Truth
The Language of God 3
Abstract
Evidence for Belief?
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Genesis, Galileo and Darwin
Considering the opening verses of Genesis, itself the beginning of God’s Word, we note that Collins’ “controller of the universe” has contrived somehow to write a book about His creative exploits, so He does not just plant morality into human brains. Anyway, there is an ancient book held by Jews to be dictated by God to Moses, and it contains Genesis, an account of God creating the world. It is legitimate to wonder what the basis is for Collins and those like him to suppose that the God of Genesis is the same as the controller of the universe, Collins is convinced he has independently detected. The great scientist offers no reason for this supposition, and you do not have to be a great scientist to see it is quite false to suppose that science upholds this ancient text:
Despite 25 centuries of debate, it is fair to say no human knows what the meaning of Genesis 1 and 2 was precisely intended to be.
These are the first two chapters of what Christians risibly call Gods Truth and God’s Word. Why does it not occur to Collins that God is a shockingly inept communicator, if no one knows what his first few paragraphs mean, and that anything so meaningless should be called the “truth”? Despite this, Collins is a rare Christian in recognizing that God gave us a brain, and can scarcely have done it expecting us never to use it. Collins offers us a citation on this from Galileo:
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Yet, that is something that faith demands, or so many Christians think, and Collins refuses to use his own gift of intellect to examine his faith honestly. How could an honest man call a book, “the truth” when he knows and admits that it is confused, partly incomprehensible, and partly false. Of course, he will not say “false” and instead prevaricates with “overstated” as a circumlocution. That too is a type of lie, as he soon confirms by saying that the interpretation by Christians of these “overstatements” was “unwarranted”. They were interpreted falsely.
Yet, Collins avers that Genesis is compatible with what science has discovered about the Big Bang:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.Genesis 1:1
This sentence, on the face of it, says God created the heavens at the same time as the earth as His first creative act. As nothing else is mentioned as existing, Christians suppose the heavens and the earth were made ex nihilo, from nothing. Reading on a few verses makes it clear He did not—he put chaos into some order—but let us stick to this first verse.
The heavens must be the whole of the universe we observe from the earth, and the earth is itself. Science has shown that the age of the universe is around 13 billion years. That then is the age of the heavens. Science has shown that the age of the earth is rather less than 5 billion years. So, the universe existed for 8 billion years before the earth was made, a period of time almost twice the age of the earth itself! The heavens and the earth were not made together “in the beginning”. The earth was made a long long time after the heavens.
If “the heavens” is taken more literally as the visible heavens, then they too were not made “in the beginning” because light had to be made before the heavens could be visible, and therefore be seen as we see them. Light consists of photons and the early universe was opaque to photons. Only when it became transparent to them could anything have been seen at all. It did not happen in the beginning, but it was much earlier than the earth, so it does not change the argument. For Genesis 1 :1 to be compatible with science, “the beginning”, must be counted as 8 billion years, and the rest of time, so far, has been only 5 billion. It is extending meaning well beyond accepted definitions, admittedly another Christian ploy—make words mean just what you want them to mean!
Collins knows this, so has the excuse prepared that Genesis is poetic. It is not strictly compatible with science, but poetically it is. That is God’s Truth. Ambiguous or poetic books can certainly contain truth, but who, other than God, is to know what of it is true? Collins has shown us rusty cans cannot see the truth anyway because the clear truth of faith is clouded by sin, yet he can, and so too can Christians generally. How do they distinguish what they consider to be true from self delusion? Nothing so mundane troubles them. They believe what they like, and when they do not like the teachings of the church they are in, they find a church they do like. Christianity allegedly has tens of thousands of different and incompatible sects. Surely that alone shows Christian belief in God’s truth is utterly bogus.
Can a scientist accept all this murk and confusion? If you are Collins, yes indeed. Just believe it like the rest, claim you will harmonize it with science, and then start repeating the same junk Christians have offered since they were the lowlife of Rome. Maybe he will begin by explaining convincingly why this God that can make the whole universe is utterly unable to say what He means. In fact, as Collins is a scientist, it would be nice to know why He thinks this ancient book of Jewish myth is God’s Truth at all? Is it because it says so? Well, it would, wouldn’t it? Especially if it was a fake! How can any scientist set himself the fruitless task of of harmonizing ancient and faulty speculation with tried and tested science? What reason can he offer for why the same objective scrutiny should not be applied to ancient books, so-called sacred, as applies to any other line of enquiry? Does the appellation “sacred” prevent normal scrutiny of the texts? Moreover, how does he know any text is “sacred”, whatever it denotes, and has not been falsely attributed with the description? Is it just because a lot of people think so? So, evolution is false because more Americans reject it than accept it? The views of ignorant people has never been any criterion of truth, and no scientist should think it.
Science should not be denied by the believer.
It must be the real purpose of this book. Collins is an evangelical, and millions of his co-religionists reject science before they would reject anything said in the bible. Collins wants to show to them that they are taking the wrong tack, digging themselves into a hole, and are depriving themselves, their children and the future of America of many potentially great scientists, like himself, all because the have unreasonable fears. He wants to show Christians they can believe both science and God—they are compatible. Given the persistence of false beliefs like Christianity, no scientist would demur from this objective. Essentially he pleads that science cannot hurt an almighty God, and, in reality, as it studies God’s own creation, it can tell the believer a great deal about the work of God. He reassures them that science cannot explain how life began, or why we are here. Believers can believe whatever answers to such questions they choose to believe. As there is no way of knowing whether such arbitrary answers are true or otherwise, the answers they choose do not matter! Except, of course, when it leads them to hatred, as it inevitably has done.
Pursuing this aim of enlightening believers, Collins launches into the sound and solid part of the book, a review of science leading up to his own work in the Human Genome Project. Whatever the beliefs of the reader, these pages are informative and educational. They can be read by everyone to advantage. As they have no bearing on Christian belief, they need not be mentioned any further here. Collins does, however, continue to make passing comments on his true calling—serving the phantom in his head he thinks is real. Thus, on discovering the human genome was only 20,000 genes long, he was shocked to find “God writes such short stories about humankind”. Why is he so shocked and why does he think 20,000 genes is particularly short? It is because it is not much more than that of worms and flies! Is there no humility to be found in that for Christians? No chance. They are made in God’s image, and that, they imagined, was much more noble than a worm, though the bible says plainly enough we are nothing more than mud, and any zoologist will point out the parallelism between our construction and that of a worm. Evolution explains it. Moreover, the mutation rate, the number of genes that do not copy properly from generation to generation, is remarkably high. It might be almost as high as it could be without giving rise to distressing numbers of still and deformed babies. The genome, therefore, might be as long as it can be.
Ordinary people who can live normal lives with no calls made to an invisible spirit guide or buddy—he calls us “Godless materialists”—will be wondering why God is needed to explain us when mutation and natural selection do the job. As Collins puts it, “Who needs God?” “I do”, he answers, and that is it! As long as he needs God, whatever the science dictates is irrelevant. An objective psychologist would have plenty to ponder in this, and Collins might be better off going to a psychiatrist than to church. The psychiatrist will at least be trying to cure him, not encouraging him in his delusion. Belief might be a comfort blanket for insecure and immature adults, but it is no reason for them forcing psychological dummies into the mouths of normal people.
Collins tries to rationalize his psychological dependence by claiming study of the genomes of humans and chimps does not explain what it means to be human. Nor does it explain what it means to be a chimp, or a worm, for that matter, but they are not bijou Gods, for Christians, like us. “DNA alone does not explain it”, Collins continues. It is like saying the properties of hydrogen and oxygen do not explain the properties of water. To know the properties of water we study water, not its constituent atoms, to know the motivation of human beings, chimps or worms, we study the animal directly, not its genome, at least until we know what each gene does.
What is sure is that small changes in genes can have profound effects on the organism. Both chimps and humans are social animals, but humans bond by talking, and have left the trees for some reason. We have evolved differently from chimps which remained in the trees, and bonded in different ways from humans. The change in environment seems to have made us more strongly social. Sociability coupled with pronounced intelligence generated new ways of inheritance other than by DNA—we pass things on by culture and education. Many of our peculiar behavioural traits are extensions of sociability and intelligence, including language, culture, education, religion, law, art, literature, music, and so on. The emergence of language and then symbolic notation hugely multiplied the possibilities of all these characteristics. None of these emergent abilities can be practically explained by the genome, any more than the weather can be practically explained by the gas laws.
Collins will not allow any sort of reasoning like this dent his faith. Faith always stands above reason, and needs no reason to explain why. It is grossly unreasonable like not wanting to tread on the joints between flagstones in the pavement, or calling the thirteenth floor 12b or omitting it all together and calling it 14, or tying your shoelaces in a particular order. It is superstition. The Romans called Christianity a superstition. Lose faith and you will be terribly unlucky. Furthermore, it is like being trapped in a revolving door, and justifying what seems odd behaviour by saying you enjoy doing it. Lastly, it is compulsive, like alcohol addiction. Addicts of Christianity cannot see it, any more than a drunken alcoholic can see their own problem. Alcoholics are habitually in denial. The alcoholic reels around reeking of whiskey but they’ve not had a drink! Collins believes in a figmentary phantom, though he has no proper evidence of it, just his own compulsion, but denies it is irrational. He will not face the social evidence for God as social security in tribal times, the actual insurance being the tribe itself, and God simply representing tribal culture, the cement that held the tribe together.
The compulsion to lie in support of their delusion contributes to the general Christian compulsion to lie without realizing it. Thus Collins tells us S Augustine was a skeptic before he converted to Christianity. He was not, he was a Manichaean, a member of a dualistic sect with origins like Christianity and Judaism in Persia, and having common features with them. Manichees revered Christ but not the Old Testament, which they probably knew had been rewritten and adulterated from the original Persian by the Egyptian Ptolemies. He remained a Manichaean for 15 years during which time he had a consort by whom he had a son. He dismissed his consort when he wanted to get on in the world and chose to become a Christian. Augustine was emphatically no religious skeptic, though he was not a Christian until he was 34 years old. Why then does Collins lie about it? How can a Christian have any compunction about lying when they think it is a virtue to lie for God?
Atheism and Agnosticism
It really is laughable the way Christians have utterly double standards, and use them freely without a qualm. Taking on the scientific atheists who decry God, Collins turns to “molecular biologist and theologian”, Alister McGrath to point out the logical fallacies behind their arguments. It is a prime example of the pan calling the kettle black! Here are people whose basic principle is faith—belief contrary to logic and the evidence—telling their critics they are illogical. Their own God, according to the book of tales that constitute his active life and death, contains a story in which he recommends his followers to ensure they can see properly themselves before they try to remove a speck from someone else’s eye! It highlights the utter lack of attention of Christians to the prescriptions of their very God. Since when have Christians ever done what their God tells them? They have been persuaded that faith is all that their God wants, despite the many explicit moral instructions he gave.
Far from being moral, they think they can do anything to defend this supposed salvific faith, because faith is all their God is interested in. They believe that God is ecstatic when they sing His praises in dewy eyed adoration, even though they ignore almost every moral prescription He uttered when He dwelt among them. When Christians begin to pay more attention to logic and evidence, then maybe we should pay more attention to them. Collins and McGrath are playing to the choir loft! Christians want to be reassured, by anyone with a reputation for scholarship, that their fancies are valid, and their critics mistaken. If they believe God appeared on earth, then they should read what He told them while He was here, and do it. They were supposed to have faith in Him, but they rejected Him for a Hellenistic mountebank who taught them to believe in magic instead of good deeds. Christians now cite the mountebank more than they cite God Himself! They are not even logical in their own belief.
Based on his fellow biological theologian, Collins considers first the atheistic argument that God is unnecessary through evolution and genetics accounting for the diversity of life. The argument is conceded! However, God could have planned it that way, even though the invention of God is now a plain violation of Occam’s razor. The second atheistic argument is that religion is anti rational, and their argument against it is that their own faith, and that of all their best friends and acquaintances is not the “blind trust in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence” atheists accuse them of. We saw above that this is merely denial, like the alcoholic, and Collins admits it when he agrees that rational argument does not substantiate faith.
The Christian substitute for reason is that belief in God is “intensely plausible”, as Collins has it. Virtue’s Simplified Dictionary tells us plausible is “seeming to be true without necessarily being so”, or “having the appearance of truth”, and “likely to win confidence not wholly deserved” And what are the degrees of plausibility that Collins thinks he sees in using the adverb “intensely” of plausible? How plausible can plausible be? At root, plausible simply means what meets with approval, from the Latin for “applause”, and whatever is not plausible is implausible—it does not meet with approval. Obviously the idea of God meets with Christian approval, so the plausibility of God is a tautology, and the adverb “intensely” is a dishonest attempt to make plausibility seem more than it is. A scientist ought to know that what is plausible is not necessarily true, nor need it be reasonable, once it is properly examined. The theory of phlogiston was plausible, so too was heat as a fluid, and that the atom was a plum pudding, but all these, and many more such hypotheses, were wrong. Christians have to be impressed by plausibilty because it is the best they have to offer.
The third atheistic objection to Christianity Collins considers is its horrific history—it has been responsible for terrible crimes. How do Collins/McGrath counter that? They don’t! Again they concede the argument! All they can offer is mitigation. Christianity is responsible for some great acts of compassion. They mean that a proportion of Christians have been compassionate, but then, so too have many none Christians, and even atheists, would you believe? Collins has based his belief on the presence in the human “soul” of a moral law, and he has shown that all of us are rusty cans, so the moral law is equally muddied in each of us, Christians or otherwise. Each of us, therefore, can act according to this law or contrary to it. Christians have no copyright on it. What then does faith do? It is not able to return the rusty can to a state of pristine purity. Quite the reverse, it is the faith that is spoiled by the can. Faith is useless. Some people are good and compassionate whether faithful or not. Faith is just a theological quality some people give themselves in self-flattery. Even if it had any effect at all, it is an effect on Collins’ rusty cans, and so can only be observed in the rusty cans when it becomes a turbid and filthy faith. Why would any scientist imagine it has a source outside the universe?
Collins attempts a little sarcasm at Richard Dawkins’ expense. Dawkins notes that humans can choose to be altruistic—“something that has never existed before”—using their intelligence and conscious awareness of external suffering. For Collins, it is a paradox that any atheist can think such a thing, but he cannot see it as his own failing, not Dawkins’. “Where might this rush of goodness come from”, he asks. It would be a novelty if Collins just once seriously thought about his fatuous questions and tried to answer them with the intellect we presume he has. Collins barely recognizes that humans are social, and social in a unique way. Could he consider it without recourse to his fantasy father? Obviously not!
He claims Dawkins goes “beyond the evidence” in claiming “science demands atheism”. Does his faith tell him this or his reason, for this question is proof that Dawkins is correct. Belief stops believers from being objective, and science must be objective to work. So, beliefs must be treated scientifically, they cannot be held until they have been found to be true by objective testing.
What does Collins say to this? If God is outside Nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove His existence. Of course, he does not mean “if” but “because”. He is not allowing any possibility that God might be within Nature, because then his argument is self refuted. Collins has given his God a place outside Nature precisely so that he can argue in this way, but he does not know anything about God. All of God’s characteristics are assumed with no evidence other than hope. So he means “because”, not “if”, and all Christians understand it.
The trouble is that his premise is itself a problem. A God totally outside the universe can have no influence within it. To have any such influence proves God is not totally outside the universe. If God has some influence inside the universe then science can detect it, but science has found no such influence unequivocally attributable to God. Collins’ premise is therefore upheld by science. God has no influence on the universe, and He might as well not exist because he cannot affect anything in the universe, including our lives! In scientific terms, any God like this does not exist, because a fundamental rule of science is skepticism—no belief without proof.
What exactly distinguishes God from any other figment of the imagination, the existence of which can neither be proved nor disproved? How does Buddy Jesus differ from Harvey the Rabbit? How does God differ in nature from Shrek, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh or the Wizard of Oz? No doubt Collins has faith only in God, but all are equally imaginary, and equally undisproveable. The fact that something cannot be disproved is absolutely no reason for accepting it. It is a principle of science that cannot be harmonized with belief, and therefore that Collins will not properly address. It is the foundation of Occam’s razor. Reject what is unnecessary. When something cannot be shown to be necessary, then it cannot be accepted on other grounds. That is what skepticism is.
Collins concludes that atheism is blind faith because it cannot defend its own premises when, as usual, he is willfully blind because he cannot work out the consequences of his own fatuous premises. He tells us that we can neither prove nor disprove God’s existence, God being outside the universe, thereby admitting that God has no effect on the world, yet he still has cause to believe He exists out of pure faith. You can hardly fail to conclude that, for all his impressive scientific credentials, Collins is a dunce who cannot apply his science other than within certain narrow bounds. He is therefore not a scientist.
Turning to agnosticism, Collins gives a quotation from T H Huxley who coined the word as being “antithetic to the ‘gnostic’ [or know all] of church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant”. Collins does not see himself in these words. He says it is logically defensible to take a position neither for nor against God. It is true, as we have seen, that anything purely imaginary can neither be proved nor disproved. Life experience depends, however, on reality not on fancy, so it is more practical to deny the existence of everything that cannot be proved. One can be an agnostic on the existence of mermaids, unicorns and wyverns, and you can live your life perfectly well until someone offers to sell you a genuine unicorn horn. You would then be better off to be skeptical. Yet Christians willingly cough up their dollars for the pastors in their churches who are selling them their own brand of unicorn horn called “life after death”.
What effrontery do we get now from this two faced confidence trickster and his chums? He tells us the agnostic should only choose agnosticism after considering “all the evidence for and against the existence of God”. Do as I say not as I do, eh? Would that Collins had done it himself before he launched on this parody of analysis.
He ends up saying if God exists and science is objectively true, then they cannot contradict. A better statement is “if science is objectively true then nothing should contradict it, including God”. Collins and his fellow Christians could take comfort in this, but instead they descend from a lofty God to a God who, in ancient times, set pen to paper right here on earth, then appeared here Himself. Such events have happened within the observable universe, indeed in our own back yard, not more than 100 generations ago. These texts prescribe gross contempt for anyone who does not have the same delusion— that they are the work of the controller of the universe! Collins is no longer trying to harmonize an abstract universal power with science, but the God described by primitive people in ages past when civilization was primitive. Nowhere does Collins explain why he thinks these ancient and ragged texts contain the words of the master of the universe, or how He contrived to get them put down for His faithful dupes, when he can leave no imprssions in our world.
Creationism and ID
Collins continues with his objective of trying to harmonize his religion with science, turning now to the least reasonable segments of Christianity, the false beliefs of the creationists and the IDers. Such brain dead wrecks must be the real aim of the book. A Christian who is a famous scientist bids to explain to biblical inerrantists and anti evolutionists how they are wrong and science is right. Furthermore, he tells them they are not fairly examining the scientific evidence! Collins cannot see that he differs from them only in degree. If he too examined all the evidence then he could not remain a believer in the Christian concept of God.
He is close enough to the creationists to be able to write that they appeal to “the strong and understandable instincts of serious believers”, yet it is “almost incomprehensible that the [young earth creationist] view has achieved such wide support” in the intellectually advanced and and technologically sophisticated USA. Collins chooses to walk a lonely road in the companionship of a footpad, apparently hoping to convert the criminal!
Is the bible the word of God or is it not? If the answer is that it is, then how can it be wrong? It so obviously is wrong, in many respects, to everyone except these brain dead believers that the only conclusion is that it cannot be the word of a supposed perfect being. What then is it? It is precisely what it looks like. The speculations of ancient priests about the world, Nature and society, plausible stories written from a position of almost total ignorance, but now known to be seriously wrong in many respects, not least that our societies have moved on and merged as the world got smaller, so that we can no longer afford to believe in petty religious differences any more. God is a character in this book, a genie serving to explain what no one then knew. Will Collins see reason here? No chance:
Parts of the bible are written as eyewitness accounts of historical events.
And quite often the eyewitness must have been God Himself! And when it was not, the biblical eyewitnesses should be accepted as genuine. Why is that? Collins must be aware that a lot of fiction is written as eyewitness accounts. He must be willing to trust this as factual because it is in the bible! Yet we still have no evidence why this ancient work is considered so trustworthy when it seems quite the opposite. We have seen he thinks some of the bible true and historical and some of it poetically true but not historical. Even more confusing is that the poetic and the prose, the historical and the allegorical are often mixed together, and then sometimes what is taken as historical is written in verse. None of this, though admitted, bothers any Christian. They believe it all, except for the bits it sometimes suits them to consider as allegorical, and, to them, even the allegories are transparent. They cannot explain it, but they know! It is God at work!
God was not so stupid as to offer the Human Genetic Code to His ancient acolytes, but apparently, He is now stupid enough not to have revised the ancient and inadequate books to make them fit for the modern world, and even impels intelligent men to believe ancient nonsense just because it was once considered authoritative or sacred. Thus Collins tells his evangelical Christian friends that they are right to hold fast to the “truths” of the bible, but he does not explain how the truths should be distinguished from the falsehoods. How is the Christian to take the allegation (Ex 33:13) that God is forgetful? How can they be so sure it is not true, being in the holy word, and indeed that God has not forgotten?
He assures his evangelical pals that science has no answer for the pressing questions of human existence, but nor has religion. It has answers that are no more than hopes and wishes, but with nothing to guarantee they are correct. Faith is all that is on offer. Evangelicals are quite right, Collins says, to oppose atheistic materialists. It is a dogmatic statement, but can the dogma be justified other than by the faith that itself needs no justification, and therefore is evidence of nothing other than willful blindness. It cannot. Curiously, Collins ends with a quotation that one might have thought it useful for him to read and act upon himself. No Christians…
…should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, more loyal to follow it, wheresoever it leads.Benjamin Warfield, cited by F S Collins
Truth though must be properly established truth, not a whim and not a lie spread by professional Christians whose living depends on everyone accepting it.
Turning to ID, which he says “deserves serious consideration”, its central plank is the idea of irreducible complexity, the existence in organisms of structures that can only exist as they are. They could not have been gradually assembled by natural selection. Collins cites ID guru, William Dumbski as saying that once such systems can be shown to have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process so that their irreducible complexity is an illusion…
…then Intelligent Design would be refuted on the general grounds that one does not invoke intelligent causes when undirected natural causes will do. In that case, Occam’s Razor would finish ID quite nicely.
And every argument for God, including Collins’ personal favourite, the law of right and wrong. With God disposed of, Nature can be seen as morally neutral, and morals a construct of living in society. “May it never be so”, Collins replies, stiff necked to the end, but proving beyond doubt that his whole faith is an irrational hope.
Collins ends up telling us about BioLogos, his own coinage, it seems, for his harmony of science and delusion. He seems to recognize it as a “God of the Gaps” theory, before immediately denying it. It is nevertheless the belief that God is the answer to questions that sciences cannot answer like “What is the meaning of Life?”, and “What happens after death?”. Ok! How are the answers to these questions to be verified? In the “spiritual logic of the heart the mind and the soul”. He means, it is true if that is what you want! His supporting argument is that God could be this and could be that… whatever suits. God is outside Nature, and Lo! now He could change it however He wishes, He could know everything, He could see how it develops, He could determine what seems random to us. He could make pigs fly. This is presumably quite different from wishful thinking which Collins spent some time telling us was not what God is.
No! A list of things that God could do, for Collins, takes care of the objections about the role of chance on evolution. Depressing and incredible though it might seem, this prominent scientist thinks imagining what an imaginary being could do answers puzzles of Nature. How can a man in such a senior position in science hold down a job while believing all this nutty fantasy? He announces he has harmonized Genesis with evolution. Neither science nor faith can be ditched. To do either is to deny truth. He never explains how he harmonises the scientific definition of truth with the religious one. Frankly, it sound as if he ought to be in an asylum.
Next, he harmonizes Adam and Eve, by saying they were not the only people on earth at the time. God had already made the human race, and here is an allegorical account of God giving particular humans a spiritual nature—a soul. It seems then that there are human beings, the majority apparently, who do not have a soul. And how is this soul transmitted generation to generation? Has Collins found it in the genome?
Approaching the end of the book, he returns to the moral law he fancies humans have in their nature, although it is impossible without God. It is the “strongest signpost to God”. That any supernatural, externally imposed quality should be assumed as an hypothesis is utterly unscientific, but human nature, including human morality can be studied by a variety of methods, and have been. It is not yet understood, but that is always a stage in scientific investigation. There is absolutely no good reason to think only God could be responsible for it, and it is puerile to suggest it. Sadly, puerile is what Collins is, if this is the best he can offer in defense of his primitive beliefs, and he seems proud to say it is.
He finally tries to justify his adoption of Christianity, even though his years in the choir as a boy had left him with the idea that Christ was a fairy tale. From God as “controller of the universe”, he decided to read the gospels, and suddenly could appreciate the horror of Christ’s claims—that he was God and could forgive sins—then rose from the dead, though he was the last of several in the bible to have done so. The master of the universe had decided to incarnate as a man on earth to be tortured to death and to ascend to heaven as proof. By his so doing, he freed humanity from the bondage of sin!
Any skeptic can do nothing but roar with laughter at this scheme, supposedly planned by the author of the universe, who had Himself cursed humanity at its inception, according to the bible. Collins has listed all the things God could do, and, in addition, he could have removed sin from the world or defined a level of sin that would not distress Him and changed human nature to fit it, defining free will in such a way that humans were not absolutely free, because all the terrible sins had been removed from their mentality, but still considered themselves free because they were quite incapable of knowing anything different. Of course, we might think anything like that is not free will, but no one at present knows what free will is, or whether we actually have it, so not a lot will have changed, and we shall then not be able to conceive of anything other than the degree of free will we had as having free will.
It is no different from God making us, in the Christian model, with specific ranges of hearing and vision. We do not feel the lack of X-ray vision or not hearing dog whistles. Moreover, what is Collins hypothetical intrusion of God’s moral law but a diluted down version of the same thing. If God had made the moral law something we all instinctive did, then He and we would all be a lot happier, and the lack of some small degree of free will would not even occur to us. Doing this would have been far more effective and Godlike than the hair brained scheme Christians attribute to Him merely to give themselves toffee.
And who is God to change His mind? Around 4000 BC, God decided to punish Adam and Eve for some sin, and he curses them and their offspring forever with being congenitally sinful. 4000 years later, He regrets or forgets what He decided, an infinitesimal time back on God’s eternal timescale. His solution is one that is suspiciously similar to schemes that agricultural societies had been practising in the previous 4000 or more years. God does not seem particularly Godlike, nor creative in His ideas. To paraphrase Heraclitus, the moronic God is the God of morons.
Almost at the end of the books, Collins says the scientist in him would not let him accept the belief in Christ however “appealing” if they could have been mythical or fake. It is the final proof there is no scientist in him. His examination of the biblical texts is as amateurish as one could expect of any five year old choirboy. Like all simple Christians regurgitating what their ministers tell them, he claims the gospels are eyewitness accounts. Well, if Matthew and Luke were eyewitnesses, why did they have to copy almost the whole of Mark when they wrote what they had seen with their own eyes? No scholar thinks these three gospels are independent.
Two of the gospel authors were apostles, Collins thinks, but scholars think otherwise. The authors of the gospels are anonymous, and the books were given these names over a century after the events they recorded. Collins thinks they were copied supernaturally accurately, but the reality is different. They contain thousands of differences, and full manuscripts do not exist until several hundred years after the events they describe, and some of those differ considerably from each other. Modern bibles note important early omissions such as the variant endings of Mark which are clearly added to the original. No none Christian source “bears witness” independently to a Jewish prophet crucified by Pilate. The most often cited instance is that of Josephus which few scholars consider as genuine, not least because it is never mentioned, important as it is, until the fourth century! Others are simply reportage of what Christians believed, not independent confirmation it was true.
None of this evidence, nor a mass more, impresses the scientist in Collins, though any scientist must examine the evidence thoroughly to be credible. Collins just is not credible. He shows repeatedly that he believes what he wants to believe irrespective of the evidence, and spews forth the usual Christian half truths and lies that are needed to bolster up this most shaky of beliefs. he even repeats the absurd claim:
The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.F F Bruce
Collins offers to put his Christian head in the scientific crocodile’s mouth as proof of his faith. Doting believers see the whole man emerge. Anyone even slightly scientific in their analysis sees a headless man lying there. Then they wonder whether he had a head anyway.
He finally converts when he sees a miracle—a frozen waterfall in the Cascade mountains, an example of the glory of Nature not of the extra entity cut out by Occam’s razor, God! The great scientist just cannot resist his compulsion to multiply entities. He attributes a wonder of Nature to a ghost in his head. Part of his brain is trapped forever in the church choir loft of his early childhood, and he just has not the strength of character or will to escape it despite his scientific training.
In his favour, he does openly criticize the attitude of some Christians when mostly they are deferential to each other. He admits that Christians are often intolerant of those with different convictions. Moroever:
Christians all too often come across as arrogant, judgemental and self righteous…
In this book, Collins is himself sometimes like this, though one of the merits of his presentation is that he generally seems a humble man. According to the Christian God, humility is a requirement of Christians, though they rarely are, as Collins observes. He notes that love is the central principle of Christ—the man who is meant to have been God, remember—and he cites Matthew 22:35-40 where, in answer to a question, Christ gives the greatest of God’s commandments. Theologians have for centuries noted that he gives two commandments in answer:
Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thy shall love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
What millions of Christians including theologians consistently miss is that the second commandment is not merely like the first, it is the same! As Hillel said, the rest is commentary. Christ makes the identity of the two great commandments absolutely clear elsewhere in his teaching (Mt 25:31-46), as we have seen above. The reason the two are the same is simple. The only way to show your love of God is to love your fellow human being. Dewey eyed singing and praying, bowing and kneeling before painted church windows, and supporting pastoral drones by putting money in the platter is not showing love of God. It is pure self indulgence. It is love of self not God. Love and compassion for others is what God wants, and, if Christ truly is God, then he says it plainly. The reason few Christians know what should be obvious is that they have let themselves be besotted by Paul, a mere man, who changed the whole meaning of Christ’s message, and the whole purpose of Christianity.
Approaching a Conclusion
In a few final shots, Collins decides that both polytheism and monotheism cannot both be right, as ever willfully blind to the fact that Christians have harmonized them by inventing the Trinity, and that God, being almighty, according to Christian definition, can appear in whatever form He chooses to suit Himself. If He chose to appear as Zeus to Greeks, then precisely how does Collins know otherwise? Because Christians are T H Huxley’s gnostics—know alls!
He also returns to the problem of qualia in consciousness—yet another of his own examples of inventing a “God of the Gaps” that elsewhere he condemns as a threat to faith. Consistency? It is impossible, even for clever Christians. Their minds just decay imperceptibly to themselves, indeed deceiving them into thinking they have abilities none Christians do not have! Here he cites another pitiful supposedly scientific theologian, John Polkinghorne, who nips through music, colour and mysticism as examples of phenomena that science cannot explain at the subjective level because science is objective. Yet science does have the answer. It is evolution. Shouldn’t a genetic scientist have been able to think of this?
It is true that science cannot describe subjective phenomena, but it can explain them. The mathematician, Paul Dirac, was joined by a colleague who made small talk saying, “Cold isn’t it?” Dirac, famously brusque, scornfully retorted, “How cold?” Subjective experience cannot be adequately explained from one person to another, but we can find out whether we have the experience, speak about it and begin to find out what we have in common, yet there is no way anyone can be sure that their own sensation of, say, pinkness is what someone else experiences as green. Maybe brain scans of people exposed to different colours will show how each affects the brain, so that a green experience can be separated from a pink one, though even then there can be no certainty. The question is why that is a proof of God to Christians.
From the very simplest of life forms, it was an evolutionary advantage to be able to sense aspects of the environment—the temperature, the light intensity, the concentration of certain substances in the environment—and by mutation and adaptation they gradually obtained these abilities, because those that did not died off at a faster rate. The organism had to have some mechanism of detection, but what was it? How could it know? We use dials and buzzers on the instrument panels of our invented mechanisms, but what could an evolving life form use?
Polkinghorne talks about vibrations amd neural currents telling him nothing about how he senses the colour pink, yet pink is sensed by him via these phenomena. So, this great man of God can have no clue from God or anywhere how a bacterium senses anything like the concentration of an acid in its environment, yet it does so without a pH meter. Because evolution has not fitted us with meters to indicate to us what we sense, we have feelings instead, and that is what these qualia are. We feel colour. We feel acidity. We feel vibrations in the air.
Why then do we have emotional attachment to some of them? It is because through evolution and experience we associate pain or pleasure with certain of our sensations. The bacterium does not want to be too hot or acidic, and feels when the environment is changing favourably or otherwise. For us, music evokes certain primitive calls of pain, horror, joy, or danger from our distant past. Temperature does the same. Our mother is warm, and we are contented when we are warmed at her bosom. When we wandered off from her, we got cold and fearful. Colour also has emotional attachments. We live in a world that is predominantly green where it is most habitable, so green signifies life and security to us. Black and grey signify bare rock and the absence of life. We feel happy about what favours us, and feel gloomy about what suggests adversity or danger. These are the meters and buzzers we have had since life began—feelings! There is nothing divine about it.
Like everything these spiritualists like Collins propose as the work of God, including frozen waterfalls, it is natural, and scientists ought to be trying to work out the details and testing their hypotheses. To say it is God given gets us precisely nowhere, any more than any other form of ID or creationism does. Yet these knee bending cringing poltroons cannot bring themselves to do anything else, despite a lifetime in science. They are the antipathy of science. They are purveyors of superstition.
They have more favourable pseudonyms for it. Collins likes “spiritual truth” though he never explains quite how we are sure it is actually true. A great deal of what Collins thinks is true seems extremely dubious or manifestly false.
Collins warns us that our own tools have limits and gives another schoolboy example cribbed from Arthur Eddington to the effect that a man decided to study sea life by netting it. He decided that nothing in the sea was smaller than three inches. He was using a three inch net! If that does not say that Collins’ fellow scientists are fools, then what does it say? The point is, Collins tells us, that the scientific net will not catch spirit, yet these believers have managed to do it without a net at all! If we took the fishing parable to its conclusion, some acquaintance of the fishing man, besotted by the notion of “spiritual truth”, will have invented a whole world of spirits in the sea undetectable by the man’s net, and have set up a church to the great aqueous Lord whose heaven is tranquility in the depths of the ocean, where we can all live forever after death—as long as we finance the comfortable lifestyle of the great Sea Lord’s ministers.
His final exhortations are to believers to adopt science, and scientists to adopt belief. He hopes he has given cause for support of these aims, and he has for the first one, his explanations of science being pitched excellently for dim witted biblical inerrantists. The second aim is a joke. It proves he does not understand science, but has been following its precepts mechanically. He thinks he has proved that atheism is the least rational worldview, but proves his own incoherence by thinking an entity external to the universe can act in it while leaving no evidence that it does. He pursues his rusty can metaphor assuring us all that the failings of Christians are because they are rusty like the rest of us, thereby proving that faith is useless. As pure water in a rusty can gives us rusty water, we cannot get our own pure water from others, but must get it from the “timeless spiritual truths that faith represents”—brought to us by a chain of rusty cans, and books written by rusty cans! He demonstrates the power of the illusion of faith to kill all reason in the human mind.
Some final problems Collins thinks we face in coming to his timeless faith he now addresses on our behalf—a rusty can passing on the rusty faith to the very end! Are we troubled that God allows suffering? No! It is no problem when there is no God. “Life is short”, Collins feels he has to remind us, and the death rate will be one per person for the foreseeable future. He does not explain the relevance of these obvious facts, unless it is some sort of reminder of the “spiritual truth” of the eternal life available only to those who refuse to use their allegedly God given brain and accept faith as a substitute for thinking. The main motivation of Christians is their fear of death, their horror that the death rate is indeed one per person. They cannot face this reality, so kid themselves that by having faith and adoring their phantom Lord, they will avoid the unavoidable.
God is not threatened by science, but equally science is not threatened by God, he finally tells us. Nothing is threatened by nothing. What threatens science is not God but Christians and others who hold unfounded beliefs, often through school age indoctrination. Collins has found things to learn in other spiritual traditions, but strangely, he settles on the one he was obliged to spend countless hours hearing as a boy, albeit that his chosen variant was more popular, because less intelligent than the Episcopal one. Religions depend on childhood indoctrination for their propagation. If it were a crime to teach children fancy as truth—as it should be—then faith would quickly become an interest of charlatans, eccentrics, neurotics and psychotics.
Faith is irrelevant to the modern world providing that proper social mores are taught by parents and in schools. The failure of parental guidance and the public schools to properly inform children is what drives the pressure for faith schools we currently experience. For what remains true in the modern world are the injunctions in religions, derived from the tribal culture in which they began, to love and help our fellow human beings, and not to torment and kill them. There is nothing supernatural in this. It is entirely natural and sensible. Yet this, the important part of religion for society and human security, is ignored by all but a few sensitive Christians. None of the many Christians who voted for greedy opportunists like Bush and Blair, Christians so-called, are Christians in any moral sense. They are self centered worshippers of an invisible idol they have constructed in their own image, a supernatural reflexion of their greedy, selfish selves!
Collins’ instinct that the moral law is vitally important to society is correct, but he wraps it up in all the familiar supernatural bunkum of traditional Christianity, an early deviation from the practical morality of Christ. Moral law wants emphasizing, not as the law of a supernatural fancy, but as the law that society is built upon, and without which it cannot stand. It is far from mere piety. It is doing what is right, and that is prescribed in terms of what preserves society and keeps us civilized. It is care, compassion, loving kindness—Christian love even, if Christians ever actually did it.
