10 Questions for Christians

I've thought a lot about how to summarize my reasons for rejecting Christianity, and decided that one way to do so would be to condense them into ten questions that Christians would be hard-pressed to answer. This is what I have so far:

1. Do you have strong, verifiable evidence to back up the extraordinary claims your religion makes about the world?
2. Does it bother you that people of other religions often...
1. Believe just as strongly as you do?
2. Cite many of the same reasons for belief that you do?
3. Have many of the same reasons for not believing in your religion that you have for not believing in theirs?
3. Isn't it odd that you just happened to luck into the right religion, out of thousands of potential options, especially if you simply adopted the religion of your parents and/or surrounding culture?
4. Why would the God of the Old Testament sanction injustices such as slavery and command the genocide of entire nations—including innocent children?
5. Why would God cause billions of people to suffer forever simply for not believing in him?
6. If God places so much importance on belief, why did he appear only in the ancient superstitious past and give us brains that are highly prone to error?
7. Why couldn't God just decide to forgive us without killing Jesus—and how is temporarily killing one innocent man an acceptable substitute for eternally punishing billions of supposedly guilty people?
8. If the Bible is truly the divinely inspired word of God, why does it contain...
1. Scientific errors about the formation of the universe, the evolution of life, and the age of the earth?
2. Major internal contradictions?
3. Grievous errors of history and geography?
4. Failed prophecies?
9. How do you explain the concept of the soul in light of mental phenomena such as split brains? If someone's left brain hemisphere believes and their right hemisphere is an atheist, where does their soul go?
10. What specific things would convince you that Christianity is false? If there aren't any, it means that if you were wrong, you'd never know it. Do you see that lack of falsifiability as problematic?

Technically there are more than ten questions in there, but there was so much content that I needed to loosen the format a bit. Not all of them are meant to attack religious claims directly. Some are there to establish reasonable doubts and provide a starting point for skeptical inquiry. It's also worth noting that only a few of the questions are specific to Christianity; some apply to all the standard monotheistic religions, and others to religion in general.

I'm a little worried that Christians might answer flippantly if I don't provide specific examples, but I also don't want to weigh the questions down with too much text. This is still a work in progress, but overall I think it's a powerful set of questions. If a Christian really took them seriously and put serious thought into answering them, I don't see how they could come out of it with their faith intact.

The World According to Evangelical Leaders

The Pew Forum has released a survey of evangelical Protestant leaders worldwide, which includes several interesting statistics. First, their opinions of nonbelief:

• 71% of evangelical leaders called secularism a "major threat" to Christianity—the most of any option.
• Muslims beat out the "non-religious" in terms of perceived unfriendliness toward evangelicals, 69% to 45%. But that includes self-described agnostics and even some theists; the results would be different for atheists alone.
• 70% have an unfavorable view of atheists—a higher percentage than for any other (ir)religious group, including Muslims.

These figures are consistent with my previous observation that atheists are the most disliked and distrusted minority in America. Now, here are some other discouraging statistics:

• 52% of leaders think Jesus will "probably" or "definitely" return within their lifetime. Again they show that there's only a marginal difference between them and apocalyptic prophets like Harold Camping.
• 94% believe that winning converts is essential to evangelical Christianity. Helping the needy? A still-high but much-lower 73%.
• 92% have a favorable view of Pentacostals, the denomination most known for "worshipping God" by speaking gibberish and flailing around.
• 84% think homosexuality should be discouraged by society.
• 47% reject evolution entirely; another 41% insist it was God-guided.
• 55% think that "a wife must always obey her husband." Why? Well, because God said so. Isn't that reason enough to treat women as second-class citizens?
• 51% think abortion is not usually, but always wrong—which would include cases of rape, incest, and endangerment to the mother.
• 84% believe they should express their political views. These are the people in positions of authority, and that means those views will inevitably rub off on their congregations.

It always amazes me when people ask why we nonbelievers can't just mind our own business and respect other people's beliefs. These statistics should make the answer obvious: beliefs have consequences. When they're false, they can cause serious harm and even warp our perception of reality. It's only natural to promote reason when this is the result of its absence.

Now that I'm done with that little rant, I'll end on an amusing note: 52% of leaders thought that consuming alcohol is "incompatible with being a good evangelical." Even leaving aside how absurd that is on its face, let's take a look at Jesus' words in Matthew 11:18-19:

"For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' But wisdom is justified by her children."

Either evangelical leaders don't know their Bible, or they genuinely don't think Jesus himself belongs in their exclusive club.

Problems with Biblical Prophecy

Christians believe that the Bible contains many instances of fulfilled prophecy, events predicted sometimes centuries in advance that eventually unfolded exactly as described. In fact, the Bible has no more predictive power than the Quran or the Book of Mormon. Its predictions operate on principles that have naturalistic explanations. I'll give a brief overview of them below, then cover some of them more deeply in the future.

The first and most pervasive problem with alleged biblical prophecies is vagueness. Many events that the Bible predicts are either so mundane that they happen constantly or have no time limit and are bound to happen if we wait long enough—sometimes both. Here are a couple of examples:

• "...scoffers will come in that last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of his coming?'" (2 Peter 3:3-4)
• "And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. ... For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places." (Matthew 24:6-7)

Both of these are predictions about Jesus' return to earth. They sound a lot like events that are happening in modern times, don't they? But here's the thing: they could just as easily apply to pretty much any other point in history. People have been scoffing for a good 1,900 years about the fact that Jesus was supposed to come "quickly"—and rightly so. Likewise, war and natural disasters are a permanent part of human life. Why didn't Jesus instead say, "X years from now, massive earthquakes will occur at locations A, B and C"?

Because he couldn't really predict the future. And when he tried, he failed.

Another example of vague "prophecy" is the alleged phenomenon of scientific foreknowledge. For example, some Christians marvel at Leviticus 17:11's pronouncement that "the life of the flesh is in the blood," saying that ancient people couldn't have known this without divine inspiration. Two problems: First, this would be easy to conclude simply by watching any animal bleed to death. Second, blood isn't even the only part of the body that's essential to life. One could just as easily say "the life of the flesh" is in the lungs, heart or brain.

Speaking of brains, the Bible never mentions them as the center of thought and consciousness—not even once. However, it does contain countless references to thoughts and feelings emanating from the heart and even the kidneys. It seems like if God wanted his book to be scientifically accurate, this might have been an important thing to get straight. Yet in fact, the Bible is chock full of such scientific errors.

Another problem with biblical prophecies is that many of them weren't even meant to be prophecies at all, and in fact mean something very different when put into their proper context. For example, Matthew says that after Jesus' birth, his family took him to hide in Egypt, thereby fulfilling a prophecy that said, "out of Egypt I called My Son." Not bad, right? Well, take a look at the original context:

"When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son. As they called them, so they went from them; they sacrificed to the Baals, and burned incense to the carved images." (Hosea 11:1-2)

Funny, I don't remember Jesus being called Israel or making sacrifices to other gods. That's because he didn't, and this passage in Hosea is about the Israelites escaping from Egypt. Apologists try to spin passages like these as "double fulfillment," happening once in the original context and once at a later date. They can call it whatever they like, but what it amounts to is selectively reading into passages that often were never meant to be prophecies in the first place. Every bit of the Old Testament is a potential case of double fulfillment. With that much source material to work with, how could Jesus not have "fulfilled" some of it purely by chance?

There are two other ways the Bible can outright cheat to make it appear as though prophecies have been fulfilled. First let's take the previous example. Matthew's account of Jesus' flight to Egypt is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible, and directly conflicts with Luke's account. Here's what probably happened. The writer of Matthew is scouring the OT for passages about Jesus and stumbles across one where God mentions Israel as his metaphorical son. Perfect! Just replace Israel with Jesus, make up a story where he must escape to Egypt, and presto! Another prophecy fulfilled.

I'll use the book of Daniel to illustrate the second method of cheating. As it turns out, Daniel makes predictions about various wars and conquests with remarkable accuracy right up until about Daniel 11:39. The book is set as though it was written by Daniel under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II, around 600 BCE. But based on evidence in the text, biblical scholars believe the book was actually written in about 165 BCE, and that the writer tried to pass off the book as older than it really was. The so-called prophecies described events that had already taken place.

Which brings us to our final problem with biblical prophecy: Contrary to what Christians believe, some of the prophecies in the Bible flat-out failed. Everything up through Daniel 11:39 had already happened, but from Daniel 11:40 onwards the writer genuinely does try to make predictions—and of course, absolutely none of them were fulfilled. He prophesies, among other things, that Antiochus Epiphanes would utterly conquer northwest Africa, including Egypt. It never happened. By the Bible's own standard, Daniel was a false prophet and should have been put to death.

As we've seen, there are a host of problems with prophecies in the Bible. Without exception, each one suffers from some combination of vagueness, lack of time limit, lack of indication that they were even meant as prophecy, fabrication of events, forgery produced after an alleged fulfillment, or outright failure. None of these would be present if the Bible was truly the inspired word of God.

WEIT: What Makes a Species

The seventh chapter of Why Evolution Is True delves deeply into the nuances of the biological species concept, or BSC. This idea is fundamental to evolutionary biology, and was defined by Ernst Mayr in 1942 as follows:

"A group of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups."

By "reproductively isolated," we mean that individuals in two different species do not generally produce viable offspring. Coyne points out that there's no obvious reason that life should be divided into discrete species—instead it could have all blurred together, so that every point between, say, "cat" and "dog" was equally represented. While "God did it" would be equally compatible with these or any set of circumstances, evolution explains our specific observations perfectly.

In order for geographic speciation (the most common speciation process) to occur, a reproductive barrier such as a mountain range or a body of water must come between two groups of the same species. Once the groups are separated, genes cannot flow between them, so they start to become genetically distinct. This occurs largely due to natural selection as the groups adapt to differing environments, although the "random walk" produced by genetic drift can play a role as well. When the groups diverge far enough, the genomes of one group will be incompatible with the genomes of the other, so they remain distinct species even if the reproductive barrier vanishes.

We can use the principles in the above paragraph to make predictions that we can then go out and test. Lo and behold, what we find matches up precisely with what evolution predicts. First, we should be able to create reproductive barriers in the laboratory. And we do: groups of flies placed in different environments lose the ability to interbreed with other groups, sometimes in a year or less. One of Coyne's own experiments also showed that the more the DNA of two existing fly species differ, the more mating discrimination they exhibit and more likely their offspring are to be sterile.

The second prediction comes from biogeography: species that have similar genes should be found relatively close to one another, but separated by a geographical barrier. And they are: there are seven corresponding species of snapping shrimp on each side of the Isthmus of Panama (which arose to divide the Pacific and Atlantic 3 million years ago). The same holds true for islands: we don't usually find similar species on the same small island because there's not enough isolation, but we do find them on nearby islands in an archipelago. We see this in flightless crickets, Drosophila flies, and lobelia plants. Coyne points out that this pattern is also evidence against creationism:

"After all, there's no obvious reason why a creator would produce similar species of birds or lizards on continents but not on isolated islands."

Third, we should be able to observe reproductive barriers forming and speciation occurring in the wild, albeit very slowly. The example Coyne gives is the orchid Satyrium hallackii, which for now is classified as one species. In northern South Africa they have long nectar tubes that allow only hawkmoths and long-tongued flies to pollinate them, while they have short nectar tubes on the coast, where bees are the only available pollinators. The two groups are genetically isolated, and would probably remain so even if they lived in the same area.

Satyrium carneum, a close relative of the orchid Coyne mentions

Coyne ends by covering two more complex types of speciation, allopolyploidy and autopolyploidy, which involve the accidental duplication of chromosomes. Unlike normal speciation, these processes occur mostly in plants and can result in new species in just two generations. Polyploid speciation allows us to directly observe entire speciation events in the wild, which normally take too long for this to be feasible (although a certain mosquito species is a notable exception).

What we've seen here is a powerful illustration of evolution's explanatory power and scope. The biological species concept as applied to evolution allows us to make predictions with stunning accuracy. In contrast, the creationist concept of "kinds" or "baramins" is poorly defined and grants us no useful insights into the natural world. This is what we mean when we say that evolution is science, while creationism is nothing more than Bible-based wishful thinking.

Quotable Me

Previously I posted some memorable quotes from various thinkers on religion, atheism, skepticism and other topics that I'd previously posted on Twitter. Now I've compiled the tweets containing my own thoughts on those subjects. Some of these ideas are mine, but many of them are distillations of what I've learned from reading and listening to others.

Here are some bite-sized thoughts on Christianity:

• Even if Christianity somehow turned out to be true, 99% of Christians would still believe in it for terrible reasons.
• To most Christians, the Bible consists of the NT and a few OT bits like Genesis and Psalms. Books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy don't even exist.
• Why didn't God (a perfect communicator) convey criteria for salvation (the most vital topic possible) so Christians would all agree on them?
• Early Christian sects like the Marcionists and Gnostics often viewed the OT god as a wicked tyrant. I kind of wish they'd won the doctrine wars.
• We can't fully comprehend eternity, so no one can ever grasp just how awful hell would be, and how unjust it would be as punishment.
• Christians ask if you think you're "good" to begin their evangelism spiel. But of course they really mean "perfect," so why not just say so up front?
• Every believer in the resurrection should believe in UFOs: they're also BS, but at least they're based on extensive modern testimony and not an ancient book.
• It's remarkable that the Old Testament contains so much violence and yet manages to remain mind-crushingly dull.
• Funny how Harold Camping's explanation of May 21—a spiritual beginning of judgment—looks identical to nothing having happened at all.

On religion, God and atheism:

• If you wouldn't accept something as evidence for another religion, don't accept it as evidence for yours.
• Even some atheists think religion automatically deserves respect. Why shouldn't it be held to the same standard as other beliefs?
• Vague "God hypotheses" yield no useful predictions; specific ones are easily falsified.
• Religion offers you a cure to a disease you don't have.
• Not only is "no atheists in foxholes" false, it'd be worthless even if true, because people are less rational in dangerous situations.
• When people say God works in mysterious ways, they mean he works exactly as if he wasn't working at all.
• It still amazes me that most just accept the existence of a parallel reality that overlays and interacts with the physical world.
• I wonder how long it'd take for religion to die out with zero child indoctrination? My guess: 80% gone within 50 years, 95% gone in 100.
• Isn't derisively declaring "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist" a tacit admission that faith is a bad thing?
• "You're just rebelling against God!" Um... to the extent that I "rebel" against any other fictional villain, I guess.
• I think maybe half of all religious belief would evaporate if everyone on earth had to learn about the actual psychology of said beliefs.

On evolution:

• Creationists: if evolution violated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then so would prenatal development.
• I only believe in microdevelopment. Macrodevelopment from a zygote to an adult human is just a ridiculous theory!
• "Evolution isn't science, it's not observable and repeatable!" Oh, okay. I guess we'll be throwing out forensics and archaeology too, then?
• It would take a lot to falsify evolution—and that's fine, just as you wouldn't simply assume the theory of gravity was false if something fell up one day.

And on skepticism:

• Possibly the most difficult mental feat is to calmly and impartially correct cherished beliefs in the face of evidence.
• You can be biased and wrong or biased and right. Unbiased? There's no such thing.
• Deciding if a treatment works based only on your experience is like testing it with no controls, no blinds, and a sample size of one.
• Absolutely everyone is biased in how they take in new information. Those who don't acknowledge this can't even begin to counteract it.
• Certainty and correctness have virtually no correlation. What's important is how you arrive at your conclusions.
• The brain deludes itself constantly. For example: most people go their entire lives not realizing they can't see color in the periphery of their vision.
• Confirmation bias acts like a semi-permeable membrane: it lets information supporting your conclusion into your mind, and keeps contrary information out.
• On avoiding bias. Step 1: Gather all evidence. Step 2: Consider all evidence. Step 3: Draw conclusion. (Note: #3 comes last, not first.)
• Don't think of dissenting arguments as obstacles to your conclusions; think of them as tools you can use to clarify your thinking.
• Coincidences are deceptively common. In a group of 7 people, the chances that 2 will have birthdays within a week of each other is over 50%.
• Asking empirical questions about supernatural phenomena is the quickest way to reveal their absurdity.
• Correcting your mistakes is a greater virtue than being right the first time around.

While some people find tweeting to be a shallow form of communication, I think it's potentially very useful. It's not well-suited to fleshing out your ideas, but it forces you to take what you want to say and express it with efficiency and clarity. In the marketplace of ideas, the advantage often goes to those concepts that are can be quickly absorbed and understood. Since many people are averse to atheism and skepticism, this may help us get our ideas across before they close their minds.

Who's Really Being Persecuted?

Christians in America often talk about how they're being persecuted, how they're under attack from our culture on all sides. It's a bit hard for me to sympathize with them, given that the proportion of Americans who are Christian is 78%.

Generally when U.S. Christians say they're being "persecuted," they mean that someone disagrees with them, or that they're being portrayed in anything less than a positive light. But there's no indication that such opinions are widespread, or that they often lead to negative actions against Christians. So what group is most hated and distrusted? It's not Jews, Muslims, or even homosexuals.

It's atheists.

And unlike Christians, we have the data to back up this fact. Here are a few statistics that provide just a glimpse into the prejudice nonbelievers face:

• 39.6% of Americans say that atheists "do not at all agree with my vision of American society." The second highest group was Muslims, with 26.3%.
• 61% of Americans say they'd be less likely to vote for an atheist presidential candidate, and 53% would refuse outright even if they were well-qualified. In this regard, being an atheist is significantly worse than having an affair, being gay, or having never held elected office.
• 47.6% of Americans say they would disapprove if their child wanted to marry an atheist. The rate for marrying a Muslim was 33.6%; for marrying a conservative Christian it was 6.9%.
• 58% of Americans don't believe it's possible to be a moral person without believing in God.
• 61% of Americans say atheists have a negative impact on American culture. Coming in at a distant second with 39% were... Scientologists. Yes, atheists scored far worse than a litigious, psychiatry-hating, power-mad, space operatic cult.
• 52% of Americans have a "mostly" or "very unfavorable" view of atheists. The figure for evangelical Christians: 18%.

Clearly American sentiment toward atheists is overwhelmingly negative, but we can also look specifically at how they're treated. For instance, the Boy Scouts accept members from all religions, but don't allow atheists or even agnostics as scouts or group leaders. Religious people often make the baseless claim that "there are no atheists in foxholes"—and people don't take too kindly when atheist veterans make themselves known. Former President George H.W. Bush allegedly said he didn't think atheists should be considered American citizens. This article includes plenty of other injustices against nonbelievers, some of them downright astonishing.

The most notable and recent example of an atheist being persecuted is the case of Damon Fowler. He's a former public high school student who objected to having a school-sanctioned Christian prayer at his graduation ceremony. He was threatened, his parents kicked him out of his home, and the school decided to give the middle finger to church-state separation and go right on ahead with that prayer. In response, atheists online raised over $30,000 dollars to help pay his college tuition.

Often times even government institutions assume a belief in God. In some areas, only religious clergy are allowed to perform marriages. Religion is sometimes given special treatment in the military. In courtrooms, people are asked to swear on a Bible to tell the truth "so help you God." According to the Pledge of Allegiance (since 1954), we're "one nation under God." And "In God We Trust" is printed on our very currency. Who is this "one nation," and who is this "we"? These terms ought to refer to every American citizen. Why don't they include atheists?

Despite the fact that atheists are the most widely disliked major group in America, there is a silver lining. First, the percentage of people claiming no religion jumped from 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2008. (This admittedly includes non-religious theists, but the percentage of self-identified atheists has similarly increased.) And second, research has shown that as the number of atheists in an area increases, religious prejudices against them in that area are reduced—and it's not just a correlation, but a causal link. As atheists slowly become more prominent, they will eventually be more accepted as well. It's only a matter of time.

My Current Dilemma

Alas, the time for wearing
funny hats is over. Now
real life kicks in.

Last Saturday I graduated from college, and now I enter a period of uncertainty. As uncomfortable as it makes me to say it, my life so far has been a sheltered one, and I don't feel at all prepared to bear the full brunt of the real world. I'm still not totally sure what I want to do as a career, and I still depend a great deal on my parents for both financial and emotional support. At the same time, though, I don't feel like I can spend much longer living under their roof while keeping my atheism a secret from them. While I can fake a Christian outlook as well as anyone, I consider my current double life to be both ethically dubious and emotionally draining.

My parents and sister are fairly fundamentalist evangelicals. On a 1 to 10 scale (1 being casual, non-churchgoing Christians, 10 being full-time missionaries or Pat Robertson) I'd rank them around 7 or 8. As far as I can tell, they're young earth creationists, biblical inerrantists, and believe the rapture may well occur in the next few decades. They're not universally extreme—they don't constantly attribute every event to God or Satan, for example, and they seem at least somewhat ambivalent on the gay marriage issue—but they're definitely more entrenched than the average American.

My sister is heavily indoctrinated via both church and school, and was even the head of her school's "Know Your Faith" club last year. She would put up the best apologetics of the three, but on the other hand, she's generally a rational and reasonable person when it comes to non-religious topics. My mom was raised Pentacostal and is pretty devout. I think she would be the most emotional about my deconversion, and I can't say I'm optimistic about her openness to reasoned arguments. My dad is a convert from Judaism, and he doesn't seem to know all that much about his new religion. Although I'm far more familiar with Christianity, he can debate a point well and tends to be stubborn when he thinks he's in the right.

One of my main problems is that I have virtually no concept of how my family will respond to the idea that a close loved one is an atheist—just about the most foreign, backwards and frightening kind of person you can be. I'm very close to all three of them, but I've never been had any really serious conflicts with them before. No failing grades, arrests or drunken parties. This is bound to come as an absolute shock for them.

So how will they react? I know they'll be upset no matter what, but aside from that, their potential reactions range from mild discomfort to constant attempts at reconversion to kicking me out and effectively disowning me. I don't think either the first or the third is very likely, but again, I've never been on bad terms with them, so I don't have much of a point of reference. I'm also not sure how to break the news to them. Should I sit them down all at once or individually? Should I do it in person, or would writing a letter be less aggravating? I've done some research, but I haven't found any solution that appears to be significantly more successful than the rest.

From what I've read, it sounds like I should hold off on laying out the specific reasons for my unbelief, as they may take those as a personal affront. It's hard, though, because I cringe every time I hear one of them make a derisive comment about evolution or parrot a Bible story without considering its morally repugnant implications. I can't stand the idea that the people I love—people who are otherwise intelligent, wonderful human beings—can display such ignorance in certain areas. I want to educate them, to enlighten them. I imagine a day when we look back and laugh at the things they used to believe, and it pains me that such a day will almost certainly never come.

I've been putting off the announcement of my atheism for a long time, and I'll probably continue to do so for at least a little longer. It's without a doubt the deepest struggle I've ever gone through. The fact that religion has the ability to cause such anguish and uncertainty even in nonbelievers, to potentially rip close-knit families apart, only causes me to oppose it all the more.