Jehovah's Creationists

One Saturday in January, thinking the doorbell indicated the postman delivering an expected package, I opened the door to two gentlemen whom I instantly identified (don't ask me how) as either Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. Their first question confirmed my initial assessment: they asked me what I thought God's name was. My reply — that I didn't think there was any such entity as God, and so his name was of no importance to me — brought a suggestion that they read me something from the Bible, but I interrupted with a counter-suggestion that quoting Bible verses to an atheist was a hiding to nothing.

The younger guy who had so far conducted this conversation seemed a bit deflated by this, but the older one stepped in at this point to ask me why I was an atheist. I said I hadn't come across convincing evidence for the existence of any gods. Cue the creationist argument: had I looked at the multitude of living things and how marvellous and complicated they were? Yes I had, and I understood that they are all related, with common ancestry, and had come about over very long periods of time through a process of random mutation and natural selection.

Then he began talking about "kinds" and separate creation, and that different kinds could not breed with each other. I said that if he meant species, this was a reasonable definition, but although different species can't in general inter-breed, it's useful to consider the analogy of language. Children understand the language of their parents, who understand the language of their parents, and so on, and if you go back far enough you'll find a couple speaking one language who are direct ancestors of people alive today who can't understand each other's languages. And so it is with evolution.

But then he changed tack and talked about the eye, saying it couldn't have come about by evolution, to which I responded that it probably could, starting with something as simple as a patch of skin that had randomly developed some basic sensitivity to light. I think at this point he realised that he was talking to someone who has actually thought about such things, and suggested I might like to read something, to which I responded that, yes, I would. (This whole conversation took place on my doorstep, and I had things to do.)

They gave me a brochure entitled Was Life Created? And in return I gave them an Atheist Tract — several copies of which I keep by the door specifically for occasions like this. I thanked the pair of them, wished them good morning and closed the door.

But what of the brochure?

Was Life Created? is published by Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, in 2010. Though the masthead says "Made in Britain", spellings reveal it was written for an American audience. I read it through, making a few notes, and a quick check of the Jehovah's Witnesses' website turned up a PDF (the PDF, however, says "Made in the United States of America").

From the first section, "What do you believe?":

It is not the purpose of this material to ridicule the views either of fundamentalists or of those who choose not to believe in God. Rather, it is our hope that this brochure will prompt you to examine again the basis for some of your beliefs. It will present an explanation of the Bible’s account of creation that you may not have previously considered. And it will emphasize why it really does matter what you believe about how life began.

First, note the implication that atheism is a choice. This, no doubt, is tied up with what Paul says in Romans 1:20, about being "without excuse", though that part is left out of the quote when it appears later in the brochure.

The next section, "The Living Planet" — which is essentially a crude rendering of the fine-tuning argument — contains a number of loaded phrases that might be missed by those unfamiliar with the low-grade apologetic techniques employed here.

Are earth’s features a product of blind chance or of purposeful design? Without its tailor-made moon, our planet would wobble like a spinning top... ...earth is protected by amazing armor—a powerful magnetic field and a custom-made atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field truly are marvels of design that are still not fully understood.

Note the language of design and manufacture taken for granted in these question-begging excerpts. The circularity, however, does not end there; next we have a section titled "Who designed it first?" which aims to catalogue instances of engineering and science taking their inspiration from nature.

As you consider the following examples, ask yourself, ‘Who really deserves the credit for these designs?’
...
Who deserves the credit? 
...
Who is nature’s patent holder?

They quote Michael Behe, who says (essentially, as all Intelligent Design proponents do, no matter what fancy language they use) it's designed if it looks designed.

Each section of the brochure ends with a couple of questions, and most of these are loaded or begged in some way. The section just covered ("Who designed it first?") asks:

• Does it seem logical to you to believe that the brilliant engineering evident in nature came about by accident?
  

To which I would answer, no it doesn't, because that's not what happened. Natural selection is not an accidental process — indeed it could be considered the very opposite. Evolution by random mutation and natural selection occurs because of environmental pressure — it's a process that occurs because it's taking the line of least resistance. Statistically speaking, it couldn't happen any other way.

There's then a subsection headed "Was it designed? If the copy requires a designer, what about the original?" Unfortunately for the brochure's thesis, this subheading appears to undermine itself. The copy doesn't require a designer, it only requires a copier — which is what the "original" does, albeit imperfectly. Indeed it is this very imperfection that drives evolution.

The next section — "Evolution myths and facts" — attempts to discredit the theory of evolution and claims that the fossil record doesn't provide evidence of what creationists and ID proponents like to call "macro-evolution". They claim to be happy with the idea that species can change (or "adapt") due to environmental pressure, but only up to a point. And that point appears to be arbitrarily undefined. What it comes down to is analogous to believing that it is possible for someone to stand on a step, but quite impossible to ascend a flight of stairs. Much is made of "Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany," who claims that:

“Mutations cannot transform an original species [of plant or animal] into an entirely new one. This conclusion agrees with all the experiences and results of mutation research of the 20th century taken together as well as with the laws of probability.”

Some Googling reveals that Lönnig is an ID proponent who, like Michael Behe, appears to have been disowned by his own institution. The brochure includes a footnote:

Lönnig believes that life was created. His comments in this publication are his own and do not represent the opinion of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research.

Fond though they are of footnotes, the JW's are not above making a bald assertion:

To date, scientists worldwide have unearthed and cataloged some 200 million large fossils and billions of small fossils. Many researchers agree that this vast and detailed record shows that all the major groups of animals appeared suddenly and remained virtually unchanged, with many species disappearing as suddenly as they arrived.

If this was Wikipedia, that phrase "Many researchers agree" would be immediately followed by "[citation needed]".

The final main section is titled "Science and the Genesis account". Jehovah's Witnesses, apparently, are not young-earth creationists, but old-earth creationists. How, then, do they reconcile the conflicting information in Genesis? Do they claim it's meant to be poetic? Metaphorical? Wrong? Untrue? No, they don't. This section, it turns out, is one huge exercise in semantic gymnastics. I won't go into it here — read the linked PDF if you're interested. Suffice to say, if the JW's really think that reading scripture in this way can reveal truth of any kind there's no hope for them — they are beyond logic. The Bible, for them, can mean anything they want it to mean.

The final section, "Does it matter what you believe?" seems to be an argument from consequences. After quoting William Provine saying, "I can see no cosmic or ultimate meaning in human life," they ask:

Consider the significance of those words. If ultimate meaning in life were nonexistent, then you would have no purpose in living other than to try to do some measure of good and perhaps pass on your genetic traits to the next generation. At death, you would cease to exist forever. Your brain, with its ability to think, reason, and meditate on the meaning of life, would simply be an accident of nature.

Well, yes.

That — apart from the "accident" bit (see above) — is how it is.

Get used to it.

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This post is based on one of my segments in a recent episode of the Skepticule podcast.

Edited 2022-06-08 to update links to JW.ORG and Jason Curry's Atheist Tract.

Burnee links for Saturday

A Sophisticated Theologian explains why theology doesn’t progress « Why Evolution Is True
Jerry Coyne continues his fruitless quest. I admire his persistence, but can't help feeling he's wasting an awful lot of time.

50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Hmm. He could be right, you know. (The Elements of Style is a very short book, after all.)

Slavery. Bible style. | Reasonably Faithless
James East finds out if the Bible is in favour of owning people as property, with all that might imply.

Atheist Ethicist: A Non-Religious, Non-Evolutionary Account of "Ought"
A concise explanation of the fundamentals of desire utilitarianism, by its leading exponent.

Creationism's lack of Wonders

When I watched the first episode of Brian Cox's new TV series Wonders of Life I was struck by the uncompromisingly naturalistic assumptions behind his explanation of how life began on Earth. Never before have I heard such a godless approach on prime-time mainstream TV in Britain. Maybe, I thought, the tide is turning and the BBC is forsaking — albeit temporarily — its habit of "balancing" anything remotely atheistic with something necessarily faith-based. Well, maybe. But nevertheless I expected protests, especially from creationists, and I was relishing the prospect.

So I was more than a little disappointed with this lack-lustre response from my local creationist organisation, the Creation Science Movement.

On Sunday 27th January, the BBC TV aired the first of a new series called Wonders of Life, presented by Professor Brian Cox. In this first episode he wondered what life was and how it began. Like all science writers for the Beeb, Cox is a fully paid up atheist, and he set out to establish a sequence from inanimate matter to simple living cells, and so on to ourselves. He informed us that at the beginning there was energy. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, though it can change from one form to another. He demonstrated this with a waterfall where potential energy at the top of the fall is changed into kinetic energy of movement, heat and noise as the water descends. But the total amount of energy remains unchanged. All correct! He then argued that if energy cannot be added to or lost, then energy is eternal! He does not conclude that if energy has always existed, so too must matter be everlasting. Thus he dodges the problem of how matter and energy could have been created from nothing in the first place.

But Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent (E=mc²). And of course we have the old chestnut about creating something from nothing. Who says there was nothing in the first place? If the current spacetime continuum came into existence at the Big Bang, so too did cause and effect — because cause and effect have no meaning in any atemporal or aspacial sense. We can have no concept of existence in the absence of time and space, so to talk about "something" and "nothing" in a realm that lacks a coherent concept of existence is mere speculation.

He continued by saying that all processes involve a change whereby the energy becomes less able to do work, this being the Second Law. He doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion that if the universe has always existed, all the energy would have lost its potential to do work long ago and would have degenerated into heat at a very low temperature. Our universe is brimming over with energy at a high potential, so it isn’t eternal at all, but had a beginning. How could it have started at a high potential, that is, a highly ordered state? Well, not on its own!

Despite this unidentified blogger's exclamation mark, the idea that the universe came into existence spontaneously as a necessary result of a random event seems to me entirely plausible. Also I don't think many cosmologists believe that the universe as we know it has existed eternally, so I'm not sure what point is being made here.

Dr Cox told us that all living things that have ever been derive their energy from a flow of hydrogen ions in their mitochondria. Quite true! He demonstrated a simple battery made from two bottles of water with different acidities. He then wired them up to a miniature fan, which sprang into life, while gases bubbled from the electrodes. So, he argued, a flow of hydrogen ions creates life – QED. He didn’t take into account the glaring fact that the current needed a motor to make use of this energy as a fan. In the same way, in every living thing, the hydrogen ion potential in the mitochondrion requires a miniature protein motor called ATP Synthase to produce usable energy for the living cell. Someone must have designed and manufactured the fan. How much more is a Creator required for the ATP Synthase with its 31 precise components?

The reason why someone had to design and manufacture the electric fan is that electric fans don't reproduce by themselves. Why creationists appear to overlook this obvious distinction baffles me.

From then on, the professor told us, living things progressed from simple to more complex living things by mistakes in copying genes that are then selected by the environment – Darwinian evolution. Yet we know that mutations scramble the information in those genes. Moreover, how can precise genetic information come about by chance?

Anyone who seriously asks this question obviously hasn't grasped the implications of natural selection.

Now that he has told us how life began, the series should become more credible as he celebrates the wonders of life. It could hardly get less believable! 

An odd, muted conclusion — exclamation mark notwithstanding. We get the first thorough explication of current thinking on abiogenesis on mainstream TV — something of a landmark, in my opinion — but of course creationists are going to dismiss it, as this one has. That it's such a half-hearted dismissal may indicate (let's hope so) the creationist bandwagon is running out of steam.

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Shame. I had hoped for something more meaty to celebrate my 700th blogpost!

Burnee links for Saturday

Busy, busy, busy. So here are some links to be going on with.

In a Crisis, Humanists Seem Absent - NYTimes.com
A thoughtful article, pinpointing some of the issues relating to the establishment of distinct humanist groups within society.
(Via James Croft on Facebook)

Daft complaint to the BBC by anti-vax activists
Illustrating the skewed world inhabited by anti-vaxxers.
(Via Crispian Jago on Facebook.) 

The Skeptical Probe: Dr Hugh Ross - Lying for God
Assert something sufficiently often and with enough confidence and it simply becomes true, doesn't it? I was surprised and alarmed that Premier Radio associated itself with Reasons to Believe — to the extent of using that organisation's name as the subtitle of last year's Unbelievable?: The Conference. (See also the Facebook discussion.)

Sunday’s Caller and Public Response: Confirmation is not a Rebuttal » The Atheist Experience
The incomparable Tracie Harris offers some clarification of sin.

Cruella-blog: Mehdi Hasan makes me really angry.
Kate Smurthwaite gets cross. Again.

The Royal Institution: Can we just give it to the National Trust? Or the Science Museum Group? « The Thought Stash
Kash Farooq on a lamentable failure of communication.

Axp decry the Christian crib-sheet

The Atheist Experience — a weekly live TV phone-in show from Austin, Texas — this week dealt highly effectively with a version of the Moral Argument for the Existence of God (even though the caller didn't frame it in exactly those terms).

This:

http://blip.tv/the-atheist-experience-tv-show/atheist-experience-795-argument-from-making-sense-6494842


Matt and Tracie set out in no uncertain terms why biblical morality is such a crock.

Who needs truth when you have apologetics?

Last week's Unbelievable? aired a talk given by Premier Radio's favourite Christian apologist William Lane Craig, at the 2011 Bethinking conference as part of the Reasonable Faith Tour of the UK.

I understand that this talk was given to Christians, so I was concerned to hear Craig begin by misrepresenting the meaning of secularism. In fact he seemed to base his whole talk on an incorrect premise: that the "secularisation" of Britain was a bad thing because it was based in a naturalistic philosophy that denies God. But secularism is merely the idea that matters of religious belief should be independent of government (and vice versa) — and as such is as beneficial to those who hold religious beliefs as it is to those who don't.

Later on — in what might be classed as an appeal to non-authority — Craig quoted Satan, further damning any credibility he might have otherwise retained in my view. Perhaps he just doesn't see how risible his arguments sound when he plumbs such depths; he seems happy enough blowing his own trumpet about how easily he can fill a hall with an audience. Sure, he's preaching to the converted and trying to inspire them, and I appreciate that a little hyperbole can go a long way.

But Craig shouldn't be let off the hook for playing fast and loose with facts. He describes the Crucifixion as the one historical fact about Jesus of Nazareth that is universally acknowledged among historical critical scholars. This is of course true, so long as your definition of "historical critical scholars" includes only those who acknowledge the Crucifixion as a historical fact.

Craig also seems very fond of referring to "The Church" as if it were a single homogenous entity, when we all know that this couldn't be further from the truth. During the Q & A he was asked about evangelising to Darwinists and postmodernists, and he advised skirting around such issues:

My evangelistic strategy is to set the bar as low as you can; make it as easy as possible to become a Christian. There are very few things you need to believe to be a Christian: you've got to believe that God exists, that Jesus Christ is divine, that he died for your sins and rose from the dead, and that you will be saved by grace, through placing your faith in his atoning death — and really that's about it, you know?

Huh? Is that all?

The final question was about Christ being the "second Adam", and how this could be true if Adam didn't actually exist as a real person. Craig said he affirmed the historical Adam, but for those who don't, the phrase "second Adam" would be purely symbolic. For me, this lackadaisical attitude to facts exemplifies so much of Christian apologetics, and is why I find it utterly unconvincing.

At last Skepticule Extra — but wait, there's more

Starting the new year with a bit of catch-up, Skepticule Extra number 37 is available for your nostalgic reminiscence (OK, I promise to do better this year).

Can women be bishops? Can secularists be religious? Can celebrity evangelists make money?

Stand by for another dose of Skepticule Extra imminently.