God is not mocked

The forces of atheism are coming up with some new in-your-face tactics. One guy has issued a $50000 challenge:

This is an open challenge to any American citizen who passes a lie detector test that I will specify in a moment.

We will both take the math SAT or GRE (aptidude test). Your choice. We will both have only half the normally allotted time to lessen the chances of a perfect score. Lower score pays higher score $50,000.

To qualify you must take a reputable polygraph that proclaims you are truthful when you state that:

1. You are at least 95% sure that Jesus Christ came back from the dead.

AND

2. You are at least 95% sure that adults who die with the specific belief that Jesus probably wasn't resurrected will not go to heaven.
...
But I'm betting fifty grand they are not. Their beliefs make them relatively stupid (or uninterested in learning). Or only relatively stupid people can come to such beliefs. One or the other. That is my contention. And this challenge might help demonstrate that.

This is a nice idea but it might backfire. I'm sure the mean believer is pretty dumb, but I would not be surprised if there are some believers who are mathematically adept. William Dembski of the Discovery Institute is a jerk but he does have a PhD in Mathematics, for instance. And what about all those brilliant Jesuits? Do they still have them? I'd like to think that there is a class of brilliant and perverse people who are believers simply because it is intellectually challenging. Anyone can believe the possible, but believing in the impossible requires either stupidity or genius.

On a related note, The Blasphemy Challenge will offer you a free DVD of The God Who Wasn't There, and all you have to do is risk your immortal soul by posting a video clip where you deny the Holy Spirit.

I was going to do take the challenge, but then I realized that I didn't really want to deny the Holy Spirit. I'm not afraid of a little blasphemy, but I'm not sure exactly what the Holy Spirit is, so don't feel very secure in denying its existence.

Actually, I'm fairly sure that whatever the referent of "The Holy Spirit" may be (and it may be nothing more or less than an idea) I'm pretty sure it is not a thing, like a teapot orbiting Saturn. If it's anything then it is beyond existence or non-existence. Neti neti.

Personhood theory

I inserted myself in the middle of another fruitless debate, arguing against both sides. This one was primarily between Wesley J. Smith, a conservative bioethicist at the Discovery Institute (!), John Derbyshire, and Josh Rosenau over "human exceptionalism". My comments are here and here. A lot of hear and not much light, as usual. But it introduced to me a useful term, personhood theory. This is used by some bioethicists to describe the process of deciding who is or isn't a "person" under law and ethics. It makes sense to me that there should be such theories, although they may vary widely. For instance, I (and most sensible people) don't consider a 16-cell blastocyte to be a person, but many of the religious do.

But to Wesley Smith the very idea of "personhood theory" is anathema. He doesn't merely offer a competing definition of person, he regards the entire topic as an occasion for bluster and obfuscation. I can't quite understand why generally anti-science conservatives are wedded to the idea that it's 46 chromosomes that define a person.

The two main theories in play seem to be either genetic (the right-to-life conservative view) or based on some kind of cognitive quality such as self-awareness or language use). Smith's entire output seems devoted to warning that the latter criterion is perilous, leading us down a variety of slippery slopes to euthanasia, infanticide, and all manner of horrors. He's got a point, this stuff is very problematic. But throwing up hands and refusing to think about it does not strike me as a useful or interesting approach.

Marvin Minsky once proposed (jokingly, I think) that you aren't fully human until you can speak in sentences with subordinate clauses, which would allow infanticide up to age 3 or so.

It is obvious (to me at least) that "person" is a social construct. Some societies permit infanticide, others don't. The default for tribal societies seems to be to consider everyone outside of the tribe as somewhat less of a person than those within. The desire of conservatives for some kind of moral absolutism based on biology is doomed to failure, as is obvious from the glaring inconsistencies in their position. Given that, personhood theory should be a subject of intense interest.