I thought I might as well close down comments and leave this place in a more usable permanent state of sleep. Every now and then some comments trickle in, and I have no interest in continuing old discussions or deleting spam at this time.

But faithful (haha) readers need not despair. I’m now a contributor at the Agnostic Atheism blog, where you’ll occasionally find some atheism related writing from me. To be fair, a single topic like this drains creativity; there’s simply not all that much you can say about it, and when all is said and done, it feels as if you’re just repeating yourself. I’ve also gotten myself a general, Norwegian blog where I’ll hopefully not run out of topics that fast.

I’ve been asked, when discussing with theists, to read their various holy books (usually the Bible) with an open mind. The implication is that, if I gave their book an honest and open minded look, I’d become convinced and start believing, as they do. Further it’s implied that I’m not as open minded as I claim to be but rather closed to religion for not carefully examining their various books with the agnostic (i.e. undecided) attitude.

Please don’t ask me to read your holy book with an open mind. I can describe my mind as open, but not so open that my common sense falls out. Don’t you see? There’s a fundamental flaw with this request, and it’s staring you right in the eyes. There’s a huge elephant in the room, and yet you close your eyes to it! This is the assumption that a holy book can somehow validate itself.

Let me reiterate what I consider myself to be. I am a skeptic. A naturalist (i.e,. I look for natural, as opposed to supernatural causes). I’m not a scientist in the sense that I work with science, but I’m a fan of the scientific method. What does this tell you about me? It should tell you that I will not take any book’s word for its own validity. By reading your Holy Book^tm, I will only learn a bit about your brand of mythology. I won’t come to believe it.

Why is that? It should be obvious, but apparently it’s not. I don’t believe it. I will admit that I haven’t read the whole Bible. Does this mean I can’t criticize Christianity? Does the fact that I haven’t read the Koran mean I can’t criticize Islam? Absolutely not! I don’t believe them. The basic premise of these books is that they are of divine nature. They’re built on the assumption that they are inspired by or directly delivered from God, creator and all. Naturally I can’t find out if the premise is true by assuming the premise. That would be circular reasoning. It would be akin to me writing a book in which I describe myself as Messiah and I then assume that the book (coming from Messiah) is of divine nature and use that assumption to prove that I am, in fact, Messiah. Assuming the conclusion is not a way to prove anything. Actually, it’s valid. If we assume that a preposition is true, it follows that the preposition is true, but in no way have we justified the assumption.

What does this tell you? It tells you that I’m not close minded for not reading assuming your conclusion in order to assess your conclusion. If you want to prove that the Bible or the Koran, or any other Holy Book^tm is really of divine nature, you must rely on other sources. This is where the conversation usually halts. “But Messiah said it requires faith to believe!” Obviously. This is the same mindset.

Here’s an example of this mindset. In order to prove to me that Jesus was in fact Son of God, a Christian presented some Bible quote (I can’t remember where from and I can’t be bothered to look it up) that said something to the effect of, “if I [Jesus] don’t do miracles, don’t believe in me.” Miracles should be a sign that Jesus is Son of God. Then this person went on to quote other places in the Bible where Jesus does miracles. Taa-da! Instant Jesus-son-of-God! Of course, this is not how it works. This was all based on the assumption that the Bible was true to begin with.

This is some elimentary advice to theists who wish to justify their faiths to nonbelievers or believers of other faiths: never rely on your conclusion to prove your conclusion. No matter how much you obfuscate and complicate matters, if your logic can be traced back from your conclusion to your conclusion, you have built a circle, and circular reasoning is never justification for the assumption it seeks to prove. The moment someone discovers this in your reasoning, they will recognize that you have nothing to come with. So, please, rely on outside resources, if you’d be so kind. It will save you lots of embarassment.

Science has been accused of being biased towards naturalism. That’s a fair accusation. The question one should ask, however, is not whether science has a naturalistic bias, but rather whether such a bias is justified. Is there really any good reason to suppose that the world is naturalistic and that supernatural forces are nothing but mythology and legend?

First, a bit of clarification. Some will insist that, whenever we describe a “supernatural” process, it becomes natural. This is not what we mean in everyday language. You know what I mean when I refer to the supernatural: ghosts, gnomes, fairies, elves, trolls, apparitions, clarvoyance, astral projections, demons, magic, gods, exorcism, spiritism, miracles, mind-body dualism. The question we are asking is about these phenomenas and the like, and this is what I mean when I talk about supernatural causes. This, I suspect, is also what scientists mean when they say that an event has not a supernatural but a natural cause. There are those that will say that we can never know the truth about some phenomena, because, as Arthur C. Clarke stated it:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This is probably true. There is knowledge that is outside of our grasp, either in principle or in any practical sense. We must learn to approach the knowledge we have access to, and this knowledge does not include knowledge about the supernatural.

Is there anything about the scientific method itself that precludes us from investigating supernatural hypotheses? If so, perhaps science has no choice but to go the naturalistic route if it wants to remain true to its principles. But if we distill science to its core, there is nothing that leads us automatically to believe that supernatural causes are impossible. Science is about observation, hypothesis, prediction, test. This cycle repeats itself ad infinitum. At any stage, an idea may be rejected. First, we make an observation. If this observation is completely at odds with all previous observations, there is reason to doubt its validity and we must be careful not to jump all over it too early. At this stage, if we’re unable to repeat the experiment, we may abandon it, or we may put the observation on hold awaiting further data. On this stage, nothing prevents supernatural science. The next stage is hypothesis. If we have a really odd observation, we may be unable to come up with an hypothesis that can explain the observation. If this is so, we get stuck. At this point, there should be no problem for the supernatural, because people have made up supernatural causes since the dawn of humans. The next stage is prediction. In theory, there should be no problem here, either. Finally is test. If the test confirms the predictions, the hypothesis is a little safer. If it falsifies them, we must reject it. In none of the stages is there in principle any problem with supernaturalism.

Unfortunately, theory differs from practice. In theory, theory equals practice, but sadly it does not in practice. The difference in this case is simple, and it’s not really any profound thought if you think it through. All supernaturalists would do well to consider it every once in a while, and especially if considering basing some science on their supernatural ideas. Supernaturalism is a nonexplanation, an open admission of defeat. It’s waving a white flag at the universe and demanding piece, it’s closing the book and putting the microscope in the closet. It’s closing your ideas, your ears, your nose.

When we get to the hypothesis phase, supernaturalists have no problem coming up with ideas. They don’t have to make them fit into the current views of the universe in science, because they believe it to contain a glaring flaw, an omission of a whole dimension of reality from study. They make up all sorts of explanations: God did it, my dead grandma said so, Jesus ordered me to do it in a dream, a higher consciousness lifted me out of my body and projected me to the surface of an extrasolar planet. When they have done so, they find themselves quite satisfied with their hypothesis.

This practice is little more than putting a name on our ignorance. From the dawn of consciousness, that strange little primate has pointed at its own ignorance and called it “God”, or “spirit”, or “ghost”. What have we gained from this? What understanding have we built up from this renaming? When will someone come along and make a coherent foundation for supernatural realms, like Newton or Maxwell or Einstein? When will technology based on the understanding of the supernatural be accessible to the public? Nothing short of a worldwide conspiracy spanning millenia in time and the whole planet in geographical terms could possibly prevent us from seeing the results of this field of inquiry. That is, if there were any.

When we come to the prediction stage, supernaturalists must deal with a problem: their hypothesis is essentially arbitrary. They’ve made up a concept to explain another, without regard for previous confirmed hypotheses. While an ordinary scientific hypothesis is an educated guess based on prior observations and theories, a supernatural hypothesis is nothing but a guess. So, you’ve seen a woman get mysteriously ill, and then suddenly she’s just fine. What do you propose? Obviously, her dead lover healed her using his supercool überghostpowers. What can we expect to see if a woman is healed by her dead lover using his überghostpowers? This is where the surface gets bumpy. Perhaps you can expect her to be healed the next time she falls ill…but then again, maybe her dead lover is tired of zapping her back into health and has demanded that she keep healthy or he won’t help her. Perhaps we can expect to see the spot in her body where the immaterial überghostpowers made material impact, but then again, maybe her lover’s powers are magical and leave no mark on the body.

What can we expect if there are really ghosts with superpowers? What understanding will this help us gain? None at all. How do we detect this ghost-stuff? We don’t, because our equipment is not made of ghost-stuff but of a different substance, namely matter. How do we communicate? We don’t, because we have no idea how to and no idea how to find out. What possible evidence could we find to confirm this hypothesis? None at all, because the situation is equivalent to the one we’d expect with any of a thousand other supernatural hypotheses. What possible evidence could deny this hypothesis? None at all, because we have no idea what to expect and so we can’t say whether the situation really goes against our expectations.

Sure, there are unanswered questions. I have a feeling, though I would be delighted to be wrong, that we as a society and species will never fully understand the reality in which we find outselves. One open question is the origin of life, as opposed to its development over time. Some have suggested that, because science cannot yet provide us with an explanation, it ought to abandon all hope of a naturalistic cause and instead search for a supernatural one. This is little more than naming our ignorance and then worshipping it. If you say that God did it, what more are you saying than, “I cannot find any reason besides supernatural intelligence; I can’t seem to work out any of its implications or a way to test it, but it does satisfy my curiousity.”

You can complain that this naturalistic bias is bad, because it leaves a lot of land unexplored and the cause may still be supernatural. There are two answers to this. The first is that we have yet to observe anything that could be proven to be non-natural (and I mean that in the sense described in the beginning of this post). Therefore, we have no reason to assume there is a supernatural cause. The other way is the one I have chosen today: questioning the explanatory power of supernatural hypotheses. Science is the search for understanding of the world. Understanding necessitates some requirements, such as the ability to predict the consequences of our ideas, so that we can test it and use the knowledge practically in building yet more knowledge. It may be that the cause of the universe, or life, or other phenomena we observe is supernatural. But until supernaturalists can bring themselves down from the sky and see that their theories are nothing but elaborate naming schemes all describing facets of our ignorance, nothing will be done.

So, please, supernaturalists: before you question the validity of a search based on naturalistic assumptions, do make sure that your own assumptions are testable in principle and practice, and that their truth will actually tell us something. You cannot name a single discovery that was made on supernatural assumptions, and supernaturalism was the norm for thousands of years. Many supernaturalists have made great contributions to the natural sciences, but that is in spite of their supernaturalism, not because of it. When you look closer, none of the great discoveries we have made have been made on the basis of revelation, scripture, mythology or clarvoyance. None of our great heroes of science have relied solely on supernaturalism, and none of their achievements have been due to it.

Supernaturalism is an admission of defeat.

Apparently, Dinesh D’Souza, a man I hadn’t heard about until today (which shows that he’s accomplished his mission), finds it appropriate to use the Virginia Tech Massacre as an attack on atheists. First, he wrote a blog post about how atheists are nowhere to be found in the aftermath (they are), and now he’s written a post called “Dawkins’ Message to Mourners”, quoting River Out of Eden as if that’s Dawkins’ message to mourners. It’s just incredibly low.

Now, what is Dinesh D’Souza’s message to mourners? Atheists have no empathy, they’re just godless bastards who don’t care. That’s right. That’s his message.

What does he think that will do? Does he think mothers and fathers and friends are gonna go, “Hell yeah! I don’t care that someone dear to me was killed, because atheists are such bastards! Thank you, Mr. D’Souza, for comforting me in my time of need!”

D’Souza doesn’t care to explain how God could let this happen. Instead, he uses this fantastic opportunity to hype himself. Great job! I’m sure God has put a golden star next to your name in his great grade chart. I’m sure you’ll be celebrated much like Jesus when you enter Heaven. I mean, bashing unbelievers! Who could’ve done anything more virtous in such a time!

Via Friendly Atheist I found this: Atheism isn’t the final word, by Don Feder. Let’s pick it apart, shall we?

Oh, for the days when one could safely stroll into a bookstore without tripping over the latest atheist title. Ironically, by writing their tracts, in the long run atheists might boost belief.

The amount religious literature, I’m willing to bet, vastly exceeds the amount of atheist literature. Yet I don’t see atheists complaining about all the theistic literature. As for boosting belief, that would come as a result of this blatant propaganda trying to show how the evil god-haters are trying to destroy faith. That’s not true of course, but we wouldn’t wanna think about truth value, now would we?

My local Barnes & Noble has the following titles on display — Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam ; The Quotable Atheist; Letter To A Christian Nation; God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist; and The God Delusion, which is a New York Times best-seller.

Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., has become the first member of Congress to announce that he doesn’t believe in God. He’s probably just looking for a book deal.

Let me remind you of how it came about that Pete Stark admitted to nontheism. The Secular Coalition for America ran a contest to find out if there were any high profile atheists in American politics. Stark was nominated and had the courage to confirm it. An honest man being invited to admit to not having theistic belief. Don Feder doesn’t have a clue.

Why the sudden outpouring of atheist advocacy? Perhaps it’s a way for the cultural left to assert itself in the face of the religious right. Or maybe it’s meant to show that the anti-God argument can be framed more intelligently than in a Bill Maher monologue. Whatever the impetus, as a believer, I welcome the phenomenon. After all, the great enemy of belief isn’t disbelief but indifference.

Oh, please. We have atheism outside of the US, too. Atheism isn’t tied to American politics, or even the United States at all. But this navel-gazing comment seems to think it is. Wake up, theists! Atheists have good values they want for society. These cross the banal left-right axis. These cross borders. These cross continents. That atheists want some decency in America doesn’t mean they’re just young rebels.

Let the godless write their books and the faithful answer them. The disillusionment with religion that dominated British intellectual circles after World War I helped to shape the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. The surviving son of atheist icon Madalyn Murray O’Hair is an evangelical Christian.

I don’t care who the son of any atheist icons is. That he’s not atheistic only shows that he dared to be different from his mother. I’d say that’s a plus for the atheists, not the other way around.

Either way, I don’t care much. The sons and daughters of many fundamentalists are atheists. What’s that got to do with anything?

The books referenced above assert that the debate is over and that atheism has won, but atheists have been saying that for more than 200 years. Since the French Enlightenment, the death of God has been confidently proclaimed. Religion has been made obsolete by egalitarian revolution, industrialism, or science, they insisted. Yet, early in the 21st century, faith endures.

That religion will go away anytime soon is a naive hope most atheists have come to accept is utopia, nothing more. Straw man.

For 70-plus years, the Soviets tried everything imaginable to kill religion: show trials, mass murder of clerics, confiscations, indoctrination and even attempts to co-opt religious symbols and ceremonies. But belief survived, while scientific socialism is now defunct.

In China, where communism’s war on God continues, the home-church movement thrives. Half a world away, America has the highest weekly church attendance in the industrialized world, notwithstanding attacks on faith from Hollywood, academia and a judiciary seemingly intent on purging religious symbols from public spaces.

The US also have high crime rates. School shootings. Junk food culture. Drugs culture. Thieves. Liars. If you’re gonna blame the fall of communism on atheism, shouldn’t you blame these things on theism? I mean, the US is a predominantly theistic society, more so than most other western countries.

In the USA — the most science-oriented society in history — Christian bookstores, radio stations and TV programming proliferate. It seems as though a hunger for the Creator is imprinted on the human heart.

The average American doesn’t have a clue about science. That’s probably why they crave so much for the Creator, not because their heart is imprinted with some divine touch (shouldn’t we find some traces in the DNA, then?).

What would a world without God look like? Well, for one, morality becomes, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult. “Thou shalt not kill” loses much of its force when reduced from commandment to a suggestion. How inspiring can it be to wake in the morning, look in the mirror, and see an accident of evolutionary history — the end product of the random collision of molecules?

I see. The only reason Don Feder doesn’t kill is because God says so. Well, guess what? We have human authorities. Killing will lead to punishment, not by God but by society. There are psychopats both theistic and atheistic. They won’t listen whatever God or anyone else says. Morality, being God’s whim, seems to include, amount other things, genocide. Nice fella, that Yahweh.

Morality is imprinted in our genes and our environment. You’re not mentally well if you go about killing people all the time. Most criminals believe in God (yes, this has to do with the majority being religious). God belief doesn’t seem to bother them. In fact, it seems like they don’t give a shit about God.

A universe that isn’t God-centered becomes ego-centered. People come to see choices through the prism of self: what promotes the individual’s well-being and happiness. Such a worldview does not naturally lead to benevolence or self-sacrifice.

This is what amateur psychologists like to call projection of oneself’s feelings onto others. Nothing more needs to be said.

An affirmation of God can lead to the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence. In terms of morality, a denial of God leads nowhere.

And also holy war, inquisitions and intolerance. Affirmations of God aren’t inherently good or bad. They can lead to good, and they can lead to bad.

There are no secularist counterparts to Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce (the evangelical responsible for abolition of the British slave trade), Martin Luther King Jr., or the Christians — from France to Poland — who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

Yeah, because only Christians do that. I’ll tell you why: because atheists don’t do it in the name of atheism. Just like believers don’t do it in the name of theism, but in the name of their religion. I can guarantee you, there are secularists just as good as those examples. They just don’t care so much about their atheism that they put it before their work. Whereas for a theist, they’re God’s servant first and the servant of those who need it second, for an atheist there’s no such hierarchy.

True, terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Terrible things have been done in the name of every noble concept, including love, charity, loyalty and kinship. Yet, the worst horrors of the modern era were perpetrated by godless political creeds. The death toll from sectarian conflict over the ages is dwarfed by ideological violence, from the Jacobinism of Revolutionary France to the charnel houses of communism and fascism.

This is not to say that atheism leads naturally to guillotines and gulags, but, just as “love your fellow man as yourself” can be corrupted, so too can liberty, equality and fraternity.

Nuclear technology can give electricity. That doesn’t mean I will accept nuclear weapons. Analogously, the bad effects of theism are unacceptable whatever their cause. Secular conflicts aren’t caused by atheism. I’m pretty sure many religious conflicts weren’t caused by religious disputes either, but the religious disputes fueled them. But all that’s besides the point. The point is that religion isn’t acceptable in all its forms just because some of its forms are good.

There is no irrefutable evidence for God’s existence or non-existence.

Or for santa’s existence or non-existence. Or for Bilbo’s existence or non-existence. Or for the Invisible Pink Unicorn’s.

But, if you look closely, his footprints can be discerned in the sands of time.

If you squint your eyes, cock your head and dance a ritualistic dance with hallucinogenes in your blood at full moon, you can just barely see that tiny little footstep leading towards that tiny little pitiful god of yours.

Jews introduced the world to monotheism. They also were the first people to perceive history as linear— an unfolding story moving toward a conclusion. Is it a coincidence that this tiny, originally nomadic people generated the ideas that shaped the Western world, including equality, human rights and a responsibility to our fellow man?

Jews didn’t originate these ideas. Jews were no better than other peoples at the time. Equality and human rights were unheard of at the time of Jesus and before. You’re giving Jews way too much credit. You’re giving, say, ancient philosophers who didn’t reason based on a god too little credit. And all the other people in the history of humanity.

Jews are the only people to maintain their identity during two millennia of exile, and then return to their homeland and re-establish their nation.

Jews are the only people who came back to a land their distant ancestors sometime two thousand years ago held and steal it back. That doesn’t mean all Jews, of course. But mdoern Israel is not something to be proud of.

Mark Twain wrote: “The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up, held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now or have vanished.

All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” Had Twain been a believer, he might have answered his own question.

Cockroaches, too, survive all you can throw at them. Not that Jews are like cockroaches, but hanging on is not something that equals greatness.

America’s survival and rise to global pre-eminence are equally improbable. Challenging the greatest empire of the 18th century, America should never have won its independence or should have self-destructed during the Civil War.

And look where it led. Modern America isn’t something to be proud of.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the genius of our infant republic lay not in its farms and workshops but in its churches whose “pulpits flame with righteousness.”

Atheists are free to disbelieve and to try to propagate their disbelief in books and other intellectual forums. But saying the debate is over doesn’t make it so.

You said atheists say the debate is over. Atheists don’t.

A bit of humility might make their case more convincing.

Right back at you. All sides could do with some humility. Most atheists I’ve met would accept good, scientific evidence. Not so with most theists.

Then again, humility is itself a religious concept.

Then again, war is a religious concept. Then again, so is terrorism. Then again, so is intolerance. If you’re gonna give theism credit, at least credit it for all it’s done.

Of course atheism isn’t “the final word” in the literal sense. It’s just the best alternative. Nobody but the aggressives say anything else.