The Dark Matter Of Gods

This piece of good advice for theists from @Rickygervais, currently being passed around the Twitterverse, puts me in mind of something theists often mock science for - the subject of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

Like theists' various gods, Dark Matter can't be seen (which is why it's dark), can't be detected directly, which means it doesn't appear to do anything, and can't be heard, not even in the broader sense of giving off any radiant energy (which again is why it's dark).

So, with typical hypocrisy and doublethink, theists often accuse science of using faith when it comes to Dark Matter, as though for others, faith fatally undermines an idea, but not for them, obviously. For them, faith saves their idea from dismissal through lack of evidence.

But of course, the reason for Dark Matter being suspected is because we can see the effects something is exerting on the surrounding matter in that something is providing the gravity which prevents rotating galaxies from flying apart under their own inertia.

In other words, Dark Matter is a scientific hypothesis to explain a natural phenomenon. Nothing more and nothing less. If and when a better hypothesis is produced, the idea of Dark Matter will be abandoned. If, on the other hand, evidence is found to confirm it, Dark Matter will be incorporated into the scientific theory of matter. Either way the sum total of human knowledge will increase and science will move a little closer to the truth.

Strangely, theists can never point to any unexplained real phenomenon which needs a god to explain it. Unlike Dark Matter, no scientific explanation for any phenomenon has ever been shown to require a god in it. In fact, the desperate attempts by theists to insert their god in any scientific explanation has always proved to be unfounded and so should have been pared away with Ockham's Razor as an unwarranted multiplication of entities and an unnecessary complication which always adds more complexity than it explains.

The difference between science and theology is that science starts with the phenomenon and thinks up ways to explain it; theology thinks up the explanation (invariably their god) and then either invents phenomena to justify it or thinks up reason to explain why there aren't any. In other words, science is honest and true; religion is neither.

Abandoning gods will do nothing to detract from the sum total of human knowledge and will actually move us closer to the truth by discarding an old and useless hypothesis which explains nothing at all. Our knowledge increases when we stop being wrong because we now know that the old idea was wrong.

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What a Wonderful World

This amazing video was shot with a mobile phone in Kruger National Park.

Darwin's Powerful Science

Darwinian Evolution By Natural Selection, producing descent with modification, is one of the most powerful and fundamental ideas in all of science. That might sound like a sweeping statement but we are really only just beginning to appreciate both the depth and the full scope of the idea. I'll give some examples of its application later. First a little history.

Even as late as the 1950's, a century after Darwin's and Wallace's seminal paper to the Linnean Society, serious biologists were still questioning certain aspects of Darwinian Evolution, the evolution of altruism being one such problem. Even amongst evolutionary biologists debate raged over such questions as whether natural selection operated at the individual or group level, with some using the 'problem' of altruism to reason that selection must be operating at the group level because a tendency to self-sacrifice for the 'common good' would give more successful groups.

For this reason, they argued, a group with altruistic members would be more successful than one comprised of selfish individuals, yet selfishness should have been giving individuals an advantage over altruistic ones. And yet we see altruism in many successful species and especially those tending to form herds, hence, so they argued, natural selection can't be operating at the individual level because that's not what we see.

But reproduction and variation occurs at the individual level so that is where selection must be operating, even though it doesn't seem that way.

Some people even went so far as to argue that the 'unresolved' problem of altruism meant that Darwinian Evolution by Natural Selection must be flawed. They pointed to an apparent difference between what the theory predicts and what we see. (Creationist quote-mine alert!) Creation pseudo-scientists still parrot this out-dated argument, presenting it as an on-going unresolved controversy much as they present Lamarckian Evolution as current Darwinian theory. And of course, in the propagandistic world of creation pseudo-science, aimed at it is at the simplistic scientifically illiterate who find simple black and white easier to understand, any controversy, no matter how slight or imaginary or as yet unresolved, means the entire body of science is completely and irretrievably wrong.

Scientifically Illiterate Jesus

Here is more evidence from the Bible that an omniscient creator god couldn't have written it.

The interesting thing to me is how the vested interests of religious apologists and the desperate needs of Creationists to pretend they know better than people who learn science and stuff, cause them to perform the mental gymnastics needed to ignore all this evidence in the very book they worship as infallible. One trick they employ is to try to convince themselves that all modern science is wrong and the Bronze Age goat-herders knew all there is to know. In this day and age that tactic takes considerable skill at avoiding learning or finding ways to dismiss it.

I've shown in 'How We Know a God Didn't Write the Bible' how the Old Testament describes a god who was necessarily as ignorant as the Bronze Age goat-herders who wrote it. It is of course inconceivable that a god who wanted to have a book written to show us how clever, wise and powerful he is would have chosen people with such a primitive understanding of the universe without educating them first, and then allowed them to get away with such a hilarious travesty and so present the god as frankly, no wiser than an uneducated Bronze Age goat-herder.

Can you imagine a Bronze Age scribe writing a lot of stuff about relativity, quantum mechanics, atoms, germ theory and memetic evolution? Who would have taken him seriously? Of course, he had to write about stuff as he understood it. Unfortunately, he made the magic man above the sky he was assuming must have done it look as scientifically illiterate as he was. How could it be otherwise?

The usual tactic of Christians, when shown the absurdity, misogyny, racism, misanthropy and sheer brutal inhumanity in the Old Testament is to turn their backs on it, keeping the useful parts obviously, and claiming Jesus changed all that.

That excuse isn't open to them either in the case of it's manifest scientific ignorance though, because the Iron Age writers of the New Testament were little better than the Bronze Age writers of the Old Testament when it came to science. Consequently, they had the 'Son of God' who was also the God of the Old Testament, coming out with equally bad science based on the ignorance of the time. Jesus of course, or more accurately, those who wrote the myths of Jesus, had little more science to go on than the Bronze Age goat-herders. The only significant scientific progress had been in the smelting of iron and the use of wheels. (That's right, the writers of large parts of the Old Testament - the parts Creationists hold to be literal scientific truth, the font of all knowledge and the best available account of how the universe and life on earth arose - hadn't even thought of the wheel).

Let's now enjoy some of the accounts of what Jesus believed the universe to be like according to those who wrote about him.

Just like the ancient Egyptians, and people in many other pre-scientific societies, Jesus thought the heart was the seat of emotions, where thinking took place:

And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts?

Mark 2:8

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For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

Mark 11:23

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And Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a child, and set him by him.

Luke 9:47

"Hey Jesus! Didn't it bother you that these writers made it look like you and your dad knew no better than uneducated Iron Age ignoramuses how his creation worked"?

Jesus also thought that illness and disabilities, including blindness and dumbness, were cause by evils spirits (the same magical thinking which inspired all those medieval witch-burnings).

As they went out, behold, they brought to him a dumb man possessed with a devil.

Matthew 9:32

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And one of the multitude answered and said, Master, I have brought unto thee my son, which hath a dumb spirit.

Mark 9:17

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And he was casting out a devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake; and the people wondered.

Luke 11:14

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Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw.

Matthew 12:22

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And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself.

Luke 13:11

It's not just disability which is cause by demons either. Seizures and insanity were also caused by evil spirits in Jesus' day, apparently.

And, lo, a spirit taketh him, and he suddenly crieth out; and it teareth him that he foameth again, and bruising him hardly departeth from him.

Luke 9:39

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And when they were come to the multitude, there came to him a certain man, kneeling down to him, and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is lunatick, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.

Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me. And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour.

Matthew 17:14-19

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But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.

Matthew 12:28

But then what did these simple people know of physiology and the aetiology of diseases? They didn't have the benefit of years of painstaking research and vast medical libraries full of scientific journals with their peer-reviewed papers.

All they had to go on was the received 'wisdom' of superstitious people to whom a magical view of the universe seemed all too obvious. Wrong, of course, but obvious to those brought up in a tradition of magical superstition where events were cause by magic spirits and the universe had been created by a magic man in the sky.

"Hey Jesus! Why did you let the authors of the 'Gospels' make you look like a scientifically illiterate ignoramus on medical matters"?

This all reminds me of the unfortunate Kurt Wise, the Young-Earth Creationist:

Later, as a sophomore in high school, he took a newly-purchased Bible and a pair of scissors and cut out every verse which could not be interpreted literally if scientific determinations on the age of the earth and evolution were true. He pursued this task with a flashlight under the covers of his bed for several months; at the end, he had removed so much material that "with the cover of the Bible taken off, I attempted to physically lift the Bible from the bed between two fingers. Yet, try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two."^[7] Wise decided to reject evolution instead of Biblical literalism, deciding:

...that the rejection of evolution does not necessarily involve the rejection of all of science. In fact, I have come to learn that science owes its very existence and rationale to the claims of Scripture. On the other hand, I have also learned that evolution is not the only claim of modern science which must be rejected if Scripture is assumed to be true.^[7]

Wikipedia - Kurt Wise.

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Kurt Wise doesn’t need the challenge; he volunteers that, even if all the evidence in the universe flatly contradicted Scripture, and even if he had reached the point of admitting this to himself, he would still take his stand on Scripture and deny the evidence. This leaves me, as a scientist, speechless... We have it on the authority of a man who may well be creationism’s most highly qualified and most intelligent scientist that no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, no matter how all-embracing, no matter how devastatingly convincing, can ever make any difference.

Richard Dawkins - Sadly, an Honest Creationist.

I can't say I entirely agree with Richard Dawkins' charitable view of Wise. To deny the evidence of one's own eyes in favour of an evidence-free superstition, which just happens to be the same superstition that his parents had and as the label they pinned on him as a child with no say in the matter, is an abdication of the moral responsibility to admit to being wrong and to change one's mind when the evidence changes. It is staggeringly arrogant to assume that there is no possibility of any evidence which will convince you that your opinion is even slightly wrong.

I think the answer lies not in some perverse notion of personal integrity but in the realms of psychology and/or psychiatry.

Anyway, this blog isn't about the psychological damage that religion can do to its unfortunate victims, it's about how the Bible that people like Kurt Wise regard as the sacred word of an omniscient god quite clearly could not have been written, either directly or indirectly, by such a god.

The Bible is littered with scientific errors, and errors which are indisputably wrong. Of course, another way of looking at what Kurt Wise claims to have done is that he cut out all the scientific errors in the Bible and found there was almost nothing left. Should we be surprised at this? Of course not. What did the authors of the Bible know of science? The reason we don't live the way they did is because we know more than they did.

No creator god could have so misunderstood or been so abysmally ignorant of the real science of the universe. There is not a single piece of new scientific information in the Bible that was not known to the people at the time it was written - and that's a damning indictment of a book which its supporter claim is a book of science and holds eternal truth. That case can also be made for every other holy book of course. No prophet ever wrote about something then unknown to science which subsequently proved to be true.

It is more than a mere coincidence that the apparent scientific knowledge and understanding of the god who reputedly wrote the Bible was no better than that of the ordinary people of the time it was written.

So, just like the Old Testament did, the New Testament provides evidence that the Bible could not have been written by the god described in it. A book cannot validate itself but it can certainly falsify itself, and the Bible shows how to do it.

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How We Know a God Didn't Write The Bible

I'll say one thing for the Bible: it's full of good laughs.

If you can ignore the gratuitous violence, brutality, misogyny, child abuse, racism and appalling misanthropy, there are some pieces of ignorant stupidity which can be a thoroughly enjoyable read to connoisseurs of the absurd, written as it was by simple people with a very primitive understanding of the world they lived in. We can forgive them for this ignorance of course. If it wasn't for generations of scientific research we would all be that ignorant still.

Knowledge doesn't come sleeting through the atmosphere to lodge itself in our brains; we have to learn it and because we don't normally have the time to discover everything afresh for ourselves, we rely on other people to have discovered it for us and record it so we can learn from them. Bronze Age nomads simply hadn't got that history of research and body of knowledge to draw on. Incidentally, that's why so many people who can't or won't learn from that body of accumulated knowledge seem to have the same level of understanding as Bronze-age nomads.

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 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 reality of course, the poor little man had just realised what his claim 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.

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. 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 and 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.

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Dishonest To God

Creationist discussing science.

It's almost as though religious people in general and Creationists in particular think there is some virtue in dishonesty.

I know that's a sweeping statement but it really is almost impossible to find an honest religious argument put forward by an honest religious person in the social media these days. It makes you wonder whether they know what intellectual honesty is. Maybe it's part and parcel of being religious in the first place; something to do with being able to delude yourself that your intuition is somehow the best measure of truth so your 'faith' must trump evidence, reason and logic.

One manifestation of this dishonesty can be seen in almost every question asked of proponents of rationalism and scientific methodology by Creationists and in their response to the answers. Almost all Creationists' questions are designed, usually naively in the extreme, to trap or catch out the opposition with no desire at all to actually learn anything new or to gain a deeper understanding.

A typical honest question designed to elicit information and increase understanding will be, for example, "Can you explain how the universe could have come from nothing, please?"

There may then follow an exchange of information, including links and references to books and videos such as A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss, or The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, maybe a discussion of 'quantum foam', the 'Anthropic Principle' and how lots of negative energy and lots of positive energy can add up to zero energy and yet provide more than enough energy to account for the universe.

The questioner may then decide to read the books and follow the links, or at least acknowledge that there are indeed scientific explanations for how the universe came from nothing. They may even disagree, just as scientists do, but at least they do so honestly.

An honest question is characterised by:

• Exploration.
• Invitation to explain.
• Willingness to consider and think about the answer.
• Willingness to change one's mind.
• Thanks.

By contrast, a typical Creationist, having probably asked someone else the same question a day or two ago, will ask, "If the is no God who created the universe?", or even more profoundly dishonest assertion rather than a question, "Science can't explain the origin of the universe."

The dishonesty in this question is in the way it begs the questions. There is an inbuilt assumption that the universe was created and created by someone which his opponent is obliged to accept in order to engage the question. There is no request for information, merely a challenge to escape from the trap. The bald assertion that "science can't explain..." is merely an expression of ignorance at best and a lie at worst. In all probability the Creationist has been told that explanations exist every time he has asked the question, but he has chosen to ignore the answers.

More often than not an attempt to explain, or to suggest that it might be useful to read some physics is met with dismissal. "So you think your grandfather was a monkey! LOL!".

And almost invariably lurking in the background is the dishonesty of the false dichotomy fallacy, where the assumption is that there are only two possible explanations - either the scientific one or it must have been the locally popular god - coupled with the god of the gaps fallacy where the unspoken assumption is that, if science can't explain it, it must have been the locally popular god.

Characteristics of dishonest questions are:

• False premise - the question is predicated on a fallacy or unproven assumption which the respondent must accept in order to answer it. This is designed to entrap and embarrass, not to elicit information.
• Repetition. The question will be asked repeatedly regardless of how well or recently it was last answered.
• Offence at the answer, often with feigned indignation, and very frequently with a change of subject or complaint that a different question wasn't answered (the shifting goal-post strategy).
• Use of tactics in any discussion rather than substantive arguments, with evidence of rehearsal and practice, showing the disingenuous nature of the question and that the questioner, having asked it many times before, is not interested in any answers.

Personally, I find it staggering that creationists and apologists who use these strategies seem to take a pride in dishonesty and deception. I really can't see how it is consistent with a belief in a god of truth and honesty. If they really do believe in a god, it is a small god, easily damaged by information, or an insecure, vindictive little god who admires and rewards dishonesty and is afraid of losing control through ignorance and superstition, rather like a petulant child who throws its toys out of the pram when it doesn't get its own way.

But I suspect there is something else going on here. In fact there are probably several things:

• The easy answer which Creationists feel puts them on an equal or superior footing to those people who go to all that trouble studying and learning things. Why bother when you have a 'faith' which tells you all the answers? The fact that 'all the answers' are the same one and it doesn't actually answer the question is besides the point. At least you can claim to be cleverer and may even impress a few equally ignorant people.
• The 'Creationists' and Apologists who don't believe a word of it but love the power it gives them and the adulation (and often a substantial income) they get from promulgating this simplistic nonsense. No worries there about what their god thinks of them showing it takes lies and dishonesty to promote it. The market for books, talks and appearances on radio and TV chat shows is a multi-billion one in the USA alone, as is the lucrative trade to be had from online scams, usually complete with a 'donate' facility to help spread the tax-free good news.
• The psychotically deluded individuals bordering on the insane, if not actually clinically insane, or at least morbidly paranoid theophobic. These unfortunate people have invested so much of themselves in their religiosity that it is part of, or even all of, their identity. To admit to the slightest doubt would shatter their delusion and destroy their whole persona. Their entire existence is devoted to reinforcing their delusion and handling the cognitive dissonance of an intrusive and troublesome reality. What better way to do that than to trap and abuse those idiots who don't agree with me? That's teach them!

It seems dishonesty is a frequent, if not invariable, component of religion and the more religious the person is the more dishonest they need to be to maintain it.

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If Religions Were True They Wouldn't Need Dogma.

Because I said so!

Why do religions require dogmas (or should that be dogmata)? Why can't they do what science does and use evidence?

Dogma is the official system of belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It serves as part of the primary basis of an ideology or belief system, and it cannot be changed or discarded without affecting the very system's paradigm, or the ideology itself. They can refer to acceptable opinions of philosophers or philosophical schools, public decrees, or issued decisions of political authorities.

In religion:
Dogmata are found in religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, where they are considered core principles that must be upheld by all believers of that religion. As a fundamental element of religion, the term "dogma" is assigned to those theological tenets which are considered to be well demonstrated, such that their proposed disputation or revision effectively means that a person no longer accepts the given religion as his or her own, or has entered into a period of personal doubt. Dogma is distinguished from theological opinion regarding those things considered less well-known. Dogmata may be clarified and elaborated but not contradicted in novel teachings (e.g., Galatians 1:6-9). Rejection of dogma may lead to expulsion from a religious group.

Wipedia - Dogma.

Fundamentally Racist Christianity

Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. Viktor Vasnetsov, 1887

Is American Christian racism a thing of the past?

In earlier blogs I looked at the history of Christian anti-Semitism and how it was a fundamental component of Christian theology almost from the outset, through the Middle Ages and up to the twentieth century, with frequent catastrophic results for European Jewry. (See "Famous Christians - Adolf Hitler", "Famous Christians - Martin Luther" and "More Famous Christians".)

Just in case Jews imagine that the post World War II love and respect American Christians affect to have discovered for them, and the unswerving support they profess for Israel and Zionism, is genuine, it's worth looking at the history of American Christian fundamentalism, how they see the near future and where Israel and the Jews fit in this view.

More Famous Christians

Continuing the series showing the 'love, tolerance and forgiving nature' of the founding fathers of Christianity, this is an assortment of quotes showing the development of anti-Semitism which led to the many pogroms and massacres of Jews throughout the history of Christendom, culminating in the Holocaust. Many of these Christian 'thinkers' will appear in evangelical Christianity's list of favourite 'historians' who allegedly were eye-witnesses to the historicity of Jesus - even they were all born many years after Jesus supposedly lived and died.

You might think this anti-Semitism is now a thing of the past, especially in America where Christians and Jews seem to live in relative harmony. I'll show why this is a contrived illusion in another blog.

	We too, would observe your circumcision of the flesh, your Sabbath days, and in a word, all you festivals, if we were not aware of the reason why they were imposed upon you, namely, because of your sins and the hardness of heart. The custom of circumcising the flesh, handed down from Abraham, was given to you as a distinguishing mark, to set you off from other nations and from us Christians. The purpose of this was that you and only you might suffer the afflictions that are now justly yours; that only your land be desolated, and you cities ruined by fire, that the fruits of you land be eaten by strangers before your very eyes; that not one of you be permitted to enter your city of Jerusalem. Your circumcision of the flesh is the only mark by which you can certainly be distinguished from other men... as I stated before it was by reason of your sins and the sins of your fathers that, among other precepts, God imposed upon you the observance of the Sabbath as a mark. Justin Martyr - "Dialogue with Trypho" (138-161 CE)
We may thus assert in utter confidence that the Jews will not return to their earlier situation, for they have committed the most abominable of crimes, in forming this conspiracy against the Savior of the human race... hence the city where Jesus suffered was necessarily destroyed, the Jewish nation was driven from its country, and another people was called by God to the blessed election. Origen of Alexandria (185-254 CE)
	The synagogue is worse than a brothel... it is the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts... the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults…the refuge of brigands and dabauchees, and the cavern of devils. It is a criminal assembly of Jews... a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ... a house worse than a drinking shop…a den of thieves, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, the refuge of devils, a gulf and a abyss of perdition... I would say the same things about their souls... As for me, I hate the synagogue... I hate the Jews for the same reason. John Chrysostom ("Golden Mouthed") (344-407 CE)
How hateful to me are the enemies of your Scripture! How I wish that you would slay them (the Jews) with your two-edged sword, so that there should be none to oppose your word! Gladly would I have them die to themselves and live to you! St. Augustine (c. 354-430 CE), "Confessions", 12.14
	Yes, you Jews. I say, do I address you; you, who till this very day, deny the Son of God. How long, poor wretches, will ye not believe the truth? Truly I doubt whether a Jew can be really human... I lead out from its den a monstrous animal, and show it as a laughing stock in the amphitheater of the world, in the sight of all the people. I bring thee forward, thou Jew, thou brute beast, in the sight of all men. Peter the Venerable (1092-1156 CE)

What Christians now need to explain is how they can be pretending to not be anti-Semitic with such a long and tawdry history of anti-Semitism, hatred and massacres and with so much early Christianity being founded on anti-Semitic racism by virulent anti-Semitic racists, and with so many senior Catholic and Protestant clerics being enthusiastic supporters of the Holocaust as recently as the twentieth century.

My next blog will explain why they are doing so.

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Famous Christians - Martin Luther

Martin Luther is recognised as the founder and inspiration for the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Before then the entire Western Christian church was Catholic. Luther's Protestant Reformation gave rise in turn to the myriads of non-Catholic western churches, including Anglican/Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Anabaptist, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, Shakers, Aamish, Calvinist, Pentecostalists, and as many independent churches as there are Pebbles on a beach.

So, if you're a Christian and live in Western Europe, The Americas, Africa, Australia or the Pacific Islands, and you're not Catholic, the chances are your church traces its origins back to Martin Luther.

Clearly an inspirational figure, eh?

Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German monk, priest, professor of theology and important figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Emperor.

Luther taught that salvation is not earned by good deeds but received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood. Those who identify with Luther's teachings are called Lutherans.

His translation of the Bible into the vernacular (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation, and influenced the translation into English of the King James Bible. His hymns influenced the development of singing in churches. His marriage to Katharina von Bora set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry.

In his later years, while suffering from several illnesses and deteriorating health, Luther became increasingly antisemitic, writing that Jewish homes should be destroyed, their synagogues burned, money confiscated and liberty curtailed. These statements have contributed to his controversial status.

Source: Wikipedia - Martin Luther.

Martin Luther was also a major influence on the German Nazi movement of the early twentieth century, building as it did on German and Austrian racial supremacist ideas and anti-Semitism, and combining this with Catholic anti-democratic authoritarianism into a Germanic form of the extreme right-wing political Catholicism of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese Fascism.

So what sort of things did Luther say which inspired such a following?

I've numbered the following for ease of reference. Just append the page URL with #nn where nn is the number of the quote.

1. I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that these miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them. I would not have believed that a Christian could be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness upon himself. However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God's word is absent he has an easy task, not only with the weak but also with the strong. May God help us. Amen.

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2. He did not call them Abraham's children, but a "brood of vipers". Oh, that was too insulting for the noble blood and race of Israel, and they declared, "He has a demon". Our Lord also calls them a "brood of vipers"; furthermore in John 8 he states: "If you were Abraham's children ye would do what Abraham did.... You are of your father the devil. It was intolerable to them to hear that they were not Abraham's but the devil's children, nor can they bear to hear this today.

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3. Therefore the blind Jews are truly stupid fools...

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4. Now just behold these miserable, blind, and senseless people.

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5. ...their blindness and arrogance are as solid as an iron mountain.

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6. Learn from this, dear Christian, what you are doing if you permit the blind Jews to mislead you. Then the saying will truly apply, "When a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into the pit". You cannot learn anything from them except how to misunderstand the divine commandments...

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7. Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them.

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8. Moreover, they are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury. Thus they live from day to day, together with wife and child, by theft and robbery, as arch-thieves and robbers, in the most impenitent security.

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9. However, they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it. But for us Christians they stand as a terrifying example of God's wrath.

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10. If I had to refute all the other articles of the Jewish faith, I should be obliged to write against them as much and for as long a time as they have used for inventing their lies-- that is, longer than two thousand years.

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11. ...Christ and his word can hardly be recognized because of the great vermin of human ordinances. However, let this suffice for the time being on their lies against doctrine or faith.

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12. Did I not tell you earlier that a Jew is such a noble, precious jewel that God and all the angels dance when he farts?

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13. Alas, it cannot be anything but the terrible wrath of God which permits anyone to sink into such abysmal, devilish, hellish, insane baseness, envy, and arrogance. If I were to avenge myself on the devil himself I should be unable to wish him such evil and misfortune as God's wrath inflicts on the Jews, compelling them to lie and to blaspheme so monstrously, in violation of their own conscience. Anyway, they have their reward for constantly giving God the lie.

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14. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.

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Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Steven Weinberg.

15. ...but then eject them forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!

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16. Over and above that we let them get rich on our sweat and blood, while we remain poor and they such the marrow from our bones.

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17. In brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule-- if my counsel does not please your, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews, lest we become guilty sharers before God in the lies, blasphemy, the defamation, and the curses which the mad Jews indulge in so freely and wantonly against the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, this dear mother, all Christians, all authority, and ourselves. Do not grant them protection, safe-conduct, or communion with us. . . . With this faithful counsel and warning I wish to cleanse and exonerate my conscience.

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18. Let the government deal with them in this respect, as I have suggested. But whether the government acts or not, let everyone at least be guided by his own conscience and form for himself a definition or image of a Jew.

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19. However, we must avoid confirming them in their wanton lying, slandering, cursing, and defaming. Nor dare we make ourselves partners in their devilish ranting and raving by shielding and protecting them, by giving them food, drink, and shelter, or by other neighborly acts...

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20. Therefore we Christians, in turn, are obliged not to tolerate their wanton and conscious blasphemy.

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21. Accordingly, it must and dare not be considered a trifling matter but a most serious one to seek counsel against this and to save our souls from the Jews, that is, from the devil and from eternal death. My advice, as I said earlier, is:
    

    First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire...
    
    Second, that all their books-- their prayer books, their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible-- be taken from them, not leaving them one leaf, and that these be preserved for those who may be converted...
    
    Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country...
    
    Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing. For we cannot with a good conscience listen to this or tolerate it...

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22. He who hears this name [God] from a Jew must inform the authorities, or else throw sow dung at him when he sees him and chase him away.

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23. But what will happen even if we do burn down the Jews' synagogues and forbid them publicly to praise God, to pray, to teach, to utter God's name? They will still keep doing it in secret. If we know that they are doing this in secret, it is the same as if they were doing it publicly. For our knowledge of their secret doings and our toleration of them implies that they are not secret after all and thus our conscience is encumbered with it before God.

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24. If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews' blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country.

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25. ...they remain our daily murderers and bloodthirsty foes in their hearts. Their prayers and curses furnish evidence of that, as do the many stories which relate their torturing of children and all sorts of crimes for which they have often been burned at the stake or banished.

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26. ...that everyone would gladly be rid of them.

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27. Undoubtedly they do more and viler things than those which we know and discover.

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28. If I had power over the Jews, as our princes and cities have, I would deal severely with their lying mouth.

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29. They [rulers] must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow. Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them, as Moses did...
    
    If this does not help we must drive them out like mad dogs.

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30. My essay, I hope, will furnish a Christian (who in any case has no desire to become a Jew) with enough material not only to defend himself against the blind, venomous Jews, but also to become the foe of the Jews' malice, lying, and cursing, and to understand not only that their belief is false but that they are surely possessed by all devils. May Christ, our dear Lord, convert them mercifully and preserve us steadfastly and immovably in the knowledge of him, which is eternal life. Amen.

Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies.

Inspired by those words, human beings did
this to other human beings, believing they were
doing what God wanted them to do.

Just feel that Christian love!

So there you are. If Luther was the original founder of whatever church you belong to, those are the sentiments that were once held in high esteem by your founding fathers; the same sentiments which led to the cultural cancer of German Fascism, the Holocaust - the industrialised murder of 6,000,000 European Jews and Romanies and a further 20,000,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, Polish and Russian POWs, homosexuals, Communists and mentally and physically disabled people - and the lives of some 34,000,000 civilians and young soldiers, seamen and airmen's lives on both sides to put down.

Some inspirational figure, eh?

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Famous Christians - Adolf Hitler

Godwin's Law states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". It sometimes seems that religious fundamentalists, and especially those from their retarded wing - creationism - imagine this means that the first to mention Hitler wins the debate. Almost invariably you'll be told that Hitler was a Atheist and/or a Darwinian Evolutionist. As is usually the case with religious fundamentalists, the truth of the matter is irrelevant to the 'argument' because for them reality can be disregarded at will.

As these quotes show, not only was he a Catholic who significantly, along with the rest of the Catholic Nazi High Command with one exception, was never excommunicated, but he was also a Creationist, although he, like other right-wing Christians even today, had no compunction about using pseudo-Darwinism, also called 'Social Darwinism', when he needed to give his religious bigotry, racism and hatreds a gloss of superficial scientific credibility.

Incidentally, the one exception to be excommunicated by the Catholic Church was Joseph Goebbels for the sin, not of killing tens of millions of people and waging a genocidal war against Jews and Romanies, but for the heinous sin of getting divorced.

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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The Rapist's Bible

One of the charges Atheists, secularists and humanists lay at the door of religion is that they inhibit moral development by acting as a break on progress by presenting an earlier barbaric moral code as a set of fixed, objective morals to which we should all adhere, and which should stand as a yardstick by which any ethical codes should be judged.

Recently, and with good cause, the issue of rape and what its occurrence in a society says about the culture's attitude towards women, has been in the news, and not just in India.

During the last election campaign in the USA rape also became an issue when one candidate proclaimed, with no scientific evidence to support him, that women won't get pregnant if 'legitimately' raped. One wonders what sort of mindset can conclude that there is any sense in which rape can be legitimate, and that pregnancy as a result of rape is evidence that it was consensual sex, or that the victim was complicit in some way.

But the USA is a nation still steeped in the primitive superstitions to be found in the Christian Bible, together with its tacit acceptance, if not approval, of rape as an instrument of female repression and subjugation, so is it surprising to find men who think rape can be legitimate and that women are somehow to blame for being raped?

If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;

Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.

Deuteronomy 22:28-29

Aparently, 50 shekels was about 570 grams which would fetch about $554 in today's money. It also raises the question about what would happen if they were not found. Presumably, the man gets away with it.

Not so for his victim however:

If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city.

And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days.

But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you. [My emphasis]

Deuteronomy 22:13-21

So a victim of rape whose rapist hasn't been caught, will be stoned to death if her father tries to marry her off. Strangely, there seems to be no recourse to law for the victim unless the rapist is caught in flagrante delicto, but then when did mere property have any rights? (I wonder which gender thought up these laws.)

Immediately after this we see the 'punish the victim because she must have been complicit' principle, as though forcing a woman to marry her rapist isn't bad enough.

If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;

Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.

Deuteronomy 22:23-24

Rape, so it seems, was taken for granted in Old Testament times, and the god of those times saw nothing wrong with it. Or if there was anything wrong with it, it was an offence against the property of a father or a husband because it devalued the goods. Just as property was legitimate war-booty, so were women. Indeed, they were one and the same thing, but the virgins carried a higher value.

Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee. For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

Zechariah 14:1-2

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When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house, and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife.

And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.

Deuteronomy 21:10-14

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Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.

Isaiah 13:16

The Tribe of Benjamin Seizing the Daughter of Shiloh
John Everett Millais, 1848

Nice to know that, having raped a captive and found her to not be up to expectations, the rapist can't actually sell her. Can't say the writers of this stuff weren't entirely without humanity, eh?

As though these examples weren't bad enough, the Old Testament holds yet another horror. It is perfectly okay for men to go out and gang-rape virgins as a quick and easy way to get new wives:

And the congregation sent thither twelve thousand men of the valiantest, and commanded them, saying, Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabeshgilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children. And this is the thing that ye shall do, Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man.

And they found among the inhabitants of Jabeshgilead four hundred young virgins, that had known no man by lying with any male: and they brought them unto the camp to Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan. And the whole congregation sent some to speak to the children of Benjamin that were in the rock Rimmon, and to call peaceably unto them.

And Benjamin came again at that time; and they gave them wives which they had saved alive of the women of Jabeshgilead: and yet so they sufficed them not. And the people repented them for Benjamin, because that the Lord had made a breach in the tribes of Israel.

Then the elders of the congregation said, How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of Benjamin? And they said, There must be an inheritance for them that be escaped of Benjamin, that a tribe be not destroyed out of Israel. Howbeit we may not give them wives of our daughters: for the children of Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he that giveth a wife to Benjamin.

Then they said, Behold, there is a feast of the Lord in Shiloh yearly in a place which is on the north side of Bethel, on the east side of the highway that goeth up from Bethel to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah. Therefore they commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; And see, and, behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin.

And it shall be, when their fathers or their brethren come unto us to complain, that we will say unto them, Be favourable unto them for our sakes: because we reserved not to each man his wife in the war: for ye did not give unto them at this time, that ye should be guilty.

And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them wives, according to their number, of them that danced, whom they caught: and they went and returned unto their inheritance, and repaired the cities, and dwelt in them. And the children of Israel departed thence at that time, every man to his tribe and to his family, and they went out from thence every man to his inheritance.

Judges 10:21-24

And of course these were the very laws which Jesus was referring to when he said:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:17-19

But surely rape is condemned somewhere in the New Testament? Doesn't Paul have anything to say about it? Not a bit of it. Rape is never mentioned anywhere in the New Testament. Neither Jesus nor Paul, nor any of those who compiled the 'Gospels' and spun the developing myths to suit their own political ambitions; not one of those who subsequently edited them and forged the 'epistles' nor those who finally compiled selected 'books' and letters into the Bible we have today saw fit to include any mention, let alone condemnation, of rape. I wonder how many of them were men.

So it's hardly surprising that people who hold this book to be their source of morality and something to look up right and wrong in can come out with terms like 'legitimate rape'. The astonishing thing is that there are still societies in which these people are held in sufficient esteem that they can even think of standing for public office, let alone being elected to it.

Thankfully, most of the civilised world now sees this book in much the same light as they see other books of origin myths and folk tales - an interesting account of how we lived before we knew any better in the infancy of our species when belief in magic and the mind-numbing fear of malignant invisible thugs in the sky gripped mankind.

If the Bible has any use nowadays it is as something to compare the way we live today with how things used to be in more primitive times, and so be thankful to the brave scientists and philosophers who thought there must be a better way and who risked the wrath of vested interests in the clergy and helped create a modern, society based on humanitarian, humanist egalitarian ideas and not the primitive barbarism which gods were invented to justify.

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