User:Feredir28/What's So Great About Christianity

What's So Great About Christianity is a book authored by conservative Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza, published in 2007.

The following side by side presents criticism and counters to the trite arguments.

Introduction
D'Souza describes the New Atheists as follows, "The atheists no longer want to be tolerated. They want to monopolize the public square and to expel Christians from it. They want political questions like abortion to be divorced from religious and moral claims. They want to control school curricula so they can promote a secular ideology and undermine Christianity. They want to discredit the factual claims of religion, and they want to convince the rest of society that Christianity is not only mistaken but evil. They blame religion for the crimes of history and for the ongoing conflicts in the world today. In short, they want to make religion——and especially the Christian religion——disappear from the face of the earth."  Nowhere in this introduction does D'Souza provide evidence for his assertion by quoting from the new atheist literature. Atheists certainly do not want to "expel Christians" from the public square or "control school curricula." They would not be unhappy with some of the other outcomes.

Often times in this book, D'Souzaa does quote atheist writers, but he does so misleadingly and often falsely.

Why the Universe is NOT Finely-Tuned for Life
Is the world fine tuned for life? Let us ignore all the lions, bears, tigers, and sharks that would eat us. Let us ignore all the bacteria and viruses that want to infect us. Lets ignore all the poisonous snakes, fish, plants and mushrooms that would kill us. Lets ignore the forest fires, blizzards, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, avalanches, earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes that can also kill us. Lets ignore the fact that a fall from a height greater than 10 meters would probably kill us, or submerged underwater for over 10 minutes we would surely die.

Yes, let’s ignore all that and assume that the earth is a perfect place to support life. Lets for a moment wrap ourselves in a blanket of ignorance and arrogance and assume that the earth, and the universe, were designed clearly just for us. Unfortunately, most of the earth is off-limits to allow human life. Take us above 8,000 meters above sea level and we will slowly die from a lack of oxygen. Going below 2,000 meters below sea level, and we will slowly cook from the heat of the earth’s interior. It turns out that less than one-half of 1 percent (0.46%) of the earth’s total volume is capable of sustaining human life. Meaning, even if we manage to imagine that the earth is the Eden, we know it is not. More than 99.54% of it would kill us rather quickly.

But this is just earth; perhaps the solar system around us would be more suitable for us. Actually, the answer is no. Go out outside of the earth’s atmosphere and you would quickly die in a vacuum of space. And if the 0 pressure did not get you, the scorching heat in the sun, the freezing cold in the shade, or the cosmic radiation would kill you quickly.

What about all those other planets. Well, you would burn on Mercury. You would freeze on Pluto. You would suffocate, and then freeze on Mars. There is no place to stand on Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune or Uranus. On Venus, you would be cooked and crushed to death in short order.

So no, nowhere else in the solar system is hospital for sustaining human life. And it gets worse. Let’s assume everything for a moment despite everything modern science has been able to tell us about extra solar planets, that every single star in every single galaxy has an earth-like planet orbiting it. Also, ignore the giant cosmic voids that found between clusters of galaxies, even with these gross assumptions, it turns out that less than 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000073% is habitable for human life. Or to put it in another way 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999927% of the universe is not habitable for life. Kind of takes the wind out of the sails for the fine-tuning argument.

If the universe was fine-tuned for us, surely a bit more of it would be habitable. The numbers are so absurd that it defies comprehension. It is equivalent to a person after exploring 1.6 BILLION rocks like our Moon and finding one single virus particle on only one of the moons and concluding that collectively they are all fine-tuned for life. Or having six MILLION Olympic-sized swimming pools that can collectively hold no more than a single molecule of water, yet claiming they are fine-tuned for water storage. Or claiming that a hard-drive the size of the earth that can only store one bit (1/0), or a hard-drive the size of Jupiter that cannot even hold a single tweet on twitter is fine tuned for storing data. Or claiming that 2 MILLION 50 ton cranes that cant collectively hold more than a single proton are fine tuned for lifting. Or claiming that a plane at full speed travels less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the diameter of a proton over 10 billion years is fine-tuned for speed.

If you think these examples are ridiculous, then you would agree that so too is the argument that the universe is fine-tuned for life. It does not take a genius to realize how absurd and flawed this argument truly is. If this is the best it could possibly be, if this is the best environment using the natural laws of the universe that could allow human life, then it seems that the creator is not as all-powerful after all.

Let us also ponder the enormous waste of matter. The hundred billion galaxies, each with on the order of a hundred billion stars, are composed of “atomic matter,” that is, chemical elements. The portion that is luminous, that is, visible to the eye and optical telescopes, constitutes just one-half of one percent of all the mass in the universe. Another 3.5 percent of the matter in galaxies is of the same atomic nature, only nonluminous. Just 2 percent of atomic matter is composed of elements heavier than helium. One-half of 1 percent of this is composed of carbon, the main element of life. That is, 0.0007 of the mass of the universe is carbon. Yet we are supposed to think that God specially designed then universe so it would have the ability to manufacture, in stars, the carbon needed for life?

Chapter 19: A License to Kill: Atheism and the Mass Murders of History
 D'Souza does not accept the evidence that Hitler was a Roman Catholic, rather he believes that Hitler lied to the German masses to only get their support. To justify his arguments that Hitler was an atheist and anti-religious is Hitler's Table Talk. However, the contents on this has been thoroughly refuted and shown to be very untrustworthy. The main intermediate in all known versions of Table talk is Hitler's personal secretary, Martin Bormann, who was known for his anti-Christian views. Therefore, we may be reading Bormann's views and thoughts rather than Hitlers.

As for Nazi Germany, D'Souza says they divorced themselves from traditional Christianity when they constructed an Aryan Jesus to serve as a sword to cleanse the world of Jews (an act the Pope Pius XI condemned). Here is what D'Souza does not explain or share. The idea that the Aryan Christ is a "radical departure" from tradicitonal Christianity comes as news to anyone who has not studied Christian art and history. Christ, for many centuries, has been depicted as a white European, for example Epiphanius Monachus (a Greek monk from Constantinople from the eight or ninth century) described Jesus as "stood six feet tall, his hair was long, goulden-colored, and not very thick..." In summary, a Nazi Aryan Christ is in no way a radical departure from traditional Christianity. As for what Pope Pius condemned or not condemn, Pius compromised with Nazi Germany,


 * When, in 1933, We consented, Venerable Brethren, to open negotiations for a concordat, which the Reich Government proposed on the basis of a scheme of several years' standing; and when, to your unanimous satisfaction, We concluded the negotiations by a solemn treaty, We were prompted by the desire, as it behooved Us, to secure for Germany the freedom of the Church's beneficent mission and the salvation of the souls in her care, as well as by the sincere wish to render the German people a service essential for its peaceful development and prosperity. Hence, despite many and grave misgivings, We then decided not to withhold Our consent for We wished to spare the Faithful of Germany, as far as it was humanly possible, the trials and difficulties they would have had to face, given the circumstances, had the negotiations fallen through. It was by acts that We wished to make it plain, Christ's interests being Our sole object, that the pacific and maternal hand of the Church would be extended to anyone who did not actually refuse it.

If Hitler believed God wanted him to kill Jews, there is no way to verify that that mission was any less from God than when pope Innocent III wanted to exterminate Jews or other heretics in the Middle Ages.