Mutant Humans With Enhanced Abilities

Many biblical creationists argue that there are no beneficial mutations, that mutations are always harmful, never an improvement.

Numerous counterexamples could be given, but the creationist could ask, what about humans? Yes, there is sickle-cell disease that makes people have a higher resistance to a certain disease, but that clearly comes at a cost. Why don’t we see beneficial mutations that don’t have such drawbacks? What about mutations in humans that (for example) make them stronger or give them bones that are harder to break?

Actually, we have examples of both sorts of mutations. There is a family in Connecticut that displays very strong bones due to a mutation, comparing them to the hero in Unbreakable (a movie character who had unbreakable bones).

As for increased strength, there is something called myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy. From this scientific organization:

Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy is a rare condition characterized by reduced body fat and increased muscle size. Affected individuals have up to twice the usual amount of muscle mass in their bodies. They also tend to have increased muscle strength. Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy is not known to cause any medical problems, and affected individuals are intellectually normal.

Myostatin affects skeletal muscle but it doesn’t affect cardiac muscle (the heart) so cardiac muscle hypertrophy doesn’t result from this.

Yet another example of a beneficial mutation in humans is a sort of mutation found in women allows them to perceive more colors, at least in the sense of having greater perception of different shades of colors.

I don’t want to give a false impression though; not all religious people deny the existence of beneficial mutations in humans. While doing some research I stumbled upon this Ratio Christi article that concedes their existence.

Outsourcing Child Abuse

Imagine if parents told their children this:

If you always agree with our views, you will live a very pleasant life. If you disagree with our views however, we will torture you for as long as you exist.

This would seem like some form of child abuse, right? Then if we are to be consistent, should we not say the same thing about religious parents who tell their child the same thing but outsource the reward/torturing job to a deity?

Then of course there’s the problems with the existence of a supposedly morally good deity behaving in a manner akin to child abuse. Should God behave this way towards children—or for that matter people of any age? Would a good deity torture people forever simply because they weren’t convinced he was real?

I should add as a caveat that these problems don’t apply to all religions or religious families, but for those it does apply, it does seem to be a criticism worth considering.

Radiometric Dating and the Bill Nye Debate

In the Bill Nye versus young earth creationist Ken Ham debate, Ken gives this response to radiometric dating:

Unfortunately, Bill Nye did not have a satisfactory response to this. Is there one? Yep. Notice from the above video it is apparent that a creationist took the samples and then sent them off to the laboratory for dating (Potassium-Argon for the basalt and radiocarbon for the wood). There is a method of radiometric dating called isochron dating that has a built-in check for most forms of contamination. However, Chris Stassen of TalkOrigins notes that

some dating methods (e.g., K-Ar and carbon-14) do not have a built-in check for contamination, and if there has been contamination these methods will produce a meaningless age. For this reason, the results of such dating methods are not treated with as much confidence.

Bingo: a creationist sent in some stuff for dating when the dating method in question had no built-in check for contamination! Potassium-Argon and radiocarbon dating is not necessarily useless, but one does have to be careful about not sending in contaminated samples, and I am willing to bet the creationists who took the samples did not do that.

A Strange Effect of Following the Herd

A while ago I read an article about a psychological theory that explains political dysfunction in Washington. People try to see what their group approves of and then go along with the group, even if it actually goes against what the group is about! An excerpt:

Some students read about a program that was extremely generous—more generous, in fact, than any welfare policy that has ever existed in the United States—while others were presented with a very stingy proposal. But there was a twist: some versions of the article about the generous proposal portrayed it as being endorsed by Republican Party leaders; and some versions of the article about the meagre program described it as having Democratic support. The results showed that, “for both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one.”

Strange isn’t it? Trying to get along with what the group is thinking is nothing new and helps explain some pretty ludicrous things that religious people believe and how independent thought can make people less religious.

The Religious

I won’t belabor the point too long in talking about how the principle applies to the religious since I’m guessing most who read this agree with the principle applying to religion, but let’s take one that explicitly conflicts with science: young earth creationism (YEC). How can people seriously believe this? I know, there is the Bible, but with loads of Christians willing to take a more figurative interpretation of Genesis, and scientific evidence providing a pretty strong motivation to take the figurative route, not to mention just plain looking foolish for embracing YEC, why do so many embrace YEC?

First, we should understand the point of view of a young earth creationist (which I will also abbreviate as YEC). Most YEC’s don’t have expertise in a relevant scientific field. For most laypersons it simply boils down to “Who do you trust?” To the completely unprejudiced observer who doesn’t care about what he majority scientific opinion is, and wants to follow the evidence where it leads, but has no expertise in science, all too often whoever seems right is whoever has the last word. The disagreement boils down to (1) what the facts are; (2) how the facts are to be interpreted (e.g. a creationist or evolutionist explanation). If both sides explicitly agree on (1), item (2) can come into play and people and judge for themselves which side is offering the best explanation of the agreed-upon facts. Unfortunately we seldom have a case where everybody agrees on a set of facts and each side offers their own different interpretations, so it becomes more of a game of “Who do you trust?” and critical thinking becomes undermined before it can even begin, at least for those who don’t care about the majority scientific opinion and just want to follow the evidence. When you add this to the fact that many YEC’s lack sufficient critical thinking skills to begin with (at last when it comes to critiquing their own side), we can begin to understand why YEC still exists despite overwhelming scientific evidence against it. YEC’s greatly trust YEC scientists (and unfortunately, there some YEC’s with doctorates in scientific fields) and do not trust pro-evolution scientists because those scientists are “biased” towards evolution—just as many evolutionists trust pro-evolution scientists while rejecting the testimony of YEC scientists as biased.

A Cause for Caution for Atheists

But just as both sides of the political aisle susceptible to this phenomena, so too are both sides of the atheism versus theism debate. Consider my You Can’t Prove a Negative article. The “you can’t prove a negative” thing is the sort of drivel one would expect from a religious idiot wanting to undermine the view that God doesn’t exist. Yet I’ve seen atheists parrot this nonsense too, even when this is the sort of thing that goes against atheism.

I did a painstaking study of an atheist using bad objections instead of good ones in my Rosenberg versus William Lane Craig series, pointing out much better objections to Craig’s arguments. I had asked myself, “Why are atheist debaters employing such an intellectually inferior case for atheism?” No doubt part of it is simply lack of adequate preparation, but the atheists who tend to be very avid about their atheism could be caught up in the sort of emotional zealotry that both conservatives and liberals do. And emotional zealotry, whether in politics or religion, atheism or theism, helps breed irrationality and blind devotion to what somebody in the group says.

To take a specific example of a pro-atheism mistake that might be propagated due to people adhering to a group, consider the popular Euthyphro dilemma objection against divine command theory (the theory that what is moral is grounded in God’s commands). In some cases this objection works great, but the problem is that it is often applied incorrectly.

For those who don’t know, the Euthyphro dilemma goes a bit like this (there are some variants): is something moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it is moral? If it’s the first option (something is moral because God commands it), then what is moral becomes arbitrary and it would be whatever God commands; God could command us to rape babies and it would be moral for us to rape babies. If it’s the second option (God command it because it is moral), then morality holds independently of what God commands.

One question: would morality be arbitrary if it were grounded in God’s commands? Well, that depends on the deity being talked about. If the deity in question has the ability to arbitrarily command things like rape babies, then the objection works great. Let me repeat that: the Euthyphro objection works great against some deities. Some theists do believe that God, being omnipotent, is capable of commanding us to rape babies even if he chooses not to do so. But then if this God grounded morality, it would be possible for raping babies to be moral, when clearly such a thing is not possible. The problem is this though: the idea that God has the ability to command things like raping babies isn’t all that common among modern divine command theorists, even if God having that ability to make such arbitrary commands was popular with divine command theorists in the past. Rather, the sort of deity they believe in is different.

The idea is that God (for whatever reason) has a certain nature in every possible world, and since the sort of commands he makes flow necessarily from his nature (or at least have to be consistent with that nature) God’s commands wouldn’t be arbitrary. For example, a theist could believe that since God has a loving and just nature in every possible world, God issues certain commands such as loving thy neighbor because of this nature, and there is no possible world where God commands us to e.g. rape babies because that would conflict with this deity’s nature. To be sure, this sort of deity grounding morality has problems (such as whether a loving and just God would allow so much injustice in the world), but notice that the correct refutation here isn’t that “God’s commands would be arbitrary” because the commands wouldn’t be arbitrary with this particular deity, since this particular deity does not have the ability to make arbitrary commands and can only make commands that fit his loving nature. The atheist would need a different objection against this sort of deity. A better objection would be to note that simpler explanations are often better, and it’s simpler just to cut out the magic middleman. Sure, a magical deity could be responsible for morality, just like a magic deity could be responsible for a few modern earthquakes in some empirically undetectable way, but it seems far more reasonable to dispense with magical invisible persons if we don’t need them to explain reality, and we don’t need a magical invisible person to explain morality any more than we need one to explain modern earthquakes.

Despite the existence of this better objection that works more uniformly across various gods, the Euthyphro objection is still pushed as if it were an effective objection, when it typically isn’t against the sort of deity that Craig and other divine command theorists believe in. The Euthyphro objection shouldn’t be used against deities it doesn’t apply to, and yet it’s difficult to see the Euthyphro objection fading in popularity anytime soon even in just those cases where the Euthyphro objection doesn’t work. That said, I don’t think this error is quite as serious as those theists who embrace YEC.

2013 Year in Review

So it’s the end of the year which means it’s time for a review. I didn’t get all I wanted to get done this year, but I’ve had some notable moments.

One article I am proud of is Disproof of Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven. For those who don’t know, Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who claimed the following. He was in a coma induced by bacterial meningitis that left him with an all-but-destroyed brain. As such, while in this coma he was incapable of hallucinating or dreaming what he experienced: a trip to heaven. Eben Alexander also had some memories of surrounding events while he was in his coma. As you might expect, this story is baloney. I picked some juicy tidbits of one journalistic investigation exposing this fraud but I also did some of my own research that suggests some interesting and fairly shady things about Eben Alexander.

Another big thing is my series on William Lane Craig versus Rosenberg. An atheist philosopher Alex Rosenberg debated Christian philosopher William Lane Craig over whether faith in God is reasonable. I’ve complained in the past about how atheists screw up royally in presenting the case for atheism in debates against the likes of William Lane Craig, and in this series I painstakingly examine what Rosenberg did, what he did wrong, and how he could have done better. I have (possibly vain) hope that this will help atheists do better in debates against Craig.

So those are the two big ones. Other stuff:

• I attacked William Lane Craig’s infamous kalam cosmological argument.
• I argued for the presumption of atheism, mentioning one bad but tempting way to argue for it and giving a much better way to argue for it.
• Who Goes to Heaven and Hell? Here I debunk theory after theory (e.g. only those who believe in Jesus get to heaven, the rest go to hell) a religious person might believe, while also noting a more general problem.
• William Lane Craig’s Concession: Atheism is Not Implausible. Yep, pretty much what the title says. It's a notable concession for someone who has been arguing against it for decades.
• Are Debates Worthwhile? Some atheists think that atheism versus theism debates (of the structured, public sort that William Lane Craig participates in) are not worthwhile. Is that true?
• Why doesn’t God heal amputees? Lots of supposed miracles have been claimed, but amputees getting their limbs back? Not so much. Here I give some insight as to why this sort of miracle (and non-miracle) assertion pattern has occurred. A related article is Bad Timing, discussing the when-you-think-about-it odd choice for God when would choose to use his supernatural fireworks.
• Apologetics for Genocide. William Lane Craig has earned some notoriety for defending the genocide depicted in the Bible. Richard Dawkins gave a response to this that was surprisingly bad, so I gave a better one, arguing that deep down Christians know that if God exists he is not like the deity depicted in the Old Testament.
• Lastly, I countered the objection one Christian minister launched against atheism, the old “You can’t prove a negative” claim to explain why this oft-repeated nonsense is, well, nonsense.

So, yeah. I hope to do even more next year to advance reason and intelligently argue for atheism. Have a happy and logical new year everyone!

You Can’t Prove a Negative?

A Christian minister from Georgia by the name of Dr. Nelson L. Price wrote on his website, “One of the laws of logic is that you can’t prove a negative.” It’s no surprise that an ignorant religious man would use the “You can’t prove a negative” claim to undermine the justification for atheism, but this is the sort of claim that isn’t unique to such people. The 2008-06-25 Doonesbury comic claimed it was “philosophically impossible” to prove a negative. To make matters worse, I have, ironically enough, seen even atheists claim that you can’t prove a negative! So for Christians who wish to undermine atheism, comic strip writers, misguided atheists, and for those who just like reason and logic, let’s discuss this topic.

First, when you encounter someone who says, “You can’t prove a negative,” ask them to prove it. A few seconds after they start trying to prove it, inform them that by proving it they would be undermining their own position that “You can’t prove a negative.”

Second, there are some pretty obvious counterexamples to “You can’t prove a negative” in math, logic, science, and everyday life. One example is Euclid’s proof that there is no greatest prime number. Another example is “There is no married bachelor.” Just delineate the meaning of the term “bachelor” and the rest is fairly self-explanatory. Yet another example (for most people) is “There is no pink elephant before my eyes right now that is highly visible to me.” All one has to do is look and there will be sufficient evidence for the nonexistence of the highly visible pink elephant. So one can prove a negative, both in the sense of rigorous proof like we have in math and logic, and also in the weaker sense of “having sufficiently strong evidence” (as in the case of the highly visible pink elephant). It’s also worth noting that science relies on evidentially-supported negatives all the time; that’s why science has physical laws, which tell us what is and isn’t physically possible.

Atheists above all people should reject the idea that we can’t prove the nonexistence of a thing. Even if “married bachelors” and “the greatest prime number” weren’t obvious examples of things we can prove don’t exist, what about God? Surely we can prove the nonexistence of God, at least in the sense of having sufficiently strong evidence against God’s existence, thanks at least in part to the argument from evil.

Apologetics for Genocide

The Problem

Deuteronomy 20:16-18 reports God seemingly ordering a genocide (“do not leave anything alive that breathes” in the NIV). Other verses could be used, e.g. Joshua 10:40 where the “don’t leave alive anything that breathes” sort of language is used again, and 1 Samuel 15:3 where God seemingly orders the killing of men, women, children, and infants. These passages should be troubling for anybody who is a Christian or is considering Christianity.

Christians deal with these troublesome passages in different ways. Some Christians reject Biblical inerrancy, believing the writings of the New Testament to be more reliable than e.g. Deuteronomy and the books of Samuel, and there is at least some rational basis for this. Mainstream historians date the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and the letters of Paul to within the first century, a few decades after the alleged resurrection of Jesus. In contrast, mainstream scholarship dates Deuteronomy, Joshua, and the books of Samuel centuries after the alleged events took place. If you’re a Christian who rejects Biblical inerrancy, it’s not hard to guess which set of books is more likely to contain reliable information.

Some Christians, such as Paul Copan, don’t interpret the Bible in such a way that such a widespread slaughter took place, but rather as hyperbole to describe the Israelites crushing military opposition, similar to how a football coach would say “We murdered the other team” to describe soundly trouncing the opposing team in a game. Odd as that may seem, there is precedent for this in the Ancient Near East, using the hyperbole of total devastation to describe a victory. For example, Hittite king Mursili II who ruled in the early 13th and 14th century BCE is recorded as saying that he emptied certain mountains of humanity, when this wasn’t literally true. At around 1230 BCE, Rameses II’s son Merenptah said, within the context of a military campaign in an inscription known as the Merneptah Stele, that Israel has been wiped out and that its seed does not exist. There is also some evidence for the non-literal and hyperbole interpretation within the Old Testament itself. For example, 1 Samuel 15 ostensibly has all of the Amalekites being destroyed (remember 1 Samuel 15:3?) but the Amalekites pop up again in 1 Samuel 27:8 where David raided the Amalekites. The Biblical inerrantist could easily interpret 1 Samuel 15 as coinciding with Ancient Near Eastern hyperbole.

Still, there are those Christians who interpret some of the more barbaric passages more literally. William Lane Craig for instance seems to think that a perfectly good God might do something like this with respect to the slaughter of Canaanite men, women, and children.

In fairness to Craig, he doesn’t consider it genocide. Why? Craig says this:

The judgment of God upon these tribal groups, which had become so incredibly debauched by that time, is that they were being divested of their land. Canaan was being given over to Israel, whom God had now brought out of Egypt. If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at all. There was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanite peoples.

It is therefore completely misleading to characterize God’s command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated.

But what if they all stayed (the Bible doesn’t say they did, but still…)? Wouldn’t that be genocide? When dealing with apparent mass slaughters in the Old Testament, some Christians seem to define genocide narrowly so that only those cases where the slaughter is due to ethnicity will it count as genocide. For example, Justin Taylor’s blog at the Gospel Coalition says:

“Ethnic cleansing” and genocide refer to destruction of a people due to their ethnicity, and therefore this would be an inappropriate category for the destruction of the Canaanites.

One could define the word “genocide” to mean that if they want, but there also exists the broader definition in which deliberately killing a large group of a nation’s people is enough to constitute genocide. Using the narrow definition while ignoring the broader definition seems like an unsuccessful attempt at avoiding the unpleasant label of “genocide.”

William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig has gained some notoriety in the world of internet atheism for being an apologist for genocide. Here is what William Lane Craig has to say:

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged?

So according to Craig, in this story neither the Canaanite adults (deserving of judgment) nor the children (who go to heaven) were wronged. Craig then goes into some stuff about how the people doing the killing were the most wronged, and then explains (successfully or otherwise) how they weren’t wronged. You can see Dawkins criticize Craig on this sort of thing here, even quoting all the same words that I just did.

What Dawkins doesn’t do though is offer much of a rebuttal to Craig’s argument; instead he expresses his moral disgust of Craig. Maybe Dawkins thought no rebuttal is needed, but if the answer to “Who was wronged?” is “Nobody” then we need to reconsider our intellectual grounds for rejecting Craig’s argument if we don’t have any real rebuttal. If we can’t find anybody who was actually wronged by what we’re trying to call an atrocity, we need to offer more than just emotional disgust to defeat Craig’s position.

On the surface at least Craig’s response would seem to have some merit; certainly anybody deserving of the death penalty wouldn’t be wronged in being killed on the orders of the supreme judge in the universe, and the Israelites effectively transport the children to a very pleasant place, so that the children wouldn’t be wronged either. You might think the children were wronged by being separated from their parents, but if the parents were really deserving of the death penalty, this wouldn’t be so bad. Even if they weren’t deserving of the death penalty, a Christian could say the really good parents were not separated from their children but were with them in heaven. So who was wronged? And why is it more difficult than normal to find who was wronged in a story about genocide?

Here’s why: in Craig’s fairy tale, God has basically rigged everything so that actions that would otherwise have horrible consequences—especially in a worldview in which there is no afterlife—actually have good consequences. For example, in Craig’s story the dead children go to heaven, whereas an atheist might believe that any murdered children simply cease to exist. Even if some of the adults killed were innocent, on Craig’s view they would have been judged fairly by God. Again, an atheist might believe any killed person simply ceases to be.

An omnipotent God could arrange the world in such a way that actions that are terrible in the real world turn out to be good, e.g. God creating a world where shooting people actually makes them healthier, and where killing children doesn’t make the cease to be but instead merely transports them to a very pleasant place. It’s the sort of situation that makes “A good God would never order someone to do X” a lot trickier. One could claim, “A good God could never order us to shoot children” and the theist might reply, “But what about a situation where God arranged the world so that shooting children makes them healthier and doesn’t harm them in any way…”

The situation of an omnipotent deity being able to change the rules like that also cuts down other would-be objections. For instance, one could argue that he children suffered horribly when the Israelites killed them. But an omnipotent deity changes the game: the Christian could say something like, “Maybe God made them all sleep while this happened in a way that the children felt no pain at all.” Granted, the Bible doesn’t say this supernatural anesthesia happened, but it doesn’t contradict it either, and the Christian is free to speculate about matters that don’t contradict their holy book.

It might be tempting to argue that this Christian’s ad hoc damage control in positing supernatural anesthesia should be rejected and that the Christian should accept the “God ordered the massacre without anesthesia” belief instead. One problem with this response though is that it’s the Christian’s religion, not ours, and like it or not it’s their fairy tale to make up or add to as they please. We don’t want to tell them their fairy tale is false and that they should accept some other fairy tale—at least not when the replacement fairy tale is where a “perfectly good” God is more savage and brutal. It’s better to get the theist to abandon fairy tales altogether.

Another Approach

So where do we go from here? Does the omnipotent God being able to change the rules like that render the genocide story immune to intellectual criticism? No. There is something we could call the “Do you really believe it?” test. If a woman claims that God told her to kill her sleeping son, we would all think she’s nuts. In fact, most Christians would think she’s nuts. If a leader of a country kills men, women, and children saying God commanded him to do it, we would all think he’s nuts. In fact, most Christians would think he’s nuts. It seems as though deep down they know a perfectly good God wouldn’t order things like that. If there is an infallibly good God, it seems he would think it’s good for us and our children to live out our lives without anybody murdering them, hence our skepticism towards someone saying God ordered them to commit genocide. The Christian (at least the Christian who believes the massacres happened) needs to give us a good reason why we should be skeptical of someone in modern times claiming God ordered them to slaughter men, women and children and not so skeptical of the story in which God allegedly orders the massacres depicted in the (literal interpretation of) the Old Testament.