My 5 Favorite Freethought Quotes

Now that I've done five installments of my Powerful Thoughts series, I thought it might be a good time to go back through and pick my five favorite quotes from among them. There were so many great ones that it was almost impossible to choose, so I made a Google doc for my 15 favorites. Here are the top five along with my comments:

5. "Answers are a luxury enjoyed only every now and then. So early on, learn to love the questions themselves." –Neil deGrasse Tyson

Curiosity is a great thing because it so often gives rise to discovery, but sometimes the answers elude us. It's easy to grow impatient and settle on the first convenient explanation that comes along even when the real answer is still out there. So we need to value the process of forming and testing hypotheses as much as actually arriving at conclusions—to value the journey as much as the destination. It requires us to think of unanswered questions not as obstacles to be overcome, but as invitations to explore our world.

4. "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." –Thomas Jefferson

How wonderful it is that the same man who authored this quote was also a central Founding Father and our third president. We needed someone of his wisdom to guide this country in its formative years. During this period of American Enlightenment, intellectuals were already starting to question Christianity and embrace deism. But in a letter offering advice to his nephew, Jefferson had the audacity to suggest something that would be unthinkable to most people at the time.

The quote, highlighted on a page of the original letter.

This encouragement of radical, intrepid questioning should be an inspiration to skeptics everywhere. And he follows this by steamrolling the most common obstacle to investigating one's faith—the fear of divine retribution—in a way that beautifully echoes Galileo's disbelief that "the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use".

3. "Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today." –Lawrence Krauss

Plucked from a legendary 2009 physics lecture entitled "A Universe From Nothing," this statement on our origins may at first seem shallow in its irreverence, but I don't see it that way. Too often religions like Christianity rely on the beauty of ideas rather than their truth, making reality look cold and alienating by comparison. People take solace in God's invisible guiding hand and fear that a world without him would be desolate, chaotic, meaningless.

But Krauss shows that in some ways, the natural world can beat the supernatural even at its own game. An innocent god-man being tortured and killed on our behalf is an inspiring tale (if a gruesome and illogical one), but it can't hold a candle to the breathtaking magnificence of cosmology. All the heavier atoms in your body—the oxygen and carbon, the nitrogen and calcium—had to be forged within the blazing furnaces of stars. They later became supernovae, exploding so chaotically that they briefly outshone entire galaxies, forming nebulae rich with heavy elements that then collapsed to form solar systems—and eventually, in our case, intelligent life. Here's Neil deGrasse Tyson again, describing this process:

As Carl Sagan said, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." Truth, it seems, is far more worthy than fiction of our awe and admiration.

2. "Mythology is someone else's religion, different enough from your own for its absurdity to be obvious." –Anonymous

What a perfect summary of the double standard inherent within every exclusivist religion in history. It's so easy for Christians and Buddhists and Muslims to look at each other and scoff at those other peculiar beliefs, all while retaining an intense blind spot with regard to one's own. So persistent is this bias that even I as a former Christian suffer from it, despite my deconversion.

This is why I love Daniel Dennett's suggestion that schoolchildren be taught a mandatory, neutral, fact-based class on world religions. Only the most cripplingly stubborn parents could object to an impartial presentation of alternative belief systems. Yet many students would come out with a more critically informed view of each religion—including their own. The more information kids can access about religions from all cultures, the less likely they are to succumb to the ingroup-outgroup bias that allows religious exclusivism to thrive.

1. "I had no need of that hypothesis." –Pierre-Simon Laplace

This famed quip was in reply to none other than Napoleon, who told Laplace, "They tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace's response encompasses so much in just a few words: the principle of parsimony, the relentless march of science, the ever-diminishing God of the gaps. Although it was probably just an offhand remark, his calm yet firm rejection of God as explanation is emblematic of the human race's steadily increasing storehouse of knowledge.

No need of that hypothesis.

After millions of years of cowering at shadows, we have finally begun to crawl out from the darkness and into the light. We need only to let our eyes adjust to the dazzling brilliance we've discovered. It is my hope that for any incredible explanation that lacks equally incredible evidence, we, as a civilization, will soon have no need of that hypothesis.

The Uncertainty of Intuition

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."  —Richard Feynman

I'm only a novice when it comes to philosophy, but I think I've noticed a general trend within the field. First, someone comes up with a philosophical framework for explaining a certain phenomenon. Then someone else comes up with a counterexample that intuitively appears to falsify that framework. Philsophers are then faced with a couple of options: They can follow their intuitions and either modify the framework or reject it entirely, or they can continue to accept the framework and claim that it's in fact our intuition that's faulty.

Let me give a couple of examples, starting with one in the field of ethics. Utilitarianism, generally speaking, is the ethical theory that one ought to maximize the overall amount of happiness that exists. It seems like a perfectly sensible way of approaching the subject, but some versions of this concept are vulnerable to what Derek Parfit calls the Repugnant Conclusion. In the diagram below, each box represents a population; width measures group size and height measures average happiness. The Repugnant Conclusion is that according to some forms of utilitarianism, Z is preferable to A because Z's total area is greater than A's. In other words, having a massive number of people whose lives are barely worth living is preferable to having a (relatively) small number of people whose lives are extremely happy.

Intuitively, this conclusion does seem repugnant—but is it our ethical theory or our intuition that we should modify in response? Perhaps we look at Z and imagine throngs of people toiling away in a wretched struggle to survive, when what we should realize is that a life "barely worth living" is still worth living. If these people looked back at their lives in their golden years, they could honestly say they were glad to have lived. Hmm... maybe such a world wouldn't be as bad as we think.

In the previous case it was pretty easy to imagine our intuition being wrong. But now let's take on a tougher example, this time from philosophy of mind. The leading philosophical framework for understanding what constitutes a mind is called functionalism (see also the SEP). Basically, it says that what makes a mind is not any particular material (e.g. neurons), but a way of functioning: it must receive inputs which alter its internal state and produce outputs. It could be made of neurons, silicon or anything else as long as it's properly organized and functional.

Enter the China Brain. Ned Block asks us to imagine the entire population of China hooked up to one another in some way (walkie-talkies, for example), with each person corresponding to a neuron. The individuals then communicate in a rudimentary manner that mimics the firing of interconnected neural pathways. The result is sometimes known as a Blockhead.

Haha. Blockhead. Because his last name's Block.

Can this vast collection of people buzzing at each other on walkie-talkies really have mental states? Can it experience sadness or the color red? Block wants us to intuitively conclude that such possibilities are ridiculous, and certainly they seem to be. But how much of this intuition is due to the fact that we normally think of minds as embodied and centralized?

Imagine that we could somehow shrink this crowd of a billion, put them inside a human skull and attach them to the appropriate sensory inputs and motor outputs. If you had a conversation with this entity, who looks and acts exactly like a normal person, would it really be so hard to think of them as having a mind? Conversely, imagine that we could take someone's still-living brain out of their head and the stretch the neurons out across hundreds of square miles. If you walked into the middle of this silky net of microscopic axons, would it seem any more like a thinking, feeling, experiencing mind than the China brain does? Suddenly, the obvious conclusion may not be so obvious anymore.

This post is partly an excuse to share some really cool thought experiments, but I do have a point to make as well: We need to be careful about accepting intuitive philosophical arguments, because they can be engineered (intentionally or not) to push us toward an unwarranted conclusion. Daniel Dennett coined the term "intuition pump" to describe such cases. Often these arguments employ sophisticated misdirection to make us ignore factors that would dramatically change our judgment if properly understood.

Sometimes, too, an argument has at its core a subject that we as fallible humans are just flat-out bad at making judgments about, or even one that lies completely outside our realm of experience. I'm referring specifically to the cosmological argument, which I hope to eventually delve into more deeply. In arguing for Kalam, William Lane Craig proclaims that the temporal universe cannot always have existed because actual infinites cannot exist. He uses the Hilbert hotel paradox as a demonstration of this, but all he's really demonstrated is that the math of infinity is incredibly unintuitive. He also asserts that whatever begins to exist has a cause, and it again seems staggeringly unintuitive to think that the universe could have sprung up uncaused out of absolute nothingness. But a complete lack of everything—space, time, even physical laws—is in such opposition to our everyday experience that making any definitive pronouncements about its properties would be pure folly.

So here's the moral of the story: In all aspects of life, theological and ordinary alike, be skeptical about relying on intuition to solve problems. Your minds is better suited to some tasks than others, and it's beset with biases at every turn. It's easy for subtle yet crucial details to escape your notice, drastically skewing your judgment. Consider a given issue from many perspectives and try to think of what variables you may be leaving out—even when the answer seems clear-cut. Because as satisfying as it is to debunk pseudoscientists and expose charlatans, the most important part of being a skeptic isn't questioning other people. It's questioning yourself.

Born at the Wrong Time

I've had less time for writing due to longer work hours, and I'm in the process of finishing a couple of other posts, but I thought I'd quickly share a mildly interesting experience of mine from this past Sunday.

I don't go to church much anymore, but I did go to Easter service at my parents' request. It was pretty unremarkable and mediocre as far as "Sonrise" sermons go, but one thing really did stick out to me as particularly insightful—though not for the reasons it was intended to be.

The pastor's daughter made a very telling comment. She suggested that God was evident to us in the past (in the form of his interaction with the Israelites and his incarnation in Jesus) and will be in the future (in the form of the Second Coming), but that modern society is caught in a kind of "temporary atheism" because direct access to the divine is unavailable at the moment.

Well, how conveniently inconvenient.

What an odd coincidence it is that we happen to be living in the precise sliver of time during which God isn't overtly interacting with humanity. Christians who subscribe to this line of thought would have us believe that we happen to exist in a sort of divine "blind spot"—one in which God can't be empirically verified, one that looks exactly as if he was never there at all.

Do believers really find this kind of reasoning acceptable? Why doesn't it occur to them that God's "temporary" aloofness might be the rule and not the exception? And if we do reside in the one cursed era of an otherwise God-filled timeline, isn't that a needlessly cruel twist of fate? If he actually wants us to believe in him, why not give everyone the same strong evidence he supposedly gave in antiquity?

In John 20, Jesus lets Doubting Thomas put his hands in the crucifixion wounds and says, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." It's an appalling endorsement of belief without evidence, but at least he gave evidence when asked. As for the billions of skeptics who followed in Thomas' footsteps, I guess we'll be punished eternally for the crime of being born at the wrong time.

Powerful Thoughts, Vol. 5

It's only been a few weeks since the previous installment of Powerful Thoughts, but what can I say? My cup of skepticism runneth over; there are just too many good quotes to choose from. So once again, here are some about God:

• "God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown." –Friedrich Nietzsche
• "Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God." –Jean Rostand
• "If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts." –Bertrand Russell
• "If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has, filled with weaknesses?" –Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "You know when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God's the guy that ignores you." –from The Island

On Christianity:

• "Those who defend their abusers are the most comprehensively enslaved." –QualiaSoup on rationalizing religious atrocity
• "'Oh great, you ate the apple. Now I have to kill my son.' –God" –from reddit
• "There is no such thing as a Christian child, only a child of Christian parents." –from reddit
• "Moderate Christianity seems like a contradiction because its teachings are not something to casually think about here and there." –from reddit
• "That's an awfully nice soul you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it..." –reddit on Pascal's Wager
• "So far as I can remember, there's not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence." –Bertrand Russell
• "What could be more terroristic than 'Believe this or burn for an eternity'? The answer is nothing." –Brian Sapient
• "To say that God was communicating in metaphor through the Bible writers is to say that God needed communications training." –Valerie Tarico
• "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be—a Christian." –Mark Twain

On religion in general:

• "Religion claims to set its followers free... while insisting they kiss the hand of their jailer." –Paula Kirby
• "All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays." –Cathy Ladman
• "The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride." –H.L. Mencken
• "Rooting morality in a being beyond our comprehension only pushes morality beyond our comprehension." –QualiaSoup
• "The day gay marriage is legalized, nothing will change. And that is what religions are afraid of." –from reddit
• "[Religion] is partly the terror of the unknown and partly...the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes." –Bertrand Russell
• "Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion." –Jon Stewart

On reason, science and skepticism:

• "Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you." –Thomas Jefferson
• "I had no need of that hypothesis." –Pierre-Simon Laplace, in reply to Napoleon, who asked why he didn't include God in his calculations of planetary orbits
• "Don't think that because the light of science is dimmer today than tomorrow that you are justified to sneer in the dark." –from reddit
• "Earth is a bacteria planet with a temporary infestation of vertebrates." –from reddit
• "[W]hat is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to ideas." –Carl Sagan
• "You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it." –Carl Sagan
• "[Some] think: 'My God! How Horrible! I am only a machine!' But if I should find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I would say: 'How amazing! I never before realized that machines could be so marvelous!'" –Ray Smullyan
• "[S]cience is a form of arrogance control." –Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
• "Answers are a luxury enjoyed only every now and then. So early on, learn to love the questions themselves." –Neil deGrasse Tyson
• "The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found." –Miguel de Unamuno

And a few more cringeworthy quotes from fundamentalists and other extremists:

• "Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity." –Joseph McCarthy, at the onset of McCarthyism
• "The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not." –Josh McDowell
• "[T]here's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas." –Rick Perry
• "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. ...It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination...[m]ore terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." –Pat Robertson
• "Just because public opinion says something doesn't mean it's right...people said blacks were less than human." –Rick Santorum on gay marriage

You read that last one right, by the way: Santorum used the wrongful discrimination against one minority group as an example... to justify discrimination against another minority group. It's unbelievable what politicians can get away still with saying in the second decade of the 21st century. A couple of decades from now, society will look back at those quotes from Santorum and Perry with the same disgust we have for the racism of politicians like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond.

On a brighter note, plenty of the more clever and insightful quotes from this batch come from the younger generation—the denizens of YouTube and reddit. This dovetails nicely with Adam Lee's observation that the demographics of the recent Reason Rally skewed decidedly toward the youthful end of the spectrum. With all the bright, budding minds sprouting up, maybe there's a little hope for us after all.

Powerful Thoughts, Vol. 4

Welcome to the fourth installment in this series! It's been a while since the last one, but I've amassed so many awesome quotes over the past few months that the fifth will be coming up very soon. Here are some on the topic of God:

• "They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse." –Emily Dickinson
• "I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him." –Albert Einstein
• "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." –Galileo Galilei
• "Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think?" –Robert Ingersoll
• "Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved?" –Joseph Lewis
• "If triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided." –Charles de Montesquieu

On Christianity:

• "Christianity, above all, consoles; but there are naturally happy souls who do not need consolation. Consequently, Christianity begins by making such souls unhappy, for otherwise it would have no power over them." –André Gide
• "Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything—just give him time to rationalize it." –Robert Heinlein
• "There is in every village a torch: The schoolteacher. And an extinguisher: The priest." –Victor Hugo
• "The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless." –Robert Ingersoll
• "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." –Thomas Jefferson
• "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." –Friedrich Nietzsche
• "Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. ... It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge." –Thomas Paine

On religion in general:

• "Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence." –Anon
• "Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable." –Ambrose Bierce
• "Where knowledge ends, religion begins." –Benjamin Disraeli
• "Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." –Albert Einstein
• "The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum." –Havelock Ellis
• "Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." –Robert A. Heinlein
• "If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again." –Penn Jillette
• "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." –Seneca the Younger (attributed)

On reason, science and skepticism:

• "Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice." –Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• "Skepticism is the first step towards truth." –Denis Diderot
• "What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away." –Eugene Gendlin
• "There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts." –Richard Feynman
• "Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form." –Christopher Hitchens
• "Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal." –Robert Heinlein
• "Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men." –Robert Heinlein
• "The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche." –Robert Heinlein
• "It is a very odd world where people reject reason and yet benefit from the riches of reason." –Robin Ince

And finally, a few facepalm-inducing fundie quotes:

• "No one...fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails...because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God." –William Lane Craig
• "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." –Jerry Falwell
• "The fact that [John Kerry] would not support a federal marriage amendment [banning gay marriage], it equates in our minds as someone 150 years ago saying I'm personally opposed to slavery, but if my neighbor wants to own one or two that's OK." –Jerry Falwell
• "I resist Islamic immigration into the United States. ... I think our immigration policies ought to be reserved for...Christians[.]" –Bryan Fischer
• "What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them." –Martin Luther
• "Reason is the Devil's harlot, who can do nought but slander and harm whatever God says and does." –Martin Luther

It's always a bit of a shock reading the religious quotes after the skeptical ones. To plummet from insightful brilliance to the depths of intellectual desolation can be pretty depressing. I recommend going back over your favorite quotes from the other categories to cheer you up again. I'm partial to Montesquieu's three-sided triangle god myself: what a clear and powerful way to sum up the human tendency to create anthropomorphic deities.

Quotable Me, Vol. 3

Occasionally when I have a quick thought and either don't have the time or the inspiration to flesh it out into a blog post, I jot it down on my Twitter feed. Credit for a few of these goes to the sources I was reading or listening to at the time, which I sometimes condense down into a sentence or two. Here's some of the stuff I've posted over the past few months. 

On Christianity:

• Christians don't realize that each jump they make—from supernaturalism to theism to Christianity to fundamentalism—adds another layer of far-fetched assumptions.
• "Not a true Christian" is meaningless from an outsider's perspective since Christianity has no clear, accepted, universal definition.
• The idea that the earth is 6,000 years old causes serious problems for YECs, but the idea that the Flood was just 4,350 years ago is far worse.
• I've come up with a fun game. I tell a lie, and others spend centuries trying to find a way in which it's true. I'll call it... apologetics.
• Apologist (n.) – Someone whose livelihood depends on convincing you that genocide is actually a good thing when God does it.
• I've found that many Christians judge how well others understand the Bible based solely on how much others agree with their interpretation.

On God, religion and atheism:

• The rejection of this life in anticipation of a second one is the ultimate impediment to human progress.
• Vagueness is among religion's most powerful tools. Believers can disagree on every point of doctrine yet still take solace in the same book.
• Calling an unexplained phenomenon a miracle is not an explanation, but an admission of ignorance.
• God-based morality isn't objective. It's still dependent on a particular person; that person just happens to be an omnipotent dictator.
• Religion's most pervasive problem—and its greatest strategic advantage—is that for most people, it's "opt-out."
• Some people try so hard to label atheism a religion due solely to atheists' passion... so can we call "labeling atheism a religion" a religion too?
• If a god exists who punishes questioning and rewards blind faith, reason is the greatest curse he has ever conferred upon humanity.

On science and skepticism:

• Acknowledging a gap in our knowledge is the first step toward filling it.
• Once belief without sufficient evidence is permitted, everything is permitted.
• As a family that has worked its way to riches is nobler than royalty, so is humanity's evolution nobler than special creation.
• Denialists express parallel ignorance. Creationists: "Show me the transitional fossils!" Birthers: "Show me the birth certificate!"
• Idea for countering bias: when you find an opposing argument that you don't know how to answer, add it to a list so you can't brush it off.
• Three words that should never appear together: "required to believe."

Pretty soon I'll also post the fourth installment in my anthology of skeptical quotes from non-me sources.

The God We Would Expect

Our surprising God?

A couple of weeks ago I showed that if we assume the classical Christian God exists, we would expect him to create a very different universe than the one we actually live in. But then it occurred to me: why not try exactly the reverse? If we assume for the sake of argument that God exists, but then remove any prior assumptions we have about him, what would we expect him to be like based solely on what we know about the universe?

Let's find out.

What God Is
The universe as we know it is physical. Therefore, in the absence of any strong reasons to think otherwise, the immediate assumption is that God would be physical as well. It's probably not even meaningful to talk about a spiritual realm: to my knowledge, there's no real definition of what "spiritual" even means. Besides, if God was spiritual, then as I argued in the counterpart to this post, he would have no obvious reason not to make the universe spiritual as well.

If we don't start out by assuming Christianity, we would never in a million years expect God to somehow consist of a "Trinity"—of three "persons" composed of the same divine "substance." This convoluted idea of three entities that are somehow both distinct and unified may not even be coherent, let alone a reasonable prediction based only on our current knowledge. No, without good arguments to the contrary, we would expect God to be a single being—perhaps a very complex one, but certainly not one with some theologically sophisticated split personality.

While we're at it, we might as well dispense with the assumption that God is a "he," or even that "he" has a gender at all. Unless there's more than one of his kind, it would make little sense for him to have an identity as a male or a female. (Regardless, I'll still refer to him as "he" for the sake of clarity and convention.)

What God Wants
What might we expect God's goal to be in creating this universe? Contrary to what most religions of the world believe, we shouldn't necessarily assume that God particularly values humanity—or even life of any kind. If life was the goal, we would expect the universe to be teeming with it in every nook and cranny, yet Earth is the only planet we know of that has any. God seems to love dark matter and black holes more than any living creature, and of the little life that does exist, insects, plants and bacteria seem to be much higher on the divine priority list. Evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane was on the right track when he observed that "the Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other."

As I noted in the other post, we arose through a lengthy and inefficient process of cosmology and evolution. Why would God want to use such a roundabout process? Maybe we should think of him as a cosmic tinkerer, testing out various starting conditions for the formation of the universe—or even as a scientist running simulations. Philosopher Nick Bostrom's simulation argument addresses this directly, and it's probably the best argument for the existence of "God" that I've ever heard. Here's his own summary:

At least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "post-human" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

The idea is that if posthuman civilizations run a lot of detailed computer simulations involving sentient beings, it's far more likely than not that we're in one of those simulations. Both David Chalmers and Bostrom himself assign a 20% probability to this idea. While a simulator probably wouldn't meet the classical "omni" definition of God, they would certainly be one in the broad sense of a highly intelligent creator who wields virtually limitless power over their creation. So what would be the motivation of these demigods? Bostrom has some speculation on that as well:

[P]erhaps future historians would create a Matrix that mimicked the history of their own species. They might do this to find out more about their past, or to explore counterfactual historical scenarios. In the world of the Architect(s), Napoleon may have succeeded in conquering Europe, and our world might be a Matrix created to research what would have happened if Napoleon had been defeated. Or perhaps there will be future artists who create Matrices as an art form much like we create movies and operas. Or perhaps the tourist industry will create simulations of interesting historical epochs so that their contemporaries can go on themed holidays to some bygone age by entering into the simulation and interacting with its inhabitants.

As fanciful as this conjecture may seem, I think it's far more reasonable and grounded in real-world experience than any of the major religions.

Is God Good?
Given the massive amount of suffering in the world—both in human society and in nature—there's no reason to expect that God desires to minimize that suffering. In fact, philosopher Stephen Law has observed that given what we know about the world, we could argue the propositions "God is perfectly evil" and "God is perfectly good" with roughly equal effectiveness.

There are several setups that are more consistent with the amount of evil we observe. One possibility is ditheism: two gods who are equal in power, one good and one evil, battling for control. Or maybe there exists a single God who experiences wild mood swings, creating humanity on a good day and sending natural disasters to wreak havoc on a bad one. But these ideas seem needlessly complex, as a single God who's merely indifferent to our suffering explains our situation just as well. Another option is that God is in fact good, but lacks either the power or the knowledge needed to set things straight in our world.

The existence of countless conflicting religions can actually be construed as evidence that God is something of a sadist. If he's capable of revealing himself to us, he could easily resolve our disputes and unite the world's belief systems. Since we instead find the opposite, perhaps we can predict that God enjoys creating religions and setting them against each other to cause needless confusion and conflict. Granted, it's not the most parsimonious explanation for the inconsistent faiths of the world, but I think it's certainly more consistent with the data than what theists have come up with.

A Suprising God
So what have we learned about our hypothetical God from our observations of the world? Based only on the known facts, we might predict that God (if he existed) would be...

• Physical, not spiritual
• Unitary, not triune
• Genderless, not male
• Fond of dark matter and lower life forms
• A cosmic experimenter
• Indifferent to our suffering

The predictions are somewhat broader than last time around, perhaps because the very concept of God can be interpreted so broadly: from a vindictive monster to a loving father to a clinical tinkerer, or even a pantheon featuring all of the above. With enough tweaking we can get any number of deities to be consistent with our universe. Even so, some gods are clearly more likely than others, and the idea of God we get from viewing the world with an impartial eye is very different from the one we get when we're biased by Christian dogma.

One Nation, Indivisible

Today a Boston news site reported that a family in Acton, Massachusetts, has filed suit against the local school district to get them to remove the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Naturally, the reaction from most believers is extremely negative. The comments section of the article has been overwhelmed by the denizens of r/atheism, but here are a few of the comments from theists:

It's a bit like watching one of those terrible reality TV shows: it's utter drivel, yet its very foulness is what makes it so fascinating. Having read far too much of the comments section, I concluded that the arguments boil down to...

• "If you don't like it, don't say it." – A totally backwards understanding of how religion is treated in this country. How about we add "hail Satan" to the pledge and see how you like that logic?
• "The majority wants it." – The majority wants a lot of things. For much of our history the majority wanted slavery legalized. Fortunately, we have a Constitution that defends the rights of the minority.
• "We've had it for a long time." – Appeal to tradition, and a false one at that: "Under God" was added in 1954 in a sensationalized, fearmongering response to the godless Soviets.
• "This country was founded on Christian principles." – Genetic fallacy, and again, a false one at that.
• "It's a waste of time/money." – Defeating a blatant and widespread violation of church-state separation, removing a phrase that marginalizes a huge segment of the population, and raising awareness that not everyone believes we're "under God" is an extremely worthwhile effort.
• "You're infringing on our freedom of religion." – Seriously? Wow.

What most of the believers don't seem to realize is that it's not just non-religious atheists who aren't included in the pledge's current incarnation. "Under God" specifies a single sovereign deity. It marginalizes not only nonbelievers, but also many atheistic, pantheistic and polytheistic religions. Buddhists, for example, often don't believe in any sort of supreme being, and many Hindus believe in hundreds of deities without claiming one as supreme.

I did see one comment retorting that he'd never heard any of these religious people speak up to voice their discontent. This argument reveals an startling naiveness: did he ever consider that they might be afraid to speak up precisely because of the responses this issue gets from many monotheists?

Even if we completely ignore the fact that the pledge violates the Constitution and alienates both religious and nonreligious groups, there's another completely separate reason that "under God" should be removed: it's factually inaccurate. America is clearly and objectively not united by a belief in God, no matter how much some theists want it to be. I wonder how believers would feel about issue if they realized that we're essentially lying about being "one nation under God." If God exists, surely he'd rather that we own up to the fact that some of us don't believe. Instead of deceiving ourselves about our collective beliefs out of wishful thinking, we should focus on the values that truly make this country great: liberty and justice for all.

Update: Hemant Mehta over at Friendly Atheist has more details on the lawsuit. The family is using the Massachusetts Constitution's "equal protection" guarantee rather than church-state separation as their legal. According to a lawyer he talked to, this is a good route to take. Incredibly, a Christian group called The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is counter-suing, because apparently the first suit discriminates against theists. Their sense of entitlement is staggering.

The World We Would Expect

Our surprising universe.

Christians tend to take it for granted that our universe is itself strong evidence for classical theism. But this belief is deeply misguided, as we can demonstrate with a simple thought experiment. If we start from scratch without any partiality toward the world we actually live in, what sort of world would we expect God to create? If we assume that God is a triune, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, timeless, eternal, unchanging, loving, just, personal, perfect creator, what can we predict about his creation?

No World At All?
Given God's perfection, we wouldn't really expect him to create a world at all. One wouldn't expect a perfect being to be lacking in any respect, so there would simply be no need to create anything. Theologians actually tend to agree on this point: they're quite insistent that God is completely self-sufficient and has no actual need of his creation.

So their ingenious solution is to point to another of God's attributes: love. Love requires an object, and although the three persons of the Trinity supposedly serve this purpose for one another, apologist Ralph Wagener asserts that God wanted his "abundant love" to "extend...beyond the trinity to others." In response, Horia Plugaru contends that "God was indeed motivated by need in creating the universe" because without fallible beings, God would be unable to maximize his love through the greatest form of loving act: self-sacrifice. This would mean that contra the claims of apologists, God would be in some sense imperfect.

Frankly, I'm not sure whether I buy either Wagener's defense or Plugaru's counter. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that God would create fallible beings and move on from there.

A World Made for Us
So then, what would a world made for us look like? First of all, since Christians believe that both God and humans are essentially spiritual, one would expect the world God creates to be spiritual as well. There's no particular reason to think that God would create a world composed of a fundamentally different kind of "stuff," a collection of physical particles that interact according to some seemingly arbitrary set of laws. A purely spiritual realm would be not only simpler, but also far superior in some aspects: for example, there would be no physical brains to cause irrational decisions and mental illness.

Furthermore, if God values humanity, there's no clear reason for him to create us using a long and inefficient process of galaxy formation and natural selection—in that sense, at least, the young earth creationists have it exactly right. And insofar as a spiritual realm would still have use for concepts like "space," one would also expect a world appropriate for our size—as opposed to the almost inconceivable vastness of the physical realm, most of which is completely beyond our reach or even our observation. It should also be a deeply livable place—as opposed to the one we subsist in, as land animals on a planet covered 70% by water, in a universe filled with dark matter, black holes and the vacuum of space.

Pictured at center right: us.

A World of Love
Since God is assumed to be perfectly good, the world should be completely free of unnecessary evil. We also shouldn't expect any flaws in God's personality, such as vanity, bloodlust or an out-of-control temper. If we're ever deserving of punishment, that punishment should fit the crime: no indiscriminate mass slaughters. And since God is meant to be perfectly just, humans should be treated equally: there's no excuse for divine endorsement of slavery, misogyny, homophobia or one particular favored group of people.

We should expect not only equal treatment, but equal and open access to the divine. There's a common but erroneous idea that if God revealed himself to us, it would somehow rob us of the ability to freely follow him. The obvious counterexample comes from none other than Satan himself, who, despite being quite intimately acquainted with God, supposedly led a third of the angels in rebellion against him. So in the world we would expect, God is easily detectable by all of his creation—and we would know exactly what (if anything) he wants from us.

What would we expect the nature of our relationship with God to be like? Apparently we're the objects of his perfect love, although what that entails isn't totally clear. One thing I would never predict from a perfect, transcendent and loving being, though, is a demand for burnt offerings and worship. Those practices lie squarely in the domain of the weak, petty, self-absorbed tribal gods created by ancient, barbaric societies. Would God expect us to reciprocate his love? Perhaps, but to punish us if we don't seems to miss the point of "perfect love" entirely.

God's sense of justice might well lead him to reward and punish us, but these judgments would have nothing to do with belief or requited love. There's also no reason to expect that God would use perfection as the standard by which he judges us. It would be much more reasonable for him to judge us based on whether our actions tend to help or harm others—within the scope of our limited abilities. Again, the punishment should fit the crime, and we wouldn't expect even the most evil crimes to be worthy of endless suffering. Nor is there a particular need for a system of discrete lives and afterlives: one continuous, ongoing phase of life should suffice. And even if we assume that our lives are eternal by default, we shouldn't assume that eternal life is mandatory. If after a few quadrillion years we grow weary of our existence, we'd be well within our rights to self-terminate.

Our Surprising World
Here, then, is what we can say about the world we might predict given only the traits of the classical Christian God to work off of. If we even expect such a God to create a world of fallible people at all, we would expect that world to be...

• Spiritual and not physical
• Young, with life formed via special creation
• Of appropriate size and content
• Free from all unnecessary evil

And we would expect God himself to...

• Treat everyone equally
• Make his existence and his expectations of us evident
• Be free of character flaws
• Not demand sacrifices, worship or love
• Give us a single, optional life
• Reward or punish us based on actions, not belief
• Reward or punish in proportion with those actions

What a strange and surprising result! As it turns out, our predictions about the world don't correspond to reality, and our predictions about God don't correspond to what we find in the Bible.

How do we explain this massive disconnect between hypothesis and results? Well, it's possible that God has good reasons for not doing all the things we expect him to, reasons that are just too complicated for us to comprehend. But possible is not the same as probable, and the idea that this would be true for every single one of the above points is improbable in the extreme.

Another possibility, one that seems much more likely, is that our predictions were based on false premises. Either God just isn't there, or he isn't the loving, personal omnibeing that Christians claim him to be. When we take a step back and figure out what kind of world we would expect of God, it turns out to be so radically different from the one we live in that it strongly implies he—or at least this version of him—does not exist.

Infographic Interlude

When it comes to getting a point across, a single chart can sometimes be just as effective as a whole essay. Below are five examples that provide insightful criticism toward some aspect of religion.

Some fundamentalist Christians insist that laws in America have their basis in the Ten Commandments, and even that the ancient tablets should be placed in prominent positions in our nation's courthouses. Well, are American laws based on the Commandments? Absolutely not, and I made a handy chart to illustrate this:

In fact, not only does our justice system disregard most of these restrictions (and rightly so), but the first four commandments would violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The rest of these graphics are made by others. Here's one that deals a devastating blow to the concept of prayer as most Christians understand it:

The solutions to this are to assert that God changes his perfect plan to suit the whims of his followers, or to maintain that prayer is only meant to commune with God and reaffirm what he has already chosen to do. The former seems incompatible with God's omniscience—if that was a better course of action, he should already have planned on taking it—while the latter contradicts what Jesus himself said.

Here's a graphic that explains why it's laughable for the religious right to use the Bible in support of "traditional marriage" in the sense of a loving, monogamous, heterosexual relationship. The Bible is clearly not a useful guide to what types of marriage we should allow, given that it tolerates and even endorses varieties of marriage that we recognize as reprehensible today:

Another simple illustration. It seems awfully convenient that God's demonstrations of power become steadily less impressive the closer we get to modern times (and reliable recording devices):

Finally, here's a beautifully color-coded illustration of the correlations between religiosity and various measures of societal health and quality of life in all 50 states. The pattern is visible with just a glance:

Of course, this doesn't establish that religion causes social problems, but it's still a powerful counterexample to the fundamentalist idea that turning our back on God causes God to turn his back on us, leaving civilizations in chaos. Nonreligious people can and often do create healthy and well-functioning societies.

Whether they're data-rich or just convey ideas in an accessible format, visual demonstrations can get a point across with startling efficiency. Words are powerful tools, but sometimes people will give opposing views only a few seconds of open-mindedness before shutting them out. When interacting with believers, I think that a few easy-to-digest graphics can potentially go a long way.