2017

the presenter as a grade-school atheist

Outline of Jesus Presentation

Tuesday I’ll be presenting about the historical Jesus and Jesus mythicism at the Seattle Skeptics meeting here in Seattle. Here is the outline of my presentation, plus links to resources. 

Your Humble Presenter

Lifelong atheist. Raised liberal Christian. 

Atheist community organizer: “honest debates”, Darwin Day, Winter Solstice Potluck.

Author of Grandmother Fish: A Child’s First Book of Evolution.

Mainstream views on Jesus. The experts’ evidence convinces me.

Talk Format

There’s too much material to cover in one night, so I’ll review the whole thing briefly and then I can answer questions or expand on topics that folks find interesting. 

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt
says humans are “groupish”.

Human Cognitive Shortcuts

These biases make it difficult to hold a productive debate over the question of Jesus. 

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
—Programmer Alberto Brandolini.

Thinking Fast and Slow, emotions first and reason as your press agent.
I.e., You think you’re right when you feel you’re right.

Us versus them, emotionally motivated reasoning.
E.g., Am I a fake atheist? 

Binary thinking, all-or-nothing intuition, pattern matching.
E.g., “Are the gospels fact or fiction?” 

Confirmation bias, difficulty in recognizing one’s own error.
E.g., forgetting inconvenient facts. 

“May I?” thinking versus “Must I?” thinking, grasping at straws.
E.g., “There are no contemporary accounts.”

David Strauss said the gospels were
history plus mythology (1846)

Topic One: Historical Jesus

Who he was and how we know.

History of historical Jesus scholarship.

Who was Jesus, according to secular historians: The Jewish hillbilly exorcist.

The best evidence for Jesus: his disorganized cult. Lots of strong evidence about this leaderless cult. 

My favorite evidence for Jesus: his remarkable way with words.

Other evidence.

Jesus’ crazy life story.

How beliefs about Jesus changed from AD 30 to 100.

State of scholarship.

Occam’s razor.

If Richard Carrier can make his case, he will
revolutionize the scholarly study of Jesus

Topic Two: Jesus Mythicism

Historical evidence aside, skeptics can tell the mythicism is bogus by looking at it skeptically.

What is Jesus mythicism? Radical denial of evidence.

Mythicist arguments. They criticize historical evidence but offer little their own evidence.

Who are the mythicists? Atheist writers you’ve heard of only because they’re mythicists.

Is mythicism a conspiracy theory? Is “historical Jesus” the biggest con game in the history of secular scholarship?

Who’s right, the experts or you? What are the odds?

Conclusion

Links

Here are links for folks who want to see more.

History for atheists: examines evidence for and against Jesus, by and for atheists. http://bit.ly/atheistJesusTO

Christopher Hitchens lays out “impressive evidence” for a historical Jesus. http://bit.ly/hitchjesus

State of scholarship, this blog post addresses that issue: http://bit.ly/tweetjesus

Changes in belief about Jesus from AD 30 to 70, this blog post addresses that issue: http://bit.ly/TweetNTplotFixes

Other blog posts on Jesus: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Jesus

Encyclopedia Britannica, an article written by the world’s top historical Jesus expert: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jesus

A coherent mythicist account of Christian origins: No link. So far no one has been able to show me one of these, so if you find one, let me know. Update (August ’17): Dr Carrier gives a brief account of how Christianity originated in On the Historicity of Jesus. I’m happy to critically compare the mainstream account to Carrier’s account any time.

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day

A song about natural selection by
cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo

Happy Darwin Day! Today I’m running a bunch of activities at Seattle’s Darwin Day celebration, noon to 3 in Bellevue. To coordinate with the organizer, I made a list of evolution activities that I’m ready to run, and here it is. I’ve done most of these activities at school visits or other events, but a few are untried. 

Grandmother Fish

The book is a starting point for discussions about evolution and about the history of life on earth.

Wiggle-Along: A read-along of the book, with five kids in front demonstrating the sounds and motions of each Grandmother. Everyone follows along. Great for kids getting their wiggles out. If you’re not familiar with the book, you can see an early draft being read to kids for the first time in this video, which we originally did for the Kickstarter campaign in 2014. 

Timeline exercises: The five kid volunteers are part of a visual demonstration of how much time has passed since each of the Grandmothers, compared to each other, compared to Earth’s history, and compared to the existence of the universe. You can print full-size images for the five “grandmothers” to hold, available here. 

The story of my book: For kids who dream about being authors someday, the story of how I wrote Grandmother Fish is partly inspirational and partly a caution. It took me many years to figure out how to do the book, and I needed help from many friends to get it right. You can do great things, but it can take a long time, and you need to learn to accept help. 

Q&A: There’s a ton of science behind Grandmother Fish that is not obvious on the surface, so if kids have questions, I have answers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game
This is my animal-matching card game of evolutionary relationships. A “clade” is a complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. For example, “birds” composed a clade, and reptiles and birds together form a larger clade called Sauropsida. Up to 8 kids can play at once, but they’d have to all squeeze around a shared play area. This game is suited to an activity center, sort of like a craft session but for a game instead of a craft. People can drop into and out of games. The game is also a “conversation starter” for evolutionary history, as represented by the animals on the cards. Clades is illustrated by Karen Lewis, the same wonderful children’s artist who illustrated Grandmother Fish.

Kids’ Songs and Dances

We humans all evolved from people who sang and danced around the campfire all night. This stuff is fun for kids, and when kids dance, it’s an excuse for grownups to have fun, too. 

“Charles Darwin” dance: The hokey-pokey meets evolution, where kids evolve from fish into humans one body part at a time. Here a link to the lyrics. They start like this, and you get the idea. 

     “You put your right fin in, 

     You take your right fin out,

     You put your right fin in,

     And derive an arm right out…”

“If You’re Disgusted and You Know It”: A lot like “If You’re Happy and You Know It” but with universal facial expressions and sounds for key emotions: happy (smiling), sad (weeping), scared (scared face), disgusted (yuck face), and surprised (“oh” face).

“Five Violet Spiders”: A familiar tune gets original lyrics and a video by cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo. The song demonstrates natural selection, as the most visible spiders get eaten.

Link to video

Stand Up Interactive Activities

These activities require people to stand up and move around. 

Bloodlines: Roll giant dice to simulate the identification of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam in deep time. Little kids can do it, although it involves probably going extinct.

Mates: Mate-choosing simulations with cards. We simulate monogamy, mixed polygamy, and total polygamy. Kids can do it, but that might be weird. 

Life-on-Earth Timeline: This activity follows the Grandmother Fish reading. It could also be cut loose as its own activity. 

Walk-and-Talk

Stand and be counted with your people! Everyone stands in a group. The leader presents the group with either/or choices such as, “If your favorite dinosaur is a Triceratops or other herbivorer, move left. If your favorite dinosaur is a Tyrannosaur or other predator, move right.” Everybody moves and then gets to see how everyone else in the group answers each question. Opinionated people on either side can explain their choices. Periodically we stop and discuss, and then move on to new questions. The questions cover evolution questions that people can answer personally, such as favorite extinct animal, experience with evolution while growing up or in school, mammals versus birds, personal experiences (hunting, foraging, cooking, having children). It’s something of a mixer. 

Kahoot! Quizzes

These are two short online quizzes with my original questions and creative-commons images. They cover big ideas, not trivia. For each question, one option is a silly answer, so kids who can’t actually answer the questions can still play along by spotting the silly answers. I use each question as a way to put some aspect of evolution into a greater context, showing how this information fits into the larger picture. These quizzes are on the Kahoot! site, which allows people to answer questions on their phones and participate in the quiz all at once. The quizzes are free for the public to use. 

Wings Quiz: 12 questions on wings, which was the theme of Seattle’s Darwin Day this year. You can also listen to a 15-minute audio of my practicing running the quiz. You can see how I pull in evolutionary concepts and use the questions as starting points. 

Link to quiz    Link to audio

Evolution Quiz: 10 questions on evolution, Charles Darwin, and life on Earth. These are big ideas, like what Darwin thought of “savages”, not trivia, like what years Origin of Species was published. 

Link to quiz

Poetry Reading: “The Sea” by Mary Oliver

This poem is about a woman yearning to return to the fishy life of her ancestors. It’s so good I memorized it to recite at Burning Man one year. Evolution isn’t just about what happened in the past. It’s also about how we feel today, knowing that we are connected to all living things.

Link to poem    

There’s only time for me to do a fraction of these activities at Darwin Day today, but I hope to do the rest someday.

2017

Example of creationist conspiracy theorizing

Creationism is a Conspiracy Theory

You can’t be a young-earth creationist without being a conspiracy theorist. When people like Bill Nye take on creationism, they rely on facts and logic. Maybe we should add a conspiracy-theorist angle when we debate creationists. In the States, there are plenty of people who have heard a lot of disinformation about evolution and who don’t know where to stand, but most of them know that they don’t want to be part of any conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists are nut cases.

VP Mike Pence tries to portray creationism as  just another idea about where humans came from, but in reality it’s much more. Creationism rejects science, and with it the body of scientists across the globe who work to advance human knowledge. They say that scientists are not to be trusted to tell the truth about what is good science and what isn’t. According to a creationist, anybody with a middle school education can look at the evidence and know that the world’s scientists are wrong about the history of life on Earth. How could so many scientists be so wrong for so long all over the world? It has to be a conspiracy.

According to creationists, some scientists know that evolution is a lie but spread it anyway, while others are willfully ignorant. It’s not just biology teachers and textbook writers who are in on the conspiracy. It’s anthropologists, archeologists, astronomers, geneticists, geologists, psychologists, and zoologists. The conspiracy includes the whole science community, which should rise up in revolt but instead plays along. It includes everyone with a middle school education or better who looks at the facts and doesn’t see things the way creationists see them. In their book, we’re all dupes or conspirators.

If the science community, as they see it, is a vast conspiracy bent on propagating a devilish lie, what else might scientists be lying about? Climate change? Trump called it a hoax. Vaccines? He said it caused autism. Maybe fluoride in the drinking water? Chemtrails? Morgellon’s? If creationism is true, then the scientific community is a pack of liars, and any of these conspiracy theories could be legitimate. Creationists want to debate by confusing the issue with details, such as the laws of thermodynamics. Let’s look at the big picture: is there a massive, century-old, worldwide conspiracy to lie about science? If that’s the question we’re debating, maybe it will be easier for people to see creationism as the anti-intellectual movement it is.