Here’s Mike Huckabee, quoted in The New Yorker:
If somebody asked me, How do I get to Heaven, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is faith in Christ, because I believe the New Testament. That’s the only map I got. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what? If it works, I’m not going to argue with you.
Well, that makes sense. If somebody asked me, How do I get to Mount Rushmore, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is Route 90, because I believe in Google Maps. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what, if it works, I’m not going to argue with you. Unless, of course, I actually care whether you make it to Mount Rushmore or not, in which case I might take the trouble to defend my map.
Continue reading ‘For Heaven’s Sake’
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I’ll be giving a couple of talks at this summer’s FreedomFest on economic growth, the power of incentives, and why More Sex is Safer Sex. More provocatively, I’ll also be going head to head with Dinesh D’Souza in a session called “Religion on Trial: Is God the Problem?”. Dinesh will argue that religion makes the world a better place, and I’ll argue the opposite. We’ll each call on the testimony of witnesses (in my case, Michael Shermer and Doug Casey). After our closing arguments, a jury of twelve, chosen from the audience, will deliver a verdict.
Dinesh has done this before; I haven’t. So I’m calling on you guys to help me out here by giving me your best arguments—either on Dinesh’s side, so I can practice rebutting them, or on my side, so I can plagiarize them.
Remember that the ultimate question is whether religion makes the world a better place, not whether religion is true. (On the other hand, truth becomes relevant if you’re arguing that religion makes the world a worse place by making people believe false things.) So what have you got for me?
Click here to comment or read others’ comments.
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It is the season of both Lent and Passover, which means that for Christians and Jews it is the season of making small but pointless sacrifices. This always strikes me as mildly tragic. If you’re going to sacrifice your pleasures in order to feel virtuous, why not at least do it in a way that helps someone? Instead of giving up meat or leavened bread, donate a few hundred dollars to a worthy cause.
[Before you tell me that giving up meat is socially beneficial because it holds the price of meat down, remember that low prices are good for buyers only to exactly the same extent that they're bad for sellers. Changing a price does no net good. The rigorous proof of this is part of the theory of pecuniary externalities, on which the Wikipedia entry is uncharacteristically useless.]
Observing Lent or Passover has much in common with things like running around a track: You push yourself to do something hard, you feel good about it, and you leave the world pretty much the way you found it. What a shame that you didn’t push yourself to do something useful instead. I bet you could have learned to feel almost as good about that.
Continue reading ‘The Tragedy of the Chametz’
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There are roughly 30 million self-professed fundamentalist Christians in the United States. How many of them really believe what they say they do? New evidence suggests that the number is somewhere around 100. Either that or fundamentalism breeds exceptional callousness toward ones’ pets:
Many people in the U.S.—perhaps 20 million to 40 million—believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture. In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?
Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.
Promoted on the Web as “the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World,” the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. “If you love your pets, I can’t understand how you could not consider this,” he says.
Here is the full article by Mike Di Paola, writing in Business Week.
Edited to add: I shouldn’t have said 30 million fundamentalist Christians; I should have said (at least according to the Business Week article) 30 million who expect the Second Coming and the Rapture in their lifetimes.
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You know that metal plate in your bathtub? The one with the little lever on it that opens and closes the drain? What happens when the water level rises above that plate?
When my sister asked me this question over Thanksgiving dinner, I answered, with the utmost confidence, that it causes (quite instantaneously) an enormous flood. (Note the exact wording. This will be important later.) My sister nodded sagely and said “That’s what I thought, too.” My sister and I had the same mother, you see.
And then she asked, quite innocently, “So. How exactly does that work?”. And I was stunned—absolutely stunned—to realize not only that I had no answer to this question, but that there could not plausibly be an answer. Which somehow had never occurred to me in the half century or so that I’d been harboring this ridiculous notion.
Continue reading ‘Unbelievable’
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As I mentioned the other day, I’ve recently (at the direction of my old friend Deirdre McCloskey) been reading some of the work of John Polkinghorne, the physicist-turned-theologian who seems to write about a book a week attempting to reconcile his twin faiths in orthodox science and orthodox Christianity.
Although Belief in God in an Age of Science is a very short book, it is too long to review in a single blog post. Fortunately, though, much of the non-lunatic content is concentrated in roughly the first ten pages, so I’ll comment here only on those.
Polkinghorne begins in awe. He is awestruck by the extent to which our Universe seems to have been fine-tuned to support life; this is the subject matter of the much-discussed anthropic cosmological principle. To take just one example (which Polkinghorne does not mention): The very existence of elements other than hydrogen and helium depends on the fact that it’s possible, in the interior of a star, to smoosh three helum atoms together and make a carbon atom; everything else is built from there. But it’s not enough to make that carbon atom; you’ve also got to make it stick together long enough for a series of other complicated reactions to occur. Ordinarily, that doesn’t happen, but now and then it does. And the reason it happens even occasionally is that the carbon atom happens to have an energy level of exactly 7.82 million electron volts. In fact, this energy level was predicted (by Fred Hoyle and Edwin Salpeter) before it was observed, precisely on the basis that without this energy level, there could be no stable carbon, no higher elements, and no you or me.
Continue reading ‘Life, the Universes and Everything’
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Deirdre McCloskey has changed my life several times, and always for the better. I had my first economics lessons from friends who were so inspired by Deirdre’s lectures that they felt compelled to repeat them to me over dinner; she was one of my most influential teachers long before I’d ever laid eyes on her. Later on, I had the privilege of knowing her personally, counting her as a treasured friend, and being repeatedly re-inspired by her twin passions to understand the world and to make it work better.
When I decided to write a textbook that competed directly with Deirdre’s own, she was my strongest booster. When I decided to follow up with a book for the general public—the book that became The Armchair Economist—Deirdre told me exactly how to sell it to the publishers. Fifteen years later, the Armchair Economist remains one of the bestselling popular economics books in at least six languages, and at multiple levels—intellectual, practical and personal—I owe it all to Deirdre.
So it was with considerable delight that I received Deirdre’s recent email with subject line “Your Splendid Book”. But as I fully expected (having had this conversation with her more than once), her praise was tempered with disapproval of my “adolescent” atheism:
Continue reading ‘The Lament of Deirdre’
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I said this in The Big Questions and I’ll say it again: Richard Dawkins is an international treasure and one of my personal heroes, but he’s got this God thing all wrong. Here’s some of his latest, from the Wall Street Journal:
Where does [Darwinian evolution] leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must be at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.
But Darwinian evolution can’t replace God, because Darwinian evolution (at best) explains life, and explaining life was never the hard part. The Big Question is not: Why is there life? The Big Question is: Why is there anything? Explaining life does not count as explaining the Universe.
Continue reading ‘There He Goes Again’
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