God or Not Carnival thoughts
While hosting the God or Not Carnival, I of course had my own thoughts about the quality and nature of the arguments, but I was not allowed to comment on the posts themselves in the Carnival, and the manager of the Carnival asked me not to post any analysis in another blog entry until a few days after the carnival. To be honest, reading the entries was somewhat depressing, as very few of them, even among the "God" entries, agreed with my beliefs, and many of the posts were downright hostile, not merely argumentative. I will not attempt to go through the posts one by one, but there are a few arguments which I feel compelled to address. I am not interested in answering insult with insult, but I do need to explain and defend my own beliefs. Thus there are three arguments that I intend to address in the upcoming week:
So that's what I intend to talk about in the upcoming week. Ambitious, isn't it? And dang, I need to get to work on revising Eyes of the Shadow some time soon. Well, I'll do my best.
- The first argument, made at the Evangelical Atheist, is that believers are inconsistent, in fact, intellectually dishonest, in believing some parts of the Bible to be literally true while believing that others are figurative. The Evangelical Atheist allows for the fact that some things are "literally figurative"--i.e., the text makes it clear they're figurative--but argues that this doesn't allow the Christian to regard the gospel stories as literal and the creation story in Genesis as figurative, as it's either all or nothing. He's correct that believers often choose literal vs. figurative as a matter of convenience, but he's taking an overly simplistic view of the Bible. There's more leeway than he allows.
- Theist Mathetes argues that sola scriptura religions are illogical, as they neither allow for any authority to interpret the scriptures nor do they allow for an authority which establishes the authority of the scriptures. I believe that he's misinterpreting what sola scriptura means, which I'll attempt to demonstrate.
- The final argument has little to do with scriptural literalism. It is instead the observation that the Bible contains a lot of bad stuff, and taking it seriously at all, whether literally or figuratively, requires belief in a God who is overtly evil. This was the view taken by The Uncredible Hallq, Kingdom of Heathen, and Skeptic Rant among the atheists, and Radical Goddess Thealogy among the theists. This is a serious objection to the God of the Bible and deserves a serious response, even if the hostility evinced in some of these posts seemed more designed to offend than to convince. I don't think God is evil, of course. I think our Western concepts of human worth and dignity would not exist without the influence of Christianity, so we would not even have the concepts by which we judge the God of the Bible without Him. I also think these bloggers are really making just a small part of a broader argument, the context of which I'll try to provide as I address their argument.
So that's what I intend to talk about in the upcoming week. Ambitious, isn't it? And dang, I need to get to work on revising Eyes of the Shadow some time soon. Well, I'll do my best.
Related Posts (on one page):
A Religious Debate post at
9:01 AM on Fri, Jan 20, 2006
A study that just came out in Sept. in the prestigious Journal of Religion &Society strongly suggests that God worship is dangerous and life-threatening:
“Societies Worse Off ‘When They Have God on Their Side.’ RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today….” These researchers used information anyone can find in any library.
See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html and
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/pdf/2005-11.pdf)
Taking the same statistics and applying them to birth rates, the US has a birth rate of 2.07 per woman, Ireland 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76, Canada 1.5, Germany 1.3, Austria 1.3, Russia 1.2, Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1. Use these numbers as the horizontal axis on any of those strikingly linear graphs, and it looks pretty linear that way too (though not quite as linear).
Statistics are a hard thing to pin down. And separating correlations from causal effects is even harder. Since the US is such an outlier, it makes more sense to do things within the US, comparing states, than to compare it with other nations. If you do that for the abortion rate for 15-19 year olds, you can see that it has a nearly linear relationship to how Democratic a state is, whether it's Red or Blue. The linearity in that graph is quite striking. This is essentially the same argument which is being made in this paper, but Taranto's statistics are unquestionably better, being both more controlled (within a single country, and thus less influenced by differences in culture and law) with a larger sample size. Still I'm reluctant to draw conclusions from it.
The US is "almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."
Also, if you look at all 17 countries in the study -- France, Germany, England, Sweden, Japan, etc. -- there's an almost perfect corelation: the more god there is, the more dysfunction.
"In general, the higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies."
Oh, and to add a time element to this: as Europe's god-worship has fallen off over the past two hundred years, so has its homicide rate (p. 6 of the study report).
And remember -- this is info anyone can go into any library and put together themselves. You get the god rates out of one set of books, and then the suicide etc. rates out of other books, and just put them together. Do it yourself.
Donald, you're not alone. Millions of others have been swept up into the ancient, outdated warrior-god religions. But it's time for the rest of us to stand up and call a spade a spade. Because, again, you are threatening to wipe the rest of us off the face of the globe. Since you warrior god people appeared on the planet, there's been nothing but war. You don't care about the environment or the earth, because they're just dead things to you, to be "conquered," to have "dominion" over. You're killing us, Donald.
As civilized as Europe is, it's basically dying. In 50 years, it's facing economic collapse and Islamification. I'm hoping that doesn't happen--maybe they'll turn themselves around. But that's a much worse fate than what the US is looking at.
Furthermore, my quotes from the study addressed your arguments. You said that since the US was off in a corner of the graphs in certain areas (for ex., huge homicide rate coupled with a huge belief in god) that we should just ignore those graphs.
This made me think that you don't understand graphs, but I was trying to be polite and not say so. Do you understand graphs?
You can't remove a country from the data and the graphs just because you think it skews the results. The fact is, there's a CLEAR correlation between religiosity and social ills across the entire set of 17 countries. You need to look at them as a whole, not cut out countries that fall into a corner. The falling into a corner just intensifies the theory that god = trouble, since being in the corner MEANS that you have lots of god AND lots of social ills.
Japan, with the lowest degree of religiosity, has the lowest degree of social cancer. Do you want to eliminate Japan, too?
I just don't understand where you're coming from, I guess. Just seems as if you are grasping at straws to "save" your "religion."
If you took just one country, the U.S., and it had gigundo social problems AND a huge belief in god, then yes. I could see where you could say, "But the social problems could be caused by something other than the belief in god."
But it's not just one country! It's 17 countries! And the correlation between god and social problems holds true across the 17 countries!!! The more god, the worse the murder, suicide and other baddies! Across all 17 countries.
And Europe dying!?! Give me a break! Where did you hear that? Give me your sources, please, and I might listen to this. Is Japan dying too? Because remember -- Japan, with the lowest religiosity, had the fewest social problems .
There are other religions, Donald. You don't have to float on this ugly, sinking ship "christianity."
And it's practically the same thing as the moslem religion. Compare the bible and the koran sometime.
Welcome to atheistic, anti-Christian prejuidice. This is ignorance in search of a clue.
Good luck, and I won't blame you if you stop arguing with Athana. I think this does qualify as "pearls before swine". It is unconscionable that Athana can believe that a belief in Christ causes homicide, and pigs can fly.
Athana, I am an engineer who did experimental physics for his Ph.D. I most certainly know how to read graphs. I also know a bit about statistical analysis, and how much a single data point can skew results. I have, by this point, read the article, and I stand by my question about whether you have. You seem to be reading more into the article than the authors do. You also pointed specifically to suicide as evidence for the problems of theism, whereas the authors say: "The United States exhibits typical rates of youth suicide (WHO), which show little if any correlation with theistic factors in the prosperous democracies." My argument that the US is an outlier is, I think, fair. If you remove it from the charts, most of them show little if any correlation with religious beliefs. The exceptions, as I mentioned, are teen pregnancy, teen abortion, and under-five mortality, which seem to me to be all related. More teenagers getting pregnant means more teenagers getting abortions and more health problems for young kids being raised by underage single moms. That this is linear with religion is interesting, and I'd be willing to discuss whether religion is causal in this or whether it's a secondary effect (related to resistance to sexual education, for instance). I'll put a post up tomorrow which deals with the problems of outliers on statistical analysis.