Busted

I am still pretty new to Twitter. I am still getting use to how to use it, and how to get the most out of it. I also am still getting used to sorting out who to follow. One person I followed sometime ago is Adam Savage from The Mythbusters. I have been a fan of the show for years. So following Adam and Jamie seemed like a no brainier. What I didn't know from watching the show, (though in retrospect I am not surprised) is the Mythbusters are Humanists.

A few weeks ago Adam tweeted a link to the acceptance speech he gave when he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award from the Harvard Humanists. The speech was given about a year ago, but like me, people are still discovering it.

If you have not come across the speech here it is.

Here are the points he makes as I understand them;

1.People can be good without God
2.We have to take care of ourselves
3.You can appreciate the universe and beauty without God
4.Religion turned it back on truth
5.The primary mover argument is to complex, thus likely to be false
6. We can have no purpose, but still be on a mission

With that little outline lets proceed.

1. This is the mantra of the humanist movement. 'Good without God' or 'Good for Goodness sake'. I have already talked about this in more detail, so I will be brief. When Christian use the word good, they mean more along the lines  of prefect, or without sin, or righteous. When humanists use the word good they mean, morally responsible, law abiding, and more or less nice people. The two things without a doubt overlap but they are two different ways of understanding good. Yes people can be good in the humanist sense without any particulate belief system or any need for any kind of god.

2.I admittedly had a hard time titling this point, or even deciding if it should be one point or three. Here Adam hits on a few things, first prayers effectiveness, second his method of problem solving, and third his reflection on empathy and helping others. His comment that prayer works because it helps us become more aware of ourselves, our surroundings, and others is interesting. I suspect prayer does have that affect. It helps to calm our mind which enables us enter into problem solving mood. But that is hardly the entire story of prayer. Likewise this assessment only covers prayers that are seeking some kind of advice. It hardly addresses times when the problem you face cannot be solved. What can really be done when you are sitting helpless in a funeral parlor, or beside a hospital bed? Prayer is not the same thing as taking a deep breath, and clearing your mind to objectively look at a problem. Prayer is more.

3. Again here I feel that this is a non-starter. I have no doubt a person can appreciate beauty and the universe without a belief in God. Though the Christian and the Humanist may appreciate these things in different ways. However I think it is fair to say we both experience a sense of awe. Maybe the only difference is Christians can move from awe to praise.

4. There is a sad truth to his point here. The fact is Christianity has earned a bad reputation because we refused to talk with people who disagreed with us, and we have harmed people when we should have protected them.These are things that we need to apologize for and move on. We need to take seriously our call to love children as Jesus did, and to love God with all our minds.

5.It is these last two points that Adam moves from his personal observations to something more in line with theological or philosphoal reflection. And it is here we move beyond just being able to say, 'Well your experience may be X, but mine is Y.' Adam states that the primary mover argument for God, while it cannot be disproved, can be safely ignored. He thinks this because it is the most complex idea about the formation of the universe, so Ockham's razor defeats it. First let me say, I am not convinced that this is true. I do not think that invoking a primary mover is in some way more complex than the alternatives.

Lets take a look at the alternatives for a minute. If not a primary mover than what? Do we live in an unobservable multi-verse? Where one universe gives birth to another and another. But how did the first universe start? Or did the universe just spontaneously appear? Thus after eons of nothing all of a sudden a universe showed up uncaused by anything? Or did the universe come into existence through an infinite series of depend causes? Of course that can't be true because sooner or later we must run into something that started the whole process, something that itself was not caused.

All of this aside I think in any situation Ockham's razor can only tells us part of the story. After all there have been many simple explanations that needed to be discarded once they proved untrue. For example we used to believe the world was made up of four elements; earth, fire, wind, and water. That rather simple explication had to give way to the more complex and more factual periodic table. The natural world being made out of four elements may be the most simple explanation available, but it is still wrong. In the end more complex is not the same as untrue. 

6. I found this idea of being on a mission, even if life has no purpose to be interesting. I understand the idea, I even find it admirable. Everyone wants to think their life has some meaning and will have some lasting impact. However if the humanist position is correct every mission ultimately ends in failure. 

Maybe it is because our young adult group is currently studying Ecclesiastes but as I read the story about the Eagle all that was running through my head was, 'vanity, vanity a chasing after the wind'. If death is the end, if 70-100 years (if I am lucky) is all I get, than everything really is vanity. 

No matter how much knowledge I gain, no matter how much wealth I acquire, no matter how much pleasure I indulge in death will sallow it all up. The sands of time will erase my name from this world likely within a few decades. The most I could hope for is that I become one of the very few people that does something that is worth remembering. But even than, sooner or later the human race will end. Either we'll blow ourselves up, or an illness will get the better of us, or the sun will explode or the universe will run out of gas. Now this may take hundreds, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of years, but sooner or later everything ever done will come to an end, forgotten, locked away in a dead cold universe. Our mission whatever it was, will have been for nothing.

In the end there is a lot we can walk away from as we digest this speech. It shows that we need to work hard on a number of fronts. We need to show the world we can use our minds with the best of them. We need to trumpet the power of prayer. We need to strive for moral excellence. And we need to be aware that everyone no matter what their worldview is, are looking for meaning. We need to show them we have found it.

Well not really, there was nothing to bust so to speak.
I just wanted to use the graphic.
I mean what would you have done?!