Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: answering the inevitable response

Some atheists appear to view homosexuals as comrades in the great struggle against Christianity. In light of this, MD wonders if Christians can be similarly considered to harbor disproportionate inclinations towards pedophilia on the basis of the Catholic priest abuse scandal:

Hmmm. Wonder what proportion of Christian clergy molest children cf general population? . . . Conclusion: Christians more likely to molest children?

To some extent, the answer depends upon your definition of clergy. But in the end, the inescapable conclusion by MD’s metric is not only that Christians are less likly to molest children than the general population, but that gays should not be permitted in the clergy. Now, there are three significant caveats here which I will point out afterwards, but consider:

Clerical abuse
– 4,392 priests and deacons were accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002.
– The Jay Report stated there were 10,667 reported victims of clergy sexual abuse younger than 18 years during this period. The RCC victims per abuser rate was 2.43
– The 4,351 priests who were accused amount to 3.97% of the 109,694 priests in active ministry during that time.
– There were 28,700 active priests in 2005. The historical/current rate is 3.72.

Teacher abuse
– It is reported that 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from 1991-2000.
– This indicates an estimated 1,508,000 cases of school children being abused by school employees between 1950 and 2002.
– There were 3.8 million school teachers in 2010. Multiplied by the 3.72 historical/current rate, we estimate 14.1 million teachers active from 1950.

Dividing the 14.1 million historical teachers by the 1.51 million victims, then dividing by the 2.43 victim/abuser rate, this means school children have a 4.4% abuse per teacher rate compared to 4.0% per Catholic priest.

Now, the three problems. The first is that this includes the abuse by school employees who are not teachers without including the non-teachers. Currently, teachers only make up half of the PUBLIC school employees in the country, but that number was historically much lower. Nevertheless, we can safely assume that teachers historically made up about three-quarters of the school employee total, which would lower the teacher abuse rate to 3.3 percent. However, we don’t know if teachers have a higher rate or a lower rate of abuse than janitors, counselors, and administrators. I suspect it is higher, due to low average teacher IQ and the larger amount of contact with children intrinsic to the job, but I simply have no information on this.

Second, the RCC abuse numbers include the victims of priests and deacons, but don’t include the number of permanent deacons. This is because there were only 41 deacons accused of the 12,500 ordained during the period concerned. This gives a total of 122,194 clergy and reduces the RCC abuse rate to 3.6 percent.

And the third problem. 81 percent of the RCC victims were male. All of the abusers were male. This is an astonishing statistical outlier, since in the general population, girls are sexually abused three times more often than boys. The heterosexual abuse rate was therefore 0.7 percent for the clergy compared to 2.5 percent for the teachers.

The conclusion, therefore, is that Christian clergy are 3.6 times less likely to abuse children than the general population unless they are homosexual. The larger part of the clerical problem is not the Church, but Teh Gay. In fact, four-fifths of the sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests could have been avoided simply by barring homosexuals from the clergy, just as Christian doctrine has always deemed necessary. And the increasing restrictions on homosexual seminarians is the obvious reason why the rate of clergy abuse has been significantly dropping since the 1980s.

However, due to the increased embrace of homosexual clergy by the Episcopalian and Lutheran churches, we can safely conclude that the chickenhawks will be gravitating to these organizations as well as to other gay-friendly institutions that are actively involved with children. It should therefore be no surprise that the Sandusky scandal took place on a college campus and concerned a children’s organization; twenty years before, Sandusky might well have decided he was “called” to the priesthood instead of setting up a “children’s charity”.

Mailvox: is God on our side?

JH wonders:

I have read your coloumn faithfully for years, and have come to admire your level-headed and logical approach to the problems you present.

I have a question. Most social conservatives declare that life begins at conception, thus concluding that all abortions are murder. If you take this stand then you must conclude that America has the blood of 50 million innocent lives on her hands.

What right do we have then to drop bombs on ” ragheads and goat herders ‘ and the like if this is so, and how can we possibly think that God will bless our troops in foreign wars when we can’t possibly be on HIS side?

It is so. And America has no more right to bomb the goat herders of the Middle East than Rome had to invade Pontus, Armenia, and Parthia. Nor does America have any better reason to believe that God will bless their invading troops than the Romans or the National Socialist-era Germans did. Gott war nicht mit der Wehrmacht, their belt buckles notwithstanding, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that a nation whose government increasingly denies and rejects God, a nation that has slaughtered more of its own children behind closed clinic doors than the Moloch-worshipping Canaanites ever threw into the fires, enjoys divine favor.

America was founded on predominantly Christian principles, but she no longer lives by them. She is profligate, gluttonous, murderous, and repressive. She can no longer be reasonably described as either the land of the free or the home of the brave, but rather the land of the fat and the home of the indebted. I concluded some time ago that America was already finished in the historical sense, but it may take some time for most Americans to realize it or for America’s foreign policy to reflect that reality. This is entirely normal, few Britons understood that their empire was in decline until the sun had already set upon it.

It would, of course, be deeply ironic if the neocons were to get their way and America were to eventually learn of her loss of global superpower status not too terribly far from where Marcus Licinius Crassus lost his seven legions and met his death at the hands of the Parthians. Interestingly enough, Crassus, rather like Bush and Obama, failed to abide by the legal forms of making war before launching his ill-fated invasion.

Mailvox: what am I missing here?

Speaking of interlocutors, one of my occasional atheist emailers sent this in response to yesterday’s Mailvox. MD wrote:

‘ . . . the moment they decide to attempt to convince others that they are correct, they become targets.’

Never has there been a greater endorsement of the ‘new atheist’ movement than that last sentence! You’re cleverer than saying weak stuff like that.

I genuinely do not understand the point he is making here. The idea would appear to be that the New Atheism has made targets of Christians and other evangelical theists because they are incorrect. But I don’t see that this is the observable case at all. It seems to me if that X is attempting to convince others he is correct and Y decides to make X a target in response, the onus is therefore on Y to show that X is incorrect.

So, where do Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or any of the New Atheists ever attempt to show that Billy Graham or John Wesley or Thomas Aquinas are incorrect? They very seldom attack anything that is even remotely recognizable as Christian theology, preferring instead to take on what appear to be poorly remembered Sunday School versions of it. The Courtier’s Reply of PZ Myers – which, to be fair, other New Atheists besides Richard Dawkins cannot be assumed to endorse – outright attempts to justify atheists knowing nothing about what they are so ineptly criticizing.

I even remarked on this bizarre failure to actually address the most basic Christian theology in TIA: “While Harris doesn’t once cite minor Christian intellectual figures such as Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, John Wesley, G. K. Chesterton, or even C. S. Lewis, he does find it relevant to provide one reference to Tim LaHaye, thirteen references to Hitler, Himmler, and Hess, and six whole pages dedicated to Noam Chomsky. Because, after all, no one is more suited to explain the Christian faith quite so well as an elderly author of pop religious fantasies, a trio of dead Nazis, and a left-wing Jewish linguist.”

Now Dawkins does mention Aquinas and the Five Proofs in The God Delusion, but he does little more than cry “infinite regress” and demonstrate that he has missed the point of them. (I did like his point about the natural terminator, although it doesn’t actually serve to refute any of the Five Proofs since they concern beginnings rather than ends.) He also shows that he has never actually read the Summa Theologica; it is telling to note that Dawkins immediately proceeds from his cursory glance at the Five Proofs to the Ontological Argument without realizing that Aquinas rejected it more than 700 years ago in Part 1, Question 2, Article 1 of the Summa.

“OBJECTION 2: Further, those things are said to be self-evident which are known as soon as the terms are known, which the Philosopher (1 Poster. iii) says is true of the first principles of demonstration. Thus, when the nature of a whole and of a part is known, it is at once recognized that every whole is greater than its part. But as soon as the signification of the word “God” is understood, it is at once seen that God exists. For by this word is signified that thing than which nothing greater can be conceived. But that which exists actually and mentally is greater than that which exists only mentally. Therefore, since as soon as the word “God” is understood it exists mentally, it also follows that it exists actually. Therefore the proposition “God exists” is self-evident.

REPLY TO OBJECTION 2: Perhaps not everyone who hears this word “God” understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought, seeing that some have believed God to be a body. Yet, granted that everyone understands that by this word “God” is signified something than which nothing greater can be thought, nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally. Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist.”

So, it seems to me that far from being the greatest endorsement of the New Atheist movement, my statement demonstrates its impotence, its ignorance, and its intellectual dishonesty.

Mailvox: it’s not about the interlocutor

AA wonders why it’s so hard to convince atheists of anything:

I’ve been debating atheists on message boards for about 5 years now and while I’m getting better at writing, I don’t think I’m seeing a lot of results. I’m just wondering, do you think there’s a place for people like me to debate on forums and then just read your blog to get ideas and material? Or is it better to carry out debates on blogs? Also –I don’t know if you have an adderall habit or what but I’m amazed at how often you post — do you do something for your attention span and work ethic?

The quote from Bartleby’s sums it up:

“He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.”
~Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

It’s a tautology. Most atheists don’t believe in God because they don’t believe in God. If you listen to their stories and read their books, it is readily apparent that most of them became atheists between the ages of 10 and 17. There are various theories concerning why this happens, but the observable fact of the matter is that their atheism is actually less rational and less based on any reasoning than the average college student’s political party identification. All the appeals to science and so forth are nothing more than ex post facto rationalizations.

Hence all the false claims about Biblical knowledge and the attacks on Sunday School theology. What passes for their knowledge is usually the dimly remembered childhood church indoctrination. I can’t think of a single atheist who has ever been able to tell me the structure of an argument from the Summa Theologica, much less the actual content of any of the 610 arguments contained within it. And the next atheist I meet to have read Tertullian or any of the Latin Fathers except Augustine will be the first. Their ignorance isn’t merely limited to Christianity either, as they seldom know anything about the sacred works or theology of other religions except perhaps a little Greek and Norse mythology.

That being said, I am entirely open to hear other explanations for why an atheist remains an atheist after having his purported reasons for becoming an atheist destroyed from actual atheists.

The reason for combating atheism isn’t to convert the atheist. You will never see any such results. That simply isn’t going to happen because no atheist will ever cease being an atheist simply because all of his rationalizations have been shown to be factually incorrect, logically fallacious, or otherwise irrational. And that’s completely fine. The reason for shooting them down over and over again is to neutralize and counteract their effect on the weak-minded, who are even less inclined to think than the average evangelical atheist. I seldom intentionally attack atheists who make no attempt to convince others that gods and the supernatural do not exist for precisely this reason; I don’t care what they believe or do not believe. Their lack of belief has no effect on me or anyone else.

But the moment they decide to attempt to convince others that they are correct, they become targets. So, my advice is to keep doing what you’re doing, keep refining and improving your arguments, and you will likely prevent dozens, if not hundreds of people, from falling for the false arguments and incorrect logic being presented by evangelical atheists.

As for the frequency of my posting, I simply make a habit of it by sticking to a schedule. Two posts per day, period. Usually, that ends up meaning three or four on weekdays. It takes very little time; the average one probably takes between 10-15 minutes, so 2-3 posts is like watching one sitcom per day. That’s not a lot of work. I’ve recently taken the same approach to my writing and it’s been very effective. In 102 days since I started writing the first novel in the Arts of Dark and Light series, I’ve written 84,269 words, leaving me exactly 2.3 days ahead of an aggressive schedule. Only another 210,731 to go…. As for adderall, I’ve never heard of it. My only drugs of choice are cappucino and vino rosso. Three cups of the former and one or two glasses of the latter daily is my limit.

As Ecclesiastes reminds us, it’s all vanity. But one hopes that even so, some of it may be useful to others and will ultimately prove to be to the glory of God.

Mailvox: general incoherence and the Tea Party

SS defends Wall Street and blames government:

Yes I agree with both have wrong opposing ideas but, the Tea Party really had a broad based beginning and the Occupy folks are the orchestrated result of Big Union and (y)our “friends” at the Globalist Communist Party that is stirring up strife worldwide to bring down Capitalism and the West.

You know that Wall Street needed bailed out because of political pressure on the banking system to make loans to low income people that had no chance of paying them back. The resulting trading in bundled toxic securities was just a way for Bankers to spread the risk with Our government winking at the practice.

The social architects are the problem not Wall Street. The spending spree of social engineering has brought us to ruin. The government has borrowed and printed money and pushed for more of it into the economy to hide the fact that we no longer manufacture anything, we have exported all the good paying jobs.

What we are left with is a hollow shell of a service economy that is propped up by government spending and borrowing from a country that has taken all the jobs. The Tea Party has it right… it is a over-reaching Federal Bureaucracy that needs to be reigned in to it’s Constitutional boundaries and not what the anarchists Occupiers wanting to punish the successful want us to believe.

The problem is “Big” Government and the social engineering globalists that run amuck in positions of power in media and political parties!…………..

Marty denies that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of the same coin:

Two sides of the same coin? Are you nuts? I have been reading you columns mostly with great frustrations for 10 years now but this one takes the cake. You have either stopped reading or stopped thinking one of the two. I know of no tea partier that is for the wars ALL 6 of them! I know they all support our troops and will not denigrate them in times of war. But they are just as anxious to be home as anyone. The WS protesters want full blown communism and the tea party seeks a very limited and constitutional form of government. Is that two sides of the same coin? How about the tea party seeks limited and more fair taxes on everyone and not the confiscation of wealth from the wealthy. Is that same coin? The tea party wants no form whatsoever of socialized medicine and privatization of Medicare and social security. Is that two sides of the same coin? That fact of the matter is you refuse to admit the libertarian party and their philosophy is simply nutty to put it mildly. Very little of your political philosophy on how government should run would work and most of the folks know it which is why we reject your nutty libertarian junk. You are deliberately running a disinformation campaign against the tea party by linking them with Washington republicans. I will grant you one thing, the republican party is a natural home for the Tea Party; there is however no friendship between the Washington Republican establishment and the tea party. Each wishes the other gone. You know this and yet you link them like a two headed beast. If you wrote an article and said the republican Washington establishment and the WS protesters were two sides of the same coin, I would have said you were correct. In fact all the things you ascribe to tea partiers can rightly be ascribed to moderate RINO’s in Washington. The tea party did not support the extra spending. Politics is a game of wills and the simple truth is there are some battles you are going to win and some you will lose. The question in the end is what has been achieved and if the tea party gains prominence the county will be much better off. Your stupid party can’t figure out whether drugs should be legal, what’s wrong with abortion, the correct role of government and on and on. The fact of the matter is libertarianism leads to anarchy. That’s is the other side of your coin!!

Meanwhile, David isn’t inclined to let the Tea Party off the hook:

And don’t forget the Tea Party probably passed the three new job killing Free Trade pacts, too. Nobody gives a damn about saving our Middle Class factory jobs.

I responded to Marty thusly: You’re factually wrong. Not all, but most of the Tea Party-endorsed Republicans voted for the $1.299 budget deficit as well as for raising the debt ceiling. It’s also telling that you don’t give OWS the same benefit of the detail that you give the Tea Party. Both activist groups are rather stupid and incoherent… and both activist groups are correct at the deepest level. This is natural, since both are popular movements, which generally are not known for their intellectual precision. And they are two sides of the same coin, as both groups have correctly identified one-half of the problem. Unfortunately, both groups are also inclined to defend the other half of the problem.

Which is why as long as you subscribe to the Tea Party Good, Occupy Wall Street Bad mentality, you will be serving the purposes of the Washington-Wall Street axis.

Marty responded as follows:

You’re correct to link Wall Street and Washington. You’re the first and only person I have seen make this connection. But you are completely incorrect about the Tea Party and its connection to Wall Street. The tea party is the production of moderate republicans voting for Wall Street bail-out. That and health care reform. The Tea party was 100% against the bailout hence its existence. We wanted the companies to go bankrupt. And you cannot even begin to say that McCain’s running back to Washington to vote for the bailout didn’t hurt him big time. We cannot stand the republicans running this country in to the ground via WS albeit at a slower rate than the democrats via wealth confiscation.

There were 100 new Republicans voted in to congress in 2009. 54 voted against the current budget. That’s the majority of tea party Republicans the way I see it. Had you made that point in your article, you would have severely weakened your argument to the reader. You said “most” making it sound like 60% or more when in fact it was in the 40’s percent. I admit I am not always right but on this you are trying to paint a picture out of what you wish was true but it’s not.

To which I responded: You’re not counting correctly. Not all of the new Republicans were Tea Party-endorsed and not all the incumbents were not Tea Party-endorsed. Again, you are factually incorrect.

Of course, even if only 40% of the Tea Party-endorsed Congressman had been successfully corrupted within 12 months of their election, it would suffice to prove that the Tea Party strategy will not succeed.

Mailvox: they have eyes

But they really don’t want to see. LH writes about a response to yesterday’s column:

I forwarded your most recent article to a friend of mine who happens to be a supporter of Herman Cain. Rather than address issues listed in your article, his response went ad hominem.

That WND commentator…. likes to hear himself talk… what exactly did he say? I quit reading him long ago… he laid out a pretty good outline with no substantiation. He’s a Libertarian AND a Southern Baptist who claims Italian residency… a pot-smoking, tax-evading foreigner who plays church??? LOL… (I deduced that from his bio) 🙂

I do agree Cain needs to come more clearly on his involvement with the Fed… and I question his objection to a full audit, but he did not say he was against an audit… only that a “full” audit would be cost prohibitive and is not necessary… and I can agreee with that… whenever the government goes on a witch hunt, someone ends up being a scapegoat and it is not usually the one whose head should be offed. By setting parameters to the audit, the field of potential scapegoats is narrowed… I believe that is what he was alluding to…

I totally agree with Cain on whose fault it is if companies succedd or fail… in the context of “it’s not government’s place to decide…” I think the commentator got that one wrong in the end analysis.

keep watching…. The more popular Cain becomes, the more you’ll hear about his faults… Did we hear much of him before the Florida Straw Pole?. Funny how they ignore Santorum. I see a pattern.

The pattern is that if you can’t even win a Senate race, most people will conclude that your national appeal isn’t likely to be significant. There’s nothing funny about it. But it is funny how the Cain supporter cannot see that Cain is contradicting himself by claiming it’s not the government’s job to decide who wins and who loses while he is defending Wall Street and the banking bailouts.

By the way, here’s the final Facebook score from yesterday’s WND columns:

Day on Cain: 40 Likes
Cain on Cain: 823 Likes

Remember this the next time you are wondering how Wall Street and the big banks managed to get bailed out yet again by Republicans in the future. The lesson, as always, MPAI.

Mailvox: too much negativity

I found Felix’s ode to the blog to be more than a little amusing. I will, however, correct his mistaken assumption that the comments are unmoderated here. They have always been subject to moderation. I have never pretended otherwise.

I check back here for the first in months, sick of the negativity and the thinly-veiled attempts at conceiling post-moderation behind subjective “rules”. And what do I find? Still, 9 out of 10 posts are negative, and nearly that many are self-congratulatory. “Thousands come to hear what I have to say”. Oh, please. Your writing is so terrible, serving only to assuage your own insecurities, that some of us visit only periodically to see if you’re still on the internet. Your blog has became so played, so utterly formulaic and predictable (1. find some person enjoying their 15 minutues of fame 2. mock them and point out that they will never be successful, never be president, etc, 3. lather rinse repeat). The only thing you could write that would be interesting and uplifting for most of us is a suicide note!

His statistical infelicities notwithstanding, I can’t honestly say Felix is all wrong. The vast majority of the blog posts are negative in some way, but then, I am a reasonably sophisticated economics observer and we are in the early stages of a very large scale economic contraction. I’m still pointing out pretty much the same thing I’ve been pointing out since the spring of 2008, the difference is that now people like the Governor of the Bank of England are saying exactly what I’ve been saying, even if their prescriptions are very different than the ones I would suggest and are doomed to failure. Drat, there’s that negativity again!

But what else can I say? Either economic policies will work or they won’t work, and in the case of the UK’s latest quantitative easing, it won’t work, just as all the other proposed fixes didn’t work, and for much the same reason. What, I wonder, is there to be positive about in the world these days? The so-called Arab Spring? The woeful collection of Republican presidential candidates who won’t even talk about the real issues at hand? The death of Steve Jobs? I suppose I could write long and cheerful posts about how my soccer team won its last game, how good the salmon that Spacebunny made last night was, how the Vikings are going to turn it around, or how pretty the long-legged young girl who was selling her services on the suburban street in broad daylight at noon in Spain was – bloody hell, that’s a negative economic indicator too – but happy substance-free pop culture isn’t my idiom.

The main reason this blog is predictable is because I am a) consistent and b) usually correct. And the reason I am usually correct is because the behavior of human beings tends to fall within a small and relatively predictable range. Most people are not only idiots, but the particular form their idiocy takes tends to be predictable. Look, the moment a powerful banker or politician proposes something that is actually viable, I’ll be pleased to say so. But until one does, I will continue to be negative and subsequently proven correct.

Mailvox: No True Scientist?

A hard scientist casts a skeptical eye on those outside her discipline:

You’ll find this quite interesting. It’s in line with your assertions about corruption in the sciences. However, you’re making an error to apply charges of significant corruption and professional laziness to all of science. Perhaps you are in possession of evidence of which I’m not aware*, but based on what I know you’re committing the same error as atheists when they make blanket assertions about atheists vs. religious people. As you have pointed out many times, there are important distinctions within these groups. Likewise, there are important distinctions within the sciences. No field of science is free of flaws, but I have good evidence that corruption is significantly lower in physics and its sub-fields, and that research proceeds as well as can be expected for any human endeavor. I strongly suspect the increase in retractions noted by Nature traces the increased and alarming politicization of some specific fields, namely biology, medicine (including psychiatry/psychology), and climate science.

It’s important to draw a distinction between the different sciences, because developments in physics and even chemistry actually demonstrate that these fields are relatively healthy. Several discoveries in this year alone show that physicists are quite willing to abandon cherished ideas (after only a modest degree of initial resistance) in the face of new data. Also, look at the Nobel prizes announced for physics and chemistry. Both were for experiments that overturned accepted ideas, and in both cases it was only a few years to go from discovery to implementation. That’s unprecedented in other sciences.

There is no question that physics has been the gold standard of science since Isaac Newton. And I’m under no illusion that all science is created equally or that fraud pervades all of it to an equal degree. It hasn’t escaped me, after all, that Daniel Dennett and others have attempted to justify their belief in the predictions of biologists by appealing to the accuracy of predictions by physicists, which is about as sensible as claiming that one should believe psychics due to the accuracy of predictions by economists.

And the response of the physics community to the news of the superluminal neutrinos has been encouraging to those who are accustomed to witnessing very different behavior from scientists in other, softer fields. Moderate skepticism and an expectation that the experiment will be independently replicated before the existing theories are considered to be overturned is entirely reasonable and very different than the way biologists and climatologists have regarded theoretical upheavals in their scientific fields.

The division between hard science and soft science is perhaps better described as the difference between actual science and non-science designed to look like the real thing.

Mailvox: the hypocrisy of the anti-scientist

One can’t truly appreciate how effectively Dominic has argued the atheist case without comparing it to the conventional talking points usually presented by the average atheist:

Yeah, heaven forbid that we actually learn from our mistakes! Tell me vox, if you have such distrust of our present snapshot, how about you jump off your roof to test it?

But you won’t. And I’ll tell you why. While you know it can be wrong, and certainly is at some points, the chance that it’s wrong regarding your fall is abysmally low. So low that you won’t stake your life on it.

You similarly will not trust historical evidence that says humans flew , for you know well that the chance of them lying as opposed to science being wrong on the subject is really, really huge.

When someone testifies to you that he has seen a dragon in your backyard, you will, like a true hypocrite, impose upon the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons despite the fact that you know full well it can be wrong.

And I’ll tell you why. You know it can be wrong, but you’re pretty sure it isn’t. When we bet, we bet on good odds, not bad ones. There’s the difference between probable and plausible that you’re unable to grasp. There’s a chance that your car will crash, your aeroplane will be hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists, you’ll be mugged while walking, etc. Does that prevent you from going out ?

You just happen to forget this game of odds when it suits you. It’s called hypocrisy, and you play this game well.

The amusing thing about the average atheist is the way they illogically attempt to simultaneously deny the relevance of historical and testimonial evidence while appealing to it under the misapprehension that it is science. I don’t refrain from jumping off my roof because science has confirmed that the effect of Earth gravity will draw me to the ground at 9.8 m/s and I have performed a rapid calculation involving my mass, the distance of the fall from the roof, and reached a conclusion that I will not jump. Instead, I rely upon the testimonial evidence of others, which simply states “don’t jump off the roof or you will hurt yourself.”

The amusing thing about this atheist’s example of flight is that scientists of the early 20th century refused to believe the historical evidence that the Wright Brothers had, in fact, flown, in part due to their reliance upon the scientific consensus of the time which insisted that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. In fact, Lord Kelvin, the leading scientist and President of the Royal Society of England, in 1895 stated unequivocally that “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible”.

If someone testifies that he has seen a dragon in my backyard, I may or may not believe him depending upon his historical record of truthfulness. Science won’t enter into it at all. I have already seen far too many things take place that I previously thought to be impossible to place more confidence in “the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons” than in the truthfulness of an individual known to have been reliably truthful in the past.

The problem with atheists who make a fetish of science is that they simply don’t understand that science is not a universal tool ideal for all purposes, but is rather more akin to a hammer. A hammer works very well for driving nails and rather less well for cutting down trees. But preferring the use of a saw when the task at hand involves cutting down a tree does not make one intrinsically anti-hammer, nor does it make one hesitate before picking up a hammer to drive a nail.

Scientific evidence and historical evidence are complimentary, not intrinsically adversarial. They may overlap at times, they may conflict at others, but in no case are they the same thing and both types of evidence are capable of being wholly unreliable if applied in an inappropriate manner. It is far from hypocrisy to recognize the limits to a type of knowledge and restrict one’s use of it to the situations when it is relevant, especially since doing otherwise is misguided at best and quite possibly delusional.