Truth
Peter Stanford on Science and Christianity
Abstract
Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then He is evil.David Hume on God
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 23 March 2004
Truth or Comfort
Peter Stanford is a Catholic and former editor of the Catholic Herald, so it is hardly surprising when we read his book about the Devil that he cannot get beyond page 5 before he has a dig at science, just in case his sheepish readers might think that a largely skeptical attitude to Old Nick might drive them into a scientific skeptical way of thinking.
Many scientists will readily admit that they do not have all the solutions.
Science offers no truths, only approaches. These approaches are of limited use [for the] human needs that science most conspicuously fails to satisfy.
Bereavement, suffering, pain, natural disasters, the various apparently random crises of life remain as puzzling in the late twentieth century as they were to the farmers in ancient Egypt who despaired when the Nile destroyed their crops.
On the other hand:
The myths and symbols of religion retain a unique capacity for helping in negotiating and navigating the inexplicable blows of fate.
Stanford gives the impression of speaking generally. He is not. He is speaking only of his own narrow viewpoint, and that of his friends who share them—Christian, particularly Catholic, believers. There is only one myth that helps negotiating the blows of fate, and that is the lie that people will wake up from the “nightmare” that is the only life we live and find themselves in an everlasting life with all our relatives and best friends when we are dead. It is undeniable that this is a comfort for the simple people that can believe it, and as long as it does not matter that it is a lie. How could it matter that it was a lie to a Christian? Christianity is a compilation of incredible lies from beginning to end, and Christians are taught not only to believe these lies as God’s Truth, but to add as many new ones to the corpus of them as they can invent.
This lie of eternal life after death does matter, though. It is dangerous. Sensible people, even among believers, value the life we daily experience, even though it is supposed to be so awful, and do not jump in front of incoming trains to end it, in the expectation of something better post mortem. It was not always thus. S Augustine stopped people from deliberately committing suicide as soon as they were baptized into the Christian faith, in the belief that baptism washed them free of sin so that an immediate death meant an eternity of bliss! S Augustine said, “No! No! No! No!” He told them that the biggest sin of all was to take the life that God had given them, so that this direct route to eternal bliss did not actually work. If the bishop had first made them sign over all your worldly goods to the Church, as was not uncommon, it began to look like a con trick! Christians stopped doing it, and the secular courts declared suicide as murder punishable by hanging!
Of course, Christians are not the only ones who believe in the eternal life after death. So too do the Moslems. The result of their belief—added to their conviction, just like Christians, that some wars are just—makes them ready to blow themselves to smithereens as a human bomb directed at their enemies. In every respect, the denigration of a real living life for a lying illusory trick life supposedly after physical death is monstrous. It devalues real life in favour of a false martyrdom, and leads to all round misery for those involved. And the “benefit” is part of the lie. We do not meet our wives and husbands, and live in marital bliss after death for ever and ever. Even Christ in the bible denies it as clearly as possible (Mk 12:25), so what basis do the Churches have for asserting the opposite? They have none, except their need to spread the illusion—the lie!—of a desirable afterlife to keep up the collections and the voluntary martyrs.
Christian Understanding of Science
So much for religion’s “unique capacity”. What of science? It seems the Egyptians despaired when the Nile destroyed their crops, and well they might, but mostly they rejoiced that the Nile flooded to fertilize and water the land since otherwise they would be living in a desert. Perhaps the mistake is what happens from depending on the Word of God for your information. Christians and Jews read about their God making the Nile do horrid things to the Egyptians by turning into blood and causing plagues of frogs and insects and disease. The Egyptians over many millennia had no great worry about such things because they trusted the Nile to give them life. When things went wrong they blamed it onto a god called Set, the Egyptian Satan. Since the bible boasts that the Christian and Jewish God, Yehouah, was responsible for these awful plagues, this Egyptian Satan must be the God that Jews and Christians worship. But who cares about truth or logic? Certainly not a Christian!
Then again, what is puzzling about bereavement, pain, suffering, natural disasters and so on? Perhaps what is puzzling is that Stanford cannot distinguish between different types of phenomena, listing together events that cannot be classified together, except arbitrarily, as Christians choose to do. They are not even random events as a whole, as Stanford seems to think when he goes on. Natural disasters seem to be random, but one branch of science or another is getting able to predict these “random” phenomena. Hurricanes and earthquakes can, at least partially, be foreseen. How many God-sent prophets in the bible did anything as useful as predicting an earthquake and thereby saving lives? Atheistic scientists do that!
Natural disasters are called by the insurance companies “Acts of God”, and so the death and damage they do must be intended by God, and the insurers do not want to get on God’s wrong side by insuring against something He has ordained. And many “natural” phenomena are now known not to be natural at all but are often caused by believers, with no concern for this world in view of the better one waiting, destroying their own environment. Why bother preserving what is inferior and that they think God will destroy anyway, when He gets round to it. They mean when everyone thinks like them and the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. Life is such a poor substitute for life after death. Stanford is simply lying when he says that natural disasters are as puzzling today as ever. Like all God-botherers, he cannot honestly compare science and religion, for, inasmuch as religion brings any comfort to people, it is based on deception. Science, being true, actually saves lives.
God’s Truth and Christian Practice
Yet, Stanford says science offers no truths. We must be intended to complete the implied comparison. Religion does offer truths. Strange that any, even cursory, examination of religious “truths” shows them to be lies. The excuse offered is that religious lies fulfil some sort of human need, offering comfort, or whatever, but scientific truths “conspicuously” do not. So when science prophesies the path of a hurricane and enables people to flee or shutter up against it, it is conspicuously not fulfilling any human need—nor medicine, hygeine, genetics, electronics, mechanics, nutrition, materials… Why go on? The religious argument is utterly fatuous, yet endless books, magazines and newspapers as well as the broadcast media publish it daily.
For its part, religion can only offer the sop of God’s comfort blanket for those bereaved by His own acts. Christians and probably religionists generally have a curiously two-faced psychology. God kills their friends and relatives, so they turn to God for comfort!
“Thank God it was quick.” “Thank God it was not worse.” “Thank God the suffering is over.”
Being a skeptic, I regard the skeptical view as normal. Most of my best friends are skeptics. Indeed, most of the population of this small but overcrowded island are skeptics. We think it is a sign of civilization. It therefore seems, to most of us, quite insane to hold the view that God is simultaneously a mass murderer and a comforter of the survivors. The Egyptian and Persian idea that the two roles are played by opposite gods seems more sensible to the skeptic forced to imagine there are gods at all. It is hardly surprising that the abject believers in this ambivalent God are also ultra-conservative. Their leaders manipulate them as they choose, and receive praise and thanks for their kind attention.
Of course, scientists do not have all the solutions, and “many” will admit it. But Stanford implies that some of them think science does have all the solutions. No scientist, outside an asylum, thinks science has all the solutions. I bet no scientist imagines that all the solutions will ever be had, and if they do, they will qualify it on examination into big solutions to the big questions might eventually be had, but the world is so incredibly complicated that all the solutions to all the questions is just not on. Scientists know about distribution curves of probability, Gödel’s theorem and random walks. So they know that not everything can be known. Even so, what annoys Christians and gives them pride in rejecting science is that science has true explanations—something Christianity does not have, and never will, despite God’s supposed blessing. Disparagement of science has to be added to every other deception Christians have practised.
The suggestion that scientists do not have all the solutions is a pathetic attempt by a Christian hack to imply that science has no solutions, at least to any important problems. Who then has the solutions? Surely not religionists? Christians have no solutions to any questions. They have claims! What they tell us are solutions are their beliefs, untested and untestable, and therefore not solutions at all, but nothing more than wishful thinking. One of their beliefs is that their claims have the authority of God and so must be true. This is God’s Truth, and Christians cheerfully accept it. Are they pathetic?
Suffering and pain, Stanford classifies as random crises, even though Christians throughout history knew only too well that pain can be deliberately inflicted in a manner intended to cause maximum suffering. It is called torture, and some of us, when we were young and naïve, thought the whole point of the cruel torture of the Son of God before and on the cross was meant to demonstrate to his followers what they should not do to others! It is a shock to realize that the followers of the Christian God did not get the message that small boys thought God meant. From the time that Christians took power as the official religion of the Roman empire, and therefore of the western world, God’s saintly representatives among the clergy, Catholic and then Protestant, for hundreds of years ceaselessly tortured people they did not like in crueller ways even than their own God had suffered.
Christians seemed to take it that what their own God suffered must be the minimum punishment of anyone considered wicked—anyone who rejected Christianity. If the perfect man and God, Christ, was cruelly treated, then it is a sacred duty and obligation to treat non-Christians and Christian critics even worse. The “compassionate” Christian of today will not even face up to this long, long crime on humanity perpetrated by the people who taught them their faith. No one, no one at all, who is sufficiently human to imagine a fraction of the suffering deliberately caused by Christians could want to count themselves among their numbers. If Christians leave the cinema in tears, having watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, thinking to themselves Jesus suffered all that for me, then they should also think of the millions of people who have suffered as a consequence of the loathsome religion created by Christ’s followers.
Devilish acts ought to be rejected as having no human justification, on whatever grounds are offered. Christian history therefore proves that Christianity has to be rejected by humanity.
