Responses to a reader who rejects Christianity

A loyal reader of my blog, who praises my way of popularizing science, rejects Christianity and seems bothered by the fact that my articles imply that I am a Catholic. In a series of comments that he wrote in one of my posts, he explains his arguments. I did not answer him there, because of the length of his comments, which in total contain 3,346 words, while my article only has 644 (more than five times less).

I think that this reader should be classified as an agnostic rather than an atheist, as it’s possible to deduce from the following words:

There is nothing stupid about rambling about the possible existence of God and deciding "I'm going 100% that he does exist." The universe is SO complex that, as long as there is no evidence to the contrary, believing that there may be someone/something that "designed" all this... cannot be dismissed as "stupid thinking."

I think the reader's various criticisms can be summarized by quoting the following words, which also appear in his first comment:

The problem comes when we try to use all these reasonings (which, in principle, speak of God as something completely ethereal and impersonal) to try to validate the story of Jesus Christ, which seems to be the goal.

Simple, right? The reader accepts my speaking about God, but not about Jesus Christ. Apparently, he deeply resents my doing so. I have named Jesus Christ in eight posts out of more than 450, although perhaps my Christianity is also clear in posts where I don’t name him. And he accuses me of trying to bring water to my mill (or sweeping home). This is a textbook case of the ad hominem fallacy. As we know, this fallacy (which in this case can be summarized as follows: you say this because you are Catholic) can be answered in the same way: you say that because you are an atheist, or agnostic, or whatever corresponds.

Most of the comments of the reader (2092 words) are directed against the possibility of miracles, and in particular against the miracle of Fatima, to which I have dedicated several posts in this blog. I suspect that the reader thinks that his arguments contradict what I said in those posts, but on the whole I think that he has just provided a confirmation. I said this:

1. Either the event really occurred, i.e., the witnesses told the truth.
2. Either the event did not take place, and the witnesses deliberately lied.
3. Or the event did not take place, but the witnesses did not lie, they were simply mistaken, or were the prey of a collective hallucination, or some equivalent explanation.

And I added:

Skeptics say that the miracle was a collective hallucination, or an optical effect due to the contemplation of the sun. Believers prefer the first option.

G.K.Chesterton

And what does the reader do? Assert that the only valid alternatives to my trilemma are the second and the third. In other words, what I had anticipated. An agnostic or an atheist must deny the possibility of miracles, therefore must necessarily adopt the other two alternatives. A believer has one more alternative, the first. (Catholics don’t automatically accept everything we are told is a miracle, as proved by G.K. Chesterton’s stories in the collection The Incredulity of Father Brown.) Then those 2000 or so words confirm what I had predicted.

There is also some reference to the other argument used usually by atheists to deny the existence of God: the problem of evil. In this regard he says:

If the planes that were going to hit the Twin Towers had frozen in the air 20 meters from the impact... it would have been amazing, there would have been no explanation of any kind and it would have been recorded on video... However, that did not happen... And thousands of people died. And many others suffered a mind-blowing psychological impact. It seems that miracles only happen to do inconsequential nonsense.

This is the problem of human evil, to which the usual response is to point out that we are trying to blame God for the evil that men do. Or as Mark Twain may have said: There are many scapegoats, but the most common is Providence. In this specific case, God is blamed for not having performed a miracle to prevent a barbaric human act. Others usually mention Auschwitz. This demand of miracles reveals a magical-mechanical concept of God, who would only be the automatic corrector of the evil done by human beings. Times don’t change much; that was also what they said to Christ crucified: Save yourself by coming down from the cross! (Mk. 15:30).

It’s curious: some time before the reader posted these comments in my blog, I had used similar arguments in a debate about the existence of God between two artificial intelligences in my latestscience fiction novel: Operation Viginti. The debate ends in a draw, which is what usually happens in this type of debate. Reaching an agreement is almost impossible, for both sides start from different axioms: one affirms that God exists, the other denies or questions it, so it’s difficult to find a convincing argument.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next

 Manuel Alfonseca

Is popular science in crisis?

In the last thirty years, interest in scientific popularization has decreased worryingly. Perhaps not unrelated to this is the loss of prestige of science, which the man in the street tends to consider guilty or accomplice in some threats, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the uncontrolled destruction of the environment or climate change.

During this time, several permanent sections of the media dedicated to popular scientific have disappeared, as well as a few important magazines, while books on popular science do not usually achieve great sales, with few exceptions, mainly related to health.

In the mass media, the only thing that matters now is the appeal of the headline, at the expense of scientific accuracy. Thus the effects of this type of dissemination are often negative and counterproductive: instead of informing, they distort the public opinion. I have spoken about the harmful effects of this type of disclosure in several posts in this blog.

The golden age of scientific popularization

Scientific popularization, as it was carried out after 1970, can be divided into three large groups:

• High-level scientific popularization, represented by magazines aimed at readers with a good scientific base, who want to stay up to date on the advances made in disciplines other than their own:

o   Scientific American, which had entered its second century of existence and published monthly each year less than one hundred long select articles, in addition to a small number of short information articles. Its prestige increased even more when it became the medium through which some important discoveries were made public, this journal being chosen instead of better-known scientific publications, such as Nature or Science. Thus, in October 1970, Martin Gardner published in his section (Mathematical Games) the first article dedicated to the Game of Life, devised by the British mathematician John Conway: The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life". And in May 1975, Gregory Chaitin published in Scientific American his famous article Randomness and Mathematical Proof, where he showed that the randomness of integers is undecidable, an undecidability theorem comparable to Gödel’s.

The prehistory of scientific popularization

Being interested in the world, being curious to find out the causes of natural phenomena, is as old as man, but in the strict sense one cannot speak of science until the invention of writing, as the knowledge communicated through oral transmission was disorganized, imprecise, and fragmentary. For science to appear, the body of knowledge must constitute a coherent and ordered whole, which was practically impossible before more permanent means of storing information than human memory could be used.

As soon as writing systems appeared in the Middle East, India, China and America, sciences began to develop. The first three were medicine, mathematics, and astrology. They arose for practical reasons: to cure diseases; for the good management of the economy; to predict natural phenomena related to the cycle of the seasons. The natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and geology) were less necessary for early human societies, so they did not emerge until the Greek civilization.

The ethical frameworks in technology

Chernobyl disaster

Oxford Languages gives the following two definitions to the word Ethics:

Moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity.

The branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles.

The Wikipedia gives the following definition:

A branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior.

Since Aristotle wrote two (or three) books on ethics (the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and perhaps the Magna Moralia or Great Ethics), ethics has been considered an important part of philosophy.

Traditionally, three main approaches have been considered (there are more) that can serve as a framework for the construction of ethics:

Mathematical trivia and quotes from mathematicians

I have taken the following trivia and quotes about mathematics from the book A Passion for Mathematics, by Clifford A. Pickover, which I have mentioned in another post in this blog. These are the trivia:

• Let's see four amazing properties of number 5: a) It is the hypotenuse of the smallest Pythagorean triangle. b) There are five Platonic solids. c) It is the smallest automorphic number. Automorphic numbers are those whose square ends in the number. d) It is probably the only odd untouchable number. Untouchable numbers are those that are not equal to the sum of the proper divisors of any other number.

Computer programs and intelligence games

In 1956, John McCarthy and colleagues, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover (USA), defined the term Artificial Intelligence, so abused now. On the same year, Arthur Samuel, working at IBM, built the first computer program capable of playing checkers. This program kept information about the games it had played and used it to modify its future plays. In other words, it “learned.” After a certain number of games, the program was able to defeat its creator and play reasonably well in official championships.

At first sight, this seemed to go in the good direction. The creators of the term Artificial Intelligence had predicted that ten years later (that is, around 1966) we would have programs capable of performing perfect translations between any two human languages and playing chess better than the world champion. And this would only be the beginning. We would soon be able to build machines capable of behaving with equal or more intelligence than man. The old dream of building artificial men would have come true.