Preview of Dinesh D'Souza's "What's So Great About Christianity?"

Annoyed apparently by the recent thrashing Christianity has gotten in the popular bookstore these days, and no doubt havng learned well from his colleague-in-dissembling Ann Coulter on smelling an opportunity to sell books to the credulous masses, Dinesh D'Souza announces the release of his new Book: What's So Great About Christianity?" Here's his opening salvo, as he urges Christians to get out there and defend the faith:

"My new book What’s So Great About Christianity starts hitting the stores this week. It’s the first comprehensive answer to the atheist books out there, such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great...

Today’s Christians know that they do not, as their ancestors did, live in a society where God’s presence was unavoidable. No longer does Christianity form the moral basis of society. Many of us now reside in secular communities, where arguments drawn from the Bible or Christian revelation carry no weight, and where we hear different language from that spoken in church.

Instead of engaging this secular world, most Christians have taken the easy way out. They have retreated into a Christian subculture where they engage Christian concerns. Then they step back into secular society, where their Christianity is kept out of sight until the next church service. Without realizing it Christians have become postmodernists of a sort: they live by the gospel of the two truths. There is religious truth, reserved for Sundays and days of worship, and there is secular truth, which applies the rest of the time."

Indeed Dinesh has a moment of unusual clarity here. Many Christians have indeed withdrawn into a bubble of sorts, with Fox News on the TV delivering "the truth", conservative websites delivering the desired "facts" on a daily basis, and talk radio gurus like Rush and Michael Savage reminding them how evil everyone who disagrees with them is. They then go to church on Sunday, with all their carefully culled friends, and spend great times in comfort patting each other on the back and echoing their sentiments on all the issues of the day.

Of course, once they enter the secular world where we all have to get things done, they discard their bubble of banality to get the job done. Loving Jesus might get you by on Sunday, but when you get into the lab, the factory, or the board meeting, no one cares what Jesus thinks of you or vice versa. They care (mostly anyway) about what you are able to do in the real world. The irony here is rich, for it seems to pass over the heads of those like D'Souza as to why this would be? Simple: Christianity, stripped of it's secular components (like laws against murder and theft), is irrelevant to modern life. He can't admit this of course, and instead tries the laughable persecuted-Christians gambit, with an appeal to Gould's Nonoverlapping Magisteria concept:

"Many Christians have ... sought a workable, comfortable modus vivendi in which they agree to leave the secular world alone if the secular world agrees to leave them alone. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed the terms for the treaty in his book Rocks of Ages when he said that secular society relies on reason and decides matters of fact, while religious people rely on faith and decide questions about values. Many Christians seized upon this distinction with relief. This way they could stay in their subculture and be nice to everyone. "

The problem with this, as has been pointed out many times with regard to NOMA, is that Christians do not stay within the values realm. They want their dated view of the world enforced at the point of a gun on everyone else by the government. They conveniently skip over Jesus' admonishment to "give to Caeser what is Caeser and give to God what is God's", and instead try to enforce their values of what constitutes a person (abortion, cloning, stem-cell research), and what constitutes science (creationism, global warming denial), on the rest of us. Thus:

"But a group of prominent atheists—many of them evolutionary biologists—has launched a powerful public attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular; they have no interest in being nice. A new set of antireligious books—The God Delusion, The End of Faith, God Is Not Great, and so on—now shapes public debate."

As it should. Atheists, and the much larger group of nonreligious people who think there is more science to be found in the peer-reviewed journals than in the Bible, have been silent far too long. Religion should have to defend itself as any other subject should: in the public arena, with evidence and logic, not faith and tradition. This of coursed disturbs people like D'Souza, because they have been used to a favorable double standard for so long, one that placed religious claims beyond reproach, that just asking for a fair fight seems to them like playing dirty.

Speaking of playing dirty, note D'Souza's comment on the atheists that "many of them [are] evolutionary biologists". Of Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, ony Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. So why would D'Souza make such a claim? It's simple manipulation: Dawkins is the most incendiary of the bunch (though nowhere in the same league as the most incendiary of the Christians), so D'Souza would no doubt like the entirety of the New Atheism to be associated with Dawkins, in the same way global warming deniers would like the issue of global warming to be associated with Al Gore. Don't be too hard on D'Souza, for he can't win this battle with evidence and logic, so he has to stoop to such rhetorical tricks.

To his credit D'Souza rejects NOMA along with the rest of us, and sees that there is no middle ground on many of these factual issues:

"The atheists have a point: there are not two truths or multiple truths; there is one truth. Either the universe is a completely closed system and miracles are impossible, or the universe is not a closed system and there is the possibility of divine intervention in it. Either the Big Bang was the product of supernatural creation or it had a purely natural cause. In a larger sense, either the secular view of reality is correct or the religious view is correct. (Or both are wrong.) So far the atheists have been hammering the Christians and the Christians have been running for cover. It’s like one hand clapping."

More like a dog that has been beaten for hundreds of years finally raising up and fighting back. The atheists are simply saying that Christians cannot hide behind their religiousity if they are going to make material claims about the world, and attempt to enforce the implications of those claims via the ballot box (or military might). Atheists are simply demanding Christian views be subject to the very same scrutiny any other view is subjected to. But again, having had things their way for so long, people like D'Souza see this as some sort of special pleading:

"The atheists no longer want to be tolerated. They want to monopolize the public square and to expel Christians from it. They want political questions like abortion to be divorced from religious and moral claims. They want to control the school curricula, so that they can promote a secular ideology and undermine Christianity. "

I will be interested to see if D'Souza backs up these outlandish claims with any sort of evidence. Where is the evidence that atheists want to monopolize anything? Who has said Christians cannot have their say? Where is a secular ideology promoted in schools, and where have prominent atheists supported such a thing? This just looks like Coulteristic fiction weaving: when the facts don't support you, simply make them up. Atheists don't want abortion laws, or any other, to be divorced from moral claims. We just don't believe Christian morals deserve more consideration than anyone else's. Atheists, and most thinking Christians as well, want the best science we have taught to school children. That means cosmology and evolution, among many other subjects. If the findings of science undermine Christianity, then Christianity has a problem, not science.

"They want to discredit the factual claims of religion, and they want to convince the rest of society that Christianity is not only mistaken but also evil. They blame religion for the crimes of history and for the ongoing conflicts in the world today. In short, they want to make religion—and especially the Christian religion—disappear from the face of the earth."

We would love to see Christianity disappear from its privledged position in the public sphere. What people believe about the gods or their eternal resting place matters about as little to us otherwise as do their views on astrology, aliens near Alpha Centauri, or how the Cowboys will do this year. If Christianity is going to used in the public sphere, then yes, it's factual claims will be challenged. If D'Souza finds it troublesome to defend a 6,000 year old earth, animals poofing into existence, talking burning bushes, virgin births, and three-days-dead people coming back to life, perhaps he should get more particular about his sources of truth.

And earth to D'Souza: the bulk of the conflict in the world today revolves around religion, as the aforementioned authors have chronicled all-too-well. Without religion, there would be no civil war in Iraq, no 9/11, and no fighting in Northern Ireland. Is religion responsible for all the ills of the world? Of course not. But denying it is responsible for a lot of them is good old ostrich thinking. It's simple really: once you can get people to buy all that magical nonsense I listed above, getting them to believe the world would be a better place after you've killed all the Jews/Americans/Hindus/Muslims/yourselves, is a piece of cake. It is not religion per se, that is dangerous. It is faith: believing without evidence, that is, and that more than anything is what the New Atheists are bringing to the forefront of the discussion. We are simply tired of being asked to do, or not do, certain things, without being given a reason beyond "that's what I believe by faith". Not good enough.

"Christians must confront the challenge of modern atheism and secularism. This book provides a kind of tool kit to meet this challenge. The Christianity that is defended here is not “fundamentalism” but rather traditional Christianity, what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” the common ground of beliefs between Protestants and Catholics. This Christianity is the real target of the secular assault."

Ah, the big tent approach so favored by the Intelligent Design crew. I'm shocked. I wonder if Dinesh is going to forbid discussion of the age of the earth, or the nature of God, as they do. He says he has written to book for seekers and believers, but also for atheists.

"This is also a book for atheists, or at least for those atheists who welcome a challenge. Precisely because the Christians usually duck and run, the atheists have had it too easy. Their arguments have gone largely unanswered. They have been flogging the carcass of “fundamentalism” without having to encounter the horse-kick of a vigorous traditional Christianity. I think that if atheists are genuine rationalists they should welcome this book. It is an effort to meet the atheist argument on its own terms."

I for one do Dinesh. Let's see a rational defense of Christianity. Let's see you discuss atheism fairly, without the fictional characitures that are so prevalent among your writing mates. Let's see this "vigorous" Christianity so balyhooed in defenses about the New Atheist writings, but so absent in actual discourse.

"My modus operandi is one of skepticism, to view the claims of religion in the same open-minded way that we view claims of any other sort...

Taking as my foil the anti-religious arguments of prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the others, this book will show the following—1) Christianity is the main foundation of Western civilization, the root of our most cherished values. 2) The latest discoveries of modern science support the Christian claim that there is a divine being who created the universe. 3) Darwin’s theory of evolution, far from undermining the evidence for supernatural design, actually strengthens it. 4) There is nothing in science that makes miracles impossible. 5) It is reasonable to have faith. 6) Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history. 7) Atheism is often motivated not by reason but by a kind of cowardly moral escapism. I end this book by showing what is unique about Christianity and how our lives change if we become Christians. "

Well, I can't say I'm impressed. Claiming science supports the existence of a divine being, and supports the notion of supernatural design of living things, is a screaming red flag that ignorance is coming. But who knows, maybe Dinesh will suprise us and explain why a divine designer would give us and chimps the same broken vitamin C gene, why it would wire our eyes backwards, but an octopus eye rightways, and why it decided to fuse two chimp genes in humans. Anyone want to take bets that he quotes Michael Behe and William Dembski approvingly in his book?

And how in the world does lack of believe in Thor cause mass murders? Of all the claims of apologists, that one is the most absurd, but I suspect will be representative of the arguments D'Souza presents.

Behe's Scientific output: Exhibit A for ID the Science Stopper

Here is an excellent piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that ID is a science stopper. If it is such a landmark scientific finding, it would be relevant in research and would be cited by those researchers when they publish their findings. However, as David Lampe, Associate Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at the Duquesne University shows, compared to first-rate scientists, Behe's contributions and influence are paltry at best.

This is one of the tell-tale signs of a pseudoscience: stagnation. Whether it is astrology, chiropractic, or intelligent design, the one thing starkly different from mainstream science is a complete lack of change. One can check a decades-old article from any of those topics and it reads like it was written yesterday. Contrast that to a book on a hard science like astronomy, which is out of date practically the moment it leaves the printers.

So of course ID proponents don't do much science. There isn't much science to do. And with all the royalties from their book sales from all the same nimrods that buy Ann Coulter's dissembling tomes (goose step when you say that), it's easy to see how they might lose the hunger for hard work.

Triceratops Horns: Sexual Ornaments or Weapons?

From an early age I have always loved dinosaurs, and Triceratops was my favorite. Now there apparently is a scientific debate raging on whether those viscious-looking horns were primarily ornamentation that served a social function (attracting mates, establishing social heirarchy among rivals), or weapons used to defend against predators. Indeed, the hypothetical battles between Triceratops and Tyrannasaurus occupied much of the imagination of many a young dinosaur enthusaist, and arguments raged as to who the victor would be. I'm no paleontologist, but my impression of the outcome given their relative sizes and what I know of predator/prey behavior, is that a T-rex probably would not risk attacking a Triceratops that was full grown and not ill, because the risk of receiving a life-threatening gore would be too high, even in victory.

Now the science apparently tells a much lesss violent story, for much as I prefer the other interpretation, the data seems to support pretty strongly that those spike are ornamentation to intimidate rivals and attracts mates. Particularly persuasive to me was the fact that the frills triceratops and his relatives grow on their head may look like shields, but were actually too thin to be any problem for T-Rex teeth.

Hat tip to Grrlscientist for

There's Hope: Younger Set Highly Skeptical of Christianity

For all those out there bleating about how the "New Atheists" (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et al) are supposedly setting back the cause of a more freethinking nation, stick this study in your frames. Apparently skepticism, and a generally negative perception of Christianity, are at all time highs:

"Among young non-Christians, nine out of the top 12 perceptions were negative. Common negative perceptions include that present-day Christianity is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%) - representing large proportions of young outsiders who attach these negative labels to Christians. The most common favorable perceptions were that Christianity teaches the same basic ideas as other religions (82%), has good values and principles (76%), is friendly (71%), and is a faith they respect (55%)."

OK, so that's the non-Christians, of course their attitudes are negative, right? But what about the Christians themselves? No good news for the pious there either:

"Even among young Christians, many of the negative images generated significant traction. Half of young churchgoers said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political. One-third said it was old-fashioned and out of touch with reality. "

In other words, they see it for what it is, and more clearly than any generation before them. The key issue that does it for them? Homosexuality:

"Today, the most common perception is that present-day Christianity is "anti-homosexual." Overall, 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers say this phrase describes Christianity. As the research probed this perception, non-Christians and Christians explained that beyond their recognition that Christians oppose homosexuality, they believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians. One of the most frequent criticisms of young Christians was that they believe the church has made homosexuality a "bigger sin" than anything else. "

As I've noted here previously, nothing brings out the stupid like homosexuality and birth control, and that isn't going unnoticed by the generation who has been brought up to see no harm in either. Consequently, our society is shedding it's Christian skin, slowly but surely:

"One reason that Christianity’s image is changing is due to the shifting faith allegiances of Americans. Simply put, each new generation has a larger share of people who are not Christians (that is, atheists, agnostics, people associated with another faith, or those who have essentially no faith orientation). The new book refers to this group as "outsiders" because they are describing what Christianity looks like from an outsider’s perspective. Among adults over the age of 40, only about one-quarter qualify as outsiders, while among the 16 to 29 segment, two-fifths are outsiders. This represents a significant migration away from the dominant role that Christianity has had in America.

As pointed out in the Barna Update related to atheists and agnostics, this is not a passing fad wherein young people will become "more Christian" as they grow up. While Christianity remains the typical experience and most common faith in America, a fundamental recalibration is occurring within the spiritual allegiance of America’s upcoming generations."

Read the whole article, it is a gem. This should come as no surprise to anyone following the presidential election. While the Religious Right remains a powerful political force to which politicians still feel they must pander, the leading candidates themselves are far from the loony religiosity of many of the marginal candidates like the evolution-denying triumvirate of Huckabee, Tancredo, and Brownback. With the addition of Alan Keyes in the race, the association of religiosity with craziness might just stick.

The Conservative Dozen

Via Young America's Foundation we get this poster guaranteed to make every Moveon member pee his pants and run screaming into the night. The really funny thing about this photo is the conversation that must have taken place setting it up:

"OK, no, no this is all wrong. We need this to look diverse, and we've only got 4 non-whites, so you four split up, 2 on that side, 2 on the other side...beautiful. No, wait, you gals need to split up, we can't have this looking like a sausage party...let's see, we've got 8 men and 4 women, that's um, um, anyone here good at math? No? Alright, let's just try this: girl, boy, boy, girl, boy, boy...good! Hmmm, too much orange and black together, we need a black on either side, gives us that oreo look, and everyone likes oreos. Walter, you and Michelle trade places. Perfect!"

Ted Koppel on Cable News

"Cable news has become a rush to be first with the dreadfully obvious."

I can't improve on that.

Luskin's Duplication Myopia

Casey Luskin has yet another article displaying his ignorance of evolution and biology. I won’t attempt a detailed technical critique, as that has been done better elsewhere. I am going to focus on one aspect of Luskin’s lengthy article to illustrate in gory detail just how flawed the IDist’s view of evolution truly is, and I’m going to do it using their favorite analogy: language. Luskin writes:

”Duplicating Genes Doesn't Increase Biological Information in Any Important Sense. I now have 2 questions to ask of Darwinists who claim that the mechanism of gene duplication explains how Darwinian evolutionary processes can increase the information content in the genome:

(1) Does gene duplication increase the information content?
(2) Does gene duplication increase the information content?

Asking the question twice obviously does not double the meaningful information conveyed by the question. How many times would the question have to be duplicated before the meaningful information conveyed by the list of duplicated questions is twice that of the original question? The answer is that the mere duplication of a sentence does NOT increase the complex and specified information content in any meaningful way. Imagine that a builder of houses has a blueprint to build a new house, but the blueprint does not contain enough information to build the house to the specifications that the builder desires. Could the builder obtain the needed additional information merely by photocopying the original blueprint? Of course not. “

The obvious flaw in this analogy is the implicit assumption that any duplication of any words must produce new meaning (analogous to function). That is not what evolutionary theory says. It only says that SOME duplications can result in new functions. To illustrate this point, imagine a series of genes that spell out the word “cot”. This word has meaning, function, if you will. Now imagine the middle “gene” duplicates, and we get “coot”, also a word with meaning, and one that differs considerably with its ancestor. Now imagine one pointmutation, yielding “colt”. Again, a new word with meaning, and all resulting from a duplication and a subsequent point mutation. This is the more apt analogy to evolution. It is a testament to the myopia of evolution deniers that they can’t seem to think of these two steps simultaneously.

Luskin then spends an inordinate amount of time harping on the supposed lack of step-by-step descriptions supplied by Dawkins et al of the genetic path evolution has taken. This is fallacious reasoning for two reasons. First, several step-by-step descriptions of evolutionary processes have been supplied (like the eye, and the bood clotting cascade), but when such is provided, the creationists invoke Gish’s Law, and triumphantly declare the existence of that many more gaps to fill. Every new step provides two more gaps, which is clearly absurd.

Second, it simply is not necessary. No one would claim that to believe a can of vegetable soup was constructed without an overall guiding intelligence that one would need to supply a step by step account of the entire process from seedling to soup and all the intermediary steps. It is enough to know generally what goes on with soup production, especially in the absence of any intervening force. Likewise, the existence of mutation, selection, drift, and all the other elements of evolution, coupled with the piecemeal fossil and chemical history we do know, is enough sans evidence that there was any other force present that could account for all of this. I need only a witness that I left my house on foot and entered my friend’s house across the street on foot to conclude that I walked between the two. Luskin doesn’t get to assume God transported me from one house to the other merely because I can’t show him every footprint on the way.

Luskin finishes this plane crash of an article revealing once again how alien an unguided process is to creationists, as his supposed analogy to evolutionary processes chooses the desired endpoint:

” [show me how]
“METHINKSDAWKINSDOTHPROTESTTOOMUCH”
can evolve into:
“BUTIMSUREDAWKINSBELIEVESHEISRIGHT”
by changing the first sentence one letter at a time, and having it always retain some comprehensible English meaning along each small step of its evolution. This seems like a reasonable request, as it is not highly different from what Darwinists are telling me can happen in nature. “

Uh, yes it is. There is nothing in evolutionary theory that says one genetic code can evolve into any other genetic arrangement chosen by Luskin. What it says is that genetic codes will change over time, and given enough time, they may bear very little resemblance to their ancient precursor. This is just another variation of “Show me a dog giving birth to a cat”, only with more steps.

”How would Dawkins reply? Would he get angry and complain that this is “the kind of question only a creationist would ask”?

Well, I’m not angry about it, but yes, that is the answer to this question, and Luskin’s entire ill-thought-out article. It is all the sort of thing only an ignorant creationist would ask, because everyone else knows better.