20 Christian academics speaking about God

[Video Link] Dan Colman of Open Culture writes:

This summer, Jonathan Pararajasingham created 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God and then Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God. If you’re counting, that makes 100. Right alongside these twin videos came 20 Christian Academics Speaking About God, a montage featuring some respected figures (save Dinesh D’Souza) trying to square religious beliefs with their scientific work.
You could perhaps add Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens to this list, two professors who teach at a Christian liberal arts college in Boston. Earlier this week, Giberson and Stephens published The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age and an accompanying op-ed in The New York Times called The Evangelical Rejection of Reason. And it all points to a tension within America’s religious community — the one side that is “intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking” (like some of the folks shown above) and the other side that is “literalistic, overconfident and reactionary” and often hostile to basic science. Unfortunately, the authors argue, this backward-looking view has become the mainstream within evangelical circles, and it does a struggling nation no favors.

20 Christian Academics Speaking About God

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

There’s no place for reason in religion. I’m sure these are nice people, except D’souza indeed, but they can’t win this fight.
- Shazbot
  
  As a Quaker I disagree wholeheartedly.
  - http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski
    
    Because there’s so many Quakers.
- zebbart
  
  Most religious thinkers and writers throughout history have found lots of room for reason in their religions. Most have insisted on adherence to reason and rejection of pure fideism or mysticism. Pope Benedict caused a lot of trouble by quoting a Medieval debate between a Muslim and a Christian on this very point. As Benedict said, “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regensburg_lecture
  - http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski
    
    Religious thinkers… the Pope… Facepalm.jpg
- Bryan McMillan
  
  Likewise, as a deist, I find your absolutes rather limited.
  - http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski
    
    No, I have an open mind, so prove me wrong. Show me your deist god who once existed but doesn’t exist anymore,
    conveniently
    leaving no trace. Let’s call him Qwijibo.
    - Ito Kagehisa
      
      @twitter-112764200:disqus: We cannot do that, because God exists. Go look in a mirror, and see one of the many face(t)s of God, my friend. Call him Qwijibo if you like; she won’t mind.
      
      You say you have an open mind? Disprove for me pantheism. If God is (by definition) the greatest thing that exists or can exist, and that which can encompass another thing cannot be less than that which is encompassed (again, by definition) then God must be the entirety of all things. There is no thing greater than that which is all.
      - Adam Peller
        
        The question then becomes why resort to labeling “everything” as “god”? Why resort to a word which is steeped in meaning for millions as a conscious entity with a mind and will?
        
        If you are going to deprive the word God of anything meaningful by making it mean everything than you are in my opinion damn close to an atheist, asserting God is everything is ascribing awe to the entirety of existence; a position not too far from many atheistic scientists.
        
        And if God is everything where does belief enter in to the equation, how would one go about believing or disbelieving in everything? It seems to me that many people hold on to the idea of religiosity in semantics only, as they have cast out the superstitious content and replaced it with philosophically meaningless/vague/abstracted content.
http://angrychad.blogspot.com/ AngryChad

Semantics. At a certain point they all abandon science.
rscheckel

I don’t know if I’d want to read their book or not, but I’m curious by which methodology Giberson and Stephens arrived at this generalization:

“…this backward-looking view has become
the mainstream within evangelical circles…”

Are the backward-lookers obnoxious and vocal? Certainly. Are they “the mainstream”? My experience says otherwise.

Now, I’m not defending obnoxious, vocal, unthinking, evangelicals by questioning the methodology; I know they exist and I agree that their brand of propaganda “does a struggling nation no favors”. Further, I fully recognize the sway they hold on the voice of modern Christianity and faith-based discourse.

I just wonder if it serves their purpose to also brand themselves as “the mainstream” (and/or to allow themselves to be branded as such), thereby further discouraging the calm, quiet, rational Christians from speaking up. I’ll admit it; I’m tired of being grouped in with the Phelpses, the D’Souzas, and any far-right/religous-right tea bagger who chooses to co-opt my faith for their agenda.
- http://twitter.com/perizade Perizade
  
  The Phelpses and D’Souzas are the extreme of the extreme. However, whenever I go into a Christian bookstore, it’s hard to find media that doesn’t lean at least somewhat to the right. It’s not all Chic Tracts, but I’m hard pressed to find something, anything, that is even neutral. Always some sort of conservative agenda leaks through. The only exception I can think of are (ironically) Catholic bookstores and the online store Beulahenterprises.com.
  - zebbart
    
    I think the reason the books in Christian book stores leans to the right is that open-minded and educated Christians do not shop at Christian bookstores very much. We shop at regular book stores or online, just like other regular people.
    - kbryan44
      
      Christian Bookstores tend to be neither. Not “Christian” in a general sense, more “20th Century Conservative Evangelical American Christian.” Good luck finding anything by Aquinas, Augustine, Merton, or any other Catholic thinker. Or books by anyone outside of the American Evangelical tradition for that matter. re Bookstore: they often have more music, greeting cards, posters, inspirational wall hangings, and other tchotchkes than books. If I’m going a brick and mortar store, I’d much rather go to a good local book shop or a B&N.
    - http://twitter.com/perizade Perizade
      
      Honestly, I would patronize them more if they had stuff I was willing to buy. I like small bookstores and small businesses in general, even if they are more expensive. Christian bookstores, on the whole, don’t seem very interested in marketing themselves to people like me, even though I’m a fool who is easily parted with my money.
Rotwang

Show me this “god” person. I’d like to have a few words with him about a dead Chinese 2-year old.
strougly

“Christ, what an asshole”
http://twitter.com/perizade Perizade

I’m not really interested in whether or not god exists, whether you can believe in God and science, and other tired, neverending topics. I’m more interested in how literalism and extreme conservatism have become so dominant and politically powerful. I’m interested in how dissent has become intolerable to so many religious stars (yes, mere celebrities) in the US and how voting right has become a mandate within the evangelical community.
- rscheckel
  
  Those are, indeed, meaningful lines of inquiry.
- hug h
  
  I agree- the rise of literalism and extreme political conservatism are very disturbing yet in some ways quite understandable. There is always a natural appeal to dogmatic, absolutist, hierarchical groups/systems of thought as they allow refuge in certainty and foster a sense of belonging. This appeal is accentuated when the pace of change (cultural, technological, economic etc.) accelerates and is in turn exploited and manipulated by media, politicians and religious leaders to great financial and political gain. (e.g.- FOX, DeLay, Robertson)
  I have seen several work colleagues and a family member go completely off of the deep end of the far right in the last ten years.
  
  “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” Voltaire
bbonyx

Sorry, but as far as I’m concerned, all of you zealots fucked yourselves irreversibly with Galileo.

/Yes, I’m lumping all of you in together, I don’t care. No matter what your ethos, they have all shown the “We believe we’re infallibly correct and will not admit otherwise, even when we’re shown it and even when we know it ourselves” attitude at some point. No different today.
- pablohoney
  
  Wait, but didn’t God create Galileo? I’m confused…
  
  Edit: guess it was a production error with the manufacturer.
- zebbart
  
  It’s possible that all religious people are irrational or dishonest. But the vast amount of evidence to the contrary, in the form of thousands of theistic philosophers, scientists, and humanitarians who have done good work and demonstrated the appearance of intelligence, rigor, and good faith, suggests otherwise. I am inclined to think that anyone who claims all religious people are irrational or dishonest is in fact irrational or dishonest himself. The theists might be wrong, but saying any more than that really raises questions about your own epistemic and rhetorical standards.
  - bbonyx
    
    I was referring solely to scientific pursuits. I’m aware there are many “good” and honest people who are Christians. But ultimately if you believe in superstition as an underlyer to tangible fact (which you must do if you believe in God… in the loosest Christian terms) then I’d prefer to not have you weighing in on science as there is a tendency, when a seemingly insurmountable unknown is reached, to eventually throw ones hands up and say “we don’t know, we defer to ‘The Maker’” or even outright refute tangible proof if it impedes on the theistic predisposition.
    
    Keep in mind, we had men on the moon over 30 years prior to the Church finally conceding its wrongdoing toward Mr. Galilei and it wasn’t until 1758 that they admitted to the Heliocentric model of the solar system in the face of a significant amount (over 100 years) of scientific proof . That’s irrational obstinate behavior rivaling that of petulant children. And this from people who lead a significant number of others.
    - rscheckel
      
      But there’s a flaw in your thinking: Just because previous deists have gotten things wrong, admittedly laughably or horribly wrong, doesn’t mean *EVERY* deist will *ALWAYS* get *EVERYTHING* wrong. The assertion that the behavior of past beings guarantees the same (or similar) behavior of similar future beings is wrong. If that were true, scientists would still think the sun was orbiting a flat earth and that any metal could be turned to gold.
      - bbonyx
        
        Valid point, r. ;)
        But it has been my experience that those who are are theistic-centric tend to stop questioning and accept what they have been indoctrinated with, or even rail against others who question anything that upsets their comfort zone. This is generally why scientists are not “believers”.
- matlockexpressway
  
  “Yes, I’m lumping all of you in together…”
  
  Fallacy of composition + blaming people for something that happened 400 years before they were born = a real sound argument.
  
  If only those damned heretics hadn’t burned my plans for a functional time machine, we’d have this cased.
CSBD

So they found twenty people who are going to try and persuade me that their made up idea is real.

I really hate that their fantasy is only “real” because of the large number of its “believers” not by any valid metric.

Someone mentioned a “fight” there is no fight/debate when faith* is involved.

* “Faith is believing in something you know ain’t so”- Mark Twain
- rscheckel
  
  You should watch the video. It’s totally not about 20 people trying to persuade you of anything. It’s very much from the skeptical/non-Christian perspective and literally highlights the words these 20 Christian Academics use to justify gaps in their thinking.
- helleman
  
  Faith is not believing in the unbelievable. Faith is believing in something that is unknowable.
VerySincerely

Hooray for short clips provided with no context of another group of other people saying things we (the smug, smarter, better, more reasonable) don’t agree with.

Consider, however, that a ten minute mashup of atheists saying seemingly silly things would seem just as dismaying, and a religious audience would be filled with the same sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

But here’s an idea. Instead of demonetization of the other, whomever the other happens to be (gay, Muslim, PC users, Christian academics), wouldn’t we be better off seeking to understand rather than to hold up caricatures for our own smug gratification?
- Rose
  
  I think you mean demonizing.
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  I thought the people being interviewed were intelligent and reasonable. Didn’t you?
  - VerySincerely
    
    I think the people being interviewed are intelligent and reasonable, but I also think the point of this clip was to catch them admitting that they are, when it comes down to it, not really very reasonable. John Lennox, for example, has had some great moments in his discussions with Dawkins, but you certainly wouldn’t get that from his 15 second appearance here. Same for most of the others, which, you may have noticed, is punctuated by the text that pops up at the moment of climax (“Christian smart guy admits he’s totally unreasonble!”). If the point of this clip is to show academic Christians speaking reasonably, this is an odd clip to post.
jsd

I can’t find it in me to actively hate or become angry with seemingly honest people wrapping their minds around the concept of god, the laws of nature, and how the two may or may not relate to each other. These are smart people making leaps in reason, but they seem to be goodhearted, earnest, friendly, and especially concerned with the nature of their own existence.

I’m an atheist, but I would genuinely enjoy a conversation with many of the academics in the video. To dismiss them, their worldview, and whatever their personal experiences are out of hand, because we somehow find their belief in god abhorrent, is disingenuous and fruitless.

These are good people who believe in science, but also have a very strong faith in something that I personally do not think exists. There is nothing wrong with this. These people, their beliefs aside, are our allies against the marauding, arrogant, and frankly dangerous strands of evangelism sweeping the country today.
- GIFtheory
  
  I’m a Christian (Catholic) academic in RL, and it’s always heartening to see people displaying a modicum of reason in matters of faith, whether they consider themselves theists, atheists, agnostics, or pastafarians. I have no time, however, for irrational people, whatever their beliefs may be. Which is why I wasn’t going to post to this thread, until I saw your post. I’d write more… but science beckons!
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  Well said, JSD!
Graysmith

I feel like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest when I think about the fact that the vast majority of this planet’s population believes in some sort of god.

“I must be crazy to be in a loony bin like this.”
Chris Lee

The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking. – Robert Anton Wilson
thereverend

As a Christ-following, seminary educated “happy mutant”, I feel keenly the tension highlighted by this video.

Central to my faith is the idea that by following Jesus, I (like him) commit myself to humilty, genuine love and presence, and both speech and silence in service of the truth.

This profoundly opposed the religious mainstream of Christ’s Roman-era Palestine.
It also profoundly opposes both the smug, judgmental, self assured tones of today’s fundamentalist right, and the arrogance, and “chronological snobbery” that characterizes many of the naturalists I’ve encountered.

The human experience is rich and diverse. It is as repellant to dismiss outright the deep beliefs of those who hold faith, as it is for us to foist that faith uninvited upon another.

I appreciate Mark’s sharing of the video. Though I differ in opinion from many of the academics shown, we need to discuss with humility and compassion how to maintain truly “Christlike” dialogue in service of robust inquiry, personal connection, and vibrant shared community.
Seth Ervin

It is easier to dismiss something than to take the time to
actually consider the possibilities of what lies within a person’s statement,
within a person’s viewpoint. A quick negative comment ends any hope of
discussion. I find it incredibly
disturbing that people will not look another human being in the eye to discuss
anything significant. Instead we talk
about the shit that pours out of television screens night after night, the
needless minutia of our pathetic lives.
These are ultimately easier things to talk about. They are cheaper subjects to discuss, they don’t rob us of our
false sense of security. They don’t mess
with our bubble world.

I believe our lives and
our existence are supposed to mean something, and that we are meant to be
forces of good in this world. I would
say that these men who are limited (because they are men) believe the same
thing. What is wrong with that? Why is that so hard to understand or
empathize with?

I believe in God. I
believe that there is good in the world, and that we can be a part of that
good. I don’t think that there is
anything wrong with that. You can
disagree with my viewpoint, but regardless you shouldn’t cast me aside out of
the sheer fact that we are both human beings.
Surely that has to count for something.
Guest

Don’t they have anything better to do?
Gtrjames

I love Boing Boing. It’s been one of my favorite blogs on the net for years, but I don’t get the anti religious slant to many of its blog entries. Regardless, I still like you Boing Boing, and I will continue to read your blog, religiously.

For those who are wise enough to listen to both sides of the “Belief in God defies Reason/Logic” debate, I would encourage to take note of these academics (who yes are Christian):

http://bit.ly/ntsoOz – Greg Bahnsen
http://bit.ly/PUUMJ – Tim Keller
- zebbart
  
  That is a very unorthodox use of the word “orthodox” when applied to Christian faith.
sgtdoom

The Lord responds:

Who allowed these geeks to speak for me? (Resounding thunder in background….)
Mujokan

“All world views are faith claims.”

Meaningless statement.
- Gtrjames
  
  Meaningless? More like irrelevant to the issue at hand. I amended my original post. Thanks for the insight.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JG5AYMZ2NLPAERVKIS2SCIZDPQ Nothing Much

Look at how the believers turn evil into a comic book character. If evil is a comic book character it’s not possible to deal with it. It will always be there and it’s not your capability or your direct responsibility to deal with it. What is evil? At it’s base it’s selfishness without bounds, or bounds so far from reality that there is a lack of negative feedback to keep it from growing out of bounds. We were made selfish and sharing by evolution. Everyone sits on a spectrum and are driven to various extremes. THAT can be dealt with. Something can be done about that. But if you invoke a god or a devil to drive people to do horrible things … well, there’s nothing to do about that. Religion keeps humanity’s eyes shut to the true nature of evil at all our peril.
scionofgrace

…the one side that is “intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking” (like some of the folks shown above) and the other side that is “literalistic, overconfident and reactionary” and often hostile to basic science.

There are more than two sides. Always.
l337n00b

We can go on with pot calling the kettle black all day. The standard counter these days to “there is not god” is to say that the atheist must be angry, intolerant and dismissive of faith just the same as the standard counter to “there is a god” is to say the non-atheist (for lack of a better universal term) is unthinking or foolish. But worst of all are the arrogant snobs who say that everyone on both sides are equally zealous.

The scientific method is the most significant advancement we have ever come across for making useful conclusions about the world. If we want to find the answer to a question about the world, we should apply it. We should account for experimental error (including that in our own senses and cognitive biases).

We should imagine how the universe would be different with and without a God and see which hypothesis is more likely to be correct. We’ll find that there is no God with this method.If you’ve had a personal experience of God, bear in mind that other people have had personal experiences with the supernatural all throughout history and every time these experiences have been tested there has been a more plausible non-supernatural explanation. At this point, if you have a strong personal experience of God or of a supernatural phenomenon, the most reasonable guess without further evidence is that you are wrong and there is a perfectly good explanation that you are not aware of.
If you do not think that this is how we tell whether something does or does not exist, then we have a more fundamental disagreement about the universe than whether or not there is a God. Also, you *are* in fact expressing an anti-science point of view. The fact that the vast majority of people (maybe everyone), and even the vast majority of famous scientists (maybe all of them), regularly use an non-scientific approach to all sorts of things in their personal life doesn’t make those things suddenly science.
- rscheckel
  
  “We should imagine how the universe would be different with and without a
  God and see which hypothesis is more likely to be correct.”
  
  That’s not how scientific inquiry works. You can’t propose your hypotheses, “imagine” outcomes, and call it science. You must test for proofs in ways nearly designed to disprove them. You must triangulate and replicate. You can’t just think about your own observations and draw conclusions.
  
  Honestly, if deists want to make and headway on the science/faith issue, they should be exploring ways to measure the presence of a higher power instead of using the old, “well you can’t NOT prove either” approach.
  - l337n00b
    
    To be clear, I used to word “imagine” to talk about deciding which tests we should do to figure out whether there is a God or not. The tests have to done empirically, of course.
    
    I am not convinced there is no God because of my own observations. I am convinced there is no God because people have actually done studies on many of the things that should be true if there is a God and found that they are not true. People have been presenting arguments to show there is a God (of one sort or another) for thousands of years and all arguments have proven flawed. I think the evidence at this point is quite sufficiently in favour of the belief that there is no God.
    - rscheckel
      
      I don’t know how to navigate those broad general statements in a discussion format like this but I do know that we don’t know everything about our universe. Heck, we didn’t even know for certain that there were neutrinos until post-WWII. What with the new forays in our understanding of the quanta, who’s to say what the future holds for our understandings of things as of yet only speculated about?
      
      Now, I’m not proposing that God and neutrinos are related in some way. I’m just saying that, while we know a lot and we should consider that knowledge perhaps our most significant accomplishment, we continue to discover new things about how our universe works. So, yes, people have presented many a flawed argument for God, but that may be more a function of our limited understandings and our biases (particularly among the uneducated, unthinking, and fearful) than conclusive proof for the absence of a supreme being.
      
      Further, respected scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson often talk about how we humans place anthropomorphic limitations on how we think about extraterrestrial life. I carry that all-to-valid argument perhaps a bit far and posit that, if there truly is a being that is outside of and beyond human existence, then the ways it operates and interacts with this existence may yet be beyond our capability to truly measure or fully understand… even at this advanced stage of human evolution.
selfsimilar

Anyone who professes knowledge of the the unknowable is expressing faith. And the lack of an acceptable proof of God is not proof that there is no God. Thereby, in my mind, both theists and atheists espouse faith.

Faith in small doses is requisite: we cannot know the future but in probabilities. So faith is not a dirty word. But when religious or anti-religious faith is set against science or peaceful co-existence… that chaps my hide.

I’m always glad to hear reasonable and intelligent people discuss their faith though this does have a whiff of “Gotcha!” and atheist agenda making. But in general the discussants recognize the logical contradiction, even if their defenses of said contradictions are far from bullet-proof.
- Mujokan
  
  “Anyone who professes knowledge of the the unknowable is expressing faith.”
  
  So faith is another world for making things up. Nothing true can be said about the unknowable.
  
  “Faith in small doses is requisite: we cannot know the future but in probabilities.”
  
  Basing knowledge on probability does not require knowledge of the unknowable, which is by definition impossible. Faith as you define it is not required for knowledge.
  - selfsimilar
    
    There’s the proximally unknowable and the ultimately unknowable, both of which require faith to navigate. I do not know that I’ll still have a bicycle tomorrow, but I believe I will, since I locked it up. However I won’t know until tomorrow and I have faith that my lock will hold. Knowledge as you define it is a “fact” and useful only as a tool for creating the little leaps of faith we constantly make, from the assumptions about how others will react based on models we have made in our head, to every theory and law of science.
    
    The ultimately unknowable things – like the existence of God – require faith to believe one way or another. To say there is or isn’t is in your words “making things up”. But agreeing to what is ultimately unknowable and what is only proximally unknowable is difficult. Science has done an amazing job of expanding the realm of the proximally unknowable until there are only a few ultimately unknowables left.
http://twitter.com/Mystery_Donut Mystery Donut

Tough to respect a ‘scientist’ that doesn’t believe in evolution. And you hit me with that a few minutes in.
http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the only true god, and if you say otherwise you’ll be smothered in Pasta Sauce.
zombienietzsche

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and
cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that
‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” – Isaac Asimov

Science = Methodological Naturalism not Methodological Supernaturalism

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god
than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible
gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” – Stephen F. Roberts
http://twitter.com/perizade Perizade

I’m still more interested in how the evangelical community became so conservative in the 20 and 21st centuries. They didn’t start out that way. In the beginning, conservatives used to look at them with horror the way Eric Cartman would a hippie drum circle forming in his yard. With a large minority population, there are plenty that still vote Democrat, though they’ll also support Prop 8.
- kbryan44
  
  Re Understanding how evangelicals became so conservative: you might want to check out two George Marsden Books: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism and American Culture. Marsden is considered the go-to historian on the subject, and his books are accessible to the educated layperson.
xunker

It’s one thing to say “I don’t believe what you believe”, and it’s another thing entirely to say “your beliefs are less valid than mine.” Sadly, most people seem to not understand the difference.
- Mujokan
  
  It depends what “valid” means. If it means ‘”well-grounded or justifiable” (Merriam Webster) then saying that is the same as saying “I don’t believe what you believe”, really. I mean one tends to base one’s beliefs on what one thinks is justifiable.
  
  The problem IMO is more when people make the jump from “unjustified by the facts” to “immoral”. It need not be wrong to believe something without or despite evidence, and if something is not wrong then you have no right to interfere with it.
coffee100

Atheism is a very convenient worldview for a young man. He is free to do as he pleases without fear of being held accountable. He can fuck whomever he pleases, fill his body with whatever recreational chemicals are convenient and scream profanities at believers in anticipation of a grand celebration with all of his like-minded friends over a good rage comic. Then he can spend the rest of the week planted on his narrow, stoned smart ass playing Call of Duty while two-handed stuffing mom-cooked Hot Pockets into his know-it-all mouth. That anyone could endure such an existence for more than ten days is all the proof I need that God engineered humans to be the most adaptable sons-a-bitches on the scene.

When presented with a believer who accepts evolution, all of science (even the experimental unproven shit) and a 14-billion-year-old universe and further, has absolutely no problem squaring it with the Bible, they haven’t the foggiest idea what to say.

These are people who are terrified of their own hearts. They fear emotions in much the same way they fear stumbling over fallacy. Their world leaves no room for love, or compassion, or hope, or gallantry, or courage or any of the things that make human beings something other than the over-intellectualized half of a future destined for the singularity. They cannot perceive what is right in front of them because they insist on trying to understand everything with math and logic. To them, the American Flag is three wavelengths and a collection of geometric shapes, not a symbol of freedom.

It’s numbers, not letters; equations, not stanzas; brain, not heart. They have drained humanity out of human beings and replaced it with the cold demand that anything worthy of their attention must be ratified by a laboratory and peer-reviewed by the same heartless automatons they aspire to become. They demand a complete explanation, yet in their arrogance do not recognize the Teacher’s words. They will not admit the act of God attempting to explain the wonder of Creation to man would be like an accountant trying to explain the tax code to a squirrel.

Then, after noticing the sullen looks on the faces of those they have rhetorically bludgeoned with the scientifically proven, factual idea that everything that was, is, or will ever be will freeze over in a pitch black eternal heat-death, they attempt to fill the void (heh) with hastily assembled stories about how there is yet hope because we are all made of star-stuff.

These are people so walled-off from the glory all around them that they are actually able to look at a field of cherry blossoms under a blue sky and see only a re-arranged periodic table and completely miss the simple beauty of the Creator’s signature on every last atom. Because they cannot fathom the intellect of a transcendent being capable of starting with hydrogen and four basic forces and ending up with dragonflies, Megan Fox and symphony orchestras, they instead choose to put it all down to nothing from nothing equals nothing.

They are the people who, after a worthy life-long effort to find the perfect sakura blossom, will abandon their search in despair because they cannot admit there one absolute truth that can only be perceived by the human heart:

They are all perfect.
oomatter

Modern science isn’t a belief system. It’s an organized, consistent way to understand what we experience. You don’t have to believe the things you read in a chemistry or physics book are true, you can test them for yourself. Just because you’re too lazy to do it yourself, doesn’t mean that everyone is like you and simply believes these things because they’re written down in a book.
Yes, there are questions which can’t be answered scientifically (yet). Then again, just because we can formulate a question doesn’t mean it’s actually a good question.
matlockexpressway

Everyone who isn’t a sociopath takes a leap of faith analogous to that of the theist:

If you believe that murder is wrong, and not merely because it’s believed to be so by non-murderous people, you’re taking a leap of faith.

If you believe that your significant other actually loves you, and is not just with you for the money, sex, etc., you’re taking a leap of faith.

If you believe that tyranny is unjust, and not merely because free people tend to disapprove of it, you’re taking a leap of faith.

If you can demonstrably show that any of the above problems isn’t actually intractable… hat’s off to you: you’ll have done something which no philosopher has accomplished in the past 3000 years. And they’ve been working on these issues incessantly.

The problem for the atheist, then (as opposed to the agnostic, who takes no stand on the theism debate) is that if he or she believes in the wrongness of murder, or the love of a spouse, or the injustice of tyranny, he or she makes a logical leap of the same kind that the theist makes when he or she asserts the existence of a god.

[Or, in short: tu quoque.]
- l337n00b
  
  “If you believe that murder is wrong, and not merely because it’s believed to be so by non-murderous people, you’re taking a leap of faith.”
  
  None of these things requires a leap of faith at all. Your examples are not even close to analogous to a believe in God. Our contemporary standard for knowledge – the kind of knowledge that actually builds buildings, creates new technology, saves lives, etc. – is based on science. That means it’s based on demonstrating that one belief is more plausible than another, not based on a magical standard of absolute knowledge.
  It’s pretty easy to present old-timey skeptical arguments, like saying that maybe no one else suffers the same way you do, or maybe watermelon doesn’t taste to other people the way you taste watermelon. But, first of all, these possibilities can’t really be tested for or against. If you counter a large set of tested hypotheses (experience seems to be highly related to the brain, other people’s brains are organized similarly to ours, etc.) with something that is specifically designed to not be able to be tested then you aren’t really countering them at all.
  
  More importantly, did you see that video reconstructed from scanning someone’s brain while they watched a movie? If we all saw and experienced things differently, shouldn’t that be impossible? We now have more reason than ever to guess that other people have internal worlds similar to our own.
  
  So we attribute experiences of pain and anguish to others when they act as if that is what they are feeling. Again, this is just applying a reasonable standard of knowledge instead of one that requires magic to know anything. We define anguish to be bad – it is the root of our compass of bad. So once again, replace magical thinking about good and bad with reality based good and bad. Now murder and tyranny are obviously bad things. I also know that I do not want to be murdered or oppressed, and, from what I have read, I believe that others do not want that either.
  
  As for my partner loving me, there is no faith involved. It is possible she is playing some kind of long game, but the number of people who would actually do that are vanishingly small and the odds I met one are extremely low. If I was fantastically rich then it might be harder to convince myself that someone really loved me – but the fact that it would actually be harder to believe proves that I am not using a leap of faith.
  
  As I said in my earlier post, though, I have heard many claims about what we might expect to be true if there is a God – usually expressed in the form of people making claims about what God does, or talking about how to appeal to God. People have actually done experiments to see if praying for a sick person works, for example, and it does not. If religion is the way to know God and God is the source of morality, then we should expect religious people to be more moral than non-religious people. But in reality religious people commit more crimes than atheists.
  
  There is no God, and there is no leap of faith required.
  - matlockexpressway
    
    (a) I’m not so sure how you’re deriving morality from “a large set of tested hypotheses (experience seems to be highly related to the brain, other people’s brains are organized similarly to ours, etc.)” Is it “other people think the way I do” therefore “morality!”? I was pretty clearly excluding cultural relativism in my comment, so I guess we’re talking past each other. How do you accommodate the fact that some cultures (even if rare) actually believe that murder-by-vengeance is perfectly fine? Are their brains wired differently than all other humans’? That’s weak at best.
    
    (b) “We define anguish to be bad – it is the root of our compass of bad.”
    
    While I’m sympathetic to utilitarianism, I’m not so sure that it’s been conclusively demonstrated to be the one true morality.
    
    (c) “If I was fantastically rich then it might be harder to convince myself that someone really loved me – but the fact that it would actually be harder to believe proves that I am not using a leap of faith.”
    
    I’m not so sure that basing the reasonableness of belief on the balance of probabilities is the best response.
    
    (d) “If religion is the way to know God and God is the source of morality, then we should expect religious people to be more moral than non-religious people. But in reality religious people commit more crimes than atheists.”
    
    “Johnny believes in God. Johnny stole a car. Therefore god doesn’t exist.” Seems valid to me.
Ito Kagehisa

If your science contradicts your religion, one of them is wrong. Faith and science are completely compatible, unless you are making some sort of mistake in one realm or the other.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_S7NITA3IH43UDIGHRPCGZSMEPY Minnie

Why do people get all worked up over what another person believes? Why is the existence of Christian belief a threat to them? Why do they feel a mandate to obliterate opportunity for others to choose?

Seems like some people won’t be happy until Christianity is wiped from the face of the earth.

That is not fair.

Every man has a right to sort through various beliefs and decide what they want.

To tamper with, to try to exterminate, to ridicule and worst of all ~ to participate in the destruction of a set of beliefs is patently wrong. It robs other people of the chance to make up their mind for themselves.

That is the kind of thinking that genocide is based in. An intolerance of other kinds of governments, beliefs, races, etc…

Whenever I see someone bent on turning others away from a set of beliefs I think how much it is like the extinction of an animal. Leave things alone. Let people decide for themselves. Why are there so many campaigns to destroy choices we all have a right to? That is backward, bigoted, primitive thinking.
- selfsimilar
  
  The problem is a long history of “chosen” social groups, religions especially, doing terrible things to non-believers. So looked at from that perspective, we have a long history of “chosen ones” getting worked up about what other people believe, feeling threatened, and mandating Crusades, pogroms, wars, actual genocide, etc. Hence, I think, some have developed a healthy fear of religious and especially Christian ideology.
  
  I think it’s ironic that the kind of intolerance Christians were known for is now common among atheists who turn that against Christians. However, I have yet to see any physical violence done in the name of atheism, so there’s a big difference still in degree.
  
  All that said, you’re right that we need focus our energy on peaceful coexistence. The problem is that while we can all agree on the easy things that help our society run smoothly (don’t murder, don’t steal, etc.), we don’t all agree on other fundamentals, and the (mostly) religious folks who tend to cherry pick their bible quotes aslo cherry pick the science they want to believe in. And science is totally outside of religion, and should not be subjected to religious scrutiny. Young Earthers, anti-evolutionaries, and climate change deniers all are letting their belief system interfere with the rational discourse about scientific fact.
  
  So I totally understand the atheist who wants to eliminate the kind of belief system that would interfere with rational discourse over facts. It’s not backward, bigoted, primitive thinking as much as the terrified thinking of someone who sees crazy people at the helm of society.
mvigil2005

this video could be titled two different things, “Reasons to not believe in god.” or “insane rationalizations of the knowingly incorrect”
loki_the_trickster

C’mon, you must be rather oblivious to a lot of 20th century history to still think that atheists have not physically persecuted Christians. Check out countries under the Soviet Union. Check out Communist China. They have definitely persecuted. No idea if it is more or less that the religious to the non-religious though.
davcot

Faith is no reason.Beliefs should be based on evidence and reason.Faith is not a basis for logically sound belief.
honeyandlocusts

So I’m a queer lady Episcopal priest, and for me there actually is no contradiction. My mom was a science teacher, my dad’s an atheist, my church believes in evolution and the beauty and worth of science, the leader of our national church (the Presiding Bishop) is an oceanographer who specialized in the study of Pacific cephalopods and who is married to a theoretical mathematician. I experience no internal conflict when talking and thinking about science and my faith.

This video leaves me a little “meh” (er, it’s not just dudes who have opinions on science and faith, and the anti-gay and weird gender stuff is regressive). There are vibrant conversations happening about this all over the place. One such place is in this NPR interview with the Presiding Bishop: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6638780
As to whether or not things in the Bible “really” happened, we have to not anachronistically assume that the authors of the ancient scriptural texts were trying to write down the facts. ”Science” and “facts” were not part of their vocabulary or their value system: they weren’t trying to be factually accurate. We are obsessed with the factually accurate because of when we live. They were trying to write down what it meant, and they used beautiful language to do so, to convey the power of what they witnessed. They didn’t intend for it to be read literally. I believe it dishonors them to read it literally.