Bill Maher Is as Religulous as the Rest of Us

by Bobby Maddex

What a fun game, Bill. Let me give it a try:

So there are all these chemicals just kind of floating around in space. Somehow, the chemicals begin reacting against each other; they form our universe and then our planet; and then create this miraculous bowl of soup. Then get this: Out of the (non-living) soup comes a (living) cell that then turns into a fish. The fish grows some legs and eventually becomes an opossum. That opossum turns itself into a whole mess of other animals, including monkeys. These monkeys learn to stop flinging poop at each other long enough to begin walking upright, at which point they become human. The humans then have a bunch of babies who have other babies until a baby named Charles is born who argues that he knows how the world came to have babies in the first place. Some of the humans decide that they like Charles's story better than the other stories circulating throughout society (mostly because the other stories require them to behave like humans instead of monkeys), so they dismiss the other stories. Eventually, it becomes fashionable among some humans to ridicule stories that aren't Charles's, whereupon a human named Bill makes a movie about how "religulous" non-Charles stories are.

Wow, that was fun and easy.

Comments

[Nate]

Thank you so much. Your commentary is priceless. And true.

[Eric]

I was going to comment and correct you, but I think that the most helpful thing I could say is to recommend very strongly that you read a little bit about Evolution by Darwinian Natural Selection. If your post here reflects your actual beliefs (which I desperately hope is not true), you really lack an understanding of the theory.

I will just show you how you have not solved a problem, but rather regressed back to it. Your argument is this:
(1) life is too complex and improbable to have arisen by chance. (This is indeed a problem that any explanation of life must address)
(2) Something as improbable as life as we know it must be explained by conscious design.
(2) So some sort of supervening intelligence (God) must have done it.

But your argument demands the exact same sort of explanation for God. So, by your very own reasoning, God MUST have been created by an intelligent designer, and so on infinitely.

So the solution of God, which is intended to solve the problem of improbability, only regresses back to it.

Evolution by Natural Selection, however, actually explains how complex things like ourselves can emerge, over time, from the very simplest of beginnings.

[Bobby Maddex]

No, it was a caricature of Darwinian evolution that was meant to mimic Maher's caricature of Christianity. One can show any belief to be ridiculous with relative ease.

[JM Inc.]

I guess the problem with Scientology (I think it was that Jon Stewart interview where they played the Scientology clip?) is that there really is nothing to it other than batcrap crazy. Just a bunch of arbitrary points of doctrine thrown together without much regard for plausibility, and it just doesn't get any deeper no matter how hard you look. I can never get over the fact that people actually pay to participate in that sort of weirdness.

What a strange and desperate society we do live in.

[Steve L]

Eric

You are wrong in your argument that God required a super-intelligence to create Him. God is THE Uncaused Cause. He exists outside of time and space, which He created along with matter. God just Is.

This is the name He gave to Moses when asked "What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?" God's answer was "I am who I am . This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'"

There is no explanation for God. He is beyond comprehension. We can know Him, but never fully understand Him.

Now, if you want to talk about evolution and improbability…

You wrote: "Evolution by Natural Selection, however, actually explains how complex things like ourselves can emerge, over time, from the very simplest of beginnings."

It explains nothing of the kind. All natural selection can do is select from traits that already exist. It cannot create new genetic information that codes for new body types, biological processes, etc. Natural selection can shuffle genetic traits or eliminate them, but not create them.

This is why we have big dogs, little dogs, dogs with curly fur, dogs with straight fur, dogs with short legs, dogs with long legs and so on. But in the end, they're all still the same species: dogs. They'll never "evolve" into anything else.

"Aha!" you say. "What about mutations?"

What about them? It has never been demonstrated that a genetic mutation has created new information, only that it corrupts already existing information. The vast majority of mutations are harmful, if not fatal, to organisms. Most of the rest are neutral. The tiny fraction of mutations that prove beneficial to survivability come at a cost.

Example: a mutation that cause beetles to lose their wings. Such beetles are less likely to be blown out to sea by strong winds, but less likely to survive in the wild.

Another example: sickle cell anemia. It makes carriers less susceptible to malaria, but prey to a host of other biological problems.

“But given enough time, surely beneficial mutations will gradually accumulate.” This is wishful thinking. Laying aside the fact that beneficial mutations which would result in, say, the ability for blood to clot without killing the organism, would all have to occur simultaneously (and the blood clotting cascade is a VERY complex biological process), consider the following:

"What have scientists calculated the probability to be of an average-size protein occurring naturally? Walter Bradley, Ph.D. materials science, and Charles Thaxton, Ph.D. chemistry, calculated that the probability of amino acids forming into a protein is 4.9 x 10 to the minus 191.

This is well beyond the laws of probability (1x10 to the minus 50), and a protein is not even close to becoming a complete living cell. Sir Fred Hoyle, Ph.D. astronomy, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor of Applied Math and Astronomy, calculated that the probability of getting a cell by naturalistic processes is 1 x 10 to the minus 40,000." (from “Can natural processes explain the origin of life?” by Mike Riddle, May 17, 2007, from the “Answers in Genesis” website.)

Just before this in the same article, Riddle notes that “According to the laws of probability, if the chance of an event occurring is smaller than 1 in 10 to the minus 50, then the event will never occur…”

So natural selection acting on random mutations over even enormous periods of time offers absolutely no real hope for evolution. (I am speaking of what is termed macro-evolution, the change of one living organism into something entirely different, and not micro-evolution, which is just variation within a species.) Therefore, let’s consider the other explanation put forth by evolution theory…

Wait! Evolution theory offers no other explanation, does it?

So which seems more improbable: God or evolution?

[Zyphane]

Mr. Maher puts forth the idea that Scientology is "no crazier" than Christianity. We're just used to Christianity, he says. Mr. Maher could at least have some intellectual integrity and not label all religious with the same stamp because he has a vendetta against religious belief in general. Yes, to a skeptic, they both look ridiculous. However, let's look at this anthropologically. We'll operate under the assumption that the existence of God is improbable. Man evolves, his intellect becomes greater. He creates myths and seeks to describe the unseen forces that are at work in the world. This eventually gives way to the idea of "spirits" that we can interact with to affect the world around us. Later, these "spirits" evolve into "gods" in the mind of mankind. Even later, these gods are consolidated into one all-powerful "God" by the Israelites, perhaps influenced by the failed Egyptian experiment with Atenism. Eventually the Israelite monotheism gives way to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which humanizes God in the fully-God, fully-Man Jesus of Nazareth, who may or may not have been a historic personage.

Now, Scientology is a belief system that was created by a single man, L. Ron Hubbard, who was a well known writer of science fiction. And the beliefs of this "religion" don't read in the conventional supernatural, cosmological manner. They read like science fiction.

If Mr. Maher wants to look at both sets of beliefs as ridiculous, that's his prerogative. Surely, however, he can't expect me to accept that my beliefs are as crazy as Tom Cruise's beliefs. At the very least, I'm following a set of lies and misconceptions that organically grew into their modern form over thousands, perhaps millions of years. A belief system that is completely open to all inquiry. Whereas Tom Cruise is following a set of beliefs laid down by a science fiction writer, in an organization that doesn't even tell you these fantastic stories until you dish out a bunch of cash. Hmmm....

[Brian Walton]

Great post and great site. I appreciated the video. I am not surprised at all that his film is getting pretty well thrashed by the critics.

At the very least it does seem to promoting some conversation, which is his stated objective.

I found the interview to be particularly interesting. My two cents on it here:

www.allusboys.wordpress.com

[JF]

Craig Hazen Reviews Maher's Religulous:

http://www.biola.edu/news/articles/2008/081007_hazen.cfm

Hazen is a professor of comparative religion

[Cajun Nick Jagneaux]

Steve L.,

Thanks for your response to Eric.

I'd also suggest to Eric (if he hasn't already) that he read St. Thomas Aquinas about the First Cause.

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm

[Dimas]

God doesn´t exist. How i know it? Because i know it.

[Kevin H]

I am astonished (constantly and profoundly) at how simplistically religious people want to see the world. Realize that you only eschew science when it contradicts with your stories and philosophies about stories (i.e., "theology"). That's conspicuous. And Steve L--dude, it is sooooo hard to know where to begin with the bastardized probability you've offered up. It's just staggeringly wrong and ridiculous and ignorant. You cannot develop the probability of initial conditions for an event for which has not been replicated. Well, you can and you have (cited), but the figure is such a manipulation of reality that it would take the faith of a Christian to actually swallow it.

The main thing America has in common with the fundi Muslim countries is overt religiousity....oh, and a majority of citizens that believe in Creationism. 'Nuff said. Read a f#$kin' book that isn't rotten with dogma next time.

[Kevin H]

Also, with regards to your magical belief in "first cause", please look up "anthropic principle". The notion of a self-creating consciousness--an intentional consciousness, omnipotent and omniscient, yet descendent from nothing, no legacy whatsoever--is FAR AND AWAY the most ludicrously improbable event imaginable and yet a central tenant to your childish belief system.

You have to try and understand how difficult and frustrating it is for non-religious people to engage these matters with those of you who have cemented, pre-formed, infallible-text views of the world. It's like trying to teach new tricks in English to a dog who knows all his commands in German, who will take only ONE language, and that language is "immutable", "infallible", "eternal". Science doesn't do that, and when religious idiots try and co-opt scientific language for their purposes, it is incredibly embarrassing to listen to. You just make no attempt at actually understanding scientific theory, and you gulp the religious pseudoscience de jour just as readily as you have gulped your dogma for years and years. You are an anachronism.

[Clevis]

Don't be mad at us religous types. See, we got the bad religious (universe seems caused) genes and you got the good non-religious (universe seems like it just happened) genes. Oh well.