Consider: If all the rest of the religious framework were granted, would the talking snake be an additional problem? No. The talking snake is only absurd if you refuse to grant the rest of the religious framework. The fact that a snake is talking is not, of itself, the source of any additional problem - unless you were to argue that it fits the mode of a classic bias like minimal counterintuitiveness or thinking that "talking" is a simple feature that can easily be grafted on, etc. But the point is, the part where a talking snake is in this story, is, presuming the story's other premises, not the proper subject of the dispute.
The problem is the other premises, and notions like sin passed down through generations, or that the sin was contained in an easily accessible tree put right there in the Garden (trap much?), or the fact that a supernatural God is in the story - and so on and so on.
When you look at it from that perspective, then indeed, saying "Ha ha, a talking snake" is the exact mirror image of saying "Ha ha, a monkey birthed a human", because it takes refuge in absurdity instead of addressing the most important part of an argument as a whole.
The contradictions are a proper point of attack, but only if they would be really, genuinely troublesome even granting the rest of the premises.
If I were talking to a Muslim (on this level) about evolution, my next questions would probably be: "Are you aware that humans give birth to deformed babies?" and "Do you think a monkey could give birth to a deformed baby that looks like a human baby?"
Do I think that a snake could produce sounds that can be interpreted as words? Well, yeah. "Can I eat this apple?" "Sssss..." "Sounded like yessss to me, let's eat."
The use of absurdity seems more like a tool to enforce group norms than a means of conversion. That doesn't mean the beliefs aren't absurd, just that pointing out the absurdity of outsiders is common practice by in-group members. Most creationist-minded believers would use some similarly absurd way of describing evolution, with the group benefit of passing along "evolution is stupid" meme. That said, it is important to start to tease apart just how many other enforcement strategies are out there, as they are going to need to be dealt with one by one.
The truth is that neither cristians believe in a talking snake nor evolutionists believe in humans coming from monkeys. That's just a straw man falacy. Cristians believe that's a metaphor and evolutionists believe they have common ancestors.
Don't overgeneralise. Many Christians do believe Satan appeared in the form of a human snake. I know many of them. I also don't consider this to be an inferior epistemic position than pulling out 'metaphors' wherever it is convenient.
For that matter many evolutionists do believe we came from monkeys, but only due to ignorance of the details history that they don't care enough to learn.
What the lady in Cairo regarded as absurd (a monkey having a human baby) has almost no relation to what educated people who believe in evolution actually believe. What Bill Mahers regarded as absurd (a talking snake) is exactly what many Christians actually believe. The two assertions of absurdity are therefore not alike in the way that you suggest they are.
I agree with your underlying point about the absurdity heuristic not working well, but do any of us not realize this already given what modern physics tells us of the universe we live in?
Many (most? all?) Christians believe the snake was really Satan, who took the form of a snake to trick Eve. Treating it as an ordinary snake that happened to be able to talk is probably as gross a misrepresentation as the lady's misrepresentation of evolution.
"Many (most? all?) Christians believe the snake was really Satan,"
Without meaning to nitpick, what percentage of people who call themselves Christians do you think actually believe this? I'm pretty sure most of my Christian friends don't believe that any of Genesis is literally true. They probably also don't believe that a man can survive for 3 days in the belly of a whale, or that donkeys talk (Numbers 22: 26-30). I'm not really sure how this is relevant here, except that maybe I'm trying to say that a talking snake is just so damned absurd that even people who say they believe it don't actually believe it.
"I'm pretty sure most of my Christian friends don't believe that any of Genesis is literally true"
Have you asked them? Probably not, it's considered rude to ask christians questions like that, isn't it? (which is no doubt one reason why religious beliefs are able persist)
But if you did ask them you might be surprised by the answer.
Actually I suspect you are probably somewhat right: they don't beleive genesis literally. However I suspect they don't disbelieve it, either.
I actually don't think religious belief has much to to with doctrine, and I don't thmink many western christians ever actually sit down to assess exactly 'what' they believe, and what they don't. Religion isn't about believing silly things, it's primarily about belonging. Belinging to a group that at a social everyday level is mostly harmless, and normally well intentioned.
This suggests an improved absurdity heuristic: if somebody expresses a belief that seems absurd, first check whether they actually believe what you think they do. It might not be as absurd once you know what they actually believe.
They might really believe in a literal talking snake, but have you really lost much by giving the (temporary) benefit of the doubt?
I agree with your point about the absurdity heuristic.
However, I'm not sure that the three following points are relevant to the case of theism:
If a large number of intelligent people believe something, it deserves your attention. After you've studied it on its own terms, then you have a right to reject it. You could still be wrong, though.
Even if you can think of a good reason why people might be biased towards the silly idea, thus explaining it away, your good reason may still be false.
If someone cannot explain why something is not stupid to you over twenty minutes at a cafe, that doesn't mean it's stupid. It just means it's complicated, or they're not very good at explaining things.
What if we have strong evidence that the people who hold the seemingly absurd belief all have similar biases? More, what if a very large fraction of these people admit that they're biased, and are even proud of it?
That's exactly what the situation is with regard to theism, of course. Most theists admit that their religious beliefs are based only, or mostly, on faith. Some state it outright, others hide it behind circumlocutions and nebulous metaphors, and yet others need to be pushed a bit before they'll admit it, but the result is the same.
Does it still matter, then, that many of these people are intelligent, or that some of these religious beliefs may be very complex, or that I haven't studied some of them with great attention?
"What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?"
It seems - based upon personal experience - that the difference between the rational and the irrational is that the rational at least attempts to present a cogent answer to such questions in a way that actually answers the question; the irrational just gets mad at you for asking.
"The absurdity heuristic doesn't work very well."
But "There exists a talking snake" is strictly more likely to be true than "There exists a talking snake, and it was created by The God Yahweh".
FTW...
She sounds like someone who has never seen a monkey.
But more seriously, given that she's never met a creationist, it's unlikely that she's ever actually read anything at all about it, or heard a cogent argument. On the contrary, you (and probably a lot of other atheists in the world) are comparatively very knowledgeable about religions, have probably read about as much of the Bible/Koran/Torah/etc. as most believers, and likely even have parents who believe in a god. Being an atheist in many societies requires a sort of active choice – one that most children of believers don't take.
If there were books on the science (or even theology) of talking snakes, I'd be glad to read them.
"Haha, no, of course I don't believe in monkeys transforming into humans! That'd never work. I just think they diverged from a common ancestor, many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Surely you're aware of the differences between, say, sunni and shia islam, despite both believing that all the same prophets said all the same things, and splitting only a few hundred years back? To say nothing of the other Abrahamic religions.
Think of a living organism as being like a city, with cells like individual households, each keeping their own copy of DNA scrip...
Anything sufficiently beyond the bounds of what you've accepted as normal is 'absurd'. Rejecting a point, an argument, or a conclusion on the grounds that it's absurd is unreasonable. It is, in essence, refusing to consider the possibility of something on the grounds that you don't already affirm it.
Christianity is false, but it is harder to falsify it then it is to show that Barrack Obama is not a non-sapient extinct mammal. I can prove the second false to a five-year-old of average intelligence by showing a picture of Obama and an artist's rendition of a mammoth. It would take some time to explain to the same five-year-old child why Christianity does not make sense as a description of the world.
This difference—that while both claims are false, one claim is much more obviously false than the other—explains why Christianity has many adherents but the Obama-Mammoth hypothesis does not. And we can usually infer from the fact that many people believe a proposition that it is not transparently false, making it more reasonable to investigate a bit before rejecting it.
" I think theism is wrong. "
I believe you are likely to be right.
"I think it can be demonstrated to be wrong on logical grounds."
I'm really intrigued. How?
Making up absurd explanations for the talking snake goes against the direction of your post, but I wanted to share this one: a remote control snake the owner can talk through is the sort of thing that could be a children's toy. Santa Claus gave one to Satan, who used it for mischief.
Not all theists believe in 'talking snakes'.
The non-existence of 'talking snakes' as an argument against theism would be a 'strawman'.
There seems a tacit assumption here that all people who read the bible believe it is to be taken literally. Now I'm not stating my own religious views or lack thereof here, but it seems to me that this "talking snake" approach fails on entirely other grounds... namely, that it assumes that the "talking snake" story is not an allegory or metaphor. These are very old stories, told in a very poetic voice, and to take them literally is certainly absurd... It seems to me that Maher joins the absurdity by assuming the premise that "all t...
As a previous poster has said, the absurdity heuristic works very well indeed - if something seems absurd to me, I need a lot of evidence before I'll believe it. As Hume said:
"no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."
If someone claims that a talking snake is the reason for every bad thing that anyone has ever done, they're going to have to provide some evidence that this is the case. If they claim that peop...
How about this: if you think a belief is absurd and someone else disagrees, listen to their explanation of why it's not absurd.
This allows us to keep the heuristic while avoiding her mistake. The heuristic allows us to tell very quickly upon observation of their claims whether something's gone wrong in someone's reasoning process. This is justified in a similar way to how it's justified to be skeptical if someone tells you they've discovered a new prime number that happens to end with a 2.
The absurdity heuristic does work well. Almost every possible absurd claim is false. Like most heuristics, it only becomes a problem when you continue using it outside its realm of usefulness.
Almost every possible non-absurd claim is also false. I think this is Occam's Razor, not the absurdity heuristic, in effect and working great.
The “talking snake” argument against Christianity falls apart. Christianity doesn’t hinge on a literal snake speaking—it hinges on a coherent framework for understanding human nature, sin, and redemption. The Muslim woman in the story scoffs at the idea of evolution because it “sounds ridiculous.” But that is not a valid reason to reject it. Likewise, rejecting Christianity because “talking snakes sound silly” is an equally lazy dismissal. If a belief is supported by strong reasoning, evidence, and deep intellectual tradition, it deserves engagement beyond...
I just don't think it's as easy as saying "talking snakes are silly, therefore theism is false." And I find it embarrassing when >atheists say things like that, and then get called on it by intelligent religious people.
Sure, there is some embarrasment that others may not be particularly good at communicating, and thus saying something like that is just preaching to the choir, but won't reach the theist.
But, I do not find anything intellectually wrong with the argument, so what one is being called out on is being a bad propagandist, meme-gen...
The attitude of science to its past and the attitude of Christianity to its past are very (and relevantly) different.
In science, everything is meant to be revisable in the light of new evidence; authority is always supposed to be subordinate to reason and experimental results; there's a reason why the motto of the Royal Society is nullius in verba.
Christianity, on the other hand, has authorities up the wazoo. (Different authorities for different sects.) The Bible (held by many to be perfectly free from error). The Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church (held by many to be perfectly free from error, subject to certain conditions). The ancient creeds (held by many to be perfectly free from error). The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church. The Apostolic Fathers. Luther. Calvin. Aquinas. Augustine. Accepted as authorities (in so far as each one is, by any given Christian) not in the way that someone might appeal to, say, Murray Gell-Mann ("he's incredibly smart and has been very reliably right before -- but of course whatever he says can be checked by other people and anyone can make mistakes") but simply because they're Known Authorities.
In science, a discovery from...
I particularly remember one scene from Bill Maher's "Religulous". I can't find the exact quote, but I will try to sum up his argument as best I remember.
Christians believe that sin is caused by a talking snake. They may have billions of believers, thousands of years of tradition behind them, and a vast literature of apologetics justifying their faith - but when all is said and done, they're adults who believe in a talking snake.
I have read of the absurdity heuristic. I know that it is not carte blanche to go around rejecting beliefs that seem silly. But I was still sympathetic to the talking snake argument. After all...a talking snake?
I changed my mind in a Cairo cafe, talking to a young Muslim woman. I let it slip during the conversation that I was an atheist, and she seemed genuinely curious why. You've all probably been in such a situation, and you probably know how hard it is to choose just one reason, but I'd been reading about Biblical contradictions at the time and I mentioned the myriad errors and atrocities and contradictions in all the Holy Books.
Her response? "Oh, thank goodness it's that. I was afraid you were one of those crazies who believed that monkeys transformed into humans."
I admitted that um, well, maybe I sorta kinda might in fact believe that.
It is hard for me to describe exactly the look of shock on her face, but I have no doubt that her horror was genuine. I may have been the first flesh-and-blood evolutionist she ever met. "But..." she looked at me as if I was an idiot. "Monkeys don't change into humans. What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?"
I admitted that the whole process was rather complicated. I suggested that it wasn't exactly a Optimus Prime-style transformation so much as a gradual change over eons and eons. I recommended a few books on evolution that might explain it better than I could.
She said that she respected me as a person but that quite frankly I could save my breath because there was no way any book could possibly convince her that monkeys have human babies or whatever sort of balderdash I was preaching. She accused me and other evolution believers of being too willing to accept absurdities, motivated by our atheism and our fear of the self-esteem hit we'd take by accepting Allah was greater than ourselves.
It is not clear to me that this woman did anything differently than Bill Maher. Both heard statements that sounded so crazy as to not even merit further argument. Both recognized that there was a large group of people who found these statements plausible and had written extensive literature justifying them. Both decided that the statements were so absurd as to not merit examining that literature more closely. Both came up with reasons why they could discount the large number of believers because those believers must be biased.
I post this as a cautionary tale as we discuss the logic or illogic of theism. I propose taking from it the following lessons:
- The absurdity heuristic doesn't work very well.
- Even on things that sound really, really absurd.
- If a large number of intelligent people believe something, it deserves your attention. After you've studied it on its own terms, then you have a right to reject it. You could still be wrong, though.
- Even if you can think of a good reason why people might be biased towards the silly idea, thus explaining it away, your good reason may still be false.
- If someone cannot explain why something is not stupid to you over twenty minutes at a cafe, that doesn't mean it's stupid. It just means it's complicated, or they're not very good at explaining things.
- There is no royal road.
(special note to those prone to fundamental attribution errors: I do not accept theism. I think theism is wrong. I think it can be demonstrated to be wrong on logical grounds. I think the nonexistence of talking snakes is evidence against theism and can be worked into a general argument against theism. I just don't think it's as easy as saying "talking snakes are silly, therefore theism is false." And I find it embarrassing when atheists say things like that, and then get called on it by intelligent religious people.)