Verifiability

Just for the record, I'm posting a hash to a document. I'm posting it up front so that everyone can verify later when the document is made available that it is unchanged as of now. In a week it may be of significance.

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The myth of an objective morality

Introduction

The moral argument for the existence of God is presented by many Christian apologists as strong evidence for their case, spearheaded by the famous Christian philosopher and apologist Dr. William Lane Craig. The argument takes the form of the following syllogism (Dr. Craig's version¹):

• Premise 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
• Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.
• Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

The syllogism is logically sound. If the premises at true, the conclusion logically follows. It is also clear that the argument has appeal; recently a vocal atheist blogger named Leah Libresco² converted to Catholicism, basing the reason for her conversion on the argument from morality. As with any syllogism, the conclusion only follows if the premises hold. In this article I propose that neither of the premises do and focus the meat of the article on the second premise.

Premise 1

Some atheists like Matt Dillahunty from the Atheist Experience TV show in Austin, Texas³ accept premise 2 (the existence of an objective morality) but see no need to posit a god to explain it. I agree that in so far that objective moral or immoral acts would exist, it is hard to see how a god would be necessary to determine if and how those acts are moral or not. The Euthyphro dilemma⁴ comes to mind here. Either the morality is subjective (as it depends on God's opinion) or it is objective but then there is no god necessary for that determination⁵. And if, for the sake of argument we would grant that an objective morality exists and that a god is needed to lay the foundations for that objectivity, how exactly are these communicated to us? If we look at how the moral zeitgeist has shifted in the past 20 centuries, one can only conclude that either the Christian god has a sloppy way of communicating his foundations or morality is far from objective (for the sake of brevity I disregard the possibility of non-Christian gods, but in general the objection to those is analogous). Less than 2 centuries ago, slavery was still commonplace in Christian countries and Christians claim the credits for its abolishment (contrary to their own scriptures). Then women had to gain equal rights, then the same had to happen for non-caucasian races and we are at the brink of granting equal rights to homosexuals. If history is any indicator, in a couple of decades Christians will claim the credits for that grant as well.

But even though all previous objections to premise 1 are valid in my opinion, those are not my primary objections to the argument from morality. I primarily take issue with premise 2. I don't believe in the existence of an objective morality.

Definitions

Unlike most apologists I've encountered, Dr. Craig makes a distinction between moral values and duties, the former indicating what is good or bad and the latter indicating on what is right or wrong. The distinction deals mainly with the presence or absence of an obligation to act or not to act. I disagree with Dr. Craig that values (good or bad acts) are within the scope of morality, the reason for which will become clear later. The second distinction that Dr. Craig makes is between objective and subjective. He defines objective as an independence of anyone's opinion. Even though this is enough for my case against the moral argument, I think he sells it short. To be objective it should also be independent of circumstances. If an act is moral in one situation but the same act is immoral in another situation, I have a hard time to understand it as objectively moral or immoral.

Now let's study a few examples to see if the act is moral. Dr. Craig has a favorite example: torturing babies for fun is objectively morally wrong⁶. I don't think so and will get back to that example, but let's start easier.

Example 1: is lying morally wrong?

Of course, you'd say. The Christian bible made that such an important issue that it is even named as number 9 from the 10 commandments: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" (Exodus 20:16). Imagine that my colleague lost his wallet containing a few hundred euros and I found it. If on request I would lie and tell him that I haven't seen his wallet so I can keep the money, it would pretty much constitute an immoral act. Now in another situation, imagine that I had an affair outside of my marriage and ceased having the affair. If my wife would ask me if I had an affair and I would lie by telling her I didn't, it's not so clear that the lie is an immoral act. Telling the truth would hurt her feelings and could cause a breakup of the marriage which could be detrimental to all parties involved, not only me. The drawback of lying in this case is that an earlier immoral act goes unpunished but that is irrelevant to the evaluation of the later lie. So would this lie be an immoral act? I'd say the jury is out there. (Please note that all examples are purely hypothetical, this one included!) Now let's go one step further. Let's assume that your neighbor stands at your door covered with cuts and bruises and she seeks refuge at your home because she is afraid that her husband will kill her. You grant the refuge. Now if some time later the husband rings your doorbell holding a baseball bat and asks if you've seen his wife, would it be immoral to lie to him? I think quite the contrary, it would be immoral not to lie to him.
This example shows that the same act, namely purposefully lying to someone else, can be judged as immoral, moral or ambiguous depending on the circumstances. So is purposefully lying to someone else objectively immoral? I'd say no.

Example 2: is purposefully causing someone else physical pain morally wrong?

In general you'd say yes, but here too it depends on the situation. If I'm angry at someone and hit her in the face (unprovoked), it should be considered an immoral act. If you spank your child you are also causing physical pain. Many Christians would say (based on the bible book Proverbs) that this is the moral thing to do for it is part of properly raising your child. I'm not so sure and I am not alone in this hesitation. As a parent I think I've not done all too bad in raising my children and I can remember only once that I spanked one of them. In retrospect I don't think even that was necessary and in general I think it's not. If I take into account that spanking has gone horribly wrong in a few infamous cases and the fact that it does not seem to be a necessary part of good parenting, I'd say that the morality of spanking a child is at least ambiguous. What about physical pain caused by a tattoo artist? Here the pain is inflicted by request and the act is generally not considered immoral. Some people, like those who interpret the KJV translation of Leviticus 19:28 literally, might consider it immoral but that consideration is based on the aversion towards tattoos, not on the affliction of pain (here too the moral zeitgeist has shifted).  What about a surgeon who inflicts wounds on someone's abdomen for being able to remove a tumor? Here we'd say that it is the moral act to inflict the wound. This theme, doing something bad for a greater good, is a general theme in (Dutch) jurisprudence and is named "absence of material illegality" (translated literally). In Dutch jurisprudence this is established in the 1933 case in front of the Dutch supreme court where a veterinarian purposefully exposed healthy cows to the disease during an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease, an act which is forbidden by law. But by doing so, he exposed the cows to a light form of the disease to boost their immune system so they could resist the heavy form if and when it would arise. For aforementioned reason the court acquitted the veterinarian⁷.
Again we see that in the case of inflicting pain the morality depends on the circumstances.

Example 3: the expensive Chinese vase.

The two previous examples show acts that can be judged as moral or immoral depending on the circumstances. That was not included in Dr. Craigs distinction between objective and subjective.  Now let's use look at two examples would qualify his distinction. If I have a verbal fight with someone and my anger raises to a point where I take an expensive Chinese vase belonging to the other person and throw it on the ground where it breaks, I clearly commit an immoral act. Now what if a baby who has barely learned to walk picks the vase and throws it on the ground to see if it bounces, and it breaks? I can hardly think of anyone who would consider it immoral. Why?  Because the baby lacks the capacity to make a moral judgment about the act.  That would not make the act any less bad, a very expensive vase has just been destroyed, but here is a clear example that bad does not constitute immoral.  For this reason I think that Dr. Craig's  distinction between moral values and moral duties is superfluous. The primary parameter to determine if an act is moral or not is the actor's ability to make the moral judgment on the act.
So yes, personal opinion does matter and here is a clear example which is not objectively moral by Dr. Craig's own definition of objectivity.

Example 4: torturing babies.

This is an example that Dr. Craig has used a few times in debates.  Quoting Dr. Craig:

It seems to me far more plausible that there is objective right and wrong; for example, torturing babies for fun is wrong. And if you agree with me tonight that that is objectively morally wrong, then you would agree with me that therefore God exists.⁸

Now just like in the previous example, even this extreme example is immoral if and only if the torturer is capable of making the moral judgment. What if the torturer has an extreme form of narcissistic personality disorder and actually thinks that torturing babies is funny while seeing no harm in the act of torturing? Such a person is an extreme danger to society and we would lock him up in a mental institution to prevent such acts of happening, but we would not conclude that the act was immoral for the same reason that we do not consider the baby's act in the previous example to be immoral: the actor lacks the capacity to make a moral judgment. It is not without reason that judges do not penalize small children or mentally handicapped people for acts that get mentally healthy adults convicted. We as a society will take measures to prevent repetition of the act which might include forcibly hospitalizing the person, but we do not judge the act as immoral, not even an extreme act as this example. Even torturing babies for fun is not objectively immoral.

Summary

We've seen a couple of examples showing that either the circumstances or the actor's opinion is influencing the moral evaluation of an act by the society at large. Limiting the scope of such acts to only those situations that the rule generally applies to or only to people who have the capacity to make a moral judgment would move the goalpost, which is a fallacy. Such a limitation has nothing left in common with objectivity.

On the other hand, even though I think I have shown that these examples are not objective in their morality, I have not disproved premise 2. Doing that is impossible, since that would constitute proving a negative. All I can do is to evaluate examples from the other camp, like Dr. Craig's "torturing babies" example. The positive statement is being made by the apologist so the onus is on him or her to provide an example that is objectively moral or immoral. I take the null hypothesis and lack believe in the existence of an objective morality until such is proven.

Secular morality

In many debates where Dr. Craig uses the argument from morality, he presents a false dichotomy by claiming that without a god-ordained objective morality, everything is permitted. As an example I again quote him from the Pigliucci debate:

What about objective morality? Here Dr. Pigliucci is clearly in a deep existential dilemma: he affirms that morality is not objective--it is the invention of human beings--, but he cannot bring himself to say that therefore anything goes. He wants to cling to moral values. But, you see, for an atheist these values are floating in the air: they have no objective basis.⁸ 

This is such a misrepresentation of secular morality that I wonder if his misrepresentation is accidental or intentional. Yes, on a per person level one could actually say that anything goes, but we are not living on deserted islands. We are part of communities and within those communities, a consensus on morality is reached. In general this consensus seems to thrive on minimizing harm and promoting happiness in the community. Dr. Craig's examples of crimes in Nazi Germany, the killing fields in Cambodia and the like are straw men arguments. One could say that according to the morality of the perpetrators the actions were moral (even though I doubt even that: in power structures people can be made to do things that are contrary to their own morality, see e.g. the Stanley Milgram experiment⁹), but more important than that, the moral judgment of the victims is left out of the equation.

Secondly, if the argument: "without a divinely ordained objective morality, anything goes" would hold any water, then there should be at least be a minor positive correlation between communities where the religious adherence is low and a morally detriment society. It seems that the contrary is observed. A cursory survey of the religiosity of the prison population in the U.S. shows that atheists are underrepresented in comparison to the demography of the total population¹⁰.  Another example is that in comparing various European countries and the Unites States, the countries with lower religious adherence tend to have happier and more empathetic societies¹¹. Even comparing various states in the United States¹² in similar ways show the same trend.

So if not divinely ordained, where exactly does morality come from? The answer is not evident, but I strongly adhere to the theory that morality is a product of natural selection. We see primitive forms of morality in other animals species, e.g. the reciprocal altruism we find in the blood sharing between blood sucking vampires¹³ but also empathetic behavior among chimps¹⁴. Dr. Craig often quotes philosopher Michael Ruse¹⁵ who also holds the position that morality is an evolved trait and quotes it (slightly mockingly) as if it should be self-evident that the position is wrong, but he offers no rebuttal to it. He just goes back to his premises and assumes they are proven. They are not. Also, from an evolutionary perspective, kinship is important. That's why we are more likely to lend a helping hand to closely related individuals than we are to do that for others that are not that closely related, especially when the help we provide has an impact on our own lives.  I could imagine donating both my kidneys to one of my children, but I don't think I would donate a single kidney to a stranger unless I would be terminally ill (or dead).  This makes perfect sense from Richard Dawkins' "selfish gene" evolutionary perspective.

From a personal perspective, I would say that my morality is mostly based on selfish reasons: I would not want to live in a society where it is commonplace to treat others immorally our unjustly because I wouldn't want to be a victim of such treatment myself. That's why I will contribute my part in preventing such a society of getting a foothold. The general rule that I use to determine when to contribute or not, is the Platinum rule (a variant on the Golden rule): treat others the way they themselves wish to be treated. This is not an absolute rule though. It is more of a guiding principle and is limited by some factors like reciprocity and personal cost. As an example of the first: I will not help a convicted criminal to escape his sentence since he/she did not treat society likewise. As an example of the second, I will not help my neighbor in doing something that will endanger myself or others.

Notes

1. Described on Dr. Craig's article "The New Atheism and Five Arguments for God" under section 3, "The Moral Argument Based upon Moral Values and Duties", retrieved on August 8th, 2012
2. Leah Libresco blogs at "Unequally Yoked". The blog on her conversion is at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/this-is-my-last-post-for-the-patheos-atheist-portal.html
3. The Atheist Experience: http://www.atheist-experience.com/
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma
5. I am aware of the objection to the Euthyphro dilemma, i.e. that there is a third option: morality is part of God's nature. Dr. Craig has a paragraph in the article mentioned in note 1 where he makes this exact point. Dr. Garret Merriam, a philosopher at USI, dealt with this on his YouTube channel. The third option triggers a next-level dilemma, i.e. "is God in control of his nature or is God not in control of his nature". In the first case we are back at subjective morality. In the second case, something other than and outside of God is the true source of morality and we are at risk of getting into an infinite regress.
6. One debate where Dr. Craig used this example is the 1998 debate with Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, transcribed on his website "Reasonable Faith"  (retrieved on August 8th, 2012)
7. This case is known as "Huizense veearts" at is available in the journal Nederlandse Jurisprudentie NJ 1933.918.
8. The same section as linked to in note 6: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/does-god-exist-the-craig-pigliucci-debate#section_5
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
10. This is the result of an 1997 inquiry by Rod Swift from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, online available at http://holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm (retrieved on August 8th, 2012). It would be worthwhile if a formal study on this subject would be conducted.
11. This is clear from the 2005 study by Gregory Paul, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, online available at http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.pdf
12. Visually represented in the following table: http://i.imgur.com/kpb5A.png. The studies used for this image are given in the image, some of these are no longer online.
13. Gerald S. Wilkinson, Reciprocal food sharing in the vampire bat, published in Nature, Volume 308, Issue 5955, pp. 181-184 (1984), abstract available online at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984Natur.308..181W
14. See the article "The Evolution of Empathy" by Dr. Frans de Waal a primatologist from Emory University (retrieved on August 8th, 2012)
15. http://www.reasonablefaith.org/does-god-exist-the-craig-pigliucci-debate#section_1

Assumptions

Analogies aren't, I'm aware of that. Still I want to present one that describes the feeling I get when I hear counter-arguments from young-earth creationists. For the record, the following two stories are fictional though the latter is based on true stories.

Imagine a warm afternoon in Spring. Jack took half the day off because he made really long hours the day before. His wife is still at work, his son should be home from school anytime now. It's 4 PM, Jack is sitting in the living room watching the afternoon soap series on TV. He's tired, but he refuses to go to bed - he's awaiting his wife to come home. His eyes feel heavy and he start nodding his head. The last time he nodded his head he almost fell asleep so he jumps up.

Jack looks outside and he see it's dark. ``What?'' he thinks to himself, ``How come it's dark? I wasn't aware that there would be a solar eclipse today!'' He looks at the clock hanging on the wall and it shows 8 o'clock. He assumes the clock is broken because he was watching the soap at 4 PM, it just can't be 8 o'clock by now. He looks at the clock on the VCR and it also shows 8 PM. ``Oh!'' he thinks, ``I think there must have been a power failure I wasn't aware of, that's why both clocks have the same erroneous time.'' The TV is still turned on and the 8 o'clock news starts airing. And Jack thinks ``And I thought I was looking at today's airing of the soap while all this time the VCR was playing.'' Jack goes upstairs and sees his son playing a game of Little Fighter on the PC. He says ``Hey, I didn't see you coming in. Did you take a shortcut home?'' And his son replies ``No dad, I went by Jimmy first. His dad sends greetings.'' ``Yeah right'' Jack mumbles, ``Do you take me to be a fool?'' Then he walks past the bathroom and hears his wife taking a bath. He shouts to her ``How come you're home early?'' She shouts back ``What do you mean early, sleeping beauty? I made half an hour overtime before coming home and I've already had dinner.''

I think by this time the signs on the wall should be screaming loudly that Jack's assumption that he only nodded but didn't actually sleep is, well, wrong! Let's compare this story with Joe Creationist's opinion on the age of the earth.

You tell Joe that the earth is around 4.6 billion years old and that the universe is around 13.7 billion years old. ``No!'' says Joe, ``you've been lied to. God told us in his word, the Bible, that he created the heavens and the earth around 6000 years ago and since it is His word is is the truth.'' So you ask Joe to explain how it's possible that you're seeing stars that are more than 6000 light-years away. He replies something like ``I don't think they are really that far away''. So you explain the whole shebang about stellar parallax, Cepheid variables, Doppler red-shift etc. He then replies ``God is all powerful, He might have created the universe in it's present form.'' ``OK,'' you reply, so God created the universe with an appearance of age. When we saw Sanduleak going supernova at a distance of 170.000 light-years back in 1987 it was just an appearance of a star exploding, he created the light of an exploding star that never really existed, is that what you're saying?'' He replies that he cannot understand God's motives so he doesn't make an effort to do that. So you ask him why Argon dating shows a meteorite to be around 4.5 billion years old. And he replies that radiometric dating makes too many assumptions, it might be possible that the parent isotope was a lot less present than you assume. You tell him that there are a number of other methods like Uranium-Lead that all show an age of 4.5 billion years within a small margin of error. He goes on to say that God created the rock with an appearance of age to test our faith. You say ''I got one more clock for you. If you calculate the mean mutation rate of DNA and take the difference between human and yeast DNA, it counts up to a couple of billion years.'' ``Evolution is just hogwash'' Joe replies. ``God created all kinds separately and the only evolution that happens is changes within the kind.'' So you ask why we don't find don't find human remains in Cretaceous and Jurassic strata along with the dinosaurs, why the non-coding DNA like retro-virus insertions appears more alike as species are closer to each other in the phylogenetic tree, why tree rings can be composed to more that 11000 annual rings, why ice cores can show a minimum age of the earth of 160.000 years.

Shouldn't Joe by now see all the simultaneous signs on the wall screaming loudly that maybe his assumption that the Bible is literally true is, well, wrong?

Intellectual property - contradictio in terminis

I am a fervent listener of podcasts, especially skeptical ones. I came across the Logically Critical podcasts, which I would suggest to anyone. The podcaster has a unique and funny presentation which makes it very pleasant to listen to. That said, I do not agree with everything he presents.
In his third episode, Musical Theft, he equates copyright infringement with theft. This seems to be common thinking nowadays, but it is wrong. Stealing implies taking something away, i.e. the rightful owner no longer has the property. This implies that theft is only possible for scarce goods. Both US code 18 and the Dutch penal law make an explicit distinction between theft and embezzlement which makes clear that the taking away is an essential part for something to be called theft. This is not the case with copyright infringement.

Let's make one thing clear up front - in no way do I wish to justify copyright infringement, or for that matter, patent infringement, trademark violation or infringing any so called "intellectual property" law. But I do think they should be placed in proper perspective. Let's continue a little while with copyrights. Infringing on someone's copyright is not a property violation, since the copyright holder still has her own copies available. Copyright also is not an intrinsic right. Yes, you read that correctly. The purpose of copyrights were originally to "advance the arts and sciences" by granting a limited monopoly to the creator of such content. After expiration the content becomes part of the public domain, by which, finally, the collective arts and sciences have progressed. The purpose of copyright law was not to make some content creator stinking rich, but to make the society rich. But since people have coined the term "intellectual property", people tend to equate rights that are gained by intellectual creation with property rights and this is IMO a major contributor to the paradigm shift of the latter decades.

What is intellectual property?

It is a loose collection of laws that have little to nothing in common, specifically copyrights, trademarks and patents. The most important similarity in all those laws is that the government grants the holder of such rights a limited monopoly and thus refuses the same right to others. Copyright is granted automatically to all content creators, trademarks and patents have to be registered specifically. I hope it is now clear that if I do not request a patent for something I actually invented, that I have no way of preventing anyone else of manufacturing my invention. This should be a clear sign on the wall that such right is not inalienable, but that is exactly what the term "intellectual property" suggests. I also hold the strong opinion that humanity has progressed mostly by not treating intellectual advancements the way we treat property. By the latter change of policy, with only the financial gain of multi-billion dollar corporations in mind, I think we will slow down our progress immensely - if that is not yet the case.

Which brings me to the last part of my rant: patents. In the days of Tesla and Edison, patents were necessary to prevent mega-corporations to piggy-back on small inventors who would be left with nothing to gain from their invention. But society had to finally benefit by a proper description of the invention, so after expiration anyone could manufacture the invention without the need to pay royalties to the inventor. Patents were a means to encourage the continuation of inventing, especially for the small inventor. Nowadays a great subset of innovation is incremental and this is where patents fail terribly. Software is the prime example in this regard. About a century ago inventions were clearly distinguishable - think of the telephone, the light-bulb etc. Nowadays a programmer of some piece of software of a couple of thousand lines of code will easily and unknowingly violate a couple of dozen patents. Also the original purpose of the patent - to protect small inventors from mega-corporations - is now working in the exactly opposite way, namely shielding mega-corporations from small innovators. Mega-corporations have enough funds to create large patent portfolios, literally thousands of patents for anything in their field they can imagine. These mega-corporations then make cross-licencing agreements with each other, leaving the small innovator in the dark. The only small companies that are benefitting from this scheme are the so called "patent sharks". These are companies that do not produce any product but only collect patents. Their entire employee corps consists of patent lawyers. These companies sue both large and small corporations and cannot be counter-sued because they have no product with which they can violate patents themselves.

I think it is time to re-evaluate the fields of endeavor where we want to use patents as a means of enhancing the total knowledge base of society because currently it is only stifling innovation. The first step should be that we collectively seize to use the term "intellectual property".

Introducing myself

Hi there,

I would like to introduce myself and give any prospective reader an idea what one could expect on this blog.

I am a 44 year old male who grew up in Suriname, S.A. and living in the Netherlands since 1990. I am married and have 3 kids ranging from 11 to 17 (at the time of this writing). I am not a fast typer so my blogs will generally not be very long and often, but I think this is a wonderful medium to put ones mind to writing. Possibly that can be of value to someone. If it's not, all that is lost is my time doing that. But if it is, even in the slightest for just one person, that would make this blog very worthwile.

What can be expected here?

I am a recently deconverted atheist, so quite a few blogs will consider that topic. Related topics that may be touched are skepticism and pseudo-sciences in general, astronomy, evolution and molecular biology. Another passion is freedom in the digital environment (GNU/Linux, free software, opposition to software patents and the like). Those might also be subjects for blogs.

As a last note, I would explain the name of this blog space. According to astrologers, my "sun sign" is Aries - the Ram. Since astrology is the one pseudo-science that I considered junk before all others, I like piggybacking on it. Hamal is the name of the brightest star in Aries, it is therefore also referred to as "Alpha Arietes". To me, Aries is just a constellation, a grouping of a few stars that so happen to be radially close to one another as viewed from the earth, but which have absolutely nothing else in common. Hamal is just a yellow star (similar to our Sun) at a distance of 66 lightyears - i.e. appr 625 trillion km (or 390 trillion miles) and with that it's one of the closer stars. An object that far cannot possibly influence the personality of anyone. The "musings" reflect my awe and wonder for the vastness of the visible universe. It is so empty, yet so beautiful at night. Only if you start to get a grisp of the workings of the universe, without any need to invoke a supernatural entity, only then will the wonder of the universe really make a real impact and will the significance of our "pale blue dot" as it was once called by Carl Sagan, be put in the proper perspective. Using the word "musings" has been inspired by Ebon Musings which was a fundamental asset to my deconversion.

As a final note, if I make some glaring errors in either my spelling or grammar, I would appreciate being notified of this. English is not my native language.

Why I became an atheist

This is a repost of my earlier "extimony" at exchristian.net with a few minor edits and some additions. At the time (february 2006) I considered myself an atheistic agnost (i.e., I have no idea if there is a God but I consider it unlikely). Nowadays I consider myself an atheist. I don't believe in any supernatural entity because I lack evidence for them. Of course I can't prove the non-existence of a supernatural entity, so I am still pretty much agnostic to the subject as is any atheist who really considers the question. Regarding the Christian God I go a step further: I believe in the non-existence of the deity, descibed as Yahweh from the Christian Bible. I think Yahweh, given the attributes assigned to him, can be proven not to exist by means of contradiction, just as a square circle can be proven not to exist.

This is my extimony from last fabruary.

I was born and raised in Suriname (South America). My father was an inactive Catholic who experimented with different kinds of spirituality (or so he told me) and my mother was Lutheran. I have one brother who I grew up with (I have 2 more half sisters and a half brother, but I wasn't raised with them). We grew up as Catholics, went to church every Sunday but at home we weren't very active w.r.t. religion. We also went to Catholic primary and secondary schools. While in primary school (up to the age of 11) I accepted the gospel like hook, line and sinker. Still, it was during this time that the first act which would drive me away from Christianity occurred. At age 10 (1972) I got myself a kids book about astronomy and space travel. The sheer beauty of the Universe got a hold on me then and never again left me to this day. I remember most fondly that that book described Halley's comet and that it would return in 1986. I promised myself I would see it and I did :)

While growing up as a teenager I stopped believing in the creation myth, but I considered it a means to an end. In my opinion back then, if Moses would have told the ancient Jews of evolution and the size of the Universe, he would be stoned to death. I still considered myself a Christian without actually considering what that meant. I was as dead a Catholic as my father was. My mother still went to the Lutheran church but religion wasn't really a topic of discussion at home. Aside from her Christianty she was (is) also a firm believer in astrology and loads of cultural based superstitions. I never really bought those, but as a young teen I did believe in astrology. If my mom said it's true it should be, shouldn't it? After I studied more astronomy as an older teen I disregarded astrology as anything viable. By the end of my teen years my parents went into a very ugly divorce and they are still not on speaking terms after appr. 25 years. I kinda flunked school in this period but I still managed to get into a bachelor-level study (4 years) to become a police lieutenant. This is the second event to drive my current opinion about Chritianity. The study included large amounts of penal law, and two of the most basic principles of penal law happen to be the principles of proportionality (punishments should match the crime) and "subsidiarity" (is that the correct English word? I.e. you cannot punish someone for someone else's crimes). In my opinion both are violated by Christianity.

During my police study I met my wife to be. She was (still is) a reformed Christian who came from a pretty conservative Christian family. After knowing her for four years we married. We married in a reformed Christian church but we agreed to have our (then future) children to be baptised Catholic. The reason for that was that in those days there was IMO a pretty big quality gap between Catholic and non-Catholic schools and I didn't mind which Christian believe system they would be thought as long as they would get one. Still religion didn't play a big role in our lives, apart from the occasional church visits on Christmas or for baptism of my first son. One aspect of religion that I had very strong feelings about back then was that I refused every culture-based superstitious act to be used on me or my family. For example, there was this blue stuff that was used in laundry for giving white clothes a "whiter" appeal. In (negro) culture-believes one should apply this stuff visibly on the forehead of babies to keep envy away. When my mother (ethnic mixed but mostly negro) wanted to apply this to my son I freaked out and I think she got the message regarding where I stood on the subject.

In 1990 I had to flee my home country for political reasons, leaving my pregnant wife and 1.5 year old child behind. I wouldn't see them again for 14 months. After short stays in French Guyana, the U.S. and Canada, I received a visa for the Netherlands and that's where I still am today. Many years passed and my considerations regrding Christianity didn't change. I was still the dead Catholic calling himself a Christian etc. What did change is that in the meantime my brother became a born-again Christian. At first he didn't know where he fitted in, but by now he's found his homebase at the Baptist church. I don't really know what drove him, but it wasnt some life-changing event that might bring some people to hold on to Christianity. He slowly grew into it. By now he is a full blown reborn Baptist creationist. Though I personally think he deludes himself, I respect his opinions and I think he respects mine. He would like to talk about his religious convictions. This would make me start to think about the subject a little. I didn't really know the bible back then (I still don't actually) but it seemed clear to me that the creation myth was persented in the bible as a historical fact. Since this was in direct contradiction with what I knew of astronomy, I considered the bible wrong on that account and I started to wonder what else the bible was wrong about. I slowly started drifting away from what I used to believe regarding Christianity and I became something between a deist and an agnostic. I still considered it more likely than not that there should be some "driving force" that kept Nature and the universe from going haywire.

About a year ago I was apporached by a few "strongly reformed" Christians (in dutch "gereformeerden" which is a lot more fundie than the reformed Christians which is in dutch "hervormd"). These guys were passing out flyers and I started discussing Christianity with them. I laid out my argument why I considered myself an agnostic and stressed that I knew a bit (hobby-wise) about astronomy but little about evolution. Their arguments were of very mediocre quality and only capable of strengthening the belief of someone who was already convinced of Christianity, not for someone who isn't conviced at all. Still the word of one of the Christians present struck a nerve. He said quite literally: "You claim to know little to nothing of the evolution theory, still you defend it". The guy was right! I had to know more. It was the trigger to start digging on the internet. I discovered sites like TalkOrigins and the Secular Web. I also read much from the Skeptics Annotated Bible and a few articles from the Institute for Creation Research who IMO sometimes at least try to be a bit honest (see e.g. Danny Faulker's "The current state of creation astronomy"). Well, in high school I wasn't very interrested in Biology. During the Computer Science study that I once started I was confronted with elements of evolution in a seminar of Bioinformatics and in classes on Genetic Programming. But it wasn't until reading Chris Colby's "Introduction to Evolutionary Biology" and something as simple as the april 2005 "post of the month" at talk.origins that I was really swept away with the beauty of evolution. A simple conclusion I came to is: if a chimp is a type of an ape, as is a gorilla and an orangutan, then so is man. The chimp has more genetic similarities with humans than it has with the orangutan. For me, this placed the position of humanity in a completely different scope. We are not special.

Like I said, I also stumbled upon the Skeptics Annotated Bible (http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/) and I learned things about the bible that I really didn't know, e.g. Numbers 31, 2 Kings 2:23-24 and Psalm 137:9 (why didn't Boney M finish the psalm in their song?). I must say I was and still am quite horrified by reading this. Take note that as I child I received quite an anti-islamic upbringing. I read personally the following verse from the Quran: "As for the thief, both male and female, cut off their hands. It is the reward of their own deeds, an exemplary punishment from Allah. Allah is Mighty, Wise." (Sura 5:38). I thought to myself, what terribly cruel religion will want to put something like this in their holy scripture? At least Christianity states: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" (John 8:7). I was unpleasantly surprised to read of the terrible cruelties in the holy scripture of the religion that I considered just and loving (sort of) for most of my life.

So currently I came to the conclusion that I have a few major hurdles with Christianity, hurdles that I doubt I will ever overcome. First and foremost are the violations of proportionality in the teaching of eternal damnation. Granted, a few Christians believe in annihilation of the damned and if this would be the case I would have a lot less of an issue with it, but a punishment that would last eternal, however light the punishment, is disproportional to whatever temporal sin someone would have commited. Secondly I have issues with the "omnimax" features that are attributed to the Christian God. An omniscient being who creates object of which it foreknows that those beings will act against some rule and punishes those beings for it, is not omnibenevolent. I read a nice discussion between two Philosophers (Dr. Bradley and Dr. Craigh) regarding the compatibility of human free will and devine foreknowledge, and I side with Dr. Bradley that they are not. Thirdly, the more I read about scientific explanations of natural processes that were formerly only explicable by devine intervention, the more I see the unlikeliness of the existence of a God. It seems humans are very eager to want to explain everything and where they fail to do so the invent this unprovable entity to fit the gaps. I find the world around me to make a lot more sense without a God than with one. Lastly there are these specific issues I have with Christianity, some of which I didn't know to exist previously. I already explained the cruelties in the bible, but there's also the many inconsitencies in the bible and the monotheistic nature of the devine trinity. This just doesn't make sense. I read a response on this in "Answering the Atheist" where they compared Father, Jesus and Holy Spirit to be distinct entities but all God to person A, B and C to be differen persons but all being human. This still makes no sense because we don't claim that persons A, B and C are "one human".

Where do I stand now? I would still consider myself an agnost but an atheistic one. I don't think that the existence of a God can be proven or disproven but I see no need for any God. My wife knows that I have lost my faith but still has many difficulties accepting it. She still hangs on to her faith and the fact that her father passed away last year seems to have a lot to do with that. Personally I don't mind that even if she would become a strong believer, as long as we respect each others position. She did request that I "do not influence" our children and I made that promise. If they once decide that the Christian doctrine is not where they are happy they will come to the same conclusion as I did. I think this road should be a personal one. My parents and brother know how I feel and especially my father, the former dead Catholic who is now very involved in the Catholic church, has great difficulties accepting my views. For my in-laws I am still in the closet. They are a lot more conservative so coming out, especially to my mother-in-law might do more harm than good. They always knew that I did not hold conservative views and that is sufficient for the mean time.

OK, that was last february. What changed in the mean time? I no longer have a difficulty assigning the term "atheist" to my worldview. I now also lack belief to anything supernatural, especially the common concept of the soul. The reason for this is primarily this wonderful article at Ebon Musings, which systematically shows evidence for mind/brain dependencies for anything that we would regard "self awareness", anything that is commonly attibuted to a soul. I recommend this article (and most other articles at Ebon Musings) very much to anyone who wants to investigate their worldview. I am still in the phase of wanting to start discussing religion with anyone willing to listen and/or argue. I suppose that will iron out with time. But, even though I still hold the opinion that anyone should be entitled to their own religious views or lack thereof and not be hindered in the practice thereof (unless it does harm to others of course), I now side with Sam Harris that we should stop treating religious views with such careful approach and fear of hurting someone's feelings. We wouldn't treat an adult this carefully if she still believed in the tooth fairy, would we?