Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Dear Typical Atheist: Please Stop Embarrassing Us

Someone is Wrong on the Internet (xkcd)I was raised Christian in a private Christian school, my entire extended family has always been Christian, and I didn't know any atheists to speak of until I became one (I love my family and friends tremendously even though I disagree with them, but I do wish I had had someone to share the journey with). Since then, my exposure to other atheists has been limited, split between self-advertised atheists and people who haven't cared enough to dig into the issues or argue the point, but would rather sleep in on Sunday mornings. I've also read a few relevant statistics, but they're notoriously unreliable for all kinds of reasons. As a result, I can't really profile the entire atheist cross-section of society, but almost every atheist or agnostic I've met has a few irritating viewpoints in common, and I'd like to systematically challenge those perspectives. (If anyone can point me towards counterexamples, please please get in touch with me).

Firstly, science does not unequivocally prove your case for atheism. Science, as a collection, is not a mass of truth or facts, but a mass of data. It's messy, it's ambiguous, and most of it is either outright wrong or just an approximation. You don't own Science, it's not your God, and if it happens to be in your favor it's only a matter of probability, not certainty.

Next, you don't sound as smart as you think repeating again and again that you don't believe the Bible because it's full of contradictions, and you look downright stupid making an official list of them. Wikipedia's full of contradictions, and so are you. My favorite example, Proverbs 26:4-5, is a litmus test of small-mindedness:
4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you will be like him yourself.
5 Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes.

These verses are adjacent! Do you really think that this "contradiction" just slipped through the proofreading? Does this really have any bearing whatsoever on whether the Bible is worth believing?

In my opinion, most of the Bible is not very significant because it's not reasonably falsifiable: there are too many "escape clauses" and too few risky predictions. There are a few decent examples of self-contained arguments against the Bible's credibility, but for the most part you're not going to point to a group of passages in the Bible and raise many eyebrows, Christian or atheist.

There's one perspective that's only shared by agnostics and Christians, never atheists, but needs to be called out nonetheless: that it's impossible to be atheist because you can't prove God doesn't exist, and therefore there are only agnostics and believers. This claim is exactly as absurd as the reverse, that you can't be Christian because you can't prove beyond all doubt that God does exist (regardless of which perspective is better supported by evidence).

There's a similar attack stating that you can't really be a relativist because the statement "everything is relative" would have to be absolutely true, but again that perspective confuses two levels of assertion: the assertion itself (P), and the assertion that P is undeniable or absolute. I can easily state that I have no reason to believe anything is absolute. I'll save the relativism debate for another post, though.

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