My last blog argued that the false dichotomy is the plague of human thought, especially thought about Jesus. Here is another example: Ricky Gervais' 'testimony' of how he found out that God doesn't exist. I think that he was the British precursor to Steve Carell on the original version of the Office. He was also very funny as the museum director who couldn't verbally compose any of his frustrated encounters with Ben Stiller despite having a PhD (A Night at the Museum). I guess he just wasn't a people person.

http://www.rickygervais.com/bestlife.php
 

Once again I shake my head at the illogic of his discovery that once a person has rejected the idea of God they are now free to embrace life, especially science and, though he doesn't mention it explicitly, sex. One might construct a syllogism of his logic this way:
 

1. If there is a God then I cannot enjoy the world that God made, presumably because I will feel guilty about exploiting other people and nature. Usually the church in some form is the agent of this guilt.
2. But I want to exploit the world, regardless of who made it, and fulfill my rampant sexual desires with whoever lives in it, and without guilt.
3. Therefore, there is no God.
 

This is a scenario that Genesis 3 speaks to. Ironically. this is also a favorite passage that people such as Ricky Gervais, Bill Mahler, Richard Dawkins, etc. love to use when ridiculing people for believing in the Bible. It is the part of the story when the first humans get in trouble for talking to a talking snake that has legs and gives out bad advice, namely, to eat the fruit from the one tree that God has classified 'off limits'. Scholars tell us that the 'good and bad' part of this 'tree of the knowledge of good and bad' is a way of speaking about knowing everything there is to know, and presumably such knowledge comes by way of experience, since the knowledge that comes by way of books and internet porn still lay in their distant future. The snake's advertisement - the world's first marketing lie - to eat from this tree promised the earthlings a world beyond limits, especially the God-imposed kind of limits.
 

The snake's innocent-bystander-style comment is relevant to the contemporary milieu of popular atheism, whose spokesmen (yes, usually men) recapitulates the ancient marketing message in two aspects. First, that by eating from the tree in question - exploring the world without limits - we can become like God, and in the process prove our cosmic independence, if not superiority (if we lowly humans can become gods how much farther have we climbed than God who always had the divine advantage?). Second, the snake's marketing message implies that God does not want this knowledge getting out of the garden. This aspect has two implications: (1) that God, like Gervais' mother, is really a kind of spin-doctor, keeping the truth from mere humans who could be like God if they only had the correct information, and (2) that the church (as a cipher for 'God's people') is more or less carrying out this cosmic cover-up on God's behalf, usually by various modes of illegitimate power and authority.
 

In sum, the picture I have described above about the present state of us innocent humans is the narrative basis of testimonies offered by Ricky Gervais and other popular atheists. In a fit of Chestertonian irony, they that ridicule an overly literalistic reading of Genesis 3 practically quote it every time they attack Christians. But these interlocutors are not rejecting a robust and nuanced reading of the Bible, or the irrefutable self-sacrifice many of God's people demonstrate as the antithesis of their 'survival of the fittest' ideologies masquerading as science. Rather, they are simply annoyed that life implies limit. I can only wonder what their response would be of critics of evolutionary theories who explain the appearance of a self-conscious, artistic, civilization-making humanity as "apes that stood up one day." Dawkins would be disgusted. Mahler would be mortified. Gervais would be...um....whatever. The bottom line is that the scientific method, which is the logos of the atheists, has been abandoned in their ad hominem and ad populem arguments. If they really wanted to take on Genesis they would try to find the best possible explanation of the meaning of Genesis 3 (Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall would be a decent start...) and begin there. Attacking flannel-graph exegesis will not get the conversation started. But this only begs the question as to whether a real conversation is desirable to them.