On December 10, 2007, 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was found strangled, and succumbed to the assault within hours. Her father, Muhammad Parvez, and her brother Waqas were charged with her murder.

Initial speculation was that the murder was a result of Aqsa’s defiance of her father’s request that she wear the traditional Muslim head covering called a hijab, and a desire to ‘westernize’ her clothing and activities.

Even if this were not the case, it is a fact that there have been similar incidents of violence towards women for perceived acts of disobedience of religious or social traditions—something not unique to Islam.

The resulting public reaction was predictable and mostly consisted of expressions of outrage and disgust. Among the reactions were some comments showing a lack of understanding, which can cloud our judgment when it comes to discussing preventive measures. This I find disturbing. It is my fervent hope that we can stop this particular brand of insanity, but in order to do so we must ensure that our efforts are properly directed.

The comments heard in the aftermath of this tragedy came from all walks of life and from many philosophical positions. As skeptics and purveyors of science and reason, we must be able to present a rational and balanced viewpoint that is considered, not a knee-jerk reaction.

(I should note that I am not trying to reach any specific conclusions nor propose remedies and solutions; that level of analysis is best left to those with more resources and qualifications than I have. I simply wish to express my thoughts and try to figure out how we should approach these situations as skeptics.)

A few days after Aqsa Parvez’s death, a well-known radio commentator asked, “Does this not invalidate Islam? ” While he was sure to say that there were many good and decent Muslims, his implication was clear—he questioned whether Islam is valid.

This statement above all others caused me to think about this subject.

In my opinion this act, horrific as it was, invalidates nothing. It does not invalidate a god concept, it does not invalidate religion in general or Islam in particular, and, as shocking as this may sound, it does not invalidate the father’s belief in the righteousness of his actions. For all we know there may be a god who wishes us to act as Islam dictates. I don’t believe that and I feel certain that none of the readers will give the idea even a microsecond of consideration, but there is still no invalidation of anything. This was the act of one man who did it for reasons of his own.

As an atheist I cannot blame a god I don’t believe in. As a skeptic I cannot blame a religion that, in its original texts, does not preach that women should be killed for such a thing. Intellectual honesty compels skeptics to learn the facts, and from all accounts the facts are clear—all the Qur’an says is that women should dress modestly, and prescribes no punishment for those who choose to dress as they wish.

As an evolutionist I am compelled not to blame religion. Instead I see this as an entirely naturalistic human failing. Here we have a man who should have possessed the paternal instincts rooted in brain chemistry that has evolved over eons that would cause him to protect, nurture, and love his daughter. Those instincts seem to have been so weak that they were overcome by his own personal interpretation of a vague religious edict. People who do this do not have parental instincts strong enough to prevent them from harming their own children or allowing them to be harmed; in a sense they are an evolutionary dead-end. There is no religious victory here, simply a human failing. If we blame religion, we are shirking our responsibilities as skeptics and as humans to look for proper causes based on human emotions and natural causes.

If we cavalierly dismiss this as an invalidation of a religion, we are cheating ourselves by taking the easy way out; we are cheating society out of a chance to investigate and perhaps explain a very real problem that deserves attention; and we are cheating Aqsa Parvez, a young woman who simply wanted to live her life as she saw fit.

We do not know about Aqsa’s religious convictions. For all we know she may have been conventionally religious, perhaps even devout, but merely unwilling to go along with certain cultural strictures. Let us not insult her memory with conjecture.

Where are these cultural strictures found? Not in the Qur’an, but in the Hadith—a set of religious texts written by other Islamic scholars after the prophet Mohammed’s death. Linguistically the word Hadith means “that which is new from amongst things,” or “a piece of information conveyed either in a small quantity or large.” That seems rather wishy-washy, as many religious texts tend do be. Generally people invent meanings from statements, condense texts, pick and choose, or expound on them voluminously to bamboozle the faithful.

The implication is that if you wish to know what Mohammed said, read the Qur’an, but if you wish to know what he meant, read the Hadith. It is the Hadith that expounds the Qur’an’s advice that women should dress modestly, turning a description of how to dress, with no prescribed punishment, into an intolerant dictate that women be completely covered and subjected to severe punishment for disobedience. Like any other writings, the Hadith has as much credibility as an individual wishes to give it. It could be seen as ‘gospel truth’ written by hands that were guided by a god, or it could be seen as a medieval version of a Jack Chick tract.

Many non-theists will immediately see religion as the problem in all this, and they would be partially correct. But it is not religion per sè, rather the way humans use, misuse, and abuse it. Atheists are not immune. We bristle, and rightly so, when theists admonish us by saying that atheism is just another form of religion. It is not, but neither is theism—both are simply position statements (one believes there is a god, the other does not).

Another thing that infuriates non-theists is the claim that the most barbarous and murderous states of recent times, and perhaps of all time, have been officially atheistic. Unfortunately they are probably correct. The caveat here for atheists is that if we are not careful to temper our philosophy with sound judgment and healthy scepticism, we can become that which we claim to oppose. Atheism may not be a religion, although some can preach and practise it with a religious fervour, but atheists can still be religious. It can be benign or even beneficial; I have often viewed my naturalism as a form of religion and see no problem with that description (it makes me happy), although carrying it to the extremes that organisations like PETA present is, in my opinion, fundamentalism.

Perhaps the most insidious form of atheistic ‘religion,’ at least in recent experience, is statism—the worship of the state and its ideals and progress. Ostensibly atheistic leaders such as Josef Stalin, Mao Xe Dong, Pol Pot, and Kim Jong Il have been almost deified as prophets at best and demi-gods at worst. Who of my generation can forget newsreel footage of thousands of uniformed Chinese civilians waving their little red book of quotations from Chairman Mao? There have even been incidents that imply a supernatural power. When Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, some of his entourage were taken to a hospital and witnessed an operation. The patient was awake and alert during the procedure, waving the little red book and extolling the virtues of Mao. If that ain’t that old time religion, I don’t know what is. (It turns out that the operation was rigged; it was a fervent volunteer who had been given massive doses of local anaesthesia.)

I would submit that China under Mao was just as theocratic as Afghanistan under the Taliban. In Russia the long lines waiting in Red Square to glimpse Lenin’s body lying in state lasted for decades, and continue in smaller form to the present day, therefore testifying to the enduring quasi-religious fervour attached to his name and legacy.

Religion is not entirely blameless, but it’s an enabler at most. It’s rather like the person who drives the getaway car—some drivers are unwitting or unwilling dupes. Theists ride away claiming that their religions have never/would never do such a thing, and atheists hop on board and proclaim that their freedom from religion means that they could never do it. (At such times I have heard individuals from both groups invoke Anthony Flew’s ‘No true Scotsman’ fallacy*.) Some of those who are anti-religion or anti-Islam can just quickly dismiss it on that basis without any further thought. They are all wrong, as blood-soaked human history both current and ancient can all too easily illustrate.

If you wish to combat the excesses of religion, go ahead; I believe it’s a noble cause and I will stand beside you. If I can fit into my old uniform I might even lead a battalion. But I will only do so on two conditions: 1) That you realise that such excess is a strictly natural human failing that can exist independent of theism. 2) We admit that we are all therefore susceptible.

* Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about the ‘Brighton sex maniac’ striking again. Hamish is shocked and declares, “No Scotsman would do such a thing!” The next day he sits down to read the Herald and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.” – From Thinking About Thinking – Or Do I Sincerely Want to be Right? by Anthony Flew, 1975.

There are many symbols of the season, but the Christmas tree is the most iconic. Most skeptics know that the tradition of taking in a tree for the winter pre-dates Christianity’s arrival in Europe by many years, but that is not enough to dissuade those complainers who have been usurping pagan traditions since year one. For them we must take a more forward approach and confront them with their own words—the Bible itself.

When next you hear the inevitable grumbling about it being a Christmas tree, dammit, not a %$&#ing holiday tree, whip out this little biblical admonition:

Jeremiah 10:2-4 (King James Version):

2 Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.

3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.

4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

Hmm, seems as if there’s a wee bit of sinning going on in Christendom, because I’m sure that those hordes at the tree lots every year aren’t all worshipping Mother Earth.

My family? Yes, this happy band of atheists gets a tree. It’s traditional, a part of our culture. Like the Ikea commercial says, it’s a six-foot-tall, pine-scented air freshener!

Merry x-mas!

The fact is that all of the alleged controversy is rendered irrelevant when one admits that Christmas has become largely a secular holiday.

Out of the gate let me say that of course there remains a contingent of religious people for whom December 25th is the birthday of Jesus Christ, and who celebrate the date as such. But generally the majority in the world who celebrate Christmas—even in countries with very few Christians—celebrate it as a secular tradition rather than a religious one.

Christmas is mostly about giving and receiving presents, eating a lot of food, getting shmammered, attending parties, and spending time with family and friends. For some, it is about all of these things and attending church. But anecdotal evidence demonstrates that most of the church-goers attend more out of habit, tradition, or ‘keeping up appearances’ than to worship a god. In many cases, the folks who attend mass on Christmas only go to church once or twice a year (the other being Easter).

If the devoutly religious want Christmas to be purely about religion, then they must eschew all of the other Christmas traditions: gifts, food, lights, trees, etc. If they do not, then they are nothing more than hypocrites.

But what is Christmas, anyway? Is it historically a purely religious, Christian celebration?

If Jesus were a real historical figure, it is the consensus of most historians and theologians based on available evidence that December 25th was not the actual date of his birth. (Most accounts place it sometime towards the end of September.) December 25th was originally a Roman winter solstice festival known as Sol Invictus, which celebrated the ‘rebirth” of the Sun; several Sun gods were worshipped, including Sol and Mithras. Because it was already such a popular pagan holiday, it was co-opted as the birthday of Jesus. Celebrating the birth of Jesus was condemned and looked down upon by Christians for most of history; Christians didn’t start celebrating Christmas as we know it until the 1800s.

The gift-giving part of Christmas—some would argue the #1 Christmas tradition—was actually introduced long after the Church decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus. The tradition does not derive from the three wise men in the bible, as many believe. In fact, gift exchange derived from Saturnalia, a popular Roman holiday dating to 217 BCE that celebrated the god Saturn. Saturnalia involved sacrifices, a school holiday, and, yes, the exchange of gifts.

Even if we grant the ‘war-on-Christmas’ types the two lies they claim as truth (that Jesus was born on December 25th and that the gift-exchange tradition comes from the three wise men), I wonder how Jesus would feel about people celebrating his birth by literally trampling each other to death in a Walmart in order to buy the $450 video game on sale for $350.

As for that exalted symbol the Christmas tree—it is a tradition that dates to 16th century Germany. It was considered good luck to hang an evergreen at the apex of a house, and over time this morphed into having the tree inside and decorating it. The tradition immigrated to North America along with the Germans.

Traditions are what society is based on, no matter where you live in the world or what your society looks like. Traditions are mostly benign. They are also malleable and tend to change over time. And generally society changes with them. We celebrate Halloween: kids dress up in costumes and beg for candy door to door; adults dress up in costumes and parade and/or party. We do not celebrate the Celtic festival Samhain, from which Halloween is derived, warding off evil spirits by disguising ourselves as them, or slaughtering livestock and casting their bones into bonfires. (At least I hope we don’t!)

Christmas may have meant one thing once upon a time, but now it means something different. Yes, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, but we can still celebrate Christmas. Even the non-religious can celebrate Christmas because it’s about tradition, merriment, nostalgia, and making new memories. It’s an excuse to get together with family and friends we don’t see very often. It’s fun to see the excitement and awe in children’s eyes. The food, candy, and chocolate are great, although the sweaters are mostly bad. Feelings about egg nog are split, and some people even like Christmas music.

As for me, I have grown increasingly weary of Christmas the older I’ve gotten. It seems the magic goes out of it when you’re no longer a child and don’t have children in your life. But it’s the crass commercialism and pure gaudiness that I abhor more than anything. (But if that doesn’t bother you and you still have some names to cross off your shopping list, may I suggest The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, edited by the brain behind the atheist bus campaign, Ariane Sherine.)

Christmas is no Halloween, but if I remove the religiosity and the crass commercialism, it’s a pretty nice time of the year. For whatever reason The Sound of Music is always on TV this time of the year, and that’s enough for me.

So Merry Christmas, Happy Festivus, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Human Rights Day, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy New Year, Happy Omisoka, Happy St. Lucia Day, Happy Winter Solstice, Merry X-mas …and Happy any-other-December-holiday-you-may-celebrate-that-I-may-have-inadvertently-left-out!

A few quotations from well-known scientists, skeptics, and atheists on this subject:

“But of course it has long since ceased to be a religious festival. I participate for family reasons, with a reluctance that owes more to aesthetics than atheistics. I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too. So divorced has Christmas become from religion that I find no necessity to bother with euphemisms such as happy holiday season. In the same way as many of my friends call themselves Jewish atheists, I acknowledge that I come from Christian cultural roots. I am a post-Christian atheist. So, understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance, I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”
– Richard Dawkins

“It seems to me to be obvious that everything we value in Christmas—giving gifts, celebrating the holiday with our families, enjoying all of the kitsch that comes along with it—all of that has been entirely appropriated by the secular world.”
– Sam Harris

“My personal war on Christmas is fought in a way the Bill O’Reillys of the world don’t even recognize: I blithely wish people a Merry Christmas without so much as a germ of religious reverence anywhere in my body. I take this holiday and turn it into a purely secular event, with family and friends and food and presents. I celebrate the season without thought of Jesus or any of the other myths so precious to the pious idiots who get upset when a Walmart gives them a cheery ‘Happy Holidays!’”
– PZ Meyers

Premises regarding skepticism:
A skeptic bases belief upon evidence and reason. He or she uses critical inquiry—the scientific method—to examine claimed phenomena. A skeptic holds beliefs provisionally, rather than absolutely, accepting that new evidence and reason may be found to require a revision in beliefs.

Premises regarding theism:
Belief in a god—theism—is belief in an absolute. Belief in god is also usually considered a matter of faith, rather than of the evaluation of evidence.

Conclusion:
A skeptic cannot be a theist.

Despite this logic however, many skeptics are also believers in God. Many are atheists, but not all.

How can this be so? Are the believing skeptics just bad skeptics? Or are we missing something in the logic that seems to lead to the equation skepticism = atheism?

To find an answer to this perplexing mystery, let’s look, as good skeptics do, at the evidence and reasoning concerning belief in God. We’ll start with the reasoning.

Arguments for God

Over the centuries, numerous argument have been put forward both for and against the existence of God.  Here are a few of the standard pro-God arguments:

• The cosmological argument (the first-cause argument)
• The teleological argument (the argument from design)
• The ontological arguments (arguments from being)
• The argument from perfection
• The argument from authority
• The argument from the existence of morality
• The argument from miracles
• Divine revelation
• The will to believe

Some of these arguments have had their day and have disappeared.

Others have changed their form over the years. The teleological argument we know better today as the argument from design. It holds that the world seems too well designed for having been a chance event—a superior intelligence must have designed it. This was once perceived as a very strong argument, but in the past two centuries it has been blunted by theories of biological and cosmological evolution which show that natural processes can be pretty good designers too. The argument has had to become more sophisticated in the past century and survives in two forms. On one hand, some scientifically minded believers have pointed to the fine balance of forces and precisely accurate natural laws that allow life to exist in the universe as evidence of God’s handiwork. On the other hand, we have the Intelligent Design people arguing that natural selkection  may have created some things but couldn’t have created everything we see in biology, such as the human eye, and so God must have had a hand in our creation.

All of these pro-God arguments though have been debated endlessly over the years. They all have their atheistic answers, and their counter-arguments, and counter-counter-arguments, and so on.

What has become clear though is that none of these arguments clearly carry the day. There does not seem to be an irrefutable logical case to be made for the existence of God.

Yet billions of people—including lots of very smart, logical people—have believed and continue to believe in God.

Obviously, it is not the logical arguments that convinced most of them. Have you ever heard anyone say, “I used to be a sinner, but once I heard the ontological argument, I was saved”?

Perhaps a few people have been so affected. But we can probably agree it usually doesn’t work that way. It seems unlikely to account for most believers.
These theistic arguments have been used, I submit, mainly to bolster the belief of those who already believed, or as part of the general intellectual superstructure that supports a community with an existing religious orientation.

Arguments against God

Now let’s look at some the standard arguments on the other side, the atheist side, to see if there are any knock-out arguments that compel disbelief in the existence of God:

• The problem of evil
• The problem of human suffering
• The argument from poor design
• The incompatibility of God’s attributes
• The failure of prophecies
• Scientific explanation
• Psychological explanation
• Sociological explanation

A notable feature of most such arguments is that they are generally negative. Many of them are aimed at countering already stated arguments in favour of God’s existence. Or they are trying to argue against particular kinds of gods, particular characteristics of God, or particular claims for Gods. Or they are trying to explain why people believe in God, as if that explanation invalidates the belief itself.

Again, looking over all these arguments, I seriously doubt many people have had their minds changed by them. For one thing, each of these arguments has a strong answer from the theist side, answers that even an atheist could guess at.

In my experience, these are the kinds of arguments that atheists tell each other. Atheists go on about how ridiculous it is to believe a loving God would allow children to die of horrible diseases. They rant about how both sides in wars claim God is on their side. They deride superstition and the power of churches.

But they have little success in using these points to win over believers. Rarely have I heard of a believer being turned to atheism by argument alone. Have you ever heard anyone say, “I used to go to church and worship God, but once I heard the scientific explanation of how the universe evolved from the Big Bang, I became an atheist”?

We do occasionally witness people falling away from faith because of personal disillusionment—say, for example, after the death of a child leads them to question “How could a loving god have allowed this?”. But this is usually due to a personal situation having an emotional impact on them, rather than due to the rational argument on its own changing their minds.

The never-ending story

In summary, both sides have heard all the arguments. Both sides have their answers. And almost no one is convinced to switch by the arguments alone.

I’m not saying rational arguments cannot be effective under the right circumstances. At certain historical junctures or at certain points in peoples’ lives, they may be looking for a new way to see the world. And, over time, like water dripping on a rock, some rational arguments may have a cumulative effect. But it’s usually not the rational argument itself that does all the work of sudden conversion in the examples I’ve seen.

But why is this? Why don’t these rational arguments convince people?

There are emotional, logical, psychological and sociological reasons you could put forward why reason does not prevail. But I’d like to point out another factor. One of the main reasons why logical arguments don’t work may be that the two camps—the believers and the non-believers—approach them with entirely different points of reference.

Consider an argument that is used on both sides, the First Cause argument. It often goes something like this.

Theist: If there’s no God, then what created the world? Everything must have some cause.
Atheist: But if everything has a cause and God created the world, then what caused God?
Theist: God is eternal. He has no cause.
Atheist: If God can be eternal, then the world can be eternal too. The universe can have no ultimate cause. Therefore there is no need for God as the first cause.

And so the atheists have won the debate.

Or so they think. For the funny thing is, the theists go away from this kind of argument thinking that they’ve won.

The believers don’t conceive of God as being part of everything that is the world. They see God as both outside and enveloping the world—transcending the world. So when they say everything has a cause, they don’t mean to include God in that “everything”. God is beyond causation. When you say to them that God too must have a cause, that is obviously wrong to them. And when you say the world could exist without a cause, that too is obvious nonsense. In their minds they’ve forced the atheist to retreat to a ridiculous position and thus shown atheism to be nonsensical.

Now to atheists, it seems like special pleading to say God is not part of everything that’s been created. “Everything” means EVERYTHING. When you say everything has a cause, you can’t except God, or whatever you want, from that rule. You can’t say, “God created everything but God was not created.”

But is it really so crazy to do so?

The theist’s statement is reminiscent of various paradoxes that philosophy and mathematics have had to deal with. You may have heard of the liar’s paradox or the paradox of the set that includes all sets that are not members of themselves. Another version is Bertrand Russell’s famous barber’s paradox which goes like this: A town barber puts a sign in his window boasting, “I shave all the men, and no others, who do not shave themselves.” Does the barber shave himself?

These really are difficult puzzles to sort out and have been argued about for centuries. The most widely accepted solution today, usually expressed in terms of set theory, seems to be that we cannot make such statements and expect to be able to apply them to everything. We cannot create the set of “all the men who do not shave themselves and are shaved by the barber” and then see whether the barber fits into it. Rather a set is built by grouping together certain things and then seeing what defines them as belonging to the set. This way you would never end up with such a self-contradictory set.

Returning to our theist-atheist debate, at first glance it seems that the statement “God created everything but God was not created” is a similar kind of paradox outlawed by modern set theory. One could not create a set by grouping items together and then finding the group consists of “everything and not God”. But sophisticated true believers need not be fazed by this. They can say that such a group is exactly what we have found. The modern notion of set theory could be used to support, not disprove, their claim. For we find ourselves in the world as it is, a world of everything and God. So what if this offends ultra-rationalists?

Another tact they may point out is that supposedly paradoxical statements do not create such problems in everyday life. If someone in real life (outside of Philosophy classes, that is) were to confess to me “Everything I say is a lie”, I would immediately realize they did not include that very statement in their claim. If I saw in real life such a barber’s sign as in Russell paradox, my rational world would not be rocked, but instead I’d assume that he was exempting himself from the rule. (Or that the barber was a woman, of course). Similarly when the theist says, “God created everything”, God is being excepted. God is being excepted because He is different from everything else in the universe. He is beyond natural causation.

It might also be pointed out that the believers have a slight advantage over the non-believers in resolving the first-cause debate. If there is a uncaused first cause of our world, wouldn’t it more likely be something that is very different in nature from the things in our world. If there must be an uncaused cause, would it more likely be something natural or something outside our normal reality?

Actually I would still vote for something natural, but I can see why human intuitions would favour the extra-natural solution.

The atheists cannot apply the same logic to the universe creating itself in the First Cause argument, as theists can with God creating himself, since atheists (at least the ones we are concerned about here) seek only natural causes and cannot assign characteristics beyond our rationality to the universe, as theists can with God.

You may or may not balk at this reasoning—and I don’t entirely accept it myself—but at least it shows how very problematic rational arguments can become when they deal with cosmic questions such as “how did everything begin?”, “how could something come out of nothing?”, and so on.

In any case, after the First Cause argument takes place, neither the believer nor the non-believer has convinced the other that there is or is not a God. Each is left with showing only that their side is possibly right. Neither side has demonstrated that its arguments eliminate the opponent’s position.

There are no knock-out punches. Both sides come away with thinking they’re right, or at least they could be right.

Life in the Matrix

Skeptics however rely not only on logic but also on empirical research. What we see, hear, smell, touch and taste—either directly or indirectly with instruments. In a word: evidence.

However, on the question of the existence of God, there is no evidence either way. This lack of evidence is actually the atheist’s strongest asset.

The French mathematician and astronomer Laplace is supposed to have once shown Napoleon his treatise on celestial mechanics. Napoleon noted to Laplace that in all the wheeling of planets and moons and suns, Laplace hadn’t mentioned the role of God. Laplace’s reply: “I have no need for that hypothesis.”

After all is said about God and religion and first causes and evil and morality, the bottom line is that we do not need the concept of God for any immediate practical purpose. We certainly do not need it for science at this time.

“We have no need for that hypothesis” is a perfect skeptical position that we apply to all kinds of other claimed phenomena. I have seen no convincing evidence that the Loch Ness monster exists, so I don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster. There is no evidence that aliens have abducted my neighbours, so I don’t believe my neighbours are being beamed up by ETs. Lack of evidence, plus lack of convincing argument either pro and con, should by default result in a lack of belief.

There are several variations on this position in science and philosophy, not just as applied to the existence of God but as applied to all sorts of hypotheses or claimed phenomena.

• Most people know Occam’s Razor as “the simplest answer is usually the right one”. It is also called the principle of parsimony and is better expressed as “the simplest explanation that covers all the evidence is the one that should be adopted”. The original formulation of this famous rule is that one should not multiply entities needlessly. Applying this to God, we find there is no need to introduce the entity God as this entity is not needed to explain anything. We can explain the world more simply without God, therefore we do not need God in our explanation for the world.

• “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is the famous maxim that skeptics cite. If you are presented with an extraordinary claim, according to this rule of thumb, you should demand clear evidence supporting it before you accept it. The existence of a supernatural being like God would be extraordinary some people think, so we should require very good evidence before believing such a thing. Since there is no such evidence, we should

• Logical positivism and verificationism hold that only statements that are verifiable by appeal to either experience or reason are meaningful and therefore worthy of consideration. No statement about the existence of God can be verified by experience or reason and therefore it is a meaningless issue.

• Falsifiability, usually associated with philosopher Karl Popper, says only claims that can in principle be found false are scientific. A theory like “Life is a dream” may be interesting but it’s not scientific because there is no way it can be proven that life is not a dream. You could say the same of the claim “There is a God”. No way to disprove it, so not a scientific issue.

But note that something else is in common to all these guidelines, which would purportedly rule out questions of God’s existence; they do not determine ultimate truth or reality. These are rules of thumb to show the likely most successful way to go about considering various claims. The guidelines do not prove anything on their own.

For instance, extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence to support them do sometimes turn out to be valid after all. Think of such great scientific advances as the Copernican system of the planets revolving about the sun, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Einstein’s theories of relativity. These ideas all once seemed extraordinary, but in the years before the extraordinary evidence was found to support these extraordinary claims, these claims were still true, were they not? Two thousand years before Copernicus, a few individuals theorized that the earth went around the sun. They were right, of course, despite the lack of evidence to support them at the time.

Or consider string theory, the latest set of ideas being proposed to succeed relativity and quantum mechanics as the most profound explanation of how our universe works. So far there is no known test to determine whether string theory is valid. In fact—and this is disturbing—string theory may be in principle incapable of empirical confirmation. It may be impossible to test this idea about the basic structure of our physical world (although string theorists argue about this).

String theory may not only bypass the “extraordinary evidence” rule, but applying the standards of logical positivism, verificationism and falsifiability may also indicate it is meaningless or unscientific. Yet string theory must be either right or wrong. So these guidelines do not determine what is really true about the world—in this case, perhaps missing some very basic and far-reaching truths about the world.

Think of all the other things most of us believe that would not pass these tests of evidence and reason. That our loved ones love us. That it is wrong to murder our loved ones. That our loved ones, or anyone else for that matter, have minds. These are assumptions we all operate on every day, yet they have been notoriously difficult to prove by argument or evidence for several millennia.

We don’t even have a test to determine that we are not dreaming right this instant. We don’t have a test to determine our entire lives have not been illusory. Yet we tend to think that we are awake and our lives are meaningful, despite the lack of empirical evidence one way or the other.

So if science cannot present evidence for its theories about the basis of our universe’s existence and if we cannot even test the basic things we take for granted as being true every day, is it fair to demand these kind of proofs about a religion’s hypothesis about what it also considers a basic fact of our existence—namely, God as creator?

Saying we don’t need God as an hypothesis, or saying there is no evidence for His existence, is not the same as saying there is no God.

99-percent atheists

Some rational theists say the existence of God does have evidence or reason on its side, . It has passed some public or personal test for them. It is meaningful to them on some level to talk of God’s existence. God is an hypothesis they think they do need in their understanding of how the world works.

In this short space I’m not about to argue over their evidence. The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, some skeptical theists hold that such evidence exists. And this is all anyone needs to be a skeptic—to hold beliefs on the basis of evidence and reason.

Skepticism is not a set of beliefs that must be held or actions that must be taken. Skepticism is a method. Like science, it’s a time-proven approach to considering beliefs and practices. It gives people the tools to decide for themselves what to believe or not to believe, what to do or not to do.

Here’s an analogy.

Suppose someone asks you to explain what democracy in Canada means. A possible answer you might give is “Well, in Canada we get to choose who runs our government.” Another answer is, “Every few years in Canada we elect Liberals or Conservatives to form the government”.

Both of these answers may be true. But one is about the process—the method—the democratic election. The other is about a possible result of that method. For some people the democratic process leads them to certain conclusions and they vote for a particular party.

With skepticism, our method based on evidence and reason considers questions of ghosts, aliens, alternative medicine, miracles, gods, etc. Our goal is not to debunk all these claims but to consider the evidence for them. Some people using our methods come to hold very confident views on these issues. Most, if not all, of us have come to deny the existence of ghosts, for instance. Many of us have also come to disbelieve, or be confirmed in our disbelief, in gods. Others are confirmed in their theistic beliefs. But what binds us all as skeptics is the method, our acceptance of evidence and reason as an approach to all claims.

To ask “why aren’t all skeptical people atheists?” is like asking “Why aren’t all democratic people Liberals?”

As an atheist I’m willing to stay up all night arguing with fellow skeptics that the evidence and reason should lead them to disbelieve in God. But I know religious skeptics who would stay up all night to argue their side on the basis of evidence and reason too.

As a skeptic I am also aware of the inconclusiveness of arguments on both sides, as already discussed here. I am also aware of the obligation of skeptics to always keep an open mind for new evidence or reason.

For these reasons I do not consider myself a 100-percent atheist. I’m a 99-percent atheist.

Maybe 99.5 or 99.99999 percent.

(I have no way of measuring this accurately of course. Just use whatever figure you think indicates great confidence in atheism while keeping a tiny part of the mind open for potential contrary information.)

This is no different from other positions we skeptics hold on all sorts of extraordinary claims.

We’re pretty sure there is no Loch Ness monster since there is no persuasive evidence and there is lots of inductive reasoning that would make it unlikely such a creature of that size could survive in the loch. So I’m 99 percent sure (maybe 99.5 or 99.999 percent) there is no such animal. If they drain the entire loch and don’t find it, I’ll get up to as close to 100 percent sure as possible.

Have aliens ever visited earth? A more reasonable question, no evidence for it, some good arguments against it, the limiting speed of light and so on. So, maybe I’m 80 percent sure aliens haven’t visited earth.

Do aliens regularly beam up earthlings today to study their reproductive organs? A farfetched claim, no evidence for it, lots of evidence debunking such claims, lots of reasoning against it. So, 99 percent sure it doesn’t happen.

I would hope that those skeptics who believe in God also keep an open mind about what they believe, though I cannot speak for them, and that does not affect my own beliefs.

In a way, this may seem to be an escape clause for us.

Suppose today the sky should open up and God appear, revealing Himself once and for all to the world. Or suppose a group of credible scientists were to announce that looking deeply into space they have found disturbing evidence that an all-powerful intelligent being resides there and seems to be manipulating the laws of the universe.

If either of those unlikely events were to occur today, I and other atheistic skeptics would still be skeptics tomorrow. Why wouldn’t we be? We’d never said the existence of God was impossible. We’d only said there was no evidence for it and thus no reason to believe in it. Now apparently we have the evidence and thus reason to believe.

Our approach to basing belief on evidence and reason would still be valid. Our willingness to wait for evidence would have been rewarded. We could then move ahead with beliefs that were supported by the evidence.

Skepticism is not about holding a set of beliefs —“there are no aliens, there is no God, etc.”—that we defend against all contrary claims. It’s about holding provisional beliefs based on available evidence and reason.

Believers in God may meet the general requirements of skepticism by holding that beliefs should be based on evidence and reason wherever they are available.

Not that there is such a requirement or creed to which one must swear an oath of allegiance in order to be considered a member of the skeptical movement in good standing. We’re a movement to encourage widespread use of the scientific method and critical inquiry, not to demand agreement on every point on pain of excommunication.

We’re not, after all, a religion.

Soon after the documentary and book came out, at least one critical account in book form also arrived—and you can read this one for free. The Jesus Family Tomb Controversy: How the Evidence Falls Short by Dillon Burroughs, at this time of writing, is available for free download as a PDF file, from either the Amazon or Nimble Books website. You can also get a shorter version of the main arguments in a pamphlet co-authored by Dillon, “9 Facts That Disprove The Lost Tomb of Jesus”, which can be downloaded from the Skeptics.ca website here.

The main claim in dispute is that the tomb of Jesus, his mother Mary, his brother Joseph, his purported wife Mary Magdelene, his purported son Judah, and others was uncovered in 1980 during excavation for construction in Talpiyot, near Jerusalem. The ossuaries—burial boxes for bones of the deceased—were removed from the site and stored in Israel but they were left unidentified until Toronto-based archeologist and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici (known for his TV series The Naked Archeologist) and Canadian-born Hollywood director James Cameron (The Titanic and Terminator) came along.

Jacobovici also claims to have rediscovered the tomb which had been covered over since the 1980s. Watching his team do the detective work to find it makes for exciting television. A viewer is compelled to believe that the filmmakers did in fact uncover the tomb, marked with the distinctive chevron and circle symbol (which irreverently reminds me more of a Star Trek insignia than a religious symbol, but that’s just me).

But is it the tomb of Jesus? What’s a skeptic to think?

What’s at stake?

First let me state that I doubt any such findings—even if confirmed—would invalidate the Christian story by proving the material death of Christ. Many Christians do have a deeply held belief that Christ rose from the dead and ascended bodily into heaven; any solid evidence that his bones were kept in an ossuary might create serious religious difficulties for them. But the actual bones are long gone, so we have no conclusive evidence that the remains of the Biblical Jesus were ever kept in the container with his name on it. Moreover, not all Christian faiths require Christ’s resurrection and ascension to be physical.

I would expect though that the greater damage to faith might come from the major overhaul of the Christian story that would be needed if all the Jesus tomb claims were to be upheld: that Jesus was married, that Mary Magdalene was his wife, that he had a son, and that he lived and died as a mortal.. This extensive revision of the Bible narrative would probably force a similar revision of Christianity within the churches that base themselves on a traditional understanding of the Bible. But it would not necessarily require the wholesale invalidation of Christianity or religion in general. In short, it would not be the atheists’ silver bullet.

Nor, could the Jesus tomb story completely undercut the position of atheists, agnostics or other non-Christians by proving the historicity of Jesus, as some religious figures have suggested. If the Jesus-tomb claims are confirmed, the most they show in this regard is that the Biblical figures had some basis in reality—not that any one of the figures was a god or had divine powers. No evidence of miracles is being claimed.

Moreover, the claims would corroborate parts of the Bible (at least as it is currently constituted) while contradicting other parts, thus providing both ammunition and difficulties for both those disputing and those supporting the Bible’s literal veracity.

So, my own sense of the situation is that if the tomb and ossuaries were confirmed as those of Jesus’s family, there would have to be some rethinking on all sides, although the faith of either believers or non-believers is unlikely to be destroyed. There is too much wiggle room for both positions.

But we are far from having to have those debates yet. The credibility of the claim about Jesus’s tomb has yet to be established.

The critical response

The criticism of the Jesus-tomb claims (at least in academic circles) begins with the fact that they were first presented at a press conference and then on television, rather than in peer-reviewed journals or at other professional venues. This means that those with expertise in the subjects dealt with by the documentary did not have an opportunity to submit the claims to an intensive examination before they went public.

Archeologists and historians have noted that the history of the Jerusalem area during the era in question, the culture and practices of the people of that time, and the interpretation of the literature from this period are very complicated. Yet the filmmakers seem to have made huge simplifying assumptions in fields where consensus has not been reached. A great deal of assessment is needed to weigh the evidence put forward to support the conclusions reached. But those experts are being asked by media to present 15-second clips summing up their responses to the claims made on a television show—without having access to the research in the first place.

I sympathize with them in this. Taking research to the public before the professionals have a chance to evaluate it is akin to releasing movies without giving critics a chance to review them first. It smacks of a lack of confidence that the product would stand up to examination: better get it out to the consuming public before the bad reviews can sink it. But of course this is a much more serious and complex matter than whether a movie is a hit; the peer-review process is intended not only to weed out bad work altogether but also to find faults that can be repaired in order to improve the work in the end and provide conclusions that can be a dependable foundation for future work in the field. Without such ongoing examination, we end up with a body of work built on sand, to borrow a religious metaphor.

However, my journalistic side also sympathizes with Jacobovici and his team. They were not out to provide academically sound research but rather to give people something to think about. They’ve made what they consider an earth-shattering discovery and they want to get the news out to the people, instead of spending years debating picayune points with professional nitpickers.

Also, as much as I appreciate the academic peer-review system and consider it essential, I also recognize that it’s a method of self-regulation and control of intellectual disciplines, and is not always open to giving radical, new approaches a fair hearing. If one is more concerned with the court of public opinion anyway than in winning the approbation of the academic establishment, why not go directly to the public? This wouldn’t be the first time that a discipline-shaking scientific theory or discovery were announced in a popular venue rather than in an academic journal or at a conference.

I could also point out how many times the results of skeptical investigations have been reported in magazines, newsletters and press releases without serious academic or professional peer review. Why shouldn’t someone who carries out such extensive and exciting research that purports to change traditional religious views also be allowed to take his case to the public if he sees fit?

So, the media hoopla surrounding the Jesus-tomb claims might lead us to take the claims less seriously than if they had gone through a more conventional review process involving experts in their field, but it should not lead us to dismiss the claims altogether.

So let’s look at the other critical arguments that have been made. I’ll just list some of them very briefly before settling on one I find most interesting for skeptical research in general:

• The Poverty Argument: Only relatively affluent families in Jesus’s time could afford rock-cut tombs such as the one that is claimed to be the Jesus tomb, and Jesus’s family was poor.
• The Location Problem: If the family could have afforded a rock-cut tomb, it would have been created in their hometown of Nazareth, not just outside Jerusalem.
• The Family Muddle: Why does the so-called family tomb of Jesus contain so many people who are not known members of the family? It’s a big leap to assume they are all previously unrecorded members of the family (brother, son, and so on) or in-laws (wife). Some of the ossuaries in the tomb are completely unidentified—who are they?
• The Plain Box Dilemma: The ossuary said to have held Jesus is plainer than the others found in the tomb. Wouldn’t we expect the founder of a religion to have a more ornate burial box? Or at least something describing him as King of the Jews or Saviour or Lord or some such?
• The Inscriptions Difficulty: Jews were buried in shrouds at the time and only afterwards when tombs became crowded would those remains—mainly bones—be moved to ossuaries, on which identifications were hastily scratched. So the names indicate only who was thought to be in the box at the time they were moved. We do have confirmed cases of misidentifications, such as once when female DNA was found in an ossuary marked “son of”.
• The Inscriptions Difficulty II: It was customary in Jerusalem at the time to include the place of origin on the ossuary when the person interred was from outside Judea. You’d expect Jesus’s ossuary to describe him as Jesus of Galilee. The fact that the ossuary gives Yeshua’s descent from his father indicates the family is from Judea.
• The Inscriptions Difficulty III: The readings and translations of some of the inscriptions on the ossuaries are controversial. Even the reading of the inscription purported to be “Yeshua bar Yehosef” (Jesus son of Joseph) has been challenged.
• The DNA Irrelevance: The marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene is proposed as a solution to the problem raised by DNA showing that the people interred in two ossuaries were not blood relatives. But unrelated DNA cannot prove marriage. Several other ossuaries in the tomb were not checked for DNA. If they also turn out to be unrelated, are those individuals also to be considered in-laws? We can reach no conclusions about relations based on unrelated DNA.
• The Historical Hitch: We have no historical or Biblical records indicating Jesus was married or had a child, or identifying the name Mariamene on an ossuary with Mary Magdalene. Both Jewish and Roman historians agree that the tomb where Jesus’s body was left was empty at some later point and thus Jesus’s bones should not have been there to be encased in an ossuary. Also historical records indicate that James, the brother of Jesus and a founder of Christianity, was buried separately, although the filmmakers try to make a case that a supposedly missing tenth ossuary from the Jesus family tomb belonged to James.
• Improbable Probabilities: More on this one coming up.

These are only some of the difficulties raised. Granted, there are possible answers to these problems. You can probably think of some yourself. But little hard evidence is available to support those answers. This shows the number of assumptions the filmmakers must have made to eliminate these obstacles and make their entire theory fit together.

Ancient figures

Nowhere is this more telling than in the last difficulty listed. The filmmakers go to great lengths to make the case that statistics are on their side. What are the odds, they ask. that ossuaries bearing the same names as Jesus and his kin could be found in one place and not be the tomb of Jesus’s family?

In the film, University of Toronto mathematician Andrey Feuerverger is recruited to calculate this probability, and he does his calculations very carefully.

The likelihood of all those names being found together and not being those of the Biblical Jesus’s family is one in 600, he determines.

An American religion professor, James Tabor, goes further and includes the controversial ossuary of James in his more liberal calculations and comes up with odds of one in 42 million.

Now, the spread in the odds between these two calculations is enough to make one wonder. But even discounting the James ossuary and sticking with the more conservative figure, we have plenty to doubt here.

Feuerverger’s figuring amounts to a probability of more than .998 (599/600) that the tomb is that of the Biblical Jesus’s family (1.0 representing complete certainty). But calculations of probability are largely a measure of what we know versus what we don’t know. Let me explain:

If you know I have a bean in one hand but you don’t know which one, then you can calculate the probability that it is in my left hand as .5 (or one in two). It’s not 1.0 because you don’t know it’s not in my right hand. Once I open my hands and show you it’s in my left hand, your calculation of the odds that the bean is in my left hand jumps to 1.0 because you now have complete knowledge.

If you know I put beans under nine of 10 cups, then the odds of it being under any given cup you can figure to be .9 or nine out of 10. It’s not 1.0 because you don’t know that the given cup is not the very one that is missing a bean. Your knowledge takes you to .9 and your ignorance keeps you from going higher.

Same thing with Feuerverger’s Jesus tomb calculation. With absolutely conclusive evidence—if we somehow knew there were no other people then with the same names as Jesus and his family and we had complete knowledge on all the other issues raised— then the probability of the tomb with those names belonging to Jesus’s family could be determined to be 1.0. But other people in Jesus’s time did have similar names. What keeps the probability from quite getting to 1.0—by Feuerverger’s reasoning—is our not knowing whether this tomb is that one in 600 occurrence of another family with the same names.

Note, coincidence has not been ruled out by these calculations. On average every 600th tomb could have that concentration of names. Given thousands of tombs, there could be several others with the same cluster of names.

Still, the odds provided by the filmmakers are impressive.

But—and here’s the big but—the calculations are made on certain assumptions that hide other bits of missing knowledge.

For example, to help connect the Yeshua (Jesus) of the ossuary to the Jesus of the Bible, the name Mariamene e Mara on another ossuary in the family tomb is taken to refer to Mary Magdelene of the Bible and, contrary to the Biblical account, she is held to be Jesus’s wife.

This is a startling claim, to say the least, that runs against two millennia of tradition and scholarship. We won’t get into a debate on this issue here, but suppose we speculate that the odds of the Biblical Jesus being married to Mary Magdelene are one in ten, or .1, which most scholars would consider generous.

Similarly, the claim that the ossuary of Yehuda bar Yeshua (Judah son of Jesus) is that of the Biblical Jesus’s son is controversial. Suppose we give this one also a probability of .1 for our calculations.

Now, instead of assuming that we know Jesus was married to Mary Magdelene and had a son Judah, let’s bring our uncertainty—our lack of knowledge—on these matters into the calculations. Now the probability of the tomb being that of Jesus’s family is reduced from .998 to .0099 (599/600 x .1 x .1), or less than one in 100.

Even if we give a much more generous probability to each of the Mary Magdalene and Judah claims (say, .25 or one in four), we still end up with the odds of a match being pretty low (one in 16 in this case).

I have no idea, of course, what the chances of Jesus being married to Mary Magdelene and fathering Judah really are. No one does. But this hypothetical calculation shows the wide skewing of probability that occurs when assumptions are made.

Now go over that list of problems raised by critics, note the assumptions made by the Jesus-tomb proponents to overcome them, and assign odds for each of those assumptions being correct. Then multiply them out and you will get figures far different from those presented in the documentary. In all likelihood, the probability of the tomb being that of Jesus would approach nil.

Suspect calculations

But even if we were to accept all their assumptions as valid, the calculations are suspect for other reasons raised by critics.

For one thing the frequency of names such Yeshua and variations of Mary in Israel at the time — upon which the calculations were based — is uncertain. I’ve read estimates from experts giving a much higher frequency of names — including Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Matthew and Judah — than was used in Feuerverger’s calculations. One source, for example, says that over fifty percent of female residents of the area were called some variation of Mary.

Archaeologists say they have run across clusters of these names before and thus know that the basis for the statistical analysis is flawed.

In other words, we are missing huge amounts of knowledge from which to make certain judgments. If we were to take into account our ignorance on these matters, the probability that the tomb is that of Jesus and his family would have to be estimated at much, much less — close to zero, in fact.

To be fair, it should be noted that Feuerverger has wisely included a “fudge figure” in his calculations to account for the investigators’ bias. But this may not have been enough.

In fact, I question the value of such calculations of probabilities at all when so little is known. Their presentation in the documentary seems to be a polemical point, intended to persuade those who don’t examine the assumptions very closely, rather than evidence of any value.

We’ve seen this with many paranormal claims, when statements such as “What are the odds?” are made to make the claims appear more reasonable than they are.

Now, all this is not to say that the Jesus-tomb claims couldn’t be correct. If we were to gain some of that missing knowledge on any of the issues where the filmmakers have made huge assumptions to fill gaps, we might come up with calculations that would improve or decrease the odds—and eventually confirm or disprove the claims.

The lesson for skeptics is that whenever claims are backed up with “what are the odds?” kind of arguments, we should look for the assumptions and the missing knowledge behind them.

Malachy O’Morgair is known today as Saint Malachy, and like many saints, he had humble beginnings.

The son of a teacher, he lived in the northern Irish county of Armagh from 1094 to1148, worked his way up the priesthood, and eventually became bishop. If not for the intervention of a Benedictine monk named Arnold de Wyon he might be consigned to relative obscurity, but a quick perusal of the Internet indicates that even today controversy swirls around him, especially among breakaway groups who believe that Roman Catholicism has strayed from the true path. (One such group, which runs the website truecatholic.org, has even elected its own Pope.)

Saint Malachy’s holy status rests upon the prophecies attributed to him, which were allegedly discovered in the Vatican archives by the aforementioned de Wyon in 1590, a rather significant date as we shall see.

His 112 prophecies deal primarily with descriptions of future Popes, right up until the last one before the end of the world. According to most interpretations the current Pope Benedict is the penultimate pontiff, so I may be renting a backhoe this weekend and starting on the shelter.

Just as with the prophecies of Nostradamus, most of the prognostications of Saint Malachy are vague snippets which could be adapted to almost any circumstance. However, two are so specificc that one might question their provenance or consider them evidence of genuine revelation. One predicts that the English will persecute Ireland, which is correct, and the other says that England will eventually revert to Catholicism.

If we look back at the date of de Wynon’s discovery we see the problems. England did indeed persecute Ireland, and it began with an invasion by Henry II in 1171, 23 years after Malachy’s death. So is this a true prophecy? Perhaps, though it would be easier explained as hindsight by a later chronicler. Ironically, the invasion was apparently fully authorized by the only English Pope, Adrian IV, as a means of reforming the church in Ireland.

The gift of hindsight is glaringly obvious in the second prophecy, that of the return of Catholicism to England. In order for it to be restored it must first be tossed out. So how did Malachy know that England would reject Catholicism? Significantly, this turning-away does not seem to be mentioned in any of the prophecies I turned up. That did not occur until Henry VIII had his famous dust-up with Rome in the 1530s, which brought about the Church of England. As mentioned previously, de Wynon brought the document to light in 1590, which makes the whole thing look a little less like iron-clad proof of St. Malachy’s prognosticative abilities and more of de Wynon’s attempt to shore up church influence, with perhaps some level of personal gain in the bargain.

Such nefarious business is not without precedent. For another example of this kind of maneuvering, look up the Donation of Constantine on the Internet. A concise analysis is available at the following web address: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation_of_Constantine.

Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is one of those shadowy terms that we have all heard, but the act itself is something that we have probably not heard. It has come to be seen as nothing more than meaningless nonsense syllables strung together, but allegedly it once was much more divine.

Some claim that the original form was a language that could miraculously be understood by anyone hearing it, regardless of their native tongue. Quite a feat. I guess that whole Tower of Babel thing has been revoked?

So what is glossolalia? The easy reply, and probably the correct one, is that it is just a bunch of made-up words, spoken in such a way that they sound as if the speaker is using a real but unrecognizable language. It is not to be confused with Xenoglossia, which is the alleged ability to speak a real language to which one has had no exposure. While unrelated in definition, their believability quotient is about equal.

A web site called bible411.com quotes from an article in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation entitled “An Ethnological Study of Glossolalia” by George J. Jennings, March 1968. He mentions that glossolalia is practised among at least seventeen non-Christian religions of the world, a fact noted by bible411 with the wry comment “Certainly we wouldn’t attribute Glossolalia in these heathen religions to the work of the Holy Spirit.” Ah yes, when Christians babble a bunch of unintelligible phrases it’s because they are infused with the power of god, but anyone else is nuts, and a filthy heathen too. Actually, I would recommend this article for a number of reasons. There are passages that quote from scholarly research and provide a scientific approach to linguistics with a skeptical outlook, there are insights into the way believers approach the subject, and there is some uproarious unintentional humour, as the compilers do everything they can to spin things to make everyone else’s brand of belief to look silly while making their own views appear sensible.

Speaking in tongues is nowadays usually associated with the Pentecostal ministries, the typical “fire and brimstone” fundamentalist Christian sect whose adherents let little stand in their way. They take as their authority the Acts of the Apostles from the Bible, which says that on the day of Pentecost (a variable date connected to Easter) the Apostles “were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability.” The web site of Pentecostal preacher R. W. Schambach, who says that he sometimes speaks in tongues, informs us that if we call their 24-hour-a-day prayer line “an anointed prayer warrior will pray with you.” Wearing godly fatigues I presume?

The Apostle Paul writes on tongues in Corinthians, saying, “He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself, ”Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not,” and “For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.” This seems almost to go along with today’s gibberish interpretation.

Some of the most vehement objections to glossolalia come from Christians, who see the practice as not only nonsense but also insulting. The New Covenant Church of God reprints an article by D. James Janes, originally written for the Institute for First Amendment Studies. Titled “GLOSSOLALIA: THE GIFT OF GIBBERISH”, he rips into it with glee, noting that when he was flipping T.V channels and saw well-known televangelist Robert Tilton babbling away, it seemed to him that he had at one point used the phrase ‘Kowwabunga Dude’ made famous by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, hardly poster children for fundamentalists.

Believe it or not, the subject is also scorned by David Icke, the guy who claims that Earth is gradually being infiltrated by reptilian aliens. Put these weirdos in a room and they turn on each other.

Jones sided strongly with the plaintiffs against the board, calling Intelligent Design a religious view, not a science, and awarding damages and costs to the plaintiffs. Following are two excerpts from this landmark ruling: the section on whether Intelligent Design is a science and the conclusion. Footnotes and transcript references have been removed to make for easier reading.

4. Whether ID is Science

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.

Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena. This revolution entailed the rejection of the appeal to authority, and by extension, revelation, in favor of empirical evidence. Since that time period, science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth. In deliberately omitting theological or “ultimate” explanations for the existence or characteristics of the natural world, science does not consider issues of “meaning” and “purpose” in the world. While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as “methodological naturalism” and is sometimes known as the scientific method. Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify.

As the National Academy of Sciences (hereinafter “NAS”) was recognized by experts for both parties as the “most prestigious” scientific association in this country, we will accordingly cite to its opinion where appropriate. NAS is in agreement that science is limited to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data: “Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from the confirmable data – the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based upon empirical evidence are not part of science.”.

This rigorous attachment to “natural” explanations is an essential attribute to science by definition and by convention. We are in agreement with Plaintiffs’ lead expert Dr. Miller, that from a practical perspective, attributing unsolved problems about nature to causes and forces that lie outside the natural world is a “science stopper.” As Dr. Miller explained, once you attribute a cause to an untestable supernatural force, a proposition that cannot be disproven, there is no reason to continue seeking natural explanations as we have our answer. Id.

ID is predicated on supernatural causation, as we previously explained and as various expert testimony revealed. ID takes a natural phenomenon and, instead of accepting or seeking a natural explanation, argues that the explanation is supernatural. Further support for the conclusion that ID is predicated on supernatural causation is found in the ID reference book to which ninth grade biology students are directed, Pandas. Pandas states, in pertinent part, as follows:

Darwinists object to the view of intelligent design because it does not give a natural cause explanation of how the various forms of life started in the first place. Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly, through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.

Stated another way, ID posits that animals did not evolve naturally through evolutionary means but were created abruptly by a non-natural, or supernatural, designer. Defendants’ own expert witnesses acknowledged this point

It is notable that defense experts’ own mission, which mirrors that of the IDM itself, is to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world, which the Supreme Court in Edwards and the court in McLean correctly recognized as an inherently religious concept. First, defense expert Professor Fuller agreed that ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology. Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich acknowledged that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened to allow consideration of supernatural forces.

Prominent IDM leaders are in agreement with the opinions expressed by defense expert witnesses that the ground rules of science must be changed for ID to take hold and prosper. William Dembski, for instance, an IDM leader, proclaims that science is ruled by methodological naturalism and argues that this rule must be overturned if ID is to prosper.

The Discovery Institute, the think tank promoting ID whose CRSC developed the Wedge Document, acknowledges as “Governing Goals” to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies” and “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” In addition, and as previously noted, the Wedge Document states in its “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary” that the IDM’s goal is to replace science as currently practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” The IDM accordingly seeks nothing less than a complete scientific revolution in which ID will supplant evolutionary theory.

Notably, every major scientific association that has taken a position on the issue of whether ID is science has concluded that ID is not, and cannot be considered as such. Initially, we note that NAS, the “most prestigious” scientific association in this country, views ID as follows:

Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science. These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief. Documentation offered in support of these claims is typically limited to the special publications of their advocates. These publications do not offer hypotheses subject to change in light of new data, new interpretations, or demonstration of error. This contrasts with science, where any hypothesis or theory always remains subject to the possibility of rejection or modification in the light of new knowledge.

Additionally, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (hereinafter “AAAS”), the largest organization of scientists in this country, has taken a similar position on ID, namely, that it “has not proposed a scientific means of testing its claims” and that “the lack of scientific warrant for so-called ‘intelligent design theory’ makes it improper to include as part of science education . . .” Not a single expert witness over the course of the six week trial identified one major scientific association, society or organization that endorsed ID as science. What is more, defense experts concede that ID is not a theory as that term is defined by the NAS and admit that ID is at best “fringe science” which has achieved no acceptance in the scientific community.

It is therefore readily apparent to the Court that ID fails to meet the essential ground rules that limit science to testable, natural explanations. Science cannot be defined differently for Dover students than it is defined in the scientific community as an affirmative action program, as advocated by Professor Fuller, for a view that has been unable to gain a foothold within the scientific establishment. Although ID’s failure to meet the ground rules of science is sufficient for the Court to conclude that it is not science, out of an abundance of caution and in the exercise of completeness, we will analyze additional arguments advanced regarding the concepts of ID and science.

ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed. This argument is not brought to this Court anew, and in fact, the same argument, termed “contrived dualism” in McLean, was employed by creationists in the 1980s to support “creation science.” The court in McLean noted the “fallacious pedagogy of the two model approach” and that “[i]n efforts to establish ‘evidence’ in support of creation science, the defendants relied upon the same false premise as the two model approach . . . all evidence which criticized evolutionary theory was proof in support of creation science.” We do not find this false dichotomy any more availing to justify ID today than it was to justify creation science two decades ago.

ID proponents primarily argue for design through negative arguments against evolution, as illustrated by Professor Behe’s argument that “irreducibly complex” systems cannot be produced through Darwinian, or any natural, mechanisms. However, we believe that arguments against evolution are not arguments for design. Expert testimony revealed that just because scientists cannot explain today how biological systems evolved does not mean that they cannot, and will not, be able to explain them tomorrow. As Dr. Padian aptly noted, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” To that end, expert testimony from Drs. Miller and Padian provided multiple examples where Pandas asserted that no natural explanations exist, and in some cases that none could exist, and yet natural explanations have been identified in the intervening years. It also bears mentioning that as Dr. Miller stated, just because scientists cannot explain every evolutionary detail does not undermine its validity as a scientific theory as no theory in science is fully understood.

As referenced, the concept of irreducible complexity is ID’s alleged scientific centerpiece. Irreducible complexity is a negative argument against evolution, not proof of design, a point conceded by defense expert Professor Minnich. Irreducible complexity additionally fails to make a positive scientific case for ID, as will be elaborated upon below.

We initially note that irreducible complexity as defined by Professor Behe in his book Darwin’s Black Box and subsequently modified in his 2001 article entitled “Reply to My Critics,” appears as follows:

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system which is composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional . . . Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on.

Professor Behe admitted in “Reply to My Critics” that there was a defect in his view of irreducible complexity because, while it purports to be a challenge to natural selection, it does not actually address “the task facing natural selection. “Professor Behe specifically explained that “[t]he current definition puts the focus on removing a part from an already- functioning system,” but “[t]he difficult task facing Darwinian evolution, however, would not be to remove parts from sophisticated pre-existing systems; it would be to bring together components to make a new system in the first place.” Id. In that article, Professor Behe wrote that he hoped to “repair this defect in future work;” however, he has failed to do so even four years after elucidating his defect.

In addition to Professor Behe’s admitted failure to properly address the very phenomenon that irreducible complexity purports to place at issue, natural selection, Drs. Miller and Padian testified that Professor Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity depends on ignoring ways in which evolution is known to occur. Although Professor Behe is adamant in his definition of irreducible complexity when he says a precursor “missing a part is by definition nonfunctional,” what he obviously means is that it will not function in the same way the system functions when all the parts are present. For example in the case of the bacterial flagellum, removal of a part may prevent it from acting as a rotary motor. However, Professor Behe excludes, by definition, the possibility that a precursor to the bacterial flagellum functioned not as a rotary motor, but in some other way, for example as a secretory system.

As expert testimony revealed, the qualification on what is meant by “irreducible complexity” renders it meaningless as a criticism of evolution. In fact, the theory of evolution proffers exaptation as a well-recognized, well-documented explanation for how systems with multiple parts could have evolved through natural means. Exaptation means that some precursor of the subject system had a different, selectable function before experiencing the change or addition that resulted in the subject system with its present function. For instance, Dr. Padian identified the evolution of the mammalian middle ear bones from what had been jawbones as an example of this process. By defining irreducible complexity in the way that he has, Professor Behe attempts to exclude the phenomenon of exaptation by definitional fiat, ignoring as he does so abundant evidence which refutes his argument.

Notably, the NAS has rejected Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity by using the following cogent reasoning:

[S]tructures and processes that are claimed to be ‘irreducibly’ complex typically are not on closer inspection. For example, it is incorrect to assume that a complex structure or biochemical process can function only if all its components are present and functioning as we see them today. Complex biochemical systems can be built up from simpler systems through natural selection. Thus, the ‘history’ of a protein can be traced through simpler organisms . . . The evolution of complex molecular systems can occur in several ways. Natural selection can bring together parts of a system for one function at one time and then, at a later time, recombine those parts with other systems of components to produce a system that has a different function. Genes can be duplicated, altered, and then amplified through natural selection. The complex biochemical cascade resulting in blood clotting has been explained in this fashion.

As irreducible complexity is only a negative argument against evolution, it is refutable and accordingly testable, unlike ID, by showing that there are intermediate structures with selectable functions that could have evolved into the allegedly irreducibly complex systems. Importantly, however, the fact that the negative argument of irreducible complexity is testable does not make testable the argument for ID. Professor Behe has applied the concept of irreducible complexity to only a few select systems: (1) the bacterial flagellum; (2) the blood-clotting cascade; and (3) the immune system. Contrary to Professor Behe’ s assertions with respect to these few biochemical systems among the myriad existing in nature, however, Dr. Miller presented evidence, based upon peer-reviewed studies, that they are not in fact irreducibly complex.

First, with regard to the bacterial flagellum, Dr. Miller pointed to peer-reviewed studies that identified a possible precursor to the bacterial flagellum, a subsystem that was fully functional, namely the Type-III Secretory System. Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich admited that there is serious scientific research on the question of whether the bacterial flagellum evolved into the Type-III Secretary System, the Type-III Secretory System into the bacterial flagellum, or whether they both evolved from a common ancestor. None of this research or thinking involves ID. In fact, Professor Minnich testified about his research as follows: “we’re looking at the function of these systems and how they could have been derived one from the other. And it’s a legitimate scientific inquiry.”

Second, with regard to the blood-clotting cascade, Dr. Miller demonstrated that the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade has been disproven by peer-reviewed studies dating back to 1969, which show that dolphins’ and whales’ blood clots despite missing a part of the cascade, a study that was confirmed by molecular testing in 1998. Additionally and more recently, scientists published studies showing that in puffer fish, blood clots despite the cascade missing not only one, but three parts. Accordingly, scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe’s predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade. Moreover, cross-examination revealed that Professor Behe’s redefinition of the blood-clotting system was likely designed to avoid peer-reviewed scientific evidence that falsifies his argument, as it was not a scientifically warranted redefinition.

The immune system is the third system to which Professor Behe has applied the definition of irreducible complexity. Although in Darwin’s Black Box, Professor Behe wrote that not only were there no natural explanations for the immune system at the time, but that natural explanations were impossible regarding its origin. However, Dr. Miller presented peer-reviewed studies refuting Professor Behe’s claim that the immune system was irreducibly complex. Between 1996 and 2002, various studies confirmed each element of the evolutionary hypothesis explaining the origin of the immune system. In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty- eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.”

We find that such evidence demonstrates that the ID argument is dependent upon setting a scientifically unreasonable burden of proof for the theory of evolution. As a further example, the test for ID proposed by both Professors Behe and Minnich is to grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory; however, no-one inside or outside of the IDM, including those who propose the test, has conducted it. Professor Behe conceded that the proposed test could not approximate real world conditions and even if it could, Professor Minnich admitted that it would merely be a test of evolution, not design.

We therefore find that Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large. Additionally, even if irreducible complexity had not been rejected, it still does not support ID as it is merely a test for evolution, not design.

We will now consider the purportedly “positive argument” for design encompassed in the phrase used numerous times by Professors Behe and Minnich throughout their expert testimony, which is the “purposeful arrangement of parts.” Professor Behe summarized the argument as follows: We infer design when we see parts that appear to be arranged for a purpose. The strength of the inference is quantitative; the more parts that are arranged, the more intricately they interact, the stronger is our confidence in design. The appearance of design in aspects of biology is overwhelming. Since nothing other than an intelligent cause has been demonstrated to be able to yield such a strong appearance of design, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, the conclusion that the design seen in life is real design is rationally justified. As previously indicated, this argument is merely a restatement of the Reverend William Paley’s argument applied at the cell level. Minnich, Behe, and Paley reach the same conclusion, that complex organisms must have been designed using the same reasoning, except that Professors Behe and Minnich refuse to identify the designer, whereas Paley inferred from the presence of design that it was God. Expert testimony revealed that this inductive argument is not scientific and as admitted by Professor Behe, can never be ruled out.

Indeed, the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is based upon an analogy to human design. Because we are able to recognize design of artifacts and objects, according to Professor Behe, that same reasoning can be employed to determine biological design. Professor Behe testified that the strength of the analogy depends upon the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions; however, if this is the test, ID completely fails.

Unlike biological systems, human artifacts do not live and reproduce over time. They are non-replicable, they do not undergo genetic recombination, and they are not driven by natural selection. For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires. With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer’s identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems. (Professor Behe’s only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies.

It is readily apparent to the Court that the only attribute of design that biological systems appear to share with human artifacts is their complex appearance, i.e. if it looks complex or designed, it must have been designed. This inference to design based upon the appearance of a “purposeful arrangement of parts” is a completely subjective proposition, determined in the eye of each beholder and his/her viewpoint concerning the complexity of a system. Although both Professors Behe and Minnich assert that there is a quantitative aspect to the inference, on cross-examination they admitted that there is no quantitative criteria for determining the degree of complexity or number of parts that bespeak design, rather than a natural process. (As Plaintiffs aptly submit to the Court, throughout the entire trial only one piece of evidence generated by Defendants addressed the strength of the ID inference: the argument is less plausible to those for whom God’s existence is in question, and is much less plausible for those who deny God’s existence.

Accordingly, the purported positive argument for ID does not satisfy the ground rules of science which require testable hypotheses based upon natural explanations. ID is reliant upon forces acting outside of the natural world, forces that we cannot see, replicate, control or test, which have produced changes in this world. While we take no position on whether such forces exist, they are simply not testable by scientific means and therefore cannot qualify as part of the scientific process or as a scientific theory.

It is appropriate at this juncture to address ID’s claims against evolution. ID proponents support their assertion that evolutionary theory cannot account for life’s complexity by pointing to real gaps in scientific knowledge, which indisputably exist in all scientific theories, but also by misrepresenting well- established scientific propositions.

Before discussing Defendants’ claims about evolution, we initially note that an overwhelming number of scientists, as reflected by every scientific association that has spoken on the matter, have rejected the ID proponents’ challenge to evolution. Moreover, Plaintiffs’ expert in biology, Dr. Miller, a widely-recognized biology professor at Brown University who has written university-level and high- school biology textbooks used prominently throughout the nation, provided unrebutted testimony that evolution, including common descent and natural selection, is “overwhelmingly accepted” by the scientific community and that every major scientific association agrees. As the court in Selman explained, “evolution is more than a theory of origin in the context of science. To the contrary, evolution is the dominant scientific theory of origin accepted by the majority of scientists.” SDespite the scientific community’s overwhelming support for evolution, Defendants and ID proponents insist that evolution is unsupported by empirical evidence. Plaintiffs’ science experts, Drs. Miller and Padian, clearly explained how ID proponents generally and Pandas specifically, distort and misrepresent scientific knowledge in making their anti-evolution argument.

In analyzing such distortion, we turn again to Pandas, the book to which students are expressly referred in the disclaimer. Defendants hold out Pandas as representative of ID and Plaintiffs’ expert s agree in that regard. A series of arguments against evolutionary theory found in Pandas involve paleontology, which studies the life of the past and the fossil record. Plaintiffs’ expert Professor Padian was the only testifying expert witness with any expertise in paleontology.15 His testimony therefore remains unrebutted. Dr. Padian’s demonstrative slides, prepared on the basis of peer-reviewing scientific literature, illustrate how Pandas systematically distorts and misrepresents established, important evolutionary principles.

We will provide several representative examples of this distortion. First, Pandas misrepresents the “dominant form of understanding relationships” between organisms, namely, the tree of life, represented by classification determined via the method of cladistics. Second, Pandas misrepresents “homology,” the “central concept of comparative biology,” that allowed scientists to evaluate comparable parts among organisms for classification purposes for hundreds of years. Third, Pandas fails to address the well-established biological concept of exaptation, which involves a structure changing function, such as fish fins evolving fingers and bones to become legs for weight-bearing land animals. Dr. Padian testified that ID proponents fail to address exaptation because they deny that organisms change function, which is a view necessary to support abrupt- appearance. Id. Finally, Dr. Padian’s unrebutted testimony demonstrates that Pandas distorts and misrepresents evidence in the fossil record about pre-Cambrian-era fossils, the evolution of fish to amphibians, the evolution of small carnivorous dinosaurs into birds, the evolution of the mammalian middle ear, and the evolution of whales from land animals.

In addition to Dr. Padian, Dr. Miller also testified that Pandas presents discredited science. Dr. Miller testified that Pandas’ treatment of biochemical similarities between organisms is “inaccurate and downright false” and explained how Pandas misrepresents basic molecular biology concepts to advance design theory through a series of demonstrative slides. Consider, for example, that he testified as to how Pandas misinforms readers on the standard evolutionary relationships between different types of animals, a distortion which Professor Behe, a “critical reviewer” of Pandas who wrote a section within the book, affirmed. In addition, Dr. Miller refuted Pandas’ claim that evolution cannot account for new genetic information and pointed to more than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications showing the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes. In summary, Dr. Miller testified that Pandas misrepresents molecular biology and genetic principles, as well as the current state of scientific knowledge in those areas in order to teach readers that common descent and natural selection are not scientifically sound.

Accordingly, the one textbook to which the Dover ID Policy directs students contains outdated concepts and badly flawed science, as recognized by even the defense experts in this case.

A final indicator of how ID has failed to demonstrate scientific warrant is the complete absence of peer-reviewed publications supporting the theory. Expert testimony revealed that the peer review process is “exquisitely important” in the scientific process. It is a way for scientists to write up their empirical research and to share the work with fellow experts in the field, opening up the hypotheses to study, testing, and criticism. In fact, defense expert Professor Behe recognizes the importance of the peer review process and has written that science must “publish or perish.” Peer review helps to ensure that research papers are scientifically accurately, meet the standards of the scientific method, and are relevant to other scientists in the field. Moreover, peer review involves scientists submitting a manuscript to a scientific journal in the field, journal editors soliciting critical reviews from other experts in the field and deciding whether the scientist has followed proper research procedures, employed up-to-date methods, considered and cited relevant literature and generally, whether the researcher has employed sound science.

The evidence presented in this case demonstrates that ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications. Both Drs. Padian and Forrest testified that recent literature reviews of scientific and medical-electronic databases disclosed no studies supporting a biological concept of ID. On cross-examination, Professor Behe admitted that: “There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.” Additionally, Professor Behe conceded that there are no peer-reviewed papers supporting his claims that complex molecular systems, like the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade, and the immune system, were intelligently designed. In that regard, there are no peer-reviewed articles supporting Professor Behe’s argument that certain complex molecular structures are “irreducibly complex.” In addition to failing to produce papers in peer-reviewed journals, ID also features no scientific research or testing.

After this searching and careful review of ID as espoused by its proponents, as elaborated upon in submissions to the Court, and as scrutinized over a six week trial, we find that ID is not science and cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory as it has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community. ID, as noted, is grounded in theology, not science. Accepting for the sake of argument its proponents’, as well as Defendants’ argument that to introduce ID to students will encourage critical thinking, it still has utterly no place in a science curriculum. Moreover, ID’s backers have sought to a void the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

To conclude and reiterate, we express no opinion on the ultimate veracity of ID as a supernatural explanation. However, we commend to the attention of those who are inclined to superficially consider ID to be a true “scientific” alternative to evolution without a true understanding of the concept the foregoing detailed analysis. It is our view that a reasonable, objective observer would, after reviewing both the voluminous record in this case, and our narrative, reach the inescapable conclusion that ID is an interesting theological argument, but that it is not science.

….

H. Conclusion

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, § 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID. We will also issue a declaratory judgment that Plaintiffs’ rights under the Constitutions of the United States and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have been violated by Defendants’ actions. Defendants’ actions in violation of Plaintiffs’ civil rights as guaranteed to them by the Constitution of the United States and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 subject Defendants to liability with respect to injunctive and declaratory relief, but also for nominal damages and the reasonable value of Plaintiffs’ attorneys’ services and costs incurred in vindicating Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.

NOW, THEREFORE, IT IS ORDERED THAT:

1. A declaratory judgment is hereby issued in favor of Plaintiffs pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 2201, 2202, and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 such that Defendants’ ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and Art. I, § 3 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

2. Pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 65, Defendants are permanently enjoined from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District.

3. Because Plaintiffs seek nominal damages, Plaintiffs shall file with the Court and serve on Defendants, their claim for damages and a verified statement of any fees and/or costs to which they claim entitlement. Defendants shall have the right to object to any such fees and costs to the extent provided in the applicable statutes and court rules

John E. Jones III
United States District Judge

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The first book of the Bible, Genesis (1:1-31), describes the creation of the universe in six days, from out of cold nothingness, by a supernatural being to which Christianity, Judaism and Islam bid worship. As time progressed, people began to look more closely at the rocks which they trod upon, and noticed peculiarities which could not be accounted for by the Bible, and so required further explanation. Thus was born the scientific field of geology — the description of the earth’s rocks and how they came to be situated in their current locations.

Man has deduced, by adopting an objective approach, that the age of the universe is between 10 and 19 billion years old, and the earth is 4.6 billion years old (Foster, 1991). Rock formation has been explained in great detail using inductive methods and, over the course of time, has been continuously updated and improved. Fossils have been utilized to explain what life is, and how it has evolved into today’s world dominating animals and plants. Geology has allowed humans to look not only at the surface of the earth, but into the heart of the planet as well. Such techniques have also been adopted by astronomers to examine the sun and other celestial bodies.

Many different religions have, through time, told their own stories about the history of this world. None, however, have been so persistent to see the proliferation of their views as have the Christian fundamentalists. There are many sects located within fundamentalism, but one which stands out above the others is Christian Science (Scientific Creationism). The Institute for Creation Research (ICR), headed by Henry Morris, appears to be the leader in the field, refuting any and all scientific evidence pointing towards evolution and an old earth. By using unorthodox methods and abiding by a strict dogma, it has evolved into a most formidable opponent of reasonable thought. Members claim that science is the tool with which they derive their `proof’, but as this paper will show, they do no less than throw away any reason they may have learned, and warp good science so that it fits into the Creationist scheme of things. Issues supposedly proven by Creation Science are Noah’s Flood, a young earth and the refutation of evolution. The first is the backbone of the Creationist argument with the second and third following closely behind. By “proving” that there was a worldwide flood as is claimed by the Bible, the Creationist gives his explanation for the rock record and the origin of life. To discuss all the possible arguments would require volumes of material. Presented here instead is a more general focus upon the crutch of Scientific Creationism, the Noachian Deluge, as well as some background information. Most, if not all, creation arguments stem from this foundation since, from the creationist viewpoint, it is the most easily proven theory. Explained within this paper is how the creationist arguments are faulty and, if you will excuse the pun, hold no water.

A Definition of Science

Before the Creationists put forth their cases, before they attempt to research evidence which may support their position, they fail to meet the qualifications of scientific exploration. Scientific Creationism always comes back to quotations from scripture, a doctrine which is set in stone. They claim that their evidence proves that the tales told within the Bible are true. Real science, on the other hand, sets out to prove nothing, and holds no truths to be self-evident. Rather, an hypothesis is formulated from the evidence provided, changing to provide a better hypothesis as new information is made available (Hanson and Hanson, 1993).

In order to be considered scientific, a theory must be testable. Creation science is not testable. It lies outside the realm of nature due to its indispensable `acts of God’, and mankind can only use natural methods to examine a theory (Hanson and Hanson). Without the possession of this trait, a theory would be infallible, and thus no more accurate than a religious dogma. The second important characteristic of science is that a theory must, from its very conception, be able to be shown to be false. Every scientific theory has the opportunity to be argued against, for which contrary evidence may be presented. Such is not the case with Scientific Creationism, since those who practice it, will not allow contradictory evidence. Therefore, when these people accuse scientists of performing such a heresy, they themselves turn around and use it as the basis of their ideals. Such hypocrites cannot possibly qualify to be proper researchers.

Uniformitarianism

A frequent cause of confusion among creationists and scientists alike is the principle of uniformity. By definition, it does no more than simply state that present geologic processes can be examined and extrapolated in order to interpret past events. Gould (1965) distinguishes between substantive and methodological uniformitarianism. The former describes the testability of geologic change while the latter is a statement of proper scientific procedure in general. It is the methodological type that Christian Scientists misquote in their refutations of proper scientific procedure. They claim that true scientists say that deposition rates, mountain building and similar events have remained constant throughout time (Heylmun, 1971). Such a statement is untrue, for very few geologists would assert that the Appalachians have always existed as they are seen today, since there is no orogenic activity occurring at the moment. Most geologists would also agree that geosynclinal processes which occurred in the Precambrian were quite unlike those which acted in the Palaeozoic (Valentine, 1966). Methodological uniformitarianism was a useful tool when it was first introduced to oppose the presence of the supernatural in science, but it is now only a burden to the field (Gould, 1965).

Flood Mechanism

It is written in Genesis 7:17-20: And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

Morris (1974) puts forth his interpretation of the deluge in his book. The waters would come from the sky as rain, and would well up from within the earth into the oceans. This poses a problem for the Creationist: a great amount of water would have been required to cover the tallest mountains. They claim that there was a vapour canopy which encompassed the earth that would provide the torrential rainfall as God commanded it so. However, such a flood would need a downpour which had a pressure great enough to shatter Noah’s Ark. How did this canopy remain aloft? Such a volume of water would have blocked out the sunlight, inhibiting the survival of all organisms by cutting off the base of the food chain.

Accompanying the rainfall would be magmatic extrusions from the mantle, gigantic earth movements, landslides, tsunamis and explosions (Morris, 1974). Most, but not all, marine organisms would perish, as would all the land animals. Soils would be carried away as floating mats of vegetation. Eventually, even the tallest mountains would be destroyed by erosion and cause great landslides on land, and turbidity currents within the sea. Clastic fragments of boulders and gravel would be produced when the rocks cracked and bounced. The waters would undergo rapid temperature and salinity changed and large amounts of chemicals would dissolve into the water, spreading throughout the globe. Land sediments would ultimately unite with those of the ocean and, as the waters calmed down, would settle out and cement into rock while chemicals would precipitate out as allowed by temperature and salinity.

Post Depositional Modification

If water flow were to cease during an interruption in deposition of the flood (assuming that deposition is continuous underwater), then subaerial exposure would occur (Morris, 1974). Uplift and tilting of the strata would take place, truncating the beds by erosion producing an unconformity which can be used to separate geological ages. As Morris (1974) points out, only fossils can be used to indicate the end of one geological age, and the beginning of another. But he says that two of the most important boundaries, the Permian-Triassic boundary and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, grade imperceptibly from one age into the next.

The problem with this argument is that the described boundaries are arbitrary, being based on a certain faunal succession, and the finer one examines the boundary, the less defined it appears. When viewed from a distance, however, it is well defined and useable. Biostratigraphy is not absolutely perfect due to an incomplete fossil record, but it is accurate to a degree which is of use to all the appropriate scientists.

And so the Creationist standpoint is that the entire geologic column is continuous, produced by rapid formation of sediment deposition from the floodwaters, and that there is rarely a clear physical boundary between formations.

Problems With Flood Geology

Many questions arise if one considers the flood as an alternate to the modern paradigm. How did mountains form? Surely sedimentation from a global flood didn’t accumulate in isolated areas producing such high peaks. Morris already claimed that all the pre-existing mountains were eroded away, just as is stated in the Bible. If these sediments were distributed worldwide, then sediment deposition would occur roughly at a uniform rate. One formation which is six kilometers thick would have had to have been deposited at 15 m/day in the year of the flood. Despite this, the chemical properties of the rock are neatly layered.

Chalk is another important problem. It is composed of planktonic organisms between 700 and 1000 angstroms in diameter and these settle out of the water at a rate of 1.54e-5 mm/second. In the span of one year, they would have settled but only 0.5 m, not anywhere near enough to account for the vast chalk deposits such as are seen in the White Cliffs of Dover, England.

Deep within the column, when the top of one stratum is examined, rain drops, dunes, desiccation cracks, footprints, and other features can be seen. These can only be produced while exposed above water, indicating that the strata were repeatedly flooded and exposed in order to deposit sedimentary rock on top.

Most of the fossils found have been wholly mineralized. That is, the original bone or shell has been degraded and replaced by a mineral deposit. This occurs over a long time as seen by the fact that Egyptian commoners, buried during the time of Moses, are not extensively mineralized. Therefore, if animals were buried during the flood, they should not be as mineralized as they actually are, instead, a great deal of bone or shell should remain.

Another major problem is that of banded iron formation. When the earth was young (some 2 Ga), the banded iron formation was produced by chemical precipitation in the oceans with oxygen (Foster, 1991). The importance is that, had there been oxygen in the atmosphere, the iron would have been oxidized on land into red beds, and never make it to the oceans by erosion. But since the banded iron formation is found during a certain time frame, one can deduce that there was no atmospheric oxygen to oxidize it, appearing much later as organisms produced it through photosynthesis (Foster, 1991). It is assumed that Noah and all those who proceeded him breathed oxygen just as all land animals are known to do.

Polystrate Fossils

A favourite weapon of scientific creationism is the appearance of polystrate fossils. While not a technical scientific term, polystrate refers to an anomaly which crosses many consecutive rock layers. Such an example is that of Joggins, Nova Scotia, a one kilometer thick fossil forest of Carboniferous age (Dawson, 1868). The forest contains many specimens of Calamites, Sigillaria and Stigmaria roots. The Calamites and Sigillaria stems are found to grow upright through succeeding strata. An underclay is found at the lower boundary of the forest, and is extensively penetrated by the Stigmaria roots and rootlets. These structures, like modern root systems, were extremely delicate yet are found to extend through all planes of the underclay, indicating that they grew in situ. They were not, as the Creationists claim, swept by waters and deposited into place by a single event.

One fossil in particular seemed to cause excitement upon its discovery. The fossilized skeleton of a whale aged 10— 12 Ma was found in a diatomaceous earth quarry in Lompoc, California (Reese, 1976). Initial reports had it standing on its tail, progression through many layers of strata. This would, of course, indicate deposition under catastrophic conditions strengthening the creationist stance. However, as more information was made available, it was realized that instead, the whale was not vertical but instead at about 50 to the horizontal and parallel to the strata in which it lay, that had been folded to its current attitude. The strata do not exhibit catastrophic deposition, but rather have laminations present which are characteristic of slow accumulation on an anoxic bay bottom. Moreover, diatomaceous earths are built up over millions of years as diatoms settle out of the water, not from an instantaneous deposition.

Many claims are made that fossils are not seen forming today, therefore, countering uniformitarianism. Besides the blatant misuse of the term as has been previously dealt with, the statement is outright false. A deep sea dive by oceanographers on November 10, 1987 spotted a 20 m long whale skeleton, half buried in ocean bottom sediments (Smith and Kukert, 1989). This was found in the Santa Catalina basin at a depth of 1240 m, and is an excellent example of a modern fossil in the earliest stages of its formation.

Meteor Impacts

A hard-hitting question often posed to Creationists is: When did meteors impact the earth? There is factual evidence worldwide that the earth, moon and other celestial bodies, were bombarded by meteors long ago. Genesis 1:26,27 states that man and woman were created on the sixth day, and thus inhabited the earth with all the animals God had created. When did this bombardment occur then? Don de Young of ICR says that the impact craters were formed during the time of the flood. The magnitude of such a bombardment within the span of one year would vapourize the waters which encompassed the earth.

Francis Graham of Kent State University has calculated that if one meteor the same size of that which formed the Imbrium Basin on the moon, had hit the earth which was covered by waters 5 kilometers deep, it would have released more than 3 x 1026 joules of energy, which is about twenty times the energy needed to evaporate the entire flood (Fezer, 1993). Needless to say, if such an impact occurred while life was flourishing upon the planet, it would entirely be destroyed.

Conclusions

The plight of science has always been to seek the truth. The best of science has no hopes of finding a certain conclusion to research, and is called inductive science. Poorly conducted science has a conclusion before it has conducted any research. Such is the case for Creation Science. Determined that the doctrine of God is correct in its entirety, such fundamentalists go forth and criticize good science because it does not conform to the Bible. It is truly sad when people who can put their talents to good use, cannot, for they are blinded by their faith, and so are a hindrance to proper scientific research.

By refuting the geologic column, that has been investigated and accurately displayed for centuries, Scientific Creationism digs itself a hole from which it cannot escape. It calls on the invalidity of the principle of uniformity and claims that those who use it, use it wrongly, when in fact the movement does not even understand the proper meaning of the term. Those who call themselves Creationists in the name of “science”, accuse the scientific world of building a paradigm from a house of cards, and as they pick at the cards, the house falls to the ground. Some aspects, not all, may in fact be built like such a house, but by looking at the evidence they provide, we see Scientific Creationists don’t even have a deck of cards.

Figure 1. An erect tree at Joggins, Nova Scotia. Within the hollow tree trunk was found the remains of a small reptile which had fallen in and become fossilized as well. (from Dawson, 1868. p. 192)

Figure 2. Section showing polystrate Calamites within a bed of sandstone. The dark layer laying above the tree is 1 foot of shaley coal, the dark band on which the tree stands is a 1 inch thick coal seam. The many lines which cross through the strata are Stigmaria roots. (from Dawson, 1868. p. 200)

References

Fezer, K.D. 1993. “Creationism: please don’t call it science.” Creation/Evolution. v. 13, no. 1, p. 45-49.

Foster, R.J. 1991. Historical geology. Prentice Hall, New Jersey. 374p.

Genesis 1:1-31, 7:17-20

Gould, S.J. 1966. “Is uniformitarianism necessary?” American Journal of Science. v. 263, p. 223-228.

Hanson, J.R. and Hanson J.E. 1993. “Creation science and creation myths: an ethnological perspective.” Creation/Evolution. v. 13, no. 1, p. 20-31.

Heylmun, E.B. 1971. “Should we teach uniformitarianism?” Journal of Geological Education. v. 19, p. 35-37.

Morris, H.M. 1974. Scientific creationism. Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego. 277p.

Reese, K.M. 1976. “Workers find whale in diatomaceous earth quarry.” Chemical & Engineering News. v. 54, no. 42, p. 40.

Smith, C.R. and Kukert, H. 1989. “Vent fauna on whale remains.” Nature. v. 341, p. 27-28.

Valentine, J.W. 1966. “The present is the key to the present.” Journal of Geological Education. v. 14, p. 59-60.

Alphabiotics. Whew, this one’s a poser. There is a semi-official website but it’s rather maddening. Rarely have I read so much and received so little. One of the first things you are hit with is the phrase “WHEN WE COME OUT OF AN INAPPROPRIATE STRESS STATE A DYNAMIC SHIFT HAPPENS”, and below we are presented with an animated stick figure which goes from erect (balanced), to looking as if it’s gone a few rounds with Lennox Lewis (unbalanced). We are then informed that “RE-BOOTING THE BRAIN IS MUCH LIKE RE-BOOTING A COMPUTER.” I would experiment with that, but I am afraid of getting a “hard boot” if I ask any ladies to show me their Control, Alt, and Delete buttons.

It does give us the name of the perpetrator, one Dr. V. B. Chrane, a former chiropractor who invented Alphabiotics in the 1920s.

Seriously, this site is worth reading if only for seeing how little information can be dished out in so many pages, while using as many New Age catch phrases as possible. Clicking on subject headings such as “What it is…” or “How it’s done…” reveal nothing but more ramblings about how wonderful the whole process is.

But not to worry. We are assured that it is helpful “…because the cold light of science has overwhelmingly confirmed its value.” Well, that’s better than the warm hands of a trained medical professional I guess.

Some aspects of the practice can be found in the contents of a lawsuit heard in the Washington State Court of Appeals involving a former chiropractor charged with unprofessional conduct. It seems that Alphabiotics is an outgrowth of chiropractic, but manipulates only the neck. A technique used is known as the condyle lift, and even to this non-physician the procedure sounds rather frightening. For the uninitiated, and those who took high school biology far too long ago, the condyle is the point at the base of the skull which articulates with the vertebral column. Imagine lifting the skull away from your patient’s neck, turning it sharply… on second thought, I would rather not imagine it.

Here is what the commission had to say; “The Commission finds that the Chrane condyle lift is a useful but potentially dangerous chiropractic adjustment, and that one of the significant risks of the Crane condyle lift is dissection of vertebral arteries and resulting stroke. . . .” There you have it folks, it’s dangerous, and is being done by people with little or no real medical training.

The commission also discovered that Alphabiotics is claimed as a religion by its adherents, as the “Alphabiotic New Life Church”, and they have claimed that this gives them the right to give treatment as part of the free exercise of religion. Patients were given forms to sign which seemed to be only a standard medical form, but was actually a church membership form. Significantly, the commission found that “Free exercise of religion includes both the freedom to believe and the freedom to act. While the former is absolute, the latter is not. An individual’s conduct is subject to regulation for society’s protection.…”

Wise words.

The core beliefs of Alphabiotics are still somewhat of a mystery however. I don’t know how many people have ever taken such training, but if there were many I would expect someone to spill the beans and write up a more informative diatribe than anything I have been able to turn up so far. The web seems singularly devoid of details. Maybe I should take a course myself just to find out, but my astrologer tells me that this isn’t a good time and my homeopath said it doesn’t work. There’s some expert advice for you!