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Both Stalin and Mao killed millions of people on the basis of a faith.

Remember my earlier definition of the word "faith"--a belief that is accepted without evidence to support it. All religions are faith, but not all faiths are religion. For example, astrology is taken on faith, despite mountains of evidence against it, but it isn't a religion.

Stalin accepted many beliefs on faith, without evidence to support them: he believed that wheat and other organisms could be "trained" to inherit new traits they acquired from the environment, a belief that killed millions of Soviet citizens through starvation. He believed that all knowledge that came from "bourgeois" West was inherently corrupted, which caused him to reject outright things like genetic biology and molecular biology. He believed that Jews were inherently inferior in intelligence to non-Jews, and so ignored the reports of a Jewish doctor, Dr. Karpai, who had reported an anomaly in the cardiogram of one of his top Politburo officers, Andrei Zhdanov (who shortly thereafter died of a heart attack).

Chairman Mao is a textbook case of irrational and anti-rational thinking. Mao believed, for example, that industrialization could be accomplished quickly by forcing farmers to stop producing food and instead making them work on collective industrialization projects; the result of this belief that he held without supporting evidence was the Great Chinese Famine, which killed tens of millions of people.

Mao believed that formal education and schooling were inherently corrupting influences, and that all the knowledge a person needed could be gained informally through experience; as a result, most of the industrial projects developed during the Great Leap Forward, from roadways to dams to industrial infrastructure, failed or turned out to be useless, because they were not designed by skilled engineers.

Mao and Stalin are great examples of what happens when anti-intellectualism wins the day--when people reject the fruits of formal, rigorous scientific inquiry in favor of superstition and beliefs held without evidence. Stalin killed geneticists; Mao executed engineers; as a direct result, millions died.

These are not examples of what happens when atheists take power; they are examples of what happens when superstition triumphs over reason, when leaders turn their back on studious inquiry into the physical laws of the universe in favor of ideology and irrationality. There has never been a case in which millions of people have been murdered because of an excess of reasonableness.



I'm not saying any such thing; what is an 'atheist organization,' anyway? I'm saying that hospitals are most commonly built for reasons which are not religious.

How many hospitals have been built by the Assemblies of God, or the Fundamentalist Mormons? How about the Christian Scientists, who hold as a matter of faith that all of medicine is a sin, and that only the power of the Holy Spirit can cure disease?



Sorry, no. It's supported by considerable evidence; the COBE satellite was designed and built to test the predictions made by the Big Bang model, and it's one of the most stunning success stories in all of science. The data gathered by the satellite about the universal microwave background radiation match perfectly to within the limits of ...e by the theory.

As Randall Munroe, author of XKCD, famously observed, "We finally figured out that you could separate fact from superstition by a completely radical method: observation. You can try things, measure them, and see how they work! Bitches. The graph [of] data from the COBE mission, which looked at the background microwave glow of the universe and found that it fit perfectly with the idea that the universe used to be really hot everywhere. This strongly reinforced the Big Bang theory and was one of the most dramatic examples of an experiment agreeing with a theory in history -- the data points fit perfectly, with error bars too small to draw on the graph. It's one of the most triumphant scientific results in history."

How much evidence do you have to support the notion that some divine cosmic being made the world in six days and created woman out of the rib of man?

Or is that even the creation myth you prefer? There are lots of creation stories: the Chinese tradition that says the universe began with an egg, out of which hatched a giant whose arms became the world? How about the Egyptian myth in which the god Re masturbates, and from his masturbation is produced the father and mother of an entire race of gods, who go out and build the world? How about the Mesopotamian myth, which says that the descendants of the goddess Tiamat revolt against her and destroy her, then split her body in half, and create the heavens from one half and the earth from the other half?

Are each of these ideas "no better than any other"?

That is one of the main problems with the nature of faith, and one you still haven't answered, even though I have asked you twice. I will now ask you a third time.

There are hundreds of thousands of beliefs that have no evidence and can have no evidence. The three-part Christian god made the world, the giant god P'an Ku created the heavens and the earth from the halves of a gigantic eggshell, the Greek gods Gaia and Uranus create all the heavens and the earth but Uranus shuts up the flawed creations within the bowels of the earth to make way for man, the notion that the universe began when eight gods sprung from the back of an enormous jellyfish and filled the firmament with other gods, who come together to form the world; the universe began as an empty hollow that slowly filled with water and then froze into the shape of a giant, Ymir, whose armpits produced a second generation of giants who rose up and slew him, then made the world from his flesh and bones...it goes on and on and on.

Given all that, and given that there can be no evidence, not one shred, to support any of this, how do you choose a faith? Do you just believe what you're told to believe? What your parents believe? What your society believe? Were all the people who believe in Ymir and Odin and Loki and Set fools and simpletons, but you are wise and enlightened because your god is somehow better?



And cannot be. Yet I am betting that you don't believe in Apollo, Amaterasu, Geong Si, Freyr, Iris, Kagutsuchi, Maia, Marduk, Bast, Yarikh, Tiamat, Rama, Ninazu, Lugh, Hathor, Juturna, Fenrir, Ceres, Dagon, Ohkuninushi, Shapsu, Vishnu, Yum Kimil, Xochiquetzal, Tonatiuh, Selene, Shiva, Rhea, Orgelmir, Mot, Hermes, Ixtab, Davlin, Ceridwen, Athirat, Balder, or Horus, yet they can be neither proved nor disproved either. So how do you choose a god to believe in?



It's not even hard to shred. The author doesn't know what science is. The author asserts that " All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order." And that's exactly what we see; science doesn't believe that on faith, but rather that's where the evidence has led.

We don't believe that a hammer, when dropped will fall because of some kind of prophet who revealed it as an issue of faith; we believe it because every time we drop a hammer, it falls. Non-falling hammers are thin on the ground indeed.

The article's prime absurdity can be found in this ridiculous passage: "Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too." This is a re-couching of the same old tired yarn that science is just like religion because science doesn't know everything yet. It's a weak argument, which tends to be persuasive only to those who do not know what science actually is.

Think about the two cave men I talked about before. Ogg says that the sun is a god. Gronk says that it isn't; he doesn't know what it is, but it's not a god. Ogg's sun-god dies as science advances; people in prehistoric times could not explain what the sun was, but that does not mean that the sun was a god, nor that belief in a physical, non-supernatural explanation for the sun was "faith". They didn't know what that explanation was, that's all.

Now we do. Now we know that the sun is not a god. Ogg's belief in a sun-god shrinks as science advances.

I believe this is why the vast majority of the world's religious traditions, including all forms of fundamentalist Christianity, are anti-intellectual. Their gods are the gods of the gaps. Their faith only survives as long as they can say "there are things we don't know and there are things science doesn't know so that means science is just another faith." As knowledge progresses, their gods must retreat. As science learns more, their gods become less. They HAVE to be anti-intellectual, for the same reason that the caveman Ogg HAS to oppose learning about the nature of the sun. Once we do learn these things, there is no room left for god.

So as our knowledge grows, our gods become more feeble and more abstract. What was once believed to be an entire bestiary of fearsome gods whose actions shaped everything from the rising of the sun to the falling of the rain has become a distant, invisible, amorphous man in the sky who contents himself with drawing vague doodles on bits of toast.