Losing the will to review: Evidence Unseen or Arguments Unconsidered?

When I announced this book review project in September last year I made a proviso about reviewing James M. Rochford's Evidence Unseen:

...I've decided to read it and (if in my opinion it merits a review) to review it here on the blog.

I reviewed the introduction in March, and continued reading last weekend. Does it merit a review? It's going downhill fast. I had hoped for something substantial, but if the first chapter is typical I'm tempted to give it up as a waste of time. Rochford's arguments are ill-considered and sloppy, relying too much on emotion rather than logic. He refers often to atheists, "atheistic thinkers" and even an "atheistic ethical philosopher" as if they are a breed apart. I can only assume that atheists are not his target readership:

Yet, a certain tension of which they are unaware plagues them: While they are content in their atheistic worldview, they are not consistent with it... [Loc 325]

Basically telling atheists that they are psychologically defective. They are plagued with a tension — but they're unaware of it? This looks like classic projection.

If God doesn’t exist, is it possible to have a life that is ultimately significant? Unfortunately, it isn’t. [Loc 331]

Nothing unfortunate about that, as far as I know. Like many Christian apologists Rochford seems obsessed with ultimate absolute objectivity. It doesn't exist.

If the Christian God is real, then we have the hope of eternity. [Loc 368]

What is emerging here is a massive argument from consequences.

Of course, if the Christian God exists and all humans are made in his image, as the Bible teaches (Gen. 1:26-27; Jas. 3:9), then this would be both objectively true and truly important. On the other hand, if God does not exist, then human beings would hold nothing in common that could make them truly equal. [Loc 391]

This comes after a section trying to debunk "equality" — saying that people aren't really equal (when what he's actually saying is that people aren't all the same — which is true). But just because people aren't the same, that's no excuse for not treating them then with equal fairness, especially before the law.

But if everything in nature is only natural, then how can a naturalist call murder, rape, or genocide unnatural? [Loc 433]

I'm not aware that naturalists do call murder, rape and genocide "unnatural" — seems like he's setting up a straw man here.

...when we claim that morality comes from chimpanzees... [Loc 454]

Um ... we don't. More straw-manning.

Atheist Richard Dawkins argues... [Loc 455]

A Dawkins quote! (Just goes to show that Dawkins continues to rattle theists' cages.)

If morality is truly objective, then it is binding over people whether or not they agree to it. [Loc 501]

Now we're getting to the nitty gritty. Let's define "morality" and "objective", shall we? Apparently not — we're straight on to an argument with Sam Harris:

Why should we think that the flourishing of the human species is ultimately the greatest good? [Loc 508]

This is pretty easy if we're actually members of the human species ourselves (barring any quibbles over the use of "ultimately"). Then we get the seven dying patients in need of organ transplants versus one healthy person:

...wouldn’t it make sense to capture a healthy young man in the lobby to harvest his organs—the seven organs the dying people needed—to “maximize happiness”? [Loc 512]

Actually no, it wouldn't make sense — unless you're content to live in a world where you might be randomly killed so that your organs could be harvested.

While we might not know the right moral action, we still know that one must exist. [Loc 526]

By using the term "right" this is begging the question. There may be a preferable action, based on circumstances and consequences — an action that would be preferred by those affected by the consequences.

Many atheistic thinkers will openly admit that morality is not objective in a universe without God. [Loc 533]

It depends what you mean by "objective". If you mean independent of any single individual, then I'd disagree, because in a universe without God, morality can indeed be independent of any single individual. That's not to say morality is relative, or absolute. It has to be more nuanced than that (certainly more nuanced that a list of rules in a book).

“If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?” [Loc 564]

This a C. S. Lewis quote. But as usual with Lewis, his facility with words outruns his analytic capacity. What he's saying is circular, because trust and reason are part of thought. And even if thought is undesigned, it certainly isn't irrelevant to the one who's thinking. Naturally this comes back to the theistic aversion to determinism and lack of free will. There's quite a lot in this chapter about determinism and free will, and what the consequences are if they are true. Rochford uses them to illustrate the horror of naturalism, but I couldn't help reading that section as a likely true account of reality.

That concludes my "review" of Chapter 1. It's not deep, but then the chapter reviewed is ridiculously superficial. And I should probably come clean and say that this concludes my review of the entire book. From the introduction and first chapter I infer that the rest of Evidence Unseen will be more of the same — not worth the bother.

Krauss and Craig in Australia

When I heard that Lawrence Krauss was going to debate William Lane Craig again, I was confused. Why would Krauss agree to this, given what happened last time?

Anyway, the videos of the three sessions are now available, so I decided to watch them. Unbelievable? also featured Krauss and Craig, subsequent to the debates, but I decided to postpone listening to the programme until I had seen all three debates. I had misgivings about Unbelievable? having Craig on, as host Justin Brierley has in the past given Craig an unopposed platform to badmouth his debating opponent. At least this time Krauss was, I assumed, giving his side of the encounters.

http://youtu.be/-b8t70_c8eE


As for the debates, I began with the first one, in Brisbane. Krauss spoke first — the format was to be an opening statement from each participant, then a moderated discussion, followed by Q&A. Not long after Krauss began, I thought I got a sense of why he had agreed to participate. It seemed it was payback time, with Krauss calling out Craig for his dishonest tactics (even though — this being the first debate of three, and this the opening statement from the first participant — we hadn't yet heard anything from Craig).

The topic was "Has Science Buried God?" — Krauss said yes, science has buried gods, plural, and gave reasons, but he also attacked Craig for misrepresentation of science, and for lying about the Dawkins and Krauss film, The Unbelievers.

In Craig's opening statement he made the odd claim that theology provides the foundation for science. He put up a slide listing "Assumptions Undergirding Science". Among these were laws of logic, the orderly structure of the physical world, the reliability of our cognitive faculties in knowing the world, and the validity of inductive reasoning. This is thinly disguised presuppositionalism. Anyone who has had dealings with presuppositional apologetics will recognise it immediately. But the fact that Craig was using a presuppositional argument to support his claim that science has not buried God lends credence to Krauss's contention that Craig is being dishonest. In Five Views on Apologetics, edited by Steven Cowan, Craig wrote:

Where presuppositionalism muddies the waters is in its apologetic methodology. As commonly understood, presuppositionalism is guilty of a logical howler: it commits the informal fallacy of “petitio principii,” or begging the question, for its advocates presuppose the truth of Christian theism in order to prove Christian theism.

So Craig is on record as decrying presuppositionalism as not a useful apologetic — and here we have him using it when it suits him. In a debate, it appears, Craig will use whatever will fit his current purpose, no matter if he believes it's true, or if it's already been refuted a thousand times. If it will help him "win" a debate, then it's all dubious theological grist to his apologetic mill. To those who have heard Craig debate a few times, this will not be a surprise.

As if to illustrate his pragmatic debating ethos, Craig offered a quote from Stephen Hawking: "Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang." Aside from the neutrality of the quote — Hawking appears to be stating what he thinks others believe — it seems like a gratuitous and selective appeal to authority, as Craig has previously described Hawking's explanation of the beginning of the universe in The Grand Design as "metaphysically absurd".

As part of Craig's thesis that science has not buried God, he claimed that the big bang theory — that the universe had a beginning — is an example of how science verifies theological claims. He cited Borde, Guth & Vilenkin in this endeavour, as they apparently show that all models of the beginning of the "universe" — whether that's our own universe or any number of other universes in a multiverse — cannot be "past eternal". That is, the universe must have had an absolute beginning. Well, that's what the Bible says! QED! What the implications of the Borde Guth Vilenkin Theorem actually are in respect of the finiteness or otherwise of the universe became a recurring theme in this series of debates — but not, generally, in a good way.

Craig's version of cosmology has always seemed to me — a non-cosmologist — overly simplistic. The beginning of the universe entails the beginning of time as well as the beginning of space, which Craig acknowledges, but he conveniently ignores the problem of causation without time. Without time, cause and effect have no meaning, so to say that anything that has a beginning (including space-time) must have a cause, is to talk nonsense. So, the universe had a beginning. Why? It's impossible to know. Craig, however, thinks otherwise, using what he called the Contingency Argument:

1. Every existing thing has an explanation of its existence (either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause).
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe is an existing thing.
4. Therefore the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.

Apart from the obvious tautology, this argument (originally from Leibniz) has serious flaws right from the start. In the first premise there is the suggestion that something that is necessarily existent is somehow explained by that necessity. But where's the explanation in saying something exists just because it must? The reason that this kind of "logic" is acceptable to theists is that it's what they use to justify God. God exists because he must. Then there's the matter of an external cause. It sounds reasonable, but if you're applying this argument to the existence of the universe the only way it works is if the definition of "universe" is such that it has something external to it. If that's what Craig means, then this argument is of no use because it's not doing what he wants, which is to explain the existence of the Universe with a capital U — the universe that includes everything and therefore by definition it's a universe with nothing external to it.

But the second premise is surely the ultimate hubris: "If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God." This isn't a premise, it's a conclusion. That Craig can put up a slide like this with a straight face is simply astonishing.

Naturally Krauss and Craig both argued about the nature of "nothing", and it was here more than anywhere else in their debates that they consistently talked past each other. Krauss talked about "nothing" as a quantum vacuum, in which particles can spontaneously pop into and out of existence. Craig maintained, rightly, that because the quantum vacuum contains energy fields it isn't nothing. What Craig means by nothing is the philosophical nothing, the nothing-at-all, anywhere, anywhen. And what he's asking is why is there something — anything at all — rather than a state of absolute nonbeing.

But such a "why question" really is — as Richard Dawkins would say — a silly question. It's clear from the outset that this state of absolute nonbeing is not an option. It's not "one of a number of possibilities" — it's the total absence of possibilities. Indeed it's the total absence of anything, and as such it's not even worth talking about. It seems to me that a state of absolute nonbeing is no more than a philosophical concept, and I see no reason to even consider that such a state was ever the case. To ask "Why is there something rather nothing?" is to suggest in the question that "something" and "nothing" are somehow equivalent to each other, as if they are two sides of the same coin — and in Krauss's view they are, if "nothing" is taken to mean empty space. As a cosmologist he directs his efforts to that question, and the physics he talks about is addressing the question of why do we have a universe of galaxies, stars and planets rather than empty space. Craig says that's not the question being asked. But the question, "Why is there something rather than a state of absolute nonbeing?" is nonsensical, because these two are not equivalent. It's like asking "Why is there political intrigue rather than glass-fibre loft-insulation?"

http://youtu.be/V82uGzgoajI


The second debate, in Sydney, was supposed to address this question directly. Krauss delivered a very condensed version of his "A Universe from Nothing" lecture, and showed a slide of an email he had received from Alex Vilenkin which in effect stated that it may be erroneous to state that no valid theory of the beginning of the universe could legitimately posit a past-eternal universe. Krauss also picked up on Craig's use of unsound premises in his Contingency Argument for the existence of God.

When it was Craig's turn he began by clarifying what he meant by "nothing", but as I've already explained, the nothing that is not anything at all is an uninteresting philosophical concept of no practical use, no likelihood of being a description of an actual state, and therefore in my opinion not worth discussing. When certain philosophers say that the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is one of the most crucial questions that can be asked, I beg to differ.

Craig reiterated the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument, claiming that the cause of the universe must be a non-physical immaterial being beyond space and time. There are multiple problems with this assertion. Why must the cause be a "being"? Do we have any examples of non-physical immaterial entities causing anything in the real world? If such an entity is "beyond space and time" how can it have an effect on anything in the real world (which is of course within space and time)? Finally, what does "beyond space and time" even mean, when applied to causative agents? Craig was just using big words to disguise the lack of evidence for his preferred "explanation". Despite what he claimed in the first debate he really was using a "God of the gaps" argument, but dressed up in fancy language.

http://youtu.be/7xcgjtps5ks


By the third debate (Melbourne) I still had no real understanding why Krauss would want to engage with Craig, other than to settle a few scores. Craig began with his usual redefinition of the topic, from "Is it reasonable to believe there is a God?" to "Are there better arguments for God's existence than against God's existence?" This might seem innocuous, but notice the subtle shift in the burden of proof. From having to provide reasons for belief in God — reasons that are compelling enough to show that such belief is reasonable — Craig now only has to provide some arguments for God's existence in opposition to arguments against. His opponent, however, now has to provide better arguments to prove a negative.

Craig used six arguments to show why, in his opinion, it is reasonable to believe there is a God: the Kalām Cosmological Argument; Mathematics; Fine Tuning; Objective Morality; the Resurrection of Jesus; and the Personal Experience of God. We've heard these countless times, and I don't intend to go into them here. Suffice to say, I don't buy any of them.

The debate degenerated into petty arguments about whether Craig really had misinterpreted the Borde Guth Vilenkin Theorem, as Krauss claimed. Craig had obtained a copy of the email that Alex Vilenkin had sent to Krauss, and which Krauss had shown in an edited form. Craig claimed that Krauss had edited out sections favourable to Craig's argument. Krauss denied this. Subsequent to the debates Craig's supporters were citing this as hypocrisy on Krauss's part — Krauss being dishonest while claiming Craig was dishonest. And subsequent to that, Krauss published a joint open email from himself and Vilenkin showing their agreement that Krauss's edited version of Vilenkin's email did not distort its meaning. Petty and distracting, and in my opinion a further indication that Krauss should not have bothered with these debates. Particularly in this last one there were extended moments when Krauss came over as cantankerous, dismissive and constantly interrupting. By the end I still didn't know why he agreed to participate. Perhaps the City Bible Forum offered him lots of money.

http://www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?mediaid={AD764830-833C-49A1-B997-D67F1B3E2D10}

When I did get around to listening to the relevant Unbelievable? podcast, I heard Krauss give his reasons for engaging with Craig. Firstly to explain how science works, and secondly:

The other thing that I try and do is counter misrepresentations, not only about science, but about nature, by people who have vested interests, and in this case I agreed to do these because having had interactions with William Lane Craig before, it was clear to me that he misrepresents science completely, in order to try and provide justification for beliefs he has that are just his beliefs, yet he presents them as if with the authority of science, which he certainly — demonstrated in these dialogues and in other cases — he certainly doesn't understand. And I felt it was really important to attack that credibility for people of goodwill who don't know, and they listen and they think "well, when this man is quoting scientists, or he's quoting science, he's doing it accurately" and I tried to show, especially in the first discussion, there's very little accuracy there whatsoever.

Host Justin Brierley interviewed Krauss and Craig separately on his show — though it's not clear whether each interviewee heard what the other said until after the whole programme was recorded. My guess is that they didn't. Frankly the whole thing was pretty tedious, with accusations flying in both directions. Nevertheless Craig still got the last word, characterising Krauss as "incapable of carrying on a civil conversation." As it happens I've met Lawrence Krauss on two separate occasions and he was perfectly charming both times, but the impression left by these debates and the Unbelievable? programme is one of cantankerous belligerence with a score to settle. Craig, on the other hand — in the debates at least, if not on Unbelievable? — came over as patient and forbearing.

It's a shame, because Lawrence Krauss is right, and William Lane Craig is wrong.

Lawrence Krauss has nothing to talk about

Last Thursday I was very pleased to attend a lecture at Portsmouth Grammar School given by Professor Lawrence Krauss. His book A Universe from Nothing has caused a stir in both religious and scientific circles. Richard Dawkins has (somewhat hyperbolically) characterised its significance on a par with Darwin's Origin, while apologists such as the mathematician John Lennox have complained that the "nothing" that Krauss writes about is not a "real" nothing (non-tautologically speaking, if that's possible).

Krauss is an excellent speaker, and though his talk did get into some very abstruse concepts — which gave him a legitimate opportunity to suggest that a more expansive explanation is available in his book — he was engaging throughout.

I have the Kindle version of A Universe from Nothing, so could not get it signed by the author. But I also have a copy of Quantum Man, so my dad (who has his own copy) and I queued up after the lecture for the signing. Here's Dad with the Prof:

Jonathan Pearce posted a response to the lecture on his A Tippling Philosopher blog. I commented as follows:

It was great lecture and my dad and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

As for the question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” — I tend to the view that there was always something, and that the philosophical nothing is a concept only.

The way I see it there are four options:

1. There never was anything, and there never will be.

2. There was something, and then there wasn’t.

3. There always was something.

4. There was nothing (the philosophical nothing) and then there was something.

Clearly (1) is not the case, and (to us) is indistinguishable from (2) as both these positions are refuted by the existence of anything at all. (4) is contentious if one believes that a true philosophical nothing is incapable of spawning a something. Which leaves (3) — the eternal something (at least, eternal in the past — it may be possible for the sum total of all the somethings to self-annihilate and become a philosophical nothing).

If theists want to complain that Krauss’s nothing is not a philosophical nothing, that’s fine by me, but then I would ask them if their God is eternal. If God is eternal then the philosophical nothing is an impossibility, and they should stop asking how something can come from nothing.

No more NOMA, no, no, no.

This evening I watched something my faithful telly-watching machine recorded for me last week — Rosh Hashanah: Science vs Religion, a half-hour programme presented by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks.

Lord Sacks is often on Thought for the Day, speaking with his characteristic measured pace, endowing each word with great meaning and authority. His precise enunciation, however, fails to conceal an embarrassing fact: that the meaning and authority are wholly spurious. It's almost as if he strings words together solely based on their euphony, without consideration of what the words might actually mean.

 

"For me, science is one of the greatest achievements of humankind — a gift given to us by God."

Well, which is it, Lord Sacks? An achievement of humankind? Or a gift from God? (Is it any wonder he thinks science and religion are compatible when he obviously can't see the blatant incompatibility of what he's saying right at the start of his own TV programme?)

You have a couple of days to catch the whole thing on iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01mqvmv/Rosh_Hashanah_Science_vs_Religion/

Some clips:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqvmv

The blurb from the BBC website:

Religion and science are frequently set up as polar opposites; incompatible ways of thinking. The Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks begs to differ. For him, science and religion can, and should, work together. To mark Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he puts his position to the test. He meets three non-believing scientists, each at the top of their field: neurologist Baroness Susan Greenfield, theoretical physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili, and the person best known for leading the scientific attack on religion, Professor Richard Dawkins. Will the Chief Rabbi succeed in convincing the militant defender of atheism that science and religion need not be at war?

It's clear that all three of the atheist scientists to whom Lord Sacks puts his plea are willing to concede that there are limits to science — and that's where the Chief Rabbi jumps in to claim the ground for himself, while simultaneously decrying "God of the gaps". But he doesn't seem to realise that just because science doesn't have answers to certain questions, he cannot claim that religion does. Because it doesn't. All that religion can do is interpret scripture — which more often than not means making stuff up.

An experiment designed to be useless

Now that PZ Myers has had his say, Premier Radio's Atheist Prayer Experiment has become wider known. I suspect most of what's been said about it so far (including by me) was without the benefit of actually reading Tim Mawson's paper on which the experiment is apparently to be based.

The paper, titled "Praying to stop being an atheist", was published in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion in January 2010, and is available as a PDF here:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/a77r315j041p4213/fulltext.pdf

Here's the abstract:

In this paper, I argue that atheists who think that the issue of God’s existence or non-existence is an important one; assign a greater than negligible probability to God’s existence; and are not in possession of a plausible argument for scepticism about the truth-directedness of uttering such prayers in their own cases, are under a prima facie epistemic obligation to pray to God that He stop them being atheists.

It sounds like Mawson is setting up a highly restricted set of circumstances in which his proposal might just have some validity. Or not.

He begins by running through some examples and provisos. He suggests that the atheist considering praying to a God he or she doesn't believe exists is similar to someone in a darkened room who calls out "Is anyone there?" even though they believe they are alone. We get a lot of hemming and hawing around the plausibility of such a belief and the reasons why someone might feel it worth their while to call out, but it all has a flavour of direction, of careful elimination of possible objections, in preparation for declaring some kind of equivalence.

Similarly then, I am suggesting that, as well as agnostics, those atheists who think of the issue of the existence or non-existence of God as an important one and neither assign God’s existence a vanishingly small probability, nor take themselves to have some reason to suppose that their engaging in the process of prayer would lead them to false positives, should engage, insofar as the costs (including opportunity costs; to repeat, this is only a prima facie obligation and there may be other obligations which trump it) are not prohibitive, in praying to God that He remove their unbelief.

That is a typical sentence (one sentence, note). The whole paper is written in this faux-Dickensian style, with an excess of double negatives and subordinate clauses to subordinate clauses, as if attempting to delay the dawning realisation that what Mawson is saying is totally unextraordinary as well as entirely superfluous.

Next we have some exposition on Divine Hiddenness, which is frankly of no help at all. Mawson suggests that the atheist —

...is still justified in conducting the prayer experiment given that the most plausible version of Theism will have as an element that God’s reasons to preserve the general level of hiddenness that he does may be countervailed by prayers of this sort.

Or in other words God might answer the atheist's prayers, or he might not. What, exactly, is that supposed to prove?

Mawson goes on to consider two potential objections. The first is a facile and futile consideration of the utility and worth, in terms of effort and return, of calling out to fairies at the bottom of the garden. Here's one reason why he doesn't think it's worth it:

I do not regard answering the question of whether or not there are fairies at the bottom of the garden as a task of great importance; it has a similar importance, it strikes me, to settling the question of whether aliens with a penchant for leaving crop circles and temporarily abducting the locals are in the habit of visiting the mid-west of the U.S.A.

Mawson should get his priorities right. He's effectively saying that if he had a trivial means of determining whether — despite the inconclusive evidence so far presented — aliens are in fact visiting the Earth on a regular basis, he wouldn't bother. Considering that one of the eternal questions we face is "Are we alone in the Universe?" I think he's being pretty dismissive. He's already based his prospective experiment on the proposition that the existence of God is important. One possibility he ought to consider is that God exists and is an extra-terrestrial.

I might also question his indifference to the possible existence of an entirely unknown species of winged homunculi that nevertheless appear frequently in historical literature. (I would have added that an answer to the fairy-question might also have a bearing on the existence of a supernatural realm, but Mawson has already stated that the fairies he's not going to call out to are entirely natural.) In explaining at length and in detail — two pages of dense explication — why he's not going to call out to fairies, Mawson gives an overwhelming impression of desperately looking for excuses.

The second objection Mawson addresses is the one PZ Myers raised:

If you tell yourself something every day over a fairly long period of time, will it affect how your mind works? I suspect the answer would be yes. Just the act of making a commitment to a religious belief and reinforcing it with daily rituals and reflection is going to fuck up your head. Most of us atheists have defenses against it — I couldn’t go through this without grumbling to myself that this behavior is bullshit, and it would probably end up making me even more disgusted with religion (if I bothered to do it, which I won’t) — but it could affect somebody who is gullible and impressionable. There’s nothing in this ‘experiment’ that could provide evidence of a god, but there is plenty of stuff to show that plastic minds exist…which we already know.

Mawson's response to this objection (obviously not a direct response to PZ, who posted the above on August 20) is to issue a kind of challenge:

Tim Mawson

Again, the analogy of the darkened room seems to me apposite. It may not be unreasonable to suppose of some people that they are so desperate to find a wise old man in the room that they mistake the echo of their own voice for a reply to their quickly-shouted question. Some suffer from schizophrenia in the best of conditions after all and the sensory deprivation attendant upon entering such a room is hardly likely to improve such conditions. But the vast majority of agnostics and atheists can know of themselves, if they can know anything of themselves, that they are not such people. Most people are able, quite rightly, to remove from consideration as a serious possibility that they will mistake the echo of their own voice for a reply to the question, ‘Is there anyone there?’ when shouted into a darkened room. Similarly, I am suggesting, most agnostics and atheists will be able, quite rightly, to remove from consideration as a serious possibility that they will ‘project’ some fantasy and thus generate false positives by conducting the sort of prayer experiment which I have suggested is otherwise prima facie obligatory on them. 

Or to put it another way, "Hey, atheists! You're made of sterner stuff than this, aren't you?"

Towards the end of the paper Mawson seems to be suggesting that the experiment cannot work:

One point we may see now then is that nothing the theist, agnostic or atheist can have experienced during the process of conducting this experiment will have given him or her any reason to believe that this process of praying to God that He reveal Himself is not truth-directed. Just the opposite; anything he or she will have experienced and even the absence of an experience will have simply increased his or her rational estimation of the reliability of this process in putting him or her in touch with ultimate metaphysical truth. Thus he or she will find himself or herself locked into what he or she will have to consider an epistemically virtuous spiral of prayer, one which ever increases his or her rational faith in God or one which ever increases his or her rational certainty that God does not exist.

This doesn't seem rational to me. Is Mawson saying that whatever the results, and whether you're theist, atheist or agnostic (agnosticism doesn't exclude the other two, by the way) you will conclude that the experiment has brought you closer to the truth? In what way is this at all useful?

Finally he comes back to a point he brought up at the beginning, that an atheist should only carry out the experiment if he or she thinks there is more than a vanishingly small probability that God exists. I read this as saying any atheist who places higher than 6.5 on Dawkins' scale should not participate. Many atheists of my acquaintance would be excluded on that basis, as would I. And we're at that point on the scale because we've already done this experiment. Many of us prayed earnestly in our youth, and beyond, with conclusively negative results. We found no evidence for the existence of God, despite repeatedly asking for it. That is why we're atheists.

Mawson rounds off his paper with a well-known quote from Bertrand Russell regarding lack of evidence for the existence of God, and suggests that Russell should perhaps have asked for some. Personally I'm not inclined to go chasing after evidence for something whose existence is not rationally implied in the first place. There's a simple matter to consider — that of burden of proof.

A creationist talk in Portsmouth

I've been suffering a surfeit* of creationism recently, which reminded me that I'd not written up the creationist talk I attended locally back in April. It was put on by Creation Ministries International and hosted by Portsmouth Christian Fellowship at the Drayton Institute, which is a community centre cum church hall within walking distance of where I live. (Though I've not written about this before, I did talk about it on Skepticule Extra episode 25.)

The talk was given by Dominic Statham, a name vaguely familiar to me — and more familiar once I realised I'd blogged about an article he wrote on last year's riots. Statham is a good speaker; he has his delivery down pat and "gives good Powerpoint". He sounds British, and is apparently an engineer, not a biologist. His talk was titled "Darwin's Theory: Good Science?" and appears to be one of several he gave throughout a UK tour — apparently he was giving another talk in Plymouth the next day.

His talk in Drayton was well attended; about 50 chairs were laid out, and most were occupied. I arrived in plenty of time and got a good seat near the front.

Dominic Statham

Statham began by stating (in words and on screen) that "Microbes to Man" is contrary to the Bible, and went on to explain the basics of Darwin's theory. This was OK as far as it went, though he slanted his explanation with typical creationist doublespeak. He talked about "survival of the fittest" as if it meant only that the stronger win out over the weaker, but this isn't what Darwin exclusively meant, as I'm sure Statham is aware. "Fittest" in this context means most closely adapted to prevailing conditions, as in "fitting its environment". Statham's implied meaning was "fittest" as in "most fit and healthy", which is clearly a skewed interpretation if not a downright distortion.

Mentioning education, Statham referred to "so-called" science classes, showing his bias, and such loaded language was evident throughout his talk. As part of his explanation of evolutionary theory he said ordinary chemicals "just happened" to come together to form living organisms. His overview of evolutionary theory was specifically set up to be easily knocked down. He described two "steps" to evolution: number one, chemicals evolved to single-cell organisms; and number two, cells evolved to man. That's a very lopsided division, but it enabled him to claim, correctly, that science currently has no proven explanation of abiogenesis, and therefore, even before we begin to discuss evolution from microbes to man, half of evolutionary theory is speculative hypothesis unsupported by evidence. But this is a straw man; abiogenesis is not part of evolutionary theory, and Darwin had little to say about it.

There was no mention of plants in Statham's explanation of evolution, though my understanding is that all plants are part of the evolutionary tree of life. There was mention of "variation within kinds" — but my understanding of "kind" is that it's a biblical term with no scientific validity.

Statham soon moved on to some technical aspects of evolution, beginning with homology — animals sharing similar body plans (same number of limbs, digits, etc., laid out in similar patterns). Despite what evolutionists infer, Statham claimed, homology does not point to common ancestry. He gave three reasons for this:

1. Embryonic development in homologous animals is different. For example, in comparing human hands to frog hands, human hands develop in the womb by the death of cells between the fingers, while in frogs the digits are formed by sprouting new growth. I took this at face value, but later, consulting the Talk Origins archive, I discovered the reason for this is that frogs have webbed feet, which cell-death between the digits would not allow.
2. Similar structures (such as limbs) in homologous animals grow from different segments of the embryo. Again, a bit of research reveals that this is by no means universal — some homologous structures grow from the same embryonic segments, some grow from different segments. Statham was presenting this as cut-and-dried disproof of evolution when it isn't.
3. Similar structures are controlled by different genes, therefore homology doesn't prove evolution. Statham merely quoted an authority for this one, giving no examples.

At the time, of course, Statham's confident statements sounded convincing, and if I'd been on the fence I would quite likely have taken what he said at face value and come away with the idea that evolution wasn't true. Clearly that was his intention, and no doubt it was effective with some of his mostly Christian audience (if they weren't already creationists).

So, having shown to his satisfaction that evolution is insufficient to explain the diversity of life, Statham stated his own explanation: a designer. He went on to state that "software encoded in DNA" is how cells work, and showed a computer animation of the highly complex structures within a cell, with the clear implication that this was all too complicated to have happened by chance. And such it might be, but it's not by chance alone that evolution works. Variations resulting from faulty copying of genes (mutation — aka the "random chance" part) coupled with natural selection, whereby those organisms less suited to their environment tend to die out before reproducing while those more suited (by virtue of their different genetic information) survive, is mostly how evolution works. As for the complexity of the cell, I would guess that the earliest cells were very much simpler than shown in the animation. The complexity of present-day cells is the result of eons of evolution — but nevertheless creationists want to say it was put there, ready made, by God.

Statham went on to cite ATP Synthase and the bacterial flagellum as examples of complexity. I know nothing of ATP Synthase, but the flagellum is a favourite of creationists in general, and of engineer-creationists in particular — and Statham is one such. We know, despite the best efforts of Michael Behe that the flagellum is not "irreducibly complex". But if you deny stepwise refinement, as Statham apparently does, the development of such structures must be highly mysterious. He quoted Michael Denton describing the complexity of the cell, and then edged into conspiracy-theory mode, claiming that academics are not free to voice doubts about evolution. He promoted the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, understandably omitting to mention that it's pretty much outright lies from start to finish.

Having already appealed to authorities, Statham quoted several more. Prof Sir Ernst Chain FRS apparently said that evolutionary theory had "…no evidence and was irreconcilable with the facts," (though I'm unable to verify this quote). Statham put up a slide with big letters reading "Evolution is a Faith" and stated that if the Bible is not right about creation, people will question it about other things. Well, yes, that's the logical thing to do. It's not logical to believe something is true just because you don't like the consequences if it's false.

Statham moved on to yet another authority, this time William Provine of Cornell University. The quote on screen contained lots of ellipsis, which immediately set alarm bells ringing — creationists are notorious for quote-mining. Back home I looked up the quote and found something a bit strange.

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear … There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either."

That's pasted directly from CMI's website, and yet it isn't what Statham showed. Looking at the screen he explained that when Provine says "modern science" he means "evolution". But Provine doesn't say "modern science", he says "modern evolutionary biology". I've no idea what's going on here.

Still quoting, now from the Bible; Romans 1:20:

"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."

This is basically, "Look around you, of course there's a creator!" (We'll leave aside the inherent problem of clearly seeing qualities that are invisible…)

Then Matthew 7:13-14:

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

Creationists, thankfully, are in the minority.

Rounding off this trinity of Bible quotes we have 1 Peter 3:15:

"But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,"

This is the apologists' verse. (Too bad some of them forget the last sentence.)

Statham suggested members of the audience might like to subscribe to the quarterly Creation magazine — a year's subscription would get you an extra issue; a three-year subscription would get you an extra issue plus a DVD. (But only if you paid in full on the night.) Statham showed several examples of the articles in the magazine — on, for example, "modern science" — though here that doesn't necessarily mean "evolution", apparently. Another article was on refuting Richard Dawkins — which I was pleased to see. Dawkins got several mentions in Statham's talk, indicating that the infamous god-hating militant evolutionist baby-eater is still rattling cages.

Then it became a bit farcical. Statham showed some testimonials for Creation magazine — after all, you wouldn't simply take his word for how great it is, would you? The first testimonial was from that well-known arbiter of all that's worthwhile in scientific literature, the comedian Peter Kay. The second was from someone named Pat F. The third … there was no third — we have two testimonials: a comedian, and anonymous Pat F. (I'm convinced — here's my credit card.)

Finally before the break, Statham promoted the website (Creation.com) and a book titled The Creation Answers Book by Batten, Catchpoole, Sarfati and Wieland, disturbingly suggesting it could be bought for teenagers setting off for university.

During the break I looked at the merchandise, of which there was plenty: books and DVDs, including the despicable Expelled.

There were six questions in the Q&A, all answered by Statham with confidence, giving me the impression that there was nothing he hadn't heard before. He even had additional Powerpoint and videos to address specific questions — almost as if the questions were planted (but I don't think they were). I've paraphrased Statham's responses below, and added appropriate links.

Q1: Darwinism is bad science — why is it still taught?

• Because animals are observed to change. But this is micro- not macro-evolution. Genetic information for micro-evolution is already present.
• Evolutionists are committed to philosophical naturalism.
• Secular scientists say natural processes today means natural processes for origins.
• They are looking for reasons not to believe in God.
• The Intelligent Design movement is doing a lot of good, but they don't present an alternative. We do; the alternative is Christ.

Q2: There's lots of evidence for the Earth being older than 10,000 years.

• Yes there is evidence for an ancient Earth, but dating methods are unreliable. Carbon 14 dating shows the Earth is young. [My understanding is that radiocarbon dating is good for up to 60,000 years, so it can't be used to prove an old Earth, but neither does it show the Earth is young.]
• The Moon's orbit is increasing, but at the rate it is, for an old Earth it ought to be farther away by now.
• There's not enough salt in the sea for an old Earth.
• Dinosaur remains are evidence for a young Earth. In Montana, dinosaur bones (not fossils) have been found with organic soft tissue still in evidence, which should have decayed if they were millions of years old.
• Science cannot tell us how old the Earth is.
• An old Earth conflicts with the Bible. Statham recommended another book: 15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History.

Q3: Where are dinosaurs in the Bible?

• Dinosaurs were made on the same day (the sixth) as Man.
• Dinosaurs were on the Ark, and lived contemporaneously with Man.
• Dinosaurs were called dragons, and some were fire-breathing.
• Carlisle Cathedral has a picture of a dinosaur on the tomb of Richard Bell, dating from 1496.

Q4: Has the universe been around longer than the Earth?

• The stars were made after the Earth.
• Billions of light years away should mean they are billions of years old, but relativity accounts for the apparent age of starlight.
• The Bible says God "stretched out the heavens" — meaning cosmic inflation.

Q5: Did Darwin have a deathbed conversion?

• Probably not, but either way it makes no difference.

Q6: How were the fossils created?

• A global flood; there is lots of evidence that fossils were buried in flood conditions.
• Fossils in the Grand Canyon are all aligned, as if carried by a current.
• Jellyfish fossils must have fossilised in hours, because they are very soft and would otherwise decay or be destroyed.
• There is an absence of transitional forms in the fossil record, such as between invertebrate marine animals and vertebrate marine animals (fish).
• The order of fossils in rock is virtually a formal falsification of Darwin's theory.

Statham made that last point (or rather, assertion) as his final comment to the final question at the end of the evening. There was no opportunity to challenge him on it before the organiser from Portsmouth Christian Fellowship got up to thank him for his talk and to lead the congregation — pardon me, the audience — in a prayer, after which I made my escape.

What did I learn from this talk? I learned that a creationist lecturing to a sympathetic audience can sound very convincing. Dominic Statham was quite clever in not stating some things outright; instead he let the audience infer what they wanted to believe from his tacit implications. I recognised his use of loaded language immediately, but only because I've heard such disingenuous slanting before. Creationists, however, are at least open about what they're up to — they want God back in our culture, and have no truck with secularism. The Intelligent Design crowd on the other hand are more insidious in their aims, all the while claiming that ID has nothing to do with religion.

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*Watch this space...

Am I no true atheist?

I'm a bit worried about my credentials as an atheist ("gnu" or otherwise). I know who the Four Horsemen are, but I couldn't tell you which came first (was it Dennett or Harris?). Off the top of my head I can't give you the entire URL for Pharyngula, nor can I reliably list all the hosts of the Atheist Experience TV show. I know there were lots of historical figures who professed atheism, but I certainly couldn't list them.

As if these failings weren't serious enough, I find I'm also unable to recite the full title of Charles Darwin's seminal work known for short as The Origin. Surely no true atheist would fail so miserably at declaring atheism's central dogmas?

Oh wait. Atheism has no dogmas, so I've nothing to declare but my lack of belief in a god or gods.

In an amusing but spurious bit of table-turning, this morning Richard Dawkins found himself being put on the spot by Giles Fraser on the Today Programme. Dawkins was unable to reel off the The Origin's full title when challenged to do so, and for this embarrassing blanking of mind in the heat of a live radio discussion some Christians have unjustly accused him of hypocrisy.

To those Christians I would say you're missing the point. Listen to the radio piece itself:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9696000/9696135.stm

Here's the Today Programme's page on it:

Research carried out by for a secularist foundation has suggested that most of those who describe themselves as Christian in Britain have only a low level of belief and practice of the religion.

A poll carried out by Ipsos-Mori for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science indicated that half of those in Britain who say they are Christian rarely go to church while nearly 60% do not read the Bible.

Prof Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, told the Today programme's Justin Webb that most people who call themselves Christian merely "tick the Christian box".

When asked whether the figures told us anything of use, Professor Dawkins insisted it "told us an awful lot" because it puts into doubt the place of Christian practices in society such as bishops in House of Lords and the presence of faith schools.

However Reverend Giles Fraser, former Canon Chancellor of St Paul's, called the findings "extraordinary" and maintained that it was not fair to trump people's "self identification" as Christians.

He said that "there are all sorts of ways to express Christianity" and that we should not be "purging religion from the public square".

Dawkins' fumbling with The Origin's full title was cringe-making but irrelevant, and here's why. Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection — Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life is not a sacred text. Dawkins might have been expected, given his area of expertise, to rise to Fraser's challenge, but the fact that on this occasion he was unable to do so means nothing more than that he had a temporary memory lapse. Such lapses are not unusual — most people have them. This particular lapse doesn't mean that Dawkins isn't a "true atheist", nor does it mean the points he was making aren't valid.

Giles Fraser tried, as religionists often do, to make atheism and Christianity somehow equivalent — two sides of the same coin. They're not. Christianity has sacred scripture containing common beliefs about supernatural events and persons, along with "moral" laws and "moral" guidance. Atheism has none of these things. All atheism has is lack of belief in any deity.

The survey in question, however, shows that a majority of people who self-identify as Christians don't meet the criteria that Christianity is commonly taken to involve. They don't know the scripture, they don't hold the beliefs and they don't follow the guidance. Their self-identification should not, therefore, be taken by policy-makers as an indication that a majority of people hold to Christian beliefs, when clearly they don't. There are religious factions in government, however, who seem so desperate to preserve religion's disproportionate influence, they are willing to misrepresent what people believe.

Giles Fraser claims it's unfair to say that people who self-identify as Christians are not really Christian just because they don't know the scripture, don't hold the beliefs and don't follow the guidance. In effect he's saying that just because people who are atheists in all but name still self-identify as Christian, it's unfair to describe them as not Christian. Maybe he's right; people should be allowed to call themselves whatever they want. But this shouldn't give the government an excuse to impose "Christian" laws on a population who, despite what they say, are clearly not Christian in the generally accepted meaning of the term.

And if atheists have no dogmas, can't recite a creed, and don't read Darwin — this too is no excuse for imposing "Christian" law.

Atheism 2.0 — fundamentally misconceived

Alain de Botton wants to take what he sees as the "good" things of religion and borrow them for atheism. He particularly likes religious buildings, which he seems to think provide examples of something that "atheism" — as some kind of movement — could usefully build. The problem with this approach is that it appears to accept the notion that atheism as a "thing" is in the same category as that other thing — religion.

It's not. According to Dictionary.com the definition of religion is this:

a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

Atheism on the other hand is not that. It's not a set of beliefs, it's the absence of belief in a god or gods. It involves no devotional or ritual observances, and says nothing at all about a moral code. Whatever religion is, atheism is not that.

Alain de Botton seems to regret that atheism is not that, and while he wouldn't accept the superhuman agency he seems to want to co-opt some of the "devotional and ritual observances".

On Justin Brierley's Unbelievable? radio programme today Alain de Botton stated that he doesn't really care for the nitty gritty details of science, and it seems that this barely concealed disdain for the hard facts of reality could be at the root of his less-than-rigorous approach to truth — an approach that sets him apart from other philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and A. C. Grayling. And of course Alain de Botton is far too nice to come out with full-blown condemnation of religious belief like Richard Dawkins and his ilk are wont to do. (His niceness was on full display in his conversation with James Orr today, but he was, almost literally, on his own ground.)

Alain de Botton already appears to be borrowing aspects of religion, such as the insistence that an absence of religion will inevitably leave a void requiring to be filled. This is not so, in the same way that removing a cancerous tumour from the body does not require something in its place.

His idea that there ought to be a community for atheists seems to me — someone who has not read his book — to be fundamentally misguided. There is already a community for atheists and people of a secular humanist turn of worldview; it's called humanity. We secular humanists (I count myself among them) can do what others do when when they don't go to church, such as attend or partake in sports, go down the pub, go to the movies, theatre, sightseeing, evening classes, quiz nights, museums, art galleries — or even skeptics conferences if we are so inclined.

All of these are communities of different kinds; pick one (or more) as you like. There's no need for something to serve as an ersatz church.

---

Alain de Botton gave a TED talk recently on the theme of his book:

Resurrecting yet another segment from that Facebook exchange

This Facebook thread (from which I have already quoted) was started by Justin Brierley as yet more disingenuous Dawkins-baiting. I forebore to snap at said bait, and eventually the conversation drifted to other matters. But further down Justin seemed motivated enough to whip it back in line with this bit of peevishness:

Unbelievable? I don't normally get that easily offended by silly things that Dawkins says, but that quotation from the piece struck me as so incredibly condescending and insulting.

Are those who are tortured and killed for their faith around the world "mewling and wimpering at the fear of death"? Are those whose faith have helped them to face incredible, harship, illness and death, "mewling and whimpering to an imaginery deity in their fear of death"?

Its a slap in the face to the sick Pirsoners of War that my grandfather tended to and gave their last rites in a Japanese camp in the 1930s, its a slap in the face to the people my wife visits today on hospital wards in their last hours to pray with and offer words of hope and love and peace.

If you think its an imagined source of stength and courage in the face of death, then you are welcome to that view, but please don't go around with the (there's not other word for it I'm afraid) offensive rubbish Dawkins passed off in this supposed eulogy.

If theists find certain characterisations of their worship of a god offensive, that's too bad. Some atheists find it offensive to be told they have no grounding for morality, and that therefore any moral judgments they make are completely without foundation — when in fact many of them have given moral questions a great deal of thought and come to their views and decisions based on consideration of a wide range of circumstances and consequences.

No-one, however, theist or atheist, has a right not to be offended. As for "mewling and whimpering" — read the Book of Common Prayer to see why such a characterisation is, in some atheist eyes, entirely justified. These were taken more or less at random from the Collects:

"we are sorely hindered by our sins"

"Grant that we, being regenerate and made thy children by adoption and grace..."

"Have compassion, we beseech thee, upon our infirmities, and those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask..."

And particularly relevant to Justin's complaint — from Ministration at the Time of Death:

"We sinners beseech you to hear us, Lord Christ: That it may
please you to deliver the soul of your servant from the power
of evil, and from eternal death"

Into your hands, O merciful Saviour, we commend your
servant N. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of
your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your
own redeeming."

But for a wholehearted mewl and a thoroughly downcast whimper I found Confession of Sin:

Almighty and most merciful Father,
we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,
we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,
we have offended against thy holy laws,
we have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
spare thou those who confess their faults,
restore thou those who are penitent,
according to thy promises declared unto mankind
in Christ Jesus our Lord;
and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake,
that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,
to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

It's not as if I had to ferret these quotes out; I simply opened up the book and there they were. Anglicans of Dawkins' generation grew up with this stuff, so it's hardly surprising that "mewling and whimpering" is seen by many as part and parcel of Christianity.

Christians, and other theists, will just have to get used to it. The ring-fence has gone, the free pass has expired, and religion must take its place alongside art, literature, music and food as a fit subject for robust criticism — and sometimes warranted ridicule.

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My grandfather would never have been caught "mewling and whimpering". He objected to being cast as a "miserable sinner" — he was willing to accept he was a sinner, but he refused to be miserable.

Unbelievable?: The Conference — Big Questions Stream

The Big Questions Stream is the last of three DVDs in this boxed set of Premier Christian Radio's one-day apologetics conference held in May this year. (I have already reviewed Disc 1 and Disc 2.)

Disc 3 begins with Mark Roques and his talk entitled: "Is Jesus the only way?"

It's a dynamic lecture, if a little unfocussed and with iffy sound. Roques claims that all people live by faith, giving as an example some rat-worshippers in India. He says there are four types of response to rat-worship, each conforming to a specific type. The first is that of, for example, James Bond, who would describe rat-worship as irrational. Roques claims this is a "modernist", secular worldview and what he describes is essentially a materialist worldview that denies the existence of anything supernatural. But as a first example it shows how ill-advised it is to use fictional examples to explain what you are claiming as fact. Religionists seem to do this a lot, as if they can't see how it's likely to be interpreted. By picking a fictional example you are essentially basing your factual claims on something that has been made up. If Bible-believers want to convince people that scripture is more than "made up" they should stop doing this.

The second example is the response of Paul Merton, who visited some rat-worshippers during a TV documentary. Merton apparently described rat-worship as "true for them" — which Roques says is a post-modernist worldview, in which everyone is entirely autonomous.

The rat-worshippers' response, however, is that rat-worship is "true" — which is Roques' example of the third type of response.

Roques' fourth type of response is exemplified by Christianity: "Don't worship rats, worship Christ."

He then goes on to list four views of salvation. The first is the "exclusivist" or "restrictivist" view, in which only those who have been called by God will go to eternity in heaven, while everyone else goes to eternal punishment. The second is an "inclusionist" but not "universalist" view, which allows even some people with no knowledge of Christ to be saved. The third is "theological pluralism", which holds that all religions can lead to God, and the fourth is the "universalist" view where everyone will be saved. Unsurprisingly there's disagreement on the matter, but as it's theology there's no way of conclusively resolving the issue — because theology is mostly fabrication. Incidentally Roques says he holds to the "inclusionist" view of salvation.

During a Christian apologetics conference there's bound to be a good deal of dissing of other religions, but some of those other religions have their own conferences, and what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Mark Roques is also guilty of conflation when he claims that for James Bond the god is science, and when later on in his talk he claims people have made "money" their god. Many religionists seem to do this, giving the impression that they are locked into a mindset in which it is impossible for anyone not to believe in a god of some kind. For such religionists, there's no such thing as a true atheist.

Roques is very big on story-telling (likening this to the parables of Jesus), but he needs to be clearer on the distinction between factual and fictional stories, otherwise people will be inevitably drawn to the idea that the whole of scripture and theology is just a series of stories. For myself I'm glad that in this lecture he used his faux "common" accent only once.

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Next on Disc 3 is a two-hander with John Lennox and David Robertson on the question "Is there evidence for God?", and it has the assertions, the atheist-bashing, and what I can only describe as self-congratulatory smugness — coupled with attempts at mitigating false modesty — coming thick and fast. I found it difficult to keep up, abandoning my use of the pause button for note-taking purposes and just let the whole thing roll over me.

The usual canards are in abundance: atheists have no grounding for moral judgements, they are closed-minded to evidence by a priori assumptions, and they don't understand the meaning of faith. But throughout their discussion neither Lennox nor Robertson explain what precisely their subjective experience of God is. It's all a tacit admission of mysterious ineffability. They say much but convey little, and I found it frustrating waiting for either of them to deliver even one thing that might be a serious challenge to atheists — either "new atheists" or the plain vanilla variety.

Lennox makes a good point, however, about "nothing buttery" when decrying materialism, but I don't think he realises that he is actually validating the materialist view when he makes it.

So in response to the question "Is there evidence for God?" the answer must begin with "It depends what you mean by evidence." And if you're after compelling evidence, rather than just a subjective feeling, forget it.

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Finally we have (again) Mark Roques, with "What about suffering?" beginning with the tale of Cornish Christian boy Thomas Pellow, captured by Turkish pirates and forced to be the slave of the Sultan. He converted to Islam (to save his own skin), and returned to his parents 30 years later. He was, we are told, sustained by his Christian faith.

Roques quotes David Hume's distillation of Epicurus's paradox — according to which an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is an incoherent concept. Roques goes on to say, "I want to try and respond to this with some perhaps fresh material." This sounds promising but ultimately leaves us high and dry, as in delivering his talk he often seems to get diverted down side alleys, never returning to the place whence he came.

Asking the question, "Is it possible to be an atheist and also affirm the existence of evil?" Roques then examines materialism, quoting Richard Dawkins in River Out of Eden on the "blind, pitiless indifference" of the universe, as well as Dawkins' response to the 2006 Edge Annual Question — "What is your dangerous idea?"

Dawkins' contribution was "Let's all stop beating Basil's car" in which he floats the (not original) idea that just as Basil Fawlty's defective car is not to blame for its deficiencies, neither are we as material humans "at fault" for our own shortcomings. Given that these essays for the Edge were supposed to be radical and iconoclastic, it's disingenuous of Roques to point to Dawkins and claim that materialists deny that humans have any moral responsibility. The problem — as usual with debates of this kind — is that key terms haven't been properly defined. What does Roques mean by "evil" or "moral"? He's speaking to a largely Christian audience, so he may consider these terms don't need defining. But this is an apologetics conference and the audience will be going out to defend their faith. Without rigorous definition of terms, their efforts could well come across as unconvincing or even sloppy.

Here's an example of what I consider egregious sloppy thinking:

"Materialism declares that only physical things exist and so it is not possible to speak about purpose, goodness and wickedness. Evil is an illusion."

First off, we need to know what Roques means by purpose, goodness, wickedness and evil. By this measure we could claim that thoughts, being "non-physical", don't exist — when they clearly do.

"Evil does not exist. It is an illusion. A delusion. A toothfairy. This is what many atheists believe. It's their religion."

This is the worst kind of straw man fallacy, and teaching it at an apologetics conference is doing nobody any favours. Roques belabours his "no responsibility in materialism" point, but without saying what he means by responsibility. When we consider ideas of materialism and determinism in human action we must be careful what we dismiss. It is possible to hold to a materialist, determinist worldview in which free will does not depend on substance dualism, and still maintain that we are responsible for our actions. The question then becomes not what do we mean by "responsible"? but what do we mean by "we"? The entity — the human — held to be "responsible" comprises the sum total of who "we" are — our current thoughts and disposition, our memories, our experiences, our genetic make-up, our education, even our present environment. Such questions are way deeper and more subtle than Roques portrays in his talk.

Roques may even be going out on a limb relative to his religionist cohorts. He claims that Anselm and Aquinas were wrong about goodness, and that Plotinus — and Plato before him — were bad influences on early Christianity. He makes this challenge:

"If naturalism/materialism is true, then surely both goodness and evil are illusions. So where do you get your notions of evil and goodness from as you rail against God?"

See how disingenuous his approach is? "Rail against God?" This may be a reaction to Dawkins' deliberate caricature of the Old Testament God in The God Delusion, but such emotive language is inappropriate to an honest examination of the problem of evil.

Roques may be a dynamic speaker (despite seeming to lose his way several times in this talk), but the thrust of his argument is superficial. When pressed he is revealed — as far as I could see — to have nothing original or indeed useful to add to the morality debate. In the Q&A the first questioner asks why God allowed evil in the first place:

"There's a sense in which I don't know the answer to that deep question."

And as he offers nothing more of substance in response, there's a pronounced lack of any other sense in which he did know the answer.

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So what did I get out of these three DVDs? I could have attended the conference itself, but I would still have needed the DVDs in order to see the parallel streams. The cost of the DVD set is comparable to the cost of the conference, but if I'd attended I would have needed to add the same again in travelling expenses. In any case I think I might have felt uncomfortable in an audience of mostly believers.

On the whole I found the talks as presented on the DVDs disappointing, but also — on another level — heartening. Much was made of equipping Christians for defending their faith in the wider world, but the armoury provided here appeared clumsy, outdated and ineffective. Not once did I find myself thinking, "Gosh, there's an argument I really must look into further." Maybe these evangelicals will be effective in converting teetering agnostics who are confused by recent new atheist literature — or maybe not. It's seems clear, however, that anyone who is happy to self-identify as an atheist on the basis of honest enquiry into the God-question will not find anything challenging on these DVDs.