An Unholy Alliance

Poverty Religion Education Wilfred R Martin

There appears to be an unholy trinity at work in human populations. This trinity results in people being more overtly religious; more fundamentally religious and more aggressively religious.

The three components of this trinity are:

• Poverty
• Ignorance either from under-education or educational under-achievement
• Fervent or militant religiosity

There are several studies into the link between poverty and religiosity.

This report by Barry Ritholtz, More Poverty = More Religion, used polling data from a Gallop study and represents the results graphically. The conclusion was 'The more poverty a nation has, the higher the “religiosity” in that nation. In general, richer countries are less religious than poorer ones.' The study also noted that 'The United States, which has the highest religiosity relative to its wealth on the planet' is an outlier, as is readily seen on the chart.

A 2009 study by Dr Tomas Rees published in Journal of Religion and Society (Vol 11) found 'Income inequality, and hence personal insecurity, was ... an important determinant of religiosity...'

So the apparent anomaly of the United States shown in the Gallop survey may be because, whilst absolute poverty is less marked there, income inequality (that is the gap between the richest and poorest) is actually higher than in many middle-income countries.

The link between education and religion per se is not so clear cut as that between income inequality and religiosity.

In the United States, religious attendance rises sharply with education across individuals, but religious attendance declines sharply with education across denominations. This puzzle is explained if education both increases the returns to social connection and reduces the extent of religious belief. The positive effect of education on sociability explains the positive education-religion relationship. The negative effect of education on religious belief causes more educated individuals to sort into less fervent religions, which explains the negative relationship between education and religion across denominations. Cross-country differences in the impact of education on religious belief can explain the large cross-country variation in the education-religion connection. These cross-country differences in the education-belief relationship can be explained by political factors (such as communism) which lead some countries to use state-controlled education to discredit religion.

Glaeser, E.L. and Sacerdote, B.I.; "Education And Religion"; Journal of Human Capital (2, 2 (Summer 2008): 188-215)

So it would seem that religious belief is not reduced by education as such, but that the propensity for more fervent, fundamentalist religions is reduced in better-educated societies. However, this data is possibly complicated by the association with the more fundamentalist religions being followed predominantly by the less educated social groups, which invariably are also the lower income groups.

It appears that the link between income inequality, or relative poverty and fundamentalism is the stronger of the two with that between (lack of) education and religion possibly being a consequence of the link between them.

The reason for this is probably to be found in the hope that religion gives to people who really have little to hope for in their lives; people who through a combination of race, social status, neighbourhood and/or lack of education, can see what the better off and the super-rich have and know that it's beyond their reach. People who have, for all practical purpose, no realistic prospect of escape from poverty and hopelessness other than by bringing about a fundamental change in the political system; a system which is dominated by the haves and the have mores and from which they have become increasingly distanced and disenfranchised by its irrelevance to them and their resulting apathy towards it.

Is it really surprising that people from whom all realistic hope for a better life in this life has been taken would fall prey to those who sell them the notion of a better life some day in another one, when all it takes is a donation (to show Jesus how much you love him), an hour or so in church on Sunday, and singing a few songs at the top of your voice to shout down your doubts?

It it really surprising that people who are at the bottom of the social order like to pretend to be superior because they have a special friend in a mega-powerful god and a 'personal relationship' with the creator of everything? And is it surprising that people with little education and from a culture resistant to it, find it difficult or distasteful to learn the science and history which would enable them to understand better the superstition they are buying into?

And is it really surprising that there exists a parasitic class of religious charlatans and snake-oil salesmen practically falling over one another to tap into this lucrative market for easy answers, false hope and a false sense of smug superiority?

And is it really surprising that there exists a class of unscrupulous politicians hailing from the very class which needs a large, poor, politically powerless underclass to supply its demands for cheap and compliant labour, which promotes these primitive superstitions with such enthusiasm, to fool the poor and dispossessed into believing they are on their side.

And therein lies another unholy alliance; that between the ruling class, the priesthood and the religion of the people. It's the same as that between the drug producer, the pedlar and the junkie.

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If God Wants Us To Believe The Bible...

If God wants us to believe the biblical account of creation why did he create a universe in which:

• The ratio of the light elements, hydrogen, deuterium, helium and lithium in the universe is exactly as predicted if the universe resulted from an intense inflation from a singularity?
• The Microwave background radiation is exactly as it is predicted to be if the inflation from a singularity occurred 13.82 billion years ago?
• The large-scale universe is expanding at a rate which is exactly as required to produce a wavelength for the microwave background radiation's as it is today?
• The sun is exactly as we would expect of a second or third generation star in a universe which is as old as the microwave background tells us and has light elements in the ratio which the Big Bang theory predicts?
• The radiometric data from rocks on Earth and of meteorites gives an age of the solar system of 4.57 billion years and and age of Earth of 4.4-4.5 billion years?

So What IS This Soul Thing?

Where on earth did this idea of a soul come from?

One thing we can be sure about is that it's a very old idea. In fact it was probably the reason for religions in the first place as there is archaeological evidence of burials from the the Palaeolithic and burial is generally taken as evidence of some sort of religion and ideas of an afterlife (which implies belief in a soul). There is even some evidence that Neanderthals may have had ritual burials. There is actual textual evidence of belief in a soul from the Bronze Age in the form of biblical writings, Sanskrit Vedas and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

So why is this notion that there is a separate entity inhabiting our bodies and which somehow continues to exist after death, such a strong and persistent belief in all human societies?

Can Anyone Explain the Purpose Of Prayer?

"Oh Lord! Won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porche's, I must make amends!"
You see, what I just don't get is how prayer can possibly change the mind of an all-knowing, infinitely wise, all-powerful, omni-benevolent god who has defined right and wrong for us and knows our deepest, most secret thoughts.

Such a god would have ensured only the best for its creation and would have set this in motion right from the start, so the purpose of prayer can't possibly to persuade such a god to change its mind.

What Warning Would You Put In A Gideon Bible?

For those few who don't know, a 'Gideon Bible' is a Bible supplied by the 'Gideons International' to hotels, hospitals, schools and other approved places. You will normally find one in the bedside cabinet in a hotel room. They are distributed by morbidly paranoid theophobic people in the hope that an omnibenevolent imaginary god won't torture them for eternity after they die.

Spreading primitive superstition and resistance to AIDS prevention measures in Africa

In the interest of balance and the welfare of potential victims, I feel that Atheists and Agnostics should insert a slip of paper containing a health warning about the contents of the Bible.

Genocide, Bible style.

This should of course contain a warning about the violence, killing, explicit sexual references, child abuse, objectivisation and dehumanisation of women, aggressively genocidal racism, explicit animal cruelty and incitement to commit murder and hate crimes amongst other activities unacceptable in a civilised society. It should also contain a warning about parental guidance, or at least the guidance of a sane adult being advisable for children and gullible people.

And that's just the first five 'books' in the Bible.

There are obviously very many other things innocent people need to be warned about, and therein lies the problem:

How would we fit this list onto, preferably, a single side of A5 (or maybe centre-folded single sheet of A4) in a succinct message.

So, here is YOUR chance to help spread the good news of Atheism, Humanism and rational thought and to help people understand the harm that primitive superstitions can do and how to avoid being fooled into believing in them and to escape from them if already infected.

Please suggest suitable, succinct, powerful, and above all, complete and truthful wording for such an insert. Copies of the best can be converted to a suitable form for concerned citizens to print off and distribute when travelling.

Freedom from religion. Free at last, free at last!

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Favourite Fallacies - The Straw Man.

One of the major problems faced by creationists and religious apologists is the mountain of science and scientific theories they need to somehow get past and still persuade themselves and/or their target audience that they have a valid, even superior argument. So they adopt strategies designed basically to pretend the evidence against them just isn't there.

All of these strategies are fallacious of course, but perhaps the commonest devise is known as the Straw Man Fallacy. The straw man is a metaphor for something which can be easily and safely attacked and which looks vaguely like the thing they would like to be attacking but know they can't. Usually, the straw man will be constructed in such a ludicrously childish fashion that it is easily dismantled by anyone with very low intellectual ability, and this of course is where apologists gain by using this device because that is usually a characteristic of the audience they are trying to fool with the straw man fallacy in the first place.

For example, you will see the Theory of Evolution misrepresented as a theory which says a monkey suddenly gave birth to a human or a living animal suddenly changed into another species, or that an entire species changed overnight into a different one so you would not expect to see any of the earlier ones around now. You will also see more subtle misrepresentations such implying that biologists recognise a distinction between evolution which results in a new taxon and evolution which results in mere change in frequency or a variable characteristic within a species. The most popular straw man in this respect is the pretence that the Theory of Evolution predicts and requires a complete set of fossils recording every change in every species throughout its evolutionary history and that the Theory of Evolution depends entirely on this requirement.

A common device used is to conflate two or more scientific theories into one, or more often, two or more straw men parodies of scientific theories such as the big bang, abiogenesis and evolution into one and throw stones at that parody instead of the real science. So you will see arguments attacking the idea that life arose in a big bang or that rocks evolved intelligence.

And of course, where this tactic works most effectively is when it is used on those with low reasoning ability and/or low scientific education who lack the ability to recognise the straw man parody and so take it on trust that it is an accurate and honest representation of science. Combined with their naive ignorance, the attacks from creationist charlatans provide them with the perfect excuse to pretend to know better than those who have spent time learning the subject and acquiring the necessary understanding, and all by learning a few simple parodies and some infantile questions based on them. This is also helped in those cultures where it tends to be assumed that those defending religions are honest and can be relied upon to tell the truth.

So we now see unfortunate victims of this deception swarming onto the Internet and infesting the social network media proudly showing off the 'killer arguments' they have picked up from people who've used this technique on them only to find they're making fools of themselves and displaying both their credulous gullibility and ignorance and ending up discrediting the very thing they came rushing excitedly on line to promote.

The other major group of people on whom this technique works, and at whom it it often aimed, are fellow religionists who have invested so much of themselves in their religion that the cognitive dissonance which results in learning science is too difficult to cope with, so avoidance strategies are readily adopted. Very often too these people will be earning their living from religion so will have made more than just a psychological investment.

Look beyond the straw man to the motives of those who assiduously create them and what do we see? We see people who know they need to create straw men to attack in the first place. What we don't see are people who have seriously looked at the science itself and made an effort to understand it, and who may be genuinely puzzled by it or genuinely mistaken about it. We see people who, if they have looked at all, have only looked for things to parody and misrepresent and have obviously had little regard for the way the body of science grows and develops, so that, for example, a book or paper, or even a popular magazine article from many years ago will be presented as current theory. And of course there will be the deliberate confusion of even the meanings of words where there is more than one current definition, such as the different popular and scientific meanings of the word 'theory' and 'law'.


Perhaps more than any other fallacy, the Straw Man Fallacy exemplified both the dishonesty of creationist and religious apologists and the naive ignorance and intellectual indolence of their credulous victims.

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Finding Fossils In The Dark

The River Evenlode

By the age of about ten I knew every path in every wood in the square mile around the small ancient northern Oxfordshire hamlet on the edge of the Wychwood Forest I was born and grew up. The hamlet where Romans had built a villa and named the footpath Via Dessica which we still called Viziker.

I knew not just every path, but practically every tree, spring, badgers' set, rabbit burrow and briar patch. I knew where the wild gooseberries and strawberries grew, which nut trees had the best nuts, where the cleanest spring water was and which crabapple trees had the sweetest apples in autumn.

Have You Written Your Book Review Today?

The Atheist community (for want of a better term) is probably amongst the best educated of any community in terms of the range of interests they have and particularly in the range and number of books they read. Many Atheist will be voracious readers of science, philosophy and even theology. Many will have interests in history, geography, politics, economics, travel, natural history (rather than the science of biology) and classics, and central to our philosophy of life will be a love of free thinking, rationalism, truth and objectivity.

So, who better to write reviews of the many popular religious and creationist books, as well popular science, evolution, humanist and atheist books?  We owe it to potential buyers of creationist and popular theology books to write honest, considered and objective reviews on sites such as Amazon, which positively encourages them. It's worth bearing in mind that you'll be writing for people who read books and are not afraid to own more than one, so not your typical Twitter creationist.

And, of course, we owe it to potential buyers of popular science, atheist and humanist books, to be equally factual, objective and honest.

Here is a link to an article explaining how to write a book review. There are lots of others on the Internet.

Go to it good people. 

Christians! Be Sensible Now And Tell Me This

Okay, Christians, let's be sensible for a moment. Answer these for me, please:

1. You tell me I need your god's forgiveness for something Adam and Eve are believed by some to have done many thousands of years ago. Why should that bother me if I don't believe in your god or the Adam and Eve myth, please?
2. Leaving that aside for a moment and accepting for the sake of argument that I am somehow responsible for something someone else did a long time ago, and over which I could not possibly have any influence or be held to account for, how did a blood sacrifice absolve me of that responsibility exactly, please? Note: I'm not asking whether it did or not; I'm asking how it worked exactly.

Are We Finally Slipping The Religious Leash?

During my lifetime, and mostly since the end of WWI, Britain and the rest of Europe and the USA, indeed all of the developed world and a great deal of the under-developed world, has become increasingly liberal and egalitarian.

Annie Kenny & Sylvia Pankhurst
Womens' Social And Political Union

Although we still have a long way to go we have seen a lessening of the class system in Britain so that we no longer send our spare daughters into the service of the middle and upper classes there to be at the disposal of the men of the house, as in my grandparents day. The once outrageously radical idea of women voting is now taken for granted, even in Switzerland where the last Canton granted women the right to vote and stand for election in February 1971.

1963 Civil Rights March
Lincoln Memorial

Following the Civil Rights Campaign of the Early 1960s and the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, Black people in USA have made major advances in civil rights. Discrimination on grounds of race, religion, gender and ethnicity is now outlawed in the EU and USA. In the EU working people have employment rights far in excess of anything dreamed of by even the most radical socialists of the 1950s and to the intense annoyance of the political right.

Capital punishment has been abolished in much of the civilised world. Women, with access to contraception, now have the same sexual freedom that men always enjoyed, and the right to planned pregnancies and to limit their family size. In the UK, women now have full property rights and can make contracts in their own name where previously they were regarded more as a possession of their husband or father, at least in the eyes of the law as they were in my grandparents day.

Recently the right to civil partnerships between homosexual couples has been established in many countries and the Christian churches are fighting a desperate rearguard action to prevent this being extended to full marriage rights. Yet only two generations ago homosexual activity was a criminal offence which meant imprisonment and shame for those convicted of loving the wrong person. And it still is in those countries where religious clerics still wield power, even carrying the death penalty.

There is still a great deal to be done in terms of freedom from discrimination but few people nowadays question the basic principle. When I was a teenager many of the rights we now take for granted were considered radical, extremist, even dangerous and well worth the security services paying them special attention. Some people even advocated that boys with long hair should be arrested and forced to have it cut!

So what's the cause of this? Why have we in many different countries, speaking many different languages and with quite different histories, all arrived at the collective opinion that the right to be treated as the equal of any another person is a basic human right?

Of course, correlation does not establish causality, though it certainly makes it worthy of consideration, but one major social change simultaneously with the changes I have mentioned above, has been the decline in support for religions partly because better education in the sciences has rendered so much of it laughably absurd.

No doubt religionists would dismiss this as a cause unless they are portraying them as showing a loss of morals; a breakdown in society. Then they would undoubtedly point to the same correlation as 'proof' of their claim whilst demanding that they be reversed.

However, I think the hypothesis of a causal link is supported by a number of things, the first being that almost all of these advances has been opposed either directly by the churches or by the political parties and classes which are themselves supported by the church.

In the 1960s we had the Protestant-backed KKK killing civil rights workers and black activists. In 1973 we had the grotesque spectacle of the 'conscience of America', Billy Graham, advising Richard Nixon that Jews should not be regarded as American citizens. The term WASP is still synonymous with right-wing Christian white supremacist male chauvinism, which is almost a definition of political conservatism in America and not far off that of Conservatism in the UK and Christian Democracy in most of Europe.

In the UK, the Anglican church opposed universal adult suffrage and especially votes for for women. In Europe, the Vatican had supported Fascism; in Serbia, the Orthodox Christian church supported genocidal nationalists. Almost universally, the Christian Churches opposed easier divorce, easier access to contraception, better sex education for teenagers. The churches in Britain, Holland, Belgium, Spain, France and Italy all supported colonialism and resisted independence for the colonies. In Northern Ireland the Presbyterian Churches were steadfast in their opposition to equal rights for Catholics and universal adult suffrage and had been directly responsible for setting up an apartheid system there in the first place. In the Irish Republic the Catholic Church effectively killed off tentative moves towards a health service.

In short, almost every piece of social progress towards a more egalitarian, less discriminatory, less chauvinistic, better educated, more liberal and more inclusive society has been opposed by the conservative right supported by the main stream Christian churches. Only now that they are losing their grip and have almost lost it altogether in some countries, have we made any real social progress.

I think the correlation is more than a coincidence. I think we are finally slipping the leash of religion, gaining our freedom and building a better society based on Humanist principles.

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If A Stranger Told You He Was Jesus...

If a stranger told you he was Jesus would you trust in Jesus or would you want evidence? That question is not a facetious as it might appear because it goes right to the heart of 'faith' and what the Bible, and theologians are expecting us to believe.

Of course the answer would be no, you wouldn't believe a stranger just because he said he was Jesus, or the Messiah, or any manifestation of a god, or even a special messenger like an angel. In fact, you'd probably assume that he was either joking or in need of care and medication. It would take an extraordinary amount of evidence to convince you otherwise, unless you are unfortunately suggestible or extraordinarily gullible.

You would almost certainly dismiss even a miracle like turning water into wine as a conjuring trick and the chances are if he touched a blind person and restored their sight you would assume they were in collusion. With some justification you'd start to suspect a scam. Any moment now he's going to ask me for a donation so he can concentrate on his mission and not have the 'distraction' of having to work for a living.

And yet you're expected to take second hand (at best) accounts of a man doing just that in biblical times on faith, and not ask for evidence. In fact, you're expected to be proud of 'accepting Jesus on faith' as though it's something to be proud of; a virtue even!

Yet, reading the Bible, what was it that allegedly convince the disciples that Jesus was the Messiah and God incarnate? Was it 'on faith'? Was it because he walked up to them, a total stranger, and said, "Hi! I'm Jesus, Son of God!"?

Nope, it was allegedly evidence in the form of miracles which did it. Even Abraham, the founder of three major world religions and countless minor sects, needed evidence, as did Moses. All the writers of the New Testament cite evidence and Paul even performed miracles (albeit small ones like turning a stick into a snake and back) to convince people.

So, why did Jesus' chosen disciples and all those Old Testament prophets have less faith that you are expected to have? Why was it okay for biblical saints to require evidence and rely on science (if you believe the stories) to arrive at their beliefs, but not you?

The answer is quite simple, of course, they wrote about having seen the evidence but they had none to show, so they fell back on the ruse of telling you it was good not to require evidence; that God would be upset if you asked for it; that 'faith' is a virtue and something to be proud of. Not that they ever doubted or needed evidence, obviously. Oh, no!

Pah! That Doubting Thomas, eh? Oh! Ye of little faith!

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And Now For Somting Compeltly Difrent

Is this the best help page advice ever?

If Creationism Is Science, Why Do They Need Tactics?

Creationist debating tactics all boil down to a single two-step strategy. Looking at these gives us a very strong clue both to those at whom they are aimed and the scant regard to honesty and integrity of those who use them.

1. Attack some obscure aspect of science, usually, but not always, something which impinges directly of their favourite mythical account of creation by a magic man using magic to make it all out of nothing. This can take several forms, including but not limited to:
   
   
   • Attacking a ridiculous parody of science.
   • Claiming something which has been explained either hasn't been or can't be explained.
   • Magnifying some obscure aspect about which there is disagreement in the science community and claiming this shows scientists can't agree about anything.
   • Claiming that something science does not yet know proves that this is unknowable and therefore science is flawed and can't answer questions.
   • Pointing to mistakes, revised or discarded earlier theories or even attempted hoaxes which some scientist may have been fooled briefly by, as proof that science gets things wrong. This can include representing mistaken or falsified accounts in the popular press as serious science, even when these have later been corrected.
   • Claiming that withdrawn papers or discarded theories are still part of the body of science and still presented as current theories, even referencing old books and journals as evidence.
   • Presenting an out of context quote from a famous scientist such as Darwin or Einstein and claiming is shows they didn't believe their own theory.
   • Confusing philosophical questions with science and claiming science is flawed because it can't tell you the purpose of your life, what the universe was created for or who made the scientific laws.
   • Lying.
2. Claim that this destroys the entire body of science and therefore their favourite notions wins by default.
   
   Thing which will never form part of their strategy are:
   
   
   • A falsifiable claim or prediction based on their god-did-it notion.
   • A statement of what they would accept as proof of the science they are attacking.
   • a description of the checkable evidence upon which their notion is based and an explanation of why it can only have the interpretation they ascribe to it.
   • A statement of what they would accept as falsifying it.

Quite clearly this strategy is designed to appeal to those who:

1. Don't understand science or the subject being attacked and will believe if you can create any degree of uncertainty over any aspect of science, or can show, accurately or not, that science was ever wrong about anything, the whole thing collapses.
2. Through cultural arrogance, parochial ignorance or a combination of both, will simply assume without question that the locally popular god is the only alternative on offer.
3. Crave the comfort of certainty and find anything which shakes that certainty uncomfortable and/or frightening and so are disinclined to question basic assumptions or learn anything which might cause them to call those basic assumptions into question.
4. Are deriving some sort of spurious self-affirmation from the thought that their inherited superstition automatically trumps anything which 'those crazy/elitist propeller-heads in white coats' and/or 'evil conspiracists' are dreaming up.

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All A Matter Of Ancestor Worship

Ancestor worship in Vietnam

As children we look up to the adults in our society. We think they are full of wisdom and know just about everything. I still remember the shock I felt when my primary school teacher was wrong about something I knew about. How could she not know that there was a bird called a Great Tit? What had gone wrong with the world when she crossed out the word 'Great' in red ink and wrote 'small' over it? These things can shatter the cosy world of certainties for an eight year old. Teachers were teachers because they knew everything, weren't they? How else did they become teachers?

Hiding Behind Piety

You know, the more involvement I have with social networking sites like Twitter and Redditt, and earlier so-called user groups or fora, the more convinced I become that religions, especially the three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Islam and Christianity - are used by a large majority of their followers as an excuse for otherwise unacceptable behaviour and attitudes. Rather than being the cause of so much hatred, they appear to be merely conduits for it.

I have already written several blogs looking at the way professional apologists like William Lane Craig pander to the desire in his followers (almost without exception from the extreme right of the political spectrum) for theological backing for things like genocide and infanticide, which any person with a normal, functional social conscience would accept as immoral.

Odious though they are, they are not the subject of this blog. What I'm referring to here are the people, usually, but by no means exclusively, from the more fundamental wings of religions. Those who proudly display their piety in their tweets and messages whilst simultaneously displaying behaviour, beliefs and attitudes that are about as far removed from normally accepted standards of civilised behaviour as it is possible to get.

It would not really be fair to single out any of these individuals for special attention but just hanging around the #TeamJesus or #JesusTweeters hashtags in Twitter or Reddit/atheism will quickly show  how almost all the messages there contain an element of condescension clear designed to place the poster in a position of superiority, a passive-aggressive threat intended to anger or intimidate, overtly disingenuous feigned compassion, obnoxious third-party references, or, very frequently, outright abuse, obscenity or threats of actual bodily harm.

It is quite clear that these people are using their 'faith' as both a weapon and a shield; something to attack other people with and something to hide behind. "Don't blame me! It's in the Bible/Qur'an/Torah". Their gods and holy books are merely something to blame.

Question them about any of their beliefs or assertions and you quickly discover that they are vacuous. Almost invariably they degenerate into evasions, lies and abuse rather than  substantiate their claims or, (Heaven forbid!) admit that they don't know or could be wrong. Most noticeable of all will be their almost complete absence of intellectual honesty. Any tactic will do rather than deal with the subject under discussion: evasions; feigned misunderstandings of a perfectly simple question; diversions; claims to have answered the question when they can be seen not to have done so, and repeated attempts to shift the burden of responsibility for their claims.  And virtually never a straight, honest answer to a direct question.

If you follow any of those regular contributors, you will see them asking the same questions over and over again, ignoring the fact that they have already had them answered, and using exactly the same tactics on someone else, clearly rehearsed and prepared.

I can accept that a small minority of these people are suffering from a deep psychological need to believe, and many, if not all, of them are suffering from a phobia which means they feel compelled to try to placate their god by any means available and, when they don't have any evidence, and know truth, honesty and integrity would fail them, they have no other option than to try sophism and deceptions.

And it is often quickly clear that many of them are doing it for money or power, or as some sort of self-affirmation.

It's equally clear that for very many, their 'faith' is a mere pretence. They no more believe that a god is watching them and knows their every thought, at least not a god who values truth, honesty and personal integrity, than I do. Maybe they believe in a dishonest god who, like them, knows there is no logical or evidential support for it's existence, or maybe they just believe in a stupid god who doesn't notice.

But the most likely explanation is that they no more believe in their god than an atheist does. The most parsimonious answer is that they are merely using a pretence of belief as an excuse.

We read of statistics like 86% of Americans say they are religious. I wonder what this would fall to if we deducted those who are merely feigning religiosity, amongst whom should be included all the charlatans, creation 'scientists', preachers who do not practice what they preach; the publicly homophobic, privately gay clerics; the 'family values' preachers who have mistresses and consort with prostitutes, the paedophile priests and those who help cover up their crimes, and so on.

Yes. I'm aware I could be slipping into the No True Scotsmen fallacy but surely a 'believer' who is merely a believer in name only, and who shows by his/her behaviour not to be anything of the sort, is not a believer.

So, when we read these statistics for nations which are simultaneously the most violent; the most chauvinistic, the most criminal, are we really reading a statistic for hypocrisy and a measure of the number of people who have learned what a convenient thing is a pretence of piety?

I'm convinced that, for many people, their god and their holy book are not sources of inspiration or manuals of morality; they are something to blame.

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Looking Back In Time.

For a change, a purely science blog rather than explaining the idiocy of creationism, Bible literalism and superstitious belief in magic in general.

One of the hardest things for a human to imagine is the idea of curved space. We have evolved in a three-dimensional world in which lines projected in each of the three dimensions carry on in a straight line at 90 degrees to one another and never meet, yet we are told, and Relativity supports the idea, that if we could build a powerful enough telescope and look far enough in front of us we could see the back of our own head. This is because the mass of the universe curves space in on itself. So, our three lines projected at right angles to one another all meet up eventually.

Exploring this thought a little led me to an interesting idea which I'm not sure I have grasped completely, it seems so intuitively untrue, yet, like Xeno's Paradox, logically true.

Just by looking up into the night sky, we can see objects which have turned out to be distant galaxies, often several million light years away. What this means is that we are looking back at the history of that object as it was when the light we are now seeing left it several million years ago. With light travelling at 186,000 miles per second, an object 1 million light years away will have been 186,000,000,000 (that's 186 billion) miles away 1 million years ago.

With a small home telescopes we can see even more objects, even further away and by using even more powerful telescopes we can see further still to objects possibly a billion or more light years away. We would now be seeing objects maybe 186,000,000,000,000 miles away.

Now, because the light from these objects has taken so long to reach us, and because we know the universe is expanding, we know that these objects are not now where they appear to be. They are now even further away from us. In fact, this recession is what causes the famous Red Shift, which incidentally holds true for every point in space because it's the space between objects which is increasing, which is not the same thing as everything moving away from a central point.

So, if we regard the range of our increasingly powerful telescopes as a sphere increasing in size with each increase in power we have the idea of an expanding sphere ever increasing in volume as the power increases. For the want of a better term, I will call this a 'sphere of perception'. Think of it as an expanding bubble seen from the inside.

Now, there is a limit to what any telescope could show us because we will also be looking further and further back into the universe's past and we will reach a barrier through which no light, or radio waves, etc. could pass. Until 300,000 after the Big Bang, the universe was opaque. This was because the temperature was so high it would have been impossible for electrons and protons to form any stable, electrically neutral, arrangements like hydrogen atoms or neutrons without high-energy photons smashing them apart, so there were no stable neutral particles. This meant that all particles interacted with all electromagnetic radiation and photons could not go anywhere, let alone pass through it. When, at about 300,000 years, the temperature fell far enough, protons could capture electrons to form hydrogen, and stable neutrons could form, sometimes binding with more protons to form larger atomic nuclei, and capture charged electrons to form electrically neutral atomic matter. At that point photons became free to stream through the universe and it became transparent.

So, even our most powerful telescopes our expanding sphere of perception would be physically limited to the universe as it was when it was just 300,000 years old. Our expanding sphere of perception would now be 13.73 billion light years. In other words, the radius would be the distance light has travelled in 13.73 billion years.

But supposing we could somehow see through this barrier and beyond, right back to the moment the universe came into existence 13.76 billion years ago...

How big would our expanding sphere of perception be now?

At the moment of the Big Bang, our sphere of perception would be the size of a singularity and it would occupy a 'space' inside where we now stand, albeit a 'space' that was there 13.76 billion years ago. You wouldn't really see the back of your own head because your head wasn't there in those days.

And even if we couldn't get past the 300,000 year barrier, our sphere of perception would only be as large as the expanding universe was after 300,000 years.

So, how is our sphere of perception both expanding and moving further away (intuitively) and contracting and getting closer (logically)? The thing which we thought was getting larger and moving further away was actually getting smaller and moving towards us, but just getting further away in time.

The answer to this is, I think, that light has not travelled in a straight line through space-time but has curved outwards as the universe has expanded. And so we 'see' a universe which appears to get larger as we look further back in time, whereas the reality is that it gets smaller. The problem is that we are using an intuition which was never evolved for the purpose for which we are trying to use it.

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Evolving Simple Complexity.

Airbus A320

Sitting inside a plane a few months ago I was struck by the similarity between aeroplanes and segmented animals. On a typical short-haul plane, once you're inside and looking down the plane you see a central aisle with rows of three seats on either side. Overhead is a row of lockers. There are rows of windows spaced evenly along the sides, with a few modified as emergency exits, etc.

If we could see the wiring for lights, in-flight entertainment, pipes for fresh air supply, emergency oxygen and so on, we would see this segmentation repeated. No doubt the same basic segmentation is repeated in the construction of the body of the plane itself, with superstructure, panels, etc. Running the length of the plane will be cables and wire for flight control, warning lights, etc, etc.

Compare this with an internal view of the skeleton of a python. See the basic similarity?

Python skeleton from the inside

The reason for this similarity is not a coincidence. It is easier to construct a series of identical or slightly modified modules and join them together to make a larger structure. In python embryology, where this process happens, the same genes with the same set of controls in the form of hox genes only needs to be repeated at each segment; to make a plane you only need to design a single row of seats, one set of overhead lockers, one window pane, one unit of lighting, fresh air supply, emergency oxygen, etc, then make a lot of them and fit them together.

So, this brings me in a roundabout way to the idea of complexity. Very generally speaking, as the so-called 'higher' animals evolved and more functionality was added so they apparently became more complex. But, this is largely illusory and in many cases actually false.

For example, does it add complexity to add an addition body segment to a python? One might as well argue that two pythons are more complex than one. Would it be a more complex aeroplane if an additional row of seats were to be added to the body, complete with all the accessory structures, leaving aside that it might need bigger wings or more powerful engines? Are two Airbus A320s more complex than one?

So, it should be fairly easy to see that, apart from a more complex (or is it just larger?) brain, there is no increase in complexity as humans evolved from the early hominids to modern Homo sapiens. There is no additional complexity to explain and certainly our DNA is no more complex and has no more information in it that that of Pan troglodytes (common chimpanzee), with whom we share 98.5% of our DNA anyway.

But, there are many examples of evolution evolving a loss of complexity. Indeed, the python itself lost complexity when it's ancestors lost their legs and shoulder and pelvic girdles with them.

Very many parasites have lost complexity during their evolution, especially parasitic worms, some of which have even lost their digestive systems and have become little more than machines for making more worms. See my blog "Intelligently Designed By A Loving God?" for examples of parasites.

And now here comes a bit that will really annoy creationists: humans, and all warm-blooded animals, are less complex than many cold-blooded animals. For example, some salamanders have vastly more DNA than we do. Some up to 30 times as much per cell.

The reasons for this are disputed, but one explanation, I think, makes a great deal of sense. A salamander needs its body to function over a wide range of ambient temperatures; warm-bodied creature have no such problem. All metabolic processes are essentially enzyme-controlled chemical reactions. It's a characteristic of enzyme-controlled reactions that they are optimal only over a very narrow temperature range, so salamanders need several different enzyme systems for the same basic process where mammals and birds only need one. So, salamanders need lots more DNA to produce all those different sets of enzymes.

Once our early ancestor, probably a small mammal-like reptile living between 30 and 70 million years ago, had evolved the ability to regulate their body temperature they could dispense with all those unnecessary enzyme systems which were now free to evolve into other systems or atrophy and the DNA could be lost or co-opted or become just junk, free to mutate away with no loss of function. But the main thing was that, with warm-bloodedness, our ancestors had become genetically less complex.

Here's an interesting database with comparative genome sizes for all sorts of animals. As you can see, in terms of genome size, the human genome at just over 3 million base pairs (Mbp) is nothing out of the ordinary for a mammal so, on the basis so beloved of information theorist creationists of 'increasing DNA complexity' being synonymous with evolution, humans are far from being the most complex and mammals are less evolved than many other orders.

Would an information theorist creationist care to explain how the second law of thermodynamics renders this evolution impossible, please? Preferably one who hasn't taken the Creationist Oath and so may not be trying to mislead us for money or political power.

Of course, this isn't a problem for the Theory of Evolution which is the scientific model for explaining the fact of evolution, because increasing complexity and relative genome size are not and never were part of the theory. Genes, and with them the species which carries them, evolve by differences in them carrying differential advantages in the given environment. Evolution by natural selection can explain the differences in the genome without resorting to magic. By contrast, creationists are left once again attacking a straw man which has only a tangential bearing on evolution and which is based, through ignorance or by deliberation, on a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject they are purporting to refute.

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Science vs Religion - A Relative Difference

Whilst reading the excellent A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss, I was struck by the following example of the different approaches to truth of religion and science.

The first person to propose the Big Bang was Georges Lemaïtre, a Belgian cleric. A former engineer, he had taken up mathematics when studying for the priesthood and had then studied cosmology under the British cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington and later at Harvard.

Lemaïtre solved Albert Einstein's equation for General Relativity and concluded that the universe was expanding, not static as just about everyone, including Einstein, had assumed. He concluded that the universe must have begun as a 'primordial atom'.

Einstein himself had realised an earlier form of his equation had 'predicted' an expanding universe and, so ingrained was the assumption of a static, eternal and small universe, he assumed his equation was incomplete and had included a 'cosmological constant' to correct the 'error'. He later called this the biggest mistake of his life and removed it, otherwise Einstein would have been credited with having predicted the Big Bang simultaneously with having explained gravity far more accurately than Newton had, all with the Theory of General Relativity.

Much Ado About Nothing

The trouble with nothing is that you can't say what it is because it's er... nothing, so there is nothing to describe or define, well nothing you can put your finger on exactly.

You see, the problem with explaining how something came from nothing is that it couldn't have done. Not because it's impossible but because it's impossible for there to be nothing.

It's a bit like trying to explain what is outside the universe. It can't be nothing because there is no time or space outside the universe for nothing to be in. In fact, there can't be an outside to the universe because there is no where for an outside to be in.

In some ways, it's a bit like asking what is north of the North Pole. The question SEEMS like a logical one because we think of north as being a direction and of course, you can always move a little bit further in the same direction even when you've arrived at the first destination. The problem is that NORTH itself stops at the north pole, just as space-time stops at the 'edge' of the universe, or at least our concept of it, because with no outside there IS no 'edge'.

And so does existence because existence itself needs space and time to exist in. In fact, it could be said that existence IS space-time.

The problem isn't with science; the problem is with human psychology and how it's evolved to help us survive on Earth where answers to questions like "What is nothing?" and, "What is outside the universe?", or even, "What is north of the North Pole?", don't really help us catch lunch, find a mate or rear children, or avoid being something else's lunch or food for their children, or food for a prospective mate.

So, to ask how everything came from nothing might SEEM like a sensible question but it's no more sensible than asking what's north of the North Pole. In fact, the notion that the default state of existence is non-existence is just that - a notion. It's merely a product of human psychology. There is of course no reason; no fundamental law; no rule which says 'nothing' should be assumed and not 'something'.

You only need consider what the question implies. "What caused something to come from nothing?", or, "How did something arise?", all imply not nothing but something to cause whatever it was. This is true whether you do what theists and religious apologists do and assume there was something and define this as a god or some force, or even a set of rules of some kind which 'caused' something to exist, or if you do what theoretical physics does and try to explain how matter arose in a quantum vacuum, which is about as close to defining 'nothing' as science can get.

Clearly, none of those things are 'nothing', not even a quantum vacuum, so they aren't 'explaining' how something came from nothing but how something came from something else; and they are no closer to explaining where this something else came from than they were to explaining where something came from in the first place.

To avoid the absurd logical regress of invoking an assumed something to explain another something, the logical thing to do is to turn the question on its head and ask why we are assuming a 'nothing' in the first place. Where did 'nothing' come from and in what sense can 'nothing' exist?

The hypocrisy of religious apologetics in demanding science explain how something came from nothing, when they are hopelessly devoid of an answer to the same question and have to define their something as nothing to try to get round it, and then being unable to explain how magic created everything from nothing, is too obvious to avoid mentioning here. There is absolutely no reason to assume the default state of existence is non-existence other than our limited human psychology which has evolved fit for purpose, but not the purpose which we are now expecting of it.

The basic problem is with trying to use human intuition to arrive at answers to these questions which are outside our experience and not what our intuition evolved for. Human intuition is a very poor measuring device for the very small, the very large, and the very strange - and quantum events are nothing if not very strange. It takes humility to accept that the answer might not be what seems intuitively obvious and this is where science as a methodology scores against religion. Science demands that you explain things in terms of what can be shown to be so, and not in terms of what seems right to you. Personal incredulity is not a scientific argument.

Remember Xeno's paradox where it seemed obvious that Achilles couldn't overtake a tortoise when looked at one way, and yet obvious that he could when looked at another? A 'paradox' which taxed the best philosophers for centuries until science gave them the right mathematical tools to show why what seemed like the right mathematical model wasn't. It was intuition which had failed, not science.

One of the ways in which apologetics gets away with it of course is that they aim their 'arguments' at those who neither have nor want the humility to think their intuition isn't the best available measure of reality. This is basically the same reason why these same people lack the humility to believe science no matter how compelling the evidence and have no hesitation in condemning it based on nothing more substantial than personal incredulity.

Slicing gods, and magic, and absurdly infinite regresses away with Occam's trusty razor leaves us with the most parsimonious answer - nothing came from nothing because there never was nothing in the first place. There is absolutely no reason to assume there ever was, intuitive though that may seem. Your personal incredulity really is not the ultimate measure of reality.

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Religion And The History Of Blood Sacrifice

There seems to be something in the human psyche which assumes sacrifice in general and blood sacrifice in particular is somehow magical and has the power to change the universe. In particular, those cultures which worship a malicious or angry god seem to assume it is mollified, even pleased by the sacrifice of an animal rather than a plant and especially if it involves blood.

Cultures in which sexual activity is regarded as sinful or frowned upon by one of more of their gods often include virginity in the ritual so the best and most powerful effect is obtained by the blood sacrifice of a virgin, and best of all a human virgin.

This has lead to the notion that a god made angry by transgressing one of it's rules, or simply by not worshipping it enough, or in exactly the right way, or even by just being born and existing, can be persuaded to forgive that 'sin' by a blood sacrifice.

The earliest accounts of human sacrifice cannot be distinguished from myth with any certainty but the existence of those myths in the first place with their assumption that human sacrifice to appease or simply to please gods, is indicative of a cultural assumption and a vestigial belief.

Khali

The Hindu Vedas refer to purushamedha, a symbolic human sacrifice which is clearly derivative of an earlier actual sacrificial ritual. Actual human sacrifice was probably practised in Bengal until the late 19th century and by the Khond tribe in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh as late as 1835. The Thuggee cult dedicated to the Hindu god of death and destruction, Khali, probably accounted for some 2 million deaths.

According to Roman historians, the Celts of Europe, including the British Isles practised human sacrifice. This is supported by archaeological evidence. It has also been suggested that the 'sacred groves' of Druids, rather than places of natural beauty where one could be as one with nature, as is romantically assumed, may have been fearful places of human sacrifice where human body parts were hung up as offerings; a grotesque tradition which may have an echo in dressing the Christmas tree. See Kingdom Of The Celts by John King.

There is evidence of human sacrifice during early Greco-Roman times. The god Artemis saving Iphigeneia, who was about to be sacrificed by her father Agamemnon, by replacing her with a deer, may be a version of the Abraham and Isaac myth of the Hebrews where the deer has become a ram.

Hawaii Human Sacrifice

One form of human sacrifice, the retainer sacrifice, where a powerful person's servants were killed and buried with him, was common across Euro-asia from earliest times and was in some areas, an integral part of the comitatus system by which a ruler gathered a trusted band of supporters, often tied with blood rituals and oaths of personal loyalty. The comitatus system found it's way into early Islam following Islam's expansion into Central Asia. The stories of the putative Christian founder, Jesus, having a small band of loyal disciples may also be a form of this.

James Cook Witnessing Human Sacrifice, Tahiti

Human blood sacrifice was certainly praticed in the Pacific islands, notably in Hawaii where luakini temples were constructed specifically for human sacrifice, and in Tahiti where it was witness by James Cook.

In pre-Columban America Mixtec, Aztec, Maya and Inca people all practiced human sacrifice.

All three Abrahamic religions trace their origins back to a legendary Bronze Age nomadic tribal leader, Abraham, who according to tradition, seems to have accepted that it was perfectly natural for a god to demand a human sacrifice, albeit one which is stopped at the last moment. There is nothing in the legend to suggest that Abraham found the idea strange, or grounds for doubting the divinity of the voice he was hearing, so very clearly the culture in which the legend arose saw human blood sacrifice as a normal way to appease gods,

Later on, as the Hebrew legends develop there are accounts of the slaughter of defeated enemies being ordered by their god and of its demands that anyone who transgresses the more important of its 'laws' were to be killed to appease it or its wrath would be visited on those who had allowed the sin to go un-punished. This is still to be found in the religions which have evolved out of this primitive Bronze Age legend.

And of course there is the Hebrew scapegoat tradition where the sins of a people can somehow be transferred to an animal which is then ritually sacrificed to the god who then forgives the people for their 'sins'.

And finally, we see the blood sacrifice represented by the death of the legendary Jesus of Nazareth, an act which even today followers of that tradition believe somehow 'saved' them from the wrath of the very god of whom the sacrificial victim was supposedly a manifestation. What sacrifice could possibly better the blood sacrifice of a mere mortal other than the blood sacrifice of a god itself, and a virginal one at that? You will still even hear people today claiming their 'sins' have been 'washed away' by the blood of Jesus as here and here.

In 1099 when Crusaders captured Jerusalem after a long siege, they ritually slaughtered all the Moslems and Jews who had defended the city, so the the city was said to be 'knee-deep in blood'. When Saladin re-took Jerusalem for Islam in 1187, in order to contrast Islam with Christianity, the inhabitants were spared and the former Moslem holy sites were restored and 'cleansed', not by washing them with sacrificial blood as the Christians had done, but with rose water.

A more recent example of the blood sacrifice can be found in Irish history. It is said of the Irish patriot Patrick Pearce:

For Pearse, the idea of a blood sacrifice had additional appeal. Even as a child, he had unusual fantasies of self-sacrifice for his country, derived from Celtic myths and religious writings. He later fused together his nationalism and his Catholic faith. His Christian devotion had always centred on Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion, and he gradually developed a consuming yearning for martyrdom, in conscious emulation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. He wrote: ‘One man can free a people, as one man redeemed the world’.

Pearse was also influenced by a mystical belief in the assumed benefit to mankind of blood spilt in violent conflict. He wrote in 1913: ‘Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing'.

Pearce led the 'Easter Rising', the timing of which was probably deliberate, and was executed for his part in it, as were thirteen others, in an act by the British authorities which resembled ritual sacrifice and which turned Irish popular opinion even more solidly behind the revolutionaries. The 'blood sacrifice' had worked, but not in some magical, mystical way, but by public revulsion at those who had carried it out.

Strangely, in all of this there is never any explanation of just how a blood sacrifice works. It seems to be something buried so deeply in the primordial human psyche that some people just assume it's so obviously true that it requires no explanation. It has been said that the frequent calls for the death penalty for particularly heinous crimes may be a demand for a blood sacrifice and that the burning of heretics and witches were forms of it.

Obviously our memes have picked up some strange mutations during their long evolution, and, as one would expect of a parasitic memeplex, it's component parts serve the needs of the meme, not their host. Possibly these demonstrations of power by a ruling and priestly class came to be accepted as having power in their own right; that rather than being demonstrations of power, the acts of human blood sacrifice was actually the source of their power.

Clearly there are people who are still infected with a memeplex which includes the acceptance of the magical power of blood sacrifice, although they will usually recoil in horror at the thought of followers of other gods, or people from earlier, less civilised times, practising it and yet their religion would not have gained any traction in a society in which the idea of human blood sacrifice was unknown or abhorrent.

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How A Pig Destroyed Darwin.

Inspired by the powerful arguments made by B. H. Shadduck, Ph.D. in his devastating polemic against Darwin published in 1925, and which is still obtainable from www.creation.org (albeit they have to give it away) I thought I would dip once more into this seminal tome. I have previously blogged about how inspired I was by this monumental work at "Oh Dear Me! How Did Darwin Get It SO Wrong?".

So, with some eagerness I looked for more inspiration in Chaper 3, entitled The Tale Of A Pail. This is what I found:

"My neighbor tells a pig story in four chapters.

(1) He bought a half starved runt of a pig.
(2) He fed it a bucket of slop and it squealed for more.
(3) He fed it a second bucket of slop and it asked for more.
(4) He put the pig in the bucket and the bucket was not nearly full.

I can believe either end of the story by itself.

My neighbor seems to believe all of it because when he tells one part he isn't thinking of the other parts.

It is easy to give mental assent to conflicting ideas, if you keep them so far apart that they do not bump each other. All I ask of students of evolution is to bring its contrary theories into focus at the same time."

So remember now, if you are ever tempted to believe in evolution, think of that neighbour and his not nearly full bucket of pig! How can science compete against this stuff, eh?

Let's see what else the wise doctor has for us.

"There are some sincere souls who think they believe in the Bible and evolution and the more they believe in one, the less they believe in the other."

What? You mean you can't believe in the Bible AND evolution?

Well, I suppose that's true! So, those deluded souls who tell you they are Christians AND evolutionists can't have read the Bible properly.

"Others think they have effected a working compromise, but the compromise is usually all on one side."

Hmm... a compromise that's not a compromise, eh? Moving on...

"I want no harmony that will back the Bible in on a switch to let the circus train go by."

Er... eh?

"... I am not unmindful of those students who would like to believe the Bible, but have had evolution-ism dinned into them till their minds follow the beaten path. If such students will try to undo the dinning long enough to consider all that is missing, misapplied or contradictory in the testimony, I have no fears for the Bible."

Only someone without the dinning could fail to agree with that, obviously. I certainly have no fear of the Bible so the dinning must be completely undone.

"If you have reached the place where you look for contradictions in the Bible and connected truth in evolution, isn't it time to reverse the process in the interest of fair play?"

Well quite! How could any rational, fair-minded and fully un-dinned person connect truth in evolution with contradictions in the Bible without reversing the process and... er... connecting contradictions in the Bible with the truth in evolution?

How can anyone fail to be convinced by the pig in a pail story? So obvious now why Darwin's Theory of Evolution didn't survive this devastating onslaught.