About two weeks ago at my university, I was approached by two young girls from Canada; Crystal and Carolynn, but turned out they were not interested in me but rather my "soul." They sat down and wanted to ask me a series of questions from their gospel tract, but I think I broke their chain of thought with my response to Question 1. Like usual, the first question is "Do you believe in God?" When I said no, something told me that I threw them off their normal routine. That is a total guess based on their reaction, but we went on to discuss several things that I have seen many times when a theist meets an atheist. We discussed why I am not a theist, religion in general, where do morals come from, and I touched a bit on history.
I learned that they were bible literalists and believed in absolutes. They believe that God made us in his image and made this planet, but they were quite on the age of the earth and I speculate that they do not accept biological evolution (I already said I did). But they were more interested in the Bible, and we engaged in a really good talk. Unfortunately we did not have a lot of time, so I suggested we stay in contact. Recently, we agreed I would start this blog so we all can stay in touch.
Dear Crystal and Carolynn, thank you for the talk and I am glad I got a chance to meet you two. I hope you are both doing well.
So far, we covered a bit on the Bible and morality, so I guess I will try to write my thoughts on them in this blog. I noted to you that I study in history and thus discussed history a lot. I mentioned that history played a role in disbelief in the book I was raised to believe as the literal truth, so I will include a bit of this in this blog as well. So I will break this blog in three sections, but I want to be clear: I am not limiting this discussion to just these topics. Please feel free to include and discuss whatever you wish, all I ask is that whenever a topic is brought up if we both can stay on topic.
Also, regarding Brian Miller, I looked him up and noted he is a physicist currently teaching a 14-week course at some evangelical campus. From what I have gathered he promotes pseudoscience (especially in fields he is not trained in), but he is obviously not a historian or scholar, rather he is a HORRIBLE historian. After a bit of digging, I found his saying that modern science was birthed from Christianity. I SWEAR I NEARLY FELL OUT OF MY CHAIR - I will address this later on. I will begin with explaining my position on atheism.
Atheism
I am an atheist, and like most atheists I am an atheist-agnostic. That is, I do not believe there are any gods and I will remain so until valid evidence is brought forth. When that happen, I will change my views accordingly. If you can prove to me today that atomic theory is wrong or the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real, I will have to accept it.
I will make it clear, atheism does not mean "belief in no God." This cannot be the right definition because this would also include polytheists who do not believe in one supreme God. Properly, the "A" in Atheism is Greek that means "without" whereas theism means "belief in God." So atheism is defined as "a lack of belief in God." The label atheist tells people what I am not, it does not tell you what I am. If you wish to learn more about an atheist, just ask more questions. They will be glad to share I am sure.
When it comes to the Abrahamic God, the theists are the ones who believe he does exist. The ones asserting a positive belief are the ones responsible for providing evidence for their claims. If you wish to change my mind, you would have to provide empirical proof that is distinguishable from any other god.
When I was young, the first book I ever picked up was the Bible, the second was a book on Greek mythology for children. In all my years as a believer, I never connected the two. My deconversion started when I examined the history of the New Testament (I will get into that later). I also read the entire Old Testament (which many Christians are sure not to teach children) and became convinced that Jesus could not be the messiah after all. Right after that, I was seriously thinking about becoming Jewish and wait for the actual messiah. But eventually I started thinking about religion in general, realized it was WAY to man-made, so I abandoned religion altogether and became a deist. However, I was only a deist for no more than a week. I carefully thought about it and realized deism was a bunch of wishful thinking, so I took the final step and here I am as an atheist-agnostic. I abandoned faith altogether and live a life based on evidence, knowledge and reason.
Morality
Morality is clearly a tricky and complex subject, but I do know that morality can be found outside monotheistic traditions. I often call myself a secular humanist, but I simply understand that empathy alone is enough to morally guide me, and thus far it has been very successful. If morality means anything, it is reducing or minimizing the suffering of others.
The following two videos, I think, give an excellent presentation and lesson about morality.
As I think one of these videos noted: belief in God would make anything justifiable. During our talk at my university, I mentioned Ron and Dan Lafferty, but I did not provide a full detailed story. Dan and five brothers, one of them was Ron. Dan converted all his brothers into Mormon fundamentalism and made them practice polygamy. They had all their wives from being treated like queens to slaves. Only Brenda, the wife of the youngest brother, did not submit. Ron was a chiropractor (pseudoscience is very common in Mormonism; Joseph and his father practiced dowsing and used crystal ball) and became a Saint and a student of Onias. Ron would over time have many revelations from God himself. One of them was instructs to kill several people to further progress of God's plan. The target was Brenda and her baby, and the revelation specifically instructed Dan to do the killing. After prayer and much preparation, Ron and Dan set off to find her. When they did, Dan beat Brenda with his fists while Ron watched. When she failed to escape and fainted, Dan strangled her with a vacuum cord. Then Dan got a knife, went to the babies room and found her standing in the corner of her crib. As Dan described it in his cell:
I spoke to her for a minute. I told her, "I'm not sure what this is all about, but apparently it's God's will that you leave this world; perhaps we can talk about it later." And then I set my hand on her head, put the knife under her chin like this, and I just...'
He virtually decapitated her. After cleaning the blade, he then returned to Brenda's corpse and slit her throat, and returned to Ron who was waiting for him and said "Okay, we can leave now." They drove around looking for their next targets, but were apprehended on August 7. Dan and Ron were tried separately. Dan received two sentences of life imprisonment after his jury was not unanimous on the death penalty. Ron refused insanity as a defense and was quickly found guilty, but was later was countered by theologians and others because it implied anyone who talks to God is crazy (since the whole Mormon faith relies on talking to God they could be considered legally insane). After going through months of psychotherapy, it was later ruled he was competent to stand trial although the countering continued to try to show that Ron's delusions were different from the billions of people around the world. On April 10, 1996 the jury convicted Ron of first-degree murder and he choose the death sentence of four bullets through the heart at close range. He is still on death row. Dan, on the other hand after all these years in prison, considers himself the "new Elijah" designated by God to recognize Christ when he instigates the thousand-year kingdom of God.
Please do not disregard this as “oh, they were just Mormons, they followed the wrong god.” Examples like these are numerous coming from any denomination of Christianity. A mother murders her own children because she does not them to suffer during the rapture or God tells a mother to lock and chain her own daughter in a closet for nine years because “she is a witch” according to her and her pastor. The point is, when you bring God into the moral equation anything is justifiable. God can order whatever he wishes, from slaying the Canaanites, Egyptians, to flooding the entire world if he chose to. If God ordered someone to kill your parents, there is no way for you to prove that God did not.
The Bible and History
I noted that history played a role on my path to disbelief. When I learned how the Bible came to be revealed that it was not as infallible as I was told.
Over the years I have examined the historical claims in the NT, and what surprised me was not what I found but was what I did not find. The stories from the NT has no historical evidence to support them. First century Palestine is a very well recorded era. Jerusalem was the center of education at that time, were illiteracy was at its lowest. Jewish parents were teaching their children to read and write the Torah. There were poets, scribes, scholars, historians, tax collectors, Roman reporters, and such. But not once do any of them record anything about a man named Jesus. How is it that this man, who is said to have startled ALL of Jerusalem asking who he was (Matt. 21:10), had so many followers so large they were "innumerable" (Luke 12:1) even coming from beyond Jordan (Matt. 4:25). If the poor, the rich, the high priests, the Romans, travelers and foreigners, and the scribes all knew about jesus, who would not have heard of him? If Herod really took the time to hunt down and try to slay jesus, but instead murdered hundreds of other babies, then this would have gotten the attention of historians all across the land. And yet, how is it that this man could enter the Temple in Jerusalem on Passover and start a riot AND NOT BE MENTIONED ONE TIME!?
Practically, every major miracle of jesus has no historical verification either. I pointed out to Crystal and Carolynn Matthew 27 where after Jesus supposedly died, all the dead rose from their graves and walked in the streets for all in Jerusalem to see. Something like this is not ignored, this is something whose news would reach the farthest corner of the Roman Empire within a week. Where is the evidence of Herod slaughtering thousands of infants? Nowhere.
All we have to go on regarding Jesus is the gospels, and unfortunately it does not get any better. What we know about the gospels is that they are all anonymous and not written by eye-witnesses.
I wrote more regarding the historicity of Jesus and the reliability of the gospels, which you can read by clicking the link below.
http://feredir28.blogspot.com/2010/12/did-jesus-christ-exist.html
After reading the blog posted, with all this in mind, I often ask Christians who quote the words of Jesus: how do you know those are the words of Christ himself? And for that matter, how do you know what Jesus did what the Bible supposedly said he did? How can Mark know what jesus said in the Gethsemane scene when Jesus was all alone?
These are all important questions; this is why I ask Christians before they go on talking about their theology, I would prefer if we all start at square one regarding God and regarding Jesus. First prove that they are real and did what you claim they have done. Once that is dealt with, then we can discuss if Jesus is the savior, is there an afterlife and whatever.
Christianity and History
I do not expect a reply from this piece. This is only regarding why Miller is a very poor historian. He claimed that science was birthed from a Christian culture, and I knew right there that I was dealing with an amateur.
Lets look at the ACTUAL history of science. Science goes back very far to the ancient Greeks (btw, they were pagans!!!). Ancient polytheists invented geometry, but that does not mean that polytheism was essential or required for the development of geometry.
Aristotle performed numerous dissection and vivisection experiments in animal anatomy and physiology - composing the most scientific range of zoological works then known.
His successor, Theophrastus, extended this work to botany and plant physiology, and the first person to produce the first known works in pyrology, mineralogy, and other fields.
His successor, Strato of Lamsacus, extended their experimental method to machines and physics - by which many of Aristotle's physical theories had been altered or abandoned
A research institute was built in Alexandria, Egypt in the third century BCE, in which Ctesibius and Philo completed the first known scientific works in experimental pneumatics.
Eratosthenes invented the science of cartography and was one of the first scientist in history to measure the diameter of the earth (he was off by 15% - not bad), and he analyzed the effect of the moon on the tides. (QUICK: someone tell Bill O'Reilly this was explained in the third century BCE.)
Herophilus became the first scientist to dissect human cadavers. Also, he and his pupil Erasistrus originated neurophysiology, establishing with detailed experiments that the mind is a function of the brain and the specific mental functions were controlled in specific areas of the brain, and they distinguished motor from sensory nerves and mapped them throughout the body. Altogether. their study of the human body and its bones, muscles, and organs, was so thorough that we still use much of their anatomical terminology.
In Sicily, their colleague Archimedes was advancing sciences of mechanics and hydrostatics, and discovering, describing, or explaining the first mathematical laws of physics.
Aristarchus began measuring the distances of the moon, sun and planets, and proposed the first heliocentric theory.
In Rhodes, Hipparchus discovered and measured celestial precession, observed the first supernova, established the first detailed scientific star charts, made numerous advances in planetary theory, and developed the first scientific system for predicting lunar and solar eclipses.
Seleucus of Babylon discovered the effect of the sun on the tides (not just the moon), developed the first mathematical lunisolar tide theory.
During the Roman Empire, science reached its pinnacle of achievement, producing works not exceeded until the Scientific Revolution. Just to name a few: Dioscorides in botany, mineralogy, and pharmacology. Hero in mathematics, pneumatics, and theatrical robotics. Ptolemy in astronomy, cartography, optics, and harmonics. Galen in anatomy, physiology, and medicine
I will stop there, I am sure you get the picture. When the cause is in place, its effect is seen. The Christian religion dominated the whole of the Western world from the fifth to the fifteenth century, and yet in all those thousand years there was no scientific revolution. Nor did any scientific revolution occur in Eastern Christian world, such as the Byzantine Empire, even though the East was just as prosperous and largely peaceful for five centuries. When the scientific revolution did take place, in a culture where religion was dominate and very authoritative, it is not surprising that the scientists were Christians and had to somehow present their work in a manner that did not contradict scripture or risk losing their career, reputation, or even their freedoms (or their lives). This was not a time when you can enjoy being an atheist, infidel, pagan or heretic. If a scientist wished to publish his work, he had to find a way to sell it without being detrimental towards the Bible. Since the Scientific Revolution took place during a Christian culture does not mean that Christianity caused the Scientific Revolution, rather it was just a marketing strategy required to sell at the time.
The point is, Miller's history is dead wrong. As a physicist thinking he knows how to properly do history, it makes me very skeptical he knows much regarding anything outside his field of work.
