JI: Paul and the Ignorance of Idolaters

Most of my coverage of Jesus, Interrupted thus far has been of problems within the gospels, so now I want to focus on two differing views within the life and writings of Paul (pp. 95–97). The issue is a fairly simple one, which just makes the discrepancy that much clearer. So, does Paul think that God has overlooked the unbelief of idolaters in the past due to their ignorance of him? Let's look at two passages, starting with a passage from Acts 17:

"Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising. Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.' "

Paul tells the people of Athens quite clearly that God has overlooked the past ignorance of those who worshiped idols. While they are now expected to repent and believe in Jesus, they had previously believed in pagan gods because, as Ehrman says, "they simply didn't know any better." And as Paul says to the Athenians, God doesn't blame them for it.

But does Paul really think that? What about the passage in Romans 1 that includes:

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things."

Here Paul takes exactly the opposite viewpoint. God "has shown" himself to them, his "attributes are clearly seen," "they are without excuse," and "they knew God." The discrepancy is threefold, as Ehrman explains:

"Do they worship idols out of ignorance? The "Paul" of Acts says yes, Paul in his own writings says no. Are they responsible for their idolatrous activities? Acts says no, Paul says yes. Does God inflict his wrathful judgment on them in the present as a result? Acts says no, Paul says yes."

So here we have two views of God's relationship with unbelievers that are clearly at odds in multiple ways. Either Paul had hopelessly conflicting opinions on this subject, he was lying to the Athenians to win them over, or the author of Acts fabricated his story. Ehrman takes the latter position, saying that "the real Paul would likely have preached some fire and brimstone to get these people to realize the error of their ways." In any case, this example deals a serious blow to the Christian claim that the Bible is an inerrant and unified work.

A Quranic Interlude

While my main focus is generally on criticism of Christianity, I thought it might be interesting to pause for a moment and try something new. I helped the Rational Thought group find some of the verses in the Bible and the Quran that promote hatred or intolerance toward some specific group—gays, women, unbelievers, and so on. I'll be going into the awful passages in the Bible in some depth later on, but for now I'll just post some of the worst stuff I found in the Quran. There's plenty more where this came from, of course; this is just a small sample of the terrible things to be found in that book.

Anti-Women
Apparently women are only half as reliable as men, and women can be beaten if they disobey men.

• "And call two witness from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not at hand, then a man and two women, of such as ye approve as witnesses, so that if one erreth (through forgetfulness) the other will remember." (Surah 2:282)

• "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them." (Surah 4:34)

Anti-Jews/Christians
Muslims who want to promote interfaith relations evidently haven't read their Quran:

• "O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends. They are friends one to another. He among you who taketh them for friends is (one) of them. Lo! Allah guideth not wrongdoing folk." (Surah 5:51)

Anti-Gay
It also condemns gay people. As a side note, "as no creature ever did before you" is a clear scientific error.

• "And Lot! (Remember) when he said unto his folk: Will ye commit abomination such as no creature ever did before you? Lo! ye come with lust unto men instead of women. Nay, but ye are wanton folk." (Surah 7:80-81)

Killing Unbelievers
The Quran makes many more explicit references to the punishment of nonbelievers than the Bible does.

• "They long that ye should disbelieve even as they disbelieve, that ye may be upon a level (with them). So choose not friends from them till they forsake their homes in the way of Allah; if they turn back (to enmity) then take them and kill them wherever ye find them, and choose no friend nor helper from among them…" (Surah 4:89)

• "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful." (Surah 9:5)

Unbelievers in Hell
It also tends to be almost gleefully detailed in its terrifying descriptions of hell.

• "Lo! Those who disbelieve Our revelations, We shall expose them to the Fire. As often as their skins are consumed We shall exchange them for fresh skins that they may taste the torment. Lo! Allah is ever Mighty, Wise." (Surah 4:56)

• "We have prepared for disbelievers Fire. Its tent encloseth them. If they ask for showers, they will be showered with water like to molten lead which burneth the faces. Calamitous the drink and ill the resting-place!" (Surah 18:29)

• "But as for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them; boiling fluid will be poured down on their heads, whereby that which is in their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted; and for them are hooked rods of iron. Whenever, in their anguish, they would go forth from thence they are driven back therein and (it is said unto them): Taste the doom of burning." (Surah 22:19-22)

By no means is the Quran a more intolerant book than the Bible in every category, though. For example, the gratuitously cruel punishment of stoning isn't mentioned even once. It denounces homosexuality, but doesn't call for killing gay people as the OT does. And although it does endorse slavery, it doesn't do so as heartily as the Bible. One could make an argument for either book being a greater source of evil teachings, but in the end it doesn't really matter. They both advocate despicable views, and no one should use either of them as the basis for their morality.

WEIT: Other Vestigiality & Atavisms

I have a lot of ground to cover this time around. Last time I covered WEIT's description of vestigiality and atavisms in humans, and now I'll do so for other animals.

There are many examples of birds with vestigial wings: ostriches and penguins use them for a different purpose, while kiwis' wings (see below) are stubby and basically useless. Other species have vestigial eyes that are malformed and covered by skin or scales, including the eastern Mediterranean blind mole rat and certain varieties of fish, salamanders and snakes. Why might this loss of function occur? Because both wings and eyes are costly to create and maintain. Notably, kiwis live in New Zealand, where a lack of large predators makes their inability to fly less of a disadvantage. And loss of eye function occurs only in species that live underground or in caves, and thus have little use for vision.

Cetaceans are some of the best cases of these phenomena. Whales have several vestiges, such as the pelvises embedded deep within their bodies. Embryology reveals yet more examples: hindlimb buds are initially visible but vanish after about seven weeks, a thin coat of hair is grown (and quickly lost), toothless baleen whales "develop embryonic teeth that disappear before birth." And remarkably, in rare cases whales are born with atavistic legs—sometimes even fully formed ones. These features point to their common ancestry with furry, four-legged, toothed land mammals.

Other examples of atavisms: Chicken embryos develop teeth if provided with a certain protein, revealing their reptilian ancestry. And splint bones in horses sometimes form into extra toes, showing how they "descend from smaller, five-toed ancestors."

Next up are genetic vestiges. 50 percent of the 800 olfactory receptor (OR) genes present in humans and other primates are inactivated, probably because we're so visually oriented that we don't need them. Dolphins—which "don't need to detect volatile odors in the air...and have a completely different set of genes for detecting waterborne chemicals"—still have OR genes, although 80 percent are inactivated. Genes for synthesizing vitamin C are also inactive in primates, fruit bats and guinea pigs. And genetic vestiges are sometimes directly connected to physical ones: for example, most mammals have a vestigial yolk sac, but mutations have inactivated the genes for producing the nutritious protein that once filled it.

The most amazing thing about these genetic vestiges is that "the sequences of the dead gene exactly mirror the pattern of resemblance predicted from the known ancestry of these species." That is, if a gene-inactivating mutation occurs, it generally occurs at the same place in all species, and the more closely related two species are, the more similar the genetic sequence will be. This phenomenon perfectly matches the hierarchical structure of the tree of life.

There's so much more I could cover from this chapter—at some point in the future I'll take an in-depth look at endogenous retroviruses and poor design—but I want to move on to some of the other completely different lines of evidence. Up next: biogeography.

Conceptualizing Eternity

It is impossible for the finite human mind to fully comprehend the nature of infinity. We all understand the idea on a surface level, but when we try to push deeper, things invariably fall apart. When we try to imagine, for example, an infinite number of soccer balls or an infinitely long stretch of rope, we end up with a "very large" amount that comes nowhere close to doing justice to the concept. There is always a nagging sense that the "end" is just around the corner—that if we just keep at it long enough, we will be able to rise above it all and take in its sweeping splendor all in one glance. This is, of course, a fantasy.

It's important to understand that infinity is not strictly a number. It is a concept that represents a quantity that is so great as to be boundless and without end. What's more, infinity regularly violates our common sense. If you owned a hotel with infinite rooms, all occupied, you could still make space for infinite new guests simply by moving each old guest from Room #1 to Room #2, Room #2 to Room #4, Room #3 to Room #6, and so on. The set of all fractions is just as large as the set of all whole numbers—although the set of all decimal numbers is even larger. This is the sort of counter-intuitive madness we must deal with when we try to grasp at this concept.

Eternity can be defined simply as an infinite length of time. In this essay I will present a thought experiment designed to help catch a glimpse of eternity's sheer, ludicrous magnitude, to understand it to the greatest extent possible—which, unfortunately, is still not much at all. In the future I will refer back to this experiment to discuss its theological implications. To get the full experience, please take your time and visualize the imagery as vividly as possible.

The Experiment

Imagine that you have decided to spend the day at the beach. Get out of your car and walk along a short concrete path surrounded on either side by grassy lawn. Descend a few steps and look around. The ocean is in front of you, the sky above is a deep and cloudless blue, and an expanse of fine white sand stretches to your left and right for as far as you can see. Sit down and take a pinch of sand with your thumb and index finger. From this pinch, isolate a single grain, which is no larger than the period on this page, and place it in the palm of your hand.

Concentrate on this grain of sand, and imagine that it represents your full lifetime, from birth up until this very moment. In order to fully comprehend this idea, go through your entire life, starting with your earliest memory and slowly working your way through the years. To the best of your ability, recall your various triumphs and failures, but try to remember the more tedious in-between moments as well. Remember every boring lecture in school, every night spent tossing and turning with insomnia, every lengthy sermon in church, every dull wait at the doctor's office, every long delay spent stuck in traffic. Realize that for each moment you can recall, there are hundreds if not thousands more that you cannot. Once the full weight of these memories is clear to you, focus on compressing these memories into the grain of sand. Whether it represents 10 years, 50, or 100, this grain of sand is your life.

Now with your other hand pick up another pinch of sand and slowly sprinkle it into the palm holding the single grain. Each new grain of sand is another lifetime's worth of lunches eaten, books read, movies watched, showers taken, papers written, and so on. Feel the innumerable slight taps as every individual grain makes contact with your hand. What you now hold in your hand is equivalent to several thousand years. Now with your free hand take a great handful of sand and let it slowly out into the other palm. As you do, try to visually isolate the single grains that still represent your full lifetime, birth to present. They probably fly by too fast to identify, but that does not make them any less real than the grain you started out with.

By now you should have a considerable pile of sand in your open palm, representing at least several million years. Dump the pile back onto the beach. Find a single grain to serve a reference, then slowly look up and down the beach to the horizon to the left and right. Try to understand fully that the entire beach consists of countless billions of grains—countless billions of lifetimes—exactly like the single reference grain. Imagine what it would mean to live out these lifetimes one by one. After experiencing year after year, you would finally be entitled to discard a single grain… and pick up the next. Goodness, you think. Infinity really is quite something. But we have only just begun.

Facing forward, you find that the ocean has vanished, replaced only with more sand—it was, apparently, just a mirage. Behind you there are no longer any steps, no grassy lawn or parking lot: only more sand. While before you saw a very long but nevertheless thin strip of sand, it now surrounds you in a flat expanse extending in all directions—hundreds of quadrillions of years of life that you are destined to live out.

Now stand up and go for a brisk jog. After a few miles you stop, panting, sweat rolling down your face. You kneel on the ground and begin to dig with your bare hands, scooping out millions of years at a time, until you have a hole several feet deep. At last, you have found it: a grain of sand representing your full lifetime. The point is that this grain, like countless others, was entirely hidden from you. It was the furthest thing from your mind, yet it still represents the same long drives and meals and lectures and workdays as the others. While it may be nothing special, it still represents many quite real and concrete years that you must live through on your endless journey through eternity.

Look up at the sky and notice that it has become filled with some unusually dark clouds. As you try to understand what makes them so peculiar, you feel a sting on your face—the sting of a thousand arguments between you and your loved ones. It begins to drizzle, then rain, then pour sand all across the desert landscape; each grain that hits your skin carries its own individual bite. The downpour becomes a deluge of such proportions that you must continually move your feet so as not to sink into it. As great heaps of sand pound against your head, you desperately fight the flood of lifetimes, but they soon overwhelm you. In seconds, you are buried up to your knees, to your waist, to your neck, and finally you are buried alive, crushed as quintillions of years press in against you from all sides.

One galaxy. Of 80 billion.

Thankfully, the deluge ceases shortly after burying you, and after several claustrophobic, painful minutes you are able to dig yourself out. But now you feel a rumbling beneath your feet, and soon you realize that the ground is expanding as sand is rapidly added to its mass. (The first 5 minutes of Powers of Ten are helpful for visualizing this part of the exercise.) The lifetimes below you multiply and increase exponentially to swallow up the moon, the nearby planets, the sun, and the entire solar system. It expands to 10 light-years across, engulfing Alpha Centauri, followed by other solar systems, followed by the entire Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Group of over 30 galaxies, and the Virgo Supercluster of over 100 galaxy groups. Eventually the sand-lives swallow up the entire observable universe—over 93 billion light-years across and containing over 80 billion galaxies, each of which contain on average about 400 billion stars.

Now take that image of the observable universe filled to the brim with tiny grains of sand, each representing your entire life's worth of experiences and each no bigger than a period on this page, and zoom out. Zoom out further and further, until the entire mass looks tiny—no larger than a grain of sand. Imagine yourself back on the beach holding that single grain of sand. The grain now represents a universe that is itself filled with grains of sand. Look to your left and right, taking in all the billions of other grains, all of which represent other universes filled with countless grains that all represent lifetimes.

Imagine going through the entire cycle in fast forward several times: a grain of sand, a pinch, a pile, a beach, a desert, a deluge, a solar system, a galaxy, a galaxy cluster, a universe that becomes a grain. Each full cycle multiplies the amount of time you must live through to such an extent that it is beyond my ability to describe it. Go through the cycle thousand times, a million, a billion. For what ridiculous, incomprehensible length of time must you now toil through your dreary existence?

The answer should make you want to vomit: it doesn't matter. Having gone through this cycle one time or a billion makes no difference. You are still no closer to the end of eternity than when you began. This is not meant in any figurative sense. After all of those mind-melting eons, you literally may as well not have started at all. You are zero percent of the way through your journey. But though your brain has long since turned to mush from the sheer accumulation of experiences, there is no giving up. You must press on and on through a life that is, in the truest sense possible, without end. That is the meaning of eternity.

Conclusion

Please do not get the impression that having gone through this exercise you are really any closer to understanding eternity. You have merely imagined a "very long" interval of time and acknowledged that this interval is nothing in comparison to the genuine article. In understanding this, you are simply waving the white flag that should have been waving all along. At best, you now comprehend that you can never comprehend eternity.

As I suggested earlier, both the nature of eternity and our ability to comprehend it have important religious implications. I will refer back to this thought experiment in later posts when discussing subjects such as the doctrine of hell.

Ken Ham's Really Dumb Question

In fact, it's one of the dumbest creationist arguments – and that's saying something. Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis, loves to ask "Were you there?" in the face of the evidence for evolution. The idea is that evolutionists can only infer evolution from our current information, but creationists have an eyewitness to support creation: God was there, and he tells us how it happened in the Bible. Here's Ham indoctrinating a crowd of children with this ridiculous argument. He's trained them sickeningly well.

There are two gigantic problems with Ham's question. First, it severely underestimates the power of indirect empirical evidence. Just because we have to infer a conclusion doesn't mean the evidence used to do so can't be extremely reliable. If we have many pieces of evidence at a crime scene (blood, fingerprints, clothing fibers, etc.) at a crime scene all matching one murder suspect, that person is quite rightly convicted. The myriad converging lines of evidence for evolution mirror this scenario quite well. And in fact, the eyewitness testimony that Ham values so highly is notoriously fallible.

The second massive problem with Ham's argument is that it severely overestimates the reliability of the Bible. We don't have direct eyewitness testimony from God about creation; we have an ancient book written by people who claim to be speaking on God's behalf. As I wrote in this post, claims must be weighed in light of the quality of the source, not just the quality of the source's alleged source. And our source, as it turns out, is terrible: the Bible's errors, contradictions and atrocities make it highly unlikely that it was authored by an omniscient, omnibenevolent God.

I'll summarize by paraphrasing a response to Ham's question that I particularly like, which goes as follows:

Creationist: How do you know evolution happened? Were you there?

Evolutionist: I didn't need to be there. We have strong evidence from archaeology, biogeography, embryology, genetics and other fields that it happened. What evidence do you have for your position?

Creationist: God was there, and he wrote about it in his book!

Evolutionist: You mean the book riddled with evils, errors and inconsistencies? Do you have any evidence that God wrote it? If not, how do you know that he did? Were you there?

OSR on Twitter & YouTube

This blog (OSR for short) now has corresponding YouTube and Twitter accounts: OtherSideReflections and @OtherSideReflec. I'll be using Twitter to occasionally jot quick down thoughts that I don't feel a pressing need to make full posts about. For example, here are my first three tweets:

• A rule of thumb: If you wouldn't accept something as evidence for another religion, don't accept it as evidence for yours.
• A single Quran is burned in Florida. In response, radical Muslims in Afghanistan riot and kill 12 people. Madness. http://on.cnn.com/e0WFdF
• Two examples of religious faith being directly responsible for global warming denialism: http://bit.ly/9e0iDg, http://n.pr/g7rBBf

As for the YouTube channel, I probably won't be uploading any videos of my own, so it'll just be a place for interesting and informative videos that I feel are relevant to this blog. I'll also include more lighthearted fare, like this hilarious yet terrifying dramatic reenactment of actual comments taken from fundamentalist forums:

There's a wealth of great content available on YouTube. But it's often hard to find, so it's convenient for me to have a place to store all of the gems that I discover buried among the dreck.

Souls and Human Cloning

My sister and I are both anime fans, and recently we watched Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, an excellent science fiction series that deals with the societal effects of huge advances in artificial intelligence and the widespread use of synthetic bodies and brains. In the thirteenth episode, a girl is suspected to be a clone of a kidnapped CEO's daughter. While we were watching, my sister asked me an interesting question: A clone wouldn't have a soul, she said, so what would it act like? She seemed genuinely stumped by the question. I couldn't just tell her that there's no such thing as a soul, so I said, "That's hard for me to answer. You should take some philosophy classes."

Both of those statements were technically true. Nevertheless, the question does deserve an answer. Basically, a human clone would be nothing more than an identical twin of the original person (albeit one born at a later date). They would probably behave at least somewhat similarly to the original, since they would share the original's genetic code. However, they would certainly have differences in personality, since they would grow up in a completely different environment.

Human cloning is one of the many issues that highlights the problems with the Christian conception of the soul. There doesn't seem to be anything in particular that would distinguish humans who do and don't have souls—in other words, the idea of a "soul" is useless; it explains nothing that can't be explained by natural means. According to Occam's razor, souls would qualify as "unnecessary entities," and so we have no reason to incorporate them into our worldview.

The view that a human clone wouldn't have a soul is actually a fairly common one, and the Bible is even cited in support of it. In Genesis 2:7, it says:

"And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."

Since it seems that in the Bible God personally imbues man with a soul, many Christians believe that a man-made clone wouldn't have one. In fact, some predict that creating a live human clone will be impossible, and will instead result in a lifeless body. Once or twice I've also heard the pastor of my church make a very startling claim: if living clones are produced, they will only appear to be "alive" because the bodies are inhabited by demons. I can easily envision a future in which clones are persecuted or even killed by a faction of extreme fundamentalist Christians. After all, if clones are merely lifeless, demon-possessed puppets, to "kill" them would be a perfectly acceptable (perhaps even commendable) act according to a Christian worldview.

And if many years from now people have their minds uploaded into artificial brains as in Ghost in the Shell, I suspect that many Christians wouldn't believe that the soul would be transferred. They might apply the same explanation of demon possession to living bodies containing mind uploads. Thus, the potential harm that Christianity poses is not limited to present issues such as gay marriage and stem cell research. As technology opens up new paradigms, it may actually create opportunities for the most fanatical Christians to kill innocent people.