a more relevant verse would seem to be “Whosoever seeks to save his life will lose it…” Gaius Baltar moves from an unwilling Messiah disgusted by the gaudy Hindu-style flashing votive lights surrounding his picture, to one who seems genuinely willing to give up his life to save another. The “one true God” has yet to be explored fully as a concept on the show, but in the mean time, interesting questions continue to be asked about how we live our lives and what matters most to us.

I observed to my wife, while we were watching the latest episode of the series to date, that Baltar seems unable to avoid some manner of beating in each and every episode he has been in this season. I’d have to go over all the episodes again (we have them on tape), but I can’t recall yet a time when Baltar has not been pistol-whipped, choked, or punched during the course of an episode since the fleet departed the Ionian Nebula

And in each and every case, Baltar’s personal sufferings have been intimately relevant to the narrative of the show. Indeed, through examples as varied as the knife attack on Baltar in the head to Galen Tyrol attempting to choke him, the series has demonstrated in almost every episode this season that the God whom Baltar is preaching effects His plan for humanity in part through human suffering.
Read the rest of this entry »

Robagne writes in with a question about Morality in relation to the theory of evolution. I can only assume he’s referring to one of the articles in my ongoing discussion with Nicholas, but I’m not going to speculate as to a specific one; his question stands alone, on its own merits, quite handily.

Agreed, Dawkins is too harsh for my liking…

I would like to ask however — what is the problem of one who believes in evolution to also believe in morals, even in God?

Evolutionary theory, like any other scientific theory is simply asserting that the universe is operating according to laws of universal application.

For me, it is amazing to think that God, in his supreme wisdom, can create life and humankind simply through the enaction of universal laws.

I have no problem in believing that while humankind has humble origins (i.e. we were once the beasts of the fields) we have now evolved into something capable of receiving God’s moralizing teachings.

The good Reader should know that I have no problem “believing” in evolution — in fact, I very readily accept the theory, in the understanding that truth (i.e. that humanity evolved) cannot contradict truth (i.e. that God created humanity and, indeed, all the Universe and its contents).

So to answer the first of Robagne’s questions is fairly straightforward: there is no problem for one to believe in both evolution and morals, nor is there a problem for one to believe in evolution and God. Your good blogger certainly believes in all three!

Robagne is exactly right in observing that evolutionary theory, like all other scientific theories, exists merely to explain the operation of the universe according to a set of (more or less) empirically determinable laws. It and other theories do not — can not — have a metaphysical component, and tell us nothing about whether any external factor influenced or influences (in the sense of an ongoing act) the function of the Universe. They can not — and do not, save when abused by those with an agenda — tell us about God, His nature, or His existence.

And indeed, God has created this magnificent Universe in which we live in part through the “enaction of universal laws.” But then, it is good that there are fixed laws, because such frameworks are necessary that another gift of God’s — the gift of free will — might be fully realized. Moreover, it is very like God to do things in this way, since His whole intent has been to approach humanity in a very incarnational, very personal way. Indeed, we see this in how he enacts his plan for our salvation through the Church.

Nicholas writes in to correct a mistake I made in this article, and to comment on it as well.

“[R]ecent discovery that the Amazon molly fish reproduces asexually”. Er, no. It was discoved in 1932. That’s why it’s called the Amazon molly, after the legendary female warriors. The news is the publication of a paper attempting to quantify how long it should have taken to become extinct, and wondering why it hasn’t.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/8/88

But I agree that human science is unlikely ever to explain everything. On the other hand, none of the big Religions explain anything. “This or that god did it” is not an explanation. It’s a cop-out.

I’ve corrected the origninal article, although I observe that the error did not substantially damange the point being made.

As to Nicholas‘ second point, in a way it is a cop-out to claim that God “did it” is a satisfactory answer to questions about origins, if in fact one is advocating God’s activity in contrast to what the evidence suggests took place (i.e. evolution). If one is preaching a dichotomy, then certainly one’s invocation of divine action is a cop-out.

But of course, that does not mean that God is not the artist behind all creation; it simply means that instead of adopting an “either/or” stance toward evolution and faith, one must adopt a “both/and” stance. Yes, humanity evolved, and yes, evolution was “guided” (if the Reader will permit the use of a somewhat clumsy term for it) by God.

Nicholas may feel compelled to argue against my having said that, and may feel the need to label even the “both/and” stance as a cop-out. And maybe it is. Equally, then, it is a cop-out to argue that evolution was unguided, which most atheists do.

As to whether religions explain anything, I think the first question that has to be asked is what we expect a religion to explain, and then what a religion really should explain. Galileo said it best, I think, in his letter to Christina, when he observed that the purpose of the Bible (and, by extension, the Church, of which he remained a faithful member until the day of his death) is to teach one how to go to Heaven, and not to teach one how the heavens go.

I think there is merit in looking to Scripture and coming away with the generalized understanding that God is responsible for all creation, but certainly there can only be folly in looking to Scripture and expecting to come away with a complete understanding of the methods and means by which anything — planets, plants, humans, whatever — arose. The Book of Genesis communicates important truths, but does so through the context of an origins legend.

Conversely, if one is looking at Scripture in the hope of better knowing the mind of God, or if one is seeking out the road to salvation, or if one is looking to discover what sanctifying grace is behind — and, indeed, enables and makes fruitful — a truly moral life, then religion has a lot to offer, and explains much.

Update: Mark Shea muses on a related topic:

in a universe governed by a supernatural God, it’s not at all odd to suppose that, now and then and for his own purposes, God may choose to fulfill the Harvard law of animal behavior and, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, do whatever the heck he wants.

The main thing that irks materialists is that God appears to have no reverence at all for carefully controlled laboratory conditions. He eats with tax collectors and sinners, not to mention granting miracles to unkempt shepherd kids and French peasants with no standing in the community of those determined not to believe. He has the gall to miraculously heal people at Lourdes and cause the sun to dance before countless thousands and Fatima, but since these documented events are not sufficiently reverential of the rules of the scientific game, they are tossed out by the high priesthood of materialsts.

All this merely means that lot of reality is not subject to scientific examination. Science can (and does) take a look at miraculous claims. But even in the fact of something spectacular (like Peter Smith’s regrown eyes after they were destroyed by silver nitrate solution) all it can do is say, “Yep. The eyes sure are healthy. Don’t know why.” For the “why”, you need to apply to the nuns who asked for Mother Cabrini’s intercession. (By the way, I have a friend who actually had lunch with Fr. Smith.)

Some people, who mysteriously pride themselves for being “rational” reject supernatural explanations out of court, no matter how bleedin’ obvious the miracle is. That’s because they confuse “reason” with pig-headed committment to shallow materialism no matter what. I prefer to actually use my reason for thinking. So when a paranormal claim is shown to be bunk, I have no driving need to believe otherwise. But similarly, when a supernatural claim gives ever indication of being supernatural, I have no driving need to reject it.

Not all claims of the supernatural are claims of the divine. Some of them bear strong earmarks of the demonic. Unlike many moderns, I find nothing a priori ridiculous about that either. The Church’s ancient claim that there are non-corporeal intelligence (angels) and that the some of them have chosen to rebel against God has much to recommend it in both scripture and in human experience. So I see no particular reason to doubt it (beyond the knee-jerk materialism of the present age). I think such agents can have effect in our world and I think the wisest thing to do when you encounter a person of intelligence and good will who claims an encounter with such a being is to take them seriously, just as you would such a person if they claimed to see a plane crash.

The skeptical answer to all such claims is “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” That slogan is, to put it kindly, rubbish. Extraordinary claims require evidence. Period. It is extraordinary to claim that light is both a wave and a particle. But the evidence point to the fact that it behaves that way anyway. Physicists did not have to perform seven Herculean feats to show this. They simply had to show that light behaved like a wave and a particle. In the same way, the evidence for the Marian apparitions at Lourdes don’t have to consist of proofs so incontrovertible that every last person on earth is compelled to accept it. It simply has to be sound enough that it’s bloody hard to explain it any other way.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is simply a psychological justification for saying, “I will refuse to accept anything that challenges my comfortable materialist worldview.” You can do that. But don’t insult my intelligence by calling it “rational”. Rational people follow the evidence where it leads. Pig-headed ideologues ignore inconvenient evidence…

I wonder, O Reader, if perhaps Nicholas falls into the category Mark Shea is describing above? There is, after all, a certain sort of person who confidently asserts that religion has nothing useful to tell us precisely because s/he refuses to regard as useful those things which religion does indeed tell and explain to us.

I remain convinced of the validlty of the theory of evolution in general, but I do think Vox raises an excellent point about the recent discovery that the Amazon molly fish’s asexual reproduction has seemingly not caused the species problems in its 70,000 year history — species that reproduce in this manner “normally” see introduced complex genetic errors that over time that will doom the species.

One thing that is annoying about evolutionists is the way that many of them declare they would be happy to abandon it if it were falsified. But every time a genuine falsification is produced, the theory is promptly respun sans substantive modification in such a manner as to dance around the previous falsification. Does anyone truly believe that a single TENS believer would abandon the faith if Haldane’s proverbial rabbit fossils in the Precambrian were found? There are many different reasons that the Molly fish may not, in fact, falsify the theory. But is there a single evolutionary adherent who will disavow it in the absence of those reasons? I doubt it…because it is first and foremost a matter of faith, not science.

Dr Myers, meanwhile, points out that evolution only requires 30 generations. So, now we’ve got a good falsification model for testing a hypothesis based on the theory. Given the reproductive cycles of rats, we can have conclusive proof or falsification of evolutionary theory within five years by seeing if we can turn rats into cud-chewing herbivores or not.

As I’ve observed before, the question regarding faith is not so much whether we believe as it is what we believe, and certainly many people do place a more or less blind faith in science. Joel recently gave us an example of this with his confident assertion that science had not explained everything “yet” — the implication, of course, being that in due time science might just explain everything for us, absolving us of every need to look to the supernatural/divine. That’s unlikely, of course, but some people do cling rather blindly both to the belief that science is able to provide all/the only explanations we might need, and that the methods of science are adequate to discover all that can be discovered.

Neither assertion is demonstrably true, and in fact both assertions are probably false. But there are more than enough people who blindly believe otherwise. Any time you’re banking part of your worldview on a “yet,” you are a person of some faith. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Where faith — whether in God or in science — goes wrong is when it confuses “yet” with hard, cold, facts.

That is, perhaps humanity is a rarity in the galaxy (and perhaps even the Universe), and perhaps extraterrestrial life is something we will never find — especially not intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Professor Andrew Watson has published his findings ["that humans evolved via a series of four "critical steps" and that the likelihood of all these occurring elsewhere is less than 0.01%."] in the academic journal Astrobiology.

“Complex life may be a rare phenomenon, observers rarer still,” he wrote.

We may have to discover tens of thousands of Earth-like planets before we find one which harbours sophisticated organisms, according to Professor Andrew Watson, from the University of East Anglia.

The reason is that the “habitable lifespan” of an Earth-like planet — estimated at five billion years — will rarely be long enough for complex life to evolve.

“We now believe that we evolved late in the Earth’s habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed,” he says.

“This has implications for our understanding of the likelihood of complex life and intelligence arising on any given planet.”

I never really understood the incredible tendency of some people to automatically assume that extraterrestrial life must exist; frankly, there is nothing to suggest that it does. Life is an amazingly complex thing, and I for one cannot believe that it arose wholly by chance — and if there was any intent behind its arising, then it is perfectly reasonable to believe that life on Earth may be unique in all of creation.

Equally, it might not be — after all, an artist may desire to compose many paintings. But if it’s out there, I very much doubt we’ll ever encounter it, especially when the odds of it being there are so astronomically low.

joel writes in with a comment about this article (or, at least, that is the article I presume he is responding to).

As an atheist, I’ve noticed that, yes, Christianity does come under more attack than other Religions (at least in the U.S.)

There’s a couple reasons for that, though:

1. In the U.S., Christianity is the biggest kid on the block. The biggest kid is always the biggest target.
2. Christianity also likes to throw its weight around in Politics. Intentional or not, its the christian worldview that has the strongest influence on our policies. Its actions in that realm make it a target, because its actions affect us all. Hinduism simply doesn’t have that kind of power.
3. Christianity is, as best I can tell, the only proselytizing religion in the US (that we don’t consider a cult). So, even walking down the street, or at our homes, it can intrude. Again making it a target.

You might argue that #1 and #3 are not fair (I think a case can be made on either side), but #2 is a real issue.

-j

In truth, O Reader, I would not argue as joel indicates. None of his points are particularly unfair, but all of them miss the point…so spectacularly, in some cases, that they seem almost specious.

The Biggest Kid?

To be sure, argument #1 is spurious, and meaningless in light of the other two points that joel makes above. Were we discussing, say, why most computer viruses seem to be targeted at Microsoft Windows, it would be a valid argument — Windows has most of the market share, and so is a natural target for people looking to cause a little chaos; were most viruses targeted at Ubuntu, the amount of chaos caused would be minimal indeed. And virus-makers are looking to cause chaos. Were we discussing the dynamics of the schoolyard (a slightly more apt example, although still not accurate enough to suit our needs in this analysis), however, we would observe that very often it is not the biggest kid who is the “biggest” target (biggest, in this latter sense, taken to mean “most often targeted,” essentially).

One tries, honestly, to limit one’s quantity of jokes about American myopia, but in this case a remark along those lines cannot be avoided. It is true that in the U.S., Christianity is the biggest kid on the block — that is safely beyond dispute. But of course, the world is much bigger than just America, and globally the “biggest kid” is probably Islam (in fact, I seem to recall some trumpeting in the media, recently, about an admission by a Vatican official along these very lines).

So really, if the preferential targeting of Christianity by atheist apologetics has anything to do with the biggest kid on the block, then atheist apologists need to give their heads a shake and realize that Islam is the biggest kid (in terms of raw numbers). Yes, this may not be true in any individual Western country, most of which are derived from a Christian heritage. And perhaps that should be telling — in countries which are predominantly Muslim, one is substantially more at risk of losing one’s life for one’s atheism, after all. Perhaps joel can be forgiven for his myopia

Which is all to say nothing at all about the fact the West, by and large, ticks along on reserves of Catholic/Christian moral capital, and that it is this moral capital in Western culture that enabled an atmosphere of open inquiry — which in turn allowed atheism to flourish — to emerge at all.

And finally, as mentioned before, joel’s first argument is invalidated by his other two arguments. That is not to say that the other two arguments do not capture aspects of what Christians in America (and elsewhere in the world) do; it is to say, however, that Christians are hardly the only ones, and it is to say that Christians do not present a sufficient danger in their attempts to justify the level of opposition that atheists bring against them. Islam is every bit as active, and in many cases more insidious, in attempting to work its way into the political fabric of Western nations — even the US — and the implications of its successes in this regard are much more dire than the imagined evils of an imaginary Christian theocracy.

Religiosity exists outside American borders, and yet pretty much everywhere one goes in the world, one can find atheists who are primarily opposed to Christianity. This is even the case in England, in spite of the fact that English Christianity is rather subdued and not particularly involved in the day-to-day politics of the land (despite the fact that Anglicanism is the state religion of Britain; America has no official state religion). By contrast, Islam is surging in Britain, with no-go areas for non-Muslims, cousin marriage, and arranged/forced marriage of schoolgirls becoming more and more commonplace each year.

Throwing its weight around

Argument #2, joel asserts, is a “real issue.” On the face of it, I don’t see what he’s getting at in regard to Christianity. Having just pointed out that Christianity is the “biggest kid” in the American philosophical playground (and, indeed, the “biggest kid” in terms of population — most Americans are Christians of one variety or another) am I right to assume that he is then complaining that Christianity is too involved in the American political scene?

What a strange concept, O Reader: that a nation where a majority of people are Christian would have a political scene in which Christianity is a concept that appears from time to time. How very unheard of! Then again, perhaps I am being sardonic.

One wonders exactly what joel is suggesting here. Is he implying that only persons of a secular bent should be allowed into the American government? Is he implying, perhaps, that persons elected to government office in America should leave their religious convictions at the door (even though, for many religious people, their religion is the first and foremost consideration in their lives)? Is he say that he personally finds it odd/unacceptable that a religious philosophy held by approximately 80% (maybe a little less) of the American population occasionally appears, in mild ways, in the political discource of an elected, supposedly representative government?

Curious.

Additionally, joel gets a bit intellectually dishonest when he attempts to note that other religions don’t have the kind of power that Christians do. He cites, by way of example, Hinduism. And he’s right in a sense: Hindus don’t really have that much power in the American government. But joel is being myopic again — were we to travel to, say, India, we would observe that Hindus have quite a lot of power in government.

Moreover, Islam is making numerous inroads into the political scene in America, including openly violating the concept of separation of church and state that many Americans, secular and religious alike, uphold and value*.

And while the involvement of Islam in American politics has not yet reached an equivalent level to that of Christianity’s involvement, numerical quantity is not the sole consideration (although I realize that for many atheists, quantity — i.e. empirical measure — is all there is to go on). The quality of the interference has to be examined.

Setting aside obvious straw men (i.e. Pat Buchanan, the legacy of Jerry Falwell, and the Westboro nutters), the average Christian in America is, typically, fairly devoted to his/her family and country; most American Christians love America and what it stands for. They might have their reservations about some things (evolution, the military, capitalism) but they will tend, by and large, to abide by American ideals. If they run for election, almost all of them do so not because they desire to impose their Christian values on the rest of the nation (although in most cases, such an imposition wouldn’t hurt America at all), but because they want to serve their country, the same as most secular politicians would.

And yes, the fact that Christians get elected to political office in America does mean that American politics take on a Christian character of sorts. But that is something not only to be expected — that is something to be praised, in a certain sense, because it confirms that the government is at least somewhat “representative” of the people it governs. There shouldn’t be a dichotomy between the ideals of government representatives and the people they represent. And at any rate, the occasional debate about evolution/intelligent design in schools nonwithstanding, the “quality” of Chrisitian involvement in government is benign; they’re not there to see about imposing a theocracy or rounding up and shooting all the homosexuals.

joel’s intellectual dishonesty, then, is his refusal to consider Islam, or even mention it by way of example, and his attempt to sidestep the issue by instead mentioning Hinduism.

The fact of the matter is, Islam is becoming more and more involved in the political scene in many Western nations, including America, and the tone of the political discourse is beyone merely worrisome. When the Archbishop of Canterbury states, bald-facedly, that sharia is unavoidable in England, when a Canadian government agency apparently has ties to Islamist elements in Canadian society, when sharia banking begins to emerge at even mainstream banks, when incidences of violent rape attacks in communities rise in lockstep with an increase in Islamic immigrants living in the same community, and when honour killings happen in places like Lewisville, and atheists are still wasting their breath decrying the subversive Christian element in American politics, I call shennanigans.

(Indeed, the only active theocracies I can think of in the world today are Islamic, and Muslim nations are about the only places in the world I can think of where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death.)

Were atheists even remotely serious about standing up in opposition to the threat that religion poses in their view, they would be all over Islam like a dirt on a mud wrestler. That they are not, with the occasional exception of Christopher Hitchens (not exactly the best or most authorative voice out there) suggests that they are afflicted with either monumental ignorance or willful blindness (or else that they are cowards hiding in fear of a fatwa).

Who proselytizes?

In argument #3, the full magnitude of joel’s intellectual dishonesty is made its most apparent. That is not to deny that Christians do not engage in evangelism. But then, so do atheists. So do Mormons. So do Jehovah’s Witnesseses. joel makes exemption for religions that could be considered “cults,” which is an interesting bit of sleight-of-hand, given that I think the most active proselytizers are said “cults” (i.e. Mormons, Jehovahs, and the like) as opposed to mainstream Christian denominations. joel hasn’t quite said “Excluding Republicans, Democrats are the most hawkish of Americans,” but he has come close to doing so, and his statement is similarly misleading because of it.

And in fact, his statement is false (tautology is a wonderful thing). joel observes that, as far as he can tell, Christianity is “the only proselytizing religion in the US” that isn’t considered a cult. That would probably come as more than a bit of a surprise to the Muslims of America, many of whom engage in far more aggressive proselytism than their Christian counterparts. One cannot fail to note, for example, that Islam is the fastest growing religion among American prisoners; it would be the height of reckless ignorance to assume that similar conversion trends did not exist in the non-incarcerated portion of the American population. Islam is also the fastest-growing religion in Europe.

Within my own lifetime, assuming trends do not shift dramatically, France will become a nation in which Islam is the religion of a majority of the population. joel objects to Christianity being a philosophy present in American politics, because within that governmental realm “its actions affect us all.” Myopic as ever, joel seems to spare no thought at all for how we all may be affected by the prospect of nuclear power France slowly and inexorably becoming the Islamic Republic of France.

Now, perhaps the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have it exactly right — maybe Christianity is the threat after all. If so, I don’t see it. Maybe I’m just blinded by my own stake in the Christian faith. Somehow, though, I very much doubt it. Taking even one example, were I an avant-garde artist presenting my “Piss Kaaba Key” in a public forum, I’d be scared witless for fear of getting the Theo van Gogh treatment. Were I instead the artist presenting “Piss Christ,” I would have no analogous fear, except perhaps the fear that people would exercise in droves their right to not attend my art show.

Any reasonable, rational person should be able to discern where the real problem is to be found. That so many supposed rationalists choose instead to focus on a non-problem is curious, and also telling.

* even I value the concept for its original intent, which was to forbid the state from explicitly establishing any one church as “the official” church of the state (i.e. Anglicanism in Britain). I don’t value the concept for the ways it has been used to muzzle religious expression, however.

…although the idea that an inbound meteorite might have catalyzed the eventual “dominance” of so-called “left-handed” amino acids (a pre-requisite for the evolution of life on Earth) is, if nothing else, interesting.

I could do without the metaphysical leap at the end of the article, though:

“This work is related to the probability that there is life somewhere else,” said Breslow. “Everything that is going on on Earth occurred because the meteorites happened to land here. But they are obviously landing in other places. If there is another planet that has the water and all of the things that are needed for life, you should be able to get the same process rolling.”

I suppose its entirely possible that meteor impacts had the effect that Ronald Breslow (Ph.D., Columbia University) and his team is proposing, and if so it is certainly a most interesting path by which some of the necessary pre-conditions for the emergence of life on Earth were set up. Of course, if it did happen that way, it doesn’t really tell us all that much about the probability of life anywhere else in the galaxy, or the Universe (I’ve said before that in articles such as this, the discussion tends to jump all too quickly to the issue of alien life) — the meteor and the amino acids it brought with it would still have had to land on a planet that had all the other pre-requisites for life already in place (i.e. a certain climate, water, ample light but controlled exposure to harsher radiation spectra, etc.). For all we know there is a scarcity of planets on which such conditions arose (we also lack any assurance that such conditions would persist; for all we know, there may be a very tiny window in a planet’s evolutionary cycle in which the potential for the emergence of life exists).

But as I said, the article ends with Breslow making a bit of a metaphysical leap in claiming that the meteor just “happened to land here.” That’s certainly one interpretation, but an equally valid interpretation would be to observe the somewhat poetic metaphor that exists in the meteor “touching” down on Earth, kindling the first necessary reactions that brought about life on this world (think: finger of God). Either way, it’s a metaphysical leap, not a scientific statement, and seems out of place in the article as a whole.

Jonah comments on a phenomenon that is getting a bit on the old side by now — the “Darwin Fish“. You know, that “clever” little modification of the classic “Jesus Fish” that you see tacked onto the bumpers of some cars, that has taken the classic fish shape and added legs to it, with either “Darwin” or “Evolve” replacing the traditional texts one finds printed in the “Jesus Fish”?

It’s one of those things that I think was meant, by whoever came up with it, to be a witty little statement against religious faith. Of course, instead of being witty, it typically comes off as petty, especially when paired (as Jonah notes that it so often is) with some sort of bumper sticker preaching “tolerance.”

Not that one ever expects truly rational thinking from secular folk. It’s nice to find, when it happens, though. But the “Darwin Fish” isn’t an example thereof.

Update: as a bonus, Michael Coren discusses that other great secular bigotry, tolerance, frameworking the discussion in the story of Magdi Allam, the Italian journalist welcomed this Easter into the Church by none other than Pope Benedict XVI himself. Allam’s conversion from Islam has been treated as controversial in the media, and has been condemned as a move calculated to inflame Christian/Muslim tensions.

Aref Ali Nayed, one of a group of 200 Muslim scholars who claim to be intent on establishing a new, open relationship with Christianity, condemned the Pope’s behaviour as “a triumphalist tool for scoring points.” The group in question tends to say very little about, for example, suicide bombings, forced conversion of Christians to Islam in Sudan or Turkey’s closing of a Catholic seminary. But is extremely upset that the Pope has behaved as, well, the Pope.

It’s a spurious, disingenuous critique. Theological dialogue may have been a Muslim tendency 800 years ago but nobody seriously believes that religious pluralism is a regarded concept in contemporary Islam. The denial and double-talk is sickening. Allam had been under police protection long before his conversion because of his staunch critique of violent Islamic fundamentalism. Death threats have increased since his embrace of Christianity and all that allegedly moderate Muslims are saying is that if there is going to be a conversion, for goodness sake keep it quiet.

But why? This is not about changing a shirt but transforming a life. According to Christian belief, Magdi Allam has begun a journey that will lead to eternal life. He has found not interesting opinion but absolute truth. Jesus didn’t say “I may be” but “I am” The Way. The only way. The Catholic Church is far more accepting than many Protestants in the way it views the salvational possibilities of non-Catholic goodness; but it still teaches that the only guaranteed way of meeting God is through the Sacramental structure of a church founded by Christ.

This notion of exclusive truth, however, is not just a problem for Muslims but for secularists as well, what with their fetish for ostensible tolerance. Modern liberalism has not merely abandoned certain commandments but replaced those it has expunged with a set of its own. The most important of which is toleration. I tolerate therefore I am. It’s nonsense of course, in that it is self-contradictory by nature — the tolerant cannot tolerate intolerance and are thus no longer tolerant — but it’s also a grand, great lie. Human rights commissions, student unions and leftist activists remind us every day of the authentic meaning of genuine intolerance.

Yet it still plays to the core of secular thinking. The standard argument, taught in universities and passively accepted in popular dialogue, is that because religion believes that it has the truth it is not broad-minded and broad-mindedness is an indication of sophistication and urbanity.

Magdi Allam said yes this Easter. Yes to a truth and no to its rivals. No to Islam, no to atheism. Which has made many Muslims and just as many of their relativist, secular allies extremely angry. An Easter present slightly more important than a chocolate egg or even a teaching course on why nothing really matters.

Chesterton defined bigotry as the inability to form a rational conception of an alternative to a proposition. To be fair, that definition allows the label of “bigot” to be applied to many a believer…but it can also be applied to many, many more on the secular/atheist side of the equation; only genuine agnostics could be considered exempt.

As a person of faith and a committed Catholic, I can nevertheless admit that I may be incorrect in my faith. I nevertheless choose to practice it, in the expectation that I am not wrong…but, certainly, I might just be. I can, to wit, conceive the alternative to the proposition I make by saying that I am a believer, a person of faith.

I’ve yet to met a self-declared atheist who can admit an ability to understand that s/he might likewise be incorrect. At best, one can expect to be told that is irrelevant and also a poor evangelical tool. Of course, the initial question — that is, the ability to rationally conveive the alternative to the atheistic proposition — did not concern Pascal’s musings at all, and the rejection itself (seen, for example, in the Rational Response Squad’s FAQ section) is evidence of the bigotry of the atheist in question.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers! If you enjoyed this article, you may also be interested in some more recent discussions I am having with a pair of atheists named Joel and Sam!

The investigators and “judges” of the human rights commissions come from many professions, hardly any of which have anything to do with the field of human rights law. There are nurses and aldermen, divorce lawyers and air force officers. And that’s good for them — those are all valuable jobs that serve a purpose in society (I make exception here for divorce lawyers).

In apologetics circles, there’s a little charge that I sometimes level at various atheistic commentators to whom I’m responding. Indeed, I’ve lambasted my cousin with it as well. It’s a serious charge in a debate — abuse of academic authority. It’s all well and good that, for example, a geologist thinks that the theory of evolution disproves the notion of God…but geology and biology are different categories of study, and being a highly skilled geologist does not mean that one is also a highly skilled biologist. Moreover, neither geology nor biology are theological disciplines, and so cannot and (ostensibly) do not concern themselves with the existence/non-existence of the divine. And no amount of academic credentials in any discipline means that one should be listened to (without an appropriate quantity of salt grains) when one is talking about matters outside the realm of one’s credentials.

And yet, that very mentality would seem to pervade the human rights commissions and the people who staff them. It would be absurd to suggest that an air force pilot or a nurse be allowed to preside over a criminal trial in the role of judge, but evidently the same high standards (as regards competent, qualified persons filling important roles affecting the well-being and freedoms of others) are not applied to the HRCs.

It’s like every time someone digs this hole a bit deeper, the whole mess gets scarier by orders of magnitude.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

But in our secularism-addled world, the bloody obvious has become both foreign and, for many, outright controversial.

Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday defended the Vatican�s right to speak out on bioethics, including its opposition to artificial procreation methods and embryonic stem cell research.

He also dismissed criticism that the Roman Catholic Church blocks scientific progress.

“Church teaching certainly cannot and must not weigh in on every novelty of science, but it has the task to reiterate the great values which are on the line and to propose to faithful and all men of good will ethical-moral principles and direction for new, important questions,” Benedict said.

Benedict brushed off those who criticize the church “as if it were an obstacle to science and to humanity�s true progress.”

The pope singled out as “new problems” the freezing of embryos, selecting which embryos should be implanted after testing them for defects, research on embryonic stem cells and attempts at human cloning.

He decried them as proof that “the barrier protecting human dignity has been broken.”

Science and religion can be fully harmonized; there are no fundamentally irreconcilable issues between the two. That’s not to say that the two won’t sometimes come into conflict, but it is to say that the true issue is not that science and religion come into conflict, but where they come into conflict.

evolution vs. creation? That’s not an issue — the theory of evolution and the belief that God created all things are fully compatible with each other, in the same way that one can simultaneously acknowledge both the carpenter and the hammer and nails. The business of Religion is not to tell us, as Galileo so nicely put it, “how the heavens go”, but instead to tell us how to get to Heaven. And the business of science is the reciprocal of that, to tell us how the heavens go. More importantly, the business of heaven is not to serve as the defining basis for moral standards, except through the framework of natural law.

The problem — the conflict, if the Reader will permit the use of such a clunky term — arises when scientific study strays into fields that flirt with, or jump headlong into, immoral practices. Stem cell research is the current example, with its tension between embryonic and adult stem cells. Obviously, embryonic stem cells are theoretically more versatile and useful, but they can only be obtained by processes which are destructive to fertilized embryos. The Chuch’s position (which, interestingly, is defensible solely on the principles of biology) is that embryos are human beings, given that they are living organisms of the species homo sapiens, and are genetically distinct from either parent (”parent” here taken to mean the donors who contributed sperm and egg to the researchers).

It is the Church’s contention, then, that embryos, despite the absence of a recognizable human figure, are already fully human, and thus deserving of full human dignity…which includes the right to not be, in essence, cannibalized for parts against their will.

One would think that it would be obvious that the above issue is not a scientific one, but a moral one, and yet for many people the fog of secularism has rendered those two categories indistinguishable from one another. That’s a pity…and it’s why, I think, the Pope has to trouble himself to say something which, only a few years ago, would have been a bloody obvious thing.

Dr. Helen links to, and reviews in brief, a very interesting-sounding book:

I spent part of the day reading Vox Day’s new book, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. You might know Vox Day from his blog and interesting take on feminist issues — he always has something provocative to add to that particular conversation and his book proves to be just as stimulating in regards to religion and faith. The Irrational Atheistis described as follows (from the inside cover):

The Irrational Atheist is not a theological work nor is it a conventional religious defense of faith. It contains no arguments for the existence of God and the supernatural, nor is it concerned with evolution, creationism, the age of Earth, or intelligent design. This book contains no arguments from Scripture. In attacking the arguments, assertions, and conclusions of the New Atheists, Vox Day’s only weapons are the secular tools of reason, logic and historically documented, independently verifiable fact. The Irrational Atheist is not a book about God, but about those who seek to replace Him….

Day takes on the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens and seeks to demonstrate that they and other “New Atheists” are no champions of reason.

Sounds like I might just have to pick this book up. In particular, I’m left tantalized by the small sample Dr. Helen provides of Vox Day’s analysis:

For example, Day discusses one argument made by Harris where Harris questions the correlation between Christian conservatism and social health:

If there was a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and social health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t. Of the 25 cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in “blue” [Democrat] states and 38% are in “red” [Republican] states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the US are in the pious state of Texas.

Interestingly, though, Day found that “red-state” crime is primarily committed by “blue counties” within those states and has a nice chart to show the stats on this. It seems that Harris was looking at states such as Texas that had more crime and called the states “red” but conveniently omitted the part where the counties where the crimes were committed tended to be “blue.”

Other myth busters include the notion that religion causes the majority of war as some atheists profess, Day provides evidence to the contrary–he found that more than 93% of all the wars in human history had no relation to Religion. In the twentieth century, in fact, he states that atheistic regimes killed three times more people in peacetime than those killed in all the wars and individual crimes combined.

I admit I’ve never been particularly troubled by the atheistic assertion that the falsity of religion can be demonstrated in part by the way that more secular nations seem to have lower crime rates than more religious nations do. As has been articulated many times (most recently, and eloquently, by Mark Shea), the validity of the teachings of the Church are in no way dependent on the actions of members of the Church. But neither have I had the time to really delve into the finer points of the statement, and it’s nice to see that Day has taken the time.

In the end, the numbers don’t really surprise all that much, do they? It turns out that the religious are, in fact, less to blame.

And in a more general sense, the notion that the crime rate is lower in more ardently secular nations does necessarily imply that the people of those nations are more moral than in nations where religion still has some value, and that is the more important distinction. That is to say: the murder rates in Sweden and Norway might be lower than in the U.S. or the Phillipenes, but where do the abortion rates sit? The rates of property crime might also be lower, but what about the rates of marital infidelity and/or pre-marital sex and serial monogamy?

In the end, legality is a less important metric than morality, because the laws of most free nations are designed (in theory) to enforce a minimum standard…but of course, there is more to being a moral person than just following the laws of the land to the letter, because laws are a human construct and subject to change at the will of humanity. Morality is external to human willfulness and weakness. How, I wonder, do all these secular nations measure up by that standard?

Something for my misguided atheistic readers to consider.

During the year just past, much attention was paid to a spate of atheist tracts, notably Sam Harris‘ Letter to a Christian Nation, Christopher Hitchens‘ God Is Not Great, and Richard Dawkins‘ The God