As I was shuffling through a stack of papers yesterday, I stumbled upon a little blue booklet given to me earlier this semester from Truth Matters, a new Christian organization on campus. Entitled The Atheist Test,¹ this booklet presents six short quizzes designed to challenge a readers' scientific understanding. It presents statistical and logical arguments and counters the theory of evolution in an attempt to convince readers of the existence of God, and his alleged creation of the universe.

Reading this 8-page booklet to find out if I'm really an atheist or not, I couldn't help but notice its own lack of scientific reasoning, blatant misuse of statistics, and ignorance of evolutionary theory. Oh, but this smart little booklet covers everything. It has bananas, coke cans, Einstein, gold in China, and fun games with oranges.

The Atheist Test starts out with the most exhausted argument for the existence of God: Everything requires a designer; therefore, so does the universe. Apparently this must mean that this designer is the Christian God. The countering argument is long-established. Who designed God?

Some would answer that God designed himself, or that he has simply always been, and has never had to be designed. Didn't they just say that everything requires a designer? Unless of course, they claim that God is separate from "everything," in which case they are merely guessing so as to avoid having to produce evidence. The argument that everything requires a designer is circular--going into infinite regress. It assumes what it wishes to prove.²

Next, the booklet springs into an interpretive persuasion that God must have made bananas for humans based on appearance. A banana is pleasing to the taste buds, has a biodegradable wrapper, is shaped for a human mouth for ease of entry and is shaped for a human hand for easy handling. The fact that it is also shaped for a chimp's use is not considered.

What this booklet fails to acknowledge is that a banana is also a species of life that grows and reproduces, just like wiener dogs, ginkgo trees, fruit bats, fleas, starfish, African elephants, and you and me. Unlike animal species though, bananas cannot walk around in search of the ideal place to spread their seeds. They must persuade animals who can to do it for them. This is why only the bananas that are most pleasing to our taste buds, the bananas most easily unwrapped, and the bananas that are shaped most closely to our hands and mouths have survived all of these millions of years. They are the ones that we picked (or that birds or other animals picked), and the ones whose seeds got spread as a result.³ Many other plants use this unconscious hitchhiking scheme too; it works well when you have no arms or legs. Strawberries and apples grow very red to attract bypassers. Flowers make themselves pretty and sweetly scented. Throughout history, we have selected our bananas, not God.

Delving further into evolution, the role of chance and coincidence comes into play. As an example, the authors pose the scenario of dropping 50 oranges randomly on the ground, and by chance the oranges land in five rows of ten. Do you believe them? Why not?

The chance that the oranges fell that way is exactly the same as if they had fallen in any other pattern. The chance is exactly the same that when dropped, 41 would be on the left, and 9 would be on the right. Oranges fall in all sorts of other patterns, but you just never notice the disordered ones. It just so happened that they fell that way by chance, as said originally.

So because it happened by pure chance, it was a coincidence in need of no further explanation. Most people believe that just because events are rare, they are impossible. This fallacy that coincidences never happen fool us into thinking that there must be other explanations for them.⁴

People mistakenly think that, because we are on the only planet known to carry life, it is a rare and magical occurrence in need of further explanation. In reality, the chances of any other outcome were exactly the same as the one we got. It was a coincidence that occurred by chance, and nothing more needs to be said. Would a lottery winner say, "It is unlikely that I could have won this lottery, so I must not have won."? We should never consider alternative explanations after the fact. There are no further explanations needed; this is the place where organic compounds happened to come together with electricity to form amino acids, the basic building blocks of life. We happen to be on the planet with life because... well, we are life. Where else would we be?

We now move in The Atheist Test on to gold in China. It asks us how much we must know about China before being confident in claiming that there is no gold there. Of course, we must search the entire Chinese landscape far and wide for gold before we can say for sure. We must have absolute knowledge of the absence of gold.

For the first time, this booklet answers its own question right... almost. The authors blindly think this is a one-way principle. This section ends by saying that in order to claim, "There is no God," one must have absolute knowledge of the entire universe to know that it does not contain God.

Funny... in the many church services I have attended in the past, the main message was that God works in mysterious ways--he is complex and awesome. They drilled it into my head that by comparison, we are insignificant and simple little beings, too small to ever understand the universe in its entirety.

So why wouldn't we also need absolute knowledge of the universe to know that there is a God? That's a pretty wild claim to make while lacking sufficient knowledge. If believers think they are so insignificant that they can never understand, how can they trust their own belief?

The real kicker is when, at the end, the authors of The Atheist Test offer us faith. It makes no sense that they would offer us faith (belief without proof), after they have attempted to scientifically prove the existence of God and his supposed creation of the universe. Here they have admitted their arguments are flawed, illogical, and useless.

I took The Atheist Test, and I passed.

Wendy Lyman is the Leading Organizer of the College Freethought Society. Those interested in meeting fellow freethinkers at UW-Eau Claire can email her for more information.

Footnotes:
1 Living Waters Publications. http://www.livingwaters.com/.
2 Barker, D. (1992). Losing Faith in Faith. FFRF, Inc: Madison, WI.
3 Diamond, J. (1999). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. W. W. Norton & Company: NewYork.
4 Stanovich, K. (2003). How to think straight about psychology. Allyn & Bacon: Boston.