How Science Works - And Why Religion Doesn't - Dark Matter - Building Testable Hypotheses

Map of the distribution of dark matter in the Universe.
The bright areas represent its highest concentrations - which is where galaxies form

N Jeffrey/Dark Energy Collaboration

Dark Matter

‘Dark stars’: dark matter may form exploding stars – and observing the damage could help reveal what it’s made of

Dark matter is known to exists, and yet no-one knows what it is.

Creationists, in a desperate attempt to reduce science to the same status as their evidence-free superstition, will claim this shows that science is a religion really. But that childish claim soon disintegrates when we understand how scientists can know that dark matter exists when they don't know what it is.

Unlike religion's god(s), scientists can measure dark matter's effects on stuff they know more about, like the 'normal' matter that you and I are made of - atoms and molecules of which stars, galaxies and super-clusters are made of. They can see the gravitational effects of dark matter, so there must be something with enough mass to produce that gravitational effect.

Theists, on the other hand can never demonstrate any effects of the god(s) they believe in and are reduced to presuppositional claims and assertions, designating their god(s) as the cause of things they don't understand - the god of the gaps false dichotomy fallacy that passes for religious apologetics.

So, what are these effects that dark matter exerts?

The gravity produced by dark matter is what holds spinning galaxies together and prevents the detectable matter in them from flying outwards by the centrifugal force of rotation. It also produces gravitational 'lensing', which is the effect of light being bent by a large mass to act like a giant lens and make distant objects look closer.

So, we know dark matter is out there even though we don't know what it is, so scientists try to work out what it could be composed of and make predictions of what this stuff would do if it existed. This is the testable hypothesis. The trick is to construct experiments to test those hypotheses.

In the following article, Andreea Font, Reader in Theoretical Astrophysics, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK, outlines some of the current hypotheses that seek to explain dark matter. Her article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

The Internet Apologists' Handbooks

Three new booklets by yours truly!

A humorous and provocative look at Internet fundamentalist apologetics. Most Internet apologists seem to know little of what they are promoting and nothing at all about what they are opposing and none of them seem to be able to understand basic ideas of probity, intellectual honesty, personal integrity or the difference between wishful thinking, assertions and actual evidence. Often, there seems to be a hidden agenda with very little evidence of an actual belief in the god being promoted, judging by the scant regard for anything by way of personal behaviour that the promoted religion teaches.

The Bible's Bad Science

One of the central claims of Christian apologetics is that the Bible contains science. Muslims make exactly the same claim of the Qur'an, of course, and like those claims, those for the Bible either don't stand up to scrutiny or are completely unremarkable because they are simple observations of natural phenomena.

I think the intention of these lists is that you don't actually check either the science or the Bible passage cited. You're just supposed to scan down the list and marvel at how all that science could have been included in the Bible if it hadn't been written by a god. Then you conclude that you're obviously right to believe in the god your parents told you was the real one and feel that nice warm glow of self-satisfaction that comes from being right all along.

The God Of Low Standards - It's Official!

David Noel Freedman. Lowering the Standards.

I've just started on Raphael Lataster's There Was No Jesus, There Is No God and, while I'm not going to write a blog on every little gem I find in it, this one justifies a brief note, I think.

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog on The God of Low Standards in which I argued that belief in gods always involves people lowering their standards of evidence way below that required to believe in fairies, to believe in other gods and even to believe that an empty road is safe to cross. In other words that religion in general and their god in particular requires a much lower standard of evidence, logic and reasoning than is used for normal, everyday life. (See for example, The Milk Bottle Delusion - Why Prayers Always Work, for the standard Christian 'proof' that God always answers prayers.)

So it's good to see a leading Christian apologist and Bible scholar, the late David Noel Freedman, as quoted by Raphael Lataster, confirming that Bible scholars need to lower their standards way below that normally required to substantiate a claim with:

We have to accept somewhat looser standards. In the legal profession, to convict the defendant of a crime , you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil cases, a preponderance of the evidence is sufficient. When dealing with the Bible or any ancient source, we have to loosen up a little; otherwise, we can't really say anything.

Hershel Shanks, How the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament Differ: An Interview with David Noel Freedman - Part 1, Bible Review 9, no. 6 (1993): 34.

Science Got It Wrong - And So Made Progress

Ripples from dawn of creation vanish in a puff of dust - physics-math - 22 September 2014 - New Scientist

Okay, so scientists got one wrong.

They thought they had found solid evidence of the ripples in the background microwave radiation predicted by the inflation model of the Big Bang and so confirmed the inflation hypothesis. Now it seems the result could have been due to cosmic dust.

Only Real Gods Agree With William Lane Craig

If ISIS’s God Were Real, Would I Be Obliged to Follow Him?

Confused Christians can now sleep soundly in their beds because William Lane Craig has revised his special Divine Command Theory (DCT). DCT says that morality is doing exactly what God commands without regard to the effects it might have on other people because God knows best and can take life if and when he wishes. All you have to do is obey God's command and whatever you do will be moral.

William Lane Craig devised this theory to justify the genocidal murder of the Canaanites in the Bible and so elevated genocide to the level of a moral crusade, provided God told you to do it. He formulated this

Apologists' Dilemma

Universe's baby pictures suggest a bubbly birth - life - 19 September 2013 - New Scientist

In this week's New Scientist we have another example of how detached modern religious apologetics has become from reality. The above article deals with the science behind the origins of our Universe and never once needs to invoke magic or deities. Instead it offers evidence for an explanation which has been mooted for many years - that our Universe arose by a perfectly natural (albeit difficult to comprehend) process, from a pre-existing metaverse. Nor is intuition invoked or an insistence that the explanation has to be easy to understand by people with little or no understanding of physics or advanced mathematics.

Contrast this with my recent public debate with Christian Apologist, Richard Bushey, who was trying to argue the line William Lane Craig takes that the so-called Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) leads to only one possible conclusion - that the Universe was created by magic by the locally popular god, who of course just happens to be the Christian one of whatever denomination you had the great good fortune to be born to parents who were believers of.

A great deal of that debate centred around the question of whether, even if we ignore the evidence of quantum mechanics that quantum events, of which the Big Bang is an example, do not require a cause, and that causality is a property of Relativity not of quantum mechanics, we have still not established that the only cause of the Big Bang must be supernatural because nature did not exists prior to it.

In fact this conclusion of the KCA is not only based on the circularity of assuming a priori that the god in the conclusion existed and was the only entity capable of creating a universe, but it also relies on the scientific ignorance of it's target audience. Any reading of the readily available literature will show that science offers several possible, perfectly natural, explanations for what the Big Bang could have occurred in and what could have caused it.

In this New Scientist article compelling evidence from a detailed analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) (the 'echo' of the Big Bang and one of the strongest pieces of evidence for it) suggests our Universe could have arisen by a process termed 'bubble nucleation'.

In this picture, our universe arose from quantum fluctuations in a much bigger cosmos called a metaverse. The quantum effects caused a phase transition in the fabric of the metaverse, and our universe popped into being, like an air bubble forming in boiling water.

Andrew Liddle of the University of Edinburgh, UK, quoted in Universe's baby pictures suggest a bubbly birth by Lisa Grossman, New Scientist, 19 September 2013, Magazine issue 2935

Incidentally, I could almost kick myself that in my debate with Richard Bushey I completely forgot Stephen Hawking's 1993 book, Black Holes and Baby Universes, in which the hypothesis that this Universe could have arisen in a non-zero energy field in a black hole in another universe was dealt with at length. It's not as though this hypothesis is new, since Hawking was writing about it twenty years ago. Surely this is enough time for people genuinely interested in scientific truth to have updated their knowledge.

And that's the dilemma for apologists. Do they update their arguments and incorporate the latest science into them, which would be honest but would mean continually abandoning old arguments, admitting they were wrong and having to think up some new ones and find smaller and smaller gaps in which to fit their shrinking god, or do they simply continue to try to fool a shrinking target audience and concentrate on those who know nothing about science and so won't have heard the science that refutes the lie they are being sold?

The contrast between science and religious apologetics is starkly revealed here. The KCA manifestly depends on the state of scientific knowledge and understanding of the Universe as it was when the KCA was first stated in its modern form a thousand years ago. This was a Universe centred on Earth where the debate still raged about whether Earth was flat or spherical and magic spirits and demons were assumed to be influencing things. It was a Universe where another physical realm was assumed to exist above the sky, inhabited by magical beings and operating the Universe as a mechanic operates his machines. It was a Universe where angels were assumed to be pushing the stars and planets on their daily circuit of the heavens.

To maintain this position, religious apologists need to avoid incorporating advances in scientific knowledge which undermine any of the basic assumptions which must have seemed intuitively true to people with that primitive level of knowledge and understanding in the eleventh century. As we saw with Richard Bushey's arguments and as we see with the identical ones put forward by people like William Lane Craig, advances in Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Chaos Theory all have to be assiduously ignored because they never support their apologetic. And so religious apologetics becomes more and more detached from reality, increasingly only working in the scientifically illiterate parts of the world where religion's power-base resides and where an understanding of the world is closer to that of an early medieval camel trader or a Bronze-Age nomad than to someone from a twenty-first century, technological society.

They will happily wave science around when they imagine it supports them, or where they imagine their audience will think it does, yet where it destroys their basic premises and assumptions, and so destroys their apologetic altogether, science can be dismissed with the wave of a hand, can be wished away by pretending it isn't there or, with the arrogance of those who believe their faith is the best measure of reality available, can be rationalised as a conspiracy by evil scientists.

And those few apologists who are able to adjust their knowledge and update their thinking will undoubtedly show they will be unable to let go of the basic intellectual dishonesty which underpins their 'art'. They will still insist the metaverse must have begun to exist and that the god they are promoting was the only thing capable of creating it, so simply shifting their argument up one level. And they will still depend on the circularity of demanding we accept a priori that their cause of the metaverse exists and has the properties they have ascribed to it in order to make their conclusion come out the way they want it to.

None of them will do what science does and start from the premise that we don't know, yet, so let's go look at the evidence and see what we can make of it. For an apologist, their 'knowledge' of what the answer will be is the only evidence required. They call this 'faith' and claim the right to special respect and the power to make rules for us based on it.

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Another Easy One For Muslims... Or Not!

My friend being inspired to write his book

It's not just Christians who won't answer simple questions about their 'faith'. Muslims are no less prone to showing their faith relies on them applying a much lower standard to their god and their dogmas than they do to normal life, and how circular reasoning and logical fallacies are the common currency of religious belief. It seems that intellectually dishonest double standards are essential for religious faith.

For example, I challenged Christian to apply their beliefs about Jesus to a scenario set in modern times with Help! What Should I Do? In this scenario I said someone had told me about someone he's heard about who was now dead but could do miracles and claimed I would live forever if I believed in him. I asked why should not believe him? I've not had a sensible reply in nearly 18 months at the time of writing and yet this is exactly the scenario Christians accept without question in order to maintain their belief in the biblical Jesus.

I also asked Christians, Jews and Muslims which of the stories in their favourite holy book they would believe without more evidence if a passing stranger told them was happening right now a mile or two down the road, in Why Believe The Holy Books?. None have them have been able to think of any, and yet they believe what a stranger told them in their favourite holy book. Why the double standard?

So let's see if Muslims can fare any better with this one:

Debate - The Kalam Cosmological Argument

This debate is about the Kalam Cosmological Argument, a favourite of religious apologetics. Here, the Christian blogger, Richard Bushey, who runs the Therefore God Exists blog attempts to establish the proposition that "The Kalam Cosmological Argument Proves The Existence Of God".

It will be echoed here and his blog The Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Opening statement by Richard:

Four Deceptions of Apologetics

In response to The Four Miracles of Atheism

Sadly, the following seems to pass for religious apologetics these days, as religious superstitions continue to retreat in the face of science. Where once they could rely on a swift execution of heretics to defend their 'faiths' without having to bother justifying it with evidence, reason or logic, they now have to try to mount some sort of defence on the science playing field, and at least look as though they are playing to science's rules. It is taken from one of very many religious apologetics websites which purports to be meeting the challenge from science.

About the only positive thing to say about this site is that, if it has the begging button traditional on these sort of sites, it is very well hidden. Normally one can dismiss them as merely selling spurious confirmation to creationists who'll pay good money to be told that their ignorant superstition trumps science and reason and who crave nothing more than a scientific-looking refutation of the science they so despise.

The Ontological Blunder

Prof. Ian Stewart, Dr. Terry Pratchett and Prof. Jack Cohen

I've previously blogged about the 'Ontological Argument' for gods (I use the plural because, idiotically, if the argument is valid - and I have seen it referred to as a conclusive proof - then it should only work for one god, yet it works for any. Make one up yourself and try it).

Briefly, the idea was thought up by Anselm, an early Anglo-Norman archbishop of Canterbury. He argued in his Proslogion that,

God [is] "that than which nothing greater can be conceived", and then argued that this being could exist in the mind. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. If it only exists in the mind, a greater being is possible—one which exists in the mind and in reality.

Source: Wikipedia - Ontological argument

Apparently, this is still trotted out in all seriousness by (especially) Christian apologists, who apparently see nothing wrong with essentially claiming they can define a god into existence and that such a god is obliged to exist.

I came across this elegant illustration of the simple, intellectually dishonest, fallacy behind this apologetic in a book by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld IV - Judgement Day.

This book is the fourth in a series dealing with basic scientific principles in a very readable way using stories set in Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The science is almost all Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, two popular science writers. I can highly recommend both the Discworld series and the Science of Discworld series.

On Anselm's Ontological Argument, they have this to say, though they refer to it as Thomas Aquinas's argument from Summa Theologica which is virtually identical in form:

Logicians and mathematicians are painfully aware, however, that this argument is flawed. Before you can use a characterisation of some entity to deduce its properties, you have to provide independent proof that such an entity exists.

The classic example is a proof that the largest whole number is 1. Consider the largest whole number. Its square is at least as big, so it must equal its square. The only whole numbers like that are 0 and 1, of which 1 is the larger. QED. Except, 1 is clearly not the largest number. For instance, 2 is bigger.

Oops.

What's wrong? The proof assumes that there is a largest whole number. If it exists, everything else is correct, and it has to be 1. But, since that makes no sense, the proof must be wrong, and that implies that it doesn't exist.

So, in order to use the ontological argument to infer the existence of the greatest conceivable being, we must first establish that such a being exists, without simply referring to the definition. So what the argument proves is 'if God exists, then God exists'.

Congratulations.

So the ontological argument is nothing more than sleight of hand; a circular argument which surreptitiously assumes its conclusion and then feeds that a priori assumption into the argument in order to produce the required answer. That is why, just like the Cosmological Argument so beloved of William Lane Craig, it works with any god or any daft notion you can dream up. If you didn't spot it earlier, Anselms fallacy was in the opening sentence. He first defined God as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" without first providing any independent proof that such an entity actually exists.

Quite obviously, had such proof been available to Anselm, or anyone else for that matter, he wouldn't have needed to invent the ontological argument in the first place, let alone perform that little bit of deception. We can be sure then that Anselm knew there was no available proof of the Christian god, just as we can be sure that those who still try to get away with it know they have no such proof.

As I've said before, substitute a peanut butter sandwich for 'God' in any theological apologetic and you can justify worshipping peanut butter sandwiches. If you are gullible enough to to fall for religious apologetics, exercise caution here or you could end up worshipping equally insane and inanimate objects. You could even start your own cult if you can find a few equally gullible idiots with thinking difficulties

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Causality

The Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect. 8th century, Japan

In the end, all theological apologetics boil down to one thing - causality. Ignoring for the moment the circularity of assuming your favourite deity doing magic is the only possible cause, then including that assumption to the exclusion of all else, as apologists do with the Cosmological Argument so it always comes up with the god they first thought of, there is still the unsupported assumption that 'everything' must have had one single cause.

Apologists find no difficulty with this assumption yet the more fundamentalist of them get quite hysterical at the thought that all living things might well have had a single common ancestor, but that's a different problem. Let's stick to causality.

Why this assumption?

How many phenomena actually have a single cause?

Let's forget for the moment that some quantum events appear not to have any cause and that the Big Bang, if there ever was a Big Bang, was probably a quantum event, and let's indulge religious apologists and grant them their prefered version of reality in which things happen or not according to the convenience of whatever argument they are trying to deploy at the time. Let's assume that everything that happens actually does have a cause.

Causality (also referred to as causation) is the relation between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first.

In common usage, causality is also the relation between a set of factors (causes) and a phenomenon (the effect). Anything that affects an effect is a factor of that effect. A direct factor is a factor that affects an effect directly, that is, without any intervening factors. (Intervening factors are sometimes called "intermediate factors".) The connection between a cause(s) and an effect in this way can also be referred to as a causal nexus.

Source: Wikipedia - Causality

Now, try this mind experiment. Think of a single event which has a single cause, and not a multiplicity of causes, each of which has a multiplicity of causes.

I've previously blogged about how many apparent basic laws, such as the Gas Laws, are only laws of mass action; emergent properties which depend on statistical probabilities involving chaotic motions of atoms or molecules. Nothing at the level of the atom or molecule is obeying a Gas Law; only in aggregated probability across the whole population does the property emerge from an underlying chaos.

What caused the Herald of Free Enterprise to sink?

Blow a balloon up until it bursts. What single event caused it to burst? Was it the last molecule of air you blew in? What about the effect of all the others? Without them, that last molecule would have had no effect. Was it pressure in your lungs or cheeks? How did that get there? What about the fabric of the balloon; the rubber? Was it the parting of a single atomic bond somewhere in the organic polymer that the rubber is composed of? How did that happen unless it was caused by the mass action of the atoms of air inside the balloon pushing on the balloon skin with a high enough average force exerted by chaotically moving molecules of air?

Make a splash in water by dropping a stone into it. What single event cause that splash? Gravity? Letting the stone fall? How did your fingers move to cause that event? How about the atomic structure of the rock which gave it solidity and enough density to allow it to fall through the air with enough force to push the water molecules out of the way? How many molecules of water constitute a 'splash'? We're back to laws of mass action and emergent properties from the chaos of water molecules again. Even the atoms of the rock and the water, or rather the fundamental particles from which they are made may well be emergent properties from an underlying chaotic structure of force fields and vibrating multi-dimensional superstrings. The positions of fundamental particles in those atoms can only be described as a probability distribution derived from integrating all possible paths through spacetime.

Which snowflake caused the avalanche? How could it have done that without all the others and in the absence of gravity or without the mountain side? And if there is a single, predictable chain of causality in an avalanche it should be entirely predictable. Guess what! It isn't. An avalanche in progress is a system in total chaos and it's not even possible to accurately predict their occurrence. This is what makes them so dangerous.

The problem is we have evolved to deal with reality at the level at which we, as complex, multicellular organisms can perceive it by processing the photons which come into our eyes and the vibrations which come into our ears, or through other senses which only work at the level of organisation within which we operate. There would be no evolutionary advantage in being able to detect things at a different level because we can't eat it, be eaten by it, use it for shelter or have sex with it.

So we assume that the Universe behaves pretty much the way things do in our world. We flick a switch or turn a key and something happens. We throw a spear and it flies through the air. If it hits the antelope in the right place the antelope dies and we get food. We press a key on our keyboard and it makes 'p' appear on our computer screen. We assume a narrative - a story behind the event.

We assume A->B->C->D. We assume that there is a simple chain of causality like there seems to be when we strike the match with which we light the fire which burns the wood which boils the water which cooks the food. Actually, I switch an electric hob-ring on, but you get the point.

In fact almost nothing happens because of a single, identifiable cause or even as the endpoint of a chain of single cause-effects. Normally, many things need to happen, some of them in sequence, some in parallel. We can't throw a spear without our brain firing off a salvo of signals to work a myriad of muscle fibres, coordinated by our eyes detecting incoming photons, processing them and passing signals on to our brains for further processing, and after a complex process by which we've weighed the spear, judge the distance, computed the trajectory and coordinated muscles in our arm, shoulder, hands, legs, back, chest and abdomen. And then, of course, gravity and inertia, explained by Newton's Laws of Motion, takes over, as well as a whole mass of small effects as the spear pushes molecules of air around causing friction and drag. Throwing a spear is not a single event in any causal sense of the word. It is a whole bunch of different events coming together to produce a single effect - the spear travelling from A to B.

So why assume a universe exists because of a single, identifiable cause?

Perhaps the major challenges in physics is to come up with a Grand Unified Theory which unifies quantum mechanics with Einsteinian Relativity because it is assumed there should be a single principle as the basis of all physics. At the moment, Relativity explains gravity while quantum mechanics explains the other three forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism. Because gravity exactly balances the sum of the other three forces, making the total energy in the Universe equal precisely zero, it is assumed they have a common 'cause' expressible by a single theory. The problem is that no one has managed to unify them yet (note: this isn't the same as saying they can't be, or won't be).

But why do we assume there should be a single cause? Why can't relativity and quantum mechanics have different causes which together caused the Universe? Why limit it to two causes even? It is said that a tendency to assume a single cause is more likely in scientists from monotheistic cultures. Is this merely an example of a culturally biased assumption; of intuition over-riding what the evidence points to; of an argument from personal incredulity?

There is of course nothing other than a baseless assumption behind the religious apologist's insistence that the Universe had a single cause, just as there is nothing behind their assumption that the single cause must have been their favourite magic friend. It is nothing more than a manifestation of their insistence that the Universe must be as they require it to be. Just because a medieval theologian who knew nothing of physics or cosmology, and probably believed that Earth was a flat disc round which a small sun orbited, thought there should be a single cause, and just because primitive people from the beginnings of recorded history who knew even less thought that the Universe worked by magic, doesn't mean there is or it does.

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Why Your God Doesn't Exist

It's quite easy to prove logically that your god doesn't exist.

The proof is a simple deduction from certain basic assumptions which themselves are only assumptions in the sense of assuming the description you use for your god is true in the first instance. It goes without saying that if your description of your god is false then the god you are describing is also false.

Let's assume your god is real and has the following notional characteristics.

God is:

• Omnipotent - all powerful - there is nothing your god can't do.
• Omniscient - all knowing - there is nothing your god doesn't know.
• Omni-benevolent - all-loving - there is nothing your god wouldn't do to defend and protect its creation.

Okay so far? Is there anything you disagree with here? Is there something your god can't do if it has a mind to? Is there anything your god doesn't know? How about all loving? Is there anything or anyone your god doesn't love and for whom it has anything less than the greatest possible concern?

If all these were true there would be no suffering in the world because your god would be aware of it, would want to prevent it and would have the power to do so.

It also follows that, if there is suffering in the world, at least one of the above must be false and if one of the above is false, the god you believe in does not have the characteristics you believe it has; in other words, the god you believe in does not exist

And yet we can see suffering exists. This is an observable, undeniable, inescapable fact.

For suffering to exist, your god must be deficient in at least one of the above. At least one of the following must be true. God is:

• Unable to prevent it, so it isn't omnipotent.
• Unaware of it, so it isn't omniscient.
• Unconcerned about it, so it isn't all-loving

So, the undeniable existence of suffering in the world proves your god as described above does not exist.

Strange then that so much of your time is spent asking your god to either stop, reduce or prevent suffering, which is nothing more than tacit acceptance that an omniscience, omnipotent, omni-benevolent god doesn't exist.

Of course, you can escape the above logic by saying your god isn't omnipotent, isn't omniscience and/or isn't omni-benevolent, but a god who can't change things, doesn't know when they need to be changed and/or isn't bothered anyway, isn't much of a god and certainly not one worthy of worship. In fact, it's hard to imagine how we could distinguish such a god from a non-existent one.

I love these simple little proofs that gods don't exist. They are so much more elegant and simple than the cumbersome, convoluted and illogical 'proofs' which religious apologists have to try to get away with. That's the great thing about being supported by evidence, reason, logic and truth, and so not needing to fall back on the fallacy of faith and having to employ charlatans to make you feel better about being superstitious.

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Pity The Poor Apologists.

Spare a thought for Christian apologists. It must be awful for them - apart, that is, from all the money that the more devious ones get from their credulous customers in return for cognitive dissonance trauma therapy in the form of books, speaking engagements and TV chat and televangelist show appearances. Imagine what it must be like having to promote fallacies for a living like, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, "...an unctuous merchant in a bazaar come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, offering consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace".

But what makes it worse for them is that the Bible itself so frequently flatly contradicts them and pulls the rug out from under their feet, so they have to plough on regardless, hoping no one has noticed. Take, for instance the stock-in-trade fall-back position when all the logic has failed and every argument has been defeated yet again - that their god is eternal and exists outside space an time and so doesn't need to be explained because the evidence bar is at ground level, whereas science of course is required to jump an impossibly high bar and provide proof of the origins of everything, including, so it seems, the origin of the nothing before there was something, whilst conceding that there was time and space before there was space-time.

This tactic is used to make several apologetics 'arguments' look to the unsophisticated both logical and honest, particularly:

1. The Cosmological Argument, where apologetic salesmen claim the right to assume that everything requires an explanation in terms of cause, except their god which is granted a free pass to make the logic work.
   
   Briefly:
   
   1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
   2. The Universe began to exist.
   3. Therefore, the Universe had a cause.
   
   Originally devised by Al-Ghazali to 'prove' the existence of Allah (and therefore that the Qur'an is the literal word of Allah), it has since been purloined by William Lane Craig who earns his living using it to 'prove' the existence of the Christian God (and therefore that the Bible is the literal word of the Christian God).

2. The Ontological Argument devised by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury under William II of England. Briefly, this argues that, because a necessary aspect of perfection is existence, and because one can conceive of a perfect god, such a god must exist. (No really!). Believe it or not, this is still trotted out despite being refuted by, amongst others, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume and Immanual Kant, and by being so obviously an absurd attempt to define God into existence which, if it were true, could be used to define anything one wishes into existence. Shame about the manifest fact that it only works for imaginary invisible things but never for real things.
   
   It is of course nothing more than the anthropocentrically arrogant view that a god must exist because one is necessary for the believer and a vindication of the view that man creates gods in his own image.

3. The Teleological Argument, also known a 'Paley's Watch' which argues that the appearance of design implies a designer and, since living things look like they were designed, there must be a designer (which is of course, the Christian God if you're a Christian; Allah if you're a Muslim, and whichever your favourite creator god is if you happened to have parents brought up in a different 'faith').
   
   This was refuted by Darwin and Wallace in 1859 but is never-the-less still trotted out by and to people who have managed to remain ignorant of descent with modification and the power of natural selection to produce the semblance of design by a natural process. Some religious apologists earn their living by providing their customers with reason to maintain this ignorance and to convince themselves that this ignorance trumps anything science can produce.
   
   It ignores the obligation to apply the argument to their own god who is, naturally, granted an exemption from the need to have its design explained. "But [insert designer god] has always existed so doesn't need to have it's origins explained!"

The problem for all these standard arguments however, is that whoever wrote the Bible failed to anticipate that future apologists were going to need this fall-back, get-out-if-jail-free card in order to get round the fact that there was no evidential or logical support for the notion they were writing about, and promptly scuppered the whole thing with the following passage reporting what one of the prophets claimed God had told him:

Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.

Isaiah 43:10

Oops!

So, Isaiah says that God says that he had a beginning and will have an end, and that before him there were no gods and there will be none after him. God also says that gods are 'formed'. To make matters worse, this is the same prophet whom Christians love to claim prophesied the birth of Jesus, so 'proving' that Jesus was who they claim he was. Obviously what's happened here is that the writer assumed all that was then known was all that was going to be known, so never anticipated apologists coming up against the arguments science can now put forward, so never imagined so much would hinge on them getting away with persuading people that God is eternal as a escape clause.

So, Christian apologists, in view of the fact the God says he is not eternal and has not existed for ever, but was once 'formed', how do you answer the following:

1. What caused God?
2. How can a perfect god be imperfect in that one day it will cease to exist and once had no existence?
3. Who or what designed God, or what natural process gave it the necessary complexity to be able to create the Universe and monitor and record all human thoughts and actions?

Alternatively you could explain why you disagree with what God said in the Bible and by what process do you came to know better than the god whom you claim created everything and knows all?

You might need to spend a while thinking up the answers, or maybe you could send the questions to William Lane Craig, or whomsoever is your current favourite 'leading' apologist, asking them to come up with an answer. It must be awful for you trying to eke out a living by denying the very thing you are being paid to promote and having to struggle to present arguments that even your supposedly omniscient god says are false.

I bet you sometimes wished you had chosen a more honest way to earn a living, don't you?

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If You Want To Debate An Atheist...

Trying to debate a Creationist or fundamentalist of any creed is sometimes like trying to hold a conversation with someone who speaks a language or employs a grammar neither of you understands. There's you expecting, or at least if you're experienced in these matters, half hoping for, a logical discussion about the validity of evidence, what it means, how it has any bearing on the matter and why it supports a particular point of view.

Does anyone remember having such a discussion with a Creationist?

Me neither.

With this in minds, and mindful also of the mental state a certain deluded Bronx resident and seminary reject got himself into when he claimed to have irrefutable scientific evidence for the Christian god, only to find his fantasy world collapsed around him when given the simple challenge to substantiate his claim expressed in scientific terms, namely:

There is verifiable, falsifiable, scientific evidence for only the Christian God for which no possible natural explanation can exist.

Okay, maybe the word 'falsifiable' was superfluous there but his objection was essentially that it wasn't fair because I wasn't supposed to put it that way and he wouldn't be allowed to delete answers and debating points he didn't like, wouldn't be able to unilaterally claim to have won when he had no arguments left and wouldn't be able to use the normal delaying tactics, obfuscations, diversions and evasions he had been rehearsing, apparently under the impression that this is what constitutes normal debate with religious matters where the point is to try to trick your opponent into believing something you know isn't true or to impress them with your tactical skills. In other words where tactics count more than evidence because the evidence is so singularly lacking

In reality of course, the poor little man had just realised what his claim of scientific evidence meant. A bit like striding onto the pitch boasting loudly about how there is not a pitcher in the land who can pitch a ball you can't knock out of the ball-park, only to find, when the ball is pitched, that you don't have a bat and aren't surr which way you should be facing.

So, with this in mind, I put these few points together to help any wanabee creationist or religious fundamentalist debaters who imagine they are going to win debates with atheists, agnostics and/or evolutionists. Some of them might seem obvious but not, so it seems, to creationists and religious fundamentalists.

If you wish to refer to any of them, they are numbered for ease of reference. Just append #nn to the page URL where nn is the number in the list.

1. Don't lie. To show us you know you need to lie for your cause shows us you know your cause is a lie. Lies can include a pretence of expertise. Especially in science, theology and apologetics very many non-believers are far more expert than you may think. We are also notorious fact checkers - which is often one reason we are Atheists.
   
   

   That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

   
   
   

   Christopher Hitchens
   A lie can be a simple claim of certainty where there is no possibility of it. It can also include a claim that a single authority figure overrules an entire body of science. The opinions of a single creationist biologist do not trump the entire collective body of scientific opinion. Almost all evolutionary biologists agree with Darwinian Evolution and there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers published in any journal of biological science which supports the notion of Intelligent Design. (Michael Behe, Transcript of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Day 12 am, p. 22 ln 25 - p.23 ln 5.)
   
   Another form of lying is using the straw man fallacy. I'll list the common fallacies you should avoid later on.

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

Christopher Hitchens

2. Don't Quote from your favourite 'sacred' book. Before your book can be accepted as the infallible word of a god you first have to show beyond reasonable doubt, using external evidence, that the god you are claiming wrote, dictated or inspired it, actually exists, otherwise your claim is mere dogma, not evidence, and not something we need to pay any attention to, any more so that we would regard a book of Greek myths as gospel truth.
   
   To try to use a book as evidence simply shows that you don't understand the concept of evidence.
3. Don't make evidence-free assertions. The only claims worth considering are those supported with evidence, logic or deductive reasoning based on known and verifiable facts. To do so again shows us you don't understand the concept of evidence and so don't have opinions worth considering.
   
   We can be certain that you would eagerly seize on any scrap of hard evidence so your reliance on assertion merely highlights the lack of it as well as your awareness of that deficit.
4. Don't try to impress us with faith. Faith itself is a fallacy, as this article shows. Faith shows us that you have abandoned learning and reason in favour of dogma and magical thinking. Your belief in an idea is not scientific data and does nothing to support your argument. It merely detracts from your credibility as an objective witness and again draws attention to your awareness of the lack of any hard evidence.

Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.

Christopher Hitchens
5. Don't expect respect for an evidence-free opinion. You have a right to your opinions but you have no right to demand others regard your opinions as fact. You have no right to private facts.
6. Don't try to trap us with loaded questions or false premises. This will show us you are disingenuous and have decided to use tactics over substance as a debating ploy because you know your argument has no substance. We are well aware of these tactics of the sophist. Using these tricks will show that you have already conceded defeat over your substantive claims. We are not interested or impressed by your skill at deception and trickery. It's a form of lying and lying is an attempt to make people believe something you know is not true.
7. Don't try special pleading. Special pleading is where you demand a lower standard of evidence for your claim than you demand of others. If your beliefs can't stand the same tests as scientific opinion then they are not worth holding and are no match for scientific evidence or deductive logic. Using this tactic will show us that you lack confidence in your own reasoning and know you have a belief which required a low level of intellectual honesty and personal integrity - the God of Low Standards argument. We are not going to compromise our intellectual integrity simply to believe something you probably don't have much confidence in yourself.
8. Don't use fallacious reasoning. You may have been fooled by them but you have the responsibility for your own arguments and for checking their validity. All the creationist and ID fallacies have been refuted. I'll provide a fuller list in a moment but the common ones are:
   • The God of The Gaps Fallacy
   • The False Dichotomy Fallacy
   • The Ontological Fallacy
   • The Cosmological Fallacy
   • The Teleological Fallacy.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

Christopher Hitchens
9. Don't quote the opinions of others as fact. Opinions are not fact, no matter how long ago they were expressed. It does not matter whether this 'expert' or that believes such and such. The only opinions worth considering are those based on evidence, logic or deductive reasoning.
   
   A great deal of theology is based on opinions about other peoples' opinions. In fact the entire body of opinion about the validity of sacred books is based on other peoples' opinions that the book is divinely inspired. There is no extra-biblical or extra-Qur'anic evidence that they are any more valid than any other ancient books. If all 'sacred' texts were truths there would be many different realities. The self-evident fact that no two religions ever arose with the same set of dogmata should tell you that books do not create reality.
   
   Just as with buildings, unless opinions make contact with reality they should not stand, and will not stand the test of scrutiny. Unquestioning acceptance of the opinions of others places them in a position of power over you and reduces you to a mere cypher.

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.

Christopher Hitchens
10. Don't argue from ignorance. Gaps in your knowledge and understanding are not scientific data. To claim expertise where you have none is a lie and lies are intended to deceive. You insult our intelligence when you try deceptions and you show the world you know you are pushing a falsehood.
    
    If you don't want to learn don't try to debate with an Atheist. If you do want to learn, be prepared to look it up for yourself. Never more so than today, ignorance must be either wilful or feigned for anyone living in a developed economy. You may come from a culture which prizes ignorance like it probably prizes virginity. Don't expect us to subscribe to that primitive ethic.

Now for that list of fallacies which are often (almost always) used by Creationists, fundamentalists and religious apologists. I got these from Jason Long's Biblical Nonsense: A Review Of The Bible For Doubting Christians.

• Bifurcation or Black & White Fallacy. Where only two alternatives are offered. Usually a ridiculous one and the one being promoted, where there are several plausible candidates. See also the False Dichotomy. A form of this fallacy is Plurium interrogationum where a yes or no answer is demanded for a complex question, for example, "Do you believe the characters in the Bible were real people"? The correct answer is that some were, some might have been and some probably weren't.
• Argumentum ad baculum. Implied threats. "You'll burn in Hell if you don't believe in Jesus"/"You'll burn in Hell if you don't worship Allah".
• Ad hominem. Attack the opponent's character. The person's character need have nothing to do with the validity of the argument unless the proposer is putting the weight of his/her personal authority and integrity into the argument and inviting you to regard him/her as a credible witness.
• The irrelevant conclusion. "Jesus died for our sins. Many people now accept Jesus. This proves that Jesus was the son of God". No. The conclusion does not follow from the assertions, even if the assertions could be proven.
• Non sequitur. The conclusion does not follow from the premise. "Because Mark wrote a biography of Jesus he must have been an expert in ancient Hebrew." Er... no. Any one could write a biography of Jesus without knowing anything very much about ancient Hebrew. It might not be worth reading but writing it doesn't make a person an expert.
• The red herring. Introducing an irrelevance into the argument.
• The straw man. A (usually infantile) parody of the opponents position is attacked instead of the real thing. This relies on the ignorance of the audience for success so is an almost universal tactic of Creationists and religious apologists. The trick is to make it look like the opponent is defending something no sane person would believe. (See above).
• The universal reply. "You just need to read the Bible/Koran". "You need to open your mind.", "God did it!", etc, etc, ad nauseum.

So there we are. If you want to debate with an Atheist you'll come a cropper if you try any of the above. All you'll have achieved is to show how dishonest and disingenuous you need to be to be a Creationist, religious fundamentalist or apologist for Christianity or Islam or whatever religious dogma you are promoting or defending.

If the above means you can't hope to win a debate with an Atheist or evolutionary biologist or other scientist then that means you have no real reason to be arguing against us. You might like to think about that and work out why that might be. If might involve you re-thinking your beliefs. There will be no reason we should re-think ours.

Cutting Out Gods With Ockham's Razor

Many readers will be familiar with the logical device known as 'Ockham's Razor' and how it can be used to eliminate bias and unnecessary complexity in the explanation of anything. This is aimed at those who aren't, and especially those who don't understand how, properly used, it invariably removes gods or other supernatural entities from any explanation of any phenomenon.

Briefly, 'Ockham's Razor' says entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily - in other words, no explanation should include unnecessary steps or the existence of unnecessary components; the most parsimonious explanation in competing hypotheses is most likely to be the correct one.

First the background:

William of Ockham (also Occam, Hockham, or several other spellings; c. 1288 – c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey.^[1] He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although he is commonly known for Occam's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is 10 April.^[2]

Source: Wikipedia - William of Ockham

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William of Ockham... is remembered as an influential Roman Catholic philosopher and nominalist, though his popular fame as a great logician rests chiefly on the maxim attributed to him and known as Ockham's razor. The term razor refers to distinguishing between two hypotheses either by "shaving away" unnecessary assumptions or cutting apart two similar conclusions.

This maxim seems to represent the general tendency of Occam's philosophy, but it has not been found in any of his writings. His nearest pronouncement seems to be Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate [Plurality must never be posited without necessity], which occurs in his theological work on the 'Sentences of Peter Lombard'.^[3]

The words attributed to Occam, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem [entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity], are absent in his extant works; this particular phrasing owes more to John Punch.^[4] Indeed, Ockham's contribution seems to be to restrict the operation of this principle in matters pertaining to miracles and God's power: so, in the Eucharist, a plurality of miracles is possible, simply because it pleases God.

This principle is sometimes phrased as pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate [plurality should not be posited without necessity]. In his Summa Totius Logicae, i. 12, Ockham cites the principle of economy, Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora [It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer].^[4]

Source: Wikipedia - Ockham's Razor

Which is a long-winded way to state the basic principle, "keep it simple, stupid".

So how does that get rid of gods and other hypothetical supernatural entities from the explanation for natural phenomena?

Take, for example, a common theological argument that the Bible or Qur'an were dictated or inspired by a god and that their survival over a long period of history is due to their divine status - which is itself evidence of their divine status.

Apart from:

• The circularity of the argument;
• The fact that there are many other surviving documents and inscriptions not claimed to be divinely inspired, some older than the Bible and Qur'an;
• The fact that it can be used for literally any old books;
• The fact that there appears to be no particular date before which divine intervention is needed to ensure conservation but after which supernatural intervention need not be hypothecated.

there are of course many possible perfectly natural explanations for the survival of ancient documents, including the operation of pure chance. Indeed the explanation may, and probably does, differ for different documents, but let's stick to the Bible and Qur'an and construct a pair or hypotheses to see how Ockham's Razor can be used to separate them and point to the most vicarious (therefore most likely to be correct) one.

1. People considered them sacred and so looked after them and made copies of them.
2. A god told people they were sacred and that they should look after them and make copies of them.

We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam's razor and cut out all the features of the theory which cannot be observed.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

The difference between 1 and 2 of course is that 2 includes a god, yet this adds nothing to an already complete explanation and indeed it had to include 1.

Including a god simply adds an additional entity. It also includes an entity for which no explanation is possible and which is untestable and unfalsifiable. Indeed it is now necessary to explain something vastly more complex than the phenomenon originally being explained - the survival of (copies of) old documents.

To reach a complete explanation which includes a god we also need to produce independent evidence for the existence of this god and an explanation of its origins and modus operandum. How exactly did it communicate this instruction and where is the evidence that it was ever conveyed? To whom and when?

So, in addition to the god the explanation now includes a whole lot of new entities, all needing to be there to justify including a god in the first place, when the natural explanation in 1 was perfectly adequate.

This is precisely what religious apologists do when they insert gods into gaps in scientific theories, real or imaginary. Including an infinitely complex god in any explanation simply because you want it to be there invariably adds an infinite complexity to the explanation when the natural explanation, whenever it has been found and a god has been evicted from yet another gap, has always turned out to be relatively simple and rational in comparison to a hypothetical god.

Ockham's Razor, properly applied, will invariably pare gods away from any explanation because the inclusion of gods multiplies entities infinitely and unnecessarily. There is never an excuse for insisting an entity be included in any explanation just because you like it and want it to be included.

In pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, necessity has nothing to do with your superstition, your need for an imaginary friend, your need to excuse otherwise unacceptable attitudes and behaviour and/or your need to earn a living selling superstitions to gullible and vulnerable people. And it has nothing to do with your inability to accept that your mummy and daddy could have been wrong.

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Misguided Evolution

Here's a strange claim from theologian and Christian apologist, Alvin Plantinga. One seriously wonders if he thought it through before writing it down, or whether, as with so many religious apologists, he wasn't writing to persuade doubters and convert non-believers but to help believers cope with the cognitive dissonance caused by trying to hold on to faith in the teeth of reality.

Plantinga is one of the Christian apologists who has accepted the overwhelming evidence for Darwinian Evolution but has also accepted, unlike some other apologists like Francis Collins, that Darwinian Evolution, properly understood, abolishes the need for a god in any theory of the origins of life - that in turn utterly destroys the nonsensical doctrine of original sin and causes the entire Christian religion to collapse under the weight of its own absurdity in fact.

But Plantinga has a vested interest to defend, so that logic can't be allowed to get in the way; a work-around has to be found, even if that work-around is as absurd as the superstition it is designed to defend.

Apologists' Glossary

In recognition of the frequent need of religious apologists to re-define everyday words to make their arguments appear to work and look logical, I have produced this handy glossary. It can also be used by normal people to decode apologetics and turn it from gibberish into normal English.

Allegory

Anything in a holy book which science has now shown not to be true and which no one in their right mind would now believe was ever meant to be taken literally. Allegories do not need to be for anything; they just need to be too silly to be taken literally now we know better.

Big Bang

1. Silly idea that nothing went bang and made everything, so the evidence for it can be ignored.
2. Not as sensible as the idea that a magic man made from nothing made everything from nothing so he would have somewhere to create me.

Climate Change

Something which isn't happening and which has nothing to do with the different weather we are having. Anyway, God will take care of it and it doesn't matter anyway because Jesus will come back soon.

Disproved.

1. Any scientific idea about which there may be the slightest uncertainty or which is not completely understood in absolute detail, or which any person claiming to be a scientist has ever questioned at any time in recorded history, if it casts doubt on a religious dogma.
2. Anything which contradicts the holy book of the religion being defended.

Evidence.

1. Something which can safely be assumed to exist if it would support the religious idea being defended.
2. Something which arrogant, elitist scientists keep going on about.

Evolution.

1. The belief that chimpanzees have human babies, invented by Stephen Dawkins who is friend of Karl Marx.
2. A scientific process which is impossible because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
3. An old idea that everyone knows has been disproved.
4. The scientific explanation for how all the different species evolved from two of each kind in just 4,000 years after Noah's flood.

Fact.

Anything presented without supporting evidence in support of religious dogma. May be given addition power by being appended with an exclamation mark and used at the end of a sentence.

False.

1. Pertaining to anything tending to disprove a religious dogma, no matter how well supported with evidence or reason.
2. Anything which contradicts the holy book of the religion being defended.

False Witnessing.

1. Telling lies - something forbidden by one of the Ten Commandments, so no Christian would ever do it.
2. Definitely not claiming to have evidence for a god when there is none, or making claims for which there is no evidential support.
3. Also, definitely not accusing people who you don't agree with of doing things they haven't done.

Faith.

1. How to tell that all other faiths are false.
2. Believing things for which there is definitely really good evidence which convinced the people who told me what to believe. No doubts about that at all. Honestly! Anyway, I wouldn't believe it if it wasn't true. Why can't other people see that?

Fool.

Anyone who doesn't agree with a religious dogma.

Foolish.

Any claim, fact or logical argument which tends to falsify the religious dogma or argument currently being used.

Good.

1. Pertaining to any act called for in a holy book, regardless of its effects on other people.
2. Pertaining to people who claim to be members of the religious sect being promoted, regardless of their behaviour.

I know it to be so.

Cf. Fact!

Just a theory.

1. A guess with no supporting evidence.
2. Description of any body of science together with the supporting evidence, research findings and consensus of opinion of experts in the field, which contradicts anything in the holy book or religious dogma being promoted or defended.

Let's agree to disagree.

I've run out of arguments and can't refute anything you've said but I'm not going to admit I've lost because I might have to change my opinion.

Literal Word Of God.

1. Everything written in the holy book being promoted. Utterly beyond dispute.
2. Unless it's just too absurd to be believed, or embarrassing, then it is allegorical - but still literally true, obviously.

Love.

The passive-aggressive act of condescending to people who disagree with you in an attempt to intimidate them.

Lying For Jesus/Allah

The paradox of religious apologists denying doing it when caught in the act.

Metaphor.

See Allegory. Normally applies to a instruction in a holy book which, if done today, would be socially unacceptable or even criminal. What it is a metaphor for is often an ineffable mystery which only devout people can understand.

Moral.

1. Pertaining to anything done in the name of the god being defended or called for in a holy book, regardless of the effect it has on other people, especially non-believers.
2. Pertaining to any act done to promote the sect being promoted, including deception, misrepresentation, false-witnessing and violence, threatened or actual.

Real.

Pertaining to something which can't be demonstrated to exist but which would need to exist for a religious dogma to be true.

Reason.

1. Not to be trusted if it gives the wrong answer. What St Paul and Martin Luther warned us not to use but didn't say why.
2. What people who don't trust God use.
3. What William Lane Craig and other religious apologists brilliantly prove God is real with.

Saved.

Pertaining to Christians who believe they have been saved from their god because they believe it exists.

Science.

1. When contradicting a religious dogma, an unreliable philosophy depending on an unproven materialist view of the universe, which never produces anything worthwhile in terms of knowledge, understanding or progress.
2. When believed to support a religious dogma, indisputable and infallible method for proving what's true.

Scientist.

1. When agreeing with the religion being promoted, brilliant and indisputable authority.
2. When disagreeing with the religion being promoted, mad, elitist, fraud who thinks he knows more than God/Allah. Probably a Communist, rapist and devil-worshipper.
3. Anyone with letters after his/her name, even if not qualified in a science subject, especially if called 'doctor'.
4. A Creationist who has watched the Discovery Channel or who owns a science book.

Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Science which makes Evolution impossible.

Sinner.

Everyone. If Catholic, someone who has sinned since they were last let off by a priest. Some people are obviously sinner than others.

True.

Pertaining to anything which would support religious dogma if it were so, especially in the absence of any supporting evidence.

Witnessing.

The act of saying anything at all which might, if believed, persuade another person to join the religious sect being promoted.

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