Nothing more than survival adaptations?

Some Internet atheists are found of Carl Sagan's dictum, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", which they then apply within a framework in which atheism is accepted as a default belief, and anything which is not atheism is a priori deemed to be extraordinary.

There are many problems with this approach. Who got to decide that an ultimately uncaused universe was deemed a default, and a caused universe was extraordinary? Arguably, the idea that anything at all can result from nothing is extraordinary. It's also a naked assertion that there needs to be a "default" at all. Again arguably, a claim should be accepted on the basis of the strength of the evidence for its truthfulness, independently of any (likely value-laden) prior assessment of how extraordinary it is or isn't supposed to be.

But in any case, let's run with the idea. According to the atheist, with his belief in the evolutionary myth, all human faculties - all human faculties (please think about that for a moment) - are explainable as beneficial survival adaptations. Or stated the other way round, there are precisely zero human faculties or abilities which are anything other than an adaptation to allow individual humans to be more successful, not just at any activity in general, but at breeding in particular, and breeding only.

That's quite an extraordinary claim, isn't it?

Atheists versus reason

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/atheists-dont-own-reason/2012/03/21/gIQA4JWUSS_blog.html

An atheist spat

Recently, a few atheist groups had a public food-fight. I recently learnt that the expression "food-fight" is not known to all Westerners... it means, a bar-room brawl, if you know what that means!

Because a few years ago I'd done some detailed research into one of the groups involved, Creation Ministries International asked me to take a look and do a write-up. They wanted to educate their readers as to the strategies that different groups of atheists are employing, and to warn Christian readers of not getting sucked into a role akin to Lenin's (if Lenin did indeed use these words) "useful idiots". The article is now on the web, here.

Darwinism and Dawkins versus Mathematics

Here is a very interesting job advert. Two professors at St. John's College, University of Oxford, are looking for two assistants to help them do research into the mathematics of population genetics and Darwinism:

http://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/3498/RA%20in%20Mathematics_FPs.pdf.download

Three things are particularly noticeable in the description of the job:

• The two professors are doing research that they hope will lead to mathematical support of Darwinism - i.e. they are friends of Darwinian theory.
  
• They frankly admit that mathematical geneticists "mainly deny that natural selection leads to optimization of any useful kind", and then go on to explain, equally frankly, that Richard Dawkins' arguments in his seminal work, "The Selfish Gene", are not supported by known mathematics.
  
• The description proceeds to explain that they are looking for mathematics that will provide a basis for many of the concepts that are the Darwinian philosophers' stock-in-trade. Or in other words, stating the implication of that, they admit that as yet, the stock-in-trade conversations of Darwinian philosophers are not grounded in any known mathematical reality.

Note again the first point: these aren't enemies of Darwinism looking to do research to tear it down. They are its friends, looking for the research to establish it, and along the way candidly admitting that the mathematics to do so does not exist and the idea is generally contradicted. And remember, these aren't clowns; these are mathematics professors at the wealthiest college in the UK's top university...

I've just hopped over to RichardDawkins.Net to see if the great non-existent misotheist has republished the job announcement yet. Seems he hasn't got round to it....

Where atheism takes you

A C Grayling is one of the media atheists - a professor of philosophy who also writes frequently in the press.

Look at this article and note:

1. The sheer empty hopelessness of Grayling's creed.
2. His sheer heartlessness in the face of a genuine tragedy.

I for one am glad atheism isn't true.

How wonderful!

According to the atheist, life as we know it is simply the product of
the struggle for survival. It's the result of competition for limited
resources, as we've thought tooth and nail with our evolutionary
competitors.

Quiet wonderful and amazing, then, that it's turned out so well, don't
you think?

For example, the incredible range of tastes and complexions in all the
foods that humans can eat. It seems to have turned out precisely as if
we were meant to enjoy food, and find pleasure in the many different
varieties.

Or consider the beauties of the natural world - waters, green dales,
sunsets, shimmering oceans, etcetera. It all looks as if it was made to
be enjoyed. What a wonderful coincdence that no purpose or plan brought
about that beauty for us to enjoy, without it ever being intended!

Consider the variety of life as a whole and all its incredible breadth
of experiences. Given that we are allegedly just Darwinian
eating-and-mating machines, it's pretty amazing that we should have such
varied and interesting existences, isn't it?

Or look at the realities of morality, as all humanity understands itself
to be under laws of right and wrong - and that right is to be chosen
whilst wrong is to be rejected. It is a great blessing that people came
to believe that (even if they live it out very inconsistently),
notwithstanding the supposed fact that life is an undirected cosmic
accident, n'est ce pas?

How about music, and all of its beauty and variety - all the different
sounds and harmonies, together with our capacity to enjoy it. Perhaps we
might not have expected that, given that we are told that the only real
uses of noise are to warn off enemies and to attract a mate. But all the
same, it's a marvellous set of coincedences that have led it to turn out
exactly as if it was designed for our pleasure again, don't you think?

The world of the atheist thinker must be a painful one. His creed tells
him to expect nothing accept accidental by-products of the fight to
reproduce. But the world he actually lives in throws up infinitely more,
as a matter of daily routine in every area of existence. One further
great mystery is how little today's campaigning atheists seem to notice
these facts.

Or putting it another way: as an explanation for reality as it really
is, atheism simply does not work, and atheists are people who are living
in denial.

Confused? You will be...

God has a super-special deal on confusion - buy one, get two extra free!

It works like this: in God's created world, God's creatures need to put God their Creator first in their thinking. If they rebel and refuse to do so, they are deliberately choosing confusion. And then confusion is what they get - by the barrel-load.

The world is very busy trying to ignore God's revealed moral law. In the West, for example, the laws against sexual immorality or dishonouring your parents and other authorities are so far from being observed that a very high number of people think that things like valuing chastity (ooh, what an old word!) or honouring authority are very close to being signs of mental illnesses.

But however much we ignore the moral law, we remain moral creatures, crafted by God. If our sense of morality is attacked and supresseed, yet still it cannot be obliterated.

Result? Moral confusion. It cannot be wiped out - so it has to be distorted and perverted instead. Here's an outstanding example from last week: "Great-grandmother given an electronic tag and curfew for selling a goldfish to a 14 year-old". Normally when I see a newspaper headline like that I think, "yes, but if you read the story there'll be more to it than that...". In this case there was - a slightly poorly cockatiel, a gerbil that wasn't well looked after by a disabled girl, a £1,000 fine for all this overflow of iniquity, and a self-righteous council spokesman dealing out sound-bite slogans to justify this punishment upon the 66-year old dear as exactly the right thing, which "sends out a message", blah blah blah. When Manchester and the result of the UK is full of adultery, abortion, drugs, prostitution, knife crime, pornography, disrespect to authorities, and so on, it's amazing that he can work up such an overflow of righteous indignation about the poor twee goldfish's potential mistreatment (though it does say something else about the British schools if by the age of 14 it can safely be assumed that you're not yet competent to look after one...). It's amazing - until you join up the dots and realise that the excess of perverted righteousness in such a case of this is simply the result of a excessive lack of concern for righteousness in the other: they're not independent ases.

The solution to this isn't a return to "common sense" or "old-fashioned values" or caning in schools etc. These things were consequences and concomitants, not causes. The root cause is godless thinking. When God hands over a nation to intellectual and moral confusion, it's because that nation has already wilfully chosen intellectual and moral confusion. They shut the door on God and after his long patience, God says "let me lock that for you". Buy one, get two free. The only way back is repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. With godly repentance, the grip of moral confusion is broken and that's when the re-building can begin - not until.

We're shocked, shocked I tell you

Richard Dawkins built a forum on his website for atheists to interact with one another, sharing the results of their free-thinking. The results
were consistently and persistently crude and revolting. As a result Dawkins has felt compelled to basically close the forum down as a venue for open discussion. The natives reacted to this news by taking it as a further opportunity to show more of the fruits of their Dawkins-inspired philosophy. Now quoth the startled mad ex-professor:

"Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, over-reacting so spectacularly to something so trivial. Even some of those with more temperate language are responding to the proposed changes in a way that is little short of hysterical. Was there ever such conservatism, such reactionary aversion to change, such vicious language in defence of a comfortable status quo? What is the underlying agenda of these people? How can anybody feel that strongly about something so small? Have we stumbled on some dark, territorial atavism? Have private fiefdoms been unwittingly trampled?

Something wrong with people? With atheists, who've been freed from that "root of all evil", namely religion, and who live in a rational, scientific, delusion-free zone? How could that be? Especially when all those God-less regimes which the atheists built in the 20th century - Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Tsetung, Hoxha, etc. - were all utopian paradises. This is such a surprise! How could this have happened?

Dawkins a-theology has no answer to that question, so he lamely pins the blame on a nebulous impersonal non-cause, "Internet culture":

Be that as it may, what this remarkable bile suggests to me is that there is something rotten in the Internet culture that can vent it. If I ever had any doubts that RD.net needs to change, and rid itself of this particular aspect of Internet culture, they are dispelled by this episode.

Because it couldn't just be the inevitable results of encouraging godless thinking, of course. You naughty, naughty "Internet culture". Curious how atheist websites seem to attract a much higher proportion of "Internet culture" than the rest of the Internet....?

Tragic.

Are science and atheism compatible?

One of the most-read blogs on the Guardian is presently this one, by Andrew Brown, entitled "Are science and atheism compatible?".

Brown does not offer a very penetrating analysis of the question, in my opinion. He does not define what he means by "science", and following that failure mostly flounders around in generalities. If he does actually answer his own question, it is not clear to me what the answer is. His main point seems to be that the rise of scientific knowledge and the fall of religious belief are not as closely correlated in reality as campaigning atheists would have us believe.

Instead of defining science, Brown begins with an in-from-left-field announcement of something totally non-obvious, thus:

Obviously the two [i.e. science and atheism] are closely linked, in as much as science assumes the falsity or at least irrelevance of supernaturalism.

This statement is a category mistake. Science, when properly defined, is the study of nature in order to search for general principles which can describe observed behaviour and predict future behaviour. Science studies the natural world in order to be able to describe patterns.

Being the study of the natural world, science can by definition make no assumptions or statements about either the falsity or irrelevance of the supernatural. It is not within its remit. Looking at nature to discover what is beyond nature is a self-contradiction. Asking science to make such statements is like asking a tennis umpire to declare a player off-side, or asking a soccer referee to send the goalkeeper off for LBW. (For non-British readers, off-side is a soccer rule, and LBW comes from the world of cricket!). It is out of scope. "False" or "irrelevant" are rulings that can only be made for something "in scope". Brown appears to be talking about "scientism" (the unprovable philosophical assumption that every question is potentially satisfiable by science), not true science.

It's important also to recognise that science is descriptive, not prescriptive. When science codifies its predictions and calls them a "law", this needs to be understood with care. The word "law" has misled many people. To predict, using Newton's "laws" of gravity, at what time the sun will rise tomorrow is quite different to explaining why the motions predicted will take place. The law tells us what we expect to see - but not why we see that thing. To say that a force of gravity is at work that obeys an inverse-square law is one thing; but to account for that force and why it is inverse-square instead of something totally different is something else. Science can note that an inverse-square law appears to consistently be at work (description); but to account for that law (prescription) is something very different.

This leads to the search for a "theory of everything". Perhaps the inverse-square law, and every other law, are natural consequences of some other working within nature. But even if they were - then that other working within nature would also need accounting for. Either then you have an infinite chain of causes, or at some point you have to allow the supernatural: that nature is ultimately caused by something beyond nature. Ultimately, nature itself needs accounting for. Searching within nature to account for nature is absurd. In other words, making science the arbiter of supernaturalism is absurd. Richard Dawkins argues that we cannot attribute the cosmos to an intelligent being, because then we would have to account for that intelligent being. But this argument only works if the intelligent being is itself within nature, and not outside it. And the Christian claim which Dawkins hopes to refute is precisely the latter: thus, Dawkins' argument is irrelevant. Dawkins has not faced up to the regress in his own position - if physical forces are sufficient to account for all we find in nature, what accounts for those physical forces themselves? Other physical forces? Or are they just suspended over nothing, having no origin and needing no explanation? This is ultimately a philosophical question, not a scientific one. Science cannot decide it, nor is it meant to.

The fact is that science itself needs accounting for, and cannot account for itself. Why should everything work together in an orderly way? Why should we be able to reduce our observations to rationally understandable principles and then generate descriptions from them? Whence this comprehensibility and orderliness?

If science needs accounting for, then the question ought to be, "does atheism count for science better or worse than theism does?". This is the question that Brown ought to ask, but skips over because he appears to have been led by such as Dawkins to confuse science with a particular (and erroneous) brand of philosophy. Theism accounts for science very well by stating that nature is orderly and understandable to human minds because it is itself created and ordered by a divine mind who fashioned it and us for each other. We were made to live in the world and to harness it. The belief that God is orderly in his being and ways and that he made us to enjoy his creation generates the expectation that nature will be orderly and possible for us to investigate and harness for our use. That is precisely why modern science was born out of the soil of Christian Europe - people expected that studying the works of their Creator would be a fruitful enterprise, not a random and frustrating one. They did not believe that order came from chaos, and so they studied the Creation expecting to find order that could be described in orderly ways: exactly what happened.

How, though, does atheism account for science and for nature itself? It does not, and cannot. Ruling out the possibility of a mind being behind the cosmos, atheism leaves scientific "laws" hanging in mid-air: they just exist, whether we like it or not and we cannot tell you why. For an atheist, the scientific enterprise is essentially a huge irrational faith-leap: he has no reason for believing that nature should be coherent or comprehensible, but he investigates it with that expectation anyway. It's just pot luck, a fortuitous hand dealt to us! (But who set up the pot, and who was the controller dealing the hand?) The compatibility between his mind and the objects being studied by his mind is just a big happy fluke. Ultimately atheism is not supported by science; rather, it removes its foundations.

The band of theologians

This is a lovely quote from astrophysicist Robert Jastrow. He's talking about the fact that 20th century physics has been a tour of crushing defeat for materialist dreamers (which is why atheist apologists try to make you only think about biology and Darwinism (not that they have much excuse for this either), and keep mum about physics):

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, W.W. Norton, New York, 1978, p. 116)

By "reason" he means the pseudo-reason of Dawkins et al - i.e., scientism. But I digress. This quote came to mind as I read from today's Daily Telegraph, this article in which the Science Correspondent reports that, well, an analysis of their behaviour shows that babies aren't innocent after all.

This hardly comes as news to anyone who has existed in the Judaeo-Christian stream since the fall of Adam. But, in hushed and awed tones, our correspondent reports:

Yet it now appears that babies learn to deceive from a far younger age than anyone previously suspected.

Excuse me - who is the "anyone" in this quote? It must exclude anyone who a) takes their Bible seriously or b) is a parent who observes their child's behaviour in any meaningful way....

Original sin, anyone? Is that really a doctrine which nobody ever suspected before? Has Mr. Gray just discounted several centuries of Western history, and the fundamental cultural values which our civilisation as built on? Something that nobody ever heard of before? Ho hum.

Or when he says "nobody" is he, perhaps, only including as real live people the people who can be described as "the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of [pseudo-]reason" ?

Hi there! Do come on up. You're a bit late, but welcome at last. Do enjoy the view before you fall off the other side!

Dawkins satire

Richard Dawkins is apparently visiting the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts.

Dawkins' mono-dimensional scientism makes him about as appropriate a figure in the world of the arts as Attila the Hun would be at a conference on good manners. But I digress. In my e-mail inbox comes a recommendation for this:

In anticipation of the visit of Richard Dawkins to the NZ International Festival of the Arts…
 
See a quality, locally produced satire/parody, 10 minute in depth “interview”, with “Richard Dawkins”…
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2RMU9_7jSY

Hear the rumble of the mad-man

Richard Dawkins has his latest in the Times - "Hear the rumble of Christian hypocrisy". His points are many and all over the map. The main one appears to be that Christian theology is inherently a glorification of meaningless retribution - a furious God who delights to inflict unnecessary punishment. This is accompanied by scores of other asides showing how really, really angry the thought of God makes Dawkins. Revealing.

Dawkins' arguments make me think of a mad-man climbing into a ring with a heavyweight boxer. Because the mad man runs around furiously, throwing punches everywhere with rapid-fire, eventually you suppose one must hit. In just a few paragraphs, Dawkins goes over much of the whole map of Christian theology with great bravado - surely one of those punches connected?

In reality, the real boxer would just tip-toe around for a few seconds as he got a good look at the mad-man, and then lean forward with one mighty, all-sufficient knockout blow, and the mad-man thuds onto the mat with no likelihood of getting up.

All that Dawkins writes is predicated on what comes at the opening. According to him, no other explanation is needed for the Haitian earthquake other than the physical explanation. Two tectonic plates bumped and ground over each other; result, earthquake. That's it. As Dawkins says, "a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, unpremeditated, unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human misery."

That's the logical outcome of Dawkins' own atheism. The world is self-contained, and physical explanations not only describe what happens, but are also entirely sufficient to account for what happens. No ideas of personal agency should be sought. This is not the way that anyone deals with the events of their own life, though, or indeed how Dawkins does. "Yes, officer, I know that he's dead, and that the autopsy shows cyanide poisoning. But this is all just the outworking of chemical laws. Cyanide is fatal, so he died - why look for another explanation? No need to arrest me."

The problem with Dawkin's position is that, according to him, human beings are also a part of nature. Thus, they are constrained by the same laws as the rest of nature. We evolved ultimately from impersonal matter, according to fixed biological principles. Hence Dawkin's own screed in the Times is not something to take seriously - it's just the law-bound outworking of his own biochemistry. All the ranting about hypocrisy and other moral crimes is not to be treated as meaningful; it's only what the natural principles at work within him made him do.

For Dawkins to impute wickedness to the personal intentionality of Christians who disagree with either him or Pat Robertson (which I do) is no more or less rational than for Christians to impute any particular activity within the world to God's personal intentionality. Dawkins is self-refuting. If we use his own measure, he's not to be taken seriously. His thoughts aren't meaningful; they're just what nature enforced upon him. Tip-toe, tip-toe, tip-toe.... THUD.

Why Darwinism is Atheism

I just came across this great quote from David Berlinksi (who isn't a believer in any particular religion). It explains very concisely why Darwinism is inherently incompatible with any form of Christian theism. I'm not sure what the word "human" is doing in the first clause.

A mechanism that requires a discerning human agent cannot be Darwinian. The Darwinian mechanism neither anticipates nor remembers. It gives no directions and makes no choices. What is unacceptable in evolutionary theory, what is strictly forbidden, is the appearance of a force with the power to survey time, a force that conserves a point or a property because it will be useful. Such a force is no longer Darwinian. How would a blind force know such a thing? David Berlinski, “Deniable Darwin” Commentary 101 (June 1, 1996).

I was careful there to say incompatible with "Christian theism" not with "theism". The above argument does not work against deism. Deism is the idea that God merely set the laws of the universe, wound the machine up, and then let it work itself out. Deism can be reconciled with Darwinism - no surprise, but Darwin was a deist in his own belief (which gives the lie to the idea that Darwin was just doing science). A deist can easily believe that God invented the algorithm and then left it to run - and perhaps also rigged the "initial conditions" that the machine operated under to make give the outcome a high, perhaps infallible, degree of certainty. But that's not Christian theism, where God creates ex nihilo by a divine intervention such that the creation itself is an exemplification of his infinite wisdom and intelligence.

The hilarious Richard Dawkins needs your pennies....

Famous atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins (who doesn't actually exist) is a multi-millionaire who lives in a large house (itself worth at least a million pounds) in splendid North Oxford.

According to Wikipedia, his most successful book, "The God Delusion", had sold over 8.5 million copies in English alone by November 2009, having also been translated into 34 other languages. The follow-up debuted at number 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list, having also hit number 1 in Ireland, Canada and Australia, and 3 months later remains high on the various Amazon country sales charts (90 in UK, 158 in US at time of checking - number 1 in the category " Books > Science > Evolution"), despite only being available so far in hardback. He has written nine other books, the first in 1976, all of which remain in print. He has produced 7 documentaries. His website (which, according to Alexa, ranks  in the top 3500 websites visited by UK Internet users and the top 11,000 for US users) has a store to sell you books, DVDs, audio books, t-shirts and other clothing, stickers, buttons, pins, tote bags and coffee mugs. A humble baseball cap will set you back $19.95 (about £13), and a coffee mug $9.95 (about £6.50).

Dr. Dawkins needs $100,000 (about £60,000) to fund his "Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reasons & Science". How do you think he might be able to do that? (This would equal 0.7 pence per copy from the sales of "The God Delusion" alone).

Yup.... by tapping up the users of his website for their spare cash! He's even launched (and presumably had to pay for) a new website with a promotional  video in order to promote it - http://fundraiser.richarddawkins.net/.

Wow! Here's the best bit - if you contribute $100, you'll get a "free" DVD! $200 gets you 2 DVDs and a book... all the way up to 10 books if you contribute $10,000. Oh - but not if you live outside the US, because apparently he can't afford the postage.

So - is RD broke, mean, or does he simply believe his audience of "rationalists" are credulous suckers? You decide... meanwhile, comment #2 on his website post introducing the fundraiser is an unemployed man who sent in his $5.

A rationalist replies

Over at Simon Hutton's blog, an atheist replied to yesterday's post on penal substitution. Here's his reply:

Simon I’ve read his piece and am even less impressed by his logic than some of your musings. Again he fails to acknowledge facts outside of theology. He seems to think because his sacred book can be interpreted by him in a certain way, then it must be true. For example, he seems to be woefully ignorant of the historical premise of scapegoating. Look up Pharmakos (Meaning magic man) such an individual would be a scapegoat, who symbolically took on the sins of a people and was expelled from a city or put to death. Osiris/Dionysis was a sacred Pharmakos, who supposedly like Jesus, died to atone for the worlds sins. The fate of the Pharmakos, was to be insulted, beaten and put to death. These rituals predate christianity and are predated by sheep, goats and lambs suffering the same fate for the sins of a tribe. Now I could just as easily ask you to enter into the framework of these more ancient religions in order to figure out wether Osiris or Dionysis or Attis are in fact moral when being sacrificed for the sins of others? And if there’s an internal logic, would that mean Attis is god? He preceded jesus performing similar feats, healing, turning water into wine, raising on the third day after being executed for the sins of the world, being called the lamb of god. The most salient question posed by a historical evaluation of Jesus’ supposed sacrifice is, why is he plagerising (I’ve used the word correctly) moral frameworks and feats from other religions? Surely he’s god, couldn’t he think of a more original way of forgiving sin?
Regards,
 Mahmut.

The gist of Mahmut's reply is that ancient Greek scape-goating concepts pre-date the New Testament, and therefore it is reasonable (or perhaps necessary) to believe that the New Testament authors lifted ("were plagerising [sic]") the concept from ancient Greek religion.

 Apart from committing the chronological fallacy ("X comes earlier, therefore X is the source"), this argument is totally insane. It can be demolished with 3 simple and uncontroversial facts which seem to have bypassed Mahmut:

• The concept of the transfer of guilt (a scape-goat, if you like), is taught repeatedly in the Hebrew Scriptures, in particular the laws of Moses (the Pentateuch) which I referred to.
  
  
• The New Testament writers everywhere self-consciously and repeatedly claim that when writing about Jesus they are writing the fulfilment of the story of the Hebrew Scriptures. They nowhere point to ancient Greece as an inspiration for their ideas.
  
  
• The Pentateuch pre-dates the existence not just of ancient Greek mythology but ancient Greece itself by several centuries.

In other words, the New Testament says "here's where we got our ideas from", the ideas can indeed be found in the place they claim to have got them from, and those ideas come way, way, way before there even was an ancient Greece. Game, set and match.

It might be reasonable from here to start investigating whether any elements of the ancient Greek concepts of substitution were derived from the Hebrews; but to flatly assert the opposite is totally bonkers - you're out by several centuries. I blogged on this issue in regard to Philip Pullman arguing similarly here. Is Mahmut simply uncritically parroting something he heard from a fellow atheist? Certainly nobody with even a thumbnail idea of what century any given culture existed in could make such a gargantuan blunder - which makes Mahmut's confident declaration that I must be ignorant of anything outside of the field of theology all the more silly. I challenge Mahmut to study the Old Testament Scriptures and acknowledge that they teach the same concept of penal substitution that the New Testament writers took up, and then to abandon his absurd theory.

Is penal substitution immoral?

This is inspired by something I read on Simon Hutton's blog.

Is penal substitution immoral? This is a stock charge made by liberal theologians and by atheists against the Christian gospel ("Christ died for our sins"). Here's atheist Christopher Hitchens explaining the objection (sorry for the lack of a reference - copied this from Simon's blog):

“Is it moral to believe that your sins – yours and mine, ladies and gentlemen – can be forgiven by the punishment of another person? Is it ethical to believe that? I would submit that the doctrine of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is utterly immoral. I might if I wished … say, “look, you’re in debt, I’ve just made a lot of money out of a God-bashing book, I’ll pay your debts for you” … I could say, if I really loved someone who’d been sentenced to prison, “if I could find a way of serving your sentence, I’d do it” … I could do what Sydney Carton does in A Tale of Two Cities … “I’ll take your place on the scaffold,” but I can’t take away your responsibilities, I can’t forgive what you did, I can’t say you didn’t do it, I can’t make you washed clean. The name for that in primitive Middle Eastern society was scapegoating. You pile the sins of the tribe on a goat and you drive that goat into the desert to die of thirst and hunger; and you think you’ve taken away the sins of the tribe: a positively immoral doctrine that abolishes the concept of personal responsibility upon which all ethics and all morality must depend.”

Now, if I was responding directly to Hitchens my first move would be to take him to task for making dogmatic pronouncements about what ethics and morality "must" depend on. Such assertions make sense in a Christian context where there is an all-supreme God who lays down the law for his creatures. But for an atheist to just bandy those ideas around as if they came down from heaven and whose obviousness was written upon our very human nature is for the atheist to jump up and down crying out "There is a God! There is a God!". Hitchens also abombinably misrepresents the scapegoat of Leviticus 16 - which the Bible everywhere teaches was symbolic; the idea that it was believed that the goat itself took away people's sins is a pure invention out of Hitchen's brain with no support from the book itself. But I digress. Let's take the point about penal substitution. Is its very nature immoral? Here's my two-part answer.

1. Let's grant that it's immoral. Then we're all damned. If I must bear the responsibility for all my sins because of this alleged immutable principle, then I must bear the responsibility for all my sins. According to the the law-giver (God), the wages of sin is death - eternal death, the unending punishment of hell. It's pointless for Hitchens to start arguing about whether God's standards of justice are wrong and that eternal hell isn't deserved. Everybody knows that condemned criminals who are found guilty of the most appalling crimes (in this case, rebellion against our God and Creator), make the very worst judges of what their crimes deserve. They're incompetent, because they're totally biased.
   
   So if nobody can pay the penalty except the sinner, then that's very bad news indeed. God, though, spent many centuries teaching mankind that substitution was possible, using such means as for example the symbolism of the scape-goat. Hence nobody should make this mistake!
   
   
2. Hitchens does not understand the cross of Jesus because he misses out a vital part of the Bible's teaching. He argues using three analogies, but fails to understand why they fail in this case. Jesus was not punished for the sins of his people despite a lack of any real connection between Jesus and his people. On the contrary, he had a unique relationship to us, which does not exist in other cases. The missing element is the doctrine of the "covenant", and the ensuing idea of a "federal headship". Here, "federal" means "representative". Christ was, by a covenant, appointed to be the head of his people. He agreed to take upon himself their responsibilities and to perform what was required of them.
   
   Now, this idea of federal representation, far from being the end of all morality, is the very basis for a great deal of the transactions in the world. The government (in the US, the "federal government") acts on the behalf of its people. For them, it negotiates treaties, passes laws and goes to war. One soldier shoots another soldier, but isn't arrested for murder as Hitchen's ideas require - because both were acting on behalf of a people. Hitchens is actually propounding a hyper-individualism. His assertion is only logically consistent with total anarchy, in which every individual acts only for themselves, and nobody can ever act on your behalf. No employee can act for his boss; no father can take a decision on behalf of his infant child and no government can act for its people. If they did, according to Hitchens, it would end all morality. Hitchens is a modern Westerner, and promotes the individual above all other federations to such a level as to completely destroy them - but it's a bit rich for him to do this in the same breath as committing the chronological fallacy and sneering at the foolish beliefs of those in the ancient east.
   
   Jesus took the punishment for his people justly, because he was joined with them in a divine covenant. This is the same reason why Adam's sins can be imputed to us - he was appointed the federal head of humanity, given authority to act on their behalf. Will Hitchens dare to tell God that he is not allowed to make such appointments? That he must run every covenant or other arrangement he wishes to make past Hitchens first, to get his approval? He's forbidden to appoint anyone to a representative role without the atheist's agreement first? Hitchens seems not to understand who is the potter, and who is the clay in this setup.
   
   At this point Hitchens might argue that personal responsibility cannot be taken by a substitute without an individual's prior and personal consent. Again, this would make him a radical individual anarchist. Will the government of Kenya or the UK agree to exempt me from its laws and taxes if I simply declare that I no longer consent to them being my government? I withdraw permission, therefore I am now a law unto myself? If an infant Hitchens suddenly announces to his daddy that said daddy no longer has permission to represent or act for him in anything, will Hitchens senior immediately agree?
   
   But again, let's grant him this point. If Hitchens decides to use this granted authority to positively forbid Christ to have anything to do with him in representing him, or atoning for his sins, or pleading before God on his behalf, then so be it. What is the outcome? Hardly joyful, is it? Insisting on the rights of one's own individuality to claim one's very own share in damnation isn't really a great use of that right, don't you think? OK, let him - if Hitchens wishes to have no part in Christ's saving work, then God shall accept his choice; but that really won't turn out well for him. We can, though, admire the righteousness of God's justice: he gives the Christ-rejecter nothing more than they themselves demand.
   

It would be immoral for my crimes against the government to be heaped upon another innocent victim who had no interest or part in my case. That's why Sydney Carton could not go to the gallows for another. But in another case, if a contract has been taken out such that someone had agreed that whatever debts I ran up in the course of my trading, he agreed to take them all, then it would be perfectly moral. Such contracts are routine. What Hitchens has to do to establish his case is to prove that the transaction recorded in Scripture in which Christ became the covenant head of his people definitely belongs to the former category and not to the latter. He hasn't done this - he hasn't even seemed to appreciate the need for it. He can't, because in fact God is at liberty to constitute whatever relationships between his own creatures that he pleases to constitute, consistent with his own holiness and justice. He simply assumes that we must and can all be related only on a hyper-individualistic basis and leaves out the authority of God. Of course he does - he's an atheist. But that's ultimately nothing more than arguing in a circle.

Christ can die in our place, and that is the good news of the Christian gospel. Jesus can die in our place because God appointed him to it. Where is Hitchen's good news? The doctrine that our sins are our own and we must be punished for them is horrible. To proclaim it as gladly as he does is a kind of madness which only sinners in determined rebellion against their Creator are capable of.

Dear Atheists. Please update your arguments.

"Kids' author says Jesus is not God: An atheist children's author is to use his latest book to say that Jesus was not God, instead claiming the Apostle Paul imagined the idea."

Read the story and you'll see that atheist campaigner Philip Pullman's idea is to argue that the idea of Jesus as God was a later encrustation on a primitive Christianity, dreamt up by the apostle Paul.

This was a popular idea in liberal academic scholarship in the 20th century up until the 1980s, but is now generally recognised, not just by evangelical scholars, as a huge mistake. It's a mistake that came from the presupposition that the New Testament documents should be read and interpreted against the background of Hellenistic philosophy. This mistake led to many of the Hebraic messages being filtered out - at least for those in the world of academic scholarship. Happily this enormous dead-end in Biblical studies bypassed the ordinary Bible-reading Christian!

The New Testament was written against a Hebraic background, and the above way of doing things is now widely recognised as completely untenable. The gospel writers and Paul and the other apostles alike approach the story of Jesus as a continuation of the Old Testament narrative. And in particular, his deity is clearly endorsed by all of them, because they all uniformally and continually attributes acts, achievements and attributes to Jesus which the Old Testament makes explicit belong exclusively to Jehovah. In both testaments, theological questions are not approach in the Greek manner - as matters of fine philosophical analysis (though of course such analysis is legitimate), but as being revealed progressively in history through God's saving interventions. And the interventions written about by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as well as Paul reveal with crystal clarity that they viewed Jesus of Nazareth as being one and the same in his being as Jehovah. Put simply, their message about the person of Christ is that he achieves everything for his people that Jehovah is meant to achieve. (And this observation eventually gives rise to the whole doctrine of the Trinity when all other Biblical considerations are factored in).

Mr. Pullman, though, is going to try to discredit Christianity with mouldy, rusted, defunct old bunk that has been debunked for decades. Good for pulling the wool over the eyes of the naive and the willingly ignorant, I suppose. But if the "New Atheist" crowd want to convince us that they're dispassionate investigators of facts, serious students of scholarship, coldly and impartially following hard evidence wherever it leads, this sort of thing won't help. Don't expect Pullman to be called out by his fellow "New Atheists" for this slip though, because the problem isn't intellectual - it's moral. They simply latch on to whatever argument seems to support their cause, whatever kind of argument it is, good, bad or ugly. The "New Atheists" have gained a reputation for being intellectually shallow and not widely read in their attempts to establish their position - and this kind of thing will only help that reputation roll on.

Christian Atheists

Have you ever noticed, that most of the atheists you run into are... Christian atheists?

By that, I mean that somehow, for some illogical reason, despite holding that:

• The universe is the product of chance, not necessity or a divine plan
  
• There is no ultimate meaning behind existence
• Our lives, once we die, are over for ever
• There is no essential difference between man and any other living species whether ape, goat or cabbage - time and undirected genetic mutations link us all together
• Etcetera etcetera...

Yet, then still try to argue that, whilst being an atheist, they can or should...

• Believe it's better to live a "moral" life than an "immoral" one (whatever those terms mean)
• Live a "meaningful" and "purposeful" existence (whatever those terms mean)
• Contribute something "positive" to existence (whatever... you get the idea)
• Live as if man is somehow a "superior" or more "significant" life form (whatever...)

Where did they get those ideas from? Not from atheism, that's for sure. Nobody starts with the first set of premises above, and logically progresses to the second. Those ideas come from Christianity. The modern Western atheist feels a very strong need to somehow argue that he can hold to that second set of premises, and comes up with the most interesting set of arguments to justify it.

Of course many atheists have been more consistent, and admitted that, starting from the presuppositions of atheism, you can't arrive at a basically Christian view of the world. Some of these atheists have been profoundly depressed by that conclusion; others have argued that we ought to face the facts and ditch the idea that Christianity is a "superior" world-view (such terms having no essential meaning), and instead start building a society based squarely on atheistic ideas.

Very few can go that far though. Most have to try to be content with the inconsistent stopping place of being Christian atheists - and thus continuing to testify to what they know is true, even though they wished it wasn't so.

More on the atheist bus campaign...

I don't spend that much time thinking about whatever slogans are being slapped upon buses in a country I don't live in, honest.

But, I was just reflecting on the reasons given by the founders of the "atheist bus campaign" for the inclusion of the word "probably" in their none-too-catchy slogan, "There is probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy life".

The reason, amusingly, is that if they dropped the "probably" then they might fall foul of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). What's behind this is that ASA requires that claims in advertisements have to be at least reasonably believable. Seems that the claim "there is no God", in the opinion of the atheists' funding the advert themselves, doesn't meet that standard and they'd get into trouble if they tried it.

Ha, ha, ha.

Can an atheist believe in right and wrong?

I've put the notes of a talk I gave last year, on the subject of atheism's incompatible with universal human notions of morality, here: http://david.dw-perspective.org.uk/writings/art.php/can-an-atheist-believe-in-right-and-wrong