Kevin Schnitzius pointed me to this video, which has been around for a while but was recently mentioned by the Disgruntled Chemist. Skip to about the two-minute mark to get some deep insight into the creationist mindset, which Tara from Aetiology (which has since moved) accurately dubbed the “argument from banana.”
You really do need to see the video, but I’ll spill the beans for the impatient: bananas are the quintessentially designed object. Not only do they fit snugly into a human hand, they even have ridges to allow for a tighter grip, a built-in color-coding that lets us know when they’re ripe, and — my favorite — a convenient pull-tab at the top for easy peeling! What better proof for the existence of God could one need?
I do wonder what they make of the Durian. Perhaps the Designer has a sense of humor?
Update: If you want to know more (perhaps your faith in naturalism has been shaken?), the video comes from a series called The Way of the Master, featuring Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. It purportedly shows in 70 countries, and has been awarded honors by the National Religious Broadcasters association.
The best proof of the existence of God that I have seen is that exp(i*pi) = -1. I have added my own corollary: del-squared phi = 0 shows that God is merciful.
Cheers
Awesome! But seriously, jeez, the atheists they interviewed, seemed worse than the bozos running the show. I mean,
Do these people have no capability for intelligent thought?? Maybe someone should tell them about emergent complexity?
Sam Gralla: It is physically possible for there to be tigers in my house, have no incontrvertible empirical evidence that there are no tigers here. Nevertheless, I am certain that there are no tigers in my house. If somebody asked me to prove that there were no tigers in my house, I’d laugh.
There is no absolute proof of any empirical claim — silliness of astrology, non-existence of the Easter bunny, non-existence of malevolent demons stealing odd numbers of socks from the laundry — and ordinarily we understand this, accepting a combination of overwhelming evidence plus a preference for simple explanations. But for whatever reason, people chicken out when it comes to God, and pretend that we either need a proof or shouldn’t draw any conclusions.
Personally, I like the eggplant argument!
(hilarious video, thanks Sean)
Hi Joe!
I tried to write my comment carefully – but of course it is never careful enough. I have no evidence that my fellow passengers would look at someone homeless and argue that it is God’s will that a person be homeless, but it is a logical extension of the extent to which they appeared to believe that everything (and I am talking, everything) is pre-destined by God. And, I would add, it would explain something that has greatly puzzled me: why so many in the Christian right in the US appear comfortable with our current economic policy. Which to my eyes (C of E educated) would appear to be the antithesis of “Christian values”.
Sean, i’d like to say, good point. Also, just to add nothing to this article, creationists are hilarious. I wish i knew more science so i could argue with them, so far my favorite argument against design is that the bladder is pourly located so that when you need to pea the most, the most blood is rushing to your privates, creating a terribly akward situation when going to the bathroom.
Why the quark gluon plasma is a banana
Samantha, don’t worry about me, I just thought I should mention that, so that no-one reading through the comments got the impression that religion=bad people, since it is often the case that many very religious people are extremely charitable.
I think you comment about the Christian right brings up an interesting point. I think their alignment is an artifact of the 2 party system in the US. If you are sufficiently convinced that, say, abortion is murder, then you are faced with the voting for a party whose financial economic you find distasteful, or with a party you consider to be murders. If there were more major parties, I think that the Republican voters would split into two camps. Financial conservatives in one group and religious groups in the other.
I should point out, in case anyone gets the wrong idea from this post, that I am very liberal (at least by US standards, and UK standards from recent experiences, though PK might give me a run for my money) and also an atheist, so I wouldn’t be voting Republican anyway. That, and I’m not a US citizen, so there is no danger of me voting there.
Amara – thanks for sharing this engineering feat by the Almighty Designer: an eggplant with a banana-like appendage. Using the ID argument, I would like to see Cameron and Comfort try to explain this one.
My uncle and my brother – both of whom were staunch Republicans – have quit the party over Bush and his failed economic policies and his destruction of what they see as “true conservative values”. It might happen yet, a Republican schism. We can only hope…
“Christians” are just silly. If you want to really find something that shows that there is an intellectually rigorous side to Christianity you have to turn to the Roman Catholics, for example, to people like Stanley Jaki from Seton Hall.
Jaki wouldn’t agree with very much said here. This banana agrugment about teleology is just dumb. It is like the old idea that the nose is for holding up one’s glasses.
My advice to the whole group: step out of the magic circle- stop performing acts of faith and your faith will go. But it’s not as simple as Dennett makes it seem.
Jeff: You make good points. I like that definition of an agnostic. I often argue that line, but if we cannot in principle ever interact with a God, he effectively doesn’t exist, and I’m back to being an atheist. Maybe the truth is I’m just undecided–I’m waiting for Sean’s combination of overwhelming empirical evidence and a preference for simple explanations.
Sean: Presumably you believe the statement “there are no malevolent demons stealing odd numbers of socks from the laundry” because there is no evidence for demons and we have a simple compelling alternative explanation (misplacing socks) that passes empirical tests (you sometimes find the sock, or learn where it went). In the case of a statement like “there is no god who made the universe”, I’m not sure what the simple compelling alternative explanation for the making of the universe would be. If asked to explain the making of the universe, I think an atheist would not answer, or call it a malformed question. It is for this reason that “is there a creator” and “are there sock-stealing demons (SSDs)” are simply not analogous. And even if the atheist had an alternative explanation for the making of the universe (please provide one–I’m drawing a blank), do we really repeatedly “find socks” to make us believe it? Of course, there are pleanty of things we can point to in the world to lead us to believe that there is no God, but nothing like finding socks. Similarly, there are things we can point to in the world that lead us to believe there is a God, but again nothing totally compelling. It is just in the nature of metaphysical questions that evidence won’t be of the usual physical nature, and therefore deserves special treatment (and perhaps chickening out).
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I do not consider a banana even uncompelling evidence for God =)
Eugene, with my very poor knowledge of bahasa melayu, I can only say this: Saya tidak suka makan buah durian.
Cynthia, You’re welcome. I buy my vegetables from a man with a vegetable truck who comes around my neighborhood 3 times a week. I asked for one melanzane (eggplant), and he absent-mindedly reached into the melanzane box and pulled out that one. Seeing the look on his face when that particular eggplant appeared in his hand was almost worth the effort of moving to Italy.
Sam Gralla – I’m just curious. Even if we don’t (yet) have a definitive “naturalistic” explanation for the origin of the Universe, why is therefore “God made the Universe” *any* sort of explanation for its origin? Why can’t I ask “Who/what created God”? Doesn’t this just lead to a infinite chain of “Who made X” questions, with no answer *ever* possible? I have never managed to see the logic behind this type of “reasoning”. If you accept this type of reasoning I would love to hear your explanation of why you find it a compelling way of arguing something.
One way of getting theists on their knees is to ask what God is: What is it that you want me to believe in? I do believe in Love, Forgiveness, and all that, but God seems to encompass something more. Every possible answer (e.g., “creator”) gives rise to more questions. It will always end in “having faith”. And then you say: “So you want me to believe in something that you cannot describe and for which there is no compelling empirical evidence? That’s just silly!”
Sam, you are shifting the goalposts. Earlier you referred to “proving an absolute statement,” and it’s important to first dispense with that straw man. The evidence we use to make decisions about “is there a God?” is of exactly the same form as for deciding whether there are sock-stealing demons, as they are equally metaphysical and supernatural constructs. In neither case is absolute proof required.
What conclusion you come to on the basis of that kind of reasoning is a different question. I have a very simple and compelling explanation for the origin of the universe — it wasn’t created, it simply exists. Hard to imagine something simpler than that. For more details see my atheism paper.
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Penn Juliett of Penn & Teller did a great rant on this over at his radio show (downloadable as a podcast)
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Hiranya: I’m not arguing for the existence of God, but you certainly could ask who made God, and the answer you would get from a theist would most likely be the same as our atheist just gave for the universe: “it wasn’t created; it simply exists.” Any belief system has to have something that just exists, (unless it wants an infinite chain or something) for the reasons you mentioned.
Sean: “Are demons stealing my socks” is a very different question from “is there a God”. I’ll avoid the word metaphysical, however, because I’ve gotten in to many unproductive arguments before about what it means. But if you want to argue by analogy with “is action X performed by demons”, you need to ask “is action Y performed by God”, not is there a God at all. I picked for action Y the creation of the universe because this thread was about creationism, and because that is a property that would distinguish an all-powerful God from a lesser demon. Then I tried to demonstrate that the question is actually not analogus in this case because action Y is unstestable by scientific means (this is what I call a metaphysical action). ‘It just exists’ may satisfy you (it certainly satisfies religious people for their God), but it is not a scientific explanation, unless ‘it just exists’ is a scientific explanation for a banana (these inquiries are all analogous, right?). “Demons stole my socks” can be falsified by science just as “God stole my socks” can be, but “God made the universe” cannot be, because we have no alternative scientific explanation for creation. That’s why it’s a different question altogether, and I use a different word for it (metaphysical).
I scanned the paper and it looks great. I’ll read it when I get a chance (and maybe write a response), but that won’t be during the lifteme of this thread. Thanks for keeping up the conversation!
Sam Gralla – thanks for your reply (I am not from a culture which postulates a creator god at all so I don’t have much of a clue why people buy into this idea). So from what you say, whereas the atheist would say “the universe just exists”, the theist would instead make a huge extrapolation outside the natural experience of the physical universe to postulate a supernatural being, and say that “there exists a supernatural being, and he/she/it created the universe”. The theist seems to me to require a hugely more faith-based assumption/axiom for the existence of the universe than the atheist.
i liek the way you think hiranya