Bill Maher And The Talking Snake: Educating the delusion atheists

          The ridicule of religion is a favorite past-time of atheists. I find this to be a rather strange behavior for people to intensely preoccupy themselves with a metaphysics in which they do not believe. As an informed Christian, I delight in writing about subjects that uplift my worldview. That, unfortunately, is not so with atheists. They are religiously preoccupied with denigrating religion. Richard Dawkins and the so-called new atheists are so obsessed with religion you could easily mistake them for religious fundamentalists who are disgruntled because they have not been able to turn water into wine. Their sophomoric and contrived disdain for religion is bad enough. It is even worse that the ridicule is done with a loquacious display of ignorance and intellectual dishonesty.

          The most delusional mantra of these militant atheists is that religious people are not intelligent. Ernst Haeckel, the German evolutionist who altered embryos to create fraudulent evidence for evolution, said that you either accept evolution or else you are a superstitious, irrational barbarian.¹ You would think the man was defending a religious doctrine and not a new scientific theory that was in search of evidence. Isaac Asimov called creationists “stupid, lying people who are not to be trusted in any way."² The lesser known but self-described new atheist, Victor Stenger, stated:
          “Perhaps the most unique position of New Atheism is that faith, which is belief without supportive evidence, should                not be given the respect, even deference, it obtains in modern society. Faith is always foolish and leads to many of             the evils of society."³ 
Of course, Dawkins could not help chime in. In The God Delusion, he states:

            “Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what we call Einsteinian religion from supernatural                 religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so), inviting                  misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own.”⁴ 

The parenthetical phrase, and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so, implies that Einstein is an atheistic scientist. Really? (Really? is how I respond to a claim that is totally false and absurd.) This is clearly a misrepresentation of Einstein, a misrepresentation that Einstein himself would not have appreciated at all. In an unequivocal rebuke of this sort of atheist slight of hand, Einstein said:

           “In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet                 people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such                      views."⁵ 

Oops! The fact is so illustrious a thinker is definitely not a fan of atheists attempts to claim him as their own. Of course, since Dawkins is obviously not an illustrious thinker, the search continues.

        Dawkins wanted to use Einstein to show that intelligent people don't believe in God. If Dawkins's research on Einstein was anything like his research for the The God Delusion, it must have been as exhaustive as a third grade essay. One has to wonder about the social and moral value of a metaphysics, in this case atheism, whose adherents can only express themselves by insulting others. What a tragic world we would live in if disagreements can only be expressed through insults. One visual expression of atheist misrepresentation of religion is the 2008 Bill Maher's movie, Religulous. It has the intellectual content of a Christian theology from a Taliban elementary school. Its dishonesty is matched only by its dishonesty. In a 2012 interview with Ross Douthat, a Christian and New York Times columnist, Bill Maher exposed himself as being dangerously misinformed. First he opined that all religions, by their very nature, are anti-intellectual. Really? America's oldest institution of higher learning, Harvard University, was established in 1636 (then as New College which became Harvard in 1639) for the expressed objective of training ministers. Why would anyone need a university-level education to engage in an anti-intellectual enterprise? Yale University was founded to train Congregationalist ministers and Princeton University was founded to train Presbyterians for the ministry. Oxford University, the oldest English-speaking university in the world, has its motto in Latin: Dominus illuminatio mea (translation, The Lord is my light), the introductory verse to Psalm 27. There is obviously a religious purpose to the origin of Oxford.

           If the claim is true that religion is anti-intellectual, then why do we find the fingerprints and DNA of Christianity all over western academia? The claim is totally absurd. Any student of European history would know that for the greater part of the last millennium, the most educated group in Europe was the clergy. Out of the monastic educational system emerged the scholastic tradition which, in turn, gave rise to universities. In the earliest university tradition, graduating students wore the attire similar to what their instructors wore in order to distinguish the graduates and instructors from visitors. Because these instructors were mainly priests, graduates dressed up like priests. This is where the tradition of wearing cap and gown at graduation came from.

        My knowledge of European history is part of my “anti-intellectual” theological education. After graduating from college with a degree in biology, I still needed three years of graduate theological education to meet the academic requirements for ordination as a United Methodist minister. Obviously, it requires more education to become anti-intellectual Methodist clergy than to be a comedian on ABC or HBO. It is really funny how every atheist is an expert on religion. Take note Bill.

          In the same interview with Douthat, Bill made another of those demonstrably false claims about religion: “Someone once said, to have a normal person to commit a horrible act, almost never happens without religion.” That original claim was made by another atheist, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel physicist. Here is what Weinberg said:

            “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil                   people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”⁶

This is a bunch of nonsense, but when spoken to a crowd of atheists, it sounds brilliant. This assertion has been totally discredited by a great deal of empirical evidence, scientific experiments to be more specific. The first and most famous of all of all these is the Stanley Milgram Experiment.⁷

            Dr. Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, was concerned about the one common excuse that many of the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trial gave: they were just following orders from authority. Could people really ignore their consciences, follow authority, and do incredibly evil things to other people? After the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Milgram wanted to find the answer to this very disturbing question. He designed an experiment in which ordinary people were told to administer electric shock to other participants. Those who administered the shock did not know that the machine was rigged so that no real shock was being delivered. Shock recipients were told to mimic pain response commensurate with the intensity of the shock. Milgram found his answer, and it was a disturbing reflection on the human capacity for evil.

           "To people's horror, Milgram discovered that a solid majority of his subjects -- roughly two-thirds --                were willing to administer the highest levels of shock to their counterparts. This was as true among              the first set of his test subjects (Yale undergrads), to subsequent "ordinary" participants as                           described  by Milgram ("professionals, white-collar workers, unemployed persons and industrial                   workers"), to test subjects abroad, from Munich to South Africa. It was also as true for women as it                was for men (although female subjects reported a higher degree of anxiety afterward).”⁸

           In Milgram’s experiment, race, class, gender, culture, educational level, and religion did not make a difference in people's response to authority. In other words, for Weinberg's “good people” to do evil, it does not take religion. It takes authority, even if the authority is a scientist wearing a lab coat. This is what the scientific evidence indicates. As a scientist, Weinberg ought to know better, but as an atheist, he has a problem dealing with the truth when it comes to religion.

           In August 1971, Stanford University psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo, headed what is called the Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment demonstrated again how authority can be used to lead people into cruel behavior. In other experiments, such as the BBC Prison Experiment of 2002, and the ABC News Experiment of 2004, the outcome conclusively confirmed Milgram's results.⁹ There is another experiment, the Hofling Hospital Experiment,).¹⁰ that drives home this point more poignantly.

           Psychiatrist Charles K. Hofling conducted an experiment in which more than 20 nurses at a hospital were ordered by unknown doctors to administer a deadly dose of a fictional drug to patients. Based on hospital protocol, all the nurses had three reasons to reject the doctors' orders: (1) The recommended dosage was unsafe, (2) nurses were not supposed to take orders from unknown doctors, and (3) the fictional drug was not on the list of approved drugs. In spite of these safety measures, only one nurse failed to follow the order. Of course, the other nurses were stopped at the patients' doors before they could do any harm.

           It takes authority for good people to do evil. This is confirmed by overwhelming empirical evidence. Weinberg's claim is an appalling display of poor judgment for someone who wants to be seen as acting from the enlightened position of science and reason. Apparently, once atheism is embraced, no fortress erected in the name of science, reason, academic degrees, raving book reviews, and endowed offices with walls of accolades can shield one from positing absurdity as scholarship or intellectual discourse. When Weinberg comments on religion, he miserably fails to demonstrate the intellect which brought him a Nobel Prize. For he comes across more as the idiotic playground bully who casts aspersions with total disregard for the facts. This is extremely unfortunate for a man who has so much to offer science. Weinberg epitomizes the view that when brilliant men step outside their areas of expertise, they brilliantly display their ignorance. Take note Bill Maher.

          One question that Bill asked in the interview deserves a response. How can otherwise intelligent people believe in a talking snake? The question is posed as a flippant dismissal of the intelligence of people who believe in the biblical creation narrative. Typical atheist fare. Let's look at the talking snake and see whose intelligence should be questioned.

         The serpent in the Garden of Eden does not appear in a vacuum. The Bible does not begin with the serpent. It begins with the creation narrative. You cannot separate the Eden episode from the creation. Of course, I won't expect an HBO comedian to know this, so I can't fault Bill for his biblical ignorance. Nothing in Eden makes sense apart from the creation. So, if you want to understand how otherwise intelligent people can believe in a talking snake, you have to begin with creation. After all, if God can create the universe out of nothing, creating a talking snake or anything else for that matter should be no problem. I hope the logic here is not too difficult for atheists to follow.

         When it comes creation, atheists don't agree on what position to take. One group of atheists say that God and creation are supernatural and science cannot deal with the supernatural. You then have another group of atheists who write books about how science shows God does not exist. If God is supernatural and science cannot deal with the supernatural, then how can science show the non-existence of God? This conflict among atheists demonstrates that atheists' claims about science and religion are not really based on any set of credible facts but on ignorance, misinformation, or a dismal failure of intellectual integrity.

          The real question here should be: Why do very intelligent people believe in creation?The one-word answer is science. Most people who know anything about science have heard about the Big Bang theory; and it's not a comedy on TV. Very few people, however, have heard about the Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom. If you are part of the majority who has never heard about the latter, don’t despair. This is not some novel creationist theory I'm about to introduce to you. The Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom is the official scientific name for what is called the Big Bang theory .

         The Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom was proposed by one of those anti-intellectual religious people, a Belgian Catholic priest and physicist, Georges Lemaître. Because the proposal came from a priest and it pointed to a universe with a beginning and the inescapable implication of creation, secular scientists, like Albert Einstein, Arthur Addington, and Fred Hoyle did not like it. In fact, in an effort to ridicule the theory, Hoyle called it the Big Bang, as if to say, “Yeah right. There was something like a bomb explosion, a big bang, and everything came into existence. What a joke!” Well, the joke was on Hoyle. Irrefutable scientific evidence has confirmed that the universe came into existence like an explosion; hence, the Big Bang, instead of being a phrase of derision, has become the universal shorthand for the Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom.

         No one with a full understanding of the Big Bang theory can deny creation with any degree of honesty. The common understanding of the Big Bang theory is that it confirms that the universe - all that we know to be nature: matter, time, space, and energy - had a beginning and it has been expanding since that beginning. Using Einstein's theory of general relativity, Lemaître reasoned that since the universe is expanding, if we follow the reverse of the expansion in a contraction back in time, we would arrive at the beginning where everything in the universe would be concentrated into a single point. This single point, which he called the primeval atom or cosmic egg (other physicists refer to it as a singularity), would be so dense that matter, energy, time, and space could not exist in it. At the very instant the primeval atom began to expand (at the Big Bang), matter, energy, space, and time came into existence. In other words, everything that we call nature – matter, energy, space, and time – did not always exist. Nature came into existence at the Big Bang.

How does all this imply creation? Let us introduce a little bit more of serious physics here. Newton's first law of motion or inertia is stated in the following manner:

             An object at rest stays at rest (and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same                       direction) unless acted upon by an external force.

This is one of the fundamental laws of physics and physicists do not argue over it; neither would I. Here is the very first point to consider: Before the Big Bang, the primeval atom was at rest and it should have remained at rest unless some external force acted upon it. If nothing natural was in existence before the Big Bang, then what is that external force that caused the primeval atom to move from a state of rest and to a state of expansion? In other words, who or what caused the Big Bang? Whatever the answer is, it cannot be anything natural.

          Philosophers like to refer to the who or what as the First Cause. Even Charles Darwin believed in an anthropomorphic First Cause, a kind of Intelligent Designer like a human being, In his autobiography, Darwin wrote:

          "Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the                feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or                    rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his                    capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.                    When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some                   degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist."¹¹ 

This is like a very cruel joke on evolutionists, that Darwin, the messiah of evolution, wants to be called a theist (someone who believes in God) because he believes in a First Cause that is an Intelligent Designer.

        Since the First Cause can not be a natural entity because nature did not yet exist, it becomes scientific evidence for the existence of the supernatural or something other than nature. I know that the existence of a reality other than nature may be a bit too difficult for atheists to comprehend; but that's exactly what science has revealed. Science may not be able to say anything about the supernatural, but it surely points to its existence or at least demolished the materialist fantasy that nature is all there is. If science points to the existence of something other than nature, how can otherwise intelligent people not believe in the supernatural? Maybe they are not as intelligent as they think. Bill Maher take note.

The Big Bang theory, which was proposed by an anti-intellectual religious man, became the evidence from physics that caused Einstein to confide to a colleague and say:

          “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the                 spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thought, the rest are details.”¹²

“I want to know how God created this world” is clearly a statement affirming belief in a God Who is the Creator Who created this world. There could not be a clearer positive statement about Einstein's belief in God and creation. This would make Einstein the only atheistic scientist who was also a creationist - a very strange kind of atheist; but this is the sort of absurdity we encounter as a consequence of Dawkins's dishonest attempt to fit Einstein into the atheist camp.

        In the 1990 edition of his very popular book, A Brief History of Time, the brilliant physicist, Stephen Hawking, remarked: “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.” Why do we have to suppose that a universe with a beginning has a creator? Hawking knows that a fundamental belief in science is that everything that has a beginning was brought into existence by agency other than itself. We know that universe has a beginning; therefore, we must admit that some agency is responsible for this beginning. If nature did not exist before the Big Bang, then whatever caused the Big Bang could not be natural. So Hawking concludes that since we are forced to accept the existence of the supernatural, we may as well accept the possibility of a Creator. Hawking has since had a change of mind about supposing a creator; however, what he proposed has no basis in science and therefore is not worth considering. We must revert to his original scientific view that a universe with a beginning points to a Creator.

       The primeval atom poses a huge problem for the foolish science worshiper who believes that science should answer every question. I would like to continue to engage the scientifically ignorant about the scientific possibility of creation. While they might delight in making claims that are false, I would continue the discussion if any scientist who does not believe in creation can answer this one question: Who or what caused the Big Bang? Bring the answer from science, then we'll talk. Until then, you may continue to wow the ignorant. Take note Bill Maher.

        In this article, I mentioned three of the greatest scientific minds of all time: Isaac Newton, a Christian theologian who didn't need science to convince him of the creation; Albert Einstein, a Jewish agnostic turned creationist because of the scientific evidence; and Stephen Hawking, another agnostic forced by the scientific evidence to accept the possibility of a Creator. To accept a Creator is, by default, to also accept creation. If the greatest scientific minds of all time acknowledge creation, how can otherwise intelligent people not believe in creation? Maybe they are not as intelligent as they think. Bill Maher take note.

        We have established that intelligent people will believe in creation for scientific reasons. Of course, science does not obligate us to any particular creation narrative; however, since the Bible is frequently the object of Bill Maher's ridicule, let's turn to biblical creation for Bill's education. Those of us who subscribe to biblical creation believe that creation happened exactly as it is described in the Bible. God spoke things into existence. It is part of God's omnipotence. Six times in the Genesis account God said, “Let there be …,” and something came into existence. Science will never ever be able to prove or disprove this. If you can't understand how the Big Bang points to creation, Divine omnipotence is definitely over your head.

           The creation story tells us that God is powerful enough to speak things into existence out of nothing. God spoke the universe into existence; He spoke all living things into existence; then He took dust and formed a living intelligent adult human being who could have had his own comedy show on HBO. Can anyone with any degree of intelligence not understand how this same God could make a snake talk? That's not the only time God made an animal speak to a human. He also made a donkey speak to Balaam (Numbers 22:21 – 41). To laugh at the prospect of a talking snake or a talking donkey within the context of an omnipotent God is to actually laugh at one's own intelligence, to laugh at one's inability to comprehend basic logic. Take note Bill Maher.

            When it comes to religion, atheist of all stripes – from Nobel scientists and mediocre professors to third-rate journalists and cheap-laughs comedians – display a level of ignorance and dishonesty too dangerous for social discourse. The idea that religion, responsible for establishing many of the great academic institutions in the world, is anti-intellectual is patently absurd. Contrary to indisputable historical evidence that atheist-controlled countries, like the Soviet Union and communist China, have killed more of their own citizens in the 20^th Century than all other forms of government combined in the previous 19 centuries, atheists still revel in this idiotic nonsense that religion is responsible for evil. No atheist critic of religion today has the intellectual integrity to admit that the Holocaust was established on the false but racist claims of evolutionary biology. Although there is indisputable scientific evidence pointing to creation, atheists think it is comedic fodder that an omnipotent Creator should make an animal talk; but the same atheists consider it serious science that an ape can change into a human all by itself. Let us all laugh because this is a joke, and the joke is not on religion. Take note Bill Maher.

           The Bible, in addition to being a spiritual and moral guide, is also soteriological history (history of salvation). As soteriological history, it is subject to all of the distortions typical of any history. Let me demonstrate how this works. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that there is a group of African pseudo-intellectuals who model the tactics of the so-called New Atheists and call themselves the New Africans. Other than race and geography, the only thing these individuals share in common is a very strong dislike for westerners, particularly white people. Of course, for many Africans, there is no group that is easier to demonize than those who represent the slave masters, colonialists, and the architects of apartheid. The New Africans insist that they are not racists but enlightened individuals who believe that the world would be a better place without white people. The New Africans are very popular among Africans who wrongly blame white people for all of the continent's problems, ignoring the continent’s over-supply of corrupt, repressive, and dictatorial kleptocrats.

             Like the new atheists who want to see only evil in religion, the New Africans want to see only evil in white people. The New Africans are not brilliant Africans or objective Africans. They are simply the New Africans – people who are determined to apply the New Atheist methodology to attribute all evils in history to only one particular group of people, in this case, White people. Like New Atheists, the New Africans can't be bothered with intrusive research tools such at logic and unbiased historical evidence. The only evidence that matters is the one that proves White people are the root of all evil. How is this New Africanism accomplished?

             Look at world history for the last two millennia. What do you see? If your view is like that of the New Africans, all you see can only be described as the evil of White people beginning with the Romans. Like some of today's western intellectuals, the Romans were content only with religions that deify humanity and offer no moral boundaries. Judaism was not like that. With the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD and the subsequent Jewish diaspora, the Romans made Judaism irrelevant. Christianity succeeded Judaism. So, here is how New African scholarship begins.

          Who killed Jesus? White people. Who carried on nearly three centuries of brutal Christian persecution? The Romans, White people. Who were the Visigoths, the Huns, and the Vandals who nearly brought Roman civilization to an end in a brutal fashion? White people. Who created, financed, and implemented the crusades? White people. Who created and operated the Inquisition? Who invented scientific racism and exterminated the Tasmanians and Native American tribes? Who conducted the trans-Atlantic slave trade? Who colonized and exploited Africa? Who created apartheid, World War I, the Holocaust, and World War II? Who exterminated 20 million Russians? Who killed 6 million Jews and millions others? All the answers are the same: White people. So the New Africans conclude that there is overwhelming evidence that White people are just evil and that the world would be better off without them. I am sure the new atheists are on board with this kind of research. Take note Bill Maher.

           Now, anyone with a high school level grasp of world history would recognize this as idiotic nonsense. A collection of disjointed historical facts can never justify the aspersion on an entire group of people. Like atheists' screeds about the Bible and religion, the racist-inspired world history ignored abundant contrary evidence. This is the same grossly distorted manner in which atheists deal with the Bible and religion. Because the Bible records God's intervention in human affairs, it will definitely contain supernatural events beyond the limited reach of science. If science can't tell us where the cosmic egg came from and what caused the Big Bang, it is beyond absurd to expect Divine action to conform to the limits of science. Yet, atheists and science worshipers, like Maher and Dawkins, encounter the supernatural – talking snake, Virgin birth, resurrection, etc – in the Bible and it becomes evidence that religion is anti-science and anti-intellectual.

          Like the New Africans, atheists list tragic events, attach them to religion, and conclude that religion is evil. Maybe I don't understand this research methodology because I'm not an atheist. It does not mean that I am not impressed by atheists. I am always impressed with how atheists are not shy about making a public display of their ignorance. It seems like all atheists are biblical scholars, experts in world history and the sociology of religion, cultural anthropologists, scientists who can tell you how science shows there is no God, and much more. In their venerable pretense of knowledge, we know that they don't know what they do not know because we see it in their delusional display of superior intellects.

          I can't, I don't, and I won't take offense at atheists' comments about the Bible, religion, and God. Why should a parent take offense at the ignorance of 2-year olds even the kids are convinced they are geniuses? When a 2-year old mentality is resident in adults, the proper response to me should be pity. Pity may be a sentiment totally foreign to atheists who think that insults and ridicule are appropriate responses to disagreements. I don't. Maybe I am not intellectual enough to know that people who disagree with me should be ridicule insulted. If that's what it takes to be an atheist, I choose to remain anti-intellectual and very religious. Bill Maher take note.

1. Quoted in W. R.Thompson's Darwin's Origin of Species DEVASTED. New York: Dutton. 1962, p.15
2. Asimov, L., Is Big Brother watching? Humanist 44(4):6–10, 1984
3.  Stenger, Victor J.  The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reaason.  New York: Prometheus Books, 2009. p.15.
4. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin Company, New York. 2006, p.13
5. Albert Einstein, according to the testimony of Prince Hubertus of Lowenstein; as quoted by Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, New York: World Publishing Company, 1971, p. 425.
6. Stenger, Victor J. The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason. New York: Prometheus Books, 2009. p.29
7. Segura, Liliana (2009, February 11) Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments. http://www.alternet.org/story/126492/
8. Ibid.
   
9. Ibid.
   
10. Ibid.
    
11. Barlow, Nora ed. 1958. The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, pp.92-93. With the original omissions restored. Edited with appendix and notes by his grand-daughter Nora Barlow. London: Collins. Found at:http://darwinonline.org.uk. Retrieved 03/21/2018
    
12. Herbert, Nick. Quantum Reality – Beyond the New Physics. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985, p.177. Quoted in Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2002. p. 123.