Atheism and the meaning of life

I had a recent conversation on Twitter with a Christian on whether my life has meaning.  Many such theists seem to believe that life can have no meaning for atheists.  The fact that we can be out there, enjoying life and the experiences it offers, seems impossible for some to grasp.

Problem 1: The Permanence Assertion

The first problem is that argument is built on an assertion. The assertion is that an experience has to be permanent for it to have meaning.  The assertion is never proven, it is obstinately accepted by fiat by the theist.  Yet, I know that holding my daughter the moment she was born, was an extremely meaningful experience. It still provokes a powerful reaction in me. That eventually I'll be dead, does not alter the fact that I felt something real, that it did have meaning for me. It doesn't have to be a permanent experience to have meaning.

If I don't have the belief that permanence is a prerequisite for meaning, it's not enough to keep repeating that assertion. You need to produce a strong argument, not insults, to establish it.  I've never heard such an argument.

Problem 2: An eternal afterlife makes this life meaningless

This can be established by comparing the different outcomes under different assumptions about an afterlife.

Lets suppose however, that each experience in Heaven gives a payoff of B, you average an annual level of happiness of b when you're alive in the mortal realm, and that each torment in Hell gives you a payoff of -H. With Heaven being superior to this life, and Hell being worse, let's simply say the B > b > -H.

Both Heaven and Hell are eternal, and thus provide you with an infinite benefit (or harm) stream.
Hence the actual payoff to being in heaven is ∞B and the payoff to being in hell is ∞(-H). With these being infinite streams, then the B and and -H is not really relevant. Heaven has an infinitely positive good payoff, Hell an infinitely negative payoff.  This is largely the logic behind Pascal's Wager. In that wager doesn't matter how unlikely you think Christianity is true, you will always win by being a Christian (or feigning being one).  The size of the payoff completely dominates the probabilities.

Your earthly existence, assuming you generally enjoyed life, has a payoff of tb, where t is the number of years you lived.  This has to be finite. Nobody is immortal.

So the ratio of payoffs of of your mortal life to heaven is tb/∞, or zero (0). In short, your mortal life is such a tiny fraction of your total existence that all your earthly experiences vanish to nothingness. You may as well shuffle off to the afterlife as fast as you can.

If we change the assumptions to an atheist one, then there is no afterlife. All the afterlife payoffs drop to zero. Which means the ratio of payoffs to a mortal life, to the after life, is tb/0. With denominator being 0, the ratio is ∞.  In short, every experience now is of profound value when we recognise its finite. The only way life can have meaning, is if it is finite in nature.

Problem 3: the Omniscience Dilemma

It gets worse if the deity is omniscient (all-knowing) as is attributed to the Abrahamic god Yaweh. Now its not just short, finite life you face that produces meaningless. Because this deity knew before you were born, where you would end up after death. If you're Hell-bound, because say you voted for Hillary Clinton or had some gay friends, Yaweh knows you can't change anything to escape Hell. You'll exist for an insignfiicant fraction of time, before suffering horrible torture. The same argument applies to heaven. Life isn't really a test if your deity already knows you're going to pass and get to Heaven. What possible meaning can life have, if there's not a single thing you can change to avoid your eternal fate?

Summary

The argument atheists can have no meaning to their life is not based on rational deliberation. I suspect rather, it's based on being intimidated by mortality and hoping a pact with an ancient god will allow the theist to escape this. People do derive however, meaning from their lives in varied ways. Living according to the values of some ancient Near Eastern pastoralists doesn't really satisfy the goals of all.  Indeed, I'm surprised anyone finds it satisfying.

Death and Legend in Judea

Introduction

Well, Easter has come and gone again.  That seems to be a good time to talk about the resurrection. Because many Christians have been talking about it.  How else can we explain the empty tomb if Jesus wasn't magically resurrected via the power of an ancient bloodgod? It's the only explanation that makes sense! (rolls eyes)

The problem with the question is its loaded nature.  The empty tomb is presented as a fact. This has some major credibility problems.

Problem 1: Timing

The empty tomb isn't used as proof of Jesus' divinity and resurrection until we get to the gospels.  The  (genuine) letters we have from Paul do not mention it. Nor is it present in other early NT letters.  For something that's supposed to convince us all that Jesus was divine and resurrected, its absence for decades in early Christianity literature is astonishing.

The gospels are generally reckoned to be written after Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans (70 CE) because they're not referenced in earlier Christian documents. Paul seems completely unaware of them.  And prophecies of Jerusalem being sacked are always easier to make after the event...

The sequence for the gospels is usually reckoned as Mark, followed by Luke and Matthew, and finally John.  This spans around 30-40 years.  And all are long after the alleged event. The gap between when the empty tomb alleged occurred and when it's first mentioned is extraordinarily large.

Edit: this alone persuades me that the empty tomb was a later contrivance.  

Problem 2: Inconsistencies

Despite the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) patently using the same sources, they can't keep the empty tomb story straight. Throw in John and it gets worse.  The number of women who went to the tomb, when they went, what they saw at the tomb, what they did afterward, whether they were believed or not are all inconsistent across the gospels.

The Apologist gambit is to assert that this is what we expect with eye-witness accounts.  No. It's consistent with a bunch of people who didn't balk at making things up to sell their religion.


Edit: the women are not the only inconsistency of course. E.g. Matthew has guards and a seal that everyone else seems to forget. The accounts are more what we'd expect with oral traditions and attempts to establish the orthodoxy or early doctrines over several decades.

Problem 3: It conflicts with Roman practice

As far as we can tell Romans did not normally allow crucified victims to get buried in tombs. Crassus left thousands of ex-slaves rotting on crosses after the suppression of the Slave revolt.  Normally crucified victims were left aloft to be picked clean by birds and the like.  

To be buried, and buried ceremoniously instead of in a common pit, is a deviation that begs for explanation.   


Edit: this is the weakest objection I have, and one that Richard Carrier has explained to my satisfaction. It is highly likely Romans allowed the locals to maintain their traditional burial practices. 

Problem 4: Joseph of Arimathea

It has always struck me how much of a Deus ex Machina Joseph plays.  In order to get Jesus from the cross, into a tomb and in the time available, requires a very powerful and capable character.  There's nobody in the disciples capable of pulling this off.

Enter Joseph.  He fixes all the problems with the plot.  First, he's politically powerful.  He's part of the council that condemned Jesus.  But like all superhero fiction, he has a secret identity.  He's also a disciple of Jesus.  He's influential enough to persuade Pilate to take the body off the cross.  He's also rich.  This is also necessary for the plot.  They have to buy linen cloth and 100 pounds of myrrh and aloe that evening.  He's also already got a tomb ready.   Every plot-hole (bar one) is immediately fixed.  Evening might be approaching when he asked Pilate for the body, but Jesus is lying in a shroud, in a tomb, with a stone covering the entrance in time for his resurrection. Phew!

The remaining plot hole of course, is there isn't enough time to get this all done in the time available. 

Joseph's appearance in the story is dramatic.  He's not mentioned in the gospels before this.  And he disappears just as dramatically. He's never mentioned again.  He's not mentioned in Acts, he's not mentioned in any of the letters preceding the gospels.  Paul, Peter and James have no recollection of him at all. He's a powerful and connected guy with massive influence, and nobody mentions him?! Amazing.  

Joseph only has one job.  He appears at exactly the right time to fill in a bunch of critical plot-holes, and then disappears.  He has the traits of a literary invention that appears decades later when the empty tomb story gets added to the Jesus legend- not the traits of an historic person. 

Edit: Even the locale of Arimathea appears made up. 

(If you want a much deeper analysis of Joseph of Arimathea, I recommend John Loftus' blog).

Conclusion

I don't feel that I need to explain the empty tomb, because I don't think there was one.  Early Christendom was plagued with doctrinal problems.  Hints of this are preserved in the letters of Paul, James and others.  This also created a range of heretical sects, such as the Arians.  

The gospels weren't written to be histories.  They were written to convince people that Jesus was the Messiah and of divine origin.  And by drawing on the authority of Jesus and the early disciples, they could be used to resolve doctrinal disputes.  Was the resurrection a mostly spiritual personal visionary event?  Or was it a physical event?  For anyone who believed in a physical resurrection, the canonical Gospels make a perfect argument. And they get more elaborate the later the gospel is composed. It's the last gospel, John, that introduces Thomas as the clincher for the physical resurrection. 

So either major scientific laws were broken to miraculously bring the offspring of an ancient god and virgin back to life.  Or the belief that the resurrection was a physical event evolved slowly in a community that was willing to add embellishments that showed this, in retelling, over decades.  It's not really difficult deciding what's the least plausible.

Never mind the Punc Eq, where's Adam and Eve?: SJ takes on genetics

I've had a lengthy response to my objections to Christianity from SJ Thomason. Rather than analysing it in one go, I'm going to break this down into smaller (and hopefully more readable formats).

The Red Herring

S.J. Thomason responds:

Let me begin by noting his reference to the flavor of Christianity. I draw attention to this statement because atheists often ask Christians to identify the “correct” Christian sect. I am of the opinion that so long as the Christian sect draws its knowledge from the Bible, embraces Jesus Christ’s divinity, and encourages people to live by the example of Jesus Christ, then the sect is correct.

This is a red herring. It would be relevant to state whether the belief in Adam and Eve in the sect the reader belongs to, are supposed to literally exist, or exist as allegories instead.

People have varying needs in the ways they grow closer to God. 

 The rest of this paragraph has nothing to do with the genetics problem. It's a description of SJ Thomason's beliefs. This suffers the defects of being irrelevant to my objection, and is boring. 

Some prefer liturgical, ritualistic churches in which the congregation sings hymns and develops an appreciation of sacraments and traditions, such as the Lutheran and Catholic churches. Others might prefer contemporary sorts of churches in which the congregation sings contemporary Christian songs and listens to informative sermons on the Bible, such as the Baptist church. Other churches blend these options and offer various interpretations of the Bible based on variations of adherence to literal interpretations of the Bible. No matter the door, all ultimately lead to Jesus. “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will be open at last” (Lewis, 1949).

The Strawman Fallacy

To answer Kaimatai’s next issue, which speaks to the origins of the universe, earth, and life on earth, I draw from Hugh Ross and his book Improbable Planet.

And straight to the strawman fallacy.  I gave as a specific example that genetics refuted that a literal Adam and Eve existed.  These are examples of an absence of evidence where there should be evidence.

“The Milky Way Galaxy, the Sun, the Moon, and the configuration of the solar system’s planets and asteroid belts reveal how Earth obtained its unique stockpile of elements and minerals that enable Earth today to sustain such an enormous biomass and biodiversity. The fossil record, isotope records, geological layers, sediment cores, ice cores, and biodeposit (biological decay products embedded in Earth’s crust) inventories provide biologists and ecologists with a chronicle of Earth’s life. Earth’s preserved record of past physical and biological events reveals an unanticipated synergy (p. 16-17).”

The conspicuous feature of the paragraph is the absence of any mention of genetics.  It's irrelevant.

“Charles Darwin presumed that the development and transformation of life throughout Earth’s history was gradual, smooth, and continuous. 

 That was in 1859.  And it was a hypothesis, that even some of his supporters (like Huxley) remained unconvinced by.  By the early 1950s, the development of population biology and speciation modes like allopatric speciation, had undermined this gradualistic view.  It persisted longer in paleontology however. 

The Appeal to (False) Authority

However, in landmark articles published in 1972 and 1977, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that the fossil record is typified by species remaining in extended stasis (little or no net evolutionary change) interrupted by quantum jumps where species suddenly disappear and then are followed quickly by sudden appearances of very different species

Correct, as a necessary consequence of speciation beginning from small populations, where the odds of leaving fossils behind are very unlikely because the populations are too small! Not because evolution works by jumps.   And we have plenty of good examples of gradual change occurring in the fossil record.

This argument is completely fallacious. Ross isn't an evolutionary biologist, or geneticist, or paleontologist.  He's a physicist. He doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. 

…It is not only at the species level where quantum jumps are observed but also at the level of families, orders, and classes of organisms (p. 19).

I'm sorry, but what did I just read!?  Pretty much all terrestrial animals are just one thing. A segmented worm-like creature with optional appendages.  We're bilateral triploblasts.  There aren't "quantum leaps". Just some tinkering with an animal with a feeding tube that runs down the centre.

“Primitive life, that is unicellular bacterial life, is but the simplest form of life on Earth. There are three other general divisions of purely physical life: (1) differentiated multicellular organisms (for example, fungi); (2) plants; and (3) animals. 

 Oh the stupid just burns now. There are three domains of life. The three divisions mentioned here make up just one of them. I know Ross is old, but it looks like he learned his biology from Darwin himself.

In addition to purely physical life, Earth today contains two kinds of life that possess distinctly nonphysical attributes. One of these kinds is a group of animals that possess a mind…that is capable of experiencing and expressing emotions, exercising intellectual analysis, and making decisions in response to that analysis and the animal’s emotional state. All mind-possessing animals share in common the attribute of parents providing sacrificial care for their offspring. Animals in this category include all mammals and birds and a few of the more advanced reptilian species such as the crocodile and the alligator” (p. 21).

 Sigh, "advanced" is not a thing in biology.

Putting the Cart before the Horse

“Another kind of life-form possessing nonphysical attributes is the species Homo sapiens sapiens. Human beings not only possess a mind, but they are also endowed with a spirit…(which) enables humans to engage in philosophy and theology and to address questions of ultimate meaning and purpose” (p. 21).

 The claim we have a spirit is a religious one. As it is embedded in the god-belief, which is disputed, the argument is a fallacious 'affirming the consequent'. Ross is putting the cart-before-the-horse. 

Again, this is irrelevant to my objection, and is resorting to an appeal to (false) authority. 

Argument by Assertion Fallacy

In other words, the earth today contains diverse and abundant species in multiple levels of advanced life, many of which appeared suddenly via quantum jumps. Such an explanation helps to explain the way the most advanced life forms possess consciousness (i.e., awareness) and spirituality, while less advanced life forms do not. Such an explanation further suggests that the first humans appeared suddenly.

1. 1. There's no such thing as more or less advanced in biology. Organisms can have basal or derived characters.  The idea of 'advancement' is a religious relic based on the Scalae Naturae. It does not exist. 
2. 2. Molecular evidence shows that species don't appear in sudden leaps. Fossils are a function of population abundance. Species that originate with low populations leave few or no fossils. Molecular evidence shows that we don't see leaps. 
1.  The decoding of the mouse genome showed that over 99% of the coding genes in a mouse and a human were the same.  A 1% change of over 65-75my isn't a jump.
3. Humans didn't appear suddenly.  That's what the genetic evidence tells us. 

Final Score

So as far as a rebuttal goes, it's a complete fail. 

•  The genetic evidence against a recent human origin from two individuals was not addressed. No evidence from the field of genetics was even produced!
• A strawman argument was conjured in its place
• An appeal to authority was attempted, but the authority was ignorant of the topic at hand!
• Assertions were frequently just wrong.

That Kalam argument

Sooner or later as an atheist on the web, you're going to run into the Cosmological Argument.  This often comes in the form of the "Kalam argument" or its modern form promoted by William Craig.

It's typically presented as a syllogism. This a logical argument that used two related premises to reach a conclusion.

• P1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
• P2: The universe began to exist;
• C: The universe has a cause

A Rapidly Inflating Singularity Explains Many of the Attributes of this Universe

(Figure via Shutterstock as Stock illustration ID: 489781135)


As the argument does not include any deities, it is imputed that this cause, must itself be uncaused.  Conveniently theists knew what this cause was all along. This is their favourite deity, which by fiat is eternal, existing outside time and space and, uncaused.

The popularity of the syllogism doesn't disguise its flaws.  It is these flaws that have prevented a stampede of atheists toward Christianity.  Let me elaborate.

A syllogism depends on the its premises being correct.  It is not good enough for them to be possibly correct.  And there are reasons to suspect the premises are not.

Let's look at the first.

How do we know that everything that begins to exist has a cause?

• The reason we have the qualification "begins to exist" is to exclude deities with eternal properties.  If it was just 'exists' then the syllogism would net in gods too.  In short, it is a special pleading fallacy introduced right at the start.  How do we know deities are able to exist without a beginning?  We don't.  No evidence is attached to prove this.  It's just one more thing we have to believe about gods on faith alone.
• It's an uncertain premise.  From what we understand about quantum mechanics, the quantum world behaves stochastically.  It's a random world at that level. Negative and positive sub-atomic particles wink in and out of existence. 
• The above means that P1 is not self-evident
• Induction is not strong enough to prove that P1 is correct. We've sampled a tiny fraction of the universe and our observed sample size of universes is still stuck at 1. 
• It makes the term 'cause' do a lot of work. Here the syllogism tries to conflate causality (in the sense of purposely caused by an agent) with other causality in other contexts (e.g. occurs naturally without intercession because of environment and natural laws). As a term, causes are not really part of the conceptual toolbox of Fundamental Physics.  I'm not convinced at this level, cause is an appropriate term.
• It is also a category fallacy. Universes don't fall into the same category as phenomenon within the universe.  
• Similarly, it's not clear what we mean by 'begins to exist'. If time is an emergent property of the universe, then it becomes difficult to talk about a point where the universe 'begins to exist' (see the Hawking-Hartle no-boundary condition).  

In short, P1 is a barely coherent and fallacious premise that has significant scientific objections to overcome.

How do we know the universe began to exist?

We don't. The standard model of the universe converges to a singularity, where the regular laws of physics as we understand them don't apply.  This could be a genuine beginning, or it could be just the observable part of other ways the universe evolved. 

Alternatives include a bouncing universe (our universe originated on another one that collapsed, before bouncing back from a singularity), cyclical (the various ekpyrotic models), reproducing from others etc.  

P2 has yet to be proven to be true.

Does the Universe Have Cause?  

 

In the sense that some event occurred that initiated an inflationary period for the universe? That seems plausible. For instance, some quantum event is potentially able to cause this.  Does that mean we know that this is how it happened?  No.  But there are natural explanations.  We don't have to invoke gods, and I'm not sure why we would.  What falsifiable hypotheses could we test? What predictions does this make?  The scientific model predicts a flat, homogeneous universe with Cosmic Background Microwave radiation. The divine model predicts a bloodgod who is outwitted by a talking snake, so that he has to mate with a virgin to kill his own offspring because two people ate some fruit.  It's not a good way to build credence.

Gods have a problem as they're not mentioned in the syllogism, and as the syllogism is attempting to prove gods exist, it's not an independent proof of said gods. We do know say, that quantum perturbations do happen. The syllogism for gods starts becoming a little circular at this point.

This lack of evidence for gods makes the whole syllogism unconvincing.  

Summary: Syllogisms aren't Evidence

Syllogisms are interesting logical arguments.  We can say if the premises are true or not, and we can say whether the conclusion follows from these premises.   But they're not evidence, they're either logically true or false.  In this case, the Kalam or first cause argument suffers a plethora of philosophical and scientific flaws. 

Let me conclude with my own syllogism to illustrate this point:

P1: Everything that exists has a natural cause (by induction)*

P2: Gods are supernatural 

C: Gods cannot exist or cause anything that does exist.

* E.g. We've replaced many supernatural explanations with natural, and never a natural explanation with a supernatural.

10 Reasons why I'm not a Christian

Internet Christians seem fond of the "list approach" to proselytizing.  This comes in various forms. Like "10 reasons Christianity is true" or "10 questions atheists can't answer".  So with that inspiration, here are 10 objections I have to the existence of the Bronze-age Deity Yaweh and his magic carpenter son.

1. The absence of evidence where there should be evidence

Depending on your flavour of Christianity, this particular deity is supposed to have created the Universe, formed the earth, begun life, created humanity from just two individuals, intervened frequently in the affairs of a Near Eastern Tribe, and made a personal appearance for approximately 33 years.  Many of these events should leave compelling evidence. Genetics should confirm we descended from just two individuals. Other civilizations should have noticed the extraordinary events described in the bible.  That evidence is just not present.

Genetics confirms that modern human species never originated from just 2 individuals

2. The Soap Test

There are no instructions on using soap.  Soap is a product that is easy to make.  It also has benefits for hygiene as well as reducing infections and limiting the spread of disease.  These effects on disease were not realised until the germ theory of disease was established.

Any deity that is supposed to be benevolent, all-knowing, and interceding to benefit a chosen tribe or people, would give instructions on its use.  Instructions on its use however are weirdly absent.  This neglect would have increased needless suffering (through illness and disease) as well as premature deaths. With no technological barrier to making soap, there is no valid reason to withhold instructions on its use. Given the vast number of people whose lives would have been improved by providing instructions, it's not a trivial issue.

3. The gospels are problematic

Not only are the gospels written well after the alleged events, they contradict each other in key details.  The nativity of Luke and Mark Matthew describe entirely different events.  Unlike Julius Caesar there are no writings of Jesus. No contemporaneous historian, of which there were several in this era, noticed any of the fantastic things described in the gospels.

One feels an omniscient (all-knowing) deity would know this would reduce the confidence non-believers would have in the Jesus-mission. Even Julius Caesar left stuff he wrote. And an all-powerful deity might have ensured the records of the Jesus-mission weren't so dependent on the contradictory, hearsay accounts we have.

4. Prayer doesn't work

Enough children have died in faith-healing cases to show that prayer only succeeds in mundane cases with a high likelihood of occurring anyway. There is no evidence at the population-level that Christians are healthier, live longer or recover from cancer more frequently.

5. How about those slaves then?

Right, Christianity has always been against slavery. Even in the first 1800 years when it wasn't.  And as the American Civil War showed, for many, not until the Federal Army reached Richmond.  The problem is that Jesus never said to abolish slavery. Neither did anyone else in the bible. Indeed, Exodus 21:20-21 said it was permissible to beat a slave so badly that they would die 2-3 days later.  The slave-owner wasn't punished in this case as the slave was his property. A chattel. Not a human being, but property.

Black Slaves (Wikipedia Commons)

This is a very simple test. Moral beings don't sanction this horrific behaviour.  Christianity perpetuated slavery. It's failed to reach a credible standard of morality that would corroborate a loving, moral supreme deity.

6. A peculiar dislike of poor black people

One appreciates that life on this planet is a little chaotic.  That means natural disasters happen.  I'm not quite sure how a loving deity allows people to die in natural disasters, as the freewill argument seems moot in these cases.  The deaths and suffering are not caused by human agency.

Tent City- Port au Prince (Wikipedia commons)

Nonetheless, the real point is how unjust these disasters are.  They impact the poorest and most vulnerable communities the most.  In 2010 a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti.  The death toll was somewhere between 100,000-300,000 people. The same year a 7.1 earthquake hit Christchurch in NZ.  One person died of a heart-attack, that might have been caused by it.  The effects are not equal.

If we're going to propose any kind of argument that humans have to put up with natural disasters, at the very least, these should not be so manifestly unjust.   Having a system that harms those communities least able to cope contradicts the alleged characters of the Christian deity.

7. Baby I call Hell

Like everything to do with the afterlife, Hell is difficult to pin down.  Is it a place of heinous torture as described by Dante and other evangelical pastors?  Or is is an eternal separation from this deity?  Given the wide-spread dogmatic belief that it is torture (and I've been threatened often enough with it), then it's irreconcilable with a just and loving deity.

 The infraction against this god is transitory in nature. All I have done is not believe it existed. That merits an infinite punishment- one that is unusually cruel, barbaric and inhumane.

Hell- Wikipedia Commons

Hell and a loving, just deity cannot both exist.

8. She blinded me with science

I appreciate that ancient people could not have had with their knowledge, the language of concepts to describe the world in scientific terms.  Nonetheless, it seems odd that many ideas about the world are simply and blatantly wrong.  The microscopic world, the scale of the universe, that earth is not its centre, that life originated billions of years ago and then evolved are in conflict with many religious dogmas.  It's not a good advertisement for these beliefs to be true.

9. It's a small world

It is inescapable that the events of the bible are restricted to a tiny part of the world.  Most of Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania are excluded.  For a universal deity, this is suspiciously parochial.  It is according to the Abrahamic religion capable of communicating in all kinds of ways.  There are burning bushes, talking donkeys, angels etc.  But only a small tribe of pastoralists are selected for this direct communication.  In particular, a tribe that whose accomplishments were so minor, they had little ability to communicate their god to others.  While civilisations around them developed maths, astronomy, engineering, democracy and philosophy, ancient Judea developed, well, penis modification.

Even within that context, only a small part of the population is considered worthy of this message.  This part being men, of course.  For a universal deity that considered all to be equal, this incredible favoritism does not make any sense.

10. Free Fallin'

The problem with an all-knowing (omniscient) god is well known.  It makes free-will a fantasy.  If a deity knows everything I'm going to do and say over my life-time, there's nothing I can do to change that.  If Abe's god knows I'm going to have sushi for lunch, then I cannot choose anything else.  That extrapolates to every other action I take, to very word I utter.  I cannot choose anything, choice is an always following a single course of action.  I can only say the lines I was given.  I can only play the role I was destined to play.

Life in this case, is meaningless.  If I am going to hell, then, nothing I do over my life will change that.  I can only undertake the actions this deity already knows I'll take.  All life is, is a brief moment where I can change nothing, followed by an eternity of hell.  There's no point to this life at all.  This god may as well put those destined to hell, straight there.  Because nothing will change that destiny.

The problem with witches

There are many reasons I don't believe in the god of Abraham. One of these reasons is the killing of "witches". This brutal fact, this product of religion,  is completely at odds with the alleged traits of this god.  In short, if there is an omniscient being (who knows all) and who truly cares for humanity, then the hideous deaths of those accused of witchcraft refutes that entity.  Let me elaborate.

The bible is very clear on what to do with witches.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live Exodus 22:18

Because witchcraft is a fictional crime, it means throughout history, countless innocents have died as a consequence of this.  Some 40-50,000 people have been killed for witchcraft in Western countries, many in quite hideous ways.  Violent attacks on witches still continue today. A UNICEF 2010 report details attacks on child-witches sic in Africa. Children with disabilities are especially targeted. Such attacks are far more common in Christian communities than Muslim.  The link is to the biblical command to kill witches. 

Now clearly, an omniscient entity would know all of this back in the "Exodus" era.  It would know that including this command would mean say, that a child with epilepsy, would be betrayed and violently attacked by the adults in his or her community. That even if they did not die, the risks they faced would inflate the likelihood of an early death.  About 20,000 streetchildren had been accused of witchcraft in the DR Congo capital Kinshasa

Knowing this, knowing that mere children would be murdered as a consequence of Exodus 22:18, this entity still allows it to be included.  So here's the question. If you knew that this edict would result in the deaths of thousands of innocents, that children would be attacked and murdered, would you include it in a text that communicated your wishes? 

This is the dilemma. If you include it, you will be responsible for the inhumane deaths of these people. If you were a benevolent and loving and deity- and your omniscience meant you could see the consequences of all your edicts- would you really include this passage?

Let's play the context game. Let's play the excuse that this is all Old Testament stuff. That there is some context here that's been overlooked. Overlooked for centuries even, as killing people for witchcraft as been a Christian tenet for most of its history.

So, as an omnipotent and benevolent being, you have the means to tell the faithful that this verse say, no longer applies (or is being applied incorrectly). You can appear as a burning bush, or a talking donkey. You can send angels as messengers. If Christianity is correct, you can even make a physical manifestation of yourself as your own, mortal son about 2000 years ago.

So about 2000 years ago, all you had to do was say something. Not do something, not change the laws of the universe. All you'd have to do is explain that Exodus 22:18 no longer applied.

If you did that, then thousands would not have died in flames in Europe.  Kids with epilepsy or autism would not be beaten, assaulted or killed.

Such a little thing.

Yet there is no record of this.

I doubt that anyone of us, with so many lives at stake, with the most vulnerable people (kids with disabilities) being the target of this, could choose not to make this clear.

You cannot claim there is an omniscient, moral and benevolent, who intercedes in this world, when the body-count of the innocents is so high. Omniscience means you must know what Exodus 22:18 leads to. Benevolence means you must do everything to prevent the consequences of that. Omnipotence gives you the power to do so. In no state of the world, does this combination explain why kids are being killed for witchcraft.

Embryology and the Qur'an

The internet provides a vehicle for many to communicate their beliefs.  Muslims have also taken to social media (like twitter) to proselytize for their religion. A popular tactic is to claim that the qur'an is filled with modern scientific knowledge.  This seems to be a bizarre tactic.  The Islamic world has not really been at the forefront of scientific discovery since, well, Copernicus worked out that the solar system was heliocentric before Muslim astronomers.  Despite studying an ancient book that provides apparently, all kinds of useful pointers on modern science, the Islamic world is deeply under-represented in science Nobel prizes etc.

One of the claims does interest me as a biologist, and also as an atheist who gets this ploy used on me a lot.  This is the claim that the qur'an anticipates modern (human) embryology.  This could only have a divine origin (despite its erstwhile similarities to Galen, for whom no such divine inspiration is attributed).

Human Embryo

The relevant verses are 23:12-14.  So I just want to look at these quickly.

We created man from an extract of clay. Then We made him as a drop in a place of settlement, firmly fixed. Then We made the drop into an alaqah (leech, suspended thing, and blood clot), then We made the alaqah into a mudghah (chewed-like substance)...
[Noble Quran 23:12-14]  

Clay

23:12 claims that humans are made from clay.   Now because clay is mostly aluminum and silicon and contain little of the organic material this is clearly not the case (the 6 macro-elements we look for as life's basic building blocks are Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Carbon and Sulphur). It is perhaps more likely this is meant in an allegorical rather than scientific sense.  But if we accept this is not being scientific, then well, it is not clear why the remaining verses are supposed to be scientific. 

Nutfah

23:13 introduces the drop (nutfah) which also presents problems. It doesn't take divine inspiration to realise that the ejaculate from a male can be a liquid drop.  It would be impressive if the qur'an mentioned sperm and eggs.  But it doesn't. In fact, eggs (baydeh) are nowhere mentioned.  It strikes me that as a guide to modern embryology, omitting any mention of eggs is well, astonishing. Parenthetically, sperm isn't mentioned either. Sometimes special pleading is used to infer that the nutfah means a human gamete. But there is nothing here that hints at the microscopic world. 

The claim of a safe lodging would also contradict ectopic pregnancies, where the gamete might settle in the fallopian tube or abdomen. This unsafe location causes miscarriages or at worst, painful pregnancies fatal to mother and child.

Alqahah

23:14 then gets very complicated as many words gets vaguer. The first stages of  embryology (blastula, gastrula) don't involve any blood vessels, so a clot isn't a good description.  It seems more plausible that the spotting that sometimes occurs in early pregnancies- or even miscarriages- would cause a 'blood clot' deduction.  

Alternatively, alaqah could be a metaphor based on a leech.  If so, it is not a very good one.  Leeches are protostomes whilst humans are deuterostomes. We haven't been alike for about 600my. Leeches lack a notochord, they lack limb buds, they lack pharyngeal arches.  A human embryo doesn't digest its host's blood. It doesn't use its mouth-parts to interact with its host.  

Even if we want to go with a leech-like interpretation over the blood-clot for alaqah, then this does not imply divine insight.  For a people familiar with butchering animals (and dare I say, people on occasion), it wouldn't take much powers of observation to notice small embryos attached to the uterus of pregnant mammals.  For ancient peoples, these likely resembled leeches.

Bones

The text above omits the last part of 23:14.  Here are two translations of it:

Muhsin Khan Then We made the Nutfah into a clot (a piece of thick coagulated blood), then We made the clot into a little lump of flesh, then We made out of that little lump of flesh bones, then We clothed the bones with flesh, and then We brought it forth as another creation. So blessed be Allah, the Best of creators.

Pickthall Then fashioned We the drop a clot, then fashioned We the clot a little lump, then fashioned We the little lump bones, then clothed the bones with flesh, and then produced it as another creation. So blessed be Allah, the Best of creators!

The issue here is simply the order bones appear. It appears to describe two stages. First, the mudghah becomes bones, then the bones are covered in flesh. This is likely a deduction of people used to butchering animals, and had no way of conceiving how muscles and flesh could be attached to bones without the skeleton being formed first.

The problem is that bones form last. Reduced to the basic steps, mesenchymal cells within the embryo first differentiate into cartilage lines. Later this cartilage is replaced by bone. At no point would we say that the bones are later covered in flesh. 

Conclusion

 It is obvious that the qur'an does not describe human embryology at any useful level.  Rather the argument depends on some very heroic special pleading. Modern scientific discoveries are retrofitted to vague language to make claims that go far beyond the verses.  It also depends on poor knowledge of embryology.  No quantity of Youtube videos or webpages can hide the fact that the Qur'an simply does not describe human embryology.  Rather than being special advanced knowledge, the qur'an seems entirely consistent with knowledge of the era. I'm reluctant to believe that the "creator of the universe" sic would know as little biology as the typical 6th C Arab.