Bad Cop

I occasionally find myself in awkward situations.

The Truth Project is a set of 12 DVD-based video lessons produced by Focus on the Family, a well-known evangelical Christian organization. Each lesson is roughly one hour long and takes the form of a lecture given by Dr. Del Tackett, former president of the Focus on the Family Institute. Lessons are always based on a specific theme; for example, the first three lessons are "Veritology: What is Truth?", "Philosophy and Ethics: Says Who?" and "Anthropology: Who is Man?"

The DVDs are meant to be viewed in small groups and discussed afterwards. The series is quite obviously intended for an evangelical Christian audience, which makes my own participation in one these discussion groups a little unusual. I have a number of Christian friends who I hang out with fairly regularly and a while back I was invited to attend their viewings of The Truth Project. I've gone every time since then and usually have very little to say. The lessons are presented such that it's difficult to have the sorts of desired discussions about them unless you share the beliefs. The questions posed are generally ones that you can only constructively answer if you already assume the Christian God exists. Pretty much the only time I feel qualified to join in is if Tackett spends a lot of time dissing the views of the secular world and his comments spill over into the following discussion. Luckily, Dr. Tackett's had a lot to say about the secular world lately.

I knew Lesson 5 ("Science: What is True?") was going to be interesting as soon as I saw the preview. As the title suggests, the lesson is largely about contemporary science, with a special focus on (what else?) Darwinism. This topic is apparently troubling enough to warrant extra time, and the lesson is thus divided into two parts. Part One is more general, lamenting modern science's refusal to consider what might exist outside "the box" (i.e. the material universe). Towards the end, Tackett turns specifically to Charles Darwin and his ideas of evolution, which segues neatly into Part Two: a full blown attack on evolutionary theory. This post is my response to Lesson 5 of The Truth project, especially Part Two.

First things first: I'm not a biologist. In fact, even if there are infinitely many versions of me, each living in one of an infinite number of universes, none of them are biologists either. But I have done some reading on the subject of evolution and I'm familiar with a lot of the basics. I write this response partly to test my own knowledge of the topic and partly as cathartic rant. I'd also like to think it'll help Truth Project viewers identify some of the possible shortfalls of this whole endeavor, but that assumes people read my blog--and that's not an assumption I'm willing to make.

Let's start at the end of Part One.

Dr. Tackett makes much of Psalm 19's opening line: "The heavens declare the glory of God." To him, this means that God's fingerprints are all over the natural world. Evidence of God is everywhere in nature and Dr. Tackett finds it just a tad ludicrous that anyone could not see it. The beauty and intricacy of nature point unavoidably to a grand designer. He's an unabashed supporter of Intelligent Design (ID), that nebulous cluster of views that can and does include everything from Young Earth Creationism to whatever the hell David Berlinski believes. One of Dr. Tackett's frequently used tricks in this lesson is to pick quotes from various atheistic figures that apparently show the laughable extremes to which they'll go to avoid seeing God's signature in our universe. He finishes Part One by presenting Darwin's often quoted statement on the peacock's tail: "It is curious that I remember well a time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over, but I have got over this stage of the complaint, & now small trifling particulars of structure often make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" The reason the peacock's tail made Darwin so sick, Dr. Tackett concludes, is that it's simply too beautiful to have come about by blind natural processes. The unconscious forces of a strictly material universe could not possibly have been responsible for something so breath-taking. Dr. Tackett thus ends as he began, proclaiming once more that "the heavens declare the glory of God."

It's a performance as effective as it is deceptive (I apologize for the Jesse Jacksonism). While those unfamiliar with Darwin's life and work were likely sold on Dr. Tackett's use of this quote, one need only access Wikipedia to see the problem with it. The peacock's tail did not make Darwin sick because it's profoundly beautiful, but because it's profoundly cumbersome. It's big, heavy, and makes flight harder than it needs to be. Natural selection is supposed to be a process by which organisms become better equipped to survive in their environments, so how could it explain something like the peacock's tail, which is so clearly a hindrance to the peacock's survival?

The answer was sexual selection, a specific kind of natural selection. Darwin had introduced a shareware version of this idea in The Origin of Species (1859) but had apparently not yet realized its full significance when he wrote the letter quoted from above (1860). By the time he published The Descent of Man in 1871, however, he was no longer sickened by the peacock's tail. By that point he had seen that although the peacock's tail is a costly burden in many cases, peahens seem to go crazy over them--the bigger and fancier the better. Sexual selection is partly responsible for differences in characteristics between the males and females of each species, and males can develop burdensome traits if the females of their species find them attractive--and so long as the decreased likelihood of long-term survival is outweighed by the increased likelihood of reproduction.

Dr. Tackett seems happily unaware of any of this, and he doesn't become any more knowledgeable in Part Two. He begins by introducing the idea of irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is an idea frequently invoked by ID advocates like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer. Darwin, you see, once wrote that if ever a trait could be found that could not have evolved through a gradual series of slight yet beneficial steps, his theory would "absolutely break down." About 14 years ago, Michael Behe claimed to have found several biological systems that violated Darwin's theory in a book called Darwin's Back Box and dubbed them irreducibly complex. This basically means that these complex multi-part systems absolutely require every part to be present and accounted for to work, and if just one is removed, the whole thing ceases to function. Thus, they could not have evolved through a sequence of gradual modifications.

The most infamous of these irreducibly complex systems is the bacterial flagellum, a curious biological rotary engine that propels certain types of cells. It's a rather intricate piece of work made up of about 50 essential components (don't ask me how it works--I'm paraphrasing the Internet here). Given that it's probably the most popular example of irreducible complexity out there, Dr. Tackett flaunts it like a new nipple piercing.

The bacterial flagellum is undoubtedly complicated. But to serve as any kind of a meaningful counter-argument to Darwinian evolution, the bacterial flagellum must be complicated in such a way that removal of any of its parts would render what's left utterly useless. Does the flagellum meet this criterion?

Incidentally, I'm reminded of a joke some of our biology teachers used to kick around in high-school during lunch hour. Q: How do you get a Type III secretion system? A: By removing 40 of the bacterial flagellum's parts. It's not very funny, I know (humor was a lot dryer back in those days), but it does make a good point: the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex. Systems such as the flagellum and other similarly complex structures can evolve through something called exaptation, where earlier structures that served other functions can be shaped into new structures with new functions. The bacterial flagellum appears to be an example of this. It may indeed need all of its parts to function, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have evolved from predecessors that had other uses.

Biologists have been making this point for years. Those like Behe typically respond by reiterating that while, yes, you can remove parts of the flagellum and be left with other structures, these other structures do not serve the same function as the bacterial flagellum. The appropriate response to this is "so what?" Evolutionary theory requires only that a given feature be able to, in principle, evolve through a step-by-step process, not that every stage of that feature's evolution serve the exact same function. Irreducible complexity is thus worthless as an argument against Darwinian evolution.

Fortunately, Tackett brings more than just irreducible complexity to the party. He goes on to discuss the fossil record, making the bizarre statement that even though we have more fossils than we did in Darwin's time, the fossil record is now less complete. I suppose he could mean that the new fossils we've gathered since then raise more questions than they answer, but that's wrong. The transition between fish and the first land-treading amphibians is well documented, as is the evolution of whales from land-dwelling mammals, and others. Yes, the fossil record is less complete than we'd like, but this is inevitable given the numerous conditions that must be fulfilled before a fossil can be formed and discovered. Tackett plays a video clip featuring David Berlinski, who seems to think that if there are 50,000 transitional forms between species A and species B, we need all 50,000 of these forms represented in the fossil record before we can accept that evolution took place. This is neither expected nor required.

While discussing the fossil record, Dr. Tackett also takes the time to get Stephen Jay Gould's (and Niles Elredge's, though he isn't mentioned) theory of punctuated equilibrium wrong. He presents it as a desperate attempt by an atheistic scientist to explain the gaps of the fossil record without invoking special creation. Tackett describes punctuated equilibrium as the theory that species undergo lengthy periods of evolutionary stability (meaning very little change) followed by brief periods of rapid change, followed again by more stability with occasional rapid change. He contrasts this with the view that species change very gradually over time. He visually represents the later as a diagonal line and the former as a staircase.

This is vaguely accurate, but as with many other ideas he discusses, both in Lesson 5 and elsewhere, Tackett leaves out important details. First of all, those periods of "rapid" change are rapid only by the standards of geological time. I believe Gould estimated them to be roughly 50,000 years long. They are not instantaneous, as the straight vertical lines that Tackett uses to visualize them would seem to suggest. Punctuated equilibrium emphasizes the importance of evolutionary pressure. When a population becomes adapted to an environment they tend to stay that way, assuming no drastic environmental changes occur. As the annoying cliché goes: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But when a segment of a population breaks off and wanders into new territory, there will be added pressure on those bold pioneers to adapt to their new environment, which leads to the relatively quick emergence of new species.

Punctuated equilibrium was controversial with a lot of biologists after it was introduced and in the following decades. Oddly enough, one of the reasons it was so controversial is actually because it's such a non-controversial idea. It was presented by journalists in the media (and by creationists) as a violent overthrow of Darwinist orthodoxy when, in reality, it was more of a playful nudge. In fact, the first time I actually read about punctuated equilibrium in an essay by Niles Eldredge I was surprised at how closely it conformed to what I had already understood evolutionary theory to be. Modern Darwinism is happy to admit that species to not evolve at a constant rate (even Darwin himself admitted this). Species go through relatively little change when there is no reason for it, and relatively large change when the environmental pressures are there. Even if Eldredge and Gould underestimated the amount of time it takes for speciation to occur (more recent estimations put it between 100,000 and 5 million years), the basic ideas of punctuated equilibrium do not conflict with Neo-Darwinism in any meaningful way.

And since we're on the subject of speciation, Tackett saves some of his weakest criticism for the idea of macroevolution. Many creationists will concede that microevolution--slight changes within otherwise fixed species--is a reality, but that macroevolution--big changes that include the formation of entirely new species--is impossible. To illustrate this Tackett shows a clip from what appears to be a documentary sympathetic to ID. Several ID advocates, including Berlinski, discuss modern day observations of the Galapagos finches, the same species that Darwin himself studied. The speakers describe a drought on the Galapagos Islands that results in an increase in the average beak size of a species of finch. At first this appears to be cause for concern; but it is then revealed, to everyone's relief, that eventually, after several more generations, the beak sizes come back down. They conclude from this that significant evolutionary changes are impossible and Darwin was wrong.

There are several problems here. First, the Galapagos finches in this story are indeed not an example of speciation, but no one has claimed that they are (in fact, Tackett and the speakers in this clip are the only ones I've heard discuss these finches in terms of speciation). What the Galapagos finches are is an excellent example of natural selection. You could be forgiven for not realizing this, as the ID advocates in the video clip are predictably stingy with the details. The reason beak sizes increase during the drought is that the small seeds produced by herbs and grasses become scarce. Under these conditions, the finches are forced to turn to large seeds for food. But finches with smaller beaks have trouble breaking these larger seeds, so finches with larger beaks gain an advantage and natural selection promotes an overall increase in beak size in subsequent generations.

So why does the average beak size then come back down? Because the drought ends. When things return to normal, small seeds become more abundant and smaller beaks regain their advantage. The Galapagos Islands go through these periods of drought every so often, resulting in changes to the environment which in turn leads to changes in the physical features of the island's inhabitants, exactly as Darwinism predicts. It's not speciation (remember, speciation usually takes between 100,000 and 5 million years), but again, no one said it was. So in attempting to discredit macroevolution, Dr. Tackett and company end up supporting natural selection, even if they don't realize it.

But still, what about macroevolution? If we don't see it among Darwin's finches, where do we see it? While the fossil record would be one obvious place to look, there are other options available for those who want something a little more dramatic. Had Tackett been genuinely interested in trying to debunk macroevolution, he could have gone after one of the many examples of observed speciation that have occurred within the span of a human lifetime. New species of flowering plants, for example, are known to occasionally arise through an event called polyploidy. One way this can occur is when two species of plants living in the same area produce a hybrid species that has all of its chromosomes doubled. The resulting hybrid will be unable to interbreed with either parent species, but it will be able to produce members of its own (brand new) species.

He could have done this, but honestly, it's hard to believe after watching Lesson 5 that Dr. Tackett has any interest in seriously engaging modern evolutionary theory, or any other idea he takes issue with. He treats the stunningly clueless video about the Galapagos finches as a definitive refutation of Darwinism, as if that was the only piece of evidence the evolutionists have. He declares during the course of this lesson that "Darwin's theory is absolutely breaking down," gleefully ignorant not only of the crippling flaws in his own arguments, but of the vast body of evidence in favor of evolution that he hasn't even begun to acknowledge, such as sequence alignment, phylogenetic reconstruction, atavisms and pseudogenes, evolutionary developmental biology, biogeography, comparative anatomy, and so on.

Obviously, not everything has been worked out. There will always be gaps in evolutionary theory. It's doubtful that any scientific theory will reach a state of perfect completion. But fortunately, that isn't necessary. What we do have is more than enough to establish the reality of common descent.

At the very least, you can say it's a better explanation than anything Tackett is likely to muster, not that he tries and not that I would expect him to. Intelligent design, after all, is not so much a coherent alternative to Darwinian evolution as a vague and constantly shifting gun tower from which stubborn biblical literalists and contrarian philosophers can take potshots at mainstream evolutionary science. It exists not to further our understanding of how the world works, but to open an escape hatch for those wishing to dodge the implications of evolutionary theory. It's a tiny escape hatch, yes, but anyone who wants badly enough to squeeze through it will undoubtedly find a way to do so (to be fair, everyone, atheists included, rejects positions they don't like based on flimsy reasoning--that's just the way human beings roll).

I'll discuss whether or not Christians really need to be afraid of evolutionary theory next time. For now, I'll say once again that Tackett is wrong on virtually every count, and I'd urge anyone who genuinely wishes to understand evolutionary theory to read the works of those who have contributed to it. Read them in their original context, not filtered through the bias of their ideological enemies. I wouldn't trust an evangelical atheist to accurately present the views of a Christian theologian. When I want to find out what Christians think, I watch, read, and talk to Christians. Likewise, no Christian should trust an evangelical creationist to present an accurate view of evolutionary theory. And indeed, Dr. Tackett does not accurately describe what evolutionary biologists think.

Nor, for that matter, does Tackett accurately present the opinions of anyone who doesn't share his beliefs. This is a major problem with The Truth Project as a whole. Every time he speaks on non-fundamentalist views that I'm even vaguely familiar with, Tackett reveals an unsettling ignorance, either distorting his opponents' positions or leaving out important details. While discussing Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis and the views of the Jesus Seminar, for example, he neglects to mention the reasons why these people came to their conclusions in the first place. It's taken for granted that they're wrong simply because they disagree with Tackett's own conclusions. He also builds a vast atheistic straw man by stringing together bite-sized quotes from a huge variety of diverse sources, presenting each one as a thought emitting from a single colossal secular overmind. Each carefully mined sentence, it is assumed, is an official position statement from the secular world at large.

Much of The Truth Project's effectiveness depends on this sort of manipulation. A drastically oversimplified summary of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs reveals the secular world to believe that human beings are inherently good. Tackett then shows a montage of disturbing scenes culled from international news footage that shows humanity at its worst, suggesting on a deeply visceral level that our species is utterly depraved. Next comes a shot of Tackett's studio audience, visibly unnerved, the occasional tear streaming down a quivering cheek. It's a dramatic, well-staged segment that skillfully drives home its point: only a fool would say human beings are inherently good.

Never mind that scientists and others involved in the relevant areas of research have rejected the "inherently good" view of human nature for at least half a century. The gene-centered view of natural selection, along with the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have revealed a pervasive selfishness to human nature that would warm Tackett's heart were he not stubbornly committed to ignoring these things. Of course, they also reveal inherent tendencies towards compassion, empathy, and cooperation. The point is that human nature is a complicated thing, neither wholly good nor evil, and while you can still find many who assume the naïvely sunny view that Tackett mocks, others have embraced the messier and more realistic portrait of our species. There is no overmind.

That Tackett is able to make his worldview appealing only by distorting the alternatives is a serious problem for his particular strand of Christianity. Tackett demonstrates repeatedly throughout this series that he is simply incapable of honestly confronting his chosen opponents. True, some of the misrepresentations might be the products of honest mistakes; but others, such as the treatment of Darwin's comments on the peacock's tail and nearly everything that follows, could only be the results of extreme scholarly laziness or intentional dishonesty. Neither says much for the integrity of The Truth Project.

I'll have nicer things to say in my next post.

A Testimony

I'm happy to say that, for the foreseeable future at least, this isn't going to be one of those current events blogs where I riff on the latest headlines, so my topics are going to have to come from other sources. My last post left a number of dangling threads. I might as well pick one of them up.

I said in that post that I was raised Lutheran but decided at some point to stop being one. It might be worthwhile to explain why.

This is something I rarely talk about in detail in my religious discussions. One of the reasons is that, while there are many religious subjects that can be discussed without incurring anyone's wrath, the question of whether a specific god exists or not tends to be more provocative. The existence of God is extremely important to a great many people, and openly doubting the validity of a given religious belief takes some measure of caution if you want to avoid pissing everyone off. So to be on the safe side, I generally try to present my point of view without explicitly arguing why I think other beliefs are wrong.

Nonetheless, I do have reasons for not being a Christian, and I think they're fairly decent ones. For the most part, they're not the stereotypical reasons you frequently hear from bandwagon atheists or from Christians attempting to catalog the justifications people give for not believing.

My loss of faith had nothing to do with the so-called "problem of evil," which is often used to argue that an all-good, all-powerful god would never allow evil and suffering to persist. Though it may be a bit callous of me to say so, I never lost much sleep over that one. I was accustomed to viewing evil solely as the outcome of human decisions.

It also had nothing to do with the hypocritical actions of religious followers, and I still think that's a dumb reason for not believing in God.

It had nothing to do with the supposedly excessive behavioral restraints required by a religious worldview. My life had little in the way of debauchery and depravity while I was believer and, sadly, not much has changed since.

It had nothing to do with the theory of evolution. I lost my faith around the end of high school but I didn't get a decent explanation of what evolution was until my third year of college.

Hell, it even had nothing to do with Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion was still years away from being published when I stopped believing, so I was not seduced into godlessness by Richard's dazzling displays of reason and logic.

My loss of faith was slow and gradual and probably had many subconscious factors that I'm not even aware of. At the heart of it, though, was my expanding perception of God and my inability to see Christianity's exclusive validity when compared to all the other world religions. In the interest of laying all my cards on the table, what follows is, to the best of my memory, the story of how I got to where I am today and the reasons why I continue to hold this position. I present it not under the naive assumption that it'll convince anyone of anything, but simply to chronicle my own personal rationale for not being a Christian, and perhaps to better understand my own thoughts on this issue.

To begin, I should mention that religion played a big role in my youth. I was enrolled in a private Lutheran school the moment I turned three and stayed there until my eight grade graduation. It's fair to say that my school promoted a fairly conservative theology. Lutherans are big on biblical literalism, and the particular denomination that I was raised in--Missouri Synod--is among the most conservative of the many Lutheran denominations. For instance, it's a matter of doctrine that you reject evolutionary explanations for the origin of species. Indeed, my school made sure to point out that evolution was false and that God created the universe exactly as described in Genesis, complete with six twenty-four-hour days. You attained salvation through Christ alone and everyone who didn't accept Christ was going to hell. And while I'm not sure they taught this explicitly, I also got it into my head at some point that only Lutherans go to heaven.

I believed all of this and more for a good ten years of my life, beginning when I achieved complete sentience somewhere around the age of two or three. Things began to change somewhat when I started high school, my first three years of which were spent at a private Catholic school. This may not sound like a big change, but it was. Though private and religious, my high school had a large student body with many different faiths represented among them. Because of the relative diversity, the school was obligated to take a more religiously open-minded stance. True, most students were Catholic, but there were plenty of Protestants as well, along with some Muslims, Buddhists, and even a few angsty teenage atheists.

The religious courses I took during those first three years of high school were noticeably different from the ones taught at my previous school. They discussed a number of historical details about the scriptures that I had not previously known, such as when the books were written and by whom. They were more likely to note the humanity of the Biblical authors rather than simply describe the whole thing as the inerrant word of God. They also introduced a number of less literal ways of interpreting Bible passages. They were still a solidly Christian school, of course, but the theology was a bit more nuanced and appealing than what I had been exposed to before, their god slightly more open to compromise. By the end of my first year, I was convinced that all Christians, not just Lutherans, went to heaven.

During my sophomore year I was able to take a class on world religions. This was something I had always wanted to do, ever since I first heard that other religions existed several years prior. Back then my interest was more like that of a sleazy tabloid reporter. I didn't want to understand the other religions so much as hear the scandalous details of their crazy sacrilegious beliefs. By the start of my second year of high school, however, I was genuinely interested. Surprisingly, I found a lot to like in the major religions that we discussed. My teacher presented them without bias or ridicule, so I gained a good deal of valuable insight. I found Hinduism to be particularly appealing, perceiving a certain logic in its doctrines of karma and reincarnation. It got to a point where I kind of wished I had been raised Hindu instead of Christian. That I had such thoughts at all probably says a lot about what I was thinking regarding the exclusivity of the Christian faith. I still considered myself a Christian, but I had a new found openness to other religions. I recognized that the mutually exclusive teachings between the various faiths meant they couldn't all be right, but I began to think that maybe being "right" wasn't what was important. There was something vaguely noble about each religion's unique search for God, and it became tempting to see them all as possessing some degree of validity or a piece of some greater truth, kind of like that analogy of the blind men and the elephant. Perhaps God was big enough to accommodate all of them. By the end of my second year, I was convinced that all religious people went to heaven.

But that world religions class put another idea into my head, too. It took a while for the implications to really hit me, but eventually it turned into what was probably the strongest intellectual reason I had for leaving Christianity. Though the class focused mainly on the beliefs held by each of the religions, we were also taught their respective histories. Most religions have their own creation myth which typically places their origins way back at the beginning of time itself. But they also have historical beginnings here on Earth, when like-minded human beings first began organizing themselves into groups according to their beliefs. Before, I had been used to thinking of Christianity as the only religion of genuinely divine inspiration, but as I thought about the historical details of all the major religions, it became harder to see how this could be the case. Yes, as Christians we believed that our version of the supernatural world was the correct one, but every religion had believers who thought the exact same thing about their own faith. They all had mythical histories embellished with supernatural events meant to establish their credibility. They couldn't all be right, and given the difficulties with piecing together ancient history, how could we ever be sure which, if any, was the one true faith? It was the first time I had really thought about this question and I didn't have a good answer.

This was perhaps the first true hint of doubt to enter my mind and it only got stronger from there. Over time, I began thinking about religions with their historical contexts in mind. I started to wonder whether they might simply be products of the cultures that "discovered" them, their individual details determined by the location, people, and circumstances from which they emerged. Given that my belief in God was still relatively intact at this point, these thoughts translated into a sense that all religions were equally valid, that they were all reaching for God in their own way. At the same time, these ideas were having an influence on how I thought about God. What used to be a small, personal and knowable God grew increasingly large and incomprehensible. I considered other forms that God might take, many of them contrary to how the Bible tends to describe him. God was becoming too big for the Bible alone.

What happened towards the end of high school and immediately afterward I can only write about in a general sense. The reason is because it becomes increasingly difficult for me to sort out exactly what I thought and when after my sophomore year. As I said, my loss of faith was very gradual. Though there were some diversions along the way, the basic trends I've described above more or less continued as time went on. There was no one defining moment when I decided once and for all to stop being a Christian. In the years following my world religions class, my perception of God simply became increasingly grand but more abstract and nonreligious. Eventually, God became so vague that I wasn't sure he existed at all. I eased into a sort of theistic agnosticism for a while, then just agnosticism. The historical circumstances of each religion now told me that they were all equally invalid, at least as far as their claims on divine knowledge were concerned. By the time I started college, there was no heaven.

Now, it may be that I simply didn't try hard enough to keep my faith. I'm sure there were authors I could have read or youth groups I could have joined had I really wanted to. But the fact that I didn't put up a strong fight, that I lost my faith without really feeling like I was losing anything, suggests it just wasn't that important to me anymore. There were probably psychological issues at work too, but I won't speculate on those now. The willingness with which I allowed my original perception of God to be so thoroughly amended and ultimately abolished indicates that, in the end, the God of Martin Luther just wasn't right for me. Nor was any other god, for that matter. The more I thought of it, the more sense it made to claim ignorance of God's ultimate nature and existence. In other words, I didn't choose agnosticism; agnosticism chose me.

Since then, I've read and thought a lot more about the subject. In recent years I've attempted to flesh out the reasons for my admittedly hazy position in more detail, figuring out exactly what I think and why. I've even familiarized myself with various religious authors and their arguments to make sure I didn't miss anything. Unfortunately, I've seen no reason to abandon that initial feeling of doubt.

For all the hysteria over evolution, the big bang and all the other scientific theories that supposedly conflict with religious teachings, I think the strongest case to be made against any religion as divine revelation is a historical one. One of the big reasons I've never seriously considered taking up my faith again is that I still fail to see what makes Christianity unique among all the other religions. Yes, there are a number of beliefs within Christianity that no other faith holds, but the same can be said of every religion. All religions have something that makes them different from the rest. But is there a good reason to think that Christianity's claims are uniquely true? Did God really make a covenant with a man named Abram thousands of years ago? Did he really lead someone named Moses and 600,000 Israelites out of Egypt? Did Jesus really raise from the dead? Or, like the stories found in Hinduism or Greek mythology, are the Biblical stories inspiring myths tailored to a specific people at a specific time? In my view, the later is infinitely more likely.

That, in the end, is the biggest problem for me. If I were to summarize the major obstacle preventing me from embracing any of the three great Western religions, I would say simply that I can find no compelling reason to think the Bible is divinely inspired, or that its stories are an accurate account of a god and his people. As challenging as it is to piece together a complete history from the ambiguous archaeological scraps left by ancient civilizations, what little we do have makes it increasingly difficult to read the Bible as a representation of actual events. It has undoubtedly enriched the lives of many millions of people over thousands of years, occasionally providing its adherents with the strength needed to endure unimaginable turmoil. It even offers some fundamental truths about human nature. But I do not believe that the god it describes exists anywhere outside its pages. I am ever more convinced that if there is a god, he or she or it is grander than anything humanity has yet imagined.

A Statement of Belief

I didn't start paying attention to politics until after the September 11 attacks. I quickly developed fairly-to-quite liberal views on most issues, although I rarely referred to myself as liberal then and do so even less frequently now, despite the fact that I still hold many of those same views. I'm a registered independent and have never belonged to a political party.

For the most part, I've tried to avoid labeling myself as one thing or another. Partly because I'm sort of attracted to the idea of ideological independence and partly because labels are often conversation killers. One of the things I noticed about political discourse in the Bush Era was how quick people were to pigeonhole their opponents and ignore them, so to avoid that, I tended to shun specific labels.

The problem with this approach is that it can create confusion if you're not clear about what you do think. Now that my interest has shifted more towards larger philosophical issues, I find myself occasionally running into this problem. I was baptized as a Lutheran and proudly referred to myself as such for a good chunk of my life. At some point, however, I decided I wasn't a Christian anymore and started calling myself an agnostic, which really doesn't say a whole lot. Agnosticism is simply one particular view regarding the validity of spiritual claims, not a complete philosophical package.

Most of the people I discuss this stuff with have reasonably clear systems of belief. I know whether or not they believe in God, which god they do or don't believe in, and how this belief affects their worldview in a general sort of way. Being a wishy-washy agnostic who refuses to align himself with any one philosophical or political ideology, I feel that I'm sometimes less clear about what I believe than I ought to be. This lack of clarity once led one of my friends to ask me if I could write down exactly what I believe. I said Yeah, I could probably do that. That was nine months ago. Tonight I'm going to make good on that commitment.

So what, briefly, do I believe? I think I'll start by asking myself two questions.

Question 1: Do any of the gods described in any of the human religions exist?
Answer: Probably not.

Question 2: Does a god or god-like thing exist, one that is perhaps above and beyond anything yet described by human beings?
Answer: Maybe, but I don't know for sure.

In short, I don't know, so I usually just say I'm an agnostic. Granted, based on these two answers alone I'd probably fit into some definitions of atheism as well. I guess the reason I don't call myself an atheist is that I place a larger emphasis on that second question than many of them seem to. I think the question of why there is something rather than nothing is a very good one, and one that we're not ready to answer yet. According to Wikipedia, there's a strong version of agnosticism claiming that the answers to spiritual questions are inherently unknowable, but I don't know if I'd go that far. It may be that once we learn enough about the universe we'll find something that we can call god or, alternatively, be able to prove definitively that all of existence came about through purely natural means. But we're not there yet and it's possible that we never will be.

There are a couple other issues that usually come along with the God one that I should probably touch on as well. First, although I'm not religious, I'm not a science supremacist either. I think scientists and scientific thinking are subject to a lot of undue romanticism by a lot of people who see science as sort of the opposite of religion, and that the scientific process is perfectly vulnerable to human abuse and politics. That said, I think the scientific process is still the best tool we have for discovering how the universe works and that it is slowly helping us piece together an accurate picture of the physical world. As for its supposed conflict with religion, I see no reason why certain kinds of religious belief can't be reconciled with science.

The other thing I want to address is morality. Discussions of God's existence often lead to the question of what basis we have for morality, especially if there is no god. My own thoughts are that while I don't see any obvious signs of an objective, divine basis for morality, I don't think that's as big a problem as some people think. There may not be an objective basis for moral law, but I would say that there's a biological one. Without going into the details, there is good reason to think that our moral tendencies are built into us and I don't think you necessarily need to invoke a god to explain this.

I'll most likely discuss these in more detail in future posts. My goal here is more to summarize my positions rather than give thorough justifications for them. Given that this blog will function largely as a self-indulgent vehicle for my opinions on important things, I thought it'd be good to start by providing a rough sense of where I stand as of now.

Prelude to a Weblog

I've decided the world needs another blog. If that sounds scary, don't worry. I'm going to try not to impose myself onto the internet the way so many other blogs do. In fact, most people won't even know I'm here, and I'm okay with that.

Before I get into things, I should probably tell you what I'm doing here. The overarching purpose of this blog is practice. I want to get better at discussing matters that I think are important. Admittedly, many of the things I think are important are things I haven't spent enough time writing, reading, or thinking about, so this is one of the steps I'm taking to fix that. I freely admit that I don't know everything about the topics that interest me, and I hope to use this space to develop them into something more substantial, or at the very least, profitable.

I certainly welcome comments, criticism and feedback so long as they're above the current internet standard of lame misspelled bumper-sticker. I'm not going to be advertising this thing, so I don't expect many visitors beyond some real-world friends and maybe the occasional drifter. Again, that's okay with me. The last thing I want is an unwieldy horde of e-rabble belligerently deflowering my comments section.

That's about it for now. Assuming I don't immediately get bored with blogging, there should be more posts in the future.

By the way, I'll be talking about God and stuff.