http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psnLrtKKo8A
“Atheists just wanna sin and get away with it.”
“Atheists are just people who have a problem with authority.”
“Atheists are just angry with God. That’s all.”
“Atheists are just people who’ve been deceived by the devil.”
“Atheists are the minions of the devil, working with him, in cahoots with him.”
“You know, I used to be an atheist, but then I came in out of the cold.”
“You know, I used to be an atheist, but then I swallowed my pride and stopped blaming God for my problems.”
“I used to be an atheist, but then I let God into my heart.”
“I used to be an atheist, but then I stopped fighting God.”
“You know, I used to have my doubts about God. Faith is sometimes not an easy thing to have, but that’s precisely what makes it so valuable.”
“I’ve known enough atheists to know that an atheist is just someone who’s struggling with his faith.”
“Atheists believe in nothing.”
“Atheists explain everything with good luck and bad luck.”
Behold a brief sampling of the messages of my upbringing. Behold the messages that mostly shaped my understanding of atheism and atheists for the first decade and-a-half of my life.
Now I say “mostly” because I knew they couldn’t be completely true. I’m related by birth to a couple people who’ve been atheists all my life. These people never discussed atheism or religion with me, but simply by knowing them, I was fortunate enough to know better.
I also say “mostly” because a few of these quotes are not from my particular upbringing, though I have encountered them and they fall into the same category.
“A design indicates a designer.”
This is called the argument from design (Really?). In theological and philosophical circles, it’s known as the Teleological Argument; “teleological” meaning “from design.” It’s most well known, historically, for its use in a book called Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, by William Paley, but it is, in fact, older than Christianity. It first appears in the dialogue Timaeus, by Plato.
But now, consider, if a design indicates a designer, what is it that indicates a design? Is it order? If so, then what constitutes order? What criteria does one employ to recognize order?
If we set that difficulty aside, then in order to conclude that order indicates design, one would have to find a way to categorically rule out the possibility of order arising by any other means. Such would require categorical knowledge the like of which all humanity combined cannot be capable of, unless, perhaps, we could compare different universes and just happened to already know that some are deliberately designed and some are not and which are which. This would be necessary in order to establish a set of criteria for identifying universal design. But in order to reach this point, we would have to already have such a set of criteria.
But even this aside, there are other problems with this line of reasoning. What if order does indicate a design, and by dint, a designer? Would the designer have to personify order as well? If so, and if order indicates a design and a design indicates a designer, then that makes the designer a design which indicates that He, She, or It must likewise have a designer, who, personifying order, would likewise need a designer, and so on and so on in an infinite regress. If, on the other hand, the designer does not need to personify order, then order can arise from disorder which would mean that that which is a design can arise from that which is not a design, which negates the need for a deliberate will.
But wait. Let’s borrow the words of Robert Ingersoll and put this in a nut shell:
“Do you know that the watch argument was Paley’s greatest effort? A man finds a watch. And it is so wonderful that he concludes it must have been designed. He then finds the man who designed the watch, and he is so much more wonderful that the man concludes he must also have been designed. He then finds God, who designed the man, and He is so much more wonderful that the man concludes that He could not have been designed. This is what the lawyers call (or used to call) a departure in pleading.”
There are abundant other, scientific problems with the teleological argument, but I’m going to focus on these. These are the philosophical problems with it.
This is the ultimate refutation of the Teleological Argument, and it comes to us compliments of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by David Hume. This book was published more than two centuries ago, yet I know that a number of my subscribers have never heard this refutation. Why not?
Clergy, apologists and theologians are people who profit from organized religion; from keeping people religious. Often, they profit a great deal, such that they have a vested interest in applying some of their financial resources to the end of preventing their flock from hearing arguments against their shpiel.
One handy means to this end is to do what they can to keep societal conditions such that everyone has to spend so much time working that no one has time for matters of investigation. Another is the practice of raising their flock with a false, unflattering, perhaps downright absurd, fabricated image of those who belong to other flocks and those who belong to none. One who has grown up Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Mormon has probably not heard this counter-argument because those who profit from your religiosity have had a vested interest in doing what they can to prevent you from hearing it. In other words, you’ve lived with your well poisoned.
(Poisoning the Well) Here we have the name of this fallacy. It’s very similar to the ad hominem, except proactive instead of reactive.
If one has a public debate before an audience between person A and person B, B makes a point and A finds himself or herself unable to refute it, and instead falls back on hurling insults and vitriol at B, then we have a reactive fallacy which is called ad hominem.
“I don’t know about that idea. It sounds a little French. I can’t find any logical problems with it, but it sounds French.”
If, on the other hand, whichever side goes first begins his or her case simply by speaking ill of the other in an effort to bias the audience against him or her before they have heard any arguments, then we have a proactive fallacy which is called Poisoning the Well.
“Before we begin, let me just say that I have nothing but the utmost respect for my opponent, but he’s a total pinhead, pinko, commie, doodie-face! Nothing personal, though.”
Battered-Wife Syndrome entails a woman staying with an abusive husband, and the main reason she stays is that he has her convinced that, if she leaves, she will be alone. This often follows a prolonged period in which he has gone to great lengths to systematically remove all the other social contacts from her life, setting her up to have her well poisoned. Of course, human beings are instinctively social animals, so the fear of solitude compels the woman to come up with all manner of reasons to believe that staying really is preferable to leaving.
Michael Shermer was originally a Christian creationist. One day, he regarded the images he was raised on of evolutionary and atheist arguments and became curious. If these are so obviously absurd, if the absurdity of them is so abundantly apparent, so easily demonstrated, why do these authority figures of mine have to keep harping that point? Something doesn’t add up here. So he made it a point to investigate evolution and atheism to see what the deal was, and now subscribes to both. That is, having been raised—reared—on Christianity and creationism, having been schooled in both, studying both and learning both forward and backward, he was deconverted by simple investigation.
As a child, adolescent, and teenager, I had no idea how acne formed. Across a period of years, I spent probably a total of hundreds of dollars on zit pads and zit creams that never really did any noticeable good. In fact, fighting acne is a fairly simple matter once you know what you’re doing. First, you have to understand the process that forms it. Second you have to figure out how to disrupt that process. Now this won’t help get rid of any acne that you already happen to have, but it will prevent new acne from forming and the acne you already have will eventually fade.
If I had known this, I would have saved a lot of money. Instead, all I understood about acne came from the companies selling those zit pads and creams. My well was poisoned.
Consider for a moment Jonestown, in Guyana Temple
When Jones realized he was going to be exposed in the press here, he and his flock pulled up the last of their roots in this country and immediately evacuated to Jonestown. There, in the middle of their rustic little village in the middle of the Guyanese jungle, all the members of the Temple
Human beings, you see, are beings of projection. That is, the things that hold true about us are the very things we tend to assume hold true about others. The overwhelming majority of the people in Jonestown knew they would never ever lie about something so serious and so important, so the few times it crossed their minds that someone might, they discounted it. They knew that they wouldn’t, so they assumed that he wouldn’t. The problem with such an approach is that it leaves the honest majority wide open to the conniving, subversive, manipulative machinations of the dishonest minority.
I know a fellow who gets all his information from one source. Well, I shouldn’t say all of it. He gets news and information from other sources, but he doesn’t trust the news and information from those other sources anywhere it disagrees with that one. He doesn’t trust any other sources because this one tells him that every other source is in on a grand conspiracy. I once pointed out the problem of such an approach to another mutual acquaintance of ours and he said that he was sure that the information source in question was right about there being conspiracies everywhere.
Now do I have any difficulty believing that the world is replete with conspiracies? No. But one of the trademarks of a conspiracy is a source of information which takes steps to become your only source. In the feudal days of Europe , each European country was divided up into kingdoms, fiefdoms and such, and the subjects living therein were entirely dependent upon their lords and kings for all their news of everything taking place outside the kingdom. So if those lords and kings were lying to them, they had no way to tell. If the lords and kings profited from the presence of these subjects and living conditions were better elsewhere, they had no reason to tell them. They had a vested interest in keeping them in the dark about such matters. If you can control how people get their news, you can control what news they get, and you can subsequently control them. That’s why a free press is so important and why a state-controlled press is properly regarded with suspicion.
This is also one important reason why, in the Confederate south, measures were taken to prevent literacy among the slaves. The more literate the slaves became, the less dependent they would be on slave owners for news; the more they would be able to, instead, get their news from the papers which might put them in a position to learn how slavery was illegal to the north, and to communicate that fact to other slaves. This would give them a motive to escape. And with that motive firmly in place, literacy would also enable them to covertly communicate with one another to coordinate escape attempts. And of course, the more slaves you have coordinating escape attempts, the more those attempts are going to succeed and undermine the Confederacy.
These preventive measures sometimes took the form of the allegation that slaves were intrinsically illiterate, and couldn’t learn to read, so one might as well not even try to teach them. But then they found this didn’t prevent people from trying to educate their slaves anyway, and they knew that, the more slave owners made the attempt, the more they would succeed. So then they made laws against it. Anything to prevent a slave from being educated, because the more a classification of people is educated, the harder it is to keep that classification in chains.
Today, the conspiracies and would-be fiefdoms must rely on other means. They may rely on this allegation about every other source being part of the same conspiracy. They may call every other source “liberally biased” while calling themselves “fair and balanced,” whatever “balanced” means. They may rattle off a long list of claims and call them “secret,” since after all, some people will believe anything if you tell them it’s a secret.
The rational, wise individual turns to multiple, independent sources for his or her news and is wary about getting into situations in which multiple, independent information sources are not available. Such a situation opens one’s well to be poisoned.
This is why, in his Baloney-Detection Kit, which one finds in the book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan lists independent verification as the first implement. This is especially important now that we find ourselves in the information age. The internet makes information five times more accessible, but it makes misinformation at least fifteen times more accessible. The challenge today isn’t finding the one (information) but sorting it out from the other (misinformation). Proverbially speaking, independent verification enables us to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I know that I have a number of Christian subscribers, and a few Muslim subscribers. I know that these include a few relative newcomers to my channel. One of these newcomers recently made it a point to tell me that she disagrees with me on a few points. As far as my Abrahamic subscribers go, I have no doubt that applies to every last one of you, but I thank all of you for being willing to hear my arguments anyway. I would also hazard to guess that, surely by now, most of you who’ve been subscribed to me, and other atheists, for at least a couple videos, have seen by now that the images of us you’ve been raised on are for the most part, mistaken. You’ve grown up with a biased preconception; a preemptive, ad hominem strawman; a poisoned well.
So here’s what I propose. Any of you who are up to it, if you can find the time (which I understand is a pretty big if nowadays), I invite you to conduct an investigation to see just how poisoned that well is. I invite you to pick one of these oppositions—either the one between evolution and creationism, or the one between the religion of your choice and atheism—and investigate the two. I invite you to hold the two up for comparison and contrast, side by side; to scrutinize both sides for any aspects that raise questions.
If you choose the first opposition, then I invite you to contact a creationist authority and ask them to recommend any book, or perhaps any three or four books which they feel do a good job of making their case. I will pit that book, whatever it is, or those books, whatever they are, against The Counter-Creationism Handbook, by Mark Isaak. That’s my recommendation there.
If, on the other hand, you choose the second opposition, then I invite you to contact an authority in that religion to solicit the same recommendation. I will pit any books they recommend against either The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Godless by Dan Barker, or Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali; any one of those three, your choice. I understand most people are too busy to read any of these, and way too busy for all of them, but I have read all three and hold the opinion that each gives a good accounting of itself. I also invite further suggestions from my subscribers, but keep it concise. Let’s stick to just one book which you feel does a good job of making the case.
There is not a doubt in my mind, in this event, those of you who can find the time for this investigation will, for the most part, find yourselves completely immersed in arguments you’ve never heard before; that you’ve never considered. The most of you who embark on this investigation will have occasion to say, “Hmm. Well that’s a good point.”
I am also reasonably confident, after this, the most of you will find the evolutionary or atheist side of the argument much more firmly based than you realized, and after that, you will probably start noticing problems you’ve never noticed before with arguments you’ve been hearing all your lives. You’ll begin to realize just how poisoned your well is. In each case, it makes no difference to me which book you read first.
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