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On Debating Christians

Adrian Hayter — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:46:59 +0000

Just over one week ago, a fellow atheist friend named Dan and I were in the student bar, drinking vodka-laced beverages and reading long pages of notes. In less than an hour, we would be debating two members of the Christian Union; a fundamentalist student society that believes the Bible is accurate, it just needs to read the correct way. The debate was entitled “Is God a Delusion?” , and team atheism had sorted out our lines of attack; Dan would be handling the fine-tuned universe fallacy, as well as the vicious nature of nature itself. I would be talking about the Theory of Evolution, illusions in nature, and our predisposition for seeing patterns that aren’t really there. We had conquered the writing of the speeches, we had even conquered the timing, getting everything into a 5 minute presentation each. The final thing we had to conquer were our nerves, hence the copious amounts of vodka.

This was the first time either of us had done something like this, and it didn’t help that only one other atheist had so far turned up to support us. Luckily, as the debate was about to start, 6 of our secular student group turned up to sit in the front row, which gave us that boost of morale to get us into the spirit. First up was a Christian who was reading Physics, so I expected him to go on about how the universe was such a wonderful place, fine-tuned to perfection. What I didn’t expect was for him to waffle for 4 of his 5 minutes, trying to explain what he considered “God” to be. As the chair banged her gavel to signify 1 minute remaining, my first opponent stumbled and quickly said something about how the presence of evil was proof of God. Whatever he said, I didn’t understand it at all, and I think my stomach gave a huge sigh of relief.

I was up next, and I managed to get my speech within the time limit, covering all the points I wanted to raise. The full transcript of both mine and Dan’s speeches are included below the fold on this blog post if you want to read them in full. Next up was the second Christian, who rejected a few of my reasons for why people believe in the supernatural, saying he didn’t believe for those reasons. This of course is a fallacy, as it can only be true on a personal level, and there are many people who believe in the supernatural for precisely the reasons I stated. His speech concerned Jesus and the power of prayer (which when I last checked was powerless). Not suprisingly, he criticised the scientific “prayer tests” and held them as an inaccurate way to determine whether prayer works (probably because the results determined prayer didn’t). Dan concluded the speeches with an attack of the fine-tuned universe view, quoting David Attenborough on his recent criticism of Christians, and pointed to the destructive force of nature as evidence against a loving caring God.

So then the floor was open to questions, and boy did we get them. I had to explain why Protazoa were still around “even though we evolved from them” as an American girl put, and how fish could develop arms when a mutation is required to create useless stumps first (clue: fish already have stumps…they are called fins). I also explained a rudimentry version of how we think the eye evolved, although on most of these questions I encouraged people to not take what I was saying without question, but to read up on it themselves (the last part of my speech was an appeal for people to start thinking freely). Luckily, my atheist friends asked the Christians a few questions about their beliefs, including a nice one about whether the discovery of multiple universes with different “tuning” would alter their belief in God.

An interesting couple of questions came from some Islamic students, one of whom asked me if I would mind if he came at me with a knife and killed me. I was expecting at least one question like this, and luckily I have a great response to it:

Let me get this straight. You are asking an atheist, someone who doesn’t believe in gods, the afterlife, or any kind of supernatural events, whether he would mind giving up what he believes is his only life? Of course I would mind! I happen to like life, and I’m not suddenly going to throw it all away because it is the one shot I have.

The same group of muslims asked us how we explained the revealed knowledge in the Koran, like the fact that salty water is separate from fresh water, and the Earth is shaped like an Ostrich egg. I didn’t correct his Earth shape hypothesis, because I wanted to attack the root of this question. I aked him plainly if he would read to me the passages of the Koran that said those things. He told me he didn’t have them on him, and so I told him I was sorry, but I couldn’t answer his question. I mentioned that these “revealed truths” are often simply very complex interpretations that are often extracted after the facts are known to science. The same logic can be applied to the Christian claim that the Bible talks about atoms, when all it says is “so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3).

All in all, I guess the theists reckon they won, and the atheists reckon we won. The debate was concluded and no vote was held (we agreed it would be good to just let people leave with their own opinions). A girl did come up and thank us for talking about what we believed, and that she would look into certain things more, and that’s always a good thing. Dan and I decided that we rather like debating, so we’re going to do some more in the future, and perhaps organise an “Ask an atheist” evening in March. Another friend wants to debate with me against the Islamic society, so I’m trying to get in touch with them. Stay tuned for more!

Adrian’s speech transcript

The question in tonight’s debate is whether God is a delusion or not. When I say “God” I am speaking about the whole “God” idea; that there is some kind of intelligent mind behind the universe, who has concerns for how we live our lives.

It is this idea that I believe is a complete delusion, because whilst it all sounds very nice, it is utterly ridiculous. Almost every religion today puts humanity in a special “chosen” position by their God. We have dominion over all the animals, simply because we have free will and are made in his image. This was all very well for people to believe hundreds of years ago, but the arrival of modern science changed this completely.

We began to realise that so called “revealed” truth contradicted the natural world, and the best way to find out what actually constitutes reality is via the scientific method. Slowly but surely, revealed truth was replaced by observed truth, things that you could actually test for validity, and form scientific theories to explain. The acts of gods that supposedly took a matter of days suddenly became natural processes that took millions upon billions of years; and whilst people still held humanity as divinely chosen, 150 years ago, a man named Charles Darwin changed that view forever.

Evolution is a natural process that tells us where we come from, and how. Through the fossil record, we have seen how millions of species died out, and that we are one of the many branches on the so-called “Tree of Life” that made it. So in some respect, we are “special”, as we are the result of a 4 billion year old struggle to survive. However, every single species of animal still alive today is a survivor too, and they are equally as special as we.

People will object to this though, and say that the evidence points to divine intervention by God on some occasions. The town of Lourdes in France is a major tourist attraction for Christians, some of whom believe that the water from a local spring has healing properties. Only 66 declared miracles have happened in the last 150 years, and when you take into consideration that 80,000 pilgrims come to Lourdes each year, that number seems utterly insignificant. None of those “miracles” involved the sudden regrowth of limbs, or any other permanent affliction being cured, and since a medical bureau was established in 1947, the average number of “cures” people have reported per year has dropped repeatedly. As the popular skeptic Michael Shermer would say, you have to count the misses as well as the hits.

The Lourdes fiasco all started with an apparition of the Virgin Mary, who supposedly spoke to a 14 year old peasant girl on 18 separate occasions. Her eyewitness testimony is all we have to go on, but it is interesting to note that neither her sister or friend saw the apparition, even though they were with her. In the opinion of skeptics, she is either delusional or lying, and the closed nature of the Catholic church on this issue makes investigating harder. Apparitions of various forms have been reported ever since, some turn up on pieces of toast, whilst others are more complex.

There is a great video on YouTube of an apparition of Jesus on a wall, although any sane person watching the video will understand that it is formed by the shadows of tree branches. As such, it isn’t detailed, and it really just looks like a man in a white robe. Only when you have religious people claiming it looks like Jesus does your brain interpret the figure as such. This of course is the key to the whole thing. Our brain is wired so that we notice patterns very quickly, and if you lie on the grass on a moderately cloudy day, you will start to see all kinds of objects in the clouds. They aren’t really there of course, and I don’t notice religious groups claiming them as miracles, so I fail to see how a similar illusion that happens to take the form of a man in a robe means that it is Jesus Christ. The fact is, that patterns occur everywhere, and all it takes is a human brain to recognise them.

What I want to argue is called free-thinking, and it involves throwing all dogma out of the door and looking at the world for what it is, not for what we are told it is. Once you understand that there is a natural explanation for everything, the need for dogma and revealed truth promptly vanishes. While I am sure that a belief in the supernatural was probably important for our survival in the past, and it gives people hope even to this day, I look at a universe for which we can explain some things, and utter “I have absolutely no idea” on others, and that makes it even more wonderful to live in. I think it is time for people to accept that there are unknowns, and things that we may never know, but before we delegate them out of this world, we should make sure they are in this world.

Dan’s speech transcript

There’s been a lot of talk these kinds of debates about the beauty and complexity of nature. I get a familiar response from religious people when I tell them I don’t think there’s any evidence for a god, they sort of stick there arms out and gesture at the nearest groups of trees and flowers like its completely obvious they must have been designed. David Attenborough has been in trouble recently. He’s started a new series called Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and said he’s had an upsurge in messages from people saying he just hasn’t been acknowledging God’s handiwork enough in his programs. He said:

“They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”

What goes for worms burrowing through eyeballs follows for everything else unfortunately. I really love his nature programs though; the BBC series Planet Earth which he narrated was amazing, attracting something like nine million viewers when it was first shown in this country. It’s gone all around the world since.

The thing which people tend to overlook when they look at pictures of wildlife is the unbelievable brutality of what they’re looking at. Everyone of those animals you see are in almost permanent terror for there lives, frightened of starving, of disease, frightened of getting an injury which is almost always a slow death sentence in the wild, and mostly frightened of just being eaten. Ultimately, all animals which aren’t kept as pets, and stroked, housed and fed their whole lives; die in one of those ways. They get old and weak and can’t get food or get too slow and get torn to pieces by predators. Think of the endless struggle out on the African plains between the zebras and antelope and the packs of wild hyenas and lions; one side can only be safe if the other starves without food, and the other can only survive by chasing down the weaker of the opposition and killing them. The system is psychopathic; it’s impersonal and totally apathetic to the suffering that’s going on. Any creator that built a system like that would have to be out of their mind.

People in favour of there being a God also like to point out the amount of ‘fine tuning’ in the universe. That the laws of things like gravity and thermodynamics have been ‘tuned’ ideally to create a universe full of life. The thing that really strikes me is that all that ‘fine tuning’ has created a universe that is almost completely empty space. You being present in 99.9 recurring percent of the universe will kill you instantly. We exist on one piece of space allotted to us in all that emptiness, in a thin film of life, on a climactic knife-edge, on a speck of dust.

And even there we aren’t safe. This is a world where more than 200,000 people can be swept off the beaches of the Indian Ocean, one day after Christmas. In fact the people of the western hemisphere were still celebrating, still eating mince pies and pulling crackers as the Asian Tsunami struck in 2004. There were families in America just sitting down and saying grace at their Christmas tables, as thousands of towns and villages were annihilated, and millions turned into widows, orphans and refugees. The universe really isn’t sentimental about its timing. But the devil is in the detail with these things, and one that gets me is some of the eyewitness reports. When tsunamis are coming in, the sea naturally draws out along the coast; people reported the small children from the local villages running out onto the miles of open beaches and laughing at all the stranded fish, totally oblivious to what was coming at them at nearly the speed of sound. The reason why things like that don’t drive us mad is because we know it isn’t personal, natural disasters just happen. We accept that the universe wasn’t designed with us in mind. But if there is a God, every bad thing that ever happens to us suddenly becomes something malicious, an all powerful, all knowing God cannot not be responsible for things like tsunamis and earthquakes, plague and the AIDS virus.

So really, to those of you who see God’s handiwork everywhere in nature what I say is, yes, look around you, but really look and be honest with yourself about what your seeing. To understand that there cannot be a God, and certainly not a benevolent one, is like a realisation of the obvious, it’s just so clear.

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“I Tried To Be An Atheist”

Adrian Hayter — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:04:39 +0000

I’ve spoken about my Christian friend David a few times on this blog, and I’m getting a chance to see his dad preach on Monday at a Christian Union meeting, so I thought I might talk about him and his beliefs a bit more. Out of respect for his privacy, I’m only referring to him by his first name (as is my policy on these things).

When I met David last year, we talked a lot about religion / Christianity / atheism. He came across to me as a very moderate Christian, the kind that never angers and always smiles (i.e. the most annoying kind). There is being nice, and then there is being so nice you constantly come across as an arrogant condescending moron.

When losing an argument about faith or religion, he would always *without fail* resort to his favourite catchphrase:

I tried to be an atheist…I really tried…

As if he thought this argument was actually worth anything. It is of course, a logical fallacy in many ways. Firstly there is no correlation between failing to do something and the accuracy of what you were trying to attempt. I could say “I tried to be a Christian” or “I tried to be a banana”, but my failure to be either of those doesn’t reflect on their actual veracity as subjects. It only reflects on my personal failure, and as we can easily demonstrate, there are people who have succeeded at being Christians, and there are plenty of bananas in the world (although atheists wish that weren’t so true).

Secondly, it doesn’t prove anything other than the inevitability of failure. Since it’s pretty easy to establish that you cannot change your beliefs on will (despite what some people claim), “trying” to be an atheist just by pure will isn’t going to work. Atheism is more of a realisation than anything; it involves reading the arguments and realising that you agree with them. So saying that you tried to be an atheist but always came back to Christianity is as much an argument as saying “I tried to be bald but my hair kept growing back”. If it’s an inevitable event, you won’t be able to change the outcome.

I guess in the baldness metaphor, you could liken becoming an atheist to older people losing their hair, or if you damaged the hair follicles beyond all hope of repair. What I’m trying to say is, that if you really want to take the view that you can “try” to believe / disbelieve in something, it will only work if the conditions are correct. A Christian can no more try to be an atheist and succeed than an atheist can try to be a Christian and succeed. There have to be certain conditions present first (doubt for the Christian, delusion for the atheist).

Another popular argument David uses is “Where did logic come from?” which implies that logic can’t exist without a creator. The obvious problem with this is that logic doesn’t exist…at least not in any material way. It’s a human concept; a way of viewing reality through the human mind. Animals do not have a concept of logic, they merely appear to live by it because everything that exists go through our logic filter before being processed by our brain. Everything we see has a logical reason for happening, otherwise we classify it as a delusion.

Asking “Where did logic come from” is the same as asking “Where did our minds come from?”, and the answer is the same: They evolved. Daniel Dennett has written on the evolution of our conscious minds (many times), and I highly recommend his book, Freedom Evolves, which deals with the concept of free will.

Needless to say, I think Monday’s CU meeting should be a blast. Hopefully I’ll get to meet the man who convinced an extremely intelligent son to follow a delusional fantasy.

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Final Conversations With The Deluded

Adrian Hayter — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:59:59 +0000

This is going to be the last (I promise!) in my current “series” of conversations with the deluded muslim “Abu”. I have a total of 19 emails from him, the vast majority of which I have responded to. He has however been increasingly rude even though I ask him not to be, and his general level of ignorance has become too much for me to bear, considering I have been spending and hour or more each day replying to each one.

I’ve had enough of him constantly repeating his arguments even though I’ve already explained to him how they don’t work, so I’ve cut off my contact with him. I have no desire to repeat myself, especially as neither side is going to conceed a point. For the last time then, Abu:

Islam is not a religion but a way of life which emcompasses all the prophets and the scriptures (which since have been manipulated and changed).

A way of life that encompasses the teachings of Jesus, Moses, Buddha, the billion or so Hindu gods, the FSM, Michael Travesser?, Joseph Smith, (I could go on). Forget that all these prophets and religions contradict each other, but Abu claims that all these religions were manipulated and changed, and that Islam is the only one true religion…now where have I heard that before?

Even if there are no alternative theories to human evolution from apes there are alternative OPINIONS by opposing scientists. This in itself proves that the theory is not factual and if full of hypothesis still left to be resolved.

As I mentioned before, this is equivalent to someone saying they don’t like rain so it can’t be factual. Opinion has nothing to do with scientific accuracy; if people have evidence that contradicts Evolution, they can submit it (in fact they are encouraged). So far, all evidence that has been submitted has turned out to be wrong in light of investigation.

The Koran was given ad the FINAL scripture to the FINAL prophet (Muhammad) the nation we are currently living under, that of the final prophet will be the last and thus we are fast approaching the end if the earth -doomsday, Armageddon.

I was waiting for a comment about so-called “doomsday”, but as a popular quote says:
“Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going?”

mountains offer the cool to the earth which it needs to neutralise the general warmth from the sun. You being a science man will agree with me when I say the mountains play an important part on the earth.

The only part mountains play on the Earth is providing some animals with a habitat, and some nice ski resorts for humanity. Abu often seems to get science the wrong way around. Mountains are cold because the Sun heats the Earth up from the ground upwards, they aren’t natural refrigerators of some kind. He used this argument to try and prove why there wasn’t life in other parts of the Solar System, forgetting momentarily that the largest mountain ever discovered is on Mars.

The ovveriding point to your argument about a past species was that their brains have had to develop in order for them to develop better tools. You are unbelievable! The tools used in modern natives tribes in the amazon have changed very little if any.

Rocks -> Sharp Rocks -> Sticks with sharp rocks -> Spears with deadly points -> Bows and Arrows -> Poisonous Arrows -> Poison Darts

I personally think they’ve changed quite a bit. Yes, they haven’t developed guns, but there was (a) no need (they don’t hunt game big enough) and (b) no resources to develop them anyway. The Amazonian tribes are masters of hunting with arrows, darts, spears etc. They have served well for centuries, and I doubt they will change much in the next 1000 years (assuming the tribes still exist in their current habitat).

Before this doomsday there will be the returning of Jesus to fight and defeat the one eyed ‘anti-Christ’ who will endeaveiur the weak in terms of faith with a series of dazzling tricks which he will perform. Jesus will be aided by a person who will cone called imam mehdi who will be born into thus world under his real name that will be Muhammad. This is the future that will occur.

So the Zombie Jesus will return from the dead (again) as some sort of uber-Zombie, and will fight some kind of Cyclops (who I assume will appear at the same time). He will perform magic tricks and impress a load of people (I doubt James Randi would be fooled), and his beautiful assistant will be called “Muhammad” which is lucky because that seems to be a popular name for people and teddy bears at the moment. Of course all this happens after the point where Abu claims Allah will forgive those who want to be forgiven, so this entire façade is pretty much just for show.

This quote is just brilliant:

The unseen that science can’t explain. I tend to refer to witchcraft when I mention the unseen. (voodoo, black magic etc) witchcraft is and has been common since the start of time hence yue hanging of these witches during medieval England. Please don’t say you don’t believe in witchcraft because I’ve seen it with my very eyes! This man who was suffering from witchcraft was sat on the couch, and a witch like voice bellowed out of him spouting off things like ‘I will never leave him’ ‘yes I have put the spell’ and so on. And then after treating it with reading some passages from the Koran the witch increased in her agony begging us to stop reading until after a couple of hours it stopped and the person was back to normal (although we hadnt cured the person of witchcraft, the spell’ remained) ive witnessed many other cases of witchcraft similar to this.

Hahahahahahaha…that’s all I can say. Really.

Well then you can laugh at your near ancestors who included legislatures in witches, who made it a social duty to kill all the witches. Then you deny your ancestors! Have you heard if the voodoo doll? It is one form of witchcraft which involves sticking needles in a doll which us thus reflected into the real human being who was the target.

The test for witchcraft involved putting the accused in a position where they couldn’t possibly end up alive afterwards. Any person who survived this torture was found guilty of witchcraft and burned. I don’t laugh at my ancestors. I am deeply ashamed at my ancestors.

Voodoo dolls have never been used to cause harm on people other than in movies, which is where the entire misconception about them was born. Voodoo dolls are usually used as representations of spirits that you can “call upon” to perform miracles, although this has never been proven either.

Did you know king henry the eighth changed certain passages in the bible and forced due acceptance by the Vatican etc just in order to bed Anne Boleyn!

No he didn’t. He created an entirely new church system based on the same book, just interpreted differently. The Vatican opposed this and never agreed to it (as far as I am aware they never have either).

Now finally, once I told him I remained unconvinced and didn’t want to hear anymore of his arguments:

ok then Adrian today marks a definitive day for you remember the date 19/06/2008. You had a personal warner yet you declined. You succumbed to falsehood you chose no affilliation but atheism a cult which has no substance or deity or anything You believe in chance You contested my arguments with pathetic Arguments of your own which on many occasions I could hardly believe what you had stated. your arrogance AND ignorance veils you as mentioned in the Koran. simply you DIDNT want to believe eventhough you’d admit I never contradicted myself and did defy atheism. Maybe I hurt your pride; I put an end to the atheist theory of yours and your responses has been defensive rather than offensive. Adrian I guess only time will tell who was right me or you. But every hour that ticks off your life is bringing you nearer to eternal doom. Hellfire forever and ever and ever a life of circles. There will be no respite and nor will you be punished in he’ll to cleanse yourself for the ultimate paradise. God says in the koran ‘enjoy yourself for a while’ and then I’m sorry to say Adrian endless repercussions.

Abu if you are reading, I will never admit that you didn’t contradict yourself because you did, and you didn’t defy atheism since you can’t prove god does exist anymore than I can prove he doesn’t. My responses were defensive since you were attacking my belief, although I did attack yours on multiple occasions so I would hardly call my arguments purely defensive anyway.

So that wraps this conversation with a very deluded person up. If anyone else wants to try and convert me to their religion, I have a contact form where you can submit your first attempt, and if I am interested in what you have to say I will respond. Please note that I hold the right to post anything you say on this site, but no details other than your first name will be used in reference (so use a fake name if you wish).

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It Wasn’t Me Your Honour, It Was Satan

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:17:00 +0000

I’m split on how to react to this story. A woman last January was spotted “driving on the wrong side of the road and through red lights at speeds of up to 70mph”.

Unfortunately, her car veered off the road and onto the pavement, killing a mother and her daughter. At the scene, the driver told investigators:

Somebody had their foot on my foot and their hand on my hand – it wasn’t me driving, it was Satan

The work of the devil?

Today she got cleared of causing death by dangerous driving.

However, she only got off the charge by entering a plea of insanity, and the jury decided to accept the plea within 15 minutes.

This whole event raises questions about how to handle religious nutcases like this woman. Should we really play along with their “insanity” when two women are dead? On the other hand, at least the courts recognised that claiming the devil did it is pretty stupid.

Hopefully she’ll be locked up for a long time in a mental institution. It’s one thing to suffer the delusion of God, but blaming your insanity on Satan and killing two innocent people is just too far.