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.)
I suggest that Genesis 3 is actually some (admittedly weak) reason to believe that. But, for the avoidance of doubt, my conjecture is not that they thought all animals talked, and I am not suggesting that they thought any non-human animals talked post-Eden.
According to this, at least some ancient-ish Hebrew commentators thought that "The snake from creation was an intelligent animal that talked, thought, and walked upright like a human". This is already long after when Genesis 3 was written, of course, but it does at minimum make it clear that this was by no means an unthinkable thought.
So that's exactly the point of people saying "ha ha, your religion has a talking snake in it", and they need not be making an error in going from "this religion's holy book has a story with a talking snake in it" to "this religion is less likely to be right than if it didn't have that story". And the fact that magic or divine intervention could obviously (if either existed) make snakes talk doesn't invalidate that.
No, actually I wondered about saying "except that it's more like incarnation than possession" but decided that was unnecessary nitpicking. So yes, rather than "of my sample of three, one basically agrees with you and two flatly disagree" it would be more accurate to say "of my sample of three, one kinda agrees with you and two flatly disagree".
The sample, by the way, consisted of the books I happen to have on my shelves that I could tell from the titles were likely to express some opinion about the question. I looked in one other but it turned out not to. So no cherry-picking here.
(But I should add that I would not expect randomly chosen Christians to be much like random samples of those three, because most Christians are theologically unsophisticated; so some version of the serpent=Satan theory might well be more popular than that sample would suggest.)
According to your own link, some commentators thought that the snake was an intelligent humanoid, some thought it was Satan in the flesh, and some thought that Genesis was... mistaken about the snake speaking.
All it shows is that the variety of interpretations is wide. "Not an unthinkable thought" is a remarkably low bar, at this level pretty much anything goes.
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