A thought from Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was a famous anti-Christian philosopher and writer. He is one of the people that conservative religious people love to hate, those who still remember him. They like to portray him, as they portray all of the rest of us who reject their hard-line theology, as evil people. But I want to bring to your attention an important statement he made, and you tell me if you think this sounds like something an evil man would say:

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”

The Search for Evidences, part two

One of the most famous recent pieces of scientific research was an article that appeared in American Heart Journal in 2006. The lead author, Herbert Benson, is a physician at the Mind/Body Institute in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. His co-authors included other doctors, Ph.D.s in medical sciences, nurses, public health experts, and theologians. This extensive team conducted what is perhaps the best study to date of whether or not prayer works.

In this study, Benson and co-workers identified about 1,800 people with heart problems, and who were scheduled to have a heart bypass operation, in hospitals across the United States. The investigators wanted to know if intercessory prayer would help the patients recover from surgery. The experimental design would seem to be very simple: some of the patients would receive supplementary intercessory prayer, and some would not. (You cannot prevent people from praying, but the investigators arranged for Catholic and Protestant religious groups to pray for the list of patients, in addition to whatever prayer from friends and family they were already receiving.)

But there is a confounding factor in this approach. If the patients who received supplementary prayer knew they were receiving it, this might have a psychosomatic effect upon them. They might feel better, and even recover better, simply in the knowledge that they were being prayed for. The prayer itself might have no spiritual or miraculous effect. Benson and colleagues were aware of this, and they designed their experiment to avoid this problem. They divided the patients into three groups, not two. Patients in two of the groups were told that they might or might not receive extra prayer. The patients in these two groups therefore could not know whether they were receiving supplementary prayer. Of these two groups, one received supplementary prayer, and one did not. The patients in the third group were told that they would receive supplementary prayer, and they did.

The two groups that were uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer had virtually identical rates of complication following surgery. This demonstrated that prayer, itself, did not cause healing in these patients. The group that received prayer and knew it had, as predicted, a psychosomatic effect, only it was the opposite effect from what was expected. These patients actually had more complications after surgery. This surprising result could not be explained, except that perhaps it was performance anxiety: the patients knew that they should recover from surgery, because if they did not, they were letting God down.

These results have left religious people, who believe that God answers prayer, scrambling. Their most common response was that God simply refused to go along with the experiment. God refused to heal the heart patients because He did not want anybody investigating Him. (This seems a strange reason for a God of Love to let somebody die.) Of course, nobody can say. The experiment tells us nothing about what God, if any, might have been thinking. All it shows is that prayer does not reliably work.

So, just as with the near-death experiences, we are left with a jarring lack of evidence that there is a God or an afterlife.

Pat Robertson strikes again

First, let me thank you all for the very insightful comments I have received. I love hearing from you.

I wonder how many of you may have heard yesterday's news about what Pat Robertson, the infamous televangelist, said about the earthquake in Haiti. Robertson has a history of blaming the victims for tragedies, for example saying that the 9-11 attacks were God's retribution for the United States permitting the existence of gays and lesbians. He has been clinically crazy for at least ten years. His most recent statement was the most outrageous and damnable, if we can pass judgement on the words of an insane man. [He also claims to be able to leg press a ton, as a result of his special protein milkshake. I published a humorous depilation of this in the March-April 2007 Skeptical Inquirer. Unfortunately, the article is not yet available online for free.]

Here is what Robertson said: The reason that the earthquake had happened in Haiti was because, two hundred years ago, the Haitians had made a pact with the devil to the effect that, if the devil would drive out the French colonialists, they would serve him.

Big preachers like Robertson just assume that any thought that pops into their minds has come from God, and that they are personally incapable of error. If there is any such thing as blasphemy, this is it. Furthermore, Robertson and others like him have made God, if there is one, appear to be a monster. Only a Satan in the Sky would have sent or even permitted such an earthquake in response to deeds done (or not done; where is Robertson's evidence?) two centuries ago? I think conservative Christians should denounce Robertson for double blasphemy: for assuming he knows the whole mind of God, and for making God appear to be the equivalent of Satan.

I have little concern about the state of Robertson's soul or about his theology. He's insane. My problem is that thousands of people (enough to financially support a whole network) believe everything he says. Mindless followers of an insane person...has history not seen this before?

The search for evidences, part one

I used to be a creationist and a fundamentalist. I believed that there was historical and scientific evidence to verify a literal (or what I thought was a literal) interpretation of the Bible. Even long after I had left this viewpoint behind, I wanted desperately to have some evidence to verify that, at least, God exists and that there is a spiritual realm.

One of the pieces of evidence that I considered good, even though not perfect, was the Near Death Experience (NDE). This occurs when people who are in a coma believe that they are floating above and seeing their own bodies on the bed; who see and speak with departed loved ones; and who see a tunnel towards light, into which a powerful and serene spiritual being invites them. Then they come back from the brink of death—always, they report, unwillingly.

Of course, all of this could be hallucination, caused by oxygen deprivation. But in some cases, patients have reported seeing things that they could not have known—usually things that happened in the operating room. But this can be explained if we consider that, despite them being in a clinical coma, their senses may have been able to detect some information for later recall.

But one patient said she saw red shoes on the roof, which (the story goes) was later confirmed and which she could not have known if her spirit had not been halfway to Heaven.

What is needed is a scientific study. Enter Sam Parnia, M.D. He wrote a book in which he described a scientific study of NDE. It was a brilliant experimental design. It included ceiling tiles that had symbols printed on the upper side, which neither the patient nor the medical personnel could see, but which an ascending spirit might be able to see. I was very excited as I read the book. Unfortunately, the book was only about the experimental design; no results. Presumably Parnia did not yet have results, and will publish them later. We are waiting, Sam!

Meanwhile, I found out that electromagnetic stimulation of the right temporal lobe of the brain could induce mental images of the tunnel of light. This is experimental evidence, though not quite proof, that this part of the NDE is a hallucination. Certain drugs, such as ketamine, can stimulate something similar to an NDE. This was very disillusioning for me to discover. I can remember where I was standing, and where the television was, when I saw this on one of the educational cable channels in 1999.

Therefore, as to whether NDE reveal a spiritual realm beyond our physical bodies and ecosystems is something about which we must remain agnostic. I say this not because I wish to reject a spiritual realm, but in spite of wanting to believe in one.

Jesus was wrong about a lot of things but...

As I said in my previous posting, I have great enthusiasm for the insights and example of Jesus of Nazareth. I believe that this man really lived, and really said many of the things attributed to him. I realize this cannot be proved by historical evidence independent of the Bible (yes, like some of you I have read Bart Ehrman and Israel Finkelstein’s books) but here is my reason for believing.

Many of the things that Jesus said and did are in direct contradiction to what many self-identified Christians today believe. They are not things that a group of people could use as a way of controlling or oppressing others. “Consider the lilies of the field, which bloom today but tomorrow dry up in the heat. Yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” This contradicts many fundamentalist sermons, which say, in effect, Do not bother to look at the lilies of the field, since God wants us to pave them over, and since he is going to burn the world up in a few years anyway. And no one on the Christian Right would tolerate a religious leader who overturned the tables of the moneychangers who made a big profit off of religion, who called religious leaders “whitewashed sepulchres,” who told his disciple Peter to put his sword away, “For those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”

The sayings attributed to Jesus are incredible. How could anyone have just thought them up? Even two thousand years later, we are amazed at them. Certainly the warriors of the Christian Right would never have come up with them. How could a handful of uneducated fishermen have invented them? I am not saying they came into Jesus’ brain out of heaven. But clearly there was a genius named Jesus who actually said these things or something similar to them.

But since Jesus said these things, his followers figured that this was not enough with which to start a church. They were not contented with having people do as Jesus did, just go off in the hills to look at wildflowers and meditate. So they had to create a doctrinal framework in which to place him. All of Christian theology is based on twisted interpretations of the recorded words of Jesus, some of which were invented by his followers.

But even when we consider the words most likely to have been Jesus’ original sayings, we find that he was wrong. He said God would take care of us. The end of the quotation above, about the lilies of the field, is “If God so clothes the grass of the field, will he not take care of you?” His most famous statement is, “Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.” Perhaps all of you have had experiences that show this is not true. As I will explain in a later post, God does not answer prayers. Jesus was wrong about this. Beautifully wrong, wrong with a supreme goodness of mind, but wrong. He wanted so strongly to believe that God had to be better than he was. But it was not true.

When I read the words of Jesus, fully aware of the priestly accretions that have been added to them, I believe them not as literal truth but as an insight into the transcendent goodness of love and beauty of the natural world.

St. Charles

In his book Darwin Loves You, George Levine spends page after page insisting that he is not trying to write a hagiography of Charles Darwin. In this blog entry, I am taking the opposite approach. It is not my intention to literally make Charles Darwin appear to be a saint, but he had some strikingly saintly characteristics. I want to call a few of them to your attention.

First, he had the perseverance of a saint. He had experiments set up all over his house, he read everything he could get and corresponded with dozens of people around the world, despite his debilitating illness. Even when ill, he would force himself to walk on his thinking path (the Sandwalk). He wanted to know the truth and find the evidence for it.

Second, he had the passion of a saint. One of his main passions was his opposition to slavery. Desmond and Moore, in their 2009 book, demonstrate that Darwin got his concept for the Tree of Life from his conviction that all humans shared a common ancestor and that all were equal; he then extended the concept to the entire world of species.

Third, he had the mild manner of a saint. He was kind and fair. He did not act egotistical and mean the way some of his opponents did and do, such as Darwin’s contemporary Richard Owen, and our contemporary Tom Delay who dismisses all who accept evolution as slime-worshippers.

Darwin was a magistrate of his local district. One incident is recorded in which a poor man was accused of poaching on government land. The evidence was clear, and Darwin found him guilty and levied the required fine. But then, Darwin paid the fine himself. The parallel with Jesus Christ is unmistakable: Christians think that God levied a fine on sinful humans, and Jesus paid the fine for us. What creationist has ever done anything like what Darwin did for the poor man?

This blog entry is also found on my other blog, "Honest Ab."

Calling Christian Agnostics

Welcome to Christian Agnostics, my blog about religion. I want to offer my insights, and ask for yours. I am a scientist who used to be a fundamentalist Christian. I have now been driven away from doctrinal Christianity, not just by the things that I have learned but by the evil behavior of millions of people who claim most fervent adherence to Christianity. This makes me an agnostic: I know nothing about what sort of God there may or may not be, and believe all the doctrines about heaven and hell to be mere figments of human imagination, created by religious leaders who used them to control the minds, hearts, and pocketbooks of other people. I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which recently mourned the death of Oral Roberts, whom many here consider to have been a great prophet of truth, but whom I consider to be a great manipulator of minds and a parasite upon people’s good intentions. In these blog entries, I will not attempt to conceal my rage against those who have used Christianity as a tool of oppression.

But I cannot believe that good and evil are merely arbitrary states. I do not believe that what is good is merely what natural selection has favored in the evolution of the human mind. I believe that what is good to the human conscience is also good for the entire cosmos. And that supreme goodness is love. In philosophical terms, I believe that love is a transcendent good, so called because it transcends beyond human circumstances. This, I believe, is the fundamental truth of Christianity. The Apostle John said, “Love one another…He who loves is born of God and knows God, he who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” This makes my agnosticism Christian. I am taking a step that conventional Christians do not take: I claim not that God is love, but that love is God. There may be nothing more to God than the transcendence of love. But that is a pretty important thing, isn’t it? In these blog entries, I will not attempt to conceal my enthusiasm for the insights and example of the man called Jesus of Nazareth whose followers felt obligated (since humans are religious animals) to call the Christ.

Join with me, and share your insights, as I begin the new year and the new decade by proclaiming that an agnostic can have something to live for: love.