To all of you that learned of our campaign through Listen Up TV and decided to check out our website, welcome to the Canadian Atheist Bus Campaign! To everyone else that hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about, Listen Up TV is a television program exploring news and current affairs from a Christian worldview. Today they aired a show about us on Global TV that can also be viewed on their website.

There are a few things I wanted to address that Lorna Dueck (Listen Up TV Host) mentioned during the show but first please take note that their broadcast is fairly slanted towards a Christian perspective and doesn’t really give a fair and equal opportunity for both Atheist and Christian viewpoints. Justin and myself spent 15-20 minutes each in-front of a camera with ListenUp but unfortunately our parts were edited and cut to a small 2-3 minutes. The show in total lasted 23 minutes 25 seconds. Despite our parts being cut short, I am grateful that they gave us an opportunity to speak with them.

During Answering Atheism Lorna spoke with David Harrison and later Dave Schmelzer, both about their religious experiences and how they went from Atheist to Christian. The two discussions revolved around experience and reason. Experience is referenced as their encounter with prayer and crying out to or asking a supposed god for help and guidance. According to them, ‘god’ responded.  A website called god Is Imaginary lists 50 proofs that god is not real and the first proof is simply asking people to try praying, I encourage you to read through it for yourself and possibly test out the first proof. Try asking God why he never heals amputees and then take a look at whywontgodhealamputees.com. Dave S. and David H. both prayed and coincidentally had some sort of result that could be explained away without a divinity.

Response to LUT’s The Wrap which discusses ’3 Reasons/Tests to Believe in God’

Response to Listen Up TV's "The Wrap"

Response to Listen Up TV's "The Wrap"

First Test according to Lorna: “the test of reason – everything has to have a starting point, it’s the law of thermodynamics. All matter has a beginning, and if it began, it has to have a cause. Science and theology relate to that. The test of reason for belief in God is not afraid to explain origin, irreducible complexity, and cause”

There are three laws of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics is that energy is never created or destroyed, it only changes form. For example: the energy used during the combustion phase of a four-stroke engine is not lost, it simply is changes form. A large portion of that energy is turned into heat, kinetic energy, and some turned into sound, but none of that energy is ever lost- it simply changes form. The second law simplified states: “It is impossible for a process to have as its sole result the transfer of heat from a cooler body to a hotter one”(About.com). The third law implies that it is impossible to cool down a system all the way to exactly absolute zero.
Apparently this is the test of reason to find God. It somehow implies a beginning and an end, doesn’t sound like it to me though.

But lets give Lorna a break, let’s suppose that everything has a beginning and an end, after all she is taking Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) five argument for the existence of God and compressing it into a dozen words. Aquinas basically argued that everything is the result of a cause before it, for example a billiard ball is moved by a cue, you move the cue, and there is a chain of movements before that leads up to that movement, or, every action is a reaction from an action before it. Aquinas believed that there was a first mover, something that originally set motion to the chain of events in our universe. He calls this first mover God. Unfortunately for Aquinas and other Christians that follow this school of thought, no one could ever prove how the first mover related to Christian theology or any theology. In other words, ‘so what’ if there was a first mover because there is nothing to imply that the first mover was the Christian god or a god of any other religion. For all we know the first mover could have been a bunch of fairies moving things, or the first mover could have moved the universe and then dropped dead. There is no evidence at all to support a first mover as the Christian god, and if there was a first movement, there’s no evidence to support it was any god of any type.

As for irreducible complexity.. that argument was debunked and disproved years ago. Michael J. Behe couldn’t ever get the scientific community to support his argument about the eye, flagellum, and mousetrap all being a complex system that would fail if one part was removed. In sum, Behe said that these complex systems would fail if a single part was removed, the removed part would render the systems useless and unable to have evolved from earlier simpler systems. His theory was largely debunked during the Kitzmiller v. Dover case when Intelligent Design was ruled out of Dover county school system.  Watch Dr. Kenneth Miller debunk irreducible complexity on YouTube here.

Second Test according to Lorna: “Test of experience, we know we experience an innate sense of right and wrong, a sense of universal moral law. Why is love the highest law of this moral code? Where does that experience originate from?”

The answer is in the words evolution and empathy and I highly recommend you read this four page PDF on “The Evolution of Empathy” from Berkley University. In this document Frans B. M. de Waal shows us how our evolutionary history suggests a deep-rooted  propensity for feelings of emotions of others.

Third Test according to Lorna: “Take the test of practice. Is belief in God and what that requires, something a person can actually consistently live with? People do practice christian doctrines in error, that explains past religious wars [...] but when Christian truth is applied correctly, does it past the test of practice. Can you live with it, day in and day out. In a way that brings you joy, peace, and improves who you are?”

Is practice of Christianity really what we want? Godisimaginary.com has created a great YouTube video titled “The Bible Is Repulsive“, it explains how according to the Bible we should be stoned and put to death if we work on the Sabbath day, that non-believing towns and inhabitants should be destroyed, and a few other shocking details about the bible that most Christians don’t know about simply because they haven’t read the bible all the way through. EvilBible.com is also a great resource to show all the horrible parts in the bible that are often overlooked. Belief in God is something we can consistently live without and there’s a popular saying that that “[...]good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things — that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg Nobel Prize in Physics (thanks to Galen for the comment giving me the correct quote).