I will leave it to our readers to identify who relied on “maneuvers.”

To help them judge I will cite your words and not rely on paraphrasing your views as you have mine.

You write: “You have observed that very smart people, like Francis Collins, occasionally believe in God.”

I didn’t write that. I wrote that some eminent scientists believe in God and that some of them have come to believe in God through science. The issue was scientists and belief, not “very smart people” and belief. In fact, with no implication intended regarding you, I have almost never encountered “very smart people” who do not believe in God. The vast majority of atheists I have met had fine brain matter, but if “smart” includes wisdom, intellectual depth, profundity of thought, and moral insight, I have encountered such people almost exclusively among believers in the Judeo-Christian God. (For the record, I have also met fools who believe in this God.)

You write: “I trust that attentive readers will notice where you have misconstrued me (or rendered a tortured interpretation of Collins, polling data, etc.) and then pressed a false charge.”

I continue to defend my understanding of Collins—in fact, on my radio show I asked him about the waterfalls and he sustained my, not your, understanding. (The entire interview with him is available through my website.)

You never took my bet that the vast majority of violent criminals were not religiously active when they committed their crimes. Instead you redefined “religiously active” to mean belief in the biblical God. Everyone who uses the term knows it doesn’t refer to belief; it refers to being active within a religion, such as with regular church or synagogue attendance, Bible study, etc. You know as well as I do that such people are not proportionately represented among America’s violent criminals. So you redefined “religiously active” to avoid the wager.

You write: “While the usefulness of religion might be worth debating in another context, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists.” I agree. My argument is that unlike Judeo-Christian America, secular societies—generally meaning those of Western Europe—lose their will to survive (by not reproducing), and stand for nothing (they were largely morally worthless in the Cold War against Communism and are worthless or worse in helping to keep Israel alive against Muslims who vow to exterminate the Jewish state.) When people realize this, they may conclude that something that is necessary for society to survive—belief in the God of Israel—may in fact exist.

You write that the Judeo-Christian tradition “even produced Stalin.” I have to admit this is a first in a lifetime of debating atheists. I can only imagine that you are referring to the fact that Stalin attended a Christian seminary as a youth. So what? Stalin was a passionate atheist who murdered untold numbers of Christian clergy, destroyed virtually every church in Russia, and forced Soviet students to study “scientific atheism.” If those violent pro-atheism policies were produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition, then words have no meaning.

You write: “Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.”

That is certainly true. However, if what may be a “useful delusion” is responsible for Judeo-Christian civilization’s abolishing slavery, discovering science and the scientific method, affirming rationality, believing in progress (the Torah was unique in repudiating the cyclic view of life), elevating women’s rights, affirming universal human rights, establishing the sanctity of human life, and so much more, then I would be loathe to dismiss it as merely a “useful delusion.”

You write: “If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.” This statement is as novel as the one suggesting that Stalin was produced by Judeo-Christian values. It is hard for me to imagine that any fair-minded reader would reach the same conclusion. If we both acknowledge that without belief in God humanity would self-destruct, it is quite a stretch to say that this fact does not “even remotely suggest that God exists.” Can you name one thing that does not exist but is essential to human survival?

You conclude: “If nothing else, our debate clearly reveals how difficult it is to change another person’s mind on this subject. Perhaps some of our readers had their views shifted one way or the other. Whatever the result, I’m very happy we took the time to correspond.”

I, too, am happy we took the time to correspond. But I never entered this debate with any hope that I would change your mind on this subject. The motto of my radio show is, “I prefer clarity to agreement,” and that is why I agreed to this. I wanted readers to attain clarity about the differences between atheism and Judeo-based theism.

And with that goal in mind, I will end with my re-wording of a superb summary of the argument for belief in God that was made by Rabbi Milton Steinberg (1903–1950), a rationalist (and non-Orthodox) rabbi: “The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else.”

And that is why your task, Sam, is infinitely greater than mine.

All the best,

Dennis

The post Day 4 (Prager): Why Are Atheists So Angry? appeared first on Jewcy.

Dear Sam:

Dr. Collins did not offer three waterfalls as an argument for belief in the Trinity, not even in your isolated citation from his book or in the single sentence in Time. All he said was that three waterfalls reminded of him of the Christian Trinity and that after observing such awesome beauty he became a believing Christian.

If a man says that a beautiful flower reminds him of his beautiful wife, he is not saying that the beauty of the flower proves his wife is also beautiful. Natural wonders often inspire a person to reflect on the divine. You see natural beauty and, for that matter, everything else in the universe, and see no Creator, just coincidence. I find that reaction at least as odd as you find seeing in nature evidence for a Creator.

The Collins comments simply indicate that he and other eminent scientists see science as arguing for a Creator God. If Collins had said that the existence of three waterfalls proves that there is a Trinity, I would then share your dismissive attitude. But these comments didn’t even imply something so preposterous.

You write that, “There is little question that exposure to a scientific education reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God,” a point I fully acknowledged in my last correspondence. But exposure to other areas of higher education, specifically the “social sciences,” further reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God.

We therefore have two choices about how to interpret these data. One is that the more one knows, the less likely one is to believe in God. That is your interpretation. I have another interpretation—that contemporary higher education increases factual knowledge but decreases wisdom. With some exceptions, I believe that the more time one spends at a university the more foolish he or she becomes.

Only among the highly educated are there still those who believe that men and women are basically the same. Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters. The moral record of secular intellectuals—Lenin’s “useful idiots”— is the worst of any single group in free societies in the last hundred years.

I am therefore not quite bowled over by data connecting higher secular education with atheism.

You write that, “Your job is to either produce a rational argument for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition (one that reveals why one billion Hindus are utterly in error about the nature of the cosmos), or to admit that you cannot do this. I am willing to bet the farm that you cannot.”

Don’t bet your farm quite yet. I have in fact made the case for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in 25 essays I wrote in 2005. Suffice it to that Judeo-Christian values alone gave humanity the notion of the sacredness of human life; linear history and therefore the idea of moral and scientific progress; universal standards of good and evil; the abolition of slavery; the scientific method; the development of democracy; equality of the sexes; the greatest experiment in non-ethnicity-based society (America); the greatest music ever composed; and the greatest art ever drawn.

As for India, I have traveled there a number of times and lectured there; I have a deep reverence for its people and culture. But India did not give us those contributions. Nor did China and certainly not any of the societies contemporaneous with the ancient Jews who gave us the Torah from which these values emanate.

Presumably you assume that all these world-changing values and unique achievements would have evolved on their own with no Hebrew Bible, no divine revelation, and no Christians to bring the Bible to the world. You are, after all, a believer that everything awesome came from nothing.

That is how you view the world: All things came from no thing; intelligence came from nonintelligence; order came from chaos. I cannot understand why anyone finds these beliefs rationally compelling. I can only conclude that it takes either a university education—the secular immersion that begins in grade school—or an antipathy to religion.

If you want to make the case for secularism producing better people in America, how about “betting the farm” on this: I bet you whatever sum we each can afford that the vast majority of murderers and rapists in this country were not religiously active during the time they committed their violent crimes. I would make a second bet that you won’t take that bet.

Here’s another real-life correlation for you to ponder. For the most part, secular Europe couldn’t tell the moral difference between America and the Soviet Union and can’t tell the difference between Israel and its enemies. Religious America knew the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” and believes that there is a moral chasm separating Israel from its enemies. And secular Europe, like secular America, doesn’t even reproduce itself. Secularism either makes people too selfish to have more than one child and/or shatters any belief in sustaining one’s society and culture.

Finally, I salute you for acknowledging the Islamic threat and for abhorring the moral relativism that pervades the West. Unlike most atheists, you do acknowledge that the moral courage to fight today’s greatest evil is primarily to be found among religious Jews and Christians. I credit that courage to the moral clarity inherent to Jewish and Christian beliefs and to these Jews’ and Christians’ belief in God. I have yet to figure out to what you ascribe the courage among the religious and the lack of moral backbone in secular Europe and America.

You are right that this moral clarity and courage among the predominantly religious does not prove the existence of the biblical God. Nothing can prove God’s existence. But it sure is a powerful argument. If society cannot survive without x, there is a good chance x exists.

Next E-Mail: The New Religion of "Scientismo"

The post Day 3 (Prager): Why Are Atheists So Angry? appeared first on Jewcy.

Dear Sam:

I may have erred in assuming that you, like myself and nearly all other mortals, could not match Dr. Francis Collins—the head of the human genome project— in his knowledge of human genetics. So if, as a graduate student in neuroscience, you have already approached Collins’s level of expertise, I salute you and exclude you from the vast majority of atheists or theists who could not debate him about the science that leads him to belief in God.

My point remains valid, as you graciously concede. Scientific knowledge hardly invalidates belief that there is a God. On the contrary, there are more believers in God in the natural sciences than in the social sciences. This suggests that it is the virtual absence of God in education, not knowledge of science, that likely accounts for the atheism of academics.

I note that you did not respond to my dismissal of your comparison of Zeus-belief with God-belief. You were wise to avoid it. That argument is intellectually silly, and unworthy of serious atheist.

You write that “the atheist you have conjured—so chock-full of false certainty—is an utter straw man.” “Straw man?” Sam, there is not one honest reader of your first letter who could assume anything but certitude on your part. Your dismissal of belief in God as intellectually identical to belief in Zeus proves my point, because both you and I are utterly certain that Zeus is not God.

And if you really aren’t certain that there is no God, level with us about your doubts as I did about mine.

The teapot argument is entirely inapplicable to me. I never wrote that atheism fails because it cannot disprove God. Are you responding to what I wrote, or just assuming that I fall into your caricature of believers?

I am, however, grateful for your bringing Bertrand Russell into the discussion. Russell is a fine example of one major reason I reject atheism. In the West, people and societies who reject the God of Judeo-Christian religions are more likely to become morally confused and foolish than believing Jews and Christians are.

Bertrand Russell, the great atheist, was, to put it gently, a very morally confused man. Among his many confused ideas was to wage pre-emptive war (including, if necessary, using nuclear bombs) on the Soviet Union after World War II, and then, after the Soviet Union gained nuclear weapons, advocated that America and the West disarm.

Secularism usually produces moral and intellectual foolishness in people and institutions. My prime evidence is the contemporary American university, which is a place of intellectual and moral confusion so deep that one must look very hard to find religious Christian or Jewish equivalents.

That is why I wrote a column years ago titled “How I found God at Columbia University.” Professors where I did my graduate work, at the Columbia University School of International Affairs, were wrong on virtually every important issue.

To give but one example of the foolishness that pervades your godless, religionless, secular world, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, was forced from office by the Harvard faculty largely because he had the audacity to say that brain differences between men and women might help account for their different predilections for the sciences and math. As the Psalms put it thousands of years ago, “Wisdom begins with awe of God.” The lack of wisdom at the secular temple, the university—where America is the world’s villain, where women and men are regarded as essentially the same, and where Marxism was taken seriously for generations—verifies the Psalmist’s view.

So thanks for raising Bertrand Russell. Though his china teapot argument is irrelevant to anything I have written or believe, his morally confused outlook on the world helped me to understand how indispensable God is to morality and wisdom, about which (especially in light of your characterization of this country as “benighted”) I'll write more in my next letter.

Take care,

Dennis

Next e-mail: Finding Jesus in a Waterfall

The post Day 2 (Prager): Why Are Atheists So Angry? appeared first on Jewcy.

There is one thing you and I agree on, Sam. You write that you are “quite sure that we need only use words like ‘reason,’ ‘common sense,’ ‘evidence,’ and ‘intellectual honesty’ to do the job.”

I agree because I am certain that use of those wonderful vehicles to truth make the case for God, not for atheism.

Yet you and other atheists—as opposed to agnostics, who simply claim doubts about God—appropriate words like “reason” and “common sense” to maintain a position that is hardly the fruit of reason and common sense.

Is it really reason and common sense that lead atheists to their certitude that everything, all existence, came about by sheer chance? That there is therefore no God, no creator, no designer? Unlikely. Atheist certainty and religious certainty are both faith claims that transcend reason and common sense. But at least religious believers have the intellectual honesty to admit theirs is a faith claim.

Nevertheless, I am not as certain about God as you are about no-God. When I look at the unjust world God created, I have questions, sometimes even doubts. But not atheists like you, Sam. No, they look at love and consciousness, at the grandeur of the universe, at the birth of a child, and they hear Bach’s music and conclude that all of this and everything else just came about by itself.

It is an understatement to say that I do not find that position intellectually compelling. And when held with certitude, it borders arrogance.

On the other side, we believers look at the evidence and believe that there is a God. In that sense, the atheist has considerably less intellectual honesty than the sophisticated believer. The atheist says he knows, despite the fact that what he “knows” is unprovable. The believer believes because he knows that what he believes is ultimately unprovable.

Now, of course, I am referring to the “sophisticated believer,” not to every human on Earth who claims to believe in God. There are many people with simplistic views of God, and many millions who have vile notions of God. If I and all other believers in God are to be lumped with Muslims who believe that slaughtering innocents gets you sex in heaven, then you must be lumped with Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung and all the other atheists who butchered more innocents than all the religious crackpots in history.

Do you not know about people such as Francis Collins? On June 11, 2006, the Times of London reported that “The scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome…now believes in the existence of God … Francis Collins, the director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man ‘closer to God.’”

Is Francis Collins irrational, lacking in common sense, unaware of evidence, and intellectually dishonest? Would you like to debate Francis Collins about God based on the scientific evidence and common sense? I doubt it.

Neither you nor I, untrained in the sciences, would even understand much of the evidence these and many other scientists offer for belief in God.

So, enough of the college dorm clichés about “no evidence” for God. You have not decided to be an atheist because of “no evidence.” As a non-scientist, you are unlikely to even know the evidence that believing scientists offer.

The Times piece quoted Collins:

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion–letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

Have you checked those 3.1 billion–letter instructions? I suspect you would understand them as poorly as I would.

In a future response I will address the other points in your opening statement. But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?

I’ll answer that question. You are talking as if you are addressing fellow atheists who cheer all these lines that belittle faith in God. They think ridicule compensates for their ignorance of intellectually sophisticated God-belief. But unfortunately for you, in this dialogue you are not addressing fellow believers in atheism or people who mock religion. You are addressing a mixed audience and debating a man who knows his arguments. I heard them in high school.

Next e-mail: Are there teapots in space?

NEXT

Do: Who is more hubristic: believers or nonbelievers? Bring the Cartesian/Pascalian fisticuffs in the Comments. Also, there’s our “I, for one, think God is dead” forum for the more Nietzschean among you. Go: Dennis Prager’s website. Read: Happiness is a Serious Problem, by Dennis Prager. A transcript of Dennis interviewing Howard Zinn.

The post Day 1 (Dennis Prager): Why Are Atheists So Angry? appeared first on Jewcy.