Category: Of Random Interest

A few months ago Eliz­a­beth Svo­bo­da sent me an email ask­ing if she could come and inter­view a few of our stu­dents for an arti­cle she was writ­ing on spir­i­tu­al­i­ty on the col­lege cam­pus. So she came to one of our par­ties and chat­ted with us.

I’m pleased to announce that the arti­cle is final­ly here: School Spir­it quotes a few of us–read it and see who you rec­og­nize!

Our neigh­bor just referred to Paula and I as genius­es.

Which is some­thing, giv­en that she has a Ph.D. in ear­ly Amer­i­can his­to­ry and her hub­bie has one in elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing.

I sus­pect the com­pli­ment was more in ref­er­ence to Paula’s prac­ti­cal wis­dom than any­thing else, but I’m still going to be telling all my friends that my genius neigh­bors think we’re smart, too. 😉

Now if only I can get Pablo to come around–he’s the oth­er Ph.D. neigh­bor and he’s not quite con­vinced that I’m sane. His wife, Sri, has a great respect for Paula, though.

The les­son learned: Paula makes me look good and I should keep her.

The oth­er les­son rein­forced: there sure are a lot of peo­ple with doc­tor­ates around here (in fact, 1/3 of adult Men­lo Park res­i­dents have at least a mas­ter’s degree).

I noticed that the web­page Why Athe­ism? is very pop­u­lar on Pop­u­li­cious and so I decid­ed to give it a look. There’s a lot of legit­i­mate crit­i­cism that can be lev­eled against Chris­tian­i­ty and against the philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments that many Chris­tians use to explain their faith, and so I always seek to learn from sites like this. And I did learn a lit­tle.

But most­ly, I was just shocked at how poor the lev­el of argu­men­ta­tion was. Giv­en that the page is so pop­u­lar, I fig­ured it would be a “best of breed” exam­ple.

‘Fraid not.

His argu­ments are most­ly against posi­tions that most thought­ful Chris­tians (at least, the ones I inter­act with) don’t actu­al­ly hold. I don’t have time to com­pose a detailed rebut­tal of his essay (actu­al­ly a tran­scribed speech), but as I have spo­ken on the gen­er­al theme before I can high­light some inad­e­qua­cies.

• We don’t claim that our mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ences should be as con­vinc­ing to oth­ers as they are to us. But we do assert that they are avail­able to you and should be includ­ed in the evi­dence you con­sid­er.
• We believe in the Big Bang. Our ques­tion is, what went bang? In oth­er words, the Big Bang explains a lot about the state of the uni­verse today, but it does­n’t tell us where it itself came from. All that it tells us is that the uni­verse had a begin­ning, and our argu­ment is that there was also a begin­ner who must be fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than the uni­verse which was begun. He rebuts some weak ver­sions of this argu­ment, but there are much stronger ver­sions to inter­act with (such as those offered by William Lane Craig).
• A lot of Chris­tians believe in one of the many the­o­ries of evo­lu­tion. In fact, I’d say most of the well-edu­cat­ed Chris­tians that I know are quite cer­tain that the earth is bil­lions of years old and that species change over time. They’re divid­ed on whether or not nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tions ade­quate­ly explain the ori­gin of life. It would be nice for our cause if such expla­na­tions could be shown to be inad­e­quate, but it’s hard­ly essen­tial.
• His response to the argu­ment from moral­i­ty miss­es the point com­plete­ly. We don’t claim that peo­ple can’t invent moral systems–it’s obvi­ous that they do so all the time. The cen­tral claim we are mak­ing is that moral­i­ty is only mean­ing­ful as a con­cept if there is more to real­i­ty than mat­ter and the forces that oper­ate upon it. More­over, we assert that any moral sys­tem which ignores this is nec­es­sar­i­ly arbi­trary and inad­e­quate.
• The claim that there is no evi­dence Jesus ever exist­ed is so ridicu­lous I’m tempt­ed not to respond to it, but giv­en that it is being recit­ed with dis­cour­ag­ing fre­quen­cy I’ll direct your atten­tion to a list of extra­bib­li­cal, nonChris­t­ian wit­ness­es to Jesus who wrote before 200 A.D..
• Since what seems to be dri­ving his site is a fear that Chris­tians have some plan to install some sort of theo­crat­ic gov­ern­ment in Amer­i­ca, I’d just like to make it clear that we believe in a sep­a­ra­tion of church and state–because the state cor­rupts the church. And besides, it’s a Bib­li­cal idea (1 Tim 2:1–2 — a prayer that the gov­ern­ment would leave Chris­tians the heck alone).

Any­way, he says a lot more in his essay. I cer­tain­ly haven’t respond­ed to it all, nor have I respond­ed thor­ough­ly to what I did take time to respond to. It’s most­ly the same-old, same-old stuff you hear if you’ve done any inves­ti­ga­tion at all into the exis­tence of God (there is evil there­fore God’s attrib­ut­es are con­tra­dic­to­ry, the Bible is stu­pid, reli­gion always oppos­es progress, etc, etc).

If those argu­ments both­er you a lot then dig around on the sites I linked to above and also lis­ten to some of the rel­e­vant lec­tures at Veritas.org. There are rea­son­able answers to peo­ple’s ques­tions.

Any­way, I guess I was just shocked that this page is so pop­u­lar. I expect­ed bet­ter of it.

If you have broad­band and a fast enough com­put­er, you’ve got to vis­it http://earth.google.com/ and down­load their soft­ware.

Absolute­ly incred­i­ble.