... Actually, here is the finished PowerPoint slide show, made available by Slideshare (www.slideshare.com) ...
And here are two presentations I made on that Powerpoint slideshow. Combined, they last about 3 hours: "Proof of God Part 1" and "Proof of God Part 2"
“Trust is when you accept what well-sourced evidence tells you. Faith is believing in something despite evidence to the contrary.”To put it another way, where there is good evidence, there is no need for faith. And where faith is needed, it is principally due to a lack of evidence. It is simply a devious and dishonest language game when apologists use very broad term, "faith", to describe both kinds of activities. Skeptics approach religious claims, and other faith-based beliefs, very carefully to avoid being taken in by every new idea that is proposed. Skepticism, itself, is not a faith or a belief system. It does not represent an active desire to disbelieve what others believe. It is a very reasonable approach to evaluating truth claims. Skepticism is the hallmark of an adult who thinks for himself. If after approaching a truth claim with skepticism, it survives, then the skeptic has good reasons to accept it. A skeptical approach filters bunk from reality. Skeptics only accept truth claims that pass through the filter. Without that filter, practically any claim would have to be accepted. We see non-skeptical gullibility in popular culture, and we see it in religion.
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”That describes the apologist approach to their various proofs exactly. Apologists don't do empirical investigation. They engage in this armchair philosophizing in trying to explain "life, the universe, and everything". They think about all of the possible ways the world could be, and conclude that those ways must somehow include the idea of god. There is no step in their thinking process in which they actually go out and look at how the universe actually is, and experiment with their ideas. You don't need to do that in their way of thinking, because they are just interested in finding ways to argue to the conclusion that they have already reached, which is that god must be the centrual hub of the universe. This kind of reasoning has never has never taught us anything true and interesting about the actual world. The early religious cosmologists saw the universe as being made of the flat, circular surface of the earth (the land circumscribed by the horizon), a heavenly firmament (a solid celestial sphere with stars rigidly embedded in it) above, a world of water above the stars and firmament, and another world of water below the surface of the earth. In the complete absence of data, they reasoned their way to this based on the bible:
"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven."(Genesis 1:6-8)and
"In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." (Genesis 7:11)
"Dawkins still appears to be convinced that religion will be defeated by rationality alone. Were that the case, David Hume would have sufficed."This is in reference to Hume's Dialogs on Natural Religion, in which he systematically shows how miracles and the resurrection of Jesus almost certainly didn't happen. Logic, reason, and empirical evidence will not be what eventually move Christians away from their faith, if that ever happens. If they were effective, then theism would have died out 250 years ago.
"...Even if we assume that objects <in the universe> somehow instantiate rules, there remains the epistemic problem of knowing whether we’ve chosen the right model, or identified the right mathematical equation (i.e. laws of Nature) for characterizing the rules that define a certain kind of object – be it a tiny electron or a star, like the sun. But if we <assume> that God wants to make intelligent beings, and that God wants these intelligent beings to reason their way to God’s existence – then we can infer that the rules which are embodied by objects in the natural world must be tailor-made to fit the minds of intelligent beings that are capable of contemplating their Creator. In other words, the universe is designed to be knowable by us. Hence we don’t need to concern ourselves with the theoretical possibility that the rules which characterize things might be too complicated even in principle for us to grasp. God, then, is the ultimate Guarantor that science can work ... Either God exists or scientific knowledge is impossible."He is invoking Descartes' attempt to prove that god would never deceive us:
"God ... a being having all those perfections that I cannot comprehend ... and a being subject to no defects whatever ... cannot be a deceiver, for it is manifest by the light of nature that all fraud and deception depend on some defect."Nevermind that god is a known deceiver (e.g., he told Adam and Eve they would die if they ate the fruit and they didn't, he told Abraham to kill Issac, and then stopped him at the last minute, he planted a "deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets", and in the new testament, "sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie"). The truth is that we don't know why or how it is that humans, and humans alone, have figured out how to probe the secrets of the universe. We do have the curiosity, and we seem to be slowly figuring it out. Religionists are talking nonsense when the confidently credit god with giving us this skill. There is absolutely no basis for making and defending such an unprovable claim. Anyone could make a similar claim about their own personal creator entity, whether it is the Christian god or some super-intelligent alien race, or the result of an experiment by an other-worldly cosmic hacker who threw some rules together and hit the "start" button.
"By means of that relation alone, we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses."The only way we could obtain knowledge of causality would be to infer it from our past observations of regularities. Our prediction of future events based on the past observations is not a rational activity, but just a matter of habit and an intuitive sense of probability – the odds of the sun not rising are infinitesimal. When we project findings about these relations into the future, we must use an intermediate premise, the uniformity of nature, which is risky, because it can change at any time and be proven false. The chicken thinks that the human will always bring it grain until the day he comes with a hatchet. According to Hume:
"It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance. All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning."For some reason, there is a trend in modern western thought to obsess with obtaining absolute, complete certainty - in particular it drives Christians to find a god who they can have utter confidence in. It seems to the apologists that unless you can deductively prove your theory (in this case, that the inductive method is reliable), you have failed. Employing the fallacious argument from consequences, Torley and others like him posit a god to save us from the uncomfortable position of not really being sure about our knowledge of the world.
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”In more recent times, probabilistic approaches have been brought to bear on the problem of induction - specifically Bayes Theorem, which bring in the concept of "prior probability". Of course it is "possible" that the laws of nature are not what we think they are, but is it "probable"? This is a key distinction which some Christians tend to overlook both in this context, and in Pascal's Wager (where they worry about the possibility of going to hell, versus the probability of it not happening). If these laws were going to change at some time, and that time has not occurred in the last several billion years, there is not a shred of evidence that indicates that it is going to occur in the next few seconds, years, or centuries. From a purely probabilistic framework, the odds of everything being turned topsy-turvy in the near future are very, very, very slim when measured against all of the opportunities for change that came and went in the past. For this reason it would be rational to assume the present trend is likely to continue, and highly irrational to assume it will not. The chances of something like this which never occurred in the past, and shows no sign of occurring in the future, are infinitesimally small - below any threshold of concern. Although we can't prove that the continuity of past/present/future will persist, a betting man could reliably count on it.
Each of the above explanations favors an active god to account for experiences that could better be explained by the complete absence of a god. The god explanation is strained and reeks of artifice. That is, it feels ad hoc, designed merely to cover the facts but provides no additional predictive or descriptive power over and above the secular explanation. It is designed to provide a cover story for what has already happened in our universe (e.g., the six days of creation, the flood, etc), but is utterly incapable of making novel predictions about future events, or even mundane predictions. It is completely untestable, and designed to be immune from refutation. Philosophers would say that the secular theory and the religious theory are "underdetermined" by the facts (i.e., the observations underdetermine several competing theories), in that each accounts for the facts so far. Occam's Razor is a tool that can be used to help decide between competing, seemingly equivalent theories.
It was named after William of Ockham, who is thought to have originated the most well-known version of it 700 years ago. The word, "razor" is part of the name because this principle is used to "shave away" needless embellishments and unnecessary assumptions from from hypotheses and explanations. A formal phrasing of it is,
Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessitywhich means we would be wise to seek out the most economical explanation that will fully account for the facts. We see this restated and reinvented from time to time, as with the "KISS" principle ("Keep it simple, stupid"), and a phrase commonly used in medicine where there can be a tendency to over-diagnose, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras”. It is also called the "Law of Economy" or the "Law of Parsimony". They all mean basically the same thing - choose the explanation which requires the smallest number of "inventions". For the teacher hearing a student's story about why they didn't turn in an assignment, the explanation which involves the student being lazy requires a smaller leap of faith than that the dog ate the homework.
This guideline does not PREVENT us from denying the existence of these extra entities (i.e., the destructive dog, the rampaging zebra). Dogs are occasionally the guilty party, and probably there has been the rare case of the zebra on-the-loose. But experience shows that it is usually the simpler explanation - the student procrastinated, the hoofbeats were those of a horse. However, it allows us to refrain from including superfluous ornamentation of the explanation in the absence of a compelling reason. In part, this is because human beings can never be sure they know what is and what is not “beyond necessity”; the necessities are not always clear to us.
The application of the principle can help shifts the burden of proof in a discussion to the party making the exaggerated claims. The Razor is a "best practice" for approaching problems. It states that one should utilize simpler theories that can fit the evidence and explain the process or phenomenon under investigation. The simplest available theory need not be most accurate. The exact meaning of "simplest" may be debatable, and people will argue of what "fitting the evidence" really means. Also, since the only reason to abandon the guideline is be confronted with a "compelling reason", the apologist will therefore construct such reasons, typically using one of the standard arguments such as the Cosmological Principle, the Fine Tuned Universe, the Ontological Argument, or the Design Implies a Designer argument. These, and others, are discussed in other sections of this blog.
Applied to Christian apologetics, we are presented with two explanations. One posits god's involvement vs. one that does not. The second is less complex and should be preferred in the absence of a reason not to. It does not require the invention of a super-being who is certainly is far more complex than the universe he created and continues to control (although I have heard Christians perversely argue that, on the contrary, god is the simplest of beings!). So, barring any compelling evidence to the contrary, the non-supernatural reason should be preferred. By the standard of Occam's Razor, the explanation that does NOT involve a god, afterlife, heaven, hell, virgin births, parting seas, pillars of salt, burning bushes, talking snakes and donkeys, exorcisms, stopping the sun, walking on water, resurrections, salvation and assorted miracles is, by far, a superior explanation for what we see here in our lives. As additional confirmation, it doesn't hurt that the naturalistic explanation has a perfect 500 year long batting average (I am starting with the Renaissance, here, though it could be argued that it began with the Greek philosophers). Never has a natural explanation fallen to a supernatural one, though the opposite frequently occurs.
If we have no good evidence for likely candidates for a supernatural event, then we clearly have no reason to postulate supernatural causation. Refusing to accept the existence of supernatural causes, however, is not equivalent to rejecting their existence. Accepting the natural explanation requires us to deny the existence of supernatural causes altogether. Occam's Razor provides us with grounds for denying the existence of supernatural causation rather than remaining agnostic about it. If we have no convincing evidence in support of the supernatural explanation for our experiences, the simplest explanation is that there are no supernatural causes influencing the natural world. Second-hand testimony, apocryphal stories, ancient documents, testimony based on personal experience, revelation, and other weak evidence for possible supernatural events can always be explained more simply than the actual occurrence of such events. It is far more likely that the testimony or evidence can be more cleanly explained in terms deception, fraud, exaggeration, imagination, poetic license, hallucination, memory errors, misunderstanding, wishful thinking, propagandizing, perceptual errors, mistranslation, or misinterpretation.
Issac Newton, although a very devout Christian, had no tolerance for what he called “occult causes” both because he saw them not only as unnecessary, but positively unhelpful. They had no explanatory power, but were simply excuses for explaining away what we didn’t yet understand. In his day, the nature of magnetism, electricity, gravity, optics, cohesion, friction, thermodynamics, fermentation, cell biology, and other natural phenomena were not well understood. Pretty much 80% of what is in a Freshman College physics textbook had not been discovered yet (he did have Galileo to rely on, but not a lot more). He envisioned that from the confusion that then reigned, laws of nature would emerge to resolve those mysteries. He criticized the Aristotelians (as we criticize Christians) for ascribing occult causes to incomprehensible natural phenomena by correctly observing that “such occult qualities put a stop to the improvement of natural philosophy, and therefore of late years have been rejected. To tell us that every species of things is endowed with an occult specific quality by which it acts and produces manifest effects is to tell us nothing”. Even so, he himself subscribed to two seemingly occult entities – the invisible force called “gravity”, and the luminiferous ether through which he believed light traveled.
However, it is important to keep in mind that he lived on the historical edge of the scientific revolution. During his lifetime, there was not a clear distinction between chemistry and alchemy, between the natural and the supernatural, between science and magic. He helped to refine those distinctions in many ways, not the least of which was an often reprinted work of just a few pages called “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy”. It was a simple guide to help thoughtful observers make sense of their experiences in the natural world.
He enumerated four rules for understanding real world “natural philosophy” (i.e., science) problems. I won't present all of them, but one in particular applies in this context:
We are to admit no more causes of natural things such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say, that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain, when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.”Newton was not alone in originating his own version of the Razor. Other philosophers such as Aristotle, Scotus, Maimonides, and Ptolemy restated this principle. According to Ptolemy, "We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible." Phrases such as "It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer" and "A plurality is not to be posited without necessity" were commonplace in the middle ages.
Even religious scholars such as Thomas Aquinas followed this rule. He said, "it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many".
QED, right? Not so fast. This is a perfect example of Christians' slippery and dangerous use of logic to prove that their fiction is reality. This was the first of many attempts to show god to be "logically necessary". It was followed by other ontological proofs by Descartes, Kant, Leibnitz, Godel, Plantinga and many others, which I won't repeat here. They are extremely tedious and academic. However, they can easily be found here on the web if you are interested.
Immediately after Anselm presented his case, a contemporary named Guanilo showed the argument to be nonsense, or to result in absurd consequences if the same argument were to be applied to the "greatest island" or the "greatest pencil". There is an infinity of "greatest" entities that can be shown to "exist" using the above logical "recipe". This fact does not necessarily disprove Anselm, but shows that its application results in assertions that we cannot reasonably accept. For example, Guanilo's reply to Anselm was along these lines:
When reduced to this trivial form, or even sillier ones such as a "greatest pencil" or "greatest bar of soap" you can easily see how what appears to be a valid and sound argument can lead you to ridiculous conclusions. Hume, Aquinas, Kant, and others have picked it to shreds, pointing out problems with several of the assumptions that go into the premises. Kant said (and most philosophers since then agree, though it continues to be contested by apologists),
‘Being’ is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing.…. By whatever and however many predicates we may think a thing…we do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that the thing is.
In other words, existence is not a quality that something has, like size or shape or color. Existence does not add to the essence of a being, but merely indicates its occurrence in reality. Though syntactically, a statement about existence is structurally identical to to a statement attributing qualities to a thing, it is a very different type of statement. The two statements, "the tree exists" and "the tree is tall" have a similar sentence structure, but they are saying two very different types of things about the tree. Kant concluded that it is conceivable for a completely perfect being to not exist in reality - only conceptually, like a perfect triangle or Guanilo's perfect island.
David Hume argued that nothing can be proven to exist using only a priori (purely logical) reasoning. You could only prove this sort of existence if its opposite (non-existence) generated a contradiction with one or more of the premises. With the god argument from Anselm, the non-existence of a perfect being is just as viable as its existence, so the argument fails to accomplish its goal. Simply imagining a perfect being doesn't cause that being to exist. This is starting to sound like Anselm was into the same wishful thinking as followers of "The Secret" and the "Law of Attraction", who believe that if you imagine things hard enough, they become true!
Despite the deficiencies and logical shortcomings of this type of argument, early ontological arguments like Anselm's serve as a model for today's crop of apologists (such as Plantinga and Craig), who continue to defend the logical proofs for god's existence which they have derived from it and augmented with their own additions.
Naturalism removes Animist preconceptions require that all natural events have a purposeful agent behind them. It removes supernatural preconceptions that spirits, both benign and malevolent, manipulate nature. It removes Aristotelian preconceptions that events unfold according to their purpose - fire "wants" to go up, and stones "want" to go down, because that is where they belong, they seek their "natural places". It removes religious preconceptions that god is behind all natural events. It removes teleological expectations that nature has an conscious, agency-driven agenda and purpose which it is trying to achieve. It removes New-Age preconceptions that everything unfolds and develops for a reason (i.e., a mystical, hidden reason). One could argue that naturalism does have one fundamental preconception - which is that it is preferable to avoid imposing human preconceptions on our observations. That is a charge that I can live with. It's like admitting you have just one flaw - and that flaw is excessive modesty :).
Naturalism does not approach nature randomly, naively, and blindly, though. Obviously, there are filters that underlie this interpretation of the universe. Without some sort of expectations and preconceptions and categories, all experience would be a blinding mix of colors, sound, and movements. It would be as William James described the experience of the infant, "as one great blooming, buzzing confusion". We investigate and categorize according to our interests, not randomly or purely objectively. Because of our human self-interest, we find some things more worthy of inspection than others, some questions more interesting than others. Naturalism generally assumes the rules of logic are valid tools for learning and understanding, that the world is real and is full of objects and forces, both with properties that can be described and understood, that these objects that interact with each other, of processes that unfold in a manner that can be understood, that the world is knowable and comprehensible, that the universe is orderly, having regularity, pattern, and structure known as "laws of nature", that all phenomena have natural causes (some known, and some yet unknown), unexplained things can be used to explain other phenomenon (e.g. gravity is thus far unexplained but it is used to explain the movement of planets and the bending of light), etc. It does not presume to catelog all of the entities, properties, and phenomena which exist in the universe, but that when we encounter them, they can be understood as natural entities, properties, and phenomena.
People who defend the religious worldview say that their view and Naturalism are just different ways of viewing the world and different ways of interpreting same evidence. They assert that proponents of both worldviews have their respective biases and filters which restrict the set of possible conclusions they will reach upon consideration of the evidence. This is emblematic of just how weak a position that the religious worldview is. They may admit that their worldview is not a science, but then they say the same thing about Naturalism - that both are just belief systems - trying to drag Naturalism down to the level of Faith by incorrectly equating them. These arguments are not valid. Naturalism is backed by actual science that makes predictions and could, or can, be falsified. It has multiple independent lines of evidence supporting it, while the religious worldview isn't a scientific theory - it can't be tested at all. There is no equivalence whatsoever. Its defenders are free to make whatever claims they want and are absolved from the requirement to prove them.
However, even with these assumptions, Naturalism is a respectful, humble, and wise way to approach the unknowns of the universe. It avoids imposing ill-informed human biases on nature, and allows nature to reveal its secrets to us. It is an approach that systematically avoids extraordinary explanations. It is, by definition, limited to "ordinary" (or natural) explanations, and it is open to the real possibility that the domain of natural explanations can and will expand as we increase our understanding. In the last 500 years, it has been shown to be the "correct" world view time and again. Going back 2500 years to the ancient Greeks, the explanations of the world that have held up over time are those that were based on an empirical and naturalistic world view (with some notable exceptions, such as "atomism", which was deduced mostly apriori but turned out to be roughly correct). The most rational explanation for the success of science is that the Naturalistic world view, which is intimately tied up with science, is correct. If one has even a single pragmatic bone in their bodies, the success of naturalism in explaining the world we live in (and the failure of all other approaches) speaks volumes!
Everyone is a naturalist at the most basic level. For everyday events, like hearing a noise and looking for its source, or watching out for obstacles to walk around, to looking for food and shelter, to interacting effectively in social situations - we all use the evidence provided by habit, nature, and our senses to try to determine how best to react. Animals do this without thinking - they have no "belief system" in place that allows them to navigate the world, and humans don't need one either. Unique among the animals, humans are driven to figure out how the world works. One thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom (with the possible exception of ants, beavers, and a few other creatures) is that we are able to exploit the natural order of the world, leverage it, make tools to manipulate it, and control it. And we do this by understanding the way it works, and then applying that knowledge. Supernatural explanations don't help us accomplish this at all. Even the most devout Christians use this naturalistic approach in all other areas of their lives. Christians make fine mathematicians, engineers, accountants, and even scientists (though the overlap of Christianity and Scientists is smaller than average). It is ONLY in the religious sphere that they add on the superfluous and needless layer of religious belief. It can be completely stripped away with no diminution in our ability to survive, prosper, and be happy in the world.
Religious apologists frequently try to shift the burden of proof to Naturalists, off their own shoulders. OK, we can take that challenge. For the last several centuries, since the Renaissance, and arguably since ancient Greece, Naturalism has made claims for how the world works, and those have been validated and shown to be correct each and every time. Anything new that we have learned about about the world, about the universe, has come through Naturalistic discovery, not religious. Religion is stagnant and unable to discover new information. It has systematically inhibited and sabotaged intellectual growth, and seen forward thinkers as heretics. As an approach to thinking about the real world, as a source of knowledge, as an epistemology, Naturalism continues to chip away at religious (including Christian) explanations of "how things work". Prior to the intellectual advances spearheaded by Naturalism, Science, Empiricism, and Rationality, conventional wisdom informed by religion was that Earth was the center of the Universe, disease was caused by demon possession or "bad air", stars were fixed in the sky in a "firmament" hanging over the flat surface of the Earth, storms and earthquakes were the acts of an angry god or gods, wars were won or lost based on a a deity's whim, comets were signs from heaven, the earth was 6000 years old, that we all descended from Adam and Eve, that slavery, rape, and torture of outsiders were acceptable, that snakes could talk, and that followers of other religions and neighboring tribes were practically sub-human and needed to be either exterminated or, at least, conquered.
Many philosophers and scientists have concluded that the best explanation for our ability to develop successful scientific explanations for such a wide range of phenomena in terms of natural causes is that there are no genuine instances of supernatural causation. As Keith Augustine wrote in "In Defense of Naturalism"
Barbara Forrest, for example, describes Naturalism as "a generalization of the cumulative results of scientific inquiry". In other words, the best explanation for the success of science is that Naturalism is true. Given the proliferation of successful scientific explanations for phenomena, Forrest concludes that there is "an asymptotic decrease in the existential possibility of the supernatural to the point at which it is wholly negligible". If Naturalism were false, there would be some phenomena that could not be explained solely in terms of natural causes. However, because science can explain all of the "uncontroversial phenomena" we have encountered (i.e., known to have actually occurred) in terms of natural causes, there probably are no phenomena which cannot be explained in terms of natural causes. Therefore, Naturalism is probably true.However, because this is an inductive conclusion, we can never be 100% sure, but as sure as we can be of anything in our experience. The possibility of it being wrong asymptotically approaches zero.
Individual theories may be disproved, but the overall body of science is fundamentally “right”. Its theories are able to explain what we currently see, to anticipate events that will occur in the future, and to predict discoveries about what occurred in the past (as in geology, astronomy, and paleontology). Its epistemological basis is nature itself, rather than mythology, tradition, personal testimony, or revelation. Apologists insultingly disparage the naturalistic worldview as "man centered" while theirs is "god centered". On the contrary, naturalism is not man-centered but focuses on all of nature, which includes man. It is universe-centered. Ironically, the Christian worldview, which claims to be god-centered, is really the man-centered worldview, since god and the bible which are the source of its epistemology, are both man-made inventions.
The increase in knowledge that results from the application of the naturalistic worldview passes through the rigorous filter of the scientific method. It is coherent (it does not contradict itself), self-correcting, consistent, reliable, open and responsive to criticism, and it makes continual progress and theoretical refinement. Further, there is no compelling reason to disbelieve it. The religious alternative is a concoction of ad hoc, dogma-driven, just-so stories that attempts to insert god as the central figure of the universe. Religious explanations contribute no new empirical success to any field they attempt to address. The explanations provided by religions are specifically suited to provide cover for what has already happened in the universe, but are utterly unable to make any worthwhile predictions or theoretical explanation for future events, and are completely incapable of being tested. They also fail in their complete inability to retrodict past events in the geological or biological history of the earth, and in any past cosmological events. They fail because they are terrible models of the universe, and so have none of the predictive power of a useful theory.
No credible competing acceptable explanation, including the religious explanation, has been proposed. And the religious explanation is missing a key ingredient required of all claims about the real world - it is not supported by evidence. This doesn’t constitute irrefutable deductive proof (which is probably not possible for any explanation of reality), instead utilizing “inference to the best explanation”, meaning that among the only set of available explanations Naturalism is by far the strongest both because of its explanatory power, and because all the evidence collected over a span of hundreds of years supports it.
Religion, on the other hand, has done nothing to advance intellectual progress in explaining the source of natural phenomena. They do no research outside of clarifying of old texts, commenting on each others writing, or trying to find fault with non-religious thinking. On the contrary, it has a history of suppressing scientific discovery (Galileo's assertions about atomism and heliocentrism, discoveries in evolutionary biology, new information from geology about the age of the Earth, discoveries from astronomy about the size, age, origin, and extent of the universe, advances in neuroscience that are beginning to uncover the source of consciousness, anthropological and psychological advances in the study of morality, current scientific attempts to unravel the mystery of life and the origin of the universe, and more). Only reluctantly and belatedly does organized religion accept the findings of science that go against entrenched dogma. The primary books they publish for the general public are of two flavors - praise-the-lord books for the already converted, and Apologist books to convert skeptics. So, when they are not celebrating amongst themselves, they are trying to sell something.
Malachi 3:6 - For I am the LORD, I change not.Richard Dawkins says in The God Delusion
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.Further, Jesus didn't just come along 2000 years ago and decide to shake things up. Apparently, he always existed, alongside God. In John 8:58, John is having Jesus say he had a pre-human existence as an angelic being in heaven, and that he existed even before Abraham was born:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”So, according to the biblical theory of the Trinity, and by his own words, Jesus was right there at God's side, along with the Holy Spirit, when all the old testament atrocities were occurring.
Consider these passages from the bible that show what a horrible and cruel being god actually is. They demonstrate how strongly he supports genocide, slavery, torture, murdering children, child sacrifice, and oppression:
"Today's Christians say the churches of the past that committed atrocities were wrong. And that's correct. They were wrong. But not for the reasons stated. They claim the Christians of the past were wrong because they misinterpreted the Bible. The truth is that they were wrong to believe the Bible in the first place. They were wrong just like Christians of today are wrong, and just like the Christians of the future will be, too. My contention is that there is not a single statement in the Bible that reveals a divine mind behind the human authors. Everything in it can be more credibly explained by the hypothesis that it's just the musings of an ancient, superstitious, barbaric people--period."These bible quotes are not god's words, but the words of primitive and pre-scientific human beings. These passages reflect the mores and customs of the violent, xenophobic people who wrote them. The desire to annihilate enemies, persecute individuals who don't respect the power structure, and exact violent retribution don't come from a god, but from man. The bible is the work of men, falsely ascribing their words to a god.
The answer to the question about why the bible is all over the map with respect to its moral guidance (from elevated to depraved) is that it is a book written by men, one that reflects their strengths and weaknesses, their vision and their myopia, their kindness and generosity, and their cruelty and selfishness. It is not inspired, but mundane.
See "Skeptics Annotated Bible" or "Murder in the Bible" for more examples.
