The A-Unicornist

All the recent hullabaloo over the historical Jesus (or Jesus McGee, as I like to call him) got me thinking about some of my past arguments regarding the historical reliability of the Bible. Oddly enough, the Bible's historicity or lack thereof wasn't really a factor in my deconversion 13 years ago; it was more spurred by what I perceived as the inanity of the theology (I've often said that reading the book of Hebrews did more to deconvert me than anything else). But the generally lousy reliability of the Bible as a collection of historical documents has certainly bolstered my confidence in my deconversion over the years.

I'm talking specifically about the New Testament (and more specifically, the gospels), although the OT is cannon fodder as well. What's interesting, though, is that Christians actually tend to agree on a lot of the basic facts. We generally agree that:
The gospels were written, at the earliest, several decades after Jesus purportedly lived, in a la…

I recently watched the discussion/debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tim Rutton, and if there was anything that Hutton kept hammering on it's that he agreed with a lot of what Hitchens said about the perversity of many religious practitioners. But the point he hammered back with is that the extremists, the fundamentalists, the evolution deniers, the war mongers, the gay and women haters, the privilege seekers, etc, are not representative of all believers.

I've mentioned my brother before, and it's appropriate here to mention him again. He's a devout evangelical Christian, and a blue-blooded liberal. I won't try to guess his stance on various political issues, but he certainly sees himself as pro-science. He's a big fan of guys like Francis Collins and Ken Miller, devout Christians who also happen to be prominent biologists who speak out against the folly of creationism. It was Miller, after all, who helped expose Intelligent Design for the pseudoscience it…

I think this stemmed partly from the deliberately provocative title of the hugely popular polemic The God Delusion. Perhaps it's research that correlates liberalism and non-belief with IQ. But whatever the root of it, believers seem to think atheists view them as unsophisticated, unintelligent, and uneducated.

Really, I don't get this one. Surely we don't think the problem with the eminent biologist Francis Collins, who helped found the human genome project, is that he's just not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Surely we don't think that devout Christian Kenneth Miller, the evolutionary biologist at Brown who publicly humiliated advocates of Intelligent Design in the infamous Dover trial, that he just needs to go back to college. These guys are obviously highly intelligent, and they're Christians.

But here's the rub: just because someone is intelligent doesn't make them immune from adhering to irrational, even delusional beliefs. intelligent people ca…

One of the criticisms that the William Lane Craigs, Alister McGraths and Alvin Plantingas have of some of the new atheist tomes, like The God Delusion is that they are very 'unsophisticated' in their treatment of philosophy. Presumably, someone with a doctorate in philosophy (like Craig) ought to be better than, say, a neuroscientist or a biologist at identifying a logically fallacious argument.

But here's the catch. There's a difference between a valid argument and sound argument. This is a valid argument:
If penguins capable of flying exist, then it is likely that some penguins have flownPenguins capable of flying existTherefor it is likely that some penguins have flown This is a valid argument because if the premises are true, then the conclusion follows (for the nitpicky nerds, we can ignore the inductive vs. deductive forms for now). But you might say, Hey! Wait a second! There's no evidence that flying penguins exist! And you'd be right. The argument is va…