Category: Atheism

A Confusing Kind of Atheist

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A problem that atheists face is that there’s no way to rationally ground morality within an irrational universe, which is to say, within a Godless universe. Different atheists approach this problem differently—most just do their best to ignore it—but there’s a kind that really perplexes me. This is the kind who says, “if you need religion to be good, that means you’re not good.”

(This is not quite as stupid as it looks on first blush, or rather, it’s as stupid as it looks but not for the reason it looks so stupid. They’re thinking entirely of “religion” as lists of rules like the ten commandments, rather than as as a description of the nature of the universe. Thus they are trying to say something like, “if you need a list of rules to follow it means that you don’t just automatically do everything good.” Which is, of course, true, though one wonders how absurdly hubristic or non-self-aware these people are that they are implicitly claiming that they’re perfect. Especially when they quite obviously aren’t.)

This kind of atheist invariably tries to argue that if a person ever needs to exercise self-restraint, that means that they’re a bad person. It is probably not entirely a coincidence that this kind of atheist is always a gentle autist who would have difficulty picking up a five pound bag of flour. I’ve no difficulty believing that they do not harm others because of any kind of self-restraint, since they’re so weak and unmasculine that they undoubtedly have no aggressive impulses at all. That much makes sense. What confuses me is how proud of this they are. It’s like they want a medal for their lack of ambition. They want people to look up to them for being physically useless.

Even weirder to me is how grossly historically ignorant they are. It never seems to occur to them that even a moderately knowledgeable person would be unable to name a time and place in which a strong, aggressive person who is sufficiently skilled at channeling their aggression so as to be successful—the kings of expanding kingdoms, for example—would not be at the top of social hierarchy while people like them—men who, to use Critical Drinker’s phrase, look like they use safety scissors to open a packet of crisps—would be at the bottom.

No one—anywhere—has ever given out medals for lacking ambition.

Debunking Determinism

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Missing the Mark, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

Since so many people who commented on my video about how determinism doesn’t exclude God, it excludes human beings seemed to want this video, instead, here’s a video debunking determinism.

This is my first time using a teleprompter (way less work than recording the audio, editing it, then finding images and editing them into the video), and I’m curious how well this works as a format.

Here’s Determinism Doesn’t Exclude God, It Excludes Human Beings:

The Universe Can’t Have Always Existed

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized4 Comments

One of the stranger things that one comes upon from atheists is the idea that the universe always existed. This is obviously impossible because it’s a simple contradiction in terms because simple observation shows that things happen because of causal linkage. Though it is more common for people to describe this model as “a causal chain that never started”, it would be more accurate to describe this model as “an infinite series that terminated.” I’m referring to the mathematical concept of an infinite series, so I think it might make sense to pause for a moment to explain what little you need to know about the mathematics of infinite series because most people don’t study higher mathematics.

Speaking a little loosely, an infinite series consists of two things:

  1. A starting value (optional)
  2. A way to generate the next value from its index in the list, the previous values, or both

One example of an infinite series, N, is: N1=1, Ni+1=Ni+1. That is, the first element in the series is 1 and each successive element is the element before it, plus one.

That’s it. That’s all infinite series are. They can be defined any way you want; you can reference more than one element, such as in the famous Fibonacci sequence where (starting with the third element) each element is the sum of the previous two. You can define them without reference to the previous element, such as a series of numbers where each is the index squared (1, 4, 9, 25, 36…). But in each case, what you have is a rule for how to generate all of the elements. What you don’t have is the elements. Yet.

This gets us to the famous mathematical fact that “infinity is not a number.” Infinity isn’t a thing, it’s rather the concept of, “you never stop.” If you ever stop, it’s not infinity. And as you can see in how we defined the infinite series above, it never stops. That’s what makes it an infinite series.

Now, the moments of time clearly form a series; they are ordered not merely by the passage of time but also by causal connections. If I push a glass off of the table, it falls after I pushed it and not before.

Now, the thing is, the set of all moments leading up to the present moment forms a sequence with a final element. A sequence with a final element, by definition, is a finite sequence. However, by the hypothesis of the world always having existed, this would be a finite sequence with infinitely many elements. That’s a contradiction, and since it is indisputable that the sequence of moments leading up to the present moment has a final element, the number of elements in that set cannot be infinite. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Uncowed by mere logic and obvious truth, the atheists who hold this kind of thing will then say that there’s no reason you have to stop when counting backwards. It could be infinite in that direction! Whether or not that’s true, it’s irrelevant, because time doesn’t go that way. Time moves forwards, not backwards. God, or the laws of physics, or brute facts, or a drunken elf named Fred, or something clearly already picked a direction for time to flow, and we’re all stuck with it. All manner of things might be true if we lived in a completely different universe than the one we live in, and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club if tautology club has rules and they’re well ordered. (Mathematically, a well-ordered set is an ordered set which has a first element. Not all ordered sets do. The rational numbers greater than zero under the standard ordering are not well-ordered, for example, because for any hypothetical first element, simply divide it in half an you have a rational number which comes before it.)

Interestingly, it has been a common theme in arguments for God to simply side-step the problem and give arguments which do not rely on the universe having started. The argument from motion (change) and the the argument from contingency and necessity are the two most obvious examples. Plenty of others don’t require it, either. (The Kalam cosmological argument is the obvious exception, of course.) I can see the appeal of simply side-stepping the problem since it’s irrelevant, but I do somewhat wonder at the wisdom of it. It may be falling on the wrong side of answering a fool according to his folly; by allowing people to persist in holding as true something that’s obviously wrong, it has allowed the fools to be wise in their own eyes.

Then again, they’d do that anyway. Most of them are clearly not seriously thinking through their own ideas. But for the few of them who are, I think it’s worth at least pointing out that the universe can’t have existed forever before explaining why it doesn’t matter anyway.

The Idolatry of Art

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Something I’ve come across in real life, but far more in (English) literature from the early-through-mid 1900s, is a weird idolatry of art. In real life this tends to be an excuse by young women to tolerate things they shouldn’t tolerate from good looking men they’re attracted to. In literature, though, there is generally far less of an obvious explanation for it.

Chesterton talked about the phenomenon as “art for art’s sake” and the thing always strikes me as having one of the great hallmarks of desperation: a mighty struggle to pretend that a thing is what one wants it to be.

I think I would do well, at this point, to give an example of what I mean. A good one that comes to mind is in Dorothy L. Sayers’ masterpiece, Gaudy Night.

“You see how easy it is, when you stick to the rules,” said Wimsey. “Miss Vane feels no compunction. She wipes me out with a firm hand, rather than damage my reputation. But the question isn’t always so simple. How about the artist of genius who has to choose between letting his family starve and painting pot-boilers to keep them?”

“He has no business to have a wife and family,” said Miss Hillyard.

“Poor devil! Then he has the further interesting choice between repressions and immorality. Mrs. Goodwin, I gather, would object to the repressions and some people might object to the immorality.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Miss Pyke. “You have hypothesized a wife and family. Well—he could stop painting. That, if he really is a genius, would be a loss to the world. But he mustn’t paint bad pictures—that would be really immoral.”

“Why?” asked Miss Edwards. “What do a few bad pictures matter, more or less?”

“Of course they matter,” said Miss Shaw. She knew a good deal about painting. “A bad picture by a good painter is a betrayal of truth—his own truth.”

Now that I’ve typed it out it’s not quite what I had in mind. You can see it, perhaps more clearly, in The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man With No Face. I can’t give details without spoiling the story (it’s a short story), but murder is committed because of an obsession with art and offense taken at the quality of the art not being recognized.

You also see this kind of thing, though not shared by the rest of the cast, in the character of Henrietta Savernake in The Hollow. She is disconnected from the rest of humanity because she is so intensely an artist, and art is more important than life. She went around in a daze trying to find the perfect model for a statue she was sculpting, then destroyed it because she realized she had, in some indefinable way, included the spite of the model (who blathered on self-importantly while modeling) into the face which otherwise had exactly what she wanted. But she wasn’t just discontent with it, she woke up from sleeping with this terrible revelation and had to run and destroy the sculpture immediately while she still had the power to do it and wasn’t too attached to it. You can also see this in how she couldn’t mourn the victim, she could only make a sculpture to express her grief.

You can see a similar thing, though in negative, in the discussion of Ann Dormer’s paintings in the Lord Peter story The Unpleasantness At the Bellona Club. Ann Dorland’s paintings were judged terrible. Not merely incompetent, but outright bad. It has something of the flavor of the ancient Greek horror at hubris.

I’ve seen many similar things which, unfortunately, are not coming to mind; hopefully you have too and know to what I am referring.

The phenomenon of artist-as-creative-god seems to be a phenomenon of, primarily, the first half of the nineteen hundreds. As far as I can tell it did predate the first world war, though it does not seem to have outlasted the second.

I can’t help but wonder if this is related to what G.K. Chesterton said (in Orthodoxy) about the will-worshipers:

At the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination. A man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches. Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world. They see that reason destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it. I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will. It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism. But however it began, the view is common enough in current literature. The main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers; they are makers. They say that choice is itself the divine thing. Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men’s acts are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness. He says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will. He does not say, “Jam will make me happy,” but “I want jam.” And in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm. Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited about it that he is obliged to write prose. He publishes a short play with several long prefaces. This is natural enough in Mr. Shaw, for all his plays are prefaces: Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry. But that Mr. Davidson (who can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine of will has taken hold of men. Even Mr. H.G.Wells has half spoken in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, “I FEEL this curve is right,” or “that line SHALL go thus.” They are all excited; and well they may be. For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they can break out of the doomed fortress of  rationalism. They think they can escape.

The Modern world, which was very much confronting the problems of Modern Philosophy in the late 1800s, faces the problem of the radical skepticism which defined Modern Philosophy. It is in the prison of doubt and has trouble bringing itself to that faith required even for simple things like getting up in the morning. (If anyone doubts this, one merely needs to look at the rate of prescriptions for antidepressants.) It strikes me that there might be a relation, here. That is, the worship of art was, perhaps, a moderately disguised worship of will in an attempt to evade the mental paralysis of Modern Philosophy. It was not sensible because it was driven by desperation.

I don’t know if this is the explanation, but it does explain the phenomenon.

Science vs. Religion Show Why Heresy Matters

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Uncategorized1 Comment

The “war between science and religion” does not really exist according to those English words in that order, and was a terrible name for what it actually did refer to. What it really should have been called was “the war between science and a particular widespread-in-the-english-speaking-world Christian heresy.” Because that’s what it actually was. I’m going to explain, briefly, before I get to the main point, which is that heresy matters.

The Book of Beginnings (more commonly known as the Book of Genesis since it frequently gets left untranslated) is obviously not meant to be anything like a science textbook, for the very obvious reason that it contains, back-to-back, two creation stories which disagree with each other about the sorts of things that a science textbook primarily concerns itself with. Whether Human Beings are the pinnacle of material creation as the end of a triumphant process or whether they are the pinnacle of creation as being given the right to name everything does not much matter to the central point of Human Beings being the pinnacle of material creation, but it matters very much to the question of which came first: the human or the chicken? It does not take a genius to figure out that the book can’t have been written primarily to answer questions it treats as irrelevant.

It doesn’t take a genius, but it does take someone who has thought about this a bit and can understand things like literary purpose. That’s not everyone. And here we come to the heresy of Sola Scriptura.

Sola Scriptura, which is the doctrine that scripture is the only authority, requires a somewhat lengthy treatment to be dealt with in full. This lengthy treatment can be found in many places so I’m not going to present it here. The relevant part to the moment is that Sola Scriptura means, as a necessary consequent, that any person (of good will/faith) who reads the bible must understand it fully and completely. (Martin Luther tried to get around this problem, in On the Bondage of the Will, by claiming that the parts of scripture that are hard to understand say the same thing as other parts, just less clearly, and so it’s not necessary to understand any part that’s hard to understand. Setting aside the astonishing hubris of claiming to fully and completely understand scripture, that doesn’t actually help anyway.)

This means that people who don’t get the concept of literary purpose, metaphor, etc. must be able to entirely understand scripture. Worse, this must be without any learning, because there are plenty of uneducated people in the world and even if there weren’t the educators would then have some of the authority since they would be teaching how to properly interpret.

The unintended consequence of this is that people who believe Sola Scriptura and who know any uneducated people or people who otherwise don’t understand things like literary intent and metaphor are forced to hold that the Book of Genesis is in fact meant as a science textbook. This puts them at war with actual science, because actual science disagreeing with the parts of Genesis which were never meant to be a science textbook will show that Sola Scriptura is false. This is “the war between science and religion.”

And this is where we come to the part where ideas have consequences: “the war between science and religion” has hurt a lot of people. Sola Fide has hurt even more people, since Sola Scriptura is just a consequence of Sola Fide. Sola Fide wouldn’t even be so bad except for Martin Luther having redefined faith from meaning, roughly, “acting according to truths we know but for which the evidence is no longer apparent” to “the will creating reality.” More colloquially, “trusting someone trustworthy” to “generating an interior feeling of certainty.” Moving faith from an act of the intellect and will in harmony to an act of the will against the intellect is, in essence, rejecting truth. And here’s the thing: Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. What Martin Luther tried to do, with Sola Fide, was to have Christianity without Christ. But you can’t do that. Which is why Martin Luther’s protestantism is proto-atheism. At some point you can’t keep up the pretense of having Christianity without Christ. Or to put it more simply: the fact that, within Christianity, there is nothing more important than the truth will eventually reassert itself. The bible cannot be the only authority because it cannot be any kind of authority. It’s a book. It is the thing authored, it is not an author itself. If the bible is the only authority, then there is no authority, and that this is logically necessary can only be evaded by an act of the will for so long. Historically, that turned out to not be very long.

It is not pleasant to call a heresy a heresy. When Saint Thomas More called William Roper, who had just asked for the hand of Sir Thomas’s daughter, a heretic, Roper replied, with great feeling, “Now that’s a word I don’t like.” To which Sir Thomas replied, “It’s not a likable word. It’s not a likable thing.” That gets to the heart of it: it’s not a likable word because it’s not a likable thing. It’s natural that people don’t like things which are not likable, but it remains important none the less.

Ideas have consequences. It is not pleasant to fight over ideas, but if we don’t fight over ideas we will still end up fighting. We will just fight over the consequences.

The Argument From Evil You Usually See Is Stupid

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized4 Comments

The argument against God’s existence from evil comes in a few forms. The most reasonable form was given by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica in the 1200s.

It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.

This rests on a misunderstanding of evil, seeing evil as a positive thing rather than a privation of good that only appears to exist in the same way that shadows appear to exist. That’s not immediately obvious about evil, so this form is not stupid.

The simpler answer, btw, is that God permits evil so as to bring about greater good from it, or as Saint Thomas said:

As Augustine says (Enchiridion xi): “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.” This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.

This form of the argument from evil is reasonable because it depends on a kind of ignorance which a reasonable person may have. That is, reasonable people may make this argument. The thing is, once answered, because they are reasonable and merely lacked some knowledge necessary to understand, once answered (well), they are intellectually satisfied and stop bring forth this argument.

This is like the people who have not heard the evidence that the earth is spinning on its axis and orbiting about the sun, and who naturally assume the earth to be stationary and the sun to be moving around the earth because this is the evidence of their senses. It is a reasonable conclusion given their limited knowledge but once their knowledge is expanded, they stop making the argument.

Then we come to the argument from evil as one tends to encounter it today.

This takes on quite a lot of forms, often from the same person. I’m only going to present one example since they all amount to the same thing, and as the ancient saying goes, one does not need to drink the whole sea to know that it is salt.

If a human father allowed his child to die when he had the power to save him, we would say that he is evil. Since God is omnipotent he could stop all death, so if you didn’t give God a special exception, you would admit that he is evil. Therefore God is either not good or does not exist.

To state the obvious (since atheists do occasionally read my blog posts) this argument rests on an obvious category error, as well as a misunderstanding of human fathers.

To briefly address the first, God is not a human father, and is only our Heavenly Father by analogy to a human father. As you can see from the argument from contingency and necessity, God is the ground of our being. His relationship is in some ways more analogous to that of an author to the characters in his novel than it is to a human father. (NOTE: I am not criticizing the metaphor that God himself gave us, I’m only noting that that’s a general analogy and that, for the purposes of this particular narrow concern that it was not meant for, it is less illuminating.) A human father is another creature in the same time and space as his child. God creates time and space as well as the human beings in it. This is why he is omnipotent and omniscent, but also why his violations of the rules which govern us do not violate their spirit. Rules are abstractions meant to enable finite creatures to navigate a world which is too complex for them. God fulfills the spirit of the rules—goodness—without being limited to the abstractions because his complete knowledge and ability to handle it all enables him to do so. Embedded within all human ethics—for those who take some trouble to try to understand human ethics—is the fact of our necessarily limited knowledge.

But the difference is still greater.

We are finite beings, which means that what we are given is finite. It is no harm to us to not give us more than we are given, since we are owed nothing. Every moment we are given is a gift. Humans are not to try to cut that short (except for a variety of justified exceptions) because it is the gift of God, not the gift of humans, and so we have no right to try to limit the gift of God. The existence God gives to people is His gift, however, which gives him the perfect right to limit it to whatever finite quantity of generosity His wisdom decides is good.

(There will be atheists who will take this as an occasion to complain that they were given more than they deserved but they feel like they deserve infinitely much. These are just bad people who are pouring forth badness out of the store of badness in their hearts. There is no possible defense for a person who received a gift—that is, something he did nothing to deserve—complaining that he wanted a bigger gift.)

There are still further differences which are pretty obvious yet these atheists seem completely oblivious to them. We, because of our limited vision, see the death of a person as the end of that person. God, outside of time, necessarily sees it as a transition to the afterlife. From God’s perspective it’s far more like when a kid graduates college and gets a job—one phase of their life is over but the next has begun.

There’s more, but I think that suffices for my point. The other thing is that there are times when a loving father must let his son die when he could stop it. A simple example is when the son can go on a mission that will certainly result in his death but which will enable him to save many other people. The father could sabotage the son’s vehicle and save his life, or drug his food and save his life, but he would be a bad father to do this.

An atheist who saw that would, no doubt, scream about how maybe a father should do that—actually, though, these days I don’t trust them to have even that much moral sense, so it’s not a given—but that God is omnipotent so he could just save the people himself or whatever.

Which brings us to the point. Whatever exactly is going on here, it’s not thinking. They are not considering the things that they are saying as ideas, it’s all just fragments of ideas as a means to an end. It may just be a complaint that they don’t understand and will not trust. It may be something else. But whatever it is, it’s not anything like a coherent train of thought meant to get at truth.

I don’t know what such people need. Probably what they need more than anything is to repent, which we can’t do for them. Probably also to forgive their parents, though that could easily be related to the repentance. Holding onto the harms others have done us tends to be wrapped up in holding on our own evil. This, again, isn’t something we can do for them. Beyond that, my guess is that they need a good friend who will be there for them in bad times as well as good, and for a good long time. This can’t be done over the internet.

So about all I can think of is to pray for them. That’s really obvious, of course, but it does no harm to repeat it.

Lord, have mercy on them, and us.

If the Sun Didn’t Exist, Man Would Have Invented It

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized6 Comments

Voltaire famously said:

If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.

(This is often rendered a little more euphonically in English as “man would have invented him” or “man would have invented him anyway.”)

This is one of those statements which is often quoted as if it is profound, and not merely profoundly stupid. To show why, I will give a parallel”

If the Sun did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.

You see, if there was no sun, some explanation would be necessary for why there is light during the day, why you can get sunburned during the day but not the night, and as our understanding of astronomy increased, why the planets orbit around a central point as if there was some enormous mass there.

Of course, if the village atheist walked by he’d remark that if the Sun didn’t exist there wouldn’t be light during the day, you wouldn’t be able to get sunburned during the day rather than the night, the planets wouldn’t orbit around a central mass, and if he was especially clever, we wouldn’t even be here to “invent” the sun to explain these things that wouldn’t need an explanation because they wouldn’t happen.

And, if this hypothetical village atheist came by, he wouldn’t realize that he’s merely stated the point. Village atheists are strange people.

(He’s probably reply, “but I can see the Sun” and wouldn’t understand at all if you explained that this is why you chose that analogy, because in general they don’t understand analogies since analogies rely on the ability to apply logic. He will also completely misunderstand if you point out that he believes in the gravity of the Sun despite not being able to see (touch, taste, feel, etc) gravity. It would be utterly lost on him if you pointed out that you can’t actually see the Sun, you can only see the light coming from the Sun, and infer the Sun that produces this light.)

By Vectron

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Interesting Finds, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mitchell and Webb have a really funny sketch about mannerisms in a galactic empire:

I love the overall work that they put into the aesthetic—nice touches like the space station behind them and the guards standing in the hallway, motionless.

I also find it funny that there are gullible atheists of the dim-witted but aggressive sort who will think that this is an accurate description of why people believe in God, and how traditions came to be more generally. They’ll think this sketch is funny because, “see, that’s just how religion got formed!”

Whereas I think it funny because it’s obviously not how religion came to be, and such ideas are absolutely absurd when you put them into practical form.

By Vectron’s kindly claw.

Materialists Often Replace God With the Future

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized3 Comments

When listening to a review by Zarathustra’s Serpent of a David Bowie song whose theme was the announcement by news reporters that we only have five more years until the world ended and the ensuing chaos, I found Arad’s suggestion that moderns had replaced, as the foundation for morality and the reason for living, God with The Future. As soon as I’d heard this, I knew it to be right. It is very interesting.

It has widely been pointed out that if God is dead then all things are permitted. This is so because nothing has a nature and so it cannot be a violation of anything’s nature to change it or even to destroy it. If things are just brute facts and we change them, they are, in their new form, just more brute facts, and there is no real way to choose between them. (This is why Nietzsche saw that humanity needed a superman who could create values and impose them by his will, such that it would become possible to live by something other than sheer will.) The superman has never come, though he has been long waited for. It seems that, while they waited, people can up with an alternative. If they could no longer live for today, they could yet live for the future.

It’s a solution that is not without its problems. It only works if one can keep up a very short shortsightedness; any contemplation of The Future as an idea reveals how empty it is. Whatever future one sacrifices for today will only be a present that must sacrifice for its own yet-to-come. Another fatal flaw is that even a cursory knowledge of history will show how utterly unpredictable the future is and how little one can realize any goal for it. To quote Jane Austen, however, desperate people are not always wise. Further, there is a sort of wisdom in a fool making plans which will only work if he remains a fool—that is what he is most likely to do.

In short, it is not philosophically coherent, but it does explain why it is that so many materialists deny that if God is dead all things are permitted.

Too Funny To Not Share

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized3 Comments

Yesterday evening, a YouTube atheist whose channel is named “TheSkepTick” (he’s British or from some commonwealth country so he means a check mark, not a blood sucking insect) made a video about one of mine. (Specifically, about the first in the Stupid Things Atheists Say series.) Since his videos get several thousand views, this has result in hundreds of comments from angry atheists telling me how stupid I am, how I understand nothing, that I’m projecting, etc. etc. etc.

I’ve no interest in watching the video, but I was mildly curious who TheSkepTick was since I’d never heard of the channel before, so I searched him up on YouTube. Then I looked at his About page. This is the part that’s too funny to not share.

A brand new channel, making Atheism & Skepticism more accessible to a wider audience. A lot of the atheist community, in my mind, sound REALLY smart, because of the huge words and fast paced rebuttals they use. It’s not all like that, you can be like me, not overly intelligent, and look at why people believe things, then question it, simply, yet effectively.

Pray for them, please.

Empathy Is Such a Stupid Basis For Morality

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, Uncategorized28 Comments

If you’ve spent more than a few minutes arguing with atheists on the internet, the subject of how they justify morality will have come up and they will have tried to justify it by saying that “they have empathy”. Usually, though not always, in very self-satisfied tones. It is curious that they are oblivious to how stupid this is. And not just in one way.

The first problem, of course, is that empathy doesn’t inevitably lead to treating people well. It’s very easy to lie to people because one doesn’t want them to suffer, to give too much candy to a child because you can’t bear to hear them cry, to give alcohol to an alcoholic because he feels miserable without it, etc. Empathy also provides no check against suffering that cannot be seen. It’s hard to shoot a man standing in front of you, and not so hard to shoot him when he’s 200 yards away, and not nearly as hard when he’s inside of a building that you’re bombing. It can be downright easy when it’s giving orders to people who don’t feel empathy to execute people in a camp hundreds of miles away.

For that matter, empathy can even lead to being cruel; if two people’s needs conflict and one feels more empathy for one person than another, that empathy can lead one to harm the other for the sake of the one more empathized with. Parents are notorious for being willing to go to great lengths for the sake of their children, even to the point of doing all sorts of immoral things to spare their children far less suffering than the harm they cause to spare it. I can testify to the temptation. If I were to consult only my feelings and not my principles, there’s no limit to the number of people I would kill for the sake of my children.

Which brings us to another problem: empathy is merely a feeling. To claim that the basis of morality is empathy is to claim that the basis of morality is a feeling. In other words, “morality is based on empathy” means “do what you feel like.” That’s not morality, that’s the absence of morality. Moreover, human beings demonstrably feel like doing bad things to each other quite often.

(Unless, of course, the atheist is trying to claim that one should privilege the feeling of empathy over feelings experienced more strongly at the time, in which case there would need to be some rational argument given, not based in empathy, for why it should be thus privileged. But if one were to try this, one would run into a sort of Euthyphro dilemma—if empathy is good because it conforms to the good, then it is not the source of goodness, and it is a distraction to talk about it; if good is good because it conforms to empathy, then to call empathy good is merely to say that it is empathy, and there is no rational basis for preferring it to other feelings.)

The fact that people feel like doing bad things to each other really gets to the heart of the problem for the atheist. It’s all very well for the atheist to say “I prefer to harm no one.” He can have no real answer to someone else replying, “but I do.” Indeed, he has no answer. If you ever suggest such a thing, the atheist merely shrieks and yells and tries to shout down the existence of such a thing. His ultimate recourse is to law, of course, which means to violence, for law is the codified application of violence by people specially charged with carrying that violence out.

(It’s hardly possible to arrest someone, try, convict, and imprison them all without at least the threat of force from the police; if you don’t think so try the following experiment: construct a medium sized steel box (with windows), walk up to some random person while manifestly carrying no weapons, and say “In my own name I arrest you and sentence you twenty years inside of my steel box. Now come along and get in. I will not force you, but I warn you that if you do not comply I shall tell you to get in again.” Do this twenty or thirty times and count how many of them the person comes along and gets in.)

Of course, when the atheist appeals to the laws which enforce his preferred morality, we may ask where his empathy for the transgressor is. Where is his empathy for all of the people in prison? It must be a terrible feeling to be arrested by the police; where is the atheist’s empathy for them?

If you go looking for it, you will find that the atheist’s empathy is often in short supply, though he credits himself in full.

I Debugged a Program in My Dreams

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, UncategorizedLeave a comment

This morning (as of the time of writing) I had a very weird experience: I woke up while dreaming so I remembered it, and in that dream I successfully debugged a program in a way that actually works when I think about it while I’m awake.

The program wasn’t real, of course, but it was very curious that the bug was perfectly possible. It was some sort of program like one of the ones I work on at my day job and the program tagged commands it sent to the server with a string. Each command also includes a tag for the next command, which the next command must include. Another developer overrode the current tag, and consequently the client program didn’t have the right command tag for the next command, so its commands wouldn’t be accepted. The overriding of the tag would in fact cause subsequent commands to not be accepted, and the fix would be to resynchronize the client with the server (whether by changing the next command tag on the server or the previous command tag on the client).

The normal experience of figuring out the solution to a problem in one’s dreams is to find out that the perception that the solution worked was just a feature of the dream, and it doesn’t really work, if one can even remember what the solution even was. I find it very interesting that it was possible to have a real solution in a dream where the problem was also a creation of the dream, and the sort of problem is entirely a human creation (computer programs).

I suspect that this is why programming and video games are so popular among atheists; since these things are creation of the human mind they feel safe in a way that things which exist apart from the human mind are not safe.

The Demand for Signs

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized3 Comments

A friend brought up the subject of people demanding signs from God, which reminded me of a thing that comes up sometimes among atheists where they say that if God wanted people to believe in Him, he should do [whatever]. It doesn’t take much experience of atheists to realize that it doesn’t matter what the thing is, it wouldn’t be enough. There could be mile-high letters in the sky made of unquenchable flames saying, “I made the world. –God” and atheists would say it’s an unexplained natural phenomenon that guided the development of language and its inexplicability was what drove the development of religion before the advent of modern science.

Vary the thing as much as you like, as long as it predates what the atheist sets as the condition, the result will be the same. It will only be believable if it happens in response to what the atheist asks for. That is, it will only be believable if God’s actions conform perfectly to the will of the atheist.

That’s the key to understanding the fundamental problem.

You can see the exact same phenomenon in romantic relationships where one partner is insecure. Let’s call them I and O, for brevity: I isn’t sure that O loves her, and asks him to do something reasonable to show it. But as soon as he does it, it occurs to her that maybe he did it for some other reason. Maybe he just thought it was a good idea, or thought that he was going to get something out of it. So I comes up with some other test for O’s love, this time more extreme; something he couldn’t think is reasonable. When he does it, she then wonders if he really loves her or is just trying to humor her because he wants sex. So she needs to push him away and demand something that he would have to hate. If O is sane, I will eventually succeed in driving him off, proving that he didn’t “really” love her. And if he isn’t sane and stays, it’s always possible that he’s doing that because the alternative is even worse, which isn’t really love, etc.

Ultimately, the problem in both cases is that the person will only believe in what is a complete extension of their own will. But if it a thing were a complete extension of one’s will, it would be a part of one (since we can’t create ex nihilo). Ultimately, the only thing that the atheist and the insecure person can believe in is… themselves.

It’s a solipsistic trap.

They will tend to be very angry that they are in this trap; they don’t want to be. They cry out to people to get them out of this trap. But no one can get them out. That’s the problem with mental prisons: the prisoner is the guard.

Actually, it’s worse.

The prisoner is the prison.

Contingency and Space

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The natural theology argument for the existence of God from contingency and necessity rests on the existence of something contingent. This is remarkably easy to supply, since any telling of this argument is, itself, contingent, and supplies the necessary contingent thing. However, explaining why it is contingent sometimes confuses people, because the non-existence of the contingent thing at some point in time is most typically used.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it can accidentally mislead people into thinking that the causal chain that must be finite (since there cannot be an actual infinity) is a temporal chain of causation. E.g. I’m here because of my parents, who are here because of their parents, and so on back to the Big Bang, which is here because of God. This can be helpful to illustrate the concept of a causal chain, but it’s not the kind that’s actually used in the argument, since it’s not the sort referenced by “actual infinity”. What’s discussed is why the contingent thing is here, now, as in, what is giving it the power to exist this moment. It cannot be something that doesn’t exist, because things which don’t exist have no power. So it must be something that also exists right now. That thing which exists right now can either be contingent or necessary, and if contingent, it too must be dependent for its existence on something else which also exists right now. And so on; this is what must terminate in something necessary because there cannot be an actual infinity.

Something that my attention was drawn to by a commentor asking me a question in one of my videos is that one can use the existence of a thing in one part of space but not another as a demonstration of contingency. If a thing were necessary and not contingent, it would exist at every point in space, since a particular location cannot cause a necessary thing to not exist. Thus anything which is someplace but not another must be contingent. The advantage to demonstrating contingency in this fashion is that space is simultaneous, and a temporal sequence will not be suggested. It is possible, then, that a person will not be accidentally led astray into thinking of a temporal sequence of events where the argument about how an actual infinity cannot exist is less clear, since the moments of time don’t exist side-by-side. (From our perspective; all moments are present to God in His eternity, of course.)

Thoughts on the Soul, While Hunting

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Missing the Mark, YouTube Channel1 Comment

A quick video I made while bow hunting while the deer weren’t coming. I share some thoughts on the soul, and how some people go wrong by thinking of the soul like a ghost in a machine, or like some sort of physical pure-energy matter that operates the body in a purely physical way, except not physical. I also talk about how everyone actually believes in the soul, because being a strict materialist would be absurd, and give examples.

Proofs for God’s Intelligence and Why Atheists Won’t Accept Them

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Missing the Mark, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

Answering a question I’ve been asked, because there are a fair number of atheists who hear the argument from motion or the argument from contingency and necessity and then ask, “why would the uncaused cause or the unmoved mover need to be intelligent?” In this video I look into the answers to that, and why atheists won’t accept them.

My Least Favorite Kind of Internet Atheist

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Of all of the various kinds of internet atheist (see Taxonomy of Atheists), my least favorite are the cult atheists who pretend to be polite and open minded. They’re very recognizable because they always introduce themselves with something like, “I haven’t seen any evidence for God, but if I did I would become a theist. Do you know of any evidence for God?” They’ll tend to start out polite, often saying things like, “perhaps I’m mistaken, can you show me where?” It sounds great.

Then when you give them what they’ve asked for, such as presenting them or directing them to one of the arguments which shows that literally all being is evidence for God (e.g. the argument from motion, or the argument from contingency and necessity), their true colors come out. They’re still gentle of speech, but they say things like, “this is an argument from ignorance,” (they love to pretend that logic is an argument from ignorance) or accuse it of some other error which it obviously doesn’t have. They’ll typically throw in some insults, at this point, though gently phrased insults. “I think you might be engaging in wishful thinking” is no less an insult for being said in tea-time language.

As you proceed, the veneer of politeness tends to drop, with accusations becoming much more direct, and everything you’ve explained to them—at their request—rejected out of hand. The more you talk to them, the clearer it becomes that they don’t believe any of their principles, and when you have finally cornered them on something, they just ignore it and tend to claim that they’ve shown something that they didn’t, a few steps back in the conversation. Sometimes they declare victory and accuse you of just not being willing to admit it, sometimes they just claim to have shown you’re irrational or whatnot. They’re an enormous waste of time, and I think that’s their goal.

I’ve dealt with more than a few of them, over the years, and I’ve learned that they all have a tell—their act like they’re new to the subject. They pretend to be fair-minded, but also completely ignorant of the subject. If pressed, they will admit that they’ve heard things about it before, but this gives the lie to their presentation of fair-mindedness. A reasonable person, on asking for evidence of something, will save the other person time by explaining what they’ve already encountered and what their problems with it are. They don’t do this because wasting someone else’s time is their goal.

The other part of this tell is that they are pretending to be the new to the subject. The only people who are completely new to the subject of whether God exists are young children and (possibly) people raised by wolves who have barely learned English. Well, that’s not quite true, since I left off the qualifier of “reasonable.” Reasonable people investigate important questions, they don’t merely ignore them until someone decides to spoon-feed them information about them. If for some strange reason a reasonable person has come across no convincing source of information on the subject of God in real life, he would not merely go onto social media and ask complete strangers for evidence that God exists. A reasonable person (in this odd circumstance) would do some online searching and find sources that seem to be high quality. Or he might even read a book or two on the subject. (And then, as I noted above, if he’s asking randos on social media, he’ll give them some idea of where he’s starting from and what he already knows.)

New Religions Don’t Look Like Christianity Either

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

To those familiar with religions throughout the world, new religions like environmentalism, veganism, wokism, marxism, etc. are pretty obviously religions and are causing a lot of damage because that’s what bad religions do. People who are not familiar with any world religions beside Christianity frequently miss this because they think that all (real) religions look like Christianity but with different names and vestments.

I suspect that the idea that all religions look like Christianity was partially due to the many protestant sects which superficially looked similar, since even the ones that did away with priests and sacraments still met in a building on Sundays for some reason. I suspect the other major part is that there is a tendency to describe other religions in (inaccurate) Christian terms in order to make them easier to understand. Thus, for example, Shaolin “monks”. There are enough similarities that if you don’t plan to learn about the thing, it works. It’s misleading, though.

You can see the same sort of thing in working out a Greek pantheon where each god had specific roles and relationships and presenting this to children in school. It’s easy to learn, because it’s somewhat familiar, but it’s not very accurate to how paganism actually worked.

All of this occurred to me when I was talking with a friend who said that the primary feature of a religion, it seemed to him, was belief in the supernatural. The thing is, the nature/supernature distinction was a Christian distinction, largely worked out as we understand it today in the middle ages. Pagans didn’t have a nature/grace distinction, and if you asked them if Poseidon was supernatural they wouldn’t have known what you meant.

Would the ancient pagans have said that there things that operated beyond human power and understanding? Absolutely, they would. Were they concerned about whether a physics textbook entirely described these things? No, not at all. For one thing, they didn’t have a physics textbook. For another, they didn’t care.

The modern obsession that atheists have with whether all of reality is described in a physics textbook is not really about physics, per se, but about one of two things:

  1. whether everything is (at least potentially) under human control
  2. whether final causality is real, i.e. do things have purposes, or can we fritter our lives away on entertainment without being a failure in life?

The first one is basically an enlightenment-era myth. Anyone with a quarter of a brain knows that human life is not even potentially under human control. That it is, is believable, basically, by rich people while they’re in good health and when they’re distracted by entertainment from considering things like plagues, asteroids, war, etc. Anyone who isn’t all of these things will reject number 1.

Regarding the second: ancient pagans didn’t tend to be strict Aristotelians, so they wouldn’t have been able to describe things in terms of final causality, but they considered people to be under all sorts of burdens, both to the family, to the city, and possibly beyond that.

If you look at the modern religions, you will find the same thing. Admittedly, they don’t tend to talk about gods as much as the ancient pagans did, though even that language is on the rise these days. In what sense the Greeks believed in Poseidon as an actual human-like being vs. Poseidon was the sea is… not well defined. Other than philosophers, who were noted for being unlike common people, I doubt you could have pinned ancient pagans down on what they meant by their gods even if you could first establish the right terminology to ask them.

As for other things, environmentalism doesn’t have a church, but pagans didn’t have churches, either. Buddhists don’t have churches, and Hindus don’t have churches, and Muslims don’t have churches. Heck, even Jews don’t have churches. Churches are a specifically Christian invention. Now, many of these religions had temples. Moderns have a preference for museums. Also, being young religions, their rites and festivals aren’t well established yet. Earth day and pride month and so on are all fairly recent; people haven’t had time to build buildings in order to be able to celebrate them well. (Actually, as a side note, it also takes time to commercialize these things. People under-estimate the degree to which ancient pagan temples were businesses.)

Another stumbling block is that modern environmentalists, vegans, progressives, etc. don’t identify these things as religions—but to some degree this is for the same reason that my atheist friend doesn’t. They, too, think of religions as basically Christianity but maybe with different doctrines and holy symbols. They don’t stop to consider that most pagans in the ancient world were not in official cults. There were cults devoted to individual gods, and they often had to do with the running of temples. Normal people were not in these cults. Normal people worshiped various gods as convenient and as seemed appropriate.

There is a related passage in G.K. Chesterton’s book The Dumb Ox which is related:

The ordinary modern critic, seeing this ascetic ideal in an authoritative Church, and not seeing it in most other inhabitants of Brixton or Brighton, is apt to say, “This is the result of Authority; it would be better to have Religion without Authority.” But in truth, a wider experience outside Brixton or Brighton would reveal the mistake. It is rare to find a fasting alderman or a Trappist politician, but it is still more rare to see nuns suspended in the air on hooks or spikes; it is unusual for a Catholic Evidence Guild orator in Hyde Park to begin his speech by gashing himself all over with knives; a stranger calling at an ordinary presbytery will seldom find the parish priest lying on the floor with a fire lighted on his chest and scorching him while he utters spiritual ejaculations. Yet all these things are done all over Asia, for instance, by voluntary enthusiasts acting solely on the great impulse of Religion; of Religion, in their case, not commonly imposed by any immediate Authority; and certainly not imposed by this particular Authority. In short, a real knowledge of mankind will tell anybody that Religion is a very terrible thing; that it is truly a raging fire, and that Authority is often quite as much needed to restrain it as to impose it. Asceticism, or the war with the appetites, is itself an appetite. It can never be eliminated from among the strange ambitions of Man. But it can be kept in some reasonable control; and it is indulged in much saner proportion under Catholic Authority than in Pagan or Puritan anarchy.

Why Moderns Abhor Violence

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, UncategorizedLeave a comment

One of the most noticeable characteristics of thoroughly modern people is that they have an absolute abhorrence of violence (when they can see it). One of the other most notable characteristics of thoroughly modern people is that their philosophy utterly undermines any moral restraint on violence and also eliminates all possibility of rational reconciliation, leaving power the only relationship between people. This may not be a coincidence.

In particular, it may be that people will only indulge in being modern (Modern philosophy, post-Modern philosophy, etc) when they feel protected from the violence which is its natural consequence. An analogy may be the various stupid ideas children will engage in as long as they’re not the ones paying for things. (Things like payment should be based on the amount of time someone puts into a job rather than the quality of their work.)

In like manner to how being vegan is a luxury good only made possible (to the degree that it even is long-term possible) by advanced technology and massive trade infrastructure, believing that morality is just an evolved set of preferences where none are any better than any others may be a luxury good for people who have an effective security force that does not believe this ready to ensure one’s safety. Or like how having a philosophy that only works for non-reproductive people is a luxury good for people with a steady supply of converts from reproductive people.

Why Talk About Atheism’s Problems

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, UncategorizedLeave a comment

When it comes to things like defending the faith, the aphorism that one catches more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar is very much on people’s minds, especially in America. Puritans were so dour and miserable that they drove people away from Christianity, etc. So, given that, why be such a downer and talk about the problems of atheism, such as meaning, irrationality, etc? Won’t that just turn people off?

One brief word before I dive into it: it should go without saying that one should not be purely negative, that one should spend most of one’s time on the positives. This post is about why talk about the negatives at all?

One very practical thing to get out of the way before we get to the real reason is that “nice” Christianity has already been played out. That sort of positivity is really an attempt to manipulate people and probably does more harm than good. Patience is a virtue, but imprudent patience is not. Nothing but patience just looks like weakness.

OK, that stuff out of the way, the big reason to talk about the problems with atheism is that a lot of people make what might be described as an inverse Pascal’s wager. Call it the Cheese Pizza Wager. If everyone agrees on cheese pizza but people do not agree on toppings, even if the toppings may be better, just go with plain cheese because it’s safer.

Given how many people will do that, it’s important to point out that we’re not in a pizza situation; the options aren’t cheese pizza vs. barbecue chicken pizza, it’s barbecue chicken pizza vs. poison pizza.

Atheism is not like Christianity but with sleeping in on Sundays. Atheism has real and serious problems such as reason not working, life having no meaning, morality being completely arbitrary, concepts such as a human being not being philosophically tenable on any level (the you-can’t-dip-your-toe-in-the-same-river-twice problem), to say nothing of the more practical issues it has with the breakdown of culture and the tendency to produce totalitarian dictatorships as people’s need for God is replaced by the state. And there’s plenty more. (Atheists will, of course, repudiate all of these things, which isn’t a problem for them since they don’t hold rationality to work and therefore don’t object in the slightest to contradicting themselves left and right while the incoherently scream that they’re being completely rational and calm.)

It’s good for people to realize that there is no consensus and that they can’t safely leave off the difficult task of understanding the world that they live in.

Daniel Dennett On Determinism

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Interesting Finds, Uncategorized2 Comments

If you are not familiar with Daniel Dennett, one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, he is a good friend of Richard Dawkins and an atheist “philosopher”. (I use the scare quotes advisedly.) As an atheist he is, almost as a matter of course, a determinist. However, he’s also a proponent of “compatibalism,” the “idea” that free will and determinism are compatible. (The trick is to redefine “free will” to mean, not something freely chosen, but something deterministically done without outside force being applied at the time.) There is a wonderful video that Dennett made in which he chides neuroscientsts who tell people that they don’t have free will for being irresponsible in doing so, because if people don’t believe that they are responsible for their actions they make less morally responsible choices:

You read that correctly. A determinist is telling other determinists that if they tell people who have no free will that they don’t have free will, the people without free will will then make morally worse choices because they now know the truth that they’re not making any choices and are thus not culpable for the choices that they’re not making.

He even cites a scientific study showing that people more frequently choose to cheat if they’ve recently read an article telling them that neuroscience proves that people don’t have free will and thus are not culpable for their actions.

Of course, Dennett is a determinist, so therefore doesn’t believe that the neuroscientists can choose to be more responsible and lie to people that they have free will in order to get them to make better choices in their lives. But determinism means never having to say you’re sorry (unless you have to): Dennett himself believes that he has no free will and so he had no choice but to make this video. So it’s all OK. He’s not actually an idiot.

He’s just a puppet being made to look like an idiot by the forces pulling his strings.

It’s Funny How Angry Atheists Don’t Believe Other Angry Atheists Exist

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The angry atheist is a very recognizable type on the internet, and as unpleasant as they can be to deal with they do sometimes also bring with them a certain amusement. What I have in mind (because it recently happened) was an angry atheist yelling at me about how science disproves Christianity because evolution means that there was no first human beings. Then a different one came along and yelled at me because everyone knows that all human beings have a common ancestor named “mitochondrial eve”. (Actually, he forgot the mitochondrial part in her name, but he did know that the evidence was mitochondrial DNA.)

This is only the most recent example, I’ve had plenty of times when one angry atheist yelled at me for the straw man of what another angry atheist had recently yelled at me, telling me that no one actually thinks that. What’s very curious is that every once in a great while this happens close enough in time and virtual space that you can actually put the people in touch with each other, but when you do, they never argue with each other. Their point was definitely worth yelling at you about, but immaterial when talking to each other.

Ah, good times.

Science vs. Christianity

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Having seen enough Bishop Barron videos where he says that polls show that people who leave the church frequently cite the “conflict” between “science” and “religion”, I’m thinking that I might make some videos on my YouTube channel about how there is no conflict between science and (orthodox) Christianity. This is a multi-faceted topic, though, so it will probably result in multiple videos.

Sub-topics include:

Most People Don’t Know Science: Probably the biggest issue is that a lot of the “science” which is supposed to contradict religion isn’t actually scientific, or isn’t modern science. (E.g. the idea that human beings don’t have a common ancestor isn’t scientific, or, if you can find someone who does propose that, has no evidence to back it up.) The scientific theory of evolution is widely misunderstood, as is quite a lot of physics, too. Etc.

Many People Don’t Know Christianity: A lot of people don’t know what would and would not contradict Christianity, anyway. E.g. the universe being 12+ billion years old doesn’t contradict Christianity, evolution doesn’t contradict Christianity, etc.

Models vs. Reality: Science, or what most people think of as science, consists in the making of models, not in describing reality as it is. Models can be useful while being inaccurate, just as the ptolemaic model of the solar system was quite useful for predicting the movement of the planets. A model having predictive power about a very narrow aspect of reality doesn’t tell you much about reality as it is.

Science Isn’t Engineering: A lot of people confuse science with engineering and think that engineering means that “science” must be “true”. In fact, a very narrow bit of theoretical science actually precedes engineering, rather than tries to explain it after the fact. Where it does, the parts which are demonstrated to be “true” are things like the theory of electromagnetism.

Epistemology: the nature of the scientific method is that all it produces are hypotheses, and these hypotheses have often turned out to be wrong in the past. Even scientific experiments are often badly misinterpreted until later, when they are retroactively interpreted correctly (or, more precisely, in line with our current preferred interpretation).

Rationality: Science presumes the world to be rationally intelligible, which only makes sense within a framework where human beings are made in the image of a creator who created the world according to a rational purpose. (This includes Judaism and Islam, and some variants of philosophical theism, e.g. Platonism or Aristotelianism.)

Religion as Bad Science Creation Myth For Religion: A lot of people think of religions in general as merely being bad science, i.e. as a way to explain the world around them. As if, to quote my friend Andrew, the Romans worshiped Janus the god of doors to explain why doors existed.

No One Actually Believes Science Anyway: E.g. Neck-down darwinism (“from the neck down, our bodies are evolved, from the neck up, all men are created equal”). No one holds that physical determinism (assumed in science) means that rapists shouldn’t be punished because they couldn’t help it. The point is that people know how limited science really is when they care to.

Scientific Methodological Assumptions Aren’t Science: Science is well known for what is sometimes called “methodological naturalism,” i.e. the assumption that what it studies is purely natural. This doesn’t mean that the whole world is natural, only that science is only looking at the parts that are. In like manner, the assumption that the laws of physics are the same throughout space and time is purely an assumption with no proof. The assumption that what we can see (detect) is all that exists, despite us clearly being at the wrong scale to see what electrons do in low-energy environments, does not make it so.

What other subjects should be included? (Please comment below.)

Update: I got a request on Twitter to go into depth on theistic evolution.