The Senseless Center

In the world of a moderate Christian, you can have your cake and eat it too. All of the pillars of modern science, including Big Bang cosmology and evolutionary biology, are held to be true, but Christianity is true also. Thus there is no conflict between science and religion , they are simply different ways of knowing. If fundamentalists and atheists would just relinquish their dogmatic, extreme, uncompromising positions and embrace the middle ground that moderates have staked out, we would all live in a more harmonious world. Christian moderates fashion themselves as peacemakers; they have the solution to the fruitless and often polemic debate between the two "extremes". Sounds perfectly sensible, right?

Actually, it's completely senseless. Christian moderates have committed the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad temperantiam (argument to moderation), wherein the middle ground between two positions is asserted to be the most reasonable merely by virtue of being the middle ground. The popular phrase the truth lies somewhere in between is essentially an appeal to argumentum ad temperantiam. While the middle ground is sometimes correct, it is entitled to no special claim on truth. Like any other claim, a middle ground claim must be established as true on the basis of evidence. On that score, moderate Christianity fails miserably.

To give just one popular example, moderate Christians usually claim that there is no conflict between the scientific story of the development of the universe (beginning with the Big Bang and ultimately leading to humans living on Earth via evolution) and the Bible (specifically the Book of Genesis). I have searched extensively for explanations of how to reconcile the two, and have found only weak rationalizations. I feel confident in asserting that no intellectually satisfying reconciliation exists.

The first tactic moderates often employ is evasion. The Bible is not a scientific textbook, they say, and ought not be read literally. The commentary at the beginning of my Bible (the New Revised Standard Version) says the following:

Chapters 1-3 deal with questions that have been asked in every age: "Where did the world and its inhabitants come from?" ... Genesis says: God created everything (1:1). The book does not give details as to when or how this was done. Innumerable fruitless arguments have raged as people have tried to use Genesis to prove or disprove various scientific theories. Genesis is simply not intended to be a scientific report. Rather, Genesis is a confession of faith. It declares that God is the Creator of all, and human beings are the climax of God's creation.

Similarly, Francis Collins¹, in his Time magazine debate with Richard Dawkins, said:

St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

These attempts are hand waving are meant to distract attention from, and avoid confronting, what Genesis actually says. In Genesis 1, the entire universe is created in six days. The earth is created on the first day; plants are created on the third day; the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth; and so on, with humans appearing last, on the sixth day, and God "resting" on the seventh.

When pressed, moderates will declare this to be metaphor -- the "days" are not literal days but rather periods of time, perhaps even billions of years. To support this assertion, they point out that the sun is not created until the fourth "day", and since it is impossible to have a day without the sun, the term must have another meaning. They may also point to phrases later in the Bible, such as "with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day" (2 Peter 3:8).

This explanation is absurd. Even were we to allow the "days" is Genesis 1 to represent billions of years, the order is completely wrong. Science has taught us that the sun existed before the earth, and certainly before plants. Genesis has the earth created first, then plants, then the sun. Furthermore, we have strong textual evidence from elsewhere in the Bible that the six days of creation are meant as standard 24 hour days. In Exodus 20:8-11, the fourth of the famous ten commandments is given as:

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work. . . For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.

Clearly, God was not telling the Israelites to work for six periods of billions of years, then rest on the seventh period of billions of years. Even if moderates could concoct an explanation for reconciling cosmology and evolution with the Bible (which I doubt), they would still have to clear the additional hurdle of showing why their position is more reasonable than the one that both fundamentalists and atheists hold -- that the Bible simply means what it says. Why would an omnipotent and omniscient God be such a poor communicator that he has misled scores of generations of humans as to their origins, and placed the Bible on a collision course with science? Why doesn't Genesis simply say what it means?

Pushing further down this line of reasoning, the moderate Christian's entire religion begins to unravel. When cornered, moderates will reluctantly concede that Adam and Eve, and the Garden of Eden, never existed. They prefer to hang their hats on the life and teachings of Jesus as recounted in the New Testament. How then does Jesus's genealogy (through his "adopted" father, Joseph) trace back to and terminate at Adam, as stated in Luke 3:23-38? What are we to make of the doctrine (subscribed to by most, but not all Christian denominations) that Jesus's sacrifice on the cross was an atonement for the "original sin" of Adam of Eve taking the forbidden fruit, a sin that all humanity inherits?

These examples are just a few of the many instances in which the moderate position ignores, downplays, or rationalizes away what the Bible actually says. As Sam Harris notes in An Atheist Manifesto, at least "fundamentalists tend to make a more principled use of their brains than 'moderates'", who are "apt to produce the most unctuous and stupefying nonsense imaginable". "Religious moderates", he writes in The End of Faith, "betray faith and reason equally".

Furthermore, in employing argumentum ad temperantiam, moderates tend also to commit the fallacy of false equivalence, wherein atheists are viewed as mirror images of fundamentalists. Since fundamentalists tend to be dogmatic, intolerant, and closed-minded, those traits are projected onto atheists. This is where the meaningless term "atheist fundamentalism" comes from². Thus Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are viewed as no more reasonable then Jerry Fallwell or Pat Robertson, just the opposite side of the same coin. This is how moderates give themselves license to dismiss atheists' arguments without meeting the burden of carefully and rigorously considering them.

As I discussed in An Honest Conversation, religious moderates are not harmless, as they shelter fundamentalists from the full force of a collision with reason, and unwittingly give rise to the very religious excesses they are likely to oppose. It is time to call moderation out for what it is: self-contradictory, incoherent nonsense.

¹Francis Collins served as the American head of the Human Genome Project, and is a moderate evangelical Christian. He is also the author of The Language of God, in which he attempts to harmonize science and Christianity. I have not yet read the book, but I do recommend Sam Harris' review on TruthDig.

²Oxford theologian Alister McGrath used this phrase in the subtitle of his book The Dawkins Delusion, a response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I have not read McGrath's book, but I expect it to be underwhelming.

I Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

When I was in 9th grade, I was asked in social studies class to name the person whom I most admire. That's a simple task on its face, but I found it exceedingly difficult. I have the same difficulty when asked to name my favorite movie. It's not that I can't find a person or movie that I like, but rather that I am not the sort of person who ranks things.

A few months ago, when I participated in something called the American Values Survey, I was again asked the most admired person question, but this time I had no trouble coming up with a name. Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has done more than any other person to promote and energize atheism in recent memory, and atheists in the United States are more confident and more vocal then ever before as a result. His recent book The God Delusion not only solidified my nascent atheism, but also inspired me to take a greater interest in the subject, ultimately leading to this blog. Superbly reasoned and elegantly witty, The God Delusion makes an unapologetically devastating (from a theists point of view) intellectual and moral case for atheism. I recommend the book to everyone. Dawkins' web site, richarddawkins.net, is also an excellent resource for a wide array of topics related to both religion and evolution. Dawkins is a top tier scientist and author who rose to prominence by proposing, in The Selfish Gene, the now widely accepted idea that the gene is the principal unit upon which evolution acts. His success in advancing the cause of atheism is in no small part due to the gravitas his name carries. It is a measure of how far atheism has to go that most Americans have nevertheless never heard of him.

My favorite atheist writer is actually not Richard Dawkins but American neuroscientist Sam Harris. His books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation are unparalleled, as are many of his other writings and speeches available at his web site, samharris.org. The best introduction to atheism available on the web (that I am aware of) is his essay An Atheist Manifesto. If you can get past the title -- it has a unfortunate tendency to evoke A Communist Manifesto, or a deranged anarchist writing an antigovernment rant in a remote cabin -- it is an excellent, and fairly quick, read.

Physicist Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis and journalist Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great are also excellent and highly recommended books. Author and journalist Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, ostensibly about Mormonism, is a fascinating case study of how religion begins, and how it can spiral out of control and spawn abuse and violence. Others that I have not yet read but come highly recommended by others include Daniel Dennet's Breaking the Spell, Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith, and Ayan Hirsi Ali's Infidel. Although I have only so far read small parts of their works, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the freethinkers of yesteryear such a Bertrand Russell and Robert Ingersoll. Lest I forget, the greatest argument for atheism ever written (or the most ironic, at least) is the book I am currently reading, the Bible.

For those of you with the time to listen to podcasts, I can recommend Point of Inquiry, Freethought Radio, The Non-Prophets, The Atheist Experience, and The Way of Reason. Some of these podcasts are better than others, but all are worth listening to. Excellent web resources include the aforementioned Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris web sites, PZ Meyers' Pharyngula blog, The Secular Web, TalkOrigins, and the Iron Chariots Wiki.

Although I believe I have some novel ideas to add to the debate, I gratefully acknowledge that I draw heavily from the aforementioned sources, among others. I truly stand on the shoulders of giants.