Faith vs. Fact: Two Opposing Sides of the Coyne

The methodological conflicts between science and religion cannot be brokered, for faith has no reliable way to find truth. It is no more compatible for someone to be a scientist in the lab and a believer in the church than it is for someone to be a science-based physician who practices homopeathic medicine in her spare time.

—Faith vs. Fact

Faith vs. Fact, fascinating folio from fellow feline fan

Book Review: Faith vs. Fact by Jerry A. Coyne. New York: Viking Penguin (2015).

I’ve read about a dozen books during this hot summer of broken weather records and burning forests, most of them relating to a scientific issue that is but should not be contentious: drastic, ongoing, and potentially devastating human-caused climate change. Three of these works stand out in my mind.

Under a Green Sky by paleontologist Peter Ward tells an engaging tale about cataclysmic extinction events while cautioning about our headlong rush into what might well be another one, caused not by volcanic activity or an asteroid but our reckless burning–in a slim century of explosive human activity–of fossilized carbon that took millions of years to accumulate. Paolo Bacigalupi makes similar warnings using fiction in The Water Knife, “a near-future thriller that casts new light on how we live today and what may be in store for us tomorrow.” (Hint: You’re screwed, especially if you live in Arizona or Nevada.)

And then there is an autographed hardback volume that especially weighed heavy in my hands as I sat sweating in the evenings among my drying trees. It’s significant to me not just because it addresses the mindset of those who deny the slow changes happening right outside their windows, but because it represents the single biggest shift in my own little life: from faith to fact. The goal of its author, evolutionary biologist and religion critic Jerry Coyne, is for people to do what came so hard for me as a Christian fundamentalist, and apparently does for millions of Americans in the thrall of our fossil-fueled Western lifestyle: “produce good reasons for what they believe–not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear.” ¹

“Nothing less than the future of our planet is at stake” when it comes to climate-change denialism, and Dr. Coyne devotes a few pages of his book to a discussion of that.² Despite “the nearly unanimous view of climate scientists that the earth is warming because of human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases,” a dismaying number of Americans and their congressional representatives have no interest in slowing our massive dumping of carbon into the atmosphere. To him and me both, the “ability of people to ignore inconvenient truths that conflict with their faith, whether or not the faith be religious, is astonishing.” ³ Yet I had that ability myself, too, ignoring and denying all the evidence against the Laestadian Christianity that long had been the most important aspect of my life.⁴

That form of faith was a religious one, of course, which is almost entirely the focus of Coyne’s book rather than some secular faith in Fox News pundits and talk radio. They are not entirely disconnected: He notes a correlation between church attendance and acceptance of scientific realities about evolution, the Big Bang, the Earth’s age, and human-caused global warming.⁵ (You can guess which way the correlation goes; sermons are not known for encouraging scientific thinking.)

Faith vs. Fact is a personal book to me for a couple more reasons that are worth mentioning before (finally!) proceeding into a detailed review of it. The odd little sect in which I was raised gets mentioned: “Laestadianism, a conservative branch of Lutheranism, considers itself the only true faith: only its roughly 60,000 adherents are eligible for salvation, with the billions of others on earth doomed to eternal torment.” Not at all inaccurate, but possibly not the way Laestadianism would like to be introduced to thousands of people.⁶

Laestadianism gets some exposure (Faith vs. Fact, p. 84)

And it was a real thrill to see my name listed alongside various personal heroes of mine–Dan Barker, Richard Dawkins, Peter Boghossian, Sean Carroll, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, John Loftus, the late Victor Stenger–when Dr. Coyne thanked some “diverse friends and colleagues” for help and encouragement on his acknowledgements page. After his reading and offering comments about a book of my own, some enjoyable correspondence, and a warm conversation about cats and atheists (not unrelated topics, really) at a conference where we finally met, I would be honored to call Dr. Coyne a friend.

So, full disclosure, an unbiased reviewer of this book I am not. But let’s go ahead and take a deeper look.

Competitors for Truth

“Science and religion,” writes Coyne in his Preface to the book, “are competitors in the business of finding out what is true about our universe.” ⁷ This pretty much summarizes his thinking on the topic, and he makes it abundantly clear which side he judges to be the winner.

All the revelations in all the world’s scriptures have never told us that a molecule of benzene has six carbon atoms arranged in a ring, or that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is this asymmetry of knowledge that, despite religion’s truth claims, make its adherents embrace the fallacious claim that religion and science occupy separate magisteria.⁸

That NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) claim was advanced by Stephen Jay Gould in hopes that religion and science could get along somehow. Coyne devotes several pages to dismantling Gould’s idea of a “potential harmony through difference of science and religion, both properly conceived and limited.” The problem, Coyne says, is that one word properly, because “real religion is frequently and stubbornly improper.” Religion tends to trespass on the boundaries of science, even though it rarely happens the other way around: The “vast majority of scientists are happy to pursue their calling as an entirely naturalistic enterprise.” ⁹ This “reliance on naturalism” is

not an assumption decided in advance, but a result of experience–the experience of men like Darwin and Laplace who found that the only way forward was to posit natural rather than supernatural explanations. Because of this success, and the recurrent failure of supernaturalism to explain anything about the universe, naturalism is now taken for granted as the guiding principle of science.¹⁰

As a scientist (or an engineer, to add my own experience into the mix), you don’t gaze upward for answers when you’re working in the lab, except maybe if a buzzing light fixture is generating electromagnetic interference. Coyne offers the amusing yet powerful example of someone who spends their life looking in vain for the Loch Ness monster. After all that effort, “stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths,” they find nothing. Which is more sensible at that point, he asks,

to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn’t there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It might be there; I’m not sure”? Most people would give the first response–unless they’re talking about God.¹¹

The reason, of course, is that there is so much at stake–an eternity of reward or punishment, one’s entire social network–when it comes to talking about God. I remember consciously denying myself the mental luxury of even allowing for the possibility of His absence. What a delicious relief it was when I finally could!

One scientist who has taken Coyne’s difficult but honest first option, after 20 years of investigation, is Dr. Susan Blackmore. “At some point something snapped,” she writes in a 2010 essay. “Instead of struggling to fit my chance results into yet another doomed theory of the paranormal, I faced up to the awful possibility that I might have been wrong from the start that perhaps there were no paranormal phenomena at all. I had to change my mind.” ¹² It’s an inspiring story, and I find Blackmore’s absence in this section of the book a bit unfortunate, a lost opportunity to point out that it can be done by a principled thinker.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Coyne has little patience for NOMA, for the efforts by theologians and science popularizers alike to avoid the appearance that a competition even exists between science and religion. Simple self-preservation makes it attractive for the liberal religious, while a strategic desire “to avoid alienating religious people” motivates scientific organizations.¹³ For their separate reasons, they all want to let religion save face by granting it some invisible sphere of truth outside the world of observation and explanation. That he terms “accommodationism,” a harmful “weakening of our organs of reason by promoting useless methods of finding truth.” ¹⁴

Accommodationist cat: Will trade much-tabbed book for tummy rub

Some science-savvy theologians claim that their sophisticated forms of faith offer “other ways of knowing” what science hasn’t yet explained. There are indeed plenty of those questions; one that Coyne mentions is why the speed of light is constant in a vacuum. Fine, he says: Provide some concrete faith-based answers, and “tell us not only what those answers are, but how they would convince either nonbelievers or members of other faiths. And let those ‘other ways of knowing’ make predictions in the same way that science does.”

But of course they don’t, and can’t. He offers a parallel to the challenge Christopher Hitchens made to believers for an example of ethical behavior only they could perform. The Coyne challenge is this: “[G]ive me a single verified fact about reality that came from Scripture or Revelation alone and then was confirmed only later by science or empirical observation.” ¹⁵ Neither challenge has ever had a credible response.¹⁶

It’s not just that religions are incompatible with science, Coyne says. Unlike science, whose many different disciplines “share a core methodology based on doubt, replication, reason, and observation,” ¹⁷ religion is splintered into countless varieties that are incompatible with each other. Yet “this incompatibility wasn’t inevitable: if the particulars of belief and dogma were somehow bestowed on humans by a god, there’s no obvious reason why there should be more than one brand of faith.” ¹⁸

This argument resonates with me for a reason Coyne probably never thought of when he made it: patent law. I’ve obtained over a dozen patents, for commercially successful technology. What those pieces of paper give you is the right to exclude others from making and using what you’ve invented, a right that you can then license and sell to others, or exercise yourself to avoid competition during the 20-year patent term.¹⁹ Now, an omnipotent God has the ultimate patent. He could just squash everything but the One True Religion that he supposedly invented, and that would be that. But that doesn’t happen, because there is no such patent holder.

Something else I’ve done is to spend an embarrassing number of hours studying and writing about those “particulars of belief and dogma” in all their hair-splitting details–not just between Protestantism and Catholicism, not just between different forms of Lutheranism, but between different forms of Laestadian Lutheranism. So I offer a hearty secular Amen to another excellent point Coyne makes along those lines: “Given that most religious people acquire their faith through accidents of birth, and those faiths are conflicting, it’s very likely that the tenets of a randomly specified religion are wrong. How can you tell if yours is right?” ²⁰

Uh, because the guys in suits who are telling you that it is too right are really, really sure of it–because their fathers in suits who told them about it were, too? Never mind those other guys at the “heretic” church one town over, who are telling a story whose differences are slight but of incomprehensible importance, and who have no less basis for making their own claims. Yeah, right.

At this point in my review, and in my life, I have the blessed freedom to offer the real answer to that dilemma, for those uncomfortable pew-sitters reading this who are suffering through the churnings of doubt: Revelation without observation is bullshit. A more refined and civilized statement, perhaps, is Coyne’s summary of his claims about the co-existence of religion and science. But it is no less direct. The two

are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. “Knowledge” acquired by religion is at odds not only with scientific knowledge, but also with knowledge professed by other religions. In the end, religion’s methods, unlike those of science, are useless for understanding reality.²¹

Come on, now, Jerry. Stop being all nice and diplomatic and vague, and tell us what you really think!

The Chimpanzee in the Room

For most everyone in the United States and probably many other places around the world, mentioning science and religion together will evoke a third topic: evolution. “While not the only scientific theory that contradicts scripture,” Coyne observes, “evolution has implications, involving materialism, human exceptionalism, and morality, that are distressing to many believers.” ²² But, as I observed in my first book after confronting those issues, then still a troubled believer of sorts in theism if no longer my childhood fundamentalism, theological imperative does not equal truth.²³

The truth about evolution is simply undeniable to any reasonably informed and thoughtful individual. As Coyne (who has spent decades working directly in the field) notes, “it is supported by mountains of scientific data–at least as much data as support the uncontroversial ‘germ theory’ that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms.” ²⁴ Indeed, we see the deadly results of evolution in action, right before our eyes, whenever new generations of those microorganisms acquire new resistances to our dwindling stocks of effective antibiotics.

And yet denial persists, to an astounding degree. Coyne summarizes the results of a 2014 Gallup poll: “fully 42%” of Americans polled “were straight biblical young-Earth creationists, agreeing that humans were created in our present form within the last ten thousand years.” Fewer than one in five “accepted evolution the way biologists do, as a naturalistic, unguided process.” The reason is not a lack of evidence, which is simply overwhelming–countless thousands of published findings from numerous scientific disciplines. Nor is it a lack of opportunity for people to learn about that evidence; Coyne notes that “we live in an age of unprecedented science popularization.” ²⁵ Indeed, he has been one of the forces behind that with his own book, deservedly a best-seller, Why Evolution is True.

This is not about the evidence. It is about a fearful, irrational denial of reality by those who cannot afford to deviate from the party line of their precious religions. In the concluding pages of Evolving out of Eden, Dr. Robert M. Price and I reflected on the mindset of the Christian fundamentalist, a place I myself had still been uncomfortably occupying not long earlier. Things get difficult for him, we wrote,

if he peers outside the safety of church society and “healthy” reading materials to glean some awareness of the many other theological problems lurking in the tall grass of science. He may recognize himself (and Jesus!) as an evolved primate, and Original Sin as an absurd doctrine built on unscientific sand. The very rationale of the atonement collapses, along with all those “sins” his pastor carries on about, which come to look like natural, even healthy traits that allowed his ancestors to replicate and eventually produce him. The God of all Creation he once praised while musing over every tree and sunset goes quiet and cold, fading into an impersonal set of laws and forces that forms life out of randomness shaped by countless acts of suffering and death.

It should be no surprise to see so many Eden dwellers turn away from all this and scurry back to retrenchment and denial, the burden of intellectual dishonesty and cognitive dissonance still lighter than the terrifying alternative. The only other options are to water down one’s faith with accommodationism, which brings its own dishonesty and dissonance, or abandon it altogether. But science has set forth the flaming sword, and the Garden cannot remain occupied for long.²⁶

Coyne provides some useful discussion of the theological dangers in that tall grass, too, including a crystal-clear falsification of the whole Adam and Eve idea (pp. 126-27), experimental demonstrations “that no external force seems to be producing mutations in an adaptively useful way” (p. 138), and a thorough debunking of the “fine-tuning” argument (pp. 160-66). Faith vs. Fact is not a book limited or even really focused on the theological problems posed by evolutionary reality, but it certainly gives the reader a flavor of what is keeping those poll numbers so high, one decade after the next, while the science marches on.

Facing Facts

“The vast majority of believers don’t want their faith examined skeptically,” Coyne observes in his concluding chapter about why this all matters. Nor “do they honestly examine other faiths to find why they see their own is true and those others as false.” What religion does, instead, is to defend “its claims by turning them into a watertight edifice immune to refutation.” The preachers and imams and their faithful listeners aren’t really interested in what is true; if they were, they would acknowledge that what they are currently thinking might not be. But that is a step they do not and cannot take, despite Coyne’s eminently sensible proposition that it is “better to find out how the world really works instead of making up stories about it, or accepting stories concocted centuries ago.”

I am no longer so concerned about religion as I used to be, and I hope for the same world that Jerry Coyne wants: “one in which the strength of one’s beliefs about matters of fact is proportional to the evidence . . . where it is okay to reserve judgment if one doesn’t know the answer, and where it’s not seen as offensive to doubt the claims of others.” ²⁷ I want that world, too, and I try to live my life as if it has already arrived.

But our culture is pervaded with irrationality and stubborn beliefs in what is palpably not true, and that has a way of creeping into one’s life regardless. It is not just felt in the aftershocks of religion rejected–the loss of a social network, the worries about superstitions being taught to children, the difficulties experienced by loved ones still inside the church walls. It also manifests in outbreaks of measles caused by vaccine deniers, in the disparaging and defunding of our educational system by a disinterested and even hostile public, and in what has concerned me most during this summer of heat and drought and smoke: climate change whose human causes and even whose very presence so many are still denying.

Not something I want to lose. [Flickr page]

“Doctrines may be a frightful burden,” Willam Catton wrote a generation ago in Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, another of the worthy books I’ve read during these past months. For, “with the prestige of antiquity and tradition, they deprive the living generation of an open-minded capacity to face facts.” ²⁸ It is a piece of the same puzzle that Coyne describes, just focused on a different form of faith–in limitless growth without consequence.

To avoid despairing of our ongoing ecological disaster, we have constructed ourselves a giant cargo cult, in which our modern “faith in science and technology as infallible solvers of any conceivable problem can be, in a post-exuberant world, just as superstitious” as the Melanasians who constructed runways in anticipation of John Frum’s return with piles of loot. Catton describes this in a chapter of his 1982 work with the eerily identical title to Coyne’s book: “Faith versus Fact.” He writes that the “modern Cargoist who expects to be bailed out of this year’s ecological predicament by next year’s technological breakthrough holds similar beliefs because of his inadequate knowledge of ecology and of technology’s role in it. Both Cargoist faiths rest upon the quicksand of fundamental ignorance lubricated by superficial knowledge.” ²⁹

This is not a faith from which I can just walk away, as I did with Christian fundamentalism, difficult as that was. So I do my empty penances (Catton: “We may come to feel guilty about stealing from the future, but we will continue to do it”) and look outside the window, air conditioner running, at my big trees that have lived through a hundred summers. They may not survive many more as hot and dry as the one that is burning the American West right now. And I find myself wishing for a sanctuary in which I might sing, to keep those facts away. But I know better, and this is the way I will always live, with a mind clear and free, still with more joy than sorrow just the same.

———

See Jerry Coyne’s book page for more information about Faith vs. Fact, a highly recommended read. If you are wrestling with doubts about a religion that you’re not sure is true anymore, and science has any part in that struggle, give yourself a few days with this work. Reality can be difficult, but the pain of trying to deny it when you know better is far worse.

My thanks to Jerry for his nice write-up of this review.

Notes

---

1. Faith vs. Fact, p. xxii. ↩

2. p. 246. ↩

3. p. 245. ↩

4. See my first book, The Examination of the Pearl. ↩

5. Faith vs. Fact, p. 245. ↩

6. The situation is actually worse than Dr. Coyne may realize. You also have to be the right kind of Laestadian to be saved, a faithful member of the correct one of at least five different splinter groups who all make their own extreme exclusivity claims. ↩

7. p. xvi. ↩

8. pp. 195-96. ↩

9. p. 108. ↩

10. p. 92. ↩

11. p. 95. ↩

12. “Why I Had to Change My Mind.” In Richard Gross, Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour, 6th ed. (London: Hodder Education), pp. 86-87. The quote is from a draft version available online at susanblackmore.co.uk/​Chapters/Gross2010.htm. ↩

13. p. 93. ↩

14. p. xxi. ↩

15. pp. 91. Back when I was a faithful Bible believer, I would have responded to the challenge with Jesus’ examples of saved and unsaved people at the moment of his second coming: “I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other will be left. There will be two women grinding at the same place; one will be taken and the other will be left. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other will be left” (Luke 17:34-36, NASB). They didn’t realize the earth was round back when that was written, I used to think, so how would a human author know to use workday examples along with a nocturnal one? But, alas, that last part about men working in the field wasn’t in the original text, and the odds of such an accidental “revelation” never occurring in thousands of lines of Scripture are very low indeed. ↩

16. pp. 227-28. ↩

17. p. 86. ↩

18. p. 85. ↩

19. The twenty years begins on the day you file the patent application, although there are no enforceable rights until claims appear in an issued patent. Some limited term extensions are possible due to certain administrative delays in getting the patent grant, but overall, patents differ from the Mickey-mouse charade of perpetual legislative updates to copyright terms in that patented ideas do usefully pass to the public good. I expect to see Walt’s precious mouse in the public domain when he can skate over frozen hellfire, perhaps to the tune of Let it Go. ↩

20. p. 85. ↩

21. p. 64. ↩

22. p. 59. ↩

23. An Examination of the Pearl (2012), §4.3.1: “But theological imperative does not equal truth. It couldn’t do so even when the Church had the rack and the stake at its disposal. The facts just sit there, mute, uncaring about how vehemently people deny their existence. . . . The only alternative to accepting the overwhelming evidence of man’s non-Adamic, evolutionary origins is to say that the evidence is false and was planted by God in fossils, vestigial body parts, patterns of speciation, ongoing and directly observed evolutionary changes, and a newly discovered treasure trove of information in our own DNA that matches up remarkably with all the observations that had been made beforehand. There is absolutely nothing contradicting that evidence except some ancient Hebrew writings (which themselves contradict each other) and the mountain of theology that has piled up on top of those writings over the centuries.” ↩

24. Faith vs. Fact, p. 59. ↩

25. p. 60. ↩

26. Robert M. Price and Edwin A. Suominen, Evolving out of Eden. Valley, WA: Tellectual Press (2013), p. 311. ↩

27. Faith vs. Fact, p. 260. ↩

28. Willam R. Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press (1982), Ch. 5, “The End of Exuberance.” Citing an 1896 essay by sociologist William Graham Sumner. ↩

29. Catton, Ch. 11, “Faith versus Fact.” ↩

 

A Life Celebration: Frank Zindler

Voices that are stilled still sing
* Of never-fading beauty,
* Of never-dying love.

—Frank Zindler, “Victrola Rolls”

Frank Zindler (1939—)

We often honor the lives of people whom we love and respect after they die. Friends, family, and colleagues gather around the mortal remains of the departed to share kind words and fond memories about him or her. It’s a time-honored ritual, and a worthy one. But, unfortunately, it always comes just a few days too late to make much of an impression on the person being honored.

Frank Zindler is one of the individuals I’ve had the privilege of meeting–if only by correspondence and telephone–who will be widely eulogized when his long and remarkable life finally ends. That day is hopefully still a couple of decades away, but the approach of his 75th year seems occasion enough to offer a tribute to this amazing man.

I asked Frank what he thought about the idea of offering him a “pre-bituary” on this blog, fearing it might seem a bit ghoulish. He was, it turned out, quite grateful and enthusiastic:

This is wonderful. I am deeply touched. I can’t help but think of Franz Schubert, who, by the time he was my age had been dead for 44 years and who, in his thirty-one-year life, was virtually unknown except to a small coterie of close friends and admirers. I don’t deserve to be so lucky. I almost feel guilty.

Frank is a vocal and firm atheist who discarded any hope (or fear!) of an afterlife fifty years ago. He isn’t concerned about where he will be when his heart finally squeezes off its last beat, when the billions of neurons in his prodigious brain flicker into darkness. As with all of us, wherever we now stand on our separate unmarked roads heading for that same destination, there simply will be no Frank at that point.

So let’s talk a little bit about Frank Zindler while he’s here to appreciate what’s being said.

I am fortunate to count Frank R. Zindler as a good friend. One cannot talk about Frank without praising him, as much as this always makes him laugh. But what else can one say? Frank has active knowledge of an astonishing range of languages, ancient and modern. He might have sold his soul for that alone! But in fact he drove a harder bargain. His expert knowledge of science, medicine, history, ancient religions, Jewish and Christian scripture, etc., etc., is unexcelled. “Frankly,” I am continually amazed. And his energy! The man is a human dynamo: translator, author, editor, composer, musician, debater, stand-up comic, New Testament scholar. I’m getting tired just trying to list everything! I can only compare him to my hero Albert Schweitzer in his energy, abilities, and achievements. –Robert M. Price

Origins

Frank R. Zindler was born on May 23, 1939 in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Thirteen years later, he graduated the eighth grade at a two-room country school. He received a scholarship to Concordia Lutheran Seminary in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for high school and seminary, but was unable to accept it due to the recent death of his father. The following year, after giving a qualifying lecture “The Carbon-Nitrogen Cycle and Energy Production in the Sun,” he was admitted to the Berrien County Astronomical Society. He was fourteen years old.

The tragedy of his father’s death had turned young Frank into “the most religious person in [his] family.” But it was a temporary transition. Once in high school, he read through the Bible on his own in an effort to parallel the curriculum he imagined would have been offered to him at the seminary. This was no casual effort; in addition to Latin, Frank studied Greek and Hebrew to better understand the biblical languages.

Frank Zindler has been my friend and fellow Atheist activist for over three decades. Beyond being an extraordinary scholar, he has always been devoted to his family, especially Ann, his late wife and best friend. Over these many years he has entertained and enlightened Michigan Atheists with his lectures, stood shoulder to shoulder with us at pickets and rallies and played with us at our spring equinox picnics. Michigan’s university and college students reap the rewards of secular assembly thanks to Frank as he was instrumental in the formation of the national and highly successful Secular Student Alliance. And who can forget his outstanding film presentation at our state Atheist convention in 2005, highlighting his efforts as he represented America’s Atheists at the Fifth World Atheist Conference in India? Oh my–there is so much more to be said, and how does one properly thank Frank for his vigilance in promoting and protecting our secular rights? –Arlene-Marie

Many of us who have undertaken similar Bible reading projects, even without Frank’s level of diligence and linguistic skill, might guess how this turned out. It was, he says, a “disaster” sowing seeds of doubt, which

would grow into the tree of skepticism that would ultimately blossom into Atheism. By the time I reached the book of Exodus (the second book of the Christian Bible) I was troubled. After reading through the books of Numbers, Joshua, and Ezra I was horrified by the morally outrageous behavior of Jehovah (Yahweh), who commanded the Israelites to commit genocide over and over again. I went to my Lutheran minister in distress over the relevant passages in the Bible, and he rather disingenuously tried to explain things away.

By his sophomore year in high school, Frank had quit going to church except for special occasions. That, he says, “was very distressing because I had been assistant organist and I loved to play the pipe organ.” Churches are about the only places you can find the things, after all.¹

But he had been “morally repulsed” by the Old Testament, and was beginning to have second thoughts about the New. How could the death of an innocent person justify the “sins” of someone else? The whole thing came back to the idea of sacrifice. Why, Frank asked, would a good God even require sacrifice?

Adding to these concerns was one that had come early on in his high school education: the devil of Darwin. When his biology classes introduced him to evolution, the troubled and still-pious Frank asked his mother what to do. She suggested reading what the man actually had to say:

Surely, I would be able for myself to see what was wrong with Darwin and explain it to my teacher when he started to teach about evolution. So, I had an aunt who lived in town who sponsored me to get a library card at the public library. I checked out Darwin and began to read. To my astonishment, Darwin made his case so thoroughly that I became an evolutionist.²

Looking back, Frank thinks he was an atheist “in all but self-recognition” when he graduated high school. (At age sixteen!) But when he arrived at Kalamazoo College, he was horrified to find “that everyone was an atheist, including the dean of chapel.” Frank found himself practically the last defender of the faith on campus, though his own had become an anemic one.³

Chapel at Kalamazoo College
Photo: Jeff Daly, CC-NC-SA licensed.

The last vestiges of theism fell away from Frank’s worldview around Halloween of his 18th year. He was attending an “all-night bull session” with five or so friends, and one of them asked a form of the age-old question about an omnipotent God: “Can he build a wall so sturdy he can’t tear it down?” His friend had posed the question more in jest than seriously, and it would have run off Frank “like water off a duck’s back” a year earlier. But Frank’s recent efforts to develop a propositional calculus, had given him the habit of looking at every word in detail.

When his friend hit him with the omnipotence paradox, Frank immediately saw the incoherence of the whole idea. They spent another hour or two coming up with corollaries. If God is infinite, he is everywhere. Then he cannot not be in a particular place, and so God is in the devil, indeed was present in Frank’s friend as he questioned God.

I told Frank my favorite form of the paradox, which I recall seeing somewhere on reddit.com: “Can God microwave a burrito so hot he can’t eat it?” That got a good laugh, long and sparkling with light notes. This was a powerful voice on the other end of the phone, almost overwhelming in all the wisdom it conveyed with every word uttered during our conversations. But it’s one that rings out with humanity and the joy of living, too, ready to laugh and grow heavy with emotion about loved ones and memories.

Atheism

Just as religious faith is a cherished aspect of many people’s lives, the decisive rejection of religion is an important part of Frank’s identity. The atheism he adopted all those years ago is not the shoulder-shrugging “I just don’t buy it, next topic” kind of unbelief quietly practiced by many millions of people. It is a loud, emphatic harrumph, a clearing of the throat that is heard, if not around the world, then at least around skeptical circles–via his lectures, work in atheist and secular organizations, involvement with various books published by American Atheist Press, and more than 400 commercial radio and television interviews and debates.

His four volumes (thus far) of articles collected in Through Atheist Eyes are full of wit and wisdom. The breadth of Frank’s knowledge is simply astounding, and these articles show it. They are, of course, from an atheist magazine, and thus share the theme of criticizing religion in its myriad forms. Frank’s express wish in his Preface to the collection is that it “will help at least a bit to break the mental chains that purveyors of the supernatural have thrown around the minds of men and women for as long as we have record.” The many hundreds of pages that follow pose tough questions for seemingly everyone and everything religious, from Jesus to Joseph Smith. Reading through them, it’s all too easy to forget how much more there is to Frank–his love of music, languages, literature, logic, history, science, and people, to hit on some of the highlights.

Frank and Ann Zindler (from left) with Madalyn Murray O’Hair (seated), her grand-
daughter and adopted daughter (Robin Murray-O’Hair, the daughter of Bill Murray),
and her son Jon Garth Murray, at that time president of American Atheists.

He did his first public lecture on the origins of life in 1959, and was vocal as an atheist from that point on. But things really took off in 1977, when he saw an advertisement in the Schenectady Gazette from a woman who had become famous–infamous as far as the religious were concerned–as an outspoken atheist: Madalyn Murray O’Hair. She’d founded American Atheists fourteen years earlier (then under the name Society of Separationists) and in 1963 had won a Supreme Court ruling against state-mandated prayer and Bible readings in public schools.⁴

I succeeded Frank Zindler as president of American Atheists, but I’m the first to tell you that no one can “succeed” or surpass Frank in much of anything. The survival of the organization–and its thriving–are directly down to Frank, and to his late wife Ann (their work on many things cannot be separated out, and Frank would not want anyone to try).

Frank Zindler is the quintessential combination of things rarely combined:

• a linguist;
• a biblical scholar who, atheist though he ardently is, has impressed many a Christian scholar;
• a scientist;
• a philanthropist;
• a debater and fearless verbal fighter for truth;
• a public speaker and sought after wit;
• an editor and renowned publisher;
• a scholarly intellectual of the first rate, with publications; aplenty (books–including four volumes–so far–of Through Atheist Eyes–and essays);
• an activist leader who many others have gladly followed.

I’m proud to serve as a fellow director with Frank Zindler on the board of American Atheists, an organization for which he has given wealth, wisdom, and work–time, talent, and treasure–for decades now. –Ed Buckner

Frank drove a hundred miles to New York City so he could see O’Hair speak. When he returned home, he started the Schenectady chapter of American Atheists. Frank and his wife Ann learned how to do cable access TV programming, and became friends and allies with O’Hair. Most famously, Frank joined her 1977 suit to get “In God We Trust” removed from U.S. money. He “made the rounds of radio and television talk-shows in the New York State Capital District,” which “infuriated the right-wing politicians who controlled the purse strings of the college” at which he was teaching.

These included the Fulton County Board of Supervisors, which introduced a “Resolution Protesting Remarks of Frank R. Zindler to Delete the Words ‘In God We Trust’ from American Currency.” By Frank’s account, they were difficult people to have as enemies.

The Board realized that even though I was Chairman of the Division of Science, Nursing, and Technology at Fulton-Montgomery Community College (SUNY), technically I was still a professor, not an administrator. I had tenure. I could not be fired except for professional incompetence or criminal acts, and the only “crime” of which I was guilty in the view of the supervisors was my defense of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States. Unlike the SUNY four-year colleges and university centers, the community colleges drew finding from three sources: the State of New York, tuition, and–you guessed it–the sponsoring county or counties. Funding from the state and tuition were automatic. The County Board of Supervisors controlled the purse strings of the school. The Board refused to approve a budget for the college “until that atheist is eliminated.”⁵

An even darker side of religious America rewarded him with “dozens of death threats over the years.” Perhaps the most worrisome was from

a man who could disguise his voice in multiple ways and then, after engaging me in conversation, would revert to what I suppose was his real voice and snarl, “The same thing that happened to Madalyn and Robin is going to happen to you and your wife.”⁶

What happened to Madalyn and Robin, and Madalyn’s son Jon, was a kidnapping and brutal murder in 1995. About a year after that horrible event, having accepted Robin’s former position of editor at American Atheist Press, Frank wrote an impassioned eulogy at Atheists.org:

We struggle to comprehend how lives so filled with promise and achievement should be snuffed out like candles in a sudden draft, how persons who have done so much to liberate the minds and elevate the aspirations of their fellows should come so startlingly and senselessly to naught. The incomprehensible injustice of these deaths shall haunt the innermost reaches and recesses of our minds like a ghost no exorcist can expel.⁷

The Diary of Ann (and) Frank

Frank married Ann Elizabeth Hunt in 1964. The Zindlers had a daughter Catherine, who gave them three grandchildren: Michael, Steven, and Laura.⁸ On their first anniversary, Ann received this from Frank:

Twelve million breaths of air have passed

Our lips since passed the breath

That said you’d be my wedded wife

And scared me half to death.

Fifty-eight billion miles and more–One

trip around the sun–A

dizzy race it is we’ve run,

But hasn’t it been fun?

And after giving birth to Catherine, she got a poem that began as follows:

Our love is now the pulse of life:

Syncarnate in one common flesh

And beating single, full with life,

Our separate hearts are One.

Ann Zindler (1935-2013)

His love for Ann was touchingly evident during our conversations. She finally and painfully succumbed to cancer in January 2013, after five years in and out of hospitals, and the loss is still raw for him. Yet he takes comfort in his memories of her–accompanying her bird watching and seeing her do glass work until a few weeks before her death–and the impact she had. Her life, he wrote in a tribute published two days after it ended, “has been transformed from a material being into a torrent of cascading memories, but the world of reason is the better for her having lived.”

They worked together on a cause they shared: Theirs was “a philosophical, activist, and loving partnership that never faltered until it was dissolved by death.” Ann was a lifelong non-believer, “someone who simply cannot believe in things without evidence.” At age five, she had balked at putting her nickel in the collection plate because she didn’t see why Jesus needed it. Being “sent off to get religion” at a Christian college did nothing to change her viewpoint. “There being around forty rules (‘commandments’) governing life in the dormitory, she and another ne’er-do-well systematically set out to break them all,” and she was asked not to return for a second year.⁹

I consider myself privileged to get to know Frank Zindler and call him my friend and my mentor. Frank is an amazing person, who collected all the best genetic traits and developed them throughout time to perfection. His knowledge and understanding of science and his passion for languages, music and poetry coexist with a delicate and very loyal soul that he always was. He is the combination of genius and absolutely royal compassion and ability to love–his family and friends, his teachers and his colleagues. When Ann was sick, he was her primary caregiver, her patient’s advocate who was incredibly attentive to details. Thanks to that, she was able to live a longer and happier life. He wrote her poems of love, which she appreciated very much, and he took great care of her.

Friends trust him with their disabled children to be taken care of after a parent’s departure. Family can count on him at all times. He is the backbone of the family. Great friend, amazing and sensitive human being, extremely hard working and selfless.

In light of his upcoming 75th B-DAY I only wish for him to be healthy, happy and with us for a long, long time. –Dr. Tatyana Geyro

The devotion of these two old lovers can be seen in what has become one of my favorite poems, written by Frank the year before Ann’s death. The inevitable end of her health struggles had become all too clear to both of them, and this is what “wrote itself” with Frank’s pen in the spring of 2012:

Let me go first into that night

Where all paths disappear

Into the silence of the stars

And naught remains to fear.

Go not before me to that void

Nor cast me back to grieve.

Stay with me ‘til the hour when I’m

Coerced at last to leave.

Beautiful as it is, Ann objected to the poem. She didn’t want to be the one left behind, any more than her husband did.

There is a type of immortality, Frank says. It is one of ideas, left for others in print and memories. Some people “enjoy” more of that than others after their deaths, in that they have changed the lives of other people. In a sense, our actions, and the results of our actions, survive us.

This book of yours, he counseled his decades-younger interviewer, will still be there when you are not. Your ideas will continue to influence other people after your physical body is gone. The way you have altered the lives of other people, whether it be your children, your friends, and your enemies if you have any. There are “unending consequences” to lives well lived.

I told Frank how much I think of his poem to Ann, how I have read it aloud to others on a couple of occasions. Here was one of the times when that light voice on the telephone cracked and halted. His tribute to a beloved wife lives on through that poem and my appreciation of it, he said, explaining how the same thing happened for a 13-year old girl through her father’s epitaph 2300 years ago. See my previous posting on this blog for that remarkable story.

Full Speed Ahead

Frank’s high school chemistry teacher had been a member of the American Chemical Society, and the journal Chemical Abstracts to which he subscribed had been young Frank’s source of information with which to design experiments isolating rubidium from beets. After having his administrative position eliminated, his funding starved, and his favorite courses cut, he began a new career at age 43: a linquist, “putting information into that same journal.”¹⁰ He mused that “some new student somewhere would be learning to do something equally exciting!” It was, Frank says, “like living in a dream that was being created by reactivation of memories.”

For most of his life, he “had been made to feel guilty for spending money on foreign language books and for ‘wasting time’ trying to learn Sanskrit, Egyptian, Mayan, or whatever.” But “it was my ability to decipher odd languages that was my main bargaining chip” for this new occupation.¹¹ And thirty years later, he is still applying that ability, astoundingly so. He employs 12-16 languages in a typical week, 18-20 over the course of a typical month.

“This is just reading,” Frank hastened to tell me, lest I get the impression that he might be a language prodigy or something. “Major languages” he reads fairly well, he says, but with the obscure ones, it comes down to “deciphering” with a dictionary. He used to “do” Arabic and Japanese, but says those languages now have plenty of native speakers where he works.

But he could re-learn them quickly if he had to, he adds. Indeed, re-learning Arabic is on his bucket list. All told, Frank has been fluent in German, Spanish, Czeck, French, Italian, Arabic, and Japanese. He also spoke modern Greek fairly well at one time.

I am honored to count Frank Zindler as a friend and colleague. Frank never ceases to amaze me with the breadth and depth of his knowledge in many and diverse fields. I am convinced he could hold a PhD in a half-dozen disciplines as diverse as geology and theology. He could have had a career as a musician and composer, had he wished. And his facility with languages is truly mind-boggling. While I struggle to remember a simple greeting in Spanish, Frank studies Sanskrit for recreation. He is a true Renaissance man, and an “apostle” for science and reason in an age of superstition. But most of all, he is a caring, compassionate human being. –James R. Burgtorf

This lifetime of linguistic learning is still ongoing. Frank gave a lecture (“a smashing success!”) just this month for his Lithuanian historical linguistics seminar at Ohio State University:

My seminar professor, who is one of a half-dozen greatest authorities in the world on the evolution of the Greek language and also my professor in Intermediate Sanskrit, said he had learned a lot from me in the course of the course and led the class in applause! I was dumbfounded but held back my tears until I was safely outside. The course is the highest-numbered linguistics course offered at OSU as far as I can tell, just five doctoral candidates and me–plus the head of the Slavic department who joined us occasionally. I’ve never had even an introductory linguistics course in my life, being entirely an autodidact.

Did you catch the part about Intermediate Sanskrit? Frank is now taking his second semester of that course. I asked him what grade he got for the first semester. He laughed, hesitated, and then said it was an “A.”

Better Late than Never

In 2019 (this section is a November 2021 update to the original essay of April 2014), Frank put out another book, Confessions of a Born-Again Atheist, which tells his amazing life story still continuing after 80 years. There was something important he wanted to get off his chest, which he writes about in the book.

It’s important to him, because he felt unable to tell anyone about it other than Ann, until he was finally ready at his 80th birthday party. The response he got to that announcement–from more than a hundred friends gathered with him–was a standing ovation, and I certainly would have stood and cheered along with them. I’ll let Frank explain:

By the twenty-first century, gay rights had become pretty much a given. It seemed like everyone had come out of the closet, even some TV and sports celebrities. Everyone, that is, but me. The longer I had deceived my friends and colleagues, the more impossible it became to tell them I had been deceiving them. In 2008 I became interim president of American Atheists itself. For six months, I was Madalyn [Murray O’Hair]’s successor as leader in the Atheist-liberation movement. The public image of Atheism itself was now at stake. I couldn’t come out. Even after gay marriage was ruled constitutional; even when I myself would officiate at a gay wedding, I couldn’t escape from my closet.

But now he has. It’s tragic that Frank couldn’t be frank about who he was for so long, although he did see quite a bit of action in that closet back in the day, if his list on page 38 of the book is any indication. And then there was a love affair with an Episcopal bishop that lasted for several years. It ended just before he married Ann in 1964–in a ceremony cut short by Ann rolling her eyes back in her head to keep their hillbilly preacher from rambling on any longer about wives being submissive to their husbands.

There was nothing inauthentic or deceptive about his marriage to this woman, though. He loved her deeply and genuinely. She knew which team he was batting for, even of his clerical lover. The thought of him “cavorting with an Episcopal bishop,” as he puts it, amused her.

The reason he did no further cavorting was simply because of the bishop’s own views on sex outside of marriage. That shows what I find to be a laudable theological consistency, even if the bishop was not quite so concerned about sex before marriage, at which the Bible wags its bony finger of indignation far more than it actually does about homosexuality.

Frank and Ann were soulmates between people who didn’t believe in souls, and bed-mates as well. So what if the sexual attraction only went in one direction? It worked, and they both knew what was going on, having a daughter in the process. Theirs certainly wasn’t the first such marriage, regardless of sexual orientation. I would venture to say that there have been quite a few entirely heterosexual marriages in many varieties of religious fundamentalism between a woman who has been treated as breeding stock and property all her life, passive and submissive, and a husband who neither knows nor cares about the lack of sexual energy, er, coming his way.

I spoke with Frank again recently, and expressed the hope that he would find a Mr. Right to share his last decade or two with. He’s not too sure; kind of busy lately. Still working full-time as a linguist and patent analyist at the age of 82, now handling a lot of COVID-19 patents. It’s pretty exciting, he says.

“Pretty exciting” is an apt description for Frank’s remarkable life as a whole.

———

Click on (most) images to enlarge. With the exception of the Kalamazoo chapel image by Jeff Daly, post-processed and reproduced under a Creative Commons license, all are post-processed versions of what was provided to me by Frank and are used with his permission. Also used with his permission are his poetry, along with material from “Eliminate that Atheist!” and his Curriculum Vitae.

See two other postings on this blog, “Endings” and “On Felines and Frenchmen,” for more of Frank’s fascinating stories.

Notes

Notes

---

1. TABEE3I website, “Interview with Frank Zindler” (February 2010). tabee3i.com/​page/interviews/en/​Frank-Zindler/ ←

2. Id. ←

3. Id.; personal communication. ←

4. Wikipedia, American Atheists ←

5. Frank Zindler, “Eliminate that Atheist!”, in Through Atheist Eyes, vol. 5 (forthcoming). ←

6. Frank Zindler, “Remembering Madalyn Murray O’Hair,
   the Founder of American Atheists.” Reprinted at the Friendly Atheist blog, patheos.com/​blogs/friendlyatheist/​2013/04/28/​remembering-madalyn-murray-ohair-the-founder-of-american-atheists ←

7. Reprinted at nowscape.com/​atheism/zindler_memoriam.htm. ←

8. Freethought Nation website, “Frank Zindler’s wife of 48 years, Ann, has died.” freethoughtnation.com/​frank-zindlers-wife-of-48-years-ann-has-died/ ←

9. Frank Zindler, “Remembering Ann.” American Atheists website, news.atheists.org/​2013/01/06/​remembering-ann/ ←

10. In his “Eliminate that Atheist!” chapter, Frank tells a harrowing story of ill treatment at the community college following his public participation in the 1977 “In God We Trust” litigation. My summary in this sentence is based only on his account, and I haven’t investigated whether there is another side to the story. ←

11. Frank Zindler, “Eliminate that Atheist!” ←

Dismantling Design with Fact and Fiction

Book review: Cross Examined. Bob Seidensticker (2011). References are to locations in the Kindle edition.

The idea that there is some intelligent designer behind the beauty and complexity of our natural world is an ancient and intuitively appealing one. The Apostle Paul sniffed at the pagans as being “without excuse” because they ought to have known the one true God from the “invisible things of him” that are “clearly seen” from creation (Rom. 1: 19-20). A few centuries later, Augustine wrote that “the world itself, by its well-ordered changes and movements, and by the fair appearance of all visible things, bears a testimony of its own, both that it has been created, and also that it could not have been created save by God, whose greatness and beauty are unutterable and invisible” (City of God, Book XI, Ch. 4).

I felt that way, too, until just a few years ago. For me, there will be no forgetting the sharp clarity of one sunny morning when I contemplated my very personal loss of the design argument in view of what I’d been learning about evolution. Standing there, I finally thought, with the scary first glimmer of a new worldview, My God of the gaps is gone.

One of the most concise and powerful refutations of the design argument I’ve come across since then was not in a biology or philosophy text, but a novel. Bob Seidensticker’s insightful and entertaining Cross Examined follows the troubled path of a young evangelical named—probably not coincidentally—”Paul” in San Francisco before and after the great earthquake of 1906. Paul has accepted it as a personal challenge to convert a friendly but sharp-tongued old atheist, “Jim,” to the Truth of Christianity.

He’s found it tough going. Finally, after consultation with his mentor and pastor, he decides to make use of the design argument. But Jim easily dismantles that, taking Paul’s now-wavering faith for a bumpy ride.

San Francisco cable car: Jim or Paul could have ridden one of these in 1906.  [Flickr page]

After listening to Paul gush about the world’s marvelous things—rainbows and sunsets, children, flowers, etc.—Jim responds with a list of nature’s horrors. “There’s a hell of a lot of pain and suffering in the world to go along with the good things,” he concludes.

“Perhaps God has a reason,” Paul replies, but Jim is having none of it. What he says to Paul isn’t something that many of us are happy to entertain, Christian or otherwise: There is simply “no reason at all. Our earth looks just as it would if there were no purpose, no design, and no wise designer” (loc. 2090).

Paleyesque San Francisco Building  [Flickr page]

Well, Paul asks, what about Paley’s watch? Here he refers to one of the most famous formulations of the design argument. William Paley began his 1802 work Natural Theology by asking readers to imagine that he’s come across a watch lying in a field. Unlike some ordinary rock whose humble natural origins are easier to envision, no one would claim that such a complicated device with all its gears and dials was always there, or that it’s a mere consequence of nature. “There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed” it, “who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.” The watch, Paley said, must have had a maker.

Not so, says Jim. And here is where Seidensticker reveals something quite brilliant through the mouth of his fictional character:

What’s amusing about Paley’s watch argument is that it defeats itself. Let’s imagine his original situation. He’s walking in a field and discovers the watch. It looks out of place, different from the plants and rocks. But if it looks different from nature because it looks designed, then nature must not look designed. You can’t argue on the one hand that the watch looks remarkable and stands out from the natural background, and on the other that the watch looks similar to nature, so both must be designed. [loc. 2093]

Thus the whole backdrop of the design argument—the supposed grandeur of the natural world—falls away. The dirt and rocks and grasses can’t provide a contrast to the intricate watch if you claim they were designed, too. No contrast, no argument. It’s like claiming that the Mona Lisa is the most valuable painting in the Louvre because it was painted.

The frost is just as natural, and non-designed, as the evolved needles.  [Flickr page]

And Seidensticker’s fictional atheist adds plenty of explanation for why all that natural stuff really wasn’t designed:

“We marvel at God’s handiwork only after we know that he exists.” Jim leaned forward. “The design argument simply takes a childish view of the world. Does the world look designed by an omniscient and benevolent god? Go to the freak show at the circus—it’s a museum of nature’s poor design. Siamese twins, two-headed pigs, bearded ladies, the Lizard Man, hermaphrodites, dwarves, giants. Monsters like the Elephant Man and unfortunates with all manner of birth defects. Deformed babies floating in formaldehyde. Is this the best that God can do?” [loc. 2099]

We have acquired much more evidence against the idea of natural design in the hundred years since the setting of Cross Examined. Molecular biology informs us about fossil genes that serve no purpose anymore but remain in the DNA because evolution has no incentive to tidy things up, and about viruses that tap into the DNA of their hosts for the sole purpose of replicating their few ruthless genes. By placing his characters as far back as he did, Seidensticker limited how much science Jim could tell Paul about. But that simplifies things and makes the book a clearer, more powerful work, while adding in the interest of some historical color.

Old against new near Chinatown, San Francisco  [Flickr page]

The facts Jim cites to his “Christian antagonist” are about things people actually saw back then, with their own eyes. Our modern knowledge about DNA and its evolutionary past is utterly damning for creationism, of both the Ken Ham and Discovery Institute varieties. But I wonder if the remoteness of that microscopic evidence from our personal experience makes it easier to dismiss, for those who are driven to do so.

That mindset is another thing Seidensticker has Jim address, and powerfully so: “Rationalization starts with God’s existence: given Christianity, how can I square it with the facts? Reason starts with the facts and follows them where they lead” (loc. 2162). So too with his important but little appreciated distinction between the terms trust and faith:

“But you use faith yourself,” Paul said. “You don’t know for certain that the sun will rise tomorrow. That you believe it will rise shows faith.”

“I trust that the sun will rise tomorrow,” Jim said. “Trust is belief in accord with evidence, and faith is belief despite a lack of evidence. When you trust, new evidence can change that belief, but when you believe on faith, you’re immune to new evidence. ‘Trust’ and ‘faith’ are two useful words, but don’t confuse them.” [loc. 3509]

There many other bits of wisdom in this book. It’s all carried along fairly smoothly with the flow of an entertaining yarn about a young man dealing with love, poverty, despair, and faith in the vibrant and sometimes merciless San Francisco of the early twentieth century.

Brooding Ship in San Francisco Bay  [Flickr page]

The storyline does get a bit strained when Seidensticker burdens his characters with big ideas to communicate over implausibly detailed dialogues. In the process, Jim, Paul, and Paul’s pastor are sometimes reduced to caricatures of the roles they play to make the author’s points about the myriad problems with Christianity. Jim the wise atheist is full of knowledge, patience, and seemingly no second thoughts about his unbelief. Paul is the perfect—perhaps a little too perfect—foil for the old sage, with his wide-eyed quest for wisdom in the midst of an ambitious evangelicalism. Paul’s pastor offers few surprises—Jimmy Swaggart minus the microphone, with a three-piece suit and top hat.

The Socratic Dialogue is an ancient literary technique, one that isn’t used much as a way of getting one’s point across anymore. But it has been done far less artfully than Seidensticker pulls it off. Justin Martyr’s second-century Dialogue with Trypho is an amusingly implausible example: The Christian and Jewish character on each side of the “dialogue” recite their gigantic lines entirely and transparently for the purpose of Justin’s Christian apologetics. Finally, the Christian hero prepares to sail off into the sunset, leaving his Jewish host all but nodding and scratching his chin in thoughtful assent to all the wisdom he’s just received: “I have been particularly pleased with the conference; and I think that these [other Jews] are of quite the same opinion as myself. For we have found more than we expected, and more than it was possible to have expected. And if we could do this more frequently, we should be much helped in the searching of the Scriptures themselves” (Ch. 142).

For Justin’s early Christianity and Seidensticker’s atheism nearly two thousand years later, the fictional hero gets his work accomplished with much speaking, more on the author’s side than the other, and a drastic change in the other party’s religious views seems imminent. But Seidensticker’s hero talks sense instead of spouting dogma, and his characters have some interesting experiences along the way to their conclusion, even if it might not be to anyone’s surprise. It’s fiction with focus, and well done. Highly recommended.

———

Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out their photo pages in my Flickr photostream. All except the cover image at the top are Copyright © 2013-14 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Check out Bob Seidensticker’s Cross Examined blog at Patheos.com.

A Fading Fascination with Faith

What a relief, to be rid of that obnoxious, intrusive presence, and to have my privacy and the freedom to explore my own thoughts and feelings returned to me.

—Edmund Cohen,
quoted in Walking Away From Faith by Ruth Tucker

Hikiau Heiau at Kealakekua Bay [Flickr page]

When you have spent your entire life as one of a chosen few recipients of “living faith” in “God’s Kingdom,” the only place on earth where salvation is to be found, your religion is no casual matter. As you progressed through childhood and the milestone of Confirmation Camp, and continued along the church’s clearly marked path of courtship, marriage, and children (lots of them), its importance rose onto a central pedestal from which it looks out over the whole of your thinking.

The foundation stones of that altar are from your childhood indoctrination: teachings about Jesus riding into Jerusalem and then writhing on the cross, eternal life versus damnation, and sin, sin, sin, in all its abundant variety. Its upper layers are built from the same sort of material, too, repeated in weekly sermons and visits with believing friends.

But there are additional reinforcements to keep faith sitting firmly in its venerated place. Your social structure has been defined, and limited, for you: cousins, respected elders, and childhood friends, all from church. It’s very difficult to do anything that would jeopardize that, and rejecting the faith you all share certainly will. Then there is the lurking realization that you’ve made irrevocable decisions about the people populating your life and your home, about all the things you’ve let yourself miss out on.¹ That gives the faith idol an invisible mental prop that’s often just as strong as the more tangible social one.

The cells of the leaf cling together and to a common vein. But there are other leaves nearby... [Flickr page]

Cognitive dissonance flares up at the thought that it might all have been for naught. Your mind desperately seeks to protect the integrity of the person you once were, the one who spent her days walking by an endless row of doors to “the world’s pleasures” that you had obediently locked. The self-limitations were imposed on you by others who claimed to speak on behalf of your conscience. It’s a cunning trick of the religious meme, especially when those pulling it off don’t even understand that they are being played, too.

Can you stand the thought of the roads not taken, the first and most formative third or half of your life put aside for eternal promises now grown stale? It’s a very tough thing to do. But when you feel you have no choice, when the mental anguish of staying finally outweighs that of leaving, then you will do it. I finally did, too.

Many similar leaves, in fact, arrayed on ever-dividing branches... [Flickr page]

It was a slow process for me, though. With the altar of my own childhood faith looming over my every thought and action, I could not simply turn my attention away when I encountered difficulties with it.² To my continual surprise, there are some people who can simply say, “That’s just a pile of rocks,” turn away, and find a new place for themselves. I was not one of them. Instead, I wound up devoting a year of my life to researching and writing a 700-page book about my troublesome faith, An Examination of the Pearl.

The distinctions blur with distance... [Flickr page]

Now, a year and a half later in the midst of a wonderful summer full of travel and natural beauty, the whole thing seems small and petty. There have been a few pangs of longing–for the people and the spectacle–when the church’s summer services were held just a dozen miles away this year. But the closest I got to the place was sitting on the grass of the high school grounds watching fireworks, and riding with a Finnish friend as he picked up his daughter from an after-hours youth gathering there.

Some of the sermons made their way into my iPod for bedtime. (I’ve found no better sleep aid.) ³ As I dozed off, after a full day of walking around San Francisco or taking in Hawaiian scenery, I wondered how any of the people sitting in that gymnasium listening to these guys could take them seriously. It was easy to forget how seriously I myself had taken it, for most of my life.

When the preachers drone on about this imagined ailment of sin and their proprietary cure-all, it now sounds like some contrived fantasy story:

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God created a first human couple in a garden where there lived an angel who had rebelled against him (and lost), then took on reptilian form, and now invisibly stalks the earth, utterly corrupting human society and producing some damn fine movies and music in the process. The reptile gave our first ancestors a sales pitch about a bit of magic produce that would give them knowledge of good and evil, which God opposed for some reason. They ate, which made God condemn everybody who would be born thereafter to an unrelenting eternity of horrific agony unless they develop the exactly correct beliefs about a part of himself that he would send to earth as a sacrifice, to himself.

Despite being almighty and loving, God is either unwilling or unable to exempt from his torture chamber anyone other than the tiny fraction of humanity who will hear a specific ritual incantation referring to this blood sacrifice, from one precise kind of believer, only a few tens of thousands of whom can be found anywhere on earth. And, truth be told, a lot of them don’t really believe much of the story, either.

———

If this is what you profess to believe, and reading my summary makes you uncomfortable or upset, consider whether there is anything actually incorrect about what I wrote. Isn’t it just my irreverent clarity of expression that actually offends you? Pious language covereth a multitude of nonsense.

A native Hawaiian (“as far as I know, my family has been here since there was a Hawaii”) with whom I spent a few hours in and out of the water told me, in language I quote without censorship due to its forceful bluntness, “I couldn’t believe I was expected to believe this bullshit.” He didn’t know the half of it. He was just talking about the problems with Christianity in general.

With enough perspective, even the tree comes to look stark and odd, dispensable... [Flickr page]

Laestadianism adds its own deep, aromatic layer to the pile. There aren’t any Laestadians living in Hawaii, though there are plenty of churches. We drove by many of those churches there, including some that consider themselves the only true believers. The nerve of them!

There are other leaves on the branches. Acknowledging that is one of the first departures Laestadians are willing to make from what their preachers insist upon. For many, doing that is enough. They remain Laestadians, less judgmental ones, perhaps sneaking in some movies on Netflix and encountering infertility at unexpectedly young ages.⁴ Or they leave the church and fall back on a more inclusive, hands-off Christianity.

It’s all good; I’m happy for them either way, or no way. But, for myself, I have seen that there are also other branches on the tree, and in fact a whole lot more than just this lousy little tree to look at in this amazing landscape of life.

And finally disappears altogether in the vastness of reality. [Flickr page]

All original images on this site are Copyright © 2013 Edwin A. Suominen. Click on any of them to enlarge it. You may freely use them, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. You can view and download the tree-in-lava-flow images from a Flickr photo set of high-resolution images.

Notes

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1. For me, the part about people populating my life mostly involves the ongoing challenge of raising children who inherited my stubborn independence and disinterest in many practical matters. But I mostly agree with the devout parents of huge church families in posing the classic emotion-driven question, “Which one would you have me give back?” That’s not to say I don’t have one candidate or another (from the eleven of them) in mind on difficult days! I’ve been fortunate in so many ways: in love with my bright and beautiful wife, a varied and memorable career, and healthy (though often challenging) children. After hearing all too many heart-rending stories, I know that things can be quite different for others. ↩

2. As I’ve written elsewhere, the trouble started with my realization that evolution is real and Adam and Eve were not. Then it progressed to the history and doctrines of the church and the Bible itself. ↩

3. Update, September 2014: Kicked the sermon-to-sleep habit, I’m happy to report. It feels good not knowing what the preachers are saying nowadays. The fascination continues to fade, and it just seems like a crazy dream at this point. Life is good. ↩

4. Those odd fertility problems are becoming epidemic in southern Finland. Must be the water. ↩