Noah's flood makes no sense

There are many creationists who believe that the story of Noah's flood in the Bible is literally true and accurate, and happened exactly as described, and have gone to great lengths to try to "prove" it (and try to show how geology and all other branches of science that can actually study these things are completely wrong and biased.)

Here are some of the objections that can be presented about the literal interpretation of that story.

Richard Dawkins presents in his book The Greatest Show On Earth one of the most compelling objections. There are many, many species of animals that appear only in relatively small and isolated parts of the world, and do not appear in the wild anywhere else, not even in fossil form. For example, there are tens of species of marsupials in Australia that do not appear anywhere else in the world. How exactly did they get there from the landing site of the ark, and why did they not leave any ancestors behind during the trip there? There are species of animals that only appear in the island of Madagascar and nowhere else. Worse still, there are species that appear only in the Galapagos islands, in the middle of a vast ocean, and nowhere else. And those are just a few examples. How did they all get to those places (after all, they would have had to cross mountain ranges, deserts and oceans, most of which are way too harsh for them to survive), why did they move all in group to those precise locations, and why did they not leave any ancestors behind?

(Incidentally, the fact that isolated places tend to have animal species that appear only there and nowhere else is completely in concordance with regular evolution. It's precisely what the theory of evolution predicts should have happened during vast amounts of time and speciation of isolated animal groups.)

There are, of course, a multitude of other objections that can be presented.

For instance, was the flood water salty or fresh? If it was salty, how did all the thousands and thousands of fresh water fish species survive for 40 days in such waters? If it was fresh, how did all the salt water fish species survive? And fish are but just one paraphyletic group of animals and plants that only survive in one type of water.

How did all the plants survive 40 days and 40 nights under innumerable tons of water? More importantly, what did the animals eat after the flood was over? (Even if all animals were magically herbivorous at that time, as some creationists suggest, there weren't many plants around for them to eat after the flood had destroyed all land plants.)

If there was a global flood, then everywhere in the world there should be a geological layer that shows this. It should be a layer clearly distinguishable from other layers because of it being full of organic material and fossils, in much more abundance than any other layer. There's no such world-wide layer.

The wackiest creationist theories claim that the geologic column was formed by the flood, and go so far as to claim that more "advanced" animals were able to flee the flood to higher ground than the more "primitive" ones (completely ignoring the fact that both fast and agile, as well as very slow animals, have been in abundance during the vast majority of the history of Earth.) This theory makes no sense because if it were so, the fossils should be found lined up at the edges of old, buried mountains, rather than being evenly distributed. Unless all these animals waited for a certain amount of sedimentary layers to form, then swam miles and miles into the expanding ocean, and then dived to the bottom to get buried at that precise layer.

Speaking of which, what exactly killed the trilobites? They were marine animals, after all. If all the other arthropods and fish survived the flood, why not trilobites?

There are many communicable diseases that can survive only in a specific species. This includes human-only diseases (examples include measles, leprosy, smallpox and typhus.) Most of these diseases are either removed sooner or later by the host's immune system, or the host dies from it. The disease can only survive if the host infects another individual before curing itself or dying.

This is a really big problem for the Arc story because it says that only two animals of most kinds were saved. All the others died in the flood. For those diseases to survive to this day, those two animals would have had to contract every single one of them and keep them alive (ie. not immunize themselves) for the entirety of the flood plus whatever time it took for them to procreate afterward. Then their offspring would have to procreate further in order to keep disseminating said diseases.

We are talking about these diseases surviving for years in one host before they can successfully spread. With the vast majority of communicable diseases this is a physical impossibility (because, as said, either the host's immune system kills the disease, or the host dies.)

Natural selection is a good thing?

Many creationists have the misconception that skeptics and atheists who accept the theory of evolution have the notion that evolution and natural selection are good things, and something to embrace and to root for. This is very often related to the concept that evolution is "natural" and the way that "nature" works (and therefore a good and desirable thing.) Therefore if something is (seemingly) against evolution and natural selection, it's therefore "unnatural" and undesirable.

Some creationists use this notion to attack atheism and "evolutionism" (as they call it.) Others use it to argue against some other things they oppose, such as homosexuality (they argue that homosexuality is "unnatural" and against the concept of evolution and natural selection.)

Unfortunately, even some atheists have this misconception. (There are even a few atheists who argue against homosexuality using this very argument.)

This is all wrong, and a huge misunderstanding of what evolution and natural selection are. They are not "good" or "bad", they just happen. They do not have a mind or a goal, they do not aim for anything, nor are they inherently desirable and good. As said, they just are, period. It's a completely mindless, aimless natural phenomenon that just happens, period. They don't care if something they affect is for "good" or "bad" (because "they" are nothing more than simple blind natural laws in action.)

Natural selection is not automatically "good" or desirable. Sometimes it might be, sometimes it's not. Much of human history has actually been a fight to surpass and overthrow natural selection, and that has been for the better. Most prominently, natural selection would mean that many diseases would have killed a good majority of people, but human medicine has overcome that problem.

(Although, one could argue that even our progress in medicine has been a kind of "natural selection" because it has succeeded in helping our species survive, which is the essence of evolution. But as said, there's no "right" or "wrong" natural selection. The most one could say is that natural selection has "failed" in a sense when a species goes extinct.)

Even if something that the human species does to better the lives of its individuals (eg. through advances in medicine) were to be considered "against natural selection" and "unnatural" (which is just a silly idea, but let's play with that thought for a moment for the sake of argument) then so what? Who exactly cares? As said, evolution and natural selection are mindless physical processes, and there's nothing in them that ought to be respected or followed. If something about evolution and natural selection is bad for us, then there's absolutely no reason to just submit to it. There's nothing wrong in "fighting back" (so to speak.)

(Of course the whole concept of something being "unnatural" is completely nonsensical. "Nature" has no goals or rules that should be followed. Nature just is, nothing more. We can't be "unnatural" even if we wanted to because we are part of this physical universe. We are bound to the properties and laws of the universe, so the whole concept of something being "unnatural" is just silly and makes no sense.)

The most blatant argument from ignorance

Argument from ignorance is an extraordinarily common argument for believing in a god. One of the most common ways to invoke it is to try to make the skeptic admit that they don't know something, and from there to jump to god, and to declare victory. In some cases the argument from ignorance is masqueraded as something else by using complex philosophical terminology and phrasings.

However, there's a popular form of this argument that's unusually blatant. Rather than trying to masquerade or hide the actual argument from ignorance, it's actually fully embraced and stated openly.

It goes something like: "If this (often a large circle, or alluding to everything that's possible to know) is everything that can be known, and this (a very small portion, eg. a small dot or percentage) is what we currently know, isn't it possible that God exists in the rest that we do not know?"

That is, rather than trying to hide, masquerade or obfuscate the argument from ignorance, just blast it fully open and outright state it. The big irony is that many people who present this argument seem to think that it's such a clever and outstanding argument, that no skeptic or atheist can respond to it.

For example, in this video a preacher lays out this very argument. He takes a long time to get to it, but the actual argument starts at about 4:30. (After he states the argument the audience laughs. I would like to think that they were laughing at the ridiculousness of the argument. Sadly, that was most likely not the case.)

(Quite ironically he says a bit before that: "and the Lord gave me an answer that I had never thought about until that moment." If such a blatant argument from ignorance is the best that the "Lord" can come up with, he isn't very smart, I would say.)

Of course the major problem with this argument is that it can be used to argue for the existence of anything you want. Dragons, unicorns, fairies, multiple gods, evil gods, the god of any religion, gods of no existing religion... whatever you want. (Ironically, the exact same argument could be used to argue for the non-existence of any god. You could just say "wouldn't it be possible that in that 95% that we don't know there is no god, and instead there is the explanation for everything without any god?")

But why would anyone believe in their existence without any actual evidence? You don't believe in everything just because there might be a remote possibility that it exists in that gap of knowledge. Rational people require actual evidence before believing in such extraordinary things. Believing in things without any evidence, just to fill out gaps in knowledge with hypotheticals, is most certainly not the smart thing to do.

Christian vs. secular morality

Many Christians claim time and again that God is the source of all morality, and that without God there can't be moral values. Moreover, God's morals (more specifically, the Christian God's morals) are perfect and absolutely good.

So let's compare the morality as taught by Christianity to secular moral values.

(Note that because there are over 30 thousand denominations of Christianity, each one with different interpretations of the Bible, there are about as many interpretations of "Christian morality" as well. However, here I'm going to take the most commonly accepted ones.)

Christian morality teaches that all crimes are equally punishable in the eyes of God. Even the smallest of infractions is deserving of the same punishment as the largest ones. Secular morality posits that punishment should be proportional to the severity of the crime.

In Christian morality there is only one single punishment for all crimes, no matter what their severity might be, and this punishment is eternal. (It varies by denomination whether this is eternal torture, or simply oblivion; the most popular interpretation is the former.) In secular morality the punishment should be fair and proportional to the severity of the crime (from warnings to fines of varying amounts to prison sentences of varying lengths, according to severity.)

In Christian morality everybody is guilty by default, and deserving of eternal punishment, unless they redeem themselves. In secular morality everybody is innocent by default until they actually commit a crime. Only after they commit an actual crime are they deserving of a punishment.

In Christian morality there is a loophole to erase your crimes without having to suffer the punishment that you deserve. There is no such loophole in secular morality.

And related to that, Christian morality has the concept of punishing innocent people on behalf of the guilty. This thought is completely abhorrent in secular morality.

Christian morality has the concept of thought crimes and victimless crimes, crimes that are "against God" (rather than against anybody else.) Conveniently, many of these crimes are things that are completely natural behavior for humans, so it's guaranteed that the vast majority of people will commit them. In secular morality crimes are those that harm others, and the whole concept of a thought crime or a victimless crime, a crime that doesn't actually do any harm to anybody, is ridiculous.

When we get down to it, secular morality is based on what's best for the society, while Christian morality is all about guilt and fear, about victimizing people for natural behavior that doesn't harm anybody, and scaring them into embracing the religion. The goal of Christian morality is not to make people behave better, but to draw them into the religion.

And then Christians claim that Christianity is the source of all morality, even the secular one...

The two basic "proofs of God"

As I have commented in a previous blog post, trying to prove the existence of a god using logic is a futile endeavor for the simple reason that logic always start with assumptions, and the "proofs of God" always start with unjustified assumptions. Using logic to "prove" the existence of a god is, basically, defining God into existence.

Anyway, the vast majority of these "proofs" have one of these two basic forms:

1. Something unknown caused X. That something was God.
2. X is immaterial/transcendental/supernatural. God is immaterial/transcendental/supernatural. Therefore God exists.

When you get down to it, when you strip the "logical proof of God" into its most basic form, it usually is one of the two fallacies above.

The first is, of course, an argument from ignorance. Since something has no (apparent) explanation, that something is then attributed to "God." No further justification needed. Furthermore, in many cases even the premise (ie. "something caused X") is an unjustified assumption. However, even if it were true, the jump in logic is still astounding.

The second form has a multitude of fallacies packed into one. So many, in fact, that listing them all is quite lengthy.

Its basic form is, of course, the so-called fallacy of the undistributed middle ("X has some property, Y has the same property, therefore X is Y; or they share other properties beside that one.") In some cases it could also be considered a post hoc fallacy ("X and Y share some property, therefore X caused Y.")

Moreover, it usually outright starts with a blatant, unjustified assumption, which makes a claim about something without even considering the alternatives. This is often a so-called category error, in other words, categorizing something as something else (one example being, categorizing "sentience" as an entity that exists all by itself independent of a brain, rather than it being a function, something that describes the physical properties and external behavior of a brain.)

The second premise (ie. "God has property X") is, of course, completely fallacious. It's a begging the question fallacy: It already assumes what the whole argument is trying to prove (ie. that God exists and has certain properties.) This also makes it circular logic.

This last thing is, in fact, what makes this type of logic so amusing. It kind of tries to "sneak in" the whole existence of a god without having to justify it.

The origin of religions

Religions are ubiquitous to humanity, and have probably existed for as long as humans have had any kind of rational higher-level thoughts. It's often hypothesized, from a purely secular point of view, why did religions form in the first place, and why they are so ubiquitous. Some hypothesize that, from an evolutionary perspective, religions offer a survival advantage to the species, which is why they are so prevalent. Others hypothesize that religion is simply a side-effect, a by-product of something else that was evolutionarily advantageous. (Such side-effects are extremely common in evolution, after all.)

Personally I find the latter idea more plausible. I'm not an evolutionary biologist nor an anthropologist, but I can perfectly well imagine that the origin of religions is something like this:

Humans are a social species, and have been so for a really long time, even from before our ancestors could even be classified as humans (ie. homo sapiens.) In our case being highly social was a survival advantage because we weren't so fit for survival as individuals. Strength in numbers, and so on.

For a society to work, some ground rules must be agreed upon, and all the members of that society have to agree to follow those rules, for the benefit of everybody. This is, in fact, where "morals" come from (especially the instinctive ones.) Those individuals who obeyed the norms of society had a bigger survival advantage than those who didn't, and therefore an instinct to follow societal rules was naturally selected.

Societies themselves evolved into being quite authoritarian. After all, what good are societal rules if the members of the society don't follow them? If there's someone who breaks the rules and harms others by doing so, the others are prompted to do something about it. To enforce the rules. The law breaker is punished or cast out of the society. This further strengthens the natural selection happening that prefers individuals who obey the rules of the society.

It was thus only natural for an instinctive "respect the authority, the authority knows what's good for me and everybody around me, abhor people who don't respect the authority" mentality to form. The stronger that this instinct was, the higher the survival advantage.

While "authority" in this case could well be a concrete person or persons, more generally it was much more abstract. Originally, "authority" was in fact the society itself. The instinct was to follow the society, regardless of who was concretely in charge. And this society, the "authority", was conceptually larger and more powerful than any single individual.

Is it any wonder that at some point this went a bit overboard? People started instinctively respecting a "higher authority" that was much larger and more powerful than themselves, and from which everything that's good and beneficial came from. The source of all morality and rules. As the mental capacity of humans increased over time, it was only natural for these people to come up with all kinds of invented descriptions and claims about this "higher authority."

The abstract concept of "the higher authority" (which was originally just the society as a whole) became more and more concrete, albeit fictional, as the stories developed and were repeated. Every storyteller would add their own flavor, their own details. Their listeners would repeat these stories to their children and other family, and so on.

In other words, religions are simply a by-product of humans being a highly social species (which has a survival advantage of obeying the rules of the society.)

Using your opponents' arguments against themselves

When little children are arguing and calling each other names, one of the most common and stereotypical answers is the classical "no, you are!"

From an adult perspective this is, of course, pretty childish, although understandable. A small child can't be expected to be able to invent witty comebacks or actual refutations, so throwing back the exactly same insult or claim is often the only thing that a child can think of.

One would think that as a person grows older and gets more experienced and knowledgeable, such a childish response of using your opponents' arguments against themselves, with little to no modification, would become as ridiculous as it really is. One would think wrong.

It's a surprisingly common occurrence for an apologist or a creationist to use the exact same arguments as skeptics use, right back at the skeptics, just with reversed terminology, even when it makes absolutely no sense. The wording may be fancier, but in its core it's a simple and straightforward "no, you are!"

In some cases it can get astonishingly blatant. For example, this is a direct quote from a creationist video:

"And to explain all this they pile up just-so-story on top of just-so-story. And if you try to ignore the problems with evolution, your world view becomes just crazy, just untenable, inconsistent. If you want to believe in evolution and live in your world view that's completely inconsistent with everything that we observe in the universe, that's just fine. But don't make it your mission to brainwash our kids; you can't even teach them to read properly, and that's the first step. We need engineers that can build stuff and solve problems by examining both sides of an issue rather than attempting to suppress or censor all the evidence for a world view that they are uncomfortable with. [...] What you believe happened millions of years ago isn't science. It's just just a belief, it's faith. It's faith in a particular version of history that's part of your world view. You can't prove it to be true."

This text is just astonishing. It's like they took a typical skeptical text and just changed a few words here and there to reverse the direction of the criticism.

In fact, try to count how many words you need to change in the quote above in order to make it a relatively valid criticism of religion. I count two (change "evolution" to "religion", and "millions" with "thousands.")

Perhaps one of the most common (and blatant) "no, you are!" arguments that this video shows is that the science of the history of the Earth is "just a belief, faith based. You can't prove it." This is the exact same argument that many atheists present against religion (although in many cases it's more of a caricature of an atheist rather than a real, experienced skeptic.) Trying to throw the exact same claim right back is just purely childish. (Yet this video goes even further, and throws right back the claims of "brainwashing" and "inconsistent with everything that we observe in the universe." It couldn't get more blatant even if it tried.)

The sad thing? Many Christians swallow this kind of text without a second thought, with no questions and no criticism whatsoever. Not even a mild "hmm, isn't this a bit of an exaggeration?" crosses their minds.