Barack Obama has squandered his presidency. He had a fleeting moment to challenge the casino capitalism and financial recklessness of our economic and political elite. He could have orchestrated a state socialism that would have provided a safety net for tens of millions of Americans faced with dislocation and misery. The sums he has doled out to Wall Street could have been used to force companies to keep workers on the job or create new banks to open up credit. But he lacked the foresight and the courage to challenge entrenched power. And now we are headed down one of two frightening roads-massive deflation or hyperinflation. Neither will be pleasant.
Hyman Minsky-an economist largely ignored during his lifetime and now held up as something of a prophet-argued that speculative bubbles, and the financial collapses that follow them, are an inevitable consequence of unregulated capitalism. Minsky, an economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis who died in 1996, warned: "The normal functioning of our economy leads to financial trauma and crises, inflation, currency depreciations, unemployment and poverty in the middle of what could be virtually universal affluence-in short ... financially complex capitalism is inherently flawed." He called for socialized banking and stimulus packages to protect workers.
Our Minsky moment, however, has passed. Obama did not introduce radical measures to change our financial structures. And the outlook, even from Obama's chief financial advisers, is very gloomy. The U.S. economy will continue to contract "for some time to come," said Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council. "I expect the economy will continue to decline," with "sharp declines in employment for quite some time this year," Summers said Sunday on "Fox News Sunday."
The International Monetary Fund has forecast that the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year and have no growth in 2010, with unemployment rising to 10.1 percent.
Deflation, for the moment, remains our most immediate threat. The Labor Department reported that in March the consumer price index fell 0.4 percent over the last year, the first decline in over 50 years. Home values have fallen in the last year by 18 percent. Our current deflation is not the massive deflation endured during the Great Depression, but if it continues, and it becomes sustained, it will wreck our economy. I suspect that the few trillion dollars thrown at an economy that may have lost as much as $40 trillion in wealth means deflation will win out.
A sustained deflation, such as the one that has afflicted Japan, would make it much harder for borrowers, who would have less cash, to pay off debt. It would fuel more defaults, see more bankruptcies and dry up credit. It would lead to a fall in wages. Those attempting to sell houses, or any other products, would watch helplessly as the value of what they own evaporated.
Classical economic theory states that when you pump huge sums of money into the economy you produce inflation. And Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would like to trigger inflation to relieve the heavy debts weighing on many banks and investment houses. Inflation, because it reduces the value of the dollar, effectively devalues debts and reduces what many owe. This push toward inflation is why we have low interest rates. This is why we are printing and borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars. And this is why projected deficits are almost beyond comprehension.
The Congressional Budget Office recently released its analysis of the Obama administration's 10-year budget proposal. The projected deficit for fiscal year 2009 is $1.8 trillion. And the CBO projects deficits over the next 10 years that annually are between about $650 billion and $1 trillion. The CBO also projects that the outstanding federal debt held by the public will increase from 40.8 percent of GDP in 2008 to 82.4 percent in 2019. This is a doubling of the national debt over the next 10 years. These deficits are being produced to jump-start the economy, to prevent deflation and to produce inflation.
Inflation, which may look good if you are a Wall Street firm overloaded with bad debt, is as risky as deflation, however. It can easily morph into hyperinflation and bring, like deflation, political and economic instability. It can lead to runs on banks. It can make your currency worthless. It discourages investment and thrift. And when you borrow at the level we are borrowing at you frequently debauch your currency. This could lead to the dollar being abandoned as a global currency. Why would the Chinese, or anyone else, want to keep buying our debt while we work overtime to devalue our currency? It means, in essence, that they can never make a profit and what they own is being reduced daily in value.
Hyperinflation is never controlled domestically. It is created by outside forces. If China and other buyers of our debt view the endlessly increasing American deficit spending as a threat to the viability of the U.S. dollar they will abandon the dollar and reduce their purchases of treasury bills. Chinese leaders have already questioned the wisdom of keeping foreign reserves predominantly in the form of U.S. dollar-denominated treasury bills and bonds. And if they walk away from the dollar our currency will become junk and hyperinflation will race through the society like a plague.
Deflation or hyperinflation will be our nemesis. These are the only two options left. The speculators on Wall Street and in the White House are again rolling the dice. But be assured that no matter what combination comes up we are going to be fleeced.
by Chris Hedges
Published on Monday, April 27, 2009 by TruthDig.com
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/27-1
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Reclaiming America’s Soul
"Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify torture. Some people in the political and media establishments have echoed his position. We need to look forward, not backward, they say. No prosecutions, please; no investigations; we're just too busy.
And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn't revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can't afford?
No, it isn't, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. "This government does not torture people," declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.
And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.
What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration's abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true - even if truth and justice came at a high price - that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren't supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?
For example, would investigating the crimes of the Bush era really divert time and energy needed elsewhere? Let's be concrete: whose time and energy are we talking about?
Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn't be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn't be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn't be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn't, and indeed shouldn't, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job - which he's supposed to do in any case - and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.
I don't know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.
Still, you might argue - and many do - that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.
But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama's attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.
That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren't allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.
Some of them probably just don't want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn't won't make it go away.
Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don't want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.
For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract "confessions" that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.
It's hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn't, now declare that we should forget the whole era - for the sake of the country, of course.
Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions - not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.
We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn't about looking backward, it's about looking forward - because it's about reclaiming America's soul.
by Paul Krugman
Published on Friday, April 24, 2009 by The New York Times
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/24-6
And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn't revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can't afford?
No, it isn't, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. "This government does not torture people," declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.
And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.
What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration's abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true - even if truth and justice came at a high price - that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren't supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?
For example, would investigating the crimes of the Bush era really divert time and energy needed elsewhere? Let's be concrete: whose time and energy are we talking about?
Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn't be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn't be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn't be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn't, and indeed shouldn't, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job - which he's supposed to do in any case - and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.
I don't know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.
Still, you might argue - and many do - that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.
But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama's attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.
That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren't allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.
Some of them probably just don't want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn't won't make it go away.
Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don't want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.
For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract "confessions" that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.
It's hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn't, now declare that we should forget the whole era - for the sake of the country, of course.
Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions - not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.
We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn't about looking backward, it's about looking forward - because it's about reclaiming America's soul.
by Paul Krugman
Published on Friday, April 24, 2009 by The New York Times
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/24-6
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The Pulitzer-Winning Investigation That Dare Not Be Uttered on TV
The New York Times' David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize yesterday for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of The Paper of Record, were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Bartow uncovered. Here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow's exposés:
By whom were these "ties to companies" undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox -- the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. They kept completely silent about Barstow's story even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs. The Pentagon's secret collaboration with these "independent analysts" shaped multiple news stories from each of these outlets on a variety of critical topics. Most amazingly, many of them continue to employ as so-called "independent analysts" the very retired generals at the heart of Barstow's story, yet still refuse to inform their viewers about any part of this story.
And even now that Barstow yesterday won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting -- one of the most prestigious awards any news story can win -- these revelations still may not be uttered on television, tragically dashing the hope expressed yesterday (rhetorically, I presume) by Media Matters' Jamison Foser that "maybe now that the story has won a Pulitzer for Barstow, they'll pay attention." Instead, it was Atrios' prediction that was decisively confirmed: "I don't think a Pulitzer will be enough to give the military analyst story more attention." Here is what Brian Williams said last night on his NBC News broadcast in reporting on the prestigious awards:
No mention that among the five NYT prizes was one for investigative reporting. Williams did manage to promote the fact that one of the award winners was an MSNBC contributor, but sadly did not find the time to inform his viewers that NBC News' war reporting and one of Williams' still-featured premiere "independent analysts," Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was and continues to be at the heart of the scandal for which Barstow won the Pulitzer. Williams' refusal to inform his readers about this now-Pulitzer-winning story is particularly notable given his direct personal involvement in the secret, joint attempts by NBC and McCaffrey to contain P.R. damage to NBC from Barstow's story, compounded by the fact that NBC was on notice of these multiple conflicts as early as April, 2003, when The Nation first reported on them.
Identically, CNN ran an 898-word story on the various Pulitzer winners -- describing virtually every winner -- but was simply unable to find any space even to mention David Barstow's name, let alone inform their readers that he won the Prize for uncovering core corruption at the heart of CNN's coverage of the Iraq War and other military-related matters. No other television news outlet implicated by Barstow's story mentioned his award, at least as far as I can tell.
The outright refusal of any of these "news organizations" even to mention what Barstow uncovered about the Pentagon's propaganda program and the way it infected their coverage is one of the most illuminating events revealing how they operate. So transparently corrupt and journalistically disgraceful is their blackout of this story that even Howard Kurtz and Politico -- that's Howard Kurtz and Politico -- lambasted them for this concealment. Meaningful criticisms of media stars from media critic (and CNN star) Howie Kurtz is about as rare as prosecutions for politically powerful lawbreakers in America, yet this is what he said about the television media's suppression of Barstow's story: "their coverage of this important issue has been pathetic."
Has there ever been another Pulitzer-Prize-winning story for investigative reporting never to be mentioned on major television -- let alone one that was twice featured as the lead story on the front page of The New York Times? To pose the question is to answer it.
by Glenn Greenwald
Published on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by Salon.com
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/21-6
Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.
By whom were these "ties to companies" undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox -- the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. They kept completely silent about Barstow's story even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs. The Pentagon's secret collaboration with these "independent analysts" shaped multiple news stories from each of these outlets on a variety of critical topics. Most amazingly, many of them continue to employ as so-called "independent analysts" the very retired generals at the heart of Barstow's story, yet still refuse to inform their viewers about any part of this story.
And even now that Barstow yesterday won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting -- one of the most prestigious awards any news story can win -- these revelations still may not be uttered on television, tragically dashing the hope expressed yesterday (rhetorically, I presume) by Media Matters' Jamison Foser that "maybe now that the story has won a Pulitzer for Barstow, they'll pay attention." Instead, it was Atrios' prediction that was decisively confirmed: "I don't think a Pulitzer will be enough to give the military analyst story more attention." Here is what Brian Williams said last night on his NBC News broadcast in reporting on the prestigious awards:
The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and the arts were awarded today. The New York Times led the way with five, including awards for breaking news and international reporting. Las Vegas Sun won for the public service category for its reporting on construction worker deaths in that city. Best commentary went to Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who of course was an on-air commentator for us on MSNBC all through the election season and continues to be. And the award for best biography went to John Meacham, the editor of Newsweek magazine, for his book "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House."
No mention that among the five NYT prizes was one for investigative reporting. Williams did manage to promote the fact that one of the award winners was an MSNBC contributor, but sadly did not find the time to inform his viewers that NBC News' war reporting and one of Williams' still-featured premiere "independent analysts," Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was and continues to be at the heart of the scandal for which Barstow won the Pulitzer. Williams' refusal to inform his readers about this now-Pulitzer-winning story is particularly notable given his direct personal involvement in the secret, joint attempts by NBC and McCaffrey to contain P.R. damage to NBC from Barstow's story, compounded by the fact that NBC was on notice of these multiple conflicts as early as April, 2003, when The Nation first reported on them.
Identically, CNN ran an 898-word story on the various Pulitzer winners -- describing virtually every winner -- but was simply unable to find any space even to mention David Barstow's name, let alone inform their readers that he won the Prize for uncovering core corruption at the heart of CNN's coverage of the Iraq War and other military-related matters. No other television news outlet implicated by Barstow's story mentioned his award, at least as far as I can tell.
The outright refusal of any of these "news organizations" even to mention what Barstow uncovered about the Pentagon's propaganda program and the way it infected their coverage is one of the most illuminating events revealing how they operate. So transparently corrupt and journalistically disgraceful is their blackout of this story that even Howard Kurtz and Politico -- that's Howard Kurtz and Politico -- lambasted them for this concealment. Meaningful criticisms of media stars from media critic (and CNN star) Howie Kurtz is about as rare as prosecutions for politically powerful lawbreakers in America, yet this is what he said about the television media's suppression of Barstow's story: "their coverage of this important issue has been pathetic."
Has there ever been another Pulitzer-Prize-winning story for investigative reporting never to be mentioned on major television -- let alone one that was twice featured as the lead story on the front page of The New York Times? To pose the question is to answer it.
by Glenn Greenwald
Published on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by Salon.com
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/21-6
In Iraq, 'Everybody Knows Somebody Killed by the War'
BAGHDAD - Amir Jabbar doesn't know how many of his friends have been murdered since the Iraq war started six years ago. He stopped counting sometime back in 2007. The numbers just got too high, he said.
"Maybe 10. Maybe more," the 31-year-old parking lot attendant said, shrugging. "It's too many."
Most of them were blown up in bomb attacks, he explained. A few just disappeared. They've been gone so long that he figures they aren't coming back.
"In my neighborhood, Sadriyah, it was very bad," said Jabbar, who stopped to talk on a busy Baghdad street corner as he ran errands. "Maybe I know more who died than most people, but everybody knows somebody killed by the war, of course."
Six years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, America is preparing to start leaving Iraq. If all goes as the Obama administration hopes it will, the democracy that America installed will take root and blossom, violence will continue to decline and Iraq's ethnic, sectarian and religious factions - still vying for their say in the country's future - will reconcile with one another.
That's the best-case scenario, however, and if it ever comes true, it won't be for some time.
What America will leave behind in Iraq, at least in broad terms, is still unknown, but Iraqis already are living with what's sure to remain the war's most personal vestige: the absence of the dead. Almost no Iraqi has escaped that trauma.
No comprehensive, reliable civilian body count exists, but so many people have been killed in the past six years that it's nearly impossible to find an Iraqi who doesn't know someone who died violently, either because of actions by American troops or, far more commonly, in the widespread bloodletting that the invasion triggered.
Walk down any street in any Baghdad neighborhood and, chances are, everyone who passes by has lost someone. Most can name more than one.
Saleh Abu Ghaith, a 46-year-old shoe merchant, lost his brother-in-law. Ghaith remembers him as a hard worker and a good father who was driving his daughter to school in 2006 when a group of men dragged him out of his car in Baghdad's Ameriyah neighborhood.
"He was Shiite living in a Sunni area," Ghaith said. "We think they wanted to take him for ransom."
Ghaith's brother-in-law wasn't one to go without a fight, however. "He resisted, so they killed him then and there," Ghaith recalled, sitting behind the counter at his small shop. "No one was ever arrested for this."
Mohamed Latif lost his brother and his grandmother.
His brother died first, about three years ago. He went out for a walk and never came home. Neighbors told Latif's family that they saw two men abduct him. They found his body the next morning, shot in the head and buried under a pile of trash on the side of the road near the family's house in Iskandariyah, in southern Iraq.
"My father never recovered," said Latif, who's 22 and can't find work. "He died, too, but of a broken heart."
Latif's grandmother was murdered in 2007, when Iraq's sectarian violence was at its worst. Someone threw a grenade through her window.
"Yes, it's sad," said Latif, who fled Iskandariyah and now lives in Baghdad, "but this is normal for us. So many people can tell you the same stories."
Those stories, and the consistency with which they can be found, may be the best, if unscientific, gauge of the war's civilian toll.
Several agencies, including the Iraqi government and a few private groups based outside the country, track war-related deaths, but most acknowledge that their figures aren't comprehensive. Their body counts vary widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
"The reality is that in war, civilian deaths are always the least likely to be properly counted and recognized, no matter how numerous they are," said John Sloboda, a co-founder of Iraq Body Count, which has recorded roughly 100,000 war-related civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003. "That's why we decided to do this, because all victims should be recognized."
Sloboda is careful to note that his organization's count, which relies mostly on news reports, isn't an estimate of the number of civilians who've been killed.
"This is the number of deaths that we're certain have taken place," he said. "It's the ones we know about. But there are undoubtedly ones we don't."
Some of the neighbors whom Samia Ahmed lost are among those who probably won't ever be counted, at least not as long as their bodies are still missing.
"A few on my street disappeared," said the 66-year-old, who sells tea on Abu Nawas Street in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood. "Maybe some of them were found, but I don't think so."
Although he's only 10, Hussein Karim has his own body count.
"Two of my aunts," he said, taking a rest from playing with his cousins at a park in Karrada.
One aunt died in 2007 in Baghdad's Sadr City district. A mother of five, she was caught in crossfire between American troops and the Mahdi Army, a Shiite Muslim militia, and was shot in the street. The other aunt died last year in a bombing while she was driving.
"The explosion killed her," Hussein said. "She was melted to the seat in her car."
by Corinne Reilly
Published on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by the McClatchy Newspapers
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/04/21-1
"Maybe 10. Maybe more," the 31-year-old parking lot attendant said, shrugging. "It's too many."
Most of them were blown up in bomb attacks, he explained. A few just disappeared. They've been gone so long that he figures they aren't coming back.
"In my neighborhood, Sadriyah, it was very bad," said Jabbar, who stopped to talk on a busy Baghdad street corner as he ran errands. "Maybe I know more who died than most people, but everybody knows somebody killed by the war, of course."
Six years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, America is preparing to start leaving Iraq. If all goes as the Obama administration hopes it will, the democracy that America installed will take root and blossom, violence will continue to decline and Iraq's ethnic, sectarian and religious factions - still vying for their say in the country's future - will reconcile with one another.
That's the best-case scenario, however, and if it ever comes true, it won't be for some time.
What America will leave behind in Iraq, at least in broad terms, is still unknown, but Iraqis already are living with what's sure to remain the war's most personal vestige: the absence of the dead. Almost no Iraqi has escaped that trauma.
No comprehensive, reliable civilian body count exists, but so many people have been killed in the past six years that it's nearly impossible to find an Iraqi who doesn't know someone who died violently, either because of actions by American troops or, far more commonly, in the widespread bloodletting that the invasion triggered.
Walk down any street in any Baghdad neighborhood and, chances are, everyone who passes by has lost someone. Most can name more than one.
Saleh Abu Ghaith, a 46-year-old shoe merchant, lost his brother-in-law. Ghaith remembers him as a hard worker and a good father who was driving his daughter to school in 2006 when a group of men dragged him out of his car in Baghdad's Ameriyah neighborhood.
"He was Shiite living in a Sunni area," Ghaith said. "We think they wanted to take him for ransom."
Ghaith's brother-in-law wasn't one to go without a fight, however. "He resisted, so they killed him then and there," Ghaith recalled, sitting behind the counter at his small shop. "No one was ever arrested for this."
Mohamed Latif lost his brother and his grandmother.
His brother died first, about three years ago. He went out for a walk and never came home. Neighbors told Latif's family that they saw two men abduct him. They found his body the next morning, shot in the head and buried under a pile of trash on the side of the road near the family's house in Iskandariyah, in southern Iraq.
"My father never recovered," said Latif, who's 22 and can't find work. "He died, too, but of a broken heart."
Latif's grandmother was murdered in 2007, when Iraq's sectarian violence was at its worst. Someone threw a grenade through her window.
"Yes, it's sad," said Latif, who fled Iskandariyah and now lives in Baghdad, "but this is normal for us. So many people can tell you the same stories."
Those stories, and the consistency with which they can be found, may be the best, if unscientific, gauge of the war's civilian toll.
Several agencies, including the Iraqi government and a few private groups based outside the country, track war-related deaths, but most acknowledge that their figures aren't comprehensive. Their body counts vary widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
"The reality is that in war, civilian deaths are always the least likely to be properly counted and recognized, no matter how numerous they are," said John Sloboda, a co-founder of Iraq Body Count, which has recorded roughly 100,000 war-related civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003. "That's why we decided to do this, because all victims should be recognized."
Sloboda is careful to note that his organization's count, which relies mostly on news reports, isn't an estimate of the number of civilians who've been killed.
"This is the number of deaths that we're certain have taken place," he said. "It's the ones we know about. But there are undoubtedly ones we don't."
Some of the neighbors whom Samia Ahmed lost are among those who probably won't ever be counted, at least not as long as their bodies are still missing.
"A few on my street disappeared," said the 66-year-old, who sells tea on Abu Nawas Street in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood. "Maybe some of them were found, but I don't think so."
Although he's only 10, Hussein Karim has his own body count.
"Two of my aunts," he said, taking a rest from playing with his cousins at a park in Karrada.
One aunt died in 2007 in Baghdad's Sadr City district. A mother of five, she was caught in crossfire between American troops and the Mahdi Army, a Shiite Muslim militia, and was shot in the street. The other aunt died last year in a bombing while she was driving.
"The explosion killed her," Hussein said. "She was melted to the seat in her car."
by Corinne Reilly
Published on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by the McClatchy Newspapers
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/04/21-1
Torturers Should Be Punished
SPOKANE, Wash. - George W. Bush insisted that the U.S. did not use torture.
But the four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos released last week by the Obama administration's Justice Department paint a starkly different picture. The declassified memos provided legal authorization for "harsh interrogation techniques" used by the Bush administration in the years following Sept. 11, 2001. They authorized (as listed in the Aug. 1, 2002, memo by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee) "walling ... facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and the waterboard."
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the OLC under Bush "became a facilitator for illegal government conduct, issuing dozens of memos meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law."
The memos authorize what the International Committee of the Red Cross called, in a leaked report, "treatment and interrogation techniques ... that amounted to torture."
These torture techniques were developed by two psychologists based in Spokane, Wash.: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Their company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, provided specialized training to members of the U.S. military to deal with capture by enemy forces. The training is called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Mitchell and Jessen, both psychologists, were contracted by the U.S. government to train interrogators with techniques they claimed would break prisoners.
They reverse-engineered the SERE training, originally developed to help people withstand and survive torture, to train a new generation of torturers.
The memos provide gruesome details of the torture. Waterboarding was used hundreds of times on a number of prisoners. The Bybee memo includes this Kafkaesque authorization: "You would like to place [Abu] Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him."
After President Barack Obama said there should be no prosecutions, he was received with great fanfare at the CIA this week. Mark Benjamin, the reporter who originally broke the Mitchell and Jessen story, said when I questioned him about Obama's position: "If you look at the president's statements and you combine them with the statements of Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Eric Holder, the attorney general ... you will see that over the last couple of days the Obama administration has announced that no one, not the people who carried out the torture program or the people who designed the program or the people that authorized the program or the people who said that it was legal-even though they knew that it frankly wasn't-none of those people will ever face charges. The attorney general has announced that ... the government will pay the legal fees for anybody who is brought up on any charges anywhere in the world or has to go before Congress. They will be provided attorneys ... they have been given this blanket immunity ... in return for nothing."
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein asked Obama to hold off on ruling out prosecutions until her panel finishes an investigation during the next six months. Though Obama promises to let the torturers go, others are pursuing them. Bybee is now a federal judge. A grass-roots movement, including Common Cause and the Center for Constitutional Rights, is calling on Congress to impeach Bybee. In Spain, Judge Baltasar Garzon, who got Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet indicted for crimes against humanity, has named Bybee and five others as targets of a prosecution.
For years, people have felt they have been hitting their heads against walls (some suffered this literally, as the memos detail). On Election Day, it looked like that wall had become a door. But that door is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change. We need a universal standard of justice. Torturers should be punished.
(Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.)
by Amy Goodman
Published on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 by TruthDig.com
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/22-2
But the four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos released last week by the Obama administration's Justice Department paint a starkly different picture. The declassified memos provided legal authorization for "harsh interrogation techniques" used by the Bush administration in the years following Sept. 11, 2001. They authorized (as listed in the Aug. 1, 2002, memo by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee) "walling ... facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and the waterboard."
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the OLC under Bush "became a facilitator for illegal government conduct, issuing dozens of memos meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law."
The memos authorize what the International Committee of the Red Cross called, in a leaked report, "treatment and interrogation techniques ... that amounted to torture."
These torture techniques were developed by two psychologists based in Spokane, Wash.: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Their company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, provided specialized training to members of the U.S. military to deal with capture by enemy forces. The training is called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Mitchell and Jessen, both psychologists, were contracted by the U.S. government to train interrogators with techniques they claimed would break prisoners.
They reverse-engineered the SERE training, originally developed to help people withstand and survive torture, to train a new generation of torturers.
The memos provide gruesome details of the torture. Waterboarding was used hundreds of times on a number of prisoners. The Bybee memo includes this Kafkaesque authorization: "You would like to place [Abu] Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him."
After President Barack Obama said there should be no prosecutions, he was received with great fanfare at the CIA this week. Mark Benjamin, the reporter who originally broke the Mitchell and Jessen story, said when I questioned him about Obama's position: "If you look at the president's statements and you combine them with the statements of Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Eric Holder, the attorney general ... you will see that over the last couple of days the Obama administration has announced that no one, not the people who carried out the torture program or the people who designed the program or the people that authorized the program or the people who said that it was legal-even though they knew that it frankly wasn't-none of those people will ever face charges. The attorney general has announced that ... the government will pay the legal fees for anybody who is brought up on any charges anywhere in the world or has to go before Congress. They will be provided attorneys ... they have been given this blanket immunity ... in return for nothing."
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein asked Obama to hold off on ruling out prosecutions until her panel finishes an investigation during the next six months. Though Obama promises to let the torturers go, others are pursuing them. Bybee is now a federal judge. A grass-roots movement, including Common Cause and the Center for Constitutional Rights, is calling on Congress to impeach Bybee. In Spain, Judge Baltasar Garzon, who got Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet indicted for crimes against humanity, has named Bybee and five others as targets of a prosecution.
For years, people have felt they have been hitting their heads against walls (some suffered this literally, as the memos detail). On Election Day, it looked like that wall had become a door. But that door is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change. We need a universal standard of justice. Torturers should be punished.
(Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.)
by Amy Goodman
Published on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 by TruthDig.com
reposted from:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/22-2
Friday, April 17, 2009
Letter to a Christian apologist
Dear Taryn
Thank you so much for responding to the letter I co-authored with my good friend Kavish, a response which came as quite a surprise based on past experiences where Christians I have engaged with have failed to tackle any of the issues raised. I must insist, however, that if this exchange is to continue that we conduct it in a spirit of honesty as far as possible. Firstly, I seriously doubt that you read any of the three books I recommended to you in the time since my last message was sent. Perhaps I am wrong about this and, if so, please be so kind as to point out which books you read in their entirety and where these supposed “holes” in the authors’ arguments are to be found. Just for the record, I never recommended any DVDs, though I could have, or at least some video clips available online. Why don’t you try and obtain speeches by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens on Youtube? Also try the first section of Zeitgeist (the other two are largely based on conspiratorial fantasies) which delves into the striking resemblance between Christianity and a number of other Middle Eastern religions that pre-dated the birth of Christ by many centuries. Secondly, it is surely not true to say that you did “not have the time to reply to all of [our] points”, considering it took you almost a month to respond and, judging by the length of your message, it must have taken you a fair bit of time to type all that up, unless you copied and pasted most of your “arguments” (more on that later). You also certainly did not “have a go at two of [our] main” points, instead opting to either deliberately misrepresent what we wrote or to set up straw men and attempting to knock these down. The latter strategy is particularly in evidence in your discussion of Descartes and in the lengthy section on the notion of evil in which you raised an issue we didn’t, at least beyond a tangential inference, expressly refer to. So, in effect, your rebuttals of our supposed two main points are not anything of the sort, resembling nothing so much as a fevered bout of shadow boxing. In some ways I’m actually quite glad that you’ve done this as it allows me to expand the scope of the discourse and to further challenge certain central tenets of the Christian faith. Your failure to respond to virtually any of the points Kavish and I raised in our article seems to concede that you were unable to adequately rebut them. Perhaps in another message you would be so kind as to attentively read through the article again and respond to the points we actually raised rather than the ones your imagination conjured. In the sprit of honest intellectual engagement I will attempt to earnestly “have a go” at all the points you highlighted in your electronic epistle.
I find it quite remarkable that you not only assert that your “faith is grounded in…the scientific evidence for a Creator” but also that “the historical evidence that the Bible and everything it records(down to every last detail) is reliable and is backed up by historical evidence”. One barely knows where to begin with such outrageousness, but I’ll give it a bash, as they say. Starting in the nineteenth century numerous German scholars began subjecting the Bible to rigorous analytical scrutiny that had hitherto not been applied to the “Good” Book. This academic criticism put paid to any form of literal interpretation of the Bible and today virtually all educated Christians, particularly in the developed world, no longer take everything in the Bible has being literally true. The fact that people still do despairingly confounds belief, but is somewhat understandable considering the nature of faith, which I will address later on.
Furthermore, numerous scientific fields such as archaeology, palaeontology, physics, geology and evolutionary biology have seriously undermined most of the “factual” claims contained in the Bible. To take some obvious ones, do you honestly believe the story of Jonah? That a man could be swallowed by a large fish and actually survive the ordeal? Do you believe that there actually was a Garden of Eden with a talking snake? Interestingly, there are two accounts of Creation in Genesis, so which one is correct? Who did Cain marry after he killed Abel? The Bible describes him travelling to a city, but if his parents were the first human beings, and him and his brother their only offspring, how did this city magically appear? Oh, and the story of Noah was borrowed basically wholesale from the Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh. The Israelites were taken to Babylon (modern day Iraq) at one point and most experts believe that the flood myth was influenced by an actual event when the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers overflowed. Also, a world that had experienced a globe-encompassing flood would look markedly different to one that had not experienced such a massive deluge. The reason that we are able to piece together a relatively conclusive narrative about the history of our earth is because of the numerous sedimentary layers that are stacked one on top of the other indicating the different eras in earth’s history that have been conveniently catalogued for us to be able to make sense of the almost incomprehensibly long timescale since the dawn of life on earth. If there had been a flood these layers would be all jumbled and we would have fossils from different epochs occupying the same layer or ones from earlier epochs found in later strata, or vice versa. In short, a total mess. What we instead find is a very ordered progression that has enabled specialists from a host of fields to be able to excavate fossils and other traces of life from previous eras thereby gaining a more thorough understanding of the myriad marvels that have come and gone over the eons.
To turn to another very famous episode in the Biblical narrative, the story of Moses and the Exodus, we find here too that the evidence is scant if non-existent. The Egyptians, one of the most advanced ancient civilisations, were very methodical in keeping a written record of important events. Strangely, they never recorded the “fact” that the Israelites were kept as slaves. Nor did they write anything about any massive flood that would surely have caused at least some degree of discomfort to them. There was a recent National Geographic programme in which various experts were interviewed and the consensus among them is that there is very little evidence of a massive migration from Egypt to the Promised Land. At best there were a number of different nomadic groups who made the trek over centuries, but no single grand narrative as is recounted in the Old Testament. If you had read ‘God is not great’ you may have read of the search by a group of Israeli archaeologists in the 1960s for traces of the Israelites’ presence in the Sinai desert where we are told they wandered around for more than 40 years. They found absolutely nothing, which is particularly telling because these archaeologists set out with the express intention of proving the Exodus narrative correct. Yet with all the religious will in the world they just couldn’t find what they were looking for in the spot where the evidence was supposed to be found.
There was also recently a programme on the History Channel in which the story of David and Goliath was discussed. Again, many of the experts were Israelis who have some stake in the story being true, yet, alas, once again we find myth running up against the wall of evidentiary enquiry and receiving a bloody nose for its troubles. In the era when the Israelites were battling the Philistines, as it is in most conflicts throughout the world today, the former wouldn’t dream of making an agreement with the latter wherein the best fighter from their respective camps would duke it out and then the winner of a single battle would be declared the overall winner. Imagine George W Bush had told Saddam Hussein to find his best warrior so that he could be pitted against the best soldier in the American army to decide the outcome of the war. Put in those terms, the story of David and Goliath is positively absurd, which it surely is upon a few moments’ reflection. According to these experts there was also a pecking order in the Israelite army so there is little chance that a lowly shepherd boy would have been called upon to shoulder the burden of his entire nation.
In ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’ Sam Harris reveals that “in two places…the Good Book states that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3:1 (I Kings 7:23-26 and II Chronicles 4:2-5)”. He goes on to write that as “an approximation of the constant pi, this is not impressive. The decimal expansion of pi runs to infinity— 3.1415926535 ... —and modern computers now allow us to calculate it to any degree of accuracy we like. But the Egyptians and Babylonians both approximated pi to a few decimal places several centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written”. Not very scientifically or mathematically accurate, particularly considering that the Bible was supposedly written with the helping hand of the creator of the universe, who somehow saw fit to provide the “unchosen” Egyptians and Babylonians with a more accurate answer. How about all those suggestions in the Bible that the earth is flat? Let’s run through a few of them, shall we:
In Isaiah 11:12 the reader is informed that “And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH”. (King James Bible).
In Revelation 7:1 we are told that “after these things I saw four angels standing on FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree. (King James). Job 38:13 confirms that the earth has ends with the statement that “it might take hold of the ENDS OF THE EARTH, that the wicked might be shaken out of it”(King James)
There are other bizarre observations regarding the earth to be found in the Bible such as the statement in Psalm 104:5 that “He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved” and also that, according to Isaiah 40:22 in the NIV, “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in”.
All rather peculiar, wouldn’t you agree?
If the historical and scientific evidence for the validity of the Bible’s various stories, “down to every last detail”, is so conclusive why is it that Hector Avalos went from being an enthusiastic Pentecostal Christian to an avowed atheist after studying Biblical archaeology? The simple answer is that he discovered a considerable disjuncture between what the Bible claimed and what archaeological findings revealed. He has been exposing this disjuncture for many years and I urge you to listen to some of his speeches or watch videos online, or read his articles for a more detailed debunking. Bart Ehrman was another highly committed evangelical Christian who experienced a crisis of faith after he researched how the Bible, in its present form, actually came to be what Christians hold in their hands today. So, whether one examines physical evidence to determine the veracity of the Bible, or undertakes textual criticism of this same book, the results are usually the same, namely that a literal interpretation of the Bible is virtually impossible to defend. In the battle between scientific evidence and the account presented by the Bible, the latter will always lose, I’m afraid. Perhaps you would care to re-evaluate your statement that “everything [the Bible] records(down to every last detail) is reliable and backed up by historical evidence”. Otherwise, you have some serious explaining to do.
I certainly don’t require your “dare” to examine the evidence for the accuracy of the Bible as I have been doing just that for many years now, but clearly you haven’t. However, I am still interested in watching those DVDs you recommend so please do send them to PO Box 556 Goodwood 7460.
As for your appeal to an “experiential reality of a relationship with God”, I’m sure you realise how that sort of declaration can never be the foundation for corroborating any significant truth about anything. I mean you surely don’t give any credence when Muslims say the exact same thing with regards Allah, or Hindus with their millions of gods, or any other confessional group. Would you give my belief in the green hobgoblin who lives in my wardrobe any more respect if I claimed that I had an “experiential reality of a relationship with” said creature? When I was young I used to have an imaginary friend, as do most children, and that “relationship” was pretty intense, but does it count in any argument to prove that such an imaginary friend actually exists? We can thus safely set aside such claims to personal revelation as a means to gaining a foothold on any meaningful truth.
I find it interesting that you appeal to “astro-physicists” to buttress your claim that the world had a beginning, which Kavish & I didn’t dispute in our article, yet when it comes to other scientific claims which might clash with your worldview you resoundingly reject them. There is an overwhelming consensus among biologists throughout the world that evolution is the best possible explanation for the myriad of life forms we see around us and which explains how life has developed down the ages. I know you reject evolution so it is really difficult for you to accept the massive mountains of evidence that conclusively make the case for this wondrously elegant explanation for the formation, and continued development, of life on earth. You have to choose, Taryn, either you respect scientific findings, or at least the consensus in the scientific community regarding any number of areas of enquiry, or you don’t. You cannot simply pick and choose and hope no one will notice. If you really respect science so much, which is vaguely implied by your references to scientific evidence (as opposed to your grasp of what such evidence actually entails), then you should ask yourself what possible evidence could shake your faith in God or the Christian faith? If nothing can possibly persuade you to think differently about the world then you have completely rejected any pretence of respect for the scientific approach. Any scientist worth their salt will be able to tell you exactly what would make them doubt the theory of evolution or Newton’s laws or any number of scientific theories.
To return to your point regarding the universe and its origins, you are quite correct that the consensus among physicists is that there was a singularity which caused the universe to spring into being and that the universe is indeed expanding. There was an article by famed physicist Lawrence Krauss last year which appeared in Nature, I believe, in which he claimed that the universe is expanding at an even greater pace than what scientists had long assumed to be the case. I wonder if you know that it was a Belgian priest, George Lemaître, who first proposed in the 1930s that the universe came in to being as a result of a unique event? Fred Hoyle later mocked this idea by referring to it as the “Big Bang” theory, which has subsequently stuck. There are also now physicists who contend that the Big Bang is in fact a big expansion as our universe could merely be expanding before contracting again as has happened countless times before. Still other physicists propose the multiverse theory wherein our universe is an island amidst an ocean of different island universes. This is only a conjecture, of course, but some consider it a serious possibility. In your brief overview of the generally accepted theory regarding our universe you deliberately sidestep the issue of infinite regress that Kavish and I raised. So we are to believe that “a beginning needs a Beginner” (an axiom if ever there was one) yet your “God” magically isn’t bound by these same laws. The question of who designed the designer still stands, because if he/she/it created the universe, then who created he/she/it? But let’s for a moment concede your point, namely that an eternal creator figure did create the “heavens and the earth” and the universe entire. How does such a fact relate to Jesus of Nazareth? Please do explain. Why couldn’t Thor or Zeus or Ra or Allah have brought the universe into being? Or any number of other gods? You have seemingly side stepped one problem, only to step right into an even more perplexing one.
You insist that “opponents of the Christian faith… maintain, arrogantly if not naively, that they will not believe anything which has not first been fully proven to them”, which once again evinces a total lack of understanding of the scientific mindset. Now I can’t talk for all “opponents of the Christian faith”, because these emanate from all quarters, including from those espousing belief in a different deity, so I will only talk from my own personal perspective which I have done throughout this message. The term “fully proven” is a concept that no rational person should subscribe to because, in a very important sense, nothing is ever fully proven. All knowledge is to a greater or lesser degree provisional. That is why scientific knowledge progresses because what we know about the world today is not all there is to know, hence we can keep embroidering our picture of the universe until a more expansive one emerges. This is also true in other fields of enquiry where the scientific concept of provisionality isn’t such a bad one to apply because, after all, there are always more books to read about any number of subjects.
Your statement also reverses the required relationship between someone who makes a particular claim and those who question said claim. This is a strategy regularly adopted by Christians who make outlandish claims about the nature of the universe and expect others to accept these claims without a shred of evidence. How it should work in a society that prizes rationality and logic over faith-based inanity is that the person making any particular statement that has a direct bearing on our understanding of the world has to at least attempt to ground his or her contention in a modicum of evidence. That is how science works and hence why I prize the scientific method above all others. To illustrate what I mean let’s think what an obvious response would be to an assertion by someone on the street that they have been endowed with the power to fly and to break through concrete walls. In case you’re wondering, that obvious response would probably be something along the lines of “okay, prove it”. Similarly, if you make claims that the universe was designed with you in mind and that the Designer of the universe sent his only son to earth on a suicide mission to die for everyone’s sins until the end of time, the obvious response is once again something like “okay, prove it”. You see, Taryn, it is up to you and your fellow travellers in the Christian religion to make the case FOR your particular doctrine, rather than the duty of us non-believers to debunk your claims. Fortunately, we are able to do this with the welter of evidence at our disposal, but the basic point still stands. And if these claims cannot be supported by at least some evidence, let alone anything approaching conclusiveness, then, as Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence”. You play that game, then so will I.
Your reference to René Descartes couldn’t be more ironic, though I’m afraid the irony comes at your expense. Descartes was a theist whose argument for the existence of god is still regularly trotted out by religious apologists to make their case for the existence of a creator, or at least their particular version thereof. Judging by what you wrote about Descartes I really don’t think you know very much about the man or his ideas. In ‘Elements of Philosophy’(Fourth Edition), edited by Samuel Stumpf and Donald Abel, a number of extracts from Descartes’ meditations are included. In the ‘First Meditation’ Descartes declares that “I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions”(pg. 49). He goes on to write that “But to accomplish this, it will NOT be necessary for me to show that ALL my opinions are false, which is something I could perhaps never manage. Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false. So, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, it will be enough if I find in each of them at least some reason for doubt. And to do this I will not need to run through them all individually, which would be an endless task”. You are thus correct in asserting that “Descartes recognized that he could not ultimately doubt everything”, but wrong to claim that his aim would “be that of doubting and criticizing everything he could”, as the above extract makes perfectly clear. His doubting of previously held beliefs was a means to greater certainty, rather than an end in and of itself. This certainty is expressed in his most famous line, “cogito ergo sum”, I think therefore I am. Thus the act of thinking is the surest ground he had to claim that he actually existed, rather than existence being a mere fragment of some demon’s imagination.
Your section on Descartes contains a glaring contradiction as on one hand you write that “Descartes recognized that he could not ultimately doubt everything” yet on the other hand the “modern-day apes of Descartes…claim they will doubt absolutely everything and accept nothing except upon proof”. To ape someone means to copy their behaviour in as close an approximation of the original as possible. So please do explain to me how people are aping Descartes when you yourself admit that they are attempting a philosophical approach to life that the famed philosopher himself never actually attempted? I also have serious questions regarding your sentence that “If a person were truly to doubt everything—his memory of past experiences, his present sensations, the ‘connections’ between experiences, the meanings of his words, the principles by which he reasons—he would not be ‘thinking’ at all (much less doubting), and there would be no ‘he’ to think or not to think”. In the first part of the sentence you write of someone attempting to truly doubt everything, yet you conclude that if they do so they are not, in the end, even doubting. How is it possible to doubt and not doubt at the same time? And why is it that doubting isn’t thinking? Surely if I just parrot what someone else thinks or does that would not be thinking as I would be acting like an automaton. The act of doubting, which is the same as questioning, is surely the first step to deeper reflection. What makes Descartes such a significant figure in the annals of modern philosophy is that he asked us, as all great philosophers ultimately do, to think more deeply about the world around us. They beckon us to call into question easy certainties and to interrogate how we know what we know, which is called epistemology, a particularly rich field of philosophy and an area most serious philosophers touch on at least to some degree, which leads me to my next point.
I take great exception to the insinuation that I am an “intellectual hypocrite” because, according to you, I publically reject an aspect of the Christian worldview that I secretly still subscribe to. This would be that seemingly catch all phrase “faith” that Christians bandy about with a reckless abandon that never ceases to amaze me. What you are in fact doing here is creating what I call a false equalisation as you are suggesting that Christians have faith in Christianity and non-believers have faith in science or philosophy or any number of other intellectual avenues. By doing so you are claiming that Christians have chosen one type of worldview in exactly the same manner that a non-believer has chosen his or her particular perspective. You are quite correct in suggesting that I “criticize(sic) Christians for appealing to ‘“faith’”, because I consider faith to be an intellectually indefensible way of gaining an understanding of anything. In fact the admission that one has faith in a particular proposition is indicative of the weak basis for believing this proposition in the first place. If there is sufficient evidence to support a claim then no faith is required. The problem with most Christians, or at least many I have encountered, is that they purposefully misrepresent how scientists and historians or numerous other researchers in various fields actually know what it is they know, in other words Christians seem completely uninterested in grasping epistemological foundations for the conclusions proffered by experts. Now, as stated, the term “fully proven” is a virtual impossibility, so it is something I would never claim, however there is a massive difference between stating that one is 99% certain, or even 70% certain, of something, and saying that the only reason I believe a particular proposition is because I have faith that it is true. Between the mindset which thinks that it is possible to know many things but recognises that there are considerable limitations to human knowledge, and one which posits that significant knowledge about the world can be gleaned purely via one’s mind without any reference to anything external to it, or based on a single text that has more evidentiary holes in it than a slab of cheddar cheese that’s been repeatedly machine gunned, lies a considerable chasm. To not understand that there is a deeply decisive difference between reading ten books on Napoleon and arriving at some conclusions, not final, about him, or examining a rapidly evolving virus under a microscope to see evolution play out in real time and thus further augment for oneself the validity of the theory of evolution, and the claim that Jesus is the son of god, or even god himself, without anything remotely approaching tangible evidence is to not understand anything.
I also suspect, Taryn, that you employ faith, in its religious meaning, only very rarely on a daily basis. When you visit the doctor with some ailment would you be happy with him declaring that you have a brain tumour, or stomach virus, or shingles, without conducting any examination whatsoever? Do you not where a seatbelt because you have faith that the Lord will protect you? Do you simply take it on faith that there is nothing wrong with your car even though there are some ominous noises emanating from your engine? What if you visited a mechanic after certain serious faults made the driving experience a rather trying affair and his only response was that he had “faith” that the car was okay even though all the evidence suggested otherwise? You would surely not be happy with such an answer, so why should people like me be happy with a Christian responding to my various enquiries regarding their faith with what amounts to nothing but one big convenient cop-out?
I also find it strange that you assert that people who demand some measure of proof for outlandish claims “act or talk like arrogant fools” and are, furthermore, “arrogant” and “naïve” to keep insisting on this simple standard of evidentiary logic, yet to claim that the universe was made with you in mind and that you know the mind of god is perfectly compatible with the notion of humility that Christians so love to espouse. Perhaps you could explain to me how one squares such amazing hubris with such self conscious humility and such a fundamental lack of evidence with such certainty of conviction?
As pointed out above, Descartes was a theist who was concerned with providing proofs for the existence of God as, according to the editors of ‘Elements of Philosophy’, when good old René thought of God he thought “of an all-perfect being: all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful…But the most fundamental perfection of all is existence. Consequently, to think of an all-perfect being that does not exist would be a manifest contradiction - as manifest a contradiction as to think of a triangle that does not have three sides” (pg. 48). Needless to say, this is a very poor argument for the existence of god and I can thus assure you that mine is certainly not the “spirit of René Descartes”, your straw man arguments aside. Unlike Christians or people of other faith traditions, I require no single text to base my life on, nor do I require saints and apostles who are elevated above the status of mere mortals. I draw on a wide range of thinkers past and present who have had significant ideas about how to live a moral life or how to go about obtaining meaningful knowledge, or even what knowledge really is. Unlike Christians I don’t need to artificially distort my intellect and curtail my inquisitiveness by assuming that one book, inspired by some unseen, numinous heaven-residing being, is the only one necessary for any ethical or scientific questions. The world of ideas, spanning the length and breadth of all that human civilisation has collectively left behind for our shared benefit, is my playground, and if you are interested in gaining insight into the sorts of questions about ethics that philosophers have raised since ancient Athens right up to the twentieth century I highly recommend reading AC Grayling’s ‘What is Good? The search for the best way to live’. If I were to identify with a particular “spirit”, as you so quaintly put it, I would prefer to think of my philosophical and intellectual spirit has having its roots in the Enlightenment where such great thinkers as Denis Diderot, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau forever altered how we think about the world and ourselves. The values of truth, justice and liberty were much vaunted, and I value them still. We have the Enlightenment to thank for the Revolution in the United States and that amazing American constitution which still continues to inspire much of the world, and upon which South Africa’s famed constitution was built upon. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which celebrated sixty years since its original promulgation in December last year, is a fruit of Enlightenment thinking, as was the anti-slavery movement, despite what latter day Christians, who for most of the history of Christianity were perfectly comfortable with slavery, might claim. Much of modern scientific progress has the Enlightenment to thank as rationality and ideas of technological advancement were so central to the key figures from the era. I could go on and on, but hopefully you get my drift, as they say in Hawaii.
Just as I requested that you conduct this exchange in a spirit of honesty, I would ask you to please not impute to me beliefs that you think I hold, rather than what I have actually indicated in my correspondence with you. Because by doing so you are not arguing against what I have written, but rather what you imagine I believe which is, as I’m sure you’ll agree, no way to conduct any meaningful debate. You may have noticed that Kavish and I addressed each and every one of the specific points raised in your letter to Varsity, yet you don’t seem to have reciprocated that approach in your subsequent message. Nevertheless, I shall stick to my discursive guns, as it were.
You claim that Kavish and I claimed in our article that god “must be ‘unintelligent’ if he allows pain and suffering”, yet that was not the point we were making. It was perhaps vaguely implied in the paragraph you are referring to, but that wasn’t our main beef. You are once again setting up straw men as you proceed to deliver a disquisition on the nature of good and evil and how without a belief in a deity such notions are purely arbitrary, which I will address from the next paragraph. But first for some clarification of the point at hand. We referred to the fact that it is estimated that one out of every three people is prone to getting cancer at least once in their lifetime. Recently my father was diagnosed with prostrate cancer, though fortunately he is receiving treatment for it and caught it in time so it should be completely dealt with after six weeks worth of radiation treatment. His doctor informed him that 53% of men over the age of fifty are liable to be afflicted by prostrate cancer. Now certainly cancer involves “pain and suffering”, but that is not the reason we deemed a creator who would allow this to happen as ‘unintelligent’. If the engine of a particular make of car had a one in three chance of malfunctioning we would conclude that this isn’t a particularly intelligent attribute. Nor would any fault that occurs in about a third of the objects made, regardless of the product, be deemed to evince a high calibre of craftsmanship. The same holds true for our reference to “tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes and famine” which, once again, surely cause plenty of pain and suffering, but the real issue is the capriciousness of a creator that would painstakingly craft a highly complicated and multi-faceted creation that would in one foul sweep be swept away as a result of an extreme weather event. The question that you failed to address in your message is once again posed, namely what is so intelligent about a creation where constant arbitrary destruction is the norm? One could affix many uncomplimentary adjectives to such a world, but intelligent is certainly not one of them. A few more questions to contemplate might be why are there all those vestigial organs that are either useless to modern humans or even harmful? Why do men have testicles on the outside which make them particularly vulnerable to assault in that region? Why do women menstruate? Keep in mind these are questions related just to the human body, I could go on almost ad infinitum about the numerous unintelligent aspects of the natural world, but I shall refrain from doing so lest you be inundated with queries for which no comfortable answers are available.
The Question of evil and the Bible’s questionable morals
The bulk of your message is concerned with the question of evil which is quite remarkable considering the word evil never appears in our original missive. You are more than welcome to confirm this just so you know I’m not unfairly accusing you of misrepresentation. The very concept of evil is religious in nature, though I still use the word because it so appositely describes the dark side of human nature. The question of evil is a very fascinating and complicated one that demands a thorough treatment. It has long been a problem for theologians and people of faith to grapple with, and certainly is not a topic that can be dealt with in the glib manner adopted in your message. There is even a lovely word in theological circles for the problem of evil, namely theodicy, which I notice was completely absent from your lengthy treatment of the subject. I am also interested to know how much of what you wrote is your own and how much was taken wholesale from “Christian philosopher Greg Bahnsen”. The reason I ask is twofold as there is a considerable difference between the style of writing and argumentation in your letter to Varsity and that which you managed to achieve in the message I received. Furthermore, you employ the use of the word ‘behavior’ twice, which, as I’m sure you are aware, is the American spelling of that word. Nevertheless, I shall still attempt to deal with what you wrote as if you had written it without help from anywhere else.
In essence, most of what you wrote in Part 2 of your message reduces to one simple dictum - non-believers have no basis to make any moral judgements. The obvious corollary being that believers, Christians in particular, have a monopoly on making moral pronouncements because their morality is grounded in an immutable foundation of divine inspiration. That you would seriously make this point after it has been so resoundingly discredited for so long is absolutely amazing and suggests yet again the desperate lengths that Christians will go to in defence of the indefensible, using arguments that are themselves completely beyond the pale of defensibility.
If you had read ‘The God Delusion’ you would have read two chapters that have a direct bearing on the two interrelated issues that were raised by your message, as these chapters delve into the question of where people get their sense of morality from and explain why the Bible is certainly not the source of morality for most Christians. I will attempt to provide partial summaries while also giving my own explanations as to the reasons for the phenomena under review.
Because you no doubt have a very limited grasp of the history of the world it may come as a shock to you that the world is billions of years old and that the story of homo sapiens occupies only the final 0.001 % of earth’s history. What is more striking is that while scientists trace the development of our hominid ancestors in the African savannah over a few million years, we have only been in our current form for about 250 000 to 100 000 years, according to Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists. Even if we take the lowest estimate at 100 000 years, the emergence of what we recognise as civilisation, such as the creation of tools, the first attempts at artistic representation, the codification of language and religion, can only be traced to about 50 000 years ago. The reason I am providing this brief overview of the history of our species is because it has a direct bearing on the issue at hand. You see, Taryn, when human beings were confined to roaming the African countryside in our earliest hominid incarnation almost everyone they met would have been either a relative or someone they depended on for survival. We are talking about groups of at most only a few dozen, whose existence was fraught with threats from many sources so it made obvious strategic sense to co-operate with one another. Without such co-operation our ancestors wouldn’t have been able to reach maturity and thus to procreate to produce more offspring. Because group cohesion was so very vital it was imperative that cheaters and other dishonest individuals be ostracised from the group lest they undermine the survivability of everyone else. There are terms for the types of co-operation that would have occurred, and still do occur in human societies, among our hominid forbears. These include reciprocal altruism which basically means “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine”, or any other variation involving a mutually beneficial relationship. Kin selection entails the greater lengths that a person will go to in order to ensure that their family is looked after. The reason being is that any person that you are related to carries at least some of your genes, thus if they survive more of yourself is carried forward into future generations. It may seem stark and not particularly grandiose to believers, but all living organisms are programmed by their DNA to reproduce and human beings are no different, with evolutionists going so far as stating that the only real purpose for our existence is to procreate, which does make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective yet needn’t preclude living an abundantly joyous life with all the trappings afforded by the modern world such as watching films by Jean-Luc Godard, listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or reading novels by Nabokov or Stendhal. I am probably getting a bit sidetracked here, so apologies. Anyway, in terms of kin selection parents will sacrifice greatly for their children, who will in turn sacrifice for their children, and siblings will also look after one another, with concern of this sort receding as family members become more and more distant. Thus you’re unlikely to sacrifice as much for a cousin three times removed as you would for a nephew, for instance.
Now what does all of this have to do with the question of evil? Well, plenty actually. Combining what we know about early humans, and what we know about the development of civilisation subsequent to the evolutionary emergence of homo habilis, homo erectus and, finally, homo sapiens, it is not only safe to say, but altogether logical, that our sense of right and wrong, or morality, is a trait hardwired into us in much the same way that language is, or other traits we have inherited over the course of our species’ evolutionary journey. This is a central thesis of Marc Hauser’s book ‘Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our universal sense of right and wrong’. Now I will admit that the science is still not conclusive on this issue, but there is strong evidence to suggest the case is as I’ve briefly summarised it. In ‘The God Delusion’, Dawkins cites a number of studies conducted by Hauser around the world where people were given identical moral dilemmas and provided strikingly similar responses in each case. Dawkins notes that “From the present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their reasons”(pg. 223). He goes on to write that after analysing the responses by people it becomes clear that “the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them”(pg. 223). He quotes Hauser directly: “ ‘Driving our moral judgements is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness’” (pg. 223). After providing details of the three main moral dilemmas posed in a study conducted by Hauser and philosopher Peter Singer, the “main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements”, which leads Dawkins to end this section by noting that “This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good – or evil” (pg. 226). Needless to say, I am certainly one of the “many others” Dawkins refers to.
Thus, Taryn, it should be clear that it is no more logical to denounce murder as an atheist than it is to do so under the supposed aegis of religious observance. We had morality before we had anything remotely resembling religion or advanced civilization, which should be obvious because if rape and murder and thievery were perfectly acceptable to our ancient ancestors we wouldn’t be here today having this exchange. As another indication of the universality of morality, can you name any society in the history of the world that has condoned murder or child abuse as a matter of principle? That these have existed in all societies is quite different to being officially approved. Certainly there are horrific stories of cannibalism in tribes in Africa and in the Pacific Islands, as well as among the likes of the Incas and Mayans, who also sacrificed young virgins to propitiate the gods, but it wasn’t as if everyone was eaten and sacrificed. These societies had a time and a place, questionable as these might have been, for performing acts which most people today find abhorrent.
Your entire discussion on what constitutes “good” and how non-believers always face the problem of appealing to a foundation that they expressly reject by virtue of not being religious is thus rendered irrelevant. In fact, you have once again erected a number of straw men which you’ve proceeded to incompetently knock down, such as the absurd idea that we, or any other non-believers, take seriously the idea that the good is defined by “whatever evokes public approval”. That wasn’t even remotely inferred in our article, and is an idea that should be rejected out of hand. Furthermore, you seem to fancy yourself quite the mind reader as you confidently assert that if one were to take the “‘good’ to be whatever evokes the approval of the individual” then “no two individuals can make identical ethical judgments”. How could you possibly know that when your imaginary Bill states that “‘Helping orphans is good,’ he would not be saying the same thing as when Ted says ‘Helping orphans is good’”? This is a complete non sequitur, and is reminiscent of most of your message wherein you waffle on either drawing illogical conclusions or smugly rebutting pronouncements that only you have identified thereby winning arguments with yourself, a victory of sorts, I suppose, but hardly the one you were aiming for I surmise. Your next paragraph makes more sense than many of the others, and it certainly is an important question of what constitutes the “greatest good for the greatest number”, as the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham formulated the problem, but it is a question that needn’t ever presuppose a cosmic creator and has long been asked by moral philosophers who see ethics as a richly complicated field precisely because there are few easy answers in sight and virtually no chance that the question will ever be settled, which runs counter to the religious mindset which always seems to want comfortably easy answers for maddeningly complex questions.
I am astounded at the ad hominems that so easily fly from the mouths, or in this case the fingers, of Christians when faced with a non-believing interlocutor. To assume that an “unbelieving worldview” is unable to argue against the Christian worldview based on the “argument from evil”, because apparently the unbeliever “must first be able to show that his judgments about the existence of evil are meaningful”, is patently absurd and just plain false. For one thing, I rarely use the “argument from evil” against Christianity because there are so many better ones that render the religion in an appropriately ridiculous and fallacious light. However, your implication is not just an insult to all non-believers everywhere, but is in fact an insult against the human race. Do you honestly think that if someone stops being a Christian the first thought that pops into their minds is that it is now perfectly acceptable to rape and murder? I can actually speak from personal experience as I was a Christian for most of my life and only finally rejected the faith about two years ago. I have had many Christian friends over the years and a number of them are among the most moral and decent individuals I have ever had the pleasure to know. I have absolutely no doubt that if they stopped believing in god and the divinity of Christ tomorrow that they would remain among the most moral and decent human beings our world possesses. It is precisely because I have enough respect for the individual that I would never make the absolutely outlandish correlation between unbelief and immorality that you and your fellow Christians so glibly trot out time and time again. I am quite sure, Taryn, that should you lose your faith tomorrow that you will remain a fundamentally decent person, which I believe that you are. Recently the philosopher Daniel Dennett, another thinker with whom I suggest you become better acquainted, gave an address at UCT and, despite being an unstinting critic of religion, acknowledged that most people are religious because they want to be better people. I agree with this assessment, but the flipside is that people don’t reject religion because they are bad or want to use atheism as an excuse to indulge in immoral behaviour. This canard so beloved of the faithful must be rejected by all thoughtful people just as the idea that Christians and other religious people are stupid should be confined to the same dustbin of calumniations. If you cannot grasp that murder and rape and child abuse are self-evidently wrong, I feel very sorry for you Taryn, and you are unintentionally revealing that your Christianity acts more as a moral crutch than as a doctrine you have adopted after long and intense ratiocination.
In the section entitled ‘Does the Unbeliever Take Evil Seriously, then?’ I find your logic for the most part very difficult to comprehend, so won’t tarry all that long on this part of your message. You write that “Unbelievers complain that certain plain facts about human experience are inconsistent with the Christian's theological beliefs about the goodness and power of God”, which is certainly accurate because the degree of inconsistency contained within the Bible makes this observation almost unavoidable unless you have very large faith-based blinkers on. It certainly doesn’t require, as you insist, “the non-Christian to assert the existence of evil in this world” which concomitantly negates the question of what “has been presupposed here?”. I’ll go into further details later on about the supposed “goodness and power of God”.
You sling further mud on unbelievers by declaring that even they “can be shaken from their easy and glib espousals of relativism in the face of moral atrocities like war, rape, and torture”. You face the problem that has already been noted numerous times in this response, which is that you constantly presuppose how the non-believer arrives at his moral judgements without reference to anything we’ve written so you have to go out on a limb and create some imaginary figure with his arguments from “personal taste, preference or subjective opinion”. If you fail to comprehend our collective evolutionary inheritance, as outlined above, it really will be impossible for you to grasp that moral judgements are possible without appeal to any theistic authority. It is thus utter failure to understand human nature, or to have any knowledge of moral philosophy dating back thousands of years, that leads you to make the utterly childish claim that the “expression of moral indignation is but personal evidence that unbelievers know this God in their heart of hearts”. The term non sequitur seems wholly inadequate to account for this mammoth leap of illogic. My indignation, nor that of my unbelieving friends, certainly does not require any “recourse to the absolute, unchanging, and good character of God in order to make philosophical sense”. Perhaps that’s what your indignation requires, but even this is a questionable assertion as I will later reveal. Christians comfort themselves with the myth that only their god can be the arbiter of any fixed set of moral principles because they see theirs as the one true way and all who stray from this path are merely misguided fools, if not downright wicked. Like the story of the resurrection, or most other stories in the not so good Book, this is a fiction that never becomes true no matter how many times you insist that it is.
Because I don’t subscribe to the belief “that evil is, in the final analysis, based on human reasoning or choices”, the final part of this section is not applicable to me. I have never expressed the belief that an “activity is wrong only if the individual (or culture) chooses some value which is inconsistent with it (e.g., pleasure, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, freedom)”. No amount of rationalisation will ever justify mass slaughter, the ill treatment of women or children, or any number of horrendous action justified in the name of culture. You’re barking up the wrong tree here, I’m afraid, as I am the furthest thing from a relativist, as anyone who knows me will attest. Perhaps in future you would care to name some names of unbelievers who apparently “professes that people determine ethical values for themselves” and who “implicitly hold that those who commit evil are not really doing anything evil, given the values which they have chosen for themselves”. I really don’t know such people, so it would be nice to know who they are so that I could avoid them in future. They sound positively dangerous, if you ask me. I don’t even know what you mean when you write that “the unbeliever who is indignant over wickedness supplies the very premises which philosophically condone and permit such behavior, even though at the same time the unbeliever wishes to insist that such behavior is not permitted—it is ‘evil’”. Maybe I’m just slow, so please explain this far flung premise if you’d be so kind.
Funny that in the final paragraph of this section you should include the confident assertion that the “non-Christian's worldview (of whatever variety) eventually cannot account for such moral outrage”, which is strange because my worldview, as expressed in summary here, has exactly accounted for such moral outrage. I also find it intriguing that you should write that “the problem of evil is precisely a philosophical problem for unbelief” considering that some of the finest Christian minds have long had a tough time precisely with this very problem, hence there is a theological concept devoted exclusively to it. Is your mind just vastly superior to theirs? Or could you be displaying a degree of arrogance that doesn’t really gel with Christ’s injunctions to his follows to exercise humility? Evil is, and always will be, a massive problem for believers and non-believers alike. Although, in point of fact, atheists (a term I’m not particularly comfortable with) have an easier time of it because, in the absence of any god, evil can be explained by virtue of the fact that we are merely animals with oversized brains who are prone, more often than not, to bestial behaviour. Because you and your ilk posit a divine creator you have, in fact, multiplied problems for yourself rather than reduced them, despite what you may claim in that self-satisfied manner. To claim that “moral notions like good or evil” are “objective and unchanging” is so laughably naïve that my jaw audibly slackened whilst reading that sentence. This does, however, provide a nice segue into my critique of your last section, entitled “Resolving the Alleged paradox” which, as I’ve come to expect, doesn’t do anything of the sort.
Unresolved paradoxes galore
There is an excellent chapter in ‘The God Delusion’ entitled “The ‘Good’ Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist” in which the author argues that wherever believers get their morals from it certainly isn’t the Bible, particularly not the Old Testament. In some ways this point bears on what I have just written, however there is considerable overlap between your arguments regarding the attributes of God and the nature of morality. Christians love to assert that their morality is “objective and unchanging” and that atheists are reduced to being relativists who have no basis for any moral judgements they might make. Dawkins expertly shows in Chapter 7 just mentioned that notions of morality have evolved over the centuries to such an extent that the beliefs held by Christians in one era are often unrecognisable from those held by Christians in a latter epoch. That discussion would take up too much space so I’ll rather examine some key chapters in the Bible that completely undermines this argument of immutable morality so persistently employed by Christians.
I’m sure you’re well aware of the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament. As you will no doubt also know, there are many laws outlined in this book as to how Jewish people should live. Because the book hasn’t been extricated from the Bible that Christians use, and the fact that Jesus told his followers that he had come to “fulfil the law”, one assumes it has a degree of relevance to Christians, or at least it should have. The punishments for various transgressions are more than a little harsh, at least by modern standards. Homosexuals, adulterers, disobedient children, and fornicators are all to be stoned to death. If a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night she is to be dragged to her father’s house and killed in front of it. There is also that famous sequence in Numbers 15 where a man is caught collecting wood on the Sabbath and Moses orders him to be killed because that is what god wants. In Exodus 31:12 -15 god tells Moses that “Because the LORD considers it a holy day, anyone who works on the Sabbath must be put to death”. Now whatever you may personally feel about adulterers and homosexuals, and I doubt your opinion is very high of either category, I am quite sure, Taryn, that you don’t think that our laws should be changed so that such people could be stoned to death. The interesting question, of course, is why don’t you feel this way, when Jews of the time saw absolutely no problem with such punishment?
Christians also love to claim that the Ten Commandments are a source of unchangeable morality, yet there are two sets of Commandments, as Moses destroyed the first tablets after discovering that the Israelites had been making idols in his absence. A number of Commandments also have absolutely no bearing on moral behaviour as god instructs his followers to have no other gods but him and to not make graven images. Now what’s so moral about simply believing in a particular deity at the exclusion of all others? What sort of lesson are we supposed to learn from this instruction?
If we turn further afield in the Old Testament we arrive at the book of Deuteronomy which is filled with more genocide than anyone should care to read about in a lifetime. There is that classic chapter 20 where God tells the Israelites that when they attack those tribes living on the outskirts of the promised land they are to give them a choice between resisting and co-operating. Resisting entails the tribe’s complete decimation, whereas if they offer no resistance the Israelites are to murder the men and take the women as slaves. Talk about a rock and a hard place!! The tribes who lived within the Promised Land were to be completely destroyed regardless of whether or not they offered any resistance. Not only were all the people supposed to be summarily murdered, but all animals were also supposed to be slaughtered. Dawkins refers to the book of Joshua and he describes it as “a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records and the xenophobic relish with which it does so” (pg. 247). In the battle of Jericho “Joshua didn’t rest until ‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword’ (Joshua 6:21) [pg. 247]. I can’t agree more with Dawkins when he contends that “the Bible story of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein’s massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs” (pg. 247). Dawkins is also not wrong when he writes that the “Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals” (pg. 247). Now how on earth do passages such as those contained in Deuteronomy, Joshua and Leviticus, to name but three striking examples, square with your idea that “God is all-good”? In fact, reading the Bible with even a moderate degree of attentiveness renders this banal formulation wholly untenable and I believe Dawkins has given the best ever definition of the god of the Old Testament, who is after all the “god” you consistently refer to as the source of your morality:
Putting aside the wholly inadequate grounding in moral philosophy provided by the Bible, one could easily turn to the history of Christianity to reveal that many adherents of the faith down the ages were hardly moral paragons. If there is such an easy equation where believing in god, or at least the Christian version thereof, equals adherence to a higher set of moral principles how does one explain the unspeakable atrocities visited upon Muslims by the Medieval Crusaders? This was the ignoble episode in Christian history when not only was Jerusalem sacked, but also saw the warriors of Christ using babies as target practice and, in probably the most repellent anecdote recorded at the time, St Bartholomew noted in his diary that after one battle the Crusaders ate their Muslim captives. Why is it that, if Christianity is supposedly the source of morality, that the Conquistadores in the 1500s, acting not only in the name of the Spanish crown but also in the name of Christ their saviour, butchered and enslaved millions of indigenous people in what is today Latin America, wiping out entire civilisations in the process? Speaking of the Spanish, I’m sure you’re aware of the very nasty machinations of the Roman Catholic Church in that country, and in other European lands, where the starkly authoritarian Inquisition took place which saw the persecution of all manner of “heretics” and even believers whose faith was seen to be insufficiently fervid. Galileo was persecuted, though thankfully not remotely as severely as many others, simply because he expanded on the concept of heliocentrism as this idea clashed with how the earth’s place in the universe is described in the Bible. Martin Luther, among most other prominent people of faith at this time, harshly rejected the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way around, and he cited Scripture to make his case by stating that “as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth”. And this is the same Bible that you describe as being so scientifically reliable? The Pilgrims who arrived at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts Bay in the 1600s were fleeing religious persecution in Europe and sought to forge a new life in the New World, which many saw as the Promised Land. Despite their deep commitment to the Christian faith they saw little wrong with treating the Native Americans they encountered with contempt and even murdering their fair share, a genocidal campaign which lasted for hundreds of years throughout North America and which ended up reducing the Native American population by about 90% according to many estimates. They also burned witches, along with their Christian counterparts in Europe, and were generally harshly intolerant of anyone holding a different belief to their own. If you doubt anything I’ve written please do read up about these historical incidents or watch documentaries which are readily available on National Geographic or the History Channel.
Christians often like to take credit for being at the vanguard of the abolitionist movement in the United States and England, and usually cite the efforts by the likes of William Wilberforce to put an end to slavery. What is often elided by this reading of history is that for centuries Christians saw absolutely nothing wrong with slavery and were often the most ardent supporters of this abomination. If Christians did finally see the error of their ways, this is hardly something for which they should be praised just as someone who returns stolen property after keeping it for a number of years will still be seen as a thief, which he has ever been. While it is certainly true that Christians valiantly battled to eliminate slavery in the United States, they were aided by many secularists and non-believers, yet every single slaveholder in the Deep South was a Bible believing Christian. The Bible gave them a perfect justification for keeping slaves and for perceiving darker skinned people as inferior. That verse in the Bible where Noah’s cursed son Ham is banished to Africa still provides the grist that many racists need to fuel their mill of ethnic intolerance. Abraham Lincoln noted with considerable sadness that both the defenders and the critics of slavery were reading from the same Bible. If this isn’t an indictment of the supposedly “objective and unchanging nature of moral notions like good and evil” provided by the Bible and belief in the Christian god then I don’t know what is.
In his article “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality” which appeared in ‘Skeptic’ magazine and is available online, John Hartung provides a possible reason why there is this discrepancy between the espoused morals of a particular religious group and their actions towards another tribe or religious community. The verdict serves to further indict religion rather than to exculpate it. Hartung posits that religions, in this case Judaism and Christianity(the two are inextricably bound), articulate various injunctions for their votaries to observe which in turn fosters in-group cohesion. So while murder and other acts are strictly forbidden within the group, the flipside to the greater cohesiveness brought about as a result of the codification of a set of laws is that a tribalism or nationalism is simultaneously encouraged due to an overdeveloped sense of in-group identification. The tribal mentality fostered by religion, which is brilliantly if disturbingly illustrated by the Bible, reveals the correspondence between intense in-group identification and the carrying out of egregious acts by the Israelites in contact with other groups that would be considered abhorrent if they occurred within the tribe of Israel. This explains how murder is ostensibly outlawed amongst the Israelites yet god, or so the Jewish writers of the Old Testament would have us believe, not only condones but actively encourages the wholesale decimation of other tribes. And you call non-believers hypocrites and relativists!!!
Another question to consider for those who hold steadfast to the belief that Christianity equals greater morality is what happens when societies gradually lose their religiosity? We should, according to your logic, notice that they become cesspits of debauchery and hotbeds of all manner of salaciousness and villainy. First, some background information. Europe was essentially the birthplace of what we now understand Christianity to be because when Constantine made Catholicism the official religion of the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century this not only enabled Christianity to spread throughout the continent but also eventually throughout much of the world when European nations began colonising vast tracts of the world beyond their shores. While I love European civilisation I also have to acknowledge that this continent has been among the most war torn for centuries with many of the wars being directly attributable to differing religious views. The Thirty Year War, for instance, wiped out about a third of Germany’s population in the 1600s. Since World War 2, which many consider the most destructive war in the history of the world, Europe has enjoyed its longest stretch of unbroken peace in its history. Interestingly, during this same era Western Europe has become increasingly secular with Christianity retreating into ever greater irrelevance as the decades wear on. In England polls reveal that only about 8% of the population regularly attend church services and that number is probably comparable to religious observance in Germany, France and Holland, with Spain and Italy recording higher numbers of church attendees but still showing an undeniable downward trend. The Scandinavian countries are probably the least religious on earth with polls in Sweden showing that between 40 and 80% of people openly identify as atheists. Sweden has one of the lowest crime, poverty and HIV infection rates in the world, with excellent health care and free education for all its citizens. The Swedes are also among the most generous nations when it comes to allocating foreign aid and accepting political refugees. For instance, they have welcomed far more refugees from Iraq than the United States has, the country which caused the mess in the first place. Sweden could well rank, along with Denmark and Norway, as well as Finland and Iceland, as the best country on earth if one takes all the various indicators of social well being into account. It would almost seem as if the less religious Sweden has become the more its quality of life has improved. In Australia the recent census revealed that about 20% of people have no religion whatsoever, up from 0.6% in the early 1960s. Australia hasn’t seen an increase in murder or rape as a result, in fact the crime rate there is also one of the lowest in the world, as is the rate of AIDs. A poll conducted in Canada last year showed that 25% of people identified as non-religious and Canada is one of the most progressive countries on earth with universal healthcare for all, a very welcoming attitude towards foreign immigrants, and also a very low crime rate. These facts should all be very worrying to someone who believes that the more religious a society is the better behaved its citizenry.
What is even more worrying for the faithful is that countries that are religious show no marked improvement over those that aren’t. In fact, in many cases they are worse behaved. Take the United States of America which, among wealthy nations, has the highest rate of religiosity bar none. Yet it also boasts, if that’s the right word, the highest murder rate of the top industrialised nations. Apart from Japan, it remains the only wealthy nation to still have the death penalty which doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the crime rate. Studies reveal that a quarter of the children in the USA are impoverished, and 15% of the general population are also classified as such. Despite being the richest nation on earth, there is no universal health care and the USA has the highest income inequality in the developed world. It is also among the world’s heaviest drug using nation. Even more intriguing is the fact that in the so-called Red States, those who are more inclined to be church going and vote Republican, the divorce rate, number of murders, amount of illegitimate children and poverty is higher than in the more secular Blue States which traditionally vote Democrat. A recent study was undertaken which revealed that subscriptions to adult websites in America was highest in conservative states such as Utah and Missouri that voted overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate in last year’s election. There is an interesting article about this phenomenon in Vanity Fair magazine called ‘Red State Babylon’ by James Wolcott if you’re interested.
South Africa has among the highest murder and rape rates in the world, yet statistics regularly show that upwards of 80% of the population identify as Christians. How does one explain this phenomenon where high rates of religiosity exist amidst an endless onslaught of venality and criminality of all stripes? I shan’t tarry any longer on this question which is naturally quite mystifying to believers yet those who understand something about human nature and the history of our species are usually far less perplexed about the apparently annoying contradiction.
Now to the last section of your message wherein you attempt to resolve “the Alleged Paradox”. I will first discuss the first three propositions you list regarding the Christian position and then I will move on to your supposed resolution to all perplexing questions, which is nothing of the sort. You contend that “God is all-good” and “all-powerful”, yet note that “Evil exists”. You further state that “the Christian presupposes that God is perfectly and completely good”, which “Scripture requires [believers] to do” and commits Christians “to evaluating everything within his experience in the light of that presupposition”. However, here you immediately run into a very ancient paradox first identified, at least according to history’s records, by Epicurus. As quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief the ancient philosopher states that "Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?" David Hume had a slightly better formulation of the Epicurean conundrum in his ‘Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion’ where he asks “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”. Just as we would judge someone very harshly who didn’t come to the aid of his fellow man if he witnessed them being robbed or assaulted, so to we must judge even more harshly a supposedly all-powerful being who knows and sees all suffering yet allows the suffering to continue unabated. It is, in fact, a form of evil to allow evil to occur in the first place, particularly in light of the immense power that the Christian god is supposed to wield. The more power one has to stop evil the more responsibility one has, so a failure to curb evil in that instance should be considered exceptionally egregious.
You attempt to overcome this basically insurmountable problem by positing a “solution” that, unfortunately for you, not only doesn’t resolve any of the above paradoxes but actually multiplies them. Your big gambit is that “God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists” which quite possibly qualifies as the biggest get out of jail free card I have ever encountered. It is a complete cop-out which doesn’t address any of the issues at hand, but merely wishes them away in the glibbest possible manner. You even go further to say that “God has PLANNED evil events for reasons which are morally commendable and good”. I have never been comfortable with the notion of free will, but at least in such an argument a substantial part of the question of evil rests with people who are given the choice to commit evil deeds while leaving god as a mere onlooker. You actually suggested that your Lord is a scheming rogue who actually has a “morally commendable” reason to perpetrate evil. Yet despite all the problems that still remain you actually have the bumptiousness to state that when “all four of these premises are maintained, there is no logical contradiction to be found, not even an apparent one”. The contradictions are more than just apparent, they are painfully obvious to all but the most deluded.
For starters you adduce, as evidence for the “morally sufficient reasons” god might have for allowing evil to exist, certain incidents in the Bible such as Abraham being compelled to sacrifice his only son, Job who loses everything as a test of his faith and the “greatest crime in all of history” (a bit of hyperbole there, methinks), Christ’s crucifixion. Apart from the obvious point about the morality of a deity who would actually inflict such suffering on his devotees, even asking them to murder their only offspring, and who thinks that by sending his son to earth on some cruel suicide mission he is absolving everybody of their sins, you are employing specific examples to explicate a generalisation. So while it is certainly morally defensible to go to war to battle the Nazis, war as a general principle is surely not morally commendable. The same is true in a host of circumstances where certain situations demand actions that are otherwise morally dubious if not downright immoral. Defenders of torture love to trot out the ticking time bomb scenario as an excuse for inflicting extreme discomfort on captives to elicit important information, yet there have virtually never been real world cases of a ticking time bomb. Here too a very specific example has been utilised to justify a general principle and should thus be rejected on the same grounds.
Your claim is also highly subjective and circular. Subjective because your claim that the evil inherent in Abraham being asked by god to kill his son, or god having his only son brutally murdered, has a morally sufficient reason is based on no concrete foundation whatsoever. Why is there a “morally sufficient” reason for sacrificing one’s child in one instance but not, let’s say, in another when the father in question could also claim holy fiat? The circularity of your argument is implicit in the fact that the only “evidence” for assuming that god had a morally sufficient reason for certain evil deeds is because the Bible informs readers that this is the case. In answer to the question of how the Bible is so certain about this you are compelled to refer back to the “good” book as a justification, hence the merry-go-round continues.
The argument is also unfalsifiable in the extreme as you simply assume that there is always a “morally sufficient reason” for evil in the world. Do you therefore apply this “logic” to the prevalence of child rape, genocide, mass starvation, wars, homicides and all manner of monstrous deeds that humans are capable of? Do you comfort people who have seen their family members murdered or raped, or have themselves been brutally assaulted, with the idea that their suffering is part of some higher moral purpose that is at this juncture merely opaque but will become clear in time? Have you or your family ever been the victim of a terrible criminal incident and did you honestly find solace in this pitiful platitude?
You have probably never read books by Noam Chomsky or John Pilger, because if you had you would realise that there are many reasons for the ubiquity of atrocities around the globe and throughout history. These reasons range from greed, to a lust for power, to ancient ethnic feuds, but are never in aid of some grand moral purpose. To tell the families of the estimated six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis that those deaths were all part of some metaphysical master plan is positively sick, and likely to have the opposite effect of the one intended. Jesus enjoined his followers to always attempt to apply to themselves the same standard they apply to others, which is very good advice that you should definitely follow in this case before you continue espousing doctrines that you fail to observe in your own life.
What’s even more interesting about this outlandish attempt to resolve a paradox that has been created by believers in the first place, is that it contradicts a statement you made in the letter you sent to Varsity. You claimed that your god “cannot let the guilty go unpunished”, a statement that Kavish and I challenged in our article. We referred to a few examples of major atrocities committed on the African continent and made the point that human rights violators such as General Suharto and George W Bush have escaped all legal punishment, the former forever as he is no longer in the land of the living. So either god punishes all evil doers or he allows evil to flourish unchecked with the only guarantee being that there is surely a “morally sufficient reason” for the evil despite even believers having no clue what the reason might be. You can’t really have it both ways because the one conclusion suggests a definitive answer to how evil is dealt with, while the other expresses a blind belief in the supposedly transcendent purpose that evil serves which is nevertheless obscure even to believers. Or should we just trust that the guilty will be punished in the next life, away from the eyes of their victims in this one?
So even on your own terms you have failed to resolve any of the paradoxes your faith institutes in the first place, and have created a multitude of even more perplexing conundrums along the way. The really interesting aspect of all this is that evil is actually a far greater problem for believers than for non-believers. Those who don’t believe in god usually understand that because human beings are basically just primates with large brains we will never attain complete rationality no matter how hard we try and will very often be prone to bouts of bestial behaviour, some people more than others obviously. They furthermore tend to realise that in the absence of a divine source for our morality that evil, to borrow the concept so overused by the religious, isn’t some abstruse nebulous force floating in some mysterious ether, but in fact has its roots within us, just as the magnificent glories that our species are capable of are products of our own minds rather than any cosmic stimuli. I think it is worth quoting the wondrously erudite and mellifluously lyrical writer Christopher Hitchens in this regard who does a very good job of summarising the central point of this paragraph:
Judging by how much you have written on this topic, and how little Kavish and I spent on it in our article, suggests that the “situation” wherein the reason for evil in the world is obscure is far more “intolerable” for believers than for those who reject ancient dogmas and cretinous creeds, supposedly because of our “pride, feelings, or rationality”, rather than because of any internal inconsistencies or any other problems with the religion itself.
You end off your message with more attacks on non-believers for failing to “trust God unless God subordinates Himself to the intellectual authority and moral evaluation of the unbeliever” and for just generally not ‘getting’ the whole concept of putting faith in a god whose designs are admittedly mysterious but surely good and true, all evidence to the contrary. Your final move in a chess match that you have largely been conducting against yourself and a number of imaginary non-believers who seem to have sprung from your own mind rather than any actual place in the real world, is to explain the source of evil with reference to the story of Adam and Eve. That you should resort to this children’s story to explain the entire shocking mess of human history, often described as a catalogue of horrors, would have beggared belief if I hadn’t already become inured to your amazing flights of fancy. The story is an ambiguous allegory at best, and a thoroughly dishonest account of our origins at worst. Thankfully the best case scenario is now adopted by most of the world’s Christians, or at least a fair share, particularly among the more educated members of the faithful, yet there are still those, clearly including yourself, who assume that there is some literal significance to a story that features as one of its central characters a talking snake and a god who creates the world in just six days and who seems to deliberately want to deprive his most prized creations of having any sort of understanding about anything by urging them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. This story is childish in another very important sense as it represents how religions have tried to simplify the complex with the best means available to them which are, needless to say, wholly inadequate in comparison to all the tools at our modern disposal. I must once again rely on Mr Hitchens to make this point more elegantly than I ever could:
So the story of Adam and Eve, being completely false in every last detail, is never going to be even remotely adequate to the task of explaining how evil entered the world. Of course the answer is that it never did, or at least not in the way that believers imagine when they discuss a concept that seeks to explain from without something that resides within. Because there is no “original sin” or “fall from grace”, the story of Jesus becomes even more absurd than it already is. Even taken on its own merits, which includes accepting that Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge thereby disobeying god and cursing all subsequent humans, the crucifixion of Christ is a completely nonsensical idea and highly repellent to boot. I might have such immense admiration for a particular friend that I would gladly serve jail time for a crime he committed. What I, nor anyone else, can ever do is wipe that crime away. So even though Jesus may have honestly thought he was dying for everyone’s sins for all time to come, he could never possibly achieve such a goal because it is a complete logical and physical impossibility. In any case why would believers want their god to send his only son to perish on the cross for their sins? And why choose to reveal himself to a small, largely illiterate tribe in a forgotten corner of the Roman Empire? Why not just forgive everyone’s sins or reveal himself to everyone at once? Even today, some 2000 years since Christ died on the cross, there are still many people on this earth who have not yet heard of him. Could the Christian god possibly have conceived of a more cumbersome way to spread such a vitally important, and eternally relevant, truth? Without the veracity of Genesis, however, Jesus’ heavenly ordained martyrdom becomes completely untenable and thus more wince-inducingly embarrassing for believers of all stripes. This probably explains why certain unsophisticated Christians still hold so desperately to the Adam and Eve story as if they were clinging for dear life to a rapidly sinking raft.
After everything that has been noted in my response, your statement that “unbelievers who challenge the Christian faith end up reasoning in circles” is laughable and not worth a rebuttal, beyond all the many that I have already put forth. It is precisely because Christians cannot present rationalists “with a logically adequate and Biblically supported solution to the problem of evil” that we reject your espousals on the matter, rather than because of a mere “lack of faith in God”, which is in any case due to the very considerable inadequacy of the Christian worldview. I have endeavoured to provide “an account of” where our “moral judgement[s]” might originate from so there is no need “to submit to the ultimate and unchallengeable moral authority of God”, by which you mean your version of god whose moral authority is anything but ultimate or unchallengeable, as I have quite thoroughly demonstrated in this lengthy response. To check one’s brain at the door and to be woefully ignorant of an incredibly wide range of subjects, including the very formation of one’s own holy book and the development of one’s own religion, is for me indeed “too high a price to pay, both philosophically and personally”, but you and your fellow travellers in the world of faith based cultism are more than welcome to sacrifice your intellects and inquisitiveness to a cause deemed worthy of such intellectual debasement.
Early on in your message you assured me that your “faith is certainly no blind leap in the dark” as you instead described it as “a step into the light”. Naturally, I beg to differ somewhat with this assessment. Judging by both the letter you sent to Varsity and by the last message I received, I would have to conclude that you are actually stumbling about in a room so dark that you are unable to even vaguely apprehend its full dimensions. If you start meaningfully digging, in the intellectual sense, you will discover that almost everything you think you know about the Christian faith is wrong, and so too the picture of the world provided by the Scriptures. Before unfairly smearing non-believers, who compromise a considerably varied group, try and analyse what it is they have thought and written over the past few centuries. A good starting point would be Thomas Paine and Voltaire, neither of whom expressly denied the existence of god but who were harsh critics of organised religion. Read about scientific discoveries by scientists, rather than misguided members of your religion who try so desperately to distort scientific findings to fit their awfully narrow perspective on the world. Read up on history, politics, philosophy and even, if not especially, on other religions so you may come to understand that they are often very similar and unquestionably reflect the hand of man more than the hand of any celestial being. As Voltaire said, “if god didn’t exist man would have to invent him”. We’ve invented so many over millennia it is difficult to keep track, but the trend has undeniably been one of winnowing down the myriad of gods that dominated the ancient polytheistic world to a situation where now more than half the world is either a Muslim or a Christian, that is a staunch monotheist. (As an aside, I think it is high time that we go one god further). In short, try and learn as much as possible about as many subjects as possible. You will soon learn that knowledge truly is power, as the old adage goes, and truly wondrous to boot. I will leave you with Daniel Dennett’s advice to the audience at the end of his talk at UCT which he managed to convey using an acronym for DARWIN spelled out the in Latin letters. He managed to come up with the following:
DESTROY THE AUTHOR OF THINGS IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE INFINITE UNIVERSE
I couldn’t have said it better myself, and hope this provides at least some nourishment for your thoughts.
Sapere aude (Dare to know).
Ryan
Thank you so much for responding to the letter I co-authored with my good friend Kavish, a response which came as quite a surprise based on past experiences where Christians I have engaged with have failed to tackle any of the issues raised. I must insist, however, that if this exchange is to continue that we conduct it in a spirit of honesty as far as possible. Firstly, I seriously doubt that you read any of the three books I recommended to you in the time since my last message was sent. Perhaps I am wrong about this and, if so, please be so kind as to point out which books you read in their entirety and where these supposed “holes” in the authors’ arguments are to be found. Just for the record, I never recommended any DVDs, though I could have, or at least some video clips available online. Why don’t you try and obtain speeches by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens on Youtube? Also try the first section of Zeitgeist (the other two are largely based on conspiratorial fantasies) which delves into the striking resemblance between Christianity and a number of other Middle Eastern religions that pre-dated the birth of Christ by many centuries. Secondly, it is surely not true to say that you did “not have the time to reply to all of [our] points”, considering it took you almost a month to respond and, judging by the length of your message, it must have taken you a fair bit of time to type all that up, unless you copied and pasted most of your “arguments” (more on that later). You also certainly did not “have a go at two of [our] main” points, instead opting to either deliberately misrepresent what we wrote or to set up straw men and attempting to knock these down. The latter strategy is particularly in evidence in your discussion of Descartes and in the lengthy section on the notion of evil in which you raised an issue we didn’t, at least beyond a tangential inference, expressly refer to. So, in effect, your rebuttals of our supposed two main points are not anything of the sort, resembling nothing so much as a fevered bout of shadow boxing. In some ways I’m actually quite glad that you’ve done this as it allows me to expand the scope of the discourse and to further challenge certain central tenets of the Christian faith. Your failure to respond to virtually any of the points Kavish and I raised in our article seems to concede that you were unable to adequately rebut them. Perhaps in another message you would be so kind as to attentively read through the article again and respond to the points we actually raised rather than the ones your imagination conjured. In the sprit of honest intellectual engagement I will attempt to earnestly “have a go” at all the points you highlighted in your electronic epistle.
I find it quite remarkable that you not only assert that your “faith is grounded in…the scientific evidence for a Creator” but also that “the historical evidence that the Bible and everything it records(down to every last detail) is reliable and is backed up by historical evidence”. One barely knows where to begin with such outrageousness, but I’ll give it a bash, as they say. Starting in the nineteenth century numerous German scholars began subjecting the Bible to rigorous analytical scrutiny that had hitherto not been applied to the “Good” Book. This academic criticism put paid to any form of literal interpretation of the Bible and today virtually all educated Christians, particularly in the developed world, no longer take everything in the Bible has being literally true. The fact that people still do despairingly confounds belief, but is somewhat understandable considering the nature of faith, which I will address later on.
Furthermore, numerous scientific fields such as archaeology, palaeontology, physics, geology and evolutionary biology have seriously undermined most of the “factual” claims contained in the Bible. To take some obvious ones, do you honestly believe the story of Jonah? That a man could be swallowed by a large fish and actually survive the ordeal? Do you believe that there actually was a Garden of Eden with a talking snake? Interestingly, there are two accounts of Creation in Genesis, so which one is correct? Who did Cain marry after he killed Abel? The Bible describes him travelling to a city, but if his parents were the first human beings, and him and his brother their only offspring, how did this city magically appear? Oh, and the story of Noah was borrowed basically wholesale from the Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh. The Israelites were taken to Babylon (modern day Iraq) at one point and most experts believe that the flood myth was influenced by an actual event when the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers overflowed. Also, a world that had experienced a globe-encompassing flood would look markedly different to one that had not experienced such a massive deluge. The reason that we are able to piece together a relatively conclusive narrative about the history of our earth is because of the numerous sedimentary layers that are stacked one on top of the other indicating the different eras in earth’s history that have been conveniently catalogued for us to be able to make sense of the almost incomprehensibly long timescale since the dawn of life on earth. If there had been a flood these layers would be all jumbled and we would have fossils from different epochs occupying the same layer or ones from earlier epochs found in later strata, or vice versa. In short, a total mess. What we instead find is a very ordered progression that has enabled specialists from a host of fields to be able to excavate fossils and other traces of life from previous eras thereby gaining a more thorough understanding of the myriad marvels that have come and gone over the eons.
To turn to another very famous episode in the Biblical narrative, the story of Moses and the Exodus, we find here too that the evidence is scant if non-existent. The Egyptians, one of the most advanced ancient civilisations, were very methodical in keeping a written record of important events. Strangely, they never recorded the “fact” that the Israelites were kept as slaves. Nor did they write anything about any massive flood that would surely have caused at least some degree of discomfort to them. There was a recent National Geographic programme in which various experts were interviewed and the consensus among them is that there is very little evidence of a massive migration from Egypt to the Promised Land. At best there were a number of different nomadic groups who made the trek over centuries, but no single grand narrative as is recounted in the Old Testament. If you had read ‘God is not great’ you may have read of the search by a group of Israeli archaeologists in the 1960s for traces of the Israelites’ presence in the Sinai desert where we are told they wandered around for more than 40 years. They found absolutely nothing, which is particularly telling because these archaeologists set out with the express intention of proving the Exodus narrative correct. Yet with all the religious will in the world they just couldn’t find what they were looking for in the spot where the evidence was supposed to be found.
There was also recently a programme on the History Channel in which the story of David and Goliath was discussed. Again, many of the experts were Israelis who have some stake in the story being true, yet, alas, once again we find myth running up against the wall of evidentiary enquiry and receiving a bloody nose for its troubles. In the era when the Israelites were battling the Philistines, as it is in most conflicts throughout the world today, the former wouldn’t dream of making an agreement with the latter wherein the best fighter from their respective camps would duke it out and then the winner of a single battle would be declared the overall winner. Imagine George W Bush had told Saddam Hussein to find his best warrior so that he could be pitted against the best soldier in the American army to decide the outcome of the war. Put in those terms, the story of David and Goliath is positively absurd, which it surely is upon a few moments’ reflection. According to these experts there was also a pecking order in the Israelite army so there is little chance that a lowly shepherd boy would have been called upon to shoulder the burden of his entire nation.
In ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’ Sam Harris reveals that “in two places…the Good Book states that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3:1 (I Kings 7:23-26 and II Chronicles 4:2-5)”. He goes on to write that as “an approximation of the constant pi, this is not impressive. The decimal expansion of pi runs to infinity— 3.1415926535 ... —and modern computers now allow us to calculate it to any degree of accuracy we like. But the Egyptians and Babylonians both approximated pi to a few decimal places several centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written”. Not very scientifically or mathematically accurate, particularly considering that the Bible was supposedly written with the helping hand of the creator of the universe, who somehow saw fit to provide the “unchosen” Egyptians and Babylonians with a more accurate answer. How about all those suggestions in the Bible that the earth is flat? Let’s run through a few of them, shall we:
In Isaiah 11:12 the reader is informed that “And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH”. (King James Bible).
In Revelation 7:1 we are told that “after these things I saw four angels standing on FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree. (King James). Job 38:13 confirms that the earth has ends with the statement that “it might take hold of the ENDS OF THE EARTH, that the wicked might be shaken out of it”(King James)
There are other bizarre observations regarding the earth to be found in the Bible such as the statement in Psalm 104:5 that “He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved” and also that, according to Isaiah 40:22 in the NIV, “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in”.
All rather peculiar, wouldn’t you agree?
If the historical and scientific evidence for the validity of the Bible’s various stories, “down to every last detail”, is so conclusive why is it that Hector Avalos went from being an enthusiastic Pentecostal Christian to an avowed atheist after studying Biblical archaeology? The simple answer is that he discovered a considerable disjuncture between what the Bible claimed and what archaeological findings revealed. He has been exposing this disjuncture for many years and I urge you to listen to some of his speeches or watch videos online, or read his articles for a more detailed debunking. Bart Ehrman was another highly committed evangelical Christian who experienced a crisis of faith after he researched how the Bible, in its present form, actually came to be what Christians hold in their hands today. So, whether one examines physical evidence to determine the veracity of the Bible, or undertakes textual criticism of this same book, the results are usually the same, namely that a literal interpretation of the Bible is virtually impossible to defend. In the battle between scientific evidence and the account presented by the Bible, the latter will always lose, I’m afraid. Perhaps you would care to re-evaluate your statement that “everything [the Bible] records(down to every last detail) is reliable and backed up by historical evidence”. Otherwise, you have some serious explaining to do.
I certainly don’t require your “dare” to examine the evidence for the accuracy of the Bible as I have been doing just that for many years now, but clearly you haven’t. However, I am still interested in watching those DVDs you recommend so please do send them to PO Box 556 Goodwood 7460.
As for your appeal to an “experiential reality of a relationship with God”, I’m sure you realise how that sort of declaration can never be the foundation for corroborating any significant truth about anything. I mean you surely don’t give any credence when Muslims say the exact same thing with regards Allah, or Hindus with their millions of gods, or any other confessional group. Would you give my belief in the green hobgoblin who lives in my wardrobe any more respect if I claimed that I had an “experiential reality of a relationship with” said creature? When I was young I used to have an imaginary friend, as do most children, and that “relationship” was pretty intense, but does it count in any argument to prove that such an imaginary friend actually exists? We can thus safely set aside such claims to personal revelation as a means to gaining a foothold on any meaningful truth.
I find it interesting that you appeal to “astro-physicists” to buttress your claim that the world had a beginning, which Kavish & I didn’t dispute in our article, yet when it comes to other scientific claims which might clash with your worldview you resoundingly reject them. There is an overwhelming consensus among biologists throughout the world that evolution is the best possible explanation for the myriad of life forms we see around us and which explains how life has developed down the ages. I know you reject evolution so it is really difficult for you to accept the massive mountains of evidence that conclusively make the case for this wondrously elegant explanation for the formation, and continued development, of life on earth. You have to choose, Taryn, either you respect scientific findings, or at least the consensus in the scientific community regarding any number of areas of enquiry, or you don’t. You cannot simply pick and choose and hope no one will notice. If you really respect science so much, which is vaguely implied by your references to scientific evidence (as opposed to your grasp of what such evidence actually entails), then you should ask yourself what possible evidence could shake your faith in God or the Christian faith? If nothing can possibly persuade you to think differently about the world then you have completely rejected any pretence of respect for the scientific approach. Any scientist worth their salt will be able to tell you exactly what would make them doubt the theory of evolution or Newton’s laws or any number of scientific theories.
To return to your point regarding the universe and its origins, you are quite correct that the consensus among physicists is that there was a singularity which caused the universe to spring into being and that the universe is indeed expanding. There was an article by famed physicist Lawrence Krauss last year which appeared in Nature, I believe, in which he claimed that the universe is expanding at an even greater pace than what scientists had long assumed to be the case. I wonder if you know that it was a Belgian priest, George Lemaître, who first proposed in the 1930s that the universe came in to being as a result of a unique event? Fred Hoyle later mocked this idea by referring to it as the “Big Bang” theory, which has subsequently stuck. There are also now physicists who contend that the Big Bang is in fact a big expansion as our universe could merely be expanding before contracting again as has happened countless times before. Still other physicists propose the multiverse theory wherein our universe is an island amidst an ocean of different island universes. This is only a conjecture, of course, but some consider it a serious possibility. In your brief overview of the generally accepted theory regarding our universe you deliberately sidestep the issue of infinite regress that Kavish and I raised. So we are to believe that “a beginning needs a Beginner” (an axiom if ever there was one) yet your “God” magically isn’t bound by these same laws. The question of who designed the designer still stands, because if he/she/it created the universe, then who created he/she/it? But let’s for a moment concede your point, namely that an eternal creator figure did create the “heavens and the earth” and the universe entire. How does such a fact relate to Jesus of Nazareth? Please do explain. Why couldn’t Thor or Zeus or Ra or Allah have brought the universe into being? Or any number of other gods? You have seemingly side stepped one problem, only to step right into an even more perplexing one.
You insist that “opponents of the Christian faith… maintain, arrogantly if not naively, that they will not believe anything which has not first been fully proven to them”, which once again evinces a total lack of understanding of the scientific mindset. Now I can’t talk for all “opponents of the Christian faith”, because these emanate from all quarters, including from those espousing belief in a different deity, so I will only talk from my own personal perspective which I have done throughout this message. The term “fully proven” is a concept that no rational person should subscribe to because, in a very important sense, nothing is ever fully proven. All knowledge is to a greater or lesser degree provisional. That is why scientific knowledge progresses because what we know about the world today is not all there is to know, hence we can keep embroidering our picture of the universe until a more expansive one emerges. This is also true in other fields of enquiry where the scientific concept of provisionality isn’t such a bad one to apply because, after all, there are always more books to read about any number of subjects.
Your statement also reverses the required relationship between someone who makes a particular claim and those who question said claim. This is a strategy regularly adopted by Christians who make outlandish claims about the nature of the universe and expect others to accept these claims without a shred of evidence. How it should work in a society that prizes rationality and logic over faith-based inanity is that the person making any particular statement that has a direct bearing on our understanding of the world has to at least attempt to ground his or her contention in a modicum of evidence. That is how science works and hence why I prize the scientific method above all others. To illustrate what I mean let’s think what an obvious response would be to an assertion by someone on the street that they have been endowed with the power to fly and to break through concrete walls. In case you’re wondering, that obvious response would probably be something along the lines of “okay, prove it”. Similarly, if you make claims that the universe was designed with you in mind and that the Designer of the universe sent his only son to earth on a suicide mission to die for everyone’s sins until the end of time, the obvious response is once again something like “okay, prove it”. You see, Taryn, it is up to you and your fellow travellers in the Christian religion to make the case FOR your particular doctrine, rather than the duty of us non-believers to debunk your claims. Fortunately, we are able to do this with the welter of evidence at our disposal, but the basic point still stands. And if these claims cannot be supported by at least some evidence, let alone anything approaching conclusiveness, then, as Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence”. You play that game, then so will I.
Your reference to René Descartes couldn’t be more ironic, though I’m afraid the irony comes at your expense. Descartes was a theist whose argument for the existence of god is still regularly trotted out by religious apologists to make their case for the existence of a creator, or at least their particular version thereof. Judging by what you wrote about Descartes I really don’t think you know very much about the man or his ideas. In ‘Elements of Philosophy’(Fourth Edition), edited by Samuel Stumpf and Donald Abel, a number of extracts from Descartes’ meditations are included. In the ‘First Meditation’ Descartes declares that “I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions”(pg. 49). He goes on to write that “But to accomplish this, it will NOT be necessary for me to show that ALL my opinions are false, which is something I could perhaps never manage. Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false. So, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, it will be enough if I find in each of them at least some reason for doubt. And to do this I will not need to run through them all individually, which would be an endless task”. You are thus correct in asserting that “Descartes recognized that he could not ultimately doubt everything”, but wrong to claim that his aim would “be that of doubting and criticizing everything he could”, as the above extract makes perfectly clear. His doubting of previously held beliefs was a means to greater certainty, rather than an end in and of itself. This certainty is expressed in his most famous line, “cogito ergo sum”, I think therefore I am. Thus the act of thinking is the surest ground he had to claim that he actually existed, rather than existence being a mere fragment of some demon’s imagination.
Your section on Descartes contains a glaring contradiction as on one hand you write that “Descartes recognized that he could not ultimately doubt everything” yet on the other hand the “modern-day apes of Descartes…claim they will doubt absolutely everything and accept nothing except upon proof”. To ape someone means to copy their behaviour in as close an approximation of the original as possible. So please do explain to me how people are aping Descartes when you yourself admit that they are attempting a philosophical approach to life that the famed philosopher himself never actually attempted? I also have serious questions regarding your sentence that “If a person were truly to doubt everything—his memory of past experiences, his present sensations, the ‘connections’ between experiences, the meanings of his words, the principles by which he reasons—he would not be ‘thinking’ at all (much less doubting), and there would be no ‘he’ to think or not to think”. In the first part of the sentence you write of someone attempting to truly doubt everything, yet you conclude that if they do so they are not, in the end, even doubting. How is it possible to doubt and not doubt at the same time? And why is it that doubting isn’t thinking? Surely if I just parrot what someone else thinks or does that would not be thinking as I would be acting like an automaton. The act of doubting, which is the same as questioning, is surely the first step to deeper reflection. What makes Descartes such a significant figure in the annals of modern philosophy is that he asked us, as all great philosophers ultimately do, to think more deeply about the world around us. They beckon us to call into question easy certainties and to interrogate how we know what we know, which is called epistemology, a particularly rich field of philosophy and an area most serious philosophers touch on at least to some degree, which leads me to my next point.
I take great exception to the insinuation that I am an “intellectual hypocrite” because, according to you, I publically reject an aspect of the Christian worldview that I secretly still subscribe to. This would be that seemingly catch all phrase “faith” that Christians bandy about with a reckless abandon that never ceases to amaze me. What you are in fact doing here is creating what I call a false equalisation as you are suggesting that Christians have faith in Christianity and non-believers have faith in science or philosophy or any number of other intellectual avenues. By doing so you are claiming that Christians have chosen one type of worldview in exactly the same manner that a non-believer has chosen his or her particular perspective. You are quite correct in suggesting that I “criticize(sic) Christians for appealing to ‘“faith’”, because I consider faith to be an intellectually indefensible way of gaining an understanding of anything. In fact the admission that one has faith in a particular proposition is indicative of the weak basis for believing this proposition in the first place. If there is sufficient evidence to support a claim then no faith is required. The problem with most Christians, or at least many I have encountered, is that they purposefully misrepresent how scientists and historians or numerous other researchers in various fields actually know what it is they know, in other words Christians seem completely uninterested in grasping epistemological foundations for the conclusions proffered by experts. Now, as stated, the term “fully proven” is a virtual impossibility, so it is something I would never claim, however there is a massive difference between stating that one is 99% certain, or even 70% certain, of something, and saying that the only reason I believe a particular proposition is because I have faith that it is true. Between the mindset which thinks that it is possible to know many things but recognises that there are considerable limitations to human knowledge, and one which posits that significant knowledge about the world can be gleaned purely via one’s mind without any reference to anything external to it, or based on a single text that has more evidentiary holes in it than a slab of cheddar cheese that’s been repeatedly machine gunned, lies a considerable chasm. To not understand that there is a deeply decisive difference between reading ten books on Napoleon and arriving at some conclusions, not final, about him, or examining a rapidly evolving virus under a microscope to see evolution play out in real time and thus further augment for oneself the validity of the theory of evolution, and the claim that Jesus is the son of god, or even god himself, without anything remotely approaching tangible evidence is to not understand anything.
I also suspect, Taryn, that you employ faith, in its religious meaning, only very rarely on a daily basis. When you visit the doctor with some ailment would you be happy with him declaring that you have a brain tumour, or stomach virus, or shingles, without conducting any examination whatsoever? Do you not where a seatbelt because you have faith that the Lord will protect you? Do you simply take it on faith that there is nothing wrong with your car even though there are some ominous noises emanating from your engine? What if you visited a mechanic after certain serious faults made the driving experience a rather trying affair and his only response was that he had “faith” that the car was okay even though all the evidence suggested otherwise? You would surely not be happy with such an answer, so why should people like me be happy with a Christian responding to my various enquiries regarding their faith with what amounts to nothing but one big convenient cop-out?
I also find it strange that you assert that people who demand some measure of proof for outlandish claims “act or talk like arrogant fools” and are, furthermore, “arrogant” and “naïve” to keep insisting on this simple standard of evidentiary logic, yet to claim that the universe was made with you in mind and that you know the mind of god is perfectly compatible with the notion of humility that Christians so love to espouse. Perhaps you could explain to me how one squares such amazing hubris with such self conscious humility and such a fundamental lack of evidence with such certainty of conviction?
As pointed out above, Descartes was a theist who was concerned with providing proofs for the existence of God as, according to the editors of ‘Elements of Philosophy’, when good old René thought of God he thought “of an all-perfect being: all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful…But the most fundamental perfection of all is existence. Consequently, to think of an all-perfect being that does not exist would be a manifest contradiction - as manifest a contradiction as to think of a triangle that does not have three sides” (pg. 48). Needless to say, this is a very poor argument for the existence of god and I can thus assure you that mine is certainly not the “spirit of René Descartes”, your straw man arguments aside. Unlike Christians or people of other faith traditions, I require no single text to base my life on, nor do I require saints and apostles who are elevated above the status of mere mortals. I draw on a wide range of thinkers past and present who have had significant ideas about how to live a moral life or how to go about obtaining meaningful knowledge, or even what knowledge really is. Unlike Christians I don’t need to artificially distort my intellect and curtail my inquisitiveness by assuming that one book, inspired by some unseen, numinous heaven-residing being, is the only one necessary for any ethical or scientific questions. The world of ideas, spanning the length and breadth of all that human civilisation has collectively left behind for our shared benefit, is my playground, and if you are interested in gaining insight into the sorts of questions about ethics that philosophers have raised since ancient Athens right up to the twentieth century I highly recommend reading AC Grayling’s ‘What is Good? The search for the best way to live’. If I were to identify with a particular “spirit”, as you so quaintly put it, I would prefer to think of my philosophical and intellectual spirit has having its roots in the Enlightenment where such great thinkers as Denis Diderot, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau forever altered how we think about the world and ourselves. The values of truth, justice and liberty were much vaunted, and I value them still. We have the Enlightenment to thank for the Revolution in the United States and that amazing American constitution which still continues to inspire much of the world, and upon which South Africa’s famed constitution was built upon. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which celebrated sixty years since its original promulgation in December last year, is a fruit of Enlightenment thinking, as was the anti-slavery movement, despite what latter day Christians, who for most of the history of Christianity were perfectly comfortable with slavery, might claim. Much of modern scientific progress has the Enlightenment to thank as rationality and ideas of technological advancement were so central to the key figures from the era. I could go on and on, but hopefully you get my drift, as they say in Hawaii.
Just as I requested that you conduct this exchange in a spirit of honesty, I would ask you to please not impute to me beliefs that you think I hold, rather than what I have actually indicated in my correspondence with you. Because by doing so you are not arguing against what I have written, but rather what you imagine I believe which is, as I’m sure you’ll agree, no way to conduct any meaningful debate. You may have noticed that Kavish and I addressed each and every one of the specific points raised in your letter to Varsity, yet you don’t seem to have reciprocated that approach in your subsequent message. Nevertheless, I shall stick to my discursive guns, as it were.
You claim that Kavish and I claimed in our article that god “must be ‘unintelligent’ if he allows pain and suffering”, yet that was not the point we were making. It was perhaps vaguely implied in the paragraph you are referring to, but that wasn’t our main beef. You are once again setting up straw men as you proceed to deliver a disquisition on the nature of good and evil and how without a belief in a deity such notions are purely arbitrary, which I will address from the next paragraph. But first for some clarification of the point at hand. We referred to the fact that it is estimated that one out of every three people is prone to getting cancer at least once in their lifetime. Recently my father was diagnosed with prostrate cancer, though fortunately he is receiving treatment for it and caught it in time so it should be completely dealt with after six weeks worth of radiation treatment. His doctor informed him that 53% of men over the age of fifty are liable to be afflicted by prostrate cancer. Now certainly cancer involves “pain and suffering”, but that is not the reason we deemed a creator who would allow this to happen as ‘unintelligent’. If the engine of a particular make of car had a one in three chance of malfunctioning we would conclude that this isn’t a particularly intelligent attribute. Nor would any fault that occurs in about a third of the objects made, regardless of the product, be deemed to evince a high calibre of craftsmanship. The same holds true for our reference to “tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes and famine” which, once again, surely cause plenty of pain and suffering, but the real issue is the capriciousness of a creator that would painstakingly craft a highly complicated and multi-faceted creation that would in one foul sweep be swept away as a result of an extreme weather event. The question that you failed to address in your message is once again posed, namely what is so intelligent about a creation where constant arbitrary destruction is the norm? One could affix many uncomplimentary adjectives to such a world, but intelligent is certainly not one of them. A few more questions to contemplate might be why are there all those vestigial organs that are either useless to modern humans or even harmful? Why do men have testicles on the outside which make them particularly vulnerable to assault in that region? Why do women menstruate? Keep in mind these are questions related just to the human body, I could go on almost ad infinitum about the numerous unintelligent aspects of the natural world, but I shall refrain from doing so lest you be inundated with queries for which no comfortable answers are available.
The Question of evil and the Bible’s questionable morals
The bulk of your message is concerned with the question of evil which is quite remarkable considering the word evil never appears in our original missive. You are more than welcome to confirm this just so you know I’m not unfairly accusing you of misrepresentation. The very concept of evil is religious in nature, though I still use the word because it so appositely describes the dark side of human nature. The question of evil is a very fascinating and complicated one that demands a thorough treatment. It has long been a problem for theologians and people of faith to grapple with, and certainly is not a topic that can be dealt with in the glib manner adopted in your message. There is even a lovely word in theological circles for the problem of evil, namely theodicy, which I notice was completely absent from your lengthy treatment of the subject. I am also interested to know how much of what you wrote is your own and how much was taken wholesale from “Christian philosopher Greg Bahnsen”. The reason I ask is twofold as there is a considerable difference between the style of writing and argumentation in your letter to Varsity and that which you managed to achieve in the message I received. Furthermore, you employ the use of the word ‘behavior’ twice, which, as I’m sure you are aware, is the American spelling of that word. Nevertheless, I shall still attempt to deal with what you wrote as if you had written it without help from anywhere else.
In essence, most of what you wrote in Part 2 of your message reduces to one simple dictum - non-believers have no basis to make any moral judgements. The obvious corollary being that believers, Christians in particular, have a monopoly on making moral pronouncements because their morality is grounded in an immutable foundation of divine inspiration. That you would seriously make this point after it has been so resoundingly discredited for so long is absolutely amazing and suggests yet again the desperate lengths that Christians will go to in defence of the indefensible, using arguments that are themselves completely beyond the pale of defensibility.
If you had read ‘The God Delusion’ you would have read two chapters that have a direct bearing on the two interrelated issues that were raised by your message, as these chapters delve into the question of where people get their sense of morality from and explain why the Bible is certainly not the source of morality for most Christians. I will attempt to provide partial summaries while also giving my own explanations as to the reasons for the phenomena under review.
Because you no doubt have a very limited grasp of the history of the world it may come as a shock to you that the world is billions of years old and that the story of homo sapiens occupies only the final 0.001 % of earth’s history. What is more striking is that while scientists trace the development of our hominid ancestors in the African savannah over a few million years, we have only been in our current form for about 250 000 to 100 000 years, according to Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists. Even if we take the lowest estimate at 100 000 years, the emergence of what we recognise as civilisation, such as the creation of tools, the first attempts at artistic representation, the codification of language and religion, can only be traced to about 50 000 years ago. The reason I am providing this brief overview of the history of our species is because it has a direct bearing on the issue at hand. You see, Taryn, when human beings were confined to roaming the African countryside in our earliest hominid incarnation almost everyone they met would have been either a relative or someone they depended on for survival. We are talking about groups of at most only a few dozen, whose existence was fraught with threats from many sources so it made obvious strategic sense to co-operate with one another. Without such co-operation our ancestors wouldn’t have been able to reach maturity and thus to procreate to produce more offspring. Because group cohesion was so very vital it was imperative that cheaters and other dishonest individuals be ostracised from the group lest they undermine the survivability of everyone else. There are terms for the types of co-operation that would have occurred, and still do occur in human societies, among our hominid forbears. These include reciprocal altruism which basically means “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine”, or any other variation involving a mutually beneficial relationship. Kin selection entails the greater lengths that a person will go to in order to ensure that their family is looked after. The reason being is that any person that you are related to carries at least some of your genes, thus if they survive more of yourself is carried forward into future generations. It may seem stark and not particularly grandiose to believers, but all living organisms are programmed by their DNA to reproduce and human beings are no different, with evolutionists going so far as stating that the only real purpose for our existence is to procreate, which does make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective yet needn’t preclude living an abundantly joyous life with all the trappings afforded by the modern world such as watching films by Jean-Luc Godard, listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or reading novels by Nabokov or Stendhal. I am probably getting a bit sidetracked here, so apologies. Anyway, in terms of kin selection parents will sacrifice greatly for their children, who will in turn sacrifice for their children, and siblings will also look after one another, with concern of this sort receding as family members become more and more distant. Thus you’re unlikely to sacrifice as much for a cousin three times removed as you would for a nephew, for instance.
Now what does all of this have to do with the question of evil? Well, plenty actually. Combining what we know about early humans, and what we know about the development of civilisation subsequent to the evolutionary emergence of homo habilis, homo erectus and, finally, homo sapiens, it is not only safe to say, but altogether logical, that our sense of right and wrong, or morality, is a trait hardwired into us in much the same way that language is, or other traits we have inherited over the course of our species’ evolutionary journey. This is a central thesis of Marc Hauser’s book ‘Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our universal sense of right and wrong’. Now I will admit that the science is still not conclusive on this issue, but there is strong evidence to suggest the case is as I’ve briefly summarised it. In ‘The God Delusion’, Dawkins cites a number of studies conducted by Hauser around the world where people were given identical moral dilemmas and provided strikingly similar responses in each case. Dawkins notes that “From the present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their reasons”(pg. 223). He goes on to write that after analysing the responses by people it becomes clear that “the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them”(pg. 223). He quotes Hauser directly: “ ‘Driving our moral judgements is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness’” (pg. 223). After providing details of the three main moral dilemmas posed in a study conducted by Hauser and philosopher Peter Singer, the “main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements”, which leads Dawkins to end this section by noting that “This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good – or evil” (pg. 226). Needless to say, I am certainly one of the “many others” Dawkins refers to.
Thus, Taryn, it should be clear that it is no more logical to denounce murder as an atheist than it is to do so under the supposed aegis of religious observance. We had morality before we had anything remotely resembling religion or advanced civilization, which should be obvious because if rape and murder and thievery were perfectly acceptable to our ancient ancestors we wouldn’t be here today having this exchange. As another indication of the universality of morality, can you name any society in the history of the world that has condoned murder or child abuse as a matter of principle? That these have existed in all societies is quite different to being officially approved. Certainly there are horrific stories of cannibalism in tribes in Africa and in the Pacific Islands, as well as among the likes of the Incas and Mayans, who also sacrificed young virgins to propitiate the gods, but it wasn’t as if everyone was eaten and sacrificed. These societies had a time and a place, questionable as these might have been, for performing acts which most people today find abhorrent.
Your entire discussion on what constitutes “good” and how non-believers always face the problem of appealing to a foundation that they expressly reject by virtue of not being religious is thus rendered irrelevant. In fact, you have once again erected a number of straw men which you’ve proceeded to incompetently knock down, such as the absurd idea that we, or any other non-believers, take seriously the idea that the good is defined by “whatever evokes public approval”. That wasn’t even remotely inferred in our article, and is an idea that should be rejected out of hand. Furthermore, you seem to fancy yourself quite the mind reader as you confidently assert that if one were to take the “‘good’ to be whatever evokes the approval of the individual” then “no two individuals can make identical ethical judgments”. How could you possibly know that when your imaginary Bill states that “‘Helping orphans is good,’ he would not be saying the same thing as when Ted says ‘Helping orphans is good’”? This is a complete non sequitur, and is reminiscent of most of your message wherein you waffle on either drawing illogical conclusions or smugly rebutting pronouncements that only you have identified thereby winning arguments with yourself, a victory of sorts, I suppose, but hardly the one you were aiming for I surmise. Your next paragraph makes more sense than many of the others, and it certainly is an important question of what constitutes the “greatest good for the greatest number”, as the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham formulated the problem, but it is a question that needn’t ever presuppose a cosmic creator and has long been asked by moral philosophers who see ethics as a richly complicated field precisely because there are few easy answers in sight and virtually no chance that the question will ever be settled, which runs counter to the religious mindset which always seems to want comfortably easy answers for maddeningly complex questions.
I am astounded at the ad hominems that so easily fly from the mouths, or in this case the fingers, of Christians when faced with a non-believing interlocutor. To assume that an “unbelieving worldview” is unable to argue against the Christian worldview based on the “argument from evil”, because apparently the unbeliever “must first be able to show that his judgments about the existence of evil are meaningful”, is patently absurd and just plain false. For one thing, I rarely use the “argument from evil” against Christianity because there are so many better ones that render the religion in an appropriately ridiculous and fallacious light. However, your implication is not just an insult to all non-believers everywhere, but is in fact an insult against the human race. Do you honestly think that if someone stops being a Christian the first thought that pops into their minds is that it is now perfectly acceptable to rape and murder? I can actually speak from personal experience as I was a Christian for most of my life and only finally rejected the faith about two years ago. I have had many Christian friends over the years and a number of them are among the most moral and decent individuals I have ever had the pleasure to know. I have absolutely no doubt that if they stopped believing in god and the divinity of Christ tomorrow that they would remain among the most moral and decent human beings our world possesses. It is precisely because I have enough respect for the individual that I would never make the absolutely outlandish correlation between unbelief and immorality that you and your fellow Christians so glibly trot out time and time again. I am quite sure, Taryn, that should you lose your faith tomorrow that you will remain a fundamentally decent person, which I believe that you are. Recently the philosopher Daniel Dennett, another thinker with whom I suggest you become better acquainted, gave an address at UCT and, despite being an unstinting critic of religion, acknowledged that most people are religious because they want to be better people. I agree with this assessment, but the flipside is that people don’t reject religion because they are bad or want to use atheism as an excuse to indulge in immoral behaviour. This canard so beloved of the faithful must be rejected by all thoughtful people just as the idea that Christians and other religious people are stupid should be confined to the same dustbin of calumniations. If you cannot grasp that murder and rape and child abuse are self-evidently wrong, I feel very sorry for you Taryn, and you are unintentionally revealing that your Christianity acts more as a moral crutch than as a doctrine you have adopted after long and intense ratiocination.
In the section entitled ‘Does the Unbeliever Take Evil Seriously, then?’ I find your logic for the most part very difficult to comprehend, so won’t tarry all that long on this part of your message. You write that “Unbelievers complain that certain plain facts about human experience are inconsistent with the Christian's theological beliefs about the goodness and power of God”, which is certainly accurate because the degree of inconsistency contained within the Bible makes this observation almost unavoidable unless you have very large faith-based blinkers on. It certainly doesn’t require, as you insist, “the non-Christian to assert the existence of evil in this world” which concomitantly negates the question of what “has been presupposed here?”. I’ll go into further details later on about the supposed “goodness and power of God”.
You sling further mud on unbelievers by declaring that even they “can be shaken from their easy and glib espousals of relativism in the face of moral atrocities like war, rape, and torture”. You face the problem that has already been noted numerous times in this response, which is that you constantly presuppose how the non-believer arrives at his moral judgements without reference to anything we’ve written so you have to go out on a limb and create some imaginary figure with his arguments from “personal taste, preference or subjective opinion”. If you fail to comprehend our collective evolutionary inheritance, as outlined above, it really will be impossible for you to grasp that moral judgements are possible without appeal to any theistic authority. It is thus utter failure to understand human nature, or to have any knowledge of moral philosophy dating back thousands of years, that leads you to make the utterly childish claim that the “expression of moral indignation is but personal evidence that unbelievers know this God in their heart of hearts”. The term non sequitur seems wholly inadequate to account for this mammoth leap of illogic. My indignation, nor that of my unbelieving friends, certainly does not require any “recourse to the absolute, unchanging, and good character of God in order to make philosophical sense”. Perhaps that’s what your indignation requires, but even this is a questionable assertion as I will later reveal. Christians comfort themselves with the myth that only their god can be the arbiter of any fixed set of moral principles because they see theirs as the one true way and all who stray from this path are merely misguided fools, if not downright wicked. Like the story of the resurrection, or most other stories in the not so good Book, this is a fiction that never becomes true no matter how many times you insist that it is.
Because I don’t subscribe to the belief “that evil is, in the final analysis, based on human reasoning or choices”, the final part of this section is not applicable to me. I have never expressed the belief that an “activity is wrong only if the individual (or culture) chooses some value which is inconsistent with it (e.g., pleasure, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, freedom)”. No amount of rationalisation will ever justify mass slaughter, the ill treatment of women or children, or any number of horrendous action justified in the name of culture. You’re barking up the wrong tree here, I’m afraid, as I am the furthest thing from a relativist, as anyone who knows me will attest. Perhaps in future you would care to name some names of unbelievers who apparently “professes that people determine ethical values for themselves” and who “implicitly hold that those who commit evil are not really doing anything evil, given the values which they have chosen for themselves”. I really don’t know such people, so it would be nice to know who they are so that I could avoid them in future. They sound positively dangerous, if you ask me. I don’t even know what you mean when you write that “the unbeliever who is indignant over wickedness supplies the very premises which philosophically condone and permit such behavior, even though at the same time the unbeliever wishes to insist that such behavior is not permitted—it is ‘evil’”. Maybe I’m just slow, so please explain this far flung premise if you’d be so kind.
Funny that in the final paragraph of this section you should include the confident assertion that the “non-Christian's worldview (of whatever variety) eventually cannot account for such moral outrage”, which is strange because my worldview, as expressed in summary here, has exactly accounted for such moral outrage. I also find it intriguing that you should write that “the problem of evil is precisely a philosophical problem for unbelief” considering that some of the finest Christian minds have long had a tough time precisely with this very problem, hence there is a theological concept devoted exclusively to it. Is your mind just vastly superior to theirs? Or could you be displaying a degree of arrogance that doesn’t really gel with Christ’s injunctions to his follows to exercise humility? Evil is, and always will be, a massive problem for believers and non-believers alike. Although, in point of fact, atheists (a term I’m not particularly comfortable with) have an easier time of it because, in the absence of any god, evil can be explained by virtue of the fact that we are merely animals with oversized brains who are prone, more often than not, to bestial behaviour. Because you and your ilk posit a divine creator you have, in fact, multiplied problems for yourself rather than reduced them, despite what you may claim in that self-satisfied manner. To claim that “moral notions like good or evil” are “objective and unchanging” is so laughably naïve that my jaw audibly slackened whilst reading that sentence. This does, however, provide a nice segue into my critique of your last section, entitled “Resolving the Alleged paradox” which, as I’ve come to expect, doesn’t do anything of the sort.
Unresolved paradoxes galore
There is an excellent chapter in ‘The God Delusion’ entitled “The ‘Good’ Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist” in which the author argues that wherever believers get their morals from it certainly isn’t the Bible, particularly not the Old Testament. In some ways this point bears on what I have just written, however there is considerable overlap between your arguments regarding the attributes of God and the nature of morality. Christians love to assert that their morality is “objective and unchanging” and that atheists are reduced to being relativists who have no basis for any moral judgements they might make. Dawkins expertly shows in Chapter 7 just mentioned that notions of morality have evolved over the centuries to such an extent that the beliefs held by Christians in one era are often unrecognisable from those held by Christians in a latter epoch. That discussion would take up too much space so I’ll rather examine some key chapters in the Bible that completely undermines this argument of immutable morality so persistently employed by Christians.
I’m sure you’re well aware of the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament. As you will no doubt also know, there are many laws outlined in this book as to how Jewish people should live. Because the book hasn’t been extricated from the Bible that Christians use, and the fact that Jesus told his followers that he had come to “fulfil the law”, one assumes it has a degree of relevance to Christians, or at least it should have. The punishments for various transgressions are more than a little harsh, at least by modern standards. Homosexuals, adulterers, disobedient children, and fornicators are all to be stoned to death. If a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night she is to be dragged to her father’s house and killed in front of it. There is also that famous sequence in Numbers 15 where a man is caught collecting wood on the Sabbath and Moses orders him to be killed because that is what god wants. In Exodus 31:12 -15 god tells Moses that “Because the LORD considers it a holy day, anyone who works on the Sabbath must be put to death”. Now whatever you may personally feel about adulterers and homosexuals, and I doubt your opinion is very high of either category, I am quite sure, Taryn, that you don’t think that our laws should be changed so that such people could be stoned to death. The interesting question, of course, is why don’t you feel this way, when Jews of the time saw absolutely no problem with such punishment?
Christians also love to claim that the Ten Commandments are a source of unchangeable morality, yet there are two sets of Commandments, as Moses destroyed the first tablets after discovering that the Israelites had been making idols in his absence. A number of Commandments also have absolutely no bearing on moral behaviour as god instructs his followers to have no other gods but him and to not make graven images. Now what’s so moral about simply believing in a particular deity at the exclusion of all others? What sort of lesson are we supposed to learn from this instruction?
If we turn further afield in the Old Testament we arrive at the book of Deuteronomy which is filled with more genocide than anyone should care to read about in a lifetime. There is that classic chapter 20 where God tells the Israelites that when they attack those tribes living on the outskirts of the promised land they are to give them a choice between resisting and co-operating. Resisting entails the tribe’s complete decimation, whereas if they offer no resistance the Israelites are to murder the men and take the women as slaves. Talk about a rock and a hard place!! The tribes who lived within the Promised Land were to be completely destroyed regardless of whether or not they offered any resistance. Not only were all the people supposed to be summarily murdered, but all animals were also supposed to be slaughtered. Dawkins refers to the book of Joshua and he describes it as “a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records and the xenophobic relish with which it does so” (pg. 247). In the battle of Jericho “Joshua didn’t rest until ‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword’ (Joshua 6:21) [pg. 247]. I can’t agree more with Dawkins when he contends that “the Bible story of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein’s massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs” (pg. 247). Dawkins is also not wrong when he writes that the “Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals” (pg. 247). Now how on earth do passages such as those contained in Deuteronomy, Joshua and Leviticus, to name but three striking examples, square with your idea that “God is all-good”? In fact, reading the Bible with even a moderate degree of attentiveness renders this banal formulation wholly untenable and I believe Dawkins has given the best ever definition of the god of the Old Testament, who is after all the “god” you consistently refer to as the source of your morality:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. (The God Delusion, pg. 31)
Putting aside the wholly inadequate grounding in moral philosophy provided by the Bible, one could easily turn to the history of Christianity to reveal that many adherents of the faith down the ages were hardly moral paragons. If there is such an easy equation where believing in god, or at least the Christian version thereof, equals adherence to a higher set of moral principles how does one explain the unspeakable atrocities visited upon Muslims by the Medieval Crusaders? This was the ignoble episode in Christian history when not only was Jerusalem sacked, but also saw the warriors of Christ using babies as target practice and, in probably the most repellent anecdote recorded at the time, St Bartholomew noted in his diary that after one battle the Crusaders ate their Muslim captives. Why is it that, if Christianity is supposedly the source of morality, that the Conquistadores in the 1500s, acting not only in the name of the Spanish crown but also in the name of Christ their saviour, butchered and enslaved millions of indigenous people in what is today Latin America, wiping out entire civilisations in the process? Speaking of the Spanish, I’m sure you’re aware of the very nasty machinations of the Roman Catholic Church in that country, and in other European lands, where the starkly authoritarian Inquisition took place which saw the persecution of all manner of “heretics” and even believers whose faith was seen to be insufficiently fervid. Galileo was persecuted, though thankfully not remotely as severely as many others, simply because he expanded on the concept of heliocentrism as this idea clashed with how the earth’s place in the universe is described in the Bible. Martin Luther, among most other prominent people of faith at this time, harshly rejected the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way around, and he cited Scripture to make his case by stating that “as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth”. And this is the same Bible that you describe as being so scientifically reliable? The Pilgrims who arrived at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts Bay in the 1600s were fleeing religious persecution in Europe and sought to forge a new life in the New World, which many saw as the Promised Land. Despite their deep commitment to the Christian faith they saw little wrong with treating the Native Americans they encountered with contempt and even murdering their fair share, a genocidal campaign which lasted for hundreds of years throughout North America and which ended up reducing the Native American population by about 90% according to many estimates. They also burned witches, along with their Christian counterparts in Europe, and were generally harshly intolerant of anyone holding a different belief to their own. If you doubt anything I’ve written please do read up about these historical incidents or watch documentaries which are readily available on National Geographic or the History Channel.
Christians often like to take credit for being at the vanguard of the abolitionist movement in the United States and England, and usually cite the efforts by the likes of William Wilberforce to put an end to slavery. What is often elided by this reading of history is that for centuries Christians saw absolutely nothing wrong with slavery and were often the most ardent supporters of this abomination. If Christians did finally see the error of their ways, this is hardly something for which they should be praised just as someone who returns stolen property after keeping it for a number of years will still be seen as a thief, which he has ever been. While it is certainly true that Christians valiantly battled to eliminate slavery in the United States, they were aided by many secularists and non-believers, yet every single slaveholder in the Deep South was a Bible believing Christian. The Bible gave them a perfect justification for keeping slaves and for perceiving darker skinned people as inferior. That verse in the Bible where Noah’s cursed son Ham is banished to Africa still provides the grist that many racists need to fuel their mill of ethnic intolerance. Abraham Lincoln noted with considerable sadness that both the defenders and the critics of slavery were reading from the same Bible. If this isn’t an indictment of the supposedly “objective and unchanging nature of moral notions like good and evil” provided by the Bible and belief in the Christian god then I don’t know what is.
In his article “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality” which appeared in ‘Skeptic’ magazine and is available online, John Hartung provides a possible reason why there is this discrepancy between the espoused morals of a particular religious group and their actions towards another tribe or religious community. The verdict serves to further indict religion rather than to exculpate it. Hartung posits that religions, in this case Judaism and Christianity(the two are inextricably bound), articulate various injunctions for their votaries to observe which in turn fosters in-group cohesion. So while murder and other acts are strictly forbidden within the group, the flipside to the greater cohesiveness brought about as a result of the codification of a set of laws is that a tribalism or nationalism is simultaneously encouraged due to an overdeveloped sense of in-group identification. The tribal mentality fostered by religion, which is brilliantly if disturbingly illustrated by the Bible, reveals the correspondence between intense in-group identification and the carrying out of egregious acts by the Israelites in contact with other groups that would be considered abhorrent if they occurred within the tribe of Israel. This explains how murder is ostensibly outlawed amongst the Israelites yet god, or so the Jewish writers of the Old Testament would have us believe, not only condones but actively encourages the wholesale decimation of other tribes. And you call non-believers hypocrites and relativists!!!
Another question to consider for those who hold steadfast to the belief that Christianity equals greater morality is what happens when societies gradually lose their religiosity? We should, according to your logic, notice that they become cesspits of debauchery and hotbeds of all manner of salaciousness and villainy. First, some background information. Europe was essentially the birthplace of what we now understand Christianity to be because when Constantine made Catholicism the official religion of the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century this not only enabled Christianity to spread throughout the continent but also eventually throughout much of the world when European nations began colonising vast tracts of the world beyond their shores. While I love European civilisation I also have to acknowledge that this continent has been among the most war torn for centuries with many of the wars being directly attributable to differing religious views. The Thirty Year War, for instance, wiped out about a third of Germany’s population in the 1600s. Since World War 2, which many consider the most destructive war in the history of the world, Europe has enjoyed its longest stretch of unbroken peace in its history. Interestingly, during this same era Western Europe has become increasingly secular with Christianity retreating into ever greater irrelevance as the decades wear on. In England polls reveal that only about 8% of the population regularly attend church services and that number is probably comparable to religious observance in Germany, France and Holland, with Spain and Italy recording higher numbers of church attendees but still showing an undeniable downward trend. The Scandinavian countries are probably the least religious on earth with polls in Sweden showing that between 40 and 80% of people openly identify as atheists. Sweden has one of the lowest crime, poverty and HIV infection rates in the world, with excellent health care and free education for all its citizens. The Swedes are also among the most generous nations when it comes to allocating foreign aid and accepting political refugees. For instance, they have welcomed far more refugees from Iraq than the United States has, the country which caused the mess in the first place. Sweden could well rank, along with Denmark and Norway, as well as Finland and Iceland, as the best country on earth if one takes all the various indicators of social well being into account. It would almost seem as if the less religious Sweden has become the more its quality of life has improved. In Australia the recent census revealed that about 20% of people have no religion whatsoever, up from 0.6% in the early 1960s. Australia hasn’t seen an increase in murder or rape as a result, in fact the crime rate there is also one of the lowest in the world, as is the rate of AIDs. A poll conducted in Canada last year showed that 25% of people identified as non-religious and Canada is one of the most progressive countries on earth with universal healthcare for all, a very welcoming attitude towards foreign immigrants, and also a very low crime rate. These facts should all be very worrying to someone who believes that the more religious a society is the better behaved its citizenry.
What is even more worrying for the faithful is that countries that are religious show no marked improvement over those that aren’t. In fact, in many cases they are worse behaved. Take the United States of America which, among wealthy nations, has the highest rate of religiosity bar none. Yet it also boasts, if that’s the right word, the highest murder rate of the top industrialised nations. Apart from Japan, it remains the only wealthy nation to still have the death penalty which doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the crime rate. Studies reveal that a quarter of the children in the USA are impoverished, and 15% of the general population are also classified as such. Despite being the richest nation on earth, there is no universal health care and the USA has the highest income inequality in the developed world. It is also among the world’s heaviest drug using nation. Even more intriguing is the fact that in the so-called Red States, those who are more inclined to be church going and vote Republican, the divorce rate, number of murders, amount of illegitimate children and poverty is higher than in the more secular Blue States which traditionally vote Democrat. A recent study was undertaken which revealed that subscriptions to adult websites in America was highest in conservative states such as Utah and Missouri that voted overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate in last year’s election. There is an interesting article about this phenomenon in Vanity Fair magazine called ‘Red State Babylon’ by James Wolcott if you’re interested.
South Africa has among the highest murder and rape rates in the world, yet statistics regularly show that upwards of 80% of the population identify as Christians. How does one explain this phenomenon where high rates of religiosity exist amidst an endless onslaught of venality and criminality of all stripes? I shan’t tarry any longer on this question which is naturally quite mystifying to believers yet those who understand something about human nature and the history of our species are usually far less perplexed about the apparently annoying contradiction.
Now to the last section of your message wherein you attempt to resolve “the Alleged Paradox”. I will first discuss the first three propositions you list regarding the Christian position and then I will move on to your supposed resolution to all perplexing questions, which is nothing of the sort. You contend that “God is all-good” and “all-powerful”, yet note that “Evil exists”. You further state that “the Christian presupposes that God is perfectly and completely good”, which “Scripture requires [believers] to do” and commits Christians “to evaluating everything within his experience in the light of that presupposition”. However, here you immediately run into a very ancient paradox first identified, at least according to history’s records, by Epicurus. As quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief the ancient philosopher states that "Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?" David Hume had a slightly better formulation of the Epicurean conundrum in his ‘Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion’ where he asks “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”. Just as we would judge someone very harshly who didn’t come to the aid of his fellow man if he witnessed them being robbed or assaulted, so to we must judge even more harshly a supposedly all-powerful being who knows and sees all suffering yet allows the suffering to continue unabated. It is, in fact, a form of evil to allow evil to occur in the first place, particularly in light of the immense power that the Christian god is supposed to wield. The more power one has to stop evil the more responsibility one has, so a failure to curb evil in that instance should be considered exceptionally egregious.
You attempt to overcome this basically insurmountable problem by positing a “solution” that, unfortunately for you, not only doesn’t resolve any of the above paradoxes but actually multiplies them. Your big gambit is that “God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists” which quite possibly qualifies as the biggest get out of jail free card I have ever encountered. It is a complete cop-out which doesn’t address any of the issues at hand, but merely wishes them away in the glibbest possible manner. You even go further to say that “God has PLANNED evil events for reasons which are morally commendable and good”. I have never been comfortable with the notion of free will, but at least in such an argument a substantial part of the question of evil rests with people who are given the choice to commit evil deeds while leaving god as a mere onlooker. You actually suggested that your Lord is a scheming rogue who actually has a “morally commendable” reason to perpetrate evil. Yet despite all the problems that still remain you actually have the bumptiousness to state that when “all four of these premises are maintained, there is no logical contradiction to be found, not even an apparent one”. The contradictions are more than just apparent, they are painfully obvious to all but the most deluded.
For starters you adduce, as evidence for the “morally sufficient reasons” god might have for allowing evil to exist, certain incidents in the Bible such as Abraham being compelled to sacrifice his only son, Job who loses everything as a test of his faith and the “greatest crime in all of history” (a bit of hyperbole there, methinks), Christ’s crucifixion. Apart from the obvious point about the morality of a deity who would actually inflict such suffering on his devotees, even asking them to murder their only offspring, and who thinks that by sending his son to earth on some cruel suicide mission he is absolving everybody of their sins, you are employing specific examples to explicate a generalisation. So while it is certainly morally defensible to go to war to battle the Nazis, war as a general principle is surely not morally commendable. The same is true in a host of circumstances where certain situations demand actions that are otherwise morally dubious if not downright immoral. Defenders of torture love to trot out the ticking time bomb scenario as an excuse for inflicting extreme discomfort on captives to elicit important information, yet there have virtually never been real world cases of a ticking time bomb. Here too a very specific example has been utilised to justify a general principle and should thus be rejected on the same grounds.
Your claim is also highly subjective and circular. Subjective because your claim that the evil inherent in Abraham being asked by god to kill his son, or god having his only son brutally murdered, has a morally sufficient reason is based on no concrete foundation whatsoever. Why is there a “morally sufficient” reason for sacrificing one’s child in one instance but not, let’s say, in another when the father in question could also claim holy fiat? The circularity of your argument is implicit in the fact that the only “evidence” for assuming that god had a morally sufficient reason for certain evil deeds is because the Bible informs readers that this is the case. In answer to the question of how the Bible is so certain about this you are compelled to refer back to the “good” book as a justification, hence the merry-go-round continues.
The argument is also unfalsifiable in the extreme as you simply assume that there is always a “morally sufficient reason” for evil in the world. Do you therefore apply this “logic” to the prevalence of child rape, genocide, mass starvation, wars, homicides and all manner of monstrous deeds that humans are capable of? Do you comfort people who have seen their family members murdered or raped, or have themselves been brutally assaulted, with the idea that their suffering is part of some higher moral purpose that is at this juncture merely opaque but will become clear in time? Have you or your family ever been the victim of a terrible criminal incident and did you honestly find solace in this pitiful platitude?
You have probably never read books by Noam Chomsky or John Pilger, because if you had you would realise that there are many reasons for the ubiquity of atrocities around the globe and throughout history. These reasons range from greed, to a lust for power, to ancient ethnic feuds, but are never in aid of some grand moral purpose. To tell the families of the estimated six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis that those deaths were all part of some metaphysical master plan is positively sick, and likely to have the opposite effect of the one intended. Jesus enjoined his followers to always attempt to apply to themselves the same standard they apply to others, which is very good advice that you should definitely follow in this case before you continue espousing doctrines that you fail to observe in your own life.
What’s even more interesting about this outlandish attempt to resolve a paradox that has been created by believers in the first place, is that it contradicts a statement you made in the letter you sent to Varsity. You claimed that your god “cannot let the guilty go unpunished”, a statement that Kavish and I challenged in our article. We referred to a few examples of major atrocities committed on the African continent and made the point that human rights violators such as General Suharto and George W Bush have escaped all legal punishment, the former forever as he is no longer in the land of the living. So either god punishes all evil doers or he allows evil to flourish unchecked with the only guarantee being that there is surely a “morally sufficient reason” for the evil despite even believers having no clue what the reason might be. You can’t really have it both ways because the one conclusion suggests a definitive answer to how evil is dealt with, while the other expresses a blind belief in the supposedly transcendent purpose that evil serves which is nevertheless obscure even to believers. Or should we just trust that the guilty will be punished in the next life, away from the eyes of their victims in this one?
So even on your own terms you have failed to resolve any of the paradoxes your faith institutes in the first place, and have created a multitude of even more perplexing conundrums along the way. The really interesting aspect of all this is that evil is actually a far greater problem for believers than for non-believers. Those who don’t believe in god usually understand that because human beings are basically just primates with large brains we will never attain complete rationality no matter how hard we try and will very often be prone to bouts of bestial behaviour, some people more than others obviously. They furthermore tend to realise that in the absence of a divine source for our morality that evil, to borrow the concept so overused by the religious, isn’t some abstruse nebulous force floating in some mysterious ether, but in fact has its roots within us, just as the magnificent glories that our species are capable of are products of our own minds rather than any cosmic stimuli. I think it is worth quoting the wondrously erudite and mellifluously lyrical writer Christopher Hitchens in this regard who does a very good job of summarising the central point of this paragraph:
“It is absurd, even for a believer, to imagine that god should owe him an explanation. But a believer nevertheless takes on the impossible task of interpreting the will of a person unknown, and thus brings these essentially absurd questions on himself. Let the assumption lapse, though, and we shall see where we are and be able to apply our intelligence, which is all that we have”. (God is not great, pg. 268)
Judging by how much you have written on this topic, and how little Kavish and I spent on it in our article, suggests that the “situation” wherein the reason for evil in the world is obscure is far more “intolerable” for believers than for those who reject ancient dogmas and cretinous creeds, supposedly because of our “pride, feelings, or rationality”, rather than because of any internal inconsistencies or any other problems with the religion itself.
You end off your message with more attacks on non-believers for failing to “trust God unless God subordinates Himself to the intellectual authority and moral evaluation of the unbeliever” and for just generally not ‘getting’ the whole concept of putting faith in a god whose designs are admittedly mysterious but surely good and true, all evidence to the contrary. Your final move in a chess match that you have largely been conducting against yourself and a number of imaginary non-believers who seem to have sprung from your own mind rather than any actual place in the real world, is to explain the source of evil with reference to the story of Adam and Eve. That you should resort to this children’s story to explain the entire shocking mess of human history, often described as a catalogue of horrors, would have beggared belief if I hadn’t already become inured to your amazing flights of fancy. The story is an ambiguous allegory at best, and a thoroughly dishonest account of our origins at worst. Thankfully the best case scenario is now adopted by most of the world’s Christians, or at least a fair share, particularly among the more educated members of the faithful, yet there are still those, clearly including yourself, who assume that there is some literal significance to a story that features as one of its central characters a talking snake and a god who creates the world in just six days and who seems to deliberately want to deprive his most prized creations of having any sort of understanding about anything by urging them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. This story is childish in another very important sense as it represents how religions have tried to simplify the complex with the best means available to them which are, needless to say, wholly inadequate in comparison to all the tools at our modern disposal. I must once again rely on Mr Hitchens to make this point more elegantly than I ever could:
“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think – though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one – that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell” (God is not great, pg. 64).
So the story of Adam and Eve, being completely false in every last detail, is never going to be even remotely adequate to the task of explaining how evil entered the world. Of course the answer is that it never did, or at least not in the way that believers imagine when they discuss a concept that seeks to explain from without something that resides within. Because there is no “original sin” or “fall from grace”, the story of Jesus becomes even more absurd than it already is. Even taken on its own merits, which includes accepting that Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge thereby disobeying god and cursing all subsequent humans, the crucifixion of Christ is a completely nonsensical idea and highly repellent to boot. I might have such immense admiration for a particular friend that I would gladly serve jail time for a crime he committed. What I, nor anyone else, can ever do is wipe that crime away. So even though Jesus may have honestly thought he was dying for everyone’s sins for all time to come, he could never possibly achieve such a goal because it is a complete logical and physical impossibility. In any case why would believers want their god to send his only son to perish on the cross for their sins? And why choose to reveal himself to a small, largely illiterate tribe in a forgotten corner of the Roman Empire? Why not just forgive everyone’s sins or reveal himself to everyone at once? Even today, some 2000 years since Christ died on the cross, there are still many people on this earth who have not yet heard of him. Could the Christian god possibly have conceived of a more cumbersome way to spread such a vitally important, and eternally relevant, truth? Without the veracity of Genesis, however, Jesus’ heavenly ordained martyrdom becomes completely untenable and thus more wince-inducingly embarrassing for believers of all stripes. This probably explains why certain unsophisticated Christians still hold so desperately to the Adam and Eve story as if they were clinging for dear life to a rapidly sinking raft.
After everything that has been noted in my response, your statement that “unbelievers who challenge the Christian faith end up reasoning in circles” is laughable and not worth a rebuttal, beyond all the many that I have already put forth. It is precisely because Christians cannot present rationalists “with a logically adequate and Biblically supported solution to the problem of evil” that we reject your espousals on the matter, rather than because of a mere “lack of faith in God”, which is in any case due to the very considerable inadequacy of the Christian worldview. I have endeavoured to provide “an account of” where our “moral judgement[s]” might originate from so there is no need “to submit to the ultimate and unchallengeable moral authority of God”, by which you mean your version of god whose moral authority is anything but ultimate or unchallengeable, as I have quite thoroughly demonstrated in this lengthy response. To check one’s brain at the door and to be woefully ignorant of an incredibly wide range of subjects, including the very formation of one’s own holy book and the development of one’s own religion, is for me indeed “too high a price to pay, both philosophically and personally”, but you and your fellow travellers in the world of faith based cultism are more than welcome to sacrifice your intellects and inquisitiveness to a cause deemed worthy of such intellectual debasement.
Early on in your message you assured me that your “faith is certainly no blind leap in the dark” as you instead described it as “a step into the light”. Naturally, I beg to differ somewhat with this assessment. Judging by both the letter you sent to Varsity and by the last message I received, I would have to conclude that you are actually stumbling about in a room so dark that you are unable to even vaguely apprehend its full dimensions. If you start meaningfully digging, in the intellectual sense, you will discover that almost everything you think you know about the Christian faith is wrong, and so too the picture of the world provided by the Scriptures. Before unfairly smearing non-believers, who compromise a considerably varied group, try and analyse what it is they have thought and written over the past few centuries. A good starting point would be Thomas Paine and Voltaire, neither of whom expressly denied the existence of god but who were harsh critics of organised religion. Read about scientific discoveries by scientists, rather than misguided members of your religion who try so desperately to distort scientific findings to fit their awfully narrow perspective on the world. Read up on history, politics, philosophy and even, if not especially, on other religions so you may come to understand that they are often very similar and unquestionably reflect the hand of man more than the hand of any celestial being. As Voltaire said, “if god didn’t exist man would have to invent him”. We’ve invented so many over millennia it is difficult to keep track, but the trend has undeniably been one of winnowing down the myriad of gods that dominated the ancient polytheistic world to a situation where now more than half the world is either a Muslim or a Christian, that is a staunch monotheist. (As an aside, I think it is high time that we go one god further). In short, try and learn as much as possible about as many subjects as possible. You will soon learn that knowledge truly is power, as the old adage goes, and truly wondrous to boot. I will leave you with Daniel Dennett’s advice to the audience at the end of his talk at UCT which he managed to convey using an acronym for DARWIN spelled out the in Latin letters. He managed to come up with the following:
DESTROY THE AUTHOR OF THINGS IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE INFINITE UNIVERSE
I couldn’t have said it better myself, and hope this provides at least some nourishment for your thoughts.
Sapere aude (Dare to know).
Ryan
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