Falsifiability of Evolution

Falsifiability

Briefly, falsifiability is a tenet of science that states that for a scientific theory to be legitimate, it must be falsifiable, that is, able to be proven false. It is attributed to the testability of a theory - as in, if the theory can be tested, then logically those tests could come back with a failing grade, showing that the theory is wrong.

For example, Newton's theory of gravity is falsifiable. How? It's very simple: find an object that doesn't fall to the ground. Since we can test gravity all day long and show how ever many objects we have the time and patience for falling to the ground and not not falling to the ground, we know that it's incredibly likely that Newton's theory of gravity is, in fact, true.

Falsifiability is not universally accepted and there are situations in which falsifiability cannot or should not immediately cause one to dismiss the scientific qualities of a theory or study. For example, observational science cannot necessarily be falsified. If your entire basis of study is simply watching someone or something perform something and recording data on it, how exactly could that be falsified? It is not an entirely black and white principle. It is, however, rather reliable when attributed correctly to things that it should be attributed to.

It's important to note several things here: whether or not something is falsifiable is not the determining factor on whether or not it is important or whether or not it is a valid concept, question, or concern. It merely determines whether something can be considered scientific (and even then, not always, as we see with observational science). Furthermore, something doesn't have to be science to be valid, contrary to the beliefs of many a keyboard-scientist.

This means that, yes, the question "Does God exist?" is not falsifiable, and therefore is not science (and it cannot be argued to be observational science or any other kind of science). This, however, doesn't make the question not valid or important. I've discussed various times how science is not the only way in which we acquire knowledge and it is not the end all be all of human knowledge and understanding. I don't feel like I need to go into it again for this.

Falsifiability of Evolution

So, now we hopefully understand the reality of what falsifiability is. What we're getting into now is the falsifiability of evolution. More specifically, I'm going to be picking at this particular wiki page on the much biased wiki RationalWiki.

First of all, in absolutely no capacity do they try to argue whether or not it is necessary for evolution as a theory to need to be falsifiable in order to be a valid theory. They even state that falsifiability is a central characteristic of science and that science, in its entirety, must be falsifiable to be valid. This misrepresents the concept of falsifiability. As we mentioned, it's not black and white, and it's not even universally accepted. It also relates directly to the theory's testability and it should not be entirely unclear that evolution is something of a hard theory to actively test. A concept like evolution could be argued to be understandably difficult to falsify while still being based off of scientific information and observation.

However, they didn't try to make that argument, and I'm not going to make it for them.

They do state correctly that scientific theories cannot be proven outright, but that the only way to definitively prove a scientific theory one way or another is if it is proven false. They then immediately misleadingly state that if a theory cannot be falsified, then it makes no difference whether or not it is true - quite a shallow view. As been mentioned before, something doesn't become meaningless merely because it is not scientific. There are a great many questions and valid concerns that are not falsifiable - that doesn't make them unimportant, especially if they could influence the quality of your life (or your afterlife).

We go on as it discusses what exactly evolution attempts to prove and, based on that, what would need to happen for it to be falsified.

[Evolution] is based on three main principles: variation, heritability and selection. Given these three principles, evolution must occur, and many features of evolution appear given only these three guiding principles. If any of these were shown to be flawed then the theory would be untenable.

This is very interesting, as the author has given himself quite the benefit of the doubt. As I've already discussed these topics quite extensively, I may be a little less detailed here, but let me just start out by saying that this statement is inherently flawed. It's, in fact, so flawed that it may actually just be purposefully misleading intellectual dishonesty.

What this statement is attempting to say is that the principles of variation, heritability, and selection necessitate evolution - that is, the ability for creatures to turn into different kinds of creatures over many years happens necessarily if these three principles are true. While it's very unlikely, this may actually have come from an innocent misunderstanding by the author themselves - these principles only necessitate the ability for generations of creatures to adapt and change over time within their own species, but it does not flow necessarily that they must then turn into different kinds of animals. We have already discussed at length why a species changing over time within its own kind does not, in any way, necessarily extrapolate into that species evolving into an entirely different kind.

If you're interested in in-depth discussion on these points, feel free to visit the lengthy and sourced post linked here. Otherwise, I'll wrap it up with one point:

DNA evidence shows that selection actually reduces the amount of DNA information within a creature. As creatures become specialized for their environment, they actually lose genetic information instead of acquiring new genetic information (new genetic information being necessary for the creature to turn into any sort of different creature, i.e. fish -> amphibian). This means that the process of selection, when analyzed at a genetic level, is actually evidence against the gradual changing over time from one kind of animal into another. Simplified, animals become less complex over time, not more complex.

This fact alone destroys any attempt at declaring that the three aforementioned principles necessitate evolution. They can be argued to necessitate change within a species (and I would agree), but not into different kinds of animals. Considering that the basis of the entire argument on this page has been debunked, I cannot even continue using this page as a source for this refutation. There is, however, one more point to be made on the information on this page before we move on.

Falsifiability of Common Descent

It is interesting to note that this author does differentiate between the concept of evolution and the common descent of life.

He defines common descent as:

...the theory that all life evolved from one common ancestor, or groups of ancestors (although it is slightly more complicated than the straw man version of "one day a cell appeared and everything is technically its descendent[sic]").

This is very interesting. Considering scientists and evolution enthusiasts' own explanations of evolution, the origin of species, and the origin of life, this purposeful separation of evolution and common descent is peculiar. The author even goes on to posit that common descent being falsified would not even necessarily disprove evolution.

I'm going to go ahead and make the call that this author is either purposefully or naively misrepresenting the concepts of changes over time and divergence of kinds into new kinds. It is an unignorably important distinction to make that the concepts of "macro-" and "microevolution" are actually distinctly different. The theory of evolution as described by Darwin does not separate itself into various, self-sustaining theories. The theory as outlined by Darwin purposefully includes the origin of life, evolution as a means of speciation, as well as common descent. It is an all-in-one package. While the concept of change over time is something that can exist without Darwin's theory, it's actually the basis of the rest of his theory - that theory being the divergence into kinds and the common descent of life from a universal common ancestor. The entire purpose of his theory was to explain the origin of life through a universal ancestor by means of natural selection causing drastic enough changes over time that all life came into existence this way because of his observations that species experienced small changes over time due to adaptation to their environment.

For what the author claims to be true to be true, the author must be referring to evolution only in its capacity for species to change among themselves over time without the implication that they could, then, evolve into different kinds. If this is the case, I would argue that the author is entirely correct. However, I find it hard to believe that this is, in fact, the author's intent, especially considering the misinformation within the piece as well as the following parts about common descent.

The author's argument for the falsifiability of common descent is as follows:

Common descent could easily be disproved (without even seriously challenging the theory of evolution) if we discovered a form of life that was not related to all the life we know - most simply, by finding life that does not use the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) for information storage and retrieval as known biological life does.

Again, the basis of this argument is flawed. The idea that we share a common ancestor because we share similarities (DNA, RNA, similar traits, functions, etc.) is, in itself, a flawed conclusion. The reality that we are all made of similar kinds of things and share similarities does not necessitate a common ancestor or common descent. The reality that all life shares similar building blocks and features doesn't conclude anything one way or another. If I create several sculptures out of clay, each sculpture is made of the same components, but each sculpture has still been created."

Drawing the conclusion that our similarities is evidence for common descent is a case of assuming your conclusion: because you already believe that we have a universal common ancestor, you view the similarities of all life as being evidence of that conclusion. It is circular and inherently intellectually dishonest. It would be equally circular and intellectually dishonest to conclude that we are all similar because we have been created out of similar materials and intentionally created with similar parts, but this conclusion is drawn in the exact same way that the naturalist's conclusion is drawn. The parallel is that neither is necessarily true - genetic similarities across kingdoms is entirely inconclusive as proof of anything.

So where do we go from here? The correct conclusion is that common descent would be falsified in the same way that evolution is falsified - contrary to the author's insistence, they depend on each other to exist as theories. If it could be shown that different kinds of creatures do not, over time, turn into new and distinctly different kinds of creatures, then common descent would therefore be impossible. Evolution into different kinds must be able to occur for common descent to be true. If evolution is true, it would therefore be evidence for common descent. They are not independent theories.

Evolution Falsified

Because I can't continue to use this same page as the basis for my rebuttal due to the entire foundation of its argument already being debunked, I'll have to come up with my own definition of what evolution shows and therefore what would need to be shown to disprove it.

The theory of evolution posits that due to changes in a species over time, one kind of animal may diverge completely into a different kind of animal. All life is theorized to have come into existence this way, starting with the first life which is assumed to be the simplest form of life that could possibly exist. This first life, due to adaptation and changes over time, diverged into different forms of life, which eventually become more diverse and complex...

Well, perhaps it's just my own bias coming through, but I feel like evolution must have already been falsified as a theory for the origin of species considering that the theory itself outlines the first life as being simple and then becoming more complex. I would suppose, then, that the way to falsify evolution would be to show that life does not become more complex as natural selection occurs, but rather less complex. This would show that, yes, evolution can be falsified, and is therefore valid science. However, it has been falsified, meaning that, while it is valid science, it is now false.

Oh my, I heard the shouts through my monitor: "What about mutations? The entire basis of Darwin's theory was that new information could be acquired through mutations!"

The thing about mutations is that they, too, are (almost exclusively) a loss or degradation of information. I've already discussed this at length, too, so this will again be just a summary:

From a genetic, DNA standpoint, mutations are overwhelmingly negative. Even mutations that are said to be "good" are, from the geneticist's view, negative. The biologist can see a mutation as being positive if it provides a survival advantage, but the genetic reality is that it is still a loss of information. Mutations may, rarely, (less than 1% of the time) create new information, but due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of mutations are either negative or a "switch being flipped" coupled with the fact that selection actually causes animals to become less complex, the chance of mutations being, for example, the reason why fish grew lungs and eventually became amphibians is effectively zero.

Let's give evolution one more shot. Let's ignore the first life. Let's assume that perhaps there are already pretty complex life forms on earth, somehow. We'll ignore how they got there and simply question whether or not those already existent, complex life forms evolving into different kinds of uniquely different life forms could occur.

The theory of evolution posits that due to changes in a species over time, one kind of animal may diverge completely into a different kind of animal. In this way, a common ancestor would take two separate evolutionary paths, with one path leading to a completely different kind of animal than the other. The diversification of the creatures of the earth could therefore occur this way.

We have a much more solid, much less already-falsified theory, here. Ignoring where those life forms came from, how could we falsify complex life forms evolving into totally different kinds of life forms due to changes over time?

We are still pretty stuck with our knowledge that animals do not become more complex over time. But does this necessarily falsify this sort of theory? It would not be entirely wrong to say that dogs and cats, while very distinct, don't necessarily have anything too drastically different that small changes over time couldn't necessitate. Neither is particularly "more complex," they are just different. While changes over time couldn't cause a fish to grow lungs, they could change a skeletal structure, make longer whiskers, maybe even retractable claws and sandpaper tongues. After all, it's not necessarily new information, just a restructure of already existent types of information.

So, our falsifiability could possibly stem from this. If it could be shown to not be possible for two morphologically and genetically distinct creatures to be able to diverge from one common ancestor, this theory would be falsified. I suppose this could be done with more research on genetics - perhaps a discovery in genetics that shows that genes couldn't reorganize themselves to change, for example, a stationary claw into a retractable one.

The problem here is still that this would be very hard to show. Proving a negative, contrary to popular belief, is not impossible, but it can be quite difficult. The reality is that it is not necessarily impossible - what you would end up with is merely a lot of evidence for the contrary, and no or little evidence in favor of it.

Which happens to look like it is the case. There is a pretty large and looming pile of evidence that two morphologically and genetically distinct creatures could not, in fact, diverge from one common ancestor. It's just that you can't definitively prove or disprove this, merely show it to be likely/unlikely. So far, it's highly unlikely.

This doesn't feel entirely satisfactory, though. A theory has to be definitively falsifiable or else it's invalid, right? Newton's theory of gravity is entirely falsifiable, right? If we saw an object thrown into the sky actually continue to fly away and not fall back down, wouldn't we have falsified gravity?

Not necessarily. See, there is that not-black-and-white thing again. We have an enormous amount of evidence that Newton's theory is correct. If it could be shown that one type of object, or even one single unique object, was not subject to gravity, we would not simply throw gravity out the window. That single object itself would be seen as an anomaly, perhaps it itself having unique properties that cause it to simply ignore gravity, while gravity itself was still solid.

So what do we do, here? Do we accept that this aspect of evolution is falsifiable, but only sort of? Or do we declare that it is not falsifiable, and therefore not valid science?

My opinion on this was already made pretty clear in the beginning. Falsifiability is not the end all be all, it does not make a question, concern, or observation meaningless. Falsifiability is also not something that can be blindly adhered to with rigid, inflexible rules. I feel that evolution is, on some level, falsifiable, and to proclaim that it isn't or was never a valid question to investigate would be intellectually insincere.

After all, it's the investigation into evolution that is continually giving us more evidence for creation. The reality of the situation is that, before we were able to see and understand the things that we are now, evolution seemed rather plausible. It wasn't until more in-depth research was done that we learned important things about how the world around us works - and how those things point toward our Creator. I would implore biologists and scientists to continue their studies, even if they do so in an attempt to explain away their own Creator. Hopefully they will reevaluate the evidence staring back at them and realize it's actually pointing in a different direction than they originally thought, as many others have done.

Why Math Can't Logically Be How The Universe Was Created

What a title. You should be very informed as to what this is about.

Many atheists will attempt to try and argue that the universe was created by math, or quantum mechanics. This comes in various forms, from a sophisticated and lengthy explanation (or maybe a book or two), to a nondescript "a mathematical formula created the universe" and so on. What is interesting about this theory is that is logically impossible.

What is math?

Mathematics is the science that deals with the logic of shape, quantity and arrangement. Math is all around us, in everything we do. It is the building block for everything in our daily lives, including mobile devices, architecture (ancient and modern), art, money, engineering, and even sports.

Math is a concept, and it is somewhat of a difficult one to explain. We understand what it is because it's all around us and it's present every day in every thing and in every possible way, everywhere in our lives. We understand the difference between having one of something or two of something because of math, and we are capable of building skyscrapers, rocket ships, and life saving medicines because of it. We can't bake a cake without math and we can't even tell you how many fingers you're holding up without math. However, pinning a definition on something like math is tricky.

Because of math's prevalence and relevance, some would say that math exists necessarily. That is, math must exist. This, however, is not a complete understanding. It's not entirely wrong, but it's just wrong enough to allow illogical theories like this one to exist.

Why doesn't math exist necessarily?

Time, space, and matter create math. Math exists necessarily, but only in the context of other existent things. In fact, without time, space, and matter, math does not exist. So math exists necessarily only due to the fact that it comes free as a package deal with the existence of things that also exist.

To put this another way, once you have a concept like time, math is "created" right alongside it. There cannot be a one second, a two second, a three second - or a second day, year, century etc. - without numbers and a way to add those numbers together. Without math, there is no possible way to describe time. Time would be meaningless without math.

It is the same with matter. You cannot have two or more of something or of any thing without a way to differentiate those things. Once you have two separate things, there needs to be a way to describe and understand the concept of having two things, or else you don't have any things. Math exists necessarily alongside matter.

Space necessitates math as well, as you cannot measure the distance between two objects without it! We see that time, matter, and space require math to exist, not the other way around.

We can see here that it's not entirely wrong to say that math exists necessarily, but it only exists necessarily in context to our universe. Our universe necessitates math - having anything other than nothingness means you immediately, necessarily also have math.

So Why Can't Math Exist Without Time, Space, and Matter

If you don't have any distinguishable things, you don't need math. If there is no time to count, no matter to differentiate, and no space - and quite literally nothing - then there is no need for math. Because math only exists necessarily alongside other existent things, that means that if nothing existed - nothing being a complete and total absence of any and every possible thing - then math could not exist.

Math requires some sort of differentiation to exist. Considering that math is a concept and not a tangible, material thing, that means that there must be some thing to apply the concept to. If there are no things, then there are no concepts. You can't have a concept of one thing, two things, four days, fifty miles, etc., unless those things exist. Without any things, the concept of math cannot be applied to anything and therefore it does not exist.

Time, Space, and Matter Didn't Exist Before The Universe

Thanks to Einstein, we know that time, space, and matter cannot exist without one another. They are interdependent - he also told us (reluctantly) that time, space, and matter had a specific and definite point of creation. They not only came into being at the same exact time, but they came into being. There was a beginning to time, space, and matter. If math only exists necessarily alongside time, space, and matter, then it also came into existence alongside time, space, and matter.

Conclusion & Further Arguments

What we see here, then, is that math could not have existed before anything at all existed in order to create existence because math does not exist without existence.

However, there are still arguments to be made. First and foremost, to get it out of the way, I'll address "if God exists, then math must have existed before the universe, so you just proved God doesn't exist!"

This argument is messy, but we'll sort it out.

We can start with the concept of God. God is timeless, spaceless, and immaterial - He is entirely infinite. He is not "one" God, He is God. He is, in fact, everywhere, everything, and every time. What we see here is actually that the only thing besides nothing that exists without time, space, and matter is infinity. But infinity existing does not necessitate that math exists. You can have infinite nothingness - that is, in fact, what we had before we had anything. You can't have one or two nothingnesses, but you can have "infinite nothingness".

Math, as we discussed, explains differentiation between things. Math explains why we can have two cats, why today is not yesterday, why your car is where it is and not somewhere else, etc. When you have infinity, you specifically do not have differentiation of things. It's the exact same reason why an infinite chain of events cannot be what created the universe - if you have infinite causes, you never have a first cause or a last cause. They are infinite, happening forever. There is no start or end, no one or two, no when or where. Math, in fact, does nothing to help us understand infinity. We don't describe infinity as being "billions and billions," or whatever, but, in fact, just... infinite. It is only infinity. There is no differentiation.

So an infinite God can exist without math, as there is still nothing to differentiate. In fact, the entire reason why monotheism is the only logical way in which the concept understood to be God can exist is because there is nothing to differentiate. Once you have differences in two separate beings, one necessarily must be in some way different than another. You can't have two infinite, timeless, spaceless, and immaterial beings. There is no differentiation to be made - so there necessarily cannot be multiple of these infinite beings.

Math requires something to differentiate in order to exist. An infinite God does not need differentiation. Furthermore, if the argument is somehow "something existed before the universe, so math existed before the universe," then we're still on the same page - my entire logical argument is that math cannot exist without something else also existing. You are, however, required to concede in this argument that God exists. So, maybe not a great argument to make if you're trying to explain away God.

Just To Make Myself Clear

There is one more point to make. If there is still any hope in your mind that math could have existed before existence and created the universe, consider what should be very obvious:

"Mathematical equations" cannot exist, just floating around in literal, pure nothingness. There is nothing about them that exist necessarily, and they are not a tangible thing. And even if mathematical equations were floating around in pure nothingness, they could not do anything. There is nothing to do anything to! If we have a recipe for a cake, this cake equation cannot just float around in space and eventually make a cake. It needs not only something to make the cake from, but it needs guidance. If mathematical equations could create anything, then I'd wonder why my math homework never did itself.

So even if mathematical equations can exist separate from any sort of time, space, or matter - even if mathematical equations can exist without any things to which it could apply itself - math is an impersonal concept. It cannot think or feel. It cannot act on its own to create anything.

This, in fact, ties directly into why God must logically be a personal being. If an impersonal, nonthinking concept such as mathematical equations existed for infinity, before time, space, and matter, and did in fact create the universe, then it would have done so necessarily. It would be unable to not create the universe, as in, these supposed mathematical equations would have necessarily had to create the universe immediately. If there is any possibility that these impersonal mathematical equations could have created anything, it would have had to have the capacity and capability to do so immediately, or else it would never do so. Math cannot make choices.

Since we know that the universe is not infinite and will eventually die out, if mathematical equations, against all logic and reason, did in fact create the universe, they would have had to do so immediately. The universe, therefore, would have already died out - infinitely long ago. Furthermore, if these mathematical equations existed for infinity, then there is no "beginning" point at which they would have created the universe, which simply heaps onto the logical impossibility of the theory.

And, no, it would not infinitely create universes. If it were allocated to create infinite universes, then it would have also done that necessarily, immediately. All of these other universes would have also already came into existence, ran out of energy, and died out, because it would have happened infinity ago. You cannot reach a beginning point in infinity - we again run into the problem of there being no beginning point at which for this mathematical equation to have began creating universes, because it would have been infinitely long ago.

Does Religion Hold Science Back?

The argument that "religion is holding science back," is common and firmly rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding. Along with the claim that religion is somehow restraining us from a deeper understanding of something that God Himself created normally comes the declaration that "religion is unscientific".

There are two important points to make here. Well, three. The first and foremost important point to make is "science" is an incredibly broad term, as it can refer to many, separate things. Following that, as I've discussed before, science (as the general concept that is generally meant in this context) and religion exist side by side - they are not and have never been 'at war'. The third one is that science itself is what holds science back.

Or should I say, scientists. Or even "scientism," a phrase coined to refer to the those who commit to 'worship' of science. I can do things in whatever order I choose.

I have a few links here, the first is an article about science being broken. It goes into the failures of the scientific community to properly peer-review studies, even when being told that they are participating in a study that is studying the effectiveness of peer review, and other things highlighting the problems that science faces from within its own ranks.

While the first one was titled "Big Science is Broken," this article is titled "Science isn't broken." Well, gee, why would I link two articles of opposite views to make my point?

Because the title of the first article is wrong. The meat of the article is correct, but "science" isn't broken. People are. We are broken, we are fallen, we are finite, biased, and flawed creatures. A perfectly designed system can still fail when subjected to the natural flaws of humanity. It was one of the first things that ever happened.

But what the second article attempts to say is that science isn't broken, it's just that the systems in place make it hard for scientists to... science things, without "cheating". This, however, is an unsatisfying conclusion. We can't accept self-admittedly flawed science because "it's just really really hard, guys!".

I.e., science is too hard for scientists. It's too hard for them to be unbiased, for them to really think critically, to really care about what they're studying, and to care to try and find out what is true rather than getting the results that they want.

The fact of the matter is that as long as science is performed by flawed people, we cannot place our unwavering faith in it. And what's being shown now is not only that is this conclusion completely true, but it's more true than it's ever been. People are terrible at science, in this "progressive and enlightened" future moreso than they were in the past. Science used to by and large be carried out for the sake of it, funded by people who had few if any ulterior motives, while nowadays many people are just trying to get as many government payouts as they can. Science is so expensive that people cannot do it without getting donations, and people do not donate to the research of causes they don't like.

Science doesn't do or say anything. Science is a limited tool that is utilized by people for us to try and better understand the world around us. But what happened is that we started to worship science - and therefore, scientists. Everyone wanted to be a scientist because they wanted the respect, they wanted to be one of those "smart people". We can see this day to day by the amount of people who act like they're scientists when they aren't, from Bill Nye (engineer, not scientist) to your common every day 16 year old on Facebook posting edgy anti-theism memes.

Where before we perhaps had scientists who were genuinely interested in scientific progression, who genuinely wanted to understand how the world around them worked, we now have a wider pool of scientists - which includes a great number of people who don't intend to use the tool for its pure and truth-seeking powers, but to make people believe the things they want them to believe by forcing studies through that may not actually prove anything, or may actually be distinctly opposite from the truth.

Now, I'm not saying every scientist doesn't care about scientific progression and is actually just using their status to promote their own agendas, nor am I saying that never happened before these recent times. What I am saying is that the information and data being compiled and analyzed by scientists is just as likely to be flawed, misinterpreted, or purposefully manipulated as any other kind of thing. Because scientists are people, and people are flawed.

We see reckless numbers of studies on the same subjects that promote different results. In the same breath we'll see a study that definitely proves that homosexual parents are 100% the same as heterosexual couples and another one that shows that homosexual parents are worse than heterosexual ones. Whatever your personal belief is, know that you can definitely manipulate scientific results to prove that you're right!

So who do we believe? Well, the average person will simply believe the study that coincides with their beliefs, just like the scientist who possibly fabricated the study in the first place made sure that their interpretations of the results showed the things they wanted it to show.

What do we end up with? We end up with a situation in which we had something we thought we could trust being shown to be just as untrustworthy as any other given thing. Leave it to people to ruin things for people.

Should we dismiss the merits of science? Of course not. Science, when utilized properly, is a very useful tool for us to understand the world around us. The problem is that we are unlikely to be able to find a disclosure on each scientific study stating "the scientist or scientists who put this study together were purposefully studying this topic because they wanted to prove [x/y/z] thing, so it's possible that these results are biased."

What options are we left with, then? Well, don't get too optimistic. We can definitely take some steps in the right direction, for instance reading past the title of an article proclaiming that a new study has just definitively proven [thing that supports your beliefs], and actually taking a look at the study in question. Many an article has been written proclaiming a result that's completely different from the study it's citing. The articles written about scientific studies are more or less a second-hand source, which opens it up to even more biased re-interpretation.

We can learn more about what makes good science and what makes bad science. As we can see (if you read both of those articles), one of the biggest problems is that you can manipulate which data and what kind of data you use for your study and still have it be "legitimate." So, really get into the meat of the study. Look at the sample sizes, the populations involved, and we can probably get some good insight into the biases that might be present if we look at the study itself in context of what current popular beliefs are and what sorts of things people are trying to prove. It would be unlikely that a study about chipmunks is being biased by political agendas (though I suppose it's possible).

So... science is not broken, it's just easily manipulated, and frequently is. Scientists tend to get in the way of science moreso than anyone else. Pseudo-scientists who are really just college kids who aren't even majoring in any field of science also help to degrade the reputation of science. Furthermore, since the government can fund scientific studies and then subsequently demand that the results of those studies aren't published when they don't prove what they wanted, we can see that politics probably gets in the way of science far more than religion does.

So what about "religion hindering the advancement of science" that we talked about?

As mentioned many times before, science and religion go hand in hand. If there is a Creator of all things, then He created... science. He created everything, thus, science is really just the discovery of the world that the Creator created.

How, then, could religion ever get in the way of science? Well, it's important to understand what people mean by this.

Generally speaking, religion "gets in the way" of science when scientists attempt to do immoral things in the name of science. For example, psychologists used to do tons of terrible studies on people that would have violated any compassionate person's moral standards. A code of ethics was installed so that psychologists couldn't emotionally scar (or physically damage) people anymore. This is easily something that "got in the way" of science.

Anti-theists also tend to believe that religion is "getting in the way" when religious people debate, contest, or deny scientific findings. There are obviously religious people who have been tricked into thinking that science is an enemy of God who will very unscientifically deny and argue against scientific advancement, but my biggest question here is how they are actually stopping anyone. If some misled religious devotees are hellbent on believing something that science "said," that doesn't... actually... stop anything. Go on. Continue. You are not restricted by the beliefs of people who disagree with you.

The problem of course starts when religious people debate, contest, or deny the implied conclusions of certain scientific findings. A straight forward example is the argument of common descent that is derived from the fact that all living things are made up of DNA and the more similar looking and operating two life forms are, the more similar their DNA. Darwinists have used this indisputable scientific fact - that we all have DNA and share similarities and what not - as proof of a common ancestor.

Apparently, I'm standing in the way of science when I say "Well, wait a moment, how exactly does this not make complete sense in the context of a Creator? If I make a sculpture of an ape and a sculpture of a human being both out of clay, how many differences do I really have to make?"

See, similar DNA among similar creatures doesn't prove anything one way or another. What happened is that scientists, due to their preexisting biases, concluded that similar DNA is clearly evidence of a common ancestor! When I point out the logically obvious reality that it could easily be evidence of a common Creator, I'm "standing in the way of science!" Brilliant.

"But wait!" the atheist shouts, "What about Galileo and the early Catholic Church? That's our best and most used example of the church getting in the way of science!"

Galileo is a good example of a distorted truth being repeated so many times that everyone now believes it. The real story of Galileo, summarized, involves being told not to proclaim things without evidence, still doing so, and then being put on house arrest with all the comforts of living, including a servant, for insulting the Pope who invited you to prove your claims in the first place.

See, Galileo actually didn't prove that the earth revolved around the sun the way that we understand it now. People back then already had evidence that the earth revolved around the sun, and a lot of that information was found around - wait for it - churches. Copernicus, a Catholic monk, actually did the studies about the earth revolving around the sun. He was just sort of a meek and socially awkward person who didn't want to go public with his findings. Galileo took Copernicus' findings and ran with them, because he was actually sort of an unapologetically brash man. He also stated several times that God had actually given him divine power over the discernment of astronomy. Yeah, so, what the Catholic church had an issue with was that - Galileo running around proclaiming that God made him an astrology-prophet.

Some of Galileo's claims were actually disproven, as Copernicus was actually the one who did all the leg work, while Galileo took it and ran around proclaiming himself something of a genius - and that everyone who disagreed with him was an idiot, including the Pope, which Galileo astonishingly basically told him to his face. Since the Pope was also basically the king, he put Galileo on house arrest for heresy - not for saying the earth revolved around the sun, but because he declared to have divine powers and also called the Pope stupid.

Sources? Here, here, and this book.

It's kind of unfortunate that the atheist's go-to for the church trying to halt scientific progression is actually all based on a lie. Another one they try to use now is stem-cell research.

We have two points to make here. Our first point is, interestingly, not all stem-cells come from embryos and fetuses:

A third source of stem cells, known as multipotent stem cells, can be found in many types of adult tissue such as bone marrow, adipose tissue (fat), and umbilical cord blood. Adult stem cells are needed every day to replenish a variety of cell types in our body that normally wear out and die in large numbers. Examples of cells that need to be constantly replaced are blood, skin cells, and the lining of our intestinal tract. Areas of the body not previously thought to contain stem cells, such as the brain, have in recent years been discovered to contain these self-renewing cells.

Our second point is that we have not come across religion getting in the way of science, but rather morality and ethics. Just as psychologists who were doing emotionally damaging and sometimes physically and developmentally horrendous ethically irreconcilable things to people "in the name of science," we come across the ethical and moral question of abortion, purposefully creating embryos for science, and a "whose life is more important?" dilemma.

As I've gone into before, stem cell research from unborn little humans is not a question of science but of morality. This isn't a religious question but a moral one. The topic has merely been conflated as being religious in nature, but it exists separate from religion. There are secular organizations against abortion! It's outright false to insist that only religious adherents are against abortion.

So what we come across now is that morality is really what "gets in the way of science." Now the question we have to ask is "is that wrong?"

This question gets pretty deep. Is it okay to "hinder" scientific advancement because of our morals, our humanity, and our respect for people's lives?

I would argue that of course it is. As I went into before about purely logical worldviews, when we ignore our humanity - our emotions and our compassion - we end up with some pretty gruesome results. Morality is more important than science as it is what keeps us human. What good is arguing about the advancement of science if it ends up destroying us?

But we have one more contest about religion hindering science - the idea that a scientist should not hold any religious beliefs. While this is only somewhat related, what we find is that people believe that the religious cannot be scientists, or more generally, scientists should not ever hold any beliefs that are not provable with science.

There is not much really to present here in the form of an argument, as this belief is rooted in personal bias and anti-theism rather than any actual argument. What we see here is that non-religious scientists believe that religious people cannot be good scientists because they believe in the false concept of religion v. science, that religion is anti-science and therefore religious beliefs will hinder a scientist from doing sciencey things.

This is all conjecture. Especially when we see that many prominent scientists in very advanced fields such as astrophysics, physics, and cosmology actually tend to find that science points toward a Creator. As with my example earlier, much of the evidence "for naturalism" is actually simply neutral evidence that proves nothing being imbued by biased scientists with a biased conclusion.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that a scientist with a belief in a Creator could possibly be unscientific considering that no one who believes in a Creator doesn't believe that that same Creator created everything - including the very thing they are studying. Scientific advancement doesn't disprove God - you do not disprove a Creator by finding out how the creation operates. If anything, belief in a Creator will simply cause the religious scientist to have a greater appreciation and reverence for that which he is studying - because he knows that it was created with love and care by the same Creator who created him.

Should Churches Pay Taxes

Currently, religious organizations are classified as non-profit organizations (because they are) and do not pay taxes. There are a good number of people who don't understand what churches are, how they function, and what their purpose is who believe that this is wrong and proceed to argue that a non-profit organization that is funded by the donations of the public should pay taxes.

Let's start with what a non-profit organization even is:

There are legal definitions, including 26 types of nonprofits recognized by the IRS...

A nonprofit is a tax-exempt organization that serves the public interest. In general, the purpose of this type of organization must be charitable, educational, scientific, religious or literary. ... The public expects to be able to make donations to these organizations and deduct these donations from their federal taxes.

Legally, a nonprofit organization is one that does not declare a profit and instead utilizes all revenue available after normal operating expenses in service to the public interest. These organizations can be unincorporated or incorporated. An unincorporated nonprofit cannot be given federal tax-exempt status or the designation of being a 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service. When a nonprofit organization is incorporated, it shares many traits with for-profit corporations except that there are no shareholders.

When starting a nonprofit corporation, the organization must file articles of incorporation with the state in which it resides or decides will be its jurisdiction for legal purposes. This is the same process a for-profit corporation must follow. Each state has various rules and regulations, but most require officers of the corporation, a board of directors, by-laws and annual meetings. Most states also require nonprofit organizations to register with state charity bureaus or other agencies and adhere to reporting requirements particularly involving fundraising operations.

When a nonprofit corporation is given tax-exempt status, it is exempt from paying federal corporate income tax. While these types of organizations also are often exempt from paying state and local sales tax, property tax and taxes on other assets, this is not always the case as states have different rules. ...

Nonprofit organizations have paid and volunteer staff, but employment taxes and federal and state workplace rules are generally no different than those imposed on for-profit organizations. A perception is that salaries in the nonprofit world are low and while this is generally true, the type of nonprofit organization can make a huge difference in how closely it compares to a for-profit business.

Universities, hospitals and large national charities are examples of organizations that can be "nonprofit" but have salary scales on par with almost any for-profit corporation. CEOs of major hospitals can commonly earn salaries and bonuses of $500,000 to over $1,000,000. University presidents can have similar scales. ...

A nonprofit organization can have clients, can offer products and services, will need revenue, should market itself, and must be concerned about customer satisfaction whether in those assisted or those who contribute donations in support of operations, programs or services. It is a business that must serve the public interest and it will succeed or fail as any business will, depending on how well it is operated.

I was unable to cut out a lot from this lengthy explanation because it is all rather relevant. Summarized:

A Non-Profit organization is the same as a For-Profit organization with two major exceptions: 

• It is not allowed to distribute profits to anyone, no matter how much money it makes. That means no dividends for shareholders.
• There are no shareholders. Nobody owns the company. It has trustees, who run the company - but they cannot sell their "trusteeship" to anyone else.

What does this mean? Essentially - 100% of the money which a Non-Profit makes is re-invested in the company. Additionally, Facebook can't buy the company - because there is nothing to buy. It's a legal entity which nobody owns.

You can learn more from a very appropriately named website, http://nonprofitanswerguide.org/.

Let's start from the top: a church is a nonprofit organization. As long as a church fits into these legal qualifications of a nonprofit organization, then it is a nonprofit organization. Nonprofit organizations are tax exempt organizations. Therefore, churches should not pay taxes. If you want to argue that churches should pay taxes, then you must argue that all nonprofit organizations must pay taxes. Or, perhaps you'll attempt to argue that churches are not or should not be considered nonprofit organizations. In this case, you'd have to change the legal criteria for what a nonprofit organization is in some way that would only affect churches (only possible through explicit bias against religious organizations, which would be unconstitutional), or simply arbitrarily declare that any organization that is religious in nature cannot be a nonprofit organization because reasons. All of these arguments are bunk - if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. A church is a nonprofit organization.

So what we have from people who believe that churches should pay taxes is actually a misunderstanding of what a nonprofit organization is and why a church is one. We'll take a look at some reasons people think churches should pay taxes.

Some arguments for the idea that churches should not be considered nonprofit organizations are that they have paid employees, or the pastors earn wages, sometimes significant ones. As we see, whether or not the people employed by or operating the organization earn enough money to buy a nice house and food for their family has no bearing on the classification of the nonprofit organization. If we want to use this qualifier, we must also declare hospitals and universities to no longer be nonprofit organizations. Maybe you're okay with that, but don't worry because there's more.

An important distinction for a nonprofit organization is that they serve the public interest - they fulfill the services expected of them by the public because the public wants them to exist. In the case of a church, it is run by the donations - in the form of tithes - of the people attending it. If people did not attend it and did not pay tithes there, that church would not exist. Therefore, churches exist because people want them there. They are paying their tithe to God, but a rational person understands that the church would not exist without their donations. By declaring that churches should pay taxes, you are essentially insisting that the government takes some of the money that I chose to pay to my church, my original income having already been taxed by the government. Basically, you want the government to take more of my money in the form of taking it from my church after I gave it to them - freely, as a donation - because I wanted them to use it to fund the charitable things they do that I like. No thanks. We could have an entirely separate discussion about taxes in general, but full disclosure: I'm not a fan.

Now, churches can be bad churches, and it's possible that instead of putting abundance of tithes toward things like ministries and charities, the lead pastor may take home more money than God might want him to. That doesn't make that particular church a nonprofit organization and it doesn't make churches as a concept nonprofit organizations. It's not something to ignore if the church isn't performing the functions that it's biblically responsible to perform - this is, however, not your or the government's problem if it's still legally a nonprofit organization. The only discussion to be had is between the congregation and the church leadership. There is nothing exactly acceptable about this, but it doesn't make it liable for the removal of its nonprofit status unless it breaches legal standards.

Some people think churches shouldn't be nonprofit organizations and should pay taxes literally just because they have a bias against religious institutions. While this is a position you can have, it has no affect on reality - there is no actual argument to be made here. Your argument is literally that religious organizations are different from other nonprofit organizations because they are religious organizations, and that somehow means they should pay taxes. Because reasons. There are nonprofit organizations that promote atheism, which is notably different from the vast majority of existing nonprofit organizations. Should those atheistic nonprofit organizations pay taxes because they are atheistic and other nonprofit organizations aren't? No, because it's legally a nonprofit organization. You are taking a personal bias against a thing and declaring that they should pay taxes because that's how you feel about it. That's not the kind of argument that holds up in court.

And yet, somehow, I see people sneak a "separation of church and state!" in here.

There is some kind of argument that the government subsidizes churches. I guess it's derived from the fact that donations the public makes to churches can be put on their personal taxes as deductions:

A subsidy is a sum of money that the government grants to a business so that the price of a commodity or service it has can remain low or competitive.  By making charitable donations tax deductible, the government is effectively subsidizing donations by giving people a return on their donations through their taxes instead of using that money on its own expenses.  Therefore, charitable donations are subsidized by the government.

What is being said here is that the government is indirectly "subsidizing" nonprofit organizations by giving tax breaks to the individual people who are making donations to those organizations. This means that the government is in fact not actually paying churches anything, but people - this is trying to play a semantics game. When you say the government "is paying" subsidies, you are misconstruing reality in order to suit the argument you wish to make. The government taking less of my money for taxes because I donated to a nonprofit organization does not mean that someone who hasn't donated money to a church is paying for the church through their taxes. That is not what is actually happening. It is "effectively" happening because if we ignore from where the money and taxes are coming and going, we can pretend like people who don't go to church are "paying" for the government "subsidizing" churches, but that's not actually how that flow of events is occurring. The government "is subsidizing" churches because they are giving tax breaks i.e., taking less of someone's money, to people who donate to churches. There is no payment being directly made to anyone, the thing that is literally happening is that specific people are allowed to keep more of their own money that the government never had in the first place.

There is the argument to be made that this is "taking potential money" away from the government, because the government would have gotten more money if this person hadn't gotten a tax break from making a charitable donation. But how relevant is this to whether or not churches should pay taxes?

An important thing here is that, notably, this applies to all nonprofit organizations. When you donate to save kittens, the government gives you a tax break. If you want churches to pay taxes because the government give tax breaks to people who tithe to that church, then you must also argue that the government must tax organizations that take donations to save kittens because of tax breaks given to the people who donated to that organization.

It's an important thing to note, too, that...

The government provides subsidies for nonprofits because they can provide a greater public good than that which the government could provide on its own.

The arguments that we should tax churches in order to do "good" things...

falls apart in light of this statement. The government specifically gives tax breaks to church tithers, "effectively subsidizing" them, on purpose because the government itself believes that nonprofit organizations can do a better job of doing good than the government can.

But wait, some people think that the donations to churches only help the churches and the church members, thereby giving those people tax breaks doesn't actually help do social good!

In the book Giving Well, the authors point out that government subsidies of charitable donations to churches only benefit members of those churches, not society as a whole; this would seem unfair given that all taxpayers contribute to the subsidy.

First of all, this is entirely false. Churches do more good for our society as a whole than the government does - and that's even if you ignore that Jesus is the only name that saves. While there are church ventures that give aid to people outside of our own country, which could be argued to be a "poor use" of funds because we could have used them to help our own people, without churches, our homeless and hungry would be much, much worse off. I'm not sure where anyone gets the idea that churches don't do social good outside of the congregation as the church is the biggest source of social good in our nation - it's simply ignored, downplayed, or lied about by people who have an ideological and irrational hatred of religion. And, no, the charities and ministries that churches do for the hungry and homeless do not exclude non-Christians - the entire purpose of those ministries in the first place is to spread the gospel, which means the non-Christians are going the be the first people these ministries try to reach. Again, this stems from a misunderstanding about what churches even do in the first place.

But wait, there's more.

By the same logic, government subsidies towards donations to Planned Parenthood and its support for abortion rights is unfair to pro-life Catholics.

If it is somehow wrong that the government gives tax breaks to the donors to organizations you don't like, why does it suddenly become fair for the government to give tax breaks to the donors to organizations that I don't like? This author goes on to argue that...

Due to this dilemma, some would argue that a tax subsidy on charitable donations is unfair to taxpayers and should not exist.

The argument to be made here isn't whether or not churches should pay taxes, it's whether or not the government should give tax breaks to people who tithe at churches. If you think it's unfair that the government "subsidizes churches" by giving tax breaks to their donors, then, like I said before, you must argue that it's unfair for the government to give tax breaks to donors to any nonprofit organization. This is a position you can have - please note, of course, that this has literally nothing to do with whether or not the church entity itself should be taxed - only about the tax breaks because of charitable donations to the individual public citizens who are donating their money to the organization.

And, if I can be honest, the tax break system itself is unfair. People in lower tax brackets - i.e., people who make less money - actually don't get these tax breaks from their charitable donations! The government still takes all of my money that it wants to even though I tithe to my church because of obtuse tax laws that make me use a certain form that excludes deductions for charitable donations. But that's a different conversation entirely. So sure, make this argument against tax breaks, but it makes no difference as to whether or not the entity itself should pay taxes.

But what about that separation of church and state, that "religious institutions lobbying funds," that is somehow misappropriation of charitable funds? Is that a worthwhile argument?

Turns out, all nonprofit organizations can lobby to some extent. Other nonprofit ideological entities like Planned Parenthood lobby, which again - why is it unfair for churches to lobby because you don't like them, but it's okay for pro-abortion organizations to lobby even thought I don't like them? Whose feelings matter more?

As for a "misappropriation of charitable funds," it would go to argue that people who are donating to a church believe in the mission and mandate of that church... and would probably be a-ok seeing the things they believe in being lobbied for in the government.

What do we find ourselves in again? Not an argument for whether or not churches should pay taxes. We have now stumbled across an argument for or against the act of lobbying itself. Whether or not it's okay for churches to lobby falls into the same jurisdiction as to whether or not it's okay for any other nonprofit organization to lobby - and the act of lobbying itself, whether you agree with that or not. This all has literally nothing to do with whether or not churches should pay taxes. You are, again, making a separate argument for a different thing entirely!

So we covered why a church is a nonprofit organization, why it's okay for the pastor to feed his family, and why government subsidies and lobbying have nothing to do with whether a church should be taxed or not. What other arguments are there?

While the vast majority of arguments can be dismissed due to the reality that churches are nonprofit organizations, people still try to make them.

Peppered among the entirely nonsensical and completely misled arguments that are easily dismissed by pointing out things we already talked about, there are a few arguments that have somewhat of a basis, so I'll go into a few.

One prevalent argument appears to be that churches "have become" political, and because they are involved in politics, they should therefore pay taxes. This argument is... interesting. It's interesting foremost because of the idea that churches have become political. It's just as interesting that an organization "being political" has some bearing on whether or not they should pay taxes. Should a for profit organization that does not support or proclaim any political opinions not pay taxes? If I have no political beliefs, can I not pay taxes? Political beliefs, agendas, proclamations or support do not dictate whether or not someone pays taxes.

If the argument is actually that it is no longer a nonprofit organization because it has political beliefs, what constitutes as a political belief? Abortion is a pretty political topic - even though it's actually a moral question. Should Planned Parenthood pay taxes? What really happened is that the beliefs the church already had, forever became political topics. Churches do not back a certain presidential candidate, they do not register for a political party (unless The Party for Jesus was a political party), and they themselves as entities cannot vote for anything or pass laws or do anything like that. They have "political beliefs" in the loosest sense of the phrase, because they've always had their beliefs, and then people came around and turned those beliefs into a political discussion.

Therefore, what argument can be made against nonprofit organizations having political beliefs? If your nonprofit organization is literally an organization that focuses around, lobbys for, promotes, and supports abortion - and nothing else - is that not political? Or can we just rightly conclude that this "being political" argument is a bunch of nonsense?

Another prevalent argument is that churches exist to perform good. Our taxes support the well being of our country (arguable), and that taxes pay for things that we all use. Churches should want to pay taxes for the good of the country (arguable), because paying taxes would be paying their fair share to support things like education, roads, fighting hunger, and providing for victims of disasters. Churches not paying taxes is therefore an active rejection of our country and its citizens.

This discussion is interesting due to the implications about what our taxes do and what they are used for. Taxes, as a concept, are a forced fee that the government imposes on citizens and businesses. They then use this money collected from people and businesses to pay for whatever they want to use it for, without the people who pay those taxes having a say in what their money goes to or who benefits from it.

Sure, we have representatives and vote for people - we don't have "taxation without representation," but from an individual person to person basis, no, we do not have a say in what our taxes go toward. I don't get to send my taxes into the IRS with a note that says "please only use this money to feed the homeless! Thanks!" With the state of our government, the programs it supports, and the fact that many of these things can in fact be in opposition to the beliefs of individuals and churches, paying taxes is not anymore "good" than the church just using the funds it's getting to perform its own good in the first place. Which is what it does. Furthermore, "good" to church very importantly includes spreading the gospel, which the government specifically does not do!

Furthermore, the church doesn't use roads, bridges, or public facilities. It's an entity - the people within the church use those things, and, whoa, those people pay taxes. It's not the people in the church who are not paying taxes, it's the entity of the church, the money made from the tithes of the people who support that church, which like I noted earlier already had taxes paid on it. I paid taxes on my income. I then took part of my remaining income and gave it to the church. I am a part of the church, but I'm not the entity of the church.

The idea that the church should want to pay taxes to support government run programs that are specifically and purposefully secular - like public education - stems from a very basic misunderstanding about what churches are and what they do. It seems that the majority of people who argue that the church should pay taxes don't actually understand what churches are, which is where the majority of these bad arguments stem from.

Another argument is that the bible says the church should pay taxes. Interesting - and yet another case of taking the bible out of context as well as the nonreligious telling the religious how they should behave based on things they don't even believe. Hypocritical, obviously, but we still need to explain why it's wrong.

We see two main passages quoted in this argument. Matthew 17:24-27 and Matthew 22:15-21. Here are those two passages:

When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma tax went up to Peter and said, “Does your teacher not pay the tax?” He said, “Yes.” And when he came into the house, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tax? From their sons or from others?” And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel. Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.”

Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone's opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar's.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.”

Here is the long and short of these passages: Jesus is declaring that the people pay taxes. He Himself paid the temple tax because He is a person and He set the example for his disciples. He declares that we, as individuals render unto Ceasar what is his - and most importantly, to God the things that are God's. Here is the big hint: the tithe is "what is God's." The bible would not insist, and does not, not even a second, that what is God's must be taxed and paid to Ceasar. The tithe is not just a donation or something we feel like giving the church, we pay the tithe because it is God's - and God does not pay taxes. This argument is actually rather blasphemous at its core. God does not answer to Ceasar - it is quite the opposite. God does not owe anyone, anything. What is God's does not get taxed from a biblical standpoint.

The most prevalent argument, however, is something something separation of church and state!!

I keep seeing this. Apparently, a supposed argument against churches paying taxes is that it wouldn't be a separation of church and state. Churches paying taxes would tie the church to the government. This argument, while it claims to support my own belief, is not very good. The vast majority of arguments therefore for the taxing of churches is that churches paying taxes would not be a failure to separate church and state. The reasons for this vary, though the argument is mostly that separation of church and state is actually violated by the government giving "special treatment" to churches. This is all, however, entirely irrelevant. Considering that the argument of separation of church and state in regards to why the church shouldn't pay taxes is not our best argument, then debunking that argument is... pretty useless. We're at square one. Square one being where I challenge you to either contest that all nonprofit organizations should pay taxes or that churches are not nonprofit organizations. The government is not giving special privileges to churches because they are churches, but rather because they are nonprofit organizations.

From people not understanding that churches are not the only entity that doesn't get taxed, to a false belief that the government somehow pays churches to exist, to not understanding what the church does with the money it gets or how it gets that money, all of these arguments for taxing churches are rooted in ignorance. Before you try to argue that churches should pay taxes, ask yourself: does my argument prove that churches are not a nonprofit organization? If your answer is no, then save yourself the energy.

However, if we did come to a point where the government did decide that no organization could avoid paying taxes by being nonprofit or otherwise, or just that religious organizations had to pay taxes, I would still contest that churches should not pay taxes. This is of course due to the biblical reasons stated earlier: the tithe is God's, and God does not answer to the government - God does not pay taxes. If the government did begin to tax churches, it would cause quite the ruckus for this very reason.

The Myths of Fairness and Equality

Fairness and equality are hot topics. People are very worried about things being fair and things being equal. After all, we were all created equal before God. If you don't believe in God, well, it says so right in the constitution! Or if you don't believe in the constitution, maybe you just believe we are all created equal because it sounds nice. Whatever your reason, it seems very difficult to argue against the concepts of making things fair and equal. Yet, I will do just that!

Unfortunately, there are distinct and prevailing misconceptions about fairness and equality. The most striking of these misconceptions being that the world, whether it is or not, should be fair and equal. We should do everything we can to ensure that we are fair, that we treat everyone equally, and that anything that isn't fair or equal about the world should be changed until it is.

This is actually entirely wrong. It is wrong from its conception and any attempts at creating this fair and equal perfect world are doomed from their beginnings.

The reality of it is that the world itself is unfair and unequal from its very foundation. Attempts at forcing the world to become fair and equal will inevitably end up with a situation in which things are still unfair and unequal, but just even worse. You cannot force equality into an unequal world without destroying some part of it as you cannot force a square peg into a circular hole without doing damage to one part of the other.

Fairness 

We'll start with fairness. Why is the world unfair?

Whether you have a Christian worldview or materialist/naturalist worldview, the innate unfairness of the world should be clearly obvious. Christians should be more embarrassed than materialists at thinking that the world should be fair.

If the world were fair, we should all go to hell.

What, exactly, is fair about the only perfect and sinless person to ever walk the face of the earth being humiliated, tortured, and executed for our sins? What exactly is fair about that person who was executed in our place literally being God Himself? When someone is convicted of a crime, we cannot offer ourselves up to go to prison in their place. When an individual is guilty, the fair consequence is that the individual in question is the one who is punished. That John 3:16 is even a verse in the bible is in its very nature unfair. Nothing about grace is fair, God's love is not fair. The basis of our beliefs are not rooted in fairness, they're rooted in love. Love, if you'll recall from the Bible, does not keep score. Love is unfair.

Unfairness is not "bad". It simply is the state of the results of various actions being different than we would expect them to be, for whatever reasons we expect such different results. It is often bad and is used almost exclusively to illustrate things that are bad, but unfairness itself is simply a descriptive term. If I am assaulted, but I forgive that person and do not press charges, that is actually unfair. He should properly face judgement and ultimately justice for his initial unfair treatment of me, but I choose to forgo seeking justice and let this man go free. This is unfairness. People, in fact, often see situations like this and get upset at this, due to its unfairness. I surely should have pressed charges, as I have done nothing wrong, and he has! The unfairness here affects only me, but I have allowed it to intentionally, for whatever reasons. Perhaps mercy, perhaps we settled things civilly following the assault, but for whatever my reasons, I have created and accept a situation that unfairly benefits the man who assaulted me.

A Christian perspective should understand that the world is not fair and cannot be. Christians aren't called to spread fairness, they're called to spread the word of God's love - which, you'll recall, is innately unfair. If the very basis of your beliefs are rooted in something that is distinctly and unarguably the opposite of fair, it should be obvious that attempting to change the world to make it fair would be counter-intuitive - and also not possible.

It's a little more complicated for the naturalist or humanist, but it is still clear.

You believe that we are all here more or less due to random natural forces, our existence merely a cosmic accident. This would not necessarily imply fairness or unfairness from its basis, but let's consider a couple of things.

Impersonal natural forces cannot be fair or unfair, they simply are. They do not pass judgements or intentionally create situations. Ignoring that we would have no concept of unfairness if there wasn't some sort of basis for the understanding of fairness, we simply need to look at nature and the natural order of things and compare them to what would be considered fair and ask ourselves if these things that happen naturally are fair.

Children dying of cancer? A flood destroying thousands of people's homes? Your cat sneezed in your face?

A quick glance around should reveal that, naturally, life is unfair. You might argue then that you're fighting to attempt to make it fair, because you believe it should be, for whatever your reasons. Well, I went over this: if the world is unfair from its very foundation, we cannot force it to be fair. We fight child cancer, we work to prevent as much damage from natural disasters as we can, we research medicine, we donate time, money, effort, and resources to giving aid to those who are in less favorable positions in life as we are, but does this make the world fair?

It should be clear that we cannot change the natural state of the world from unfairness into fairness. We cannot make the world fair. We can work towards attempting to alleviate the suffering of the ones to whom life has been particularly unfair, but an actualized goal of absolute fairness is innately impossible. If the standard of the operation of the world is unfairness, we as mere humans cannot combat this. We can barely ensure that our own lives are fair, let alone the entire world.

Am I saying it's wrong or futile to fight cancer and provide aid to people in peril? Obviously not, since these are the things God has called us to do. It's just that I understand the end goal is not fairness, but the unfairness of God's love and forgiveness through Jesus' sacrifice for us. We are called to help those who are in pretty unfair situations not to try and make it fair, but to spread the good news - that there is a free gift of salvation for those who would accept it. Nothing about alleviating homelessness is going to make the world fair, but without God as an unchanging standard of what is right and what is wrong, naturalists are without an actual understanding for the reasons they feel compelled to help others. They tend to then believe that they are doing so in the name of making the world more fair.

Which is, I'll repeat, impossible.

You must ask yourself: why do you really believe you're working toward making the world more fair? Because you believe it's actually something that's possible to achieve? Or because there is something inside of you - you might be compelled to call it your conscious - calling you to help the least of these - the homeless, sick, and hungry?

An understanding that the world is naturally unfair is easy to accept. That making it fair is impossible, is a much harder truth to swallow. We are taught to believe that the world should be fair, and therefore that it is somehow a workable goal. The reality is that the world isn't fair, and it shouldn't be fair. We learn from hardships, we build relationships through trials, and hopefully those who are lost would find God in their sorrow. The unfairness of the world is perfectly explained through the Christian truth - that this world is broken, we are fallen because of sin, and through our suffering we learn the truth. A naturalist worldview paints the unfairness of this life as merely chaos - unexplainable suffering that happens for no particular reason. Naturalists believe they can fight this lack of fairness without realizing that it's futile - the very basic foundation of the world is rooted in unfairness.

Equality

So what about equality? Isn't equality basically fairness?

No. Not really. This is another problem, another misconception - fairness and equality are conflated as being synonyms, but they are different words with different meanings.

Fairness, as we've gone into, would be that innocent children with their whole lives ahead of them wouldn't get cancer, that we could work towards getting a good job and starting our family without having to worry about it all being taken away from us in 30 seconds by a tornado, that everyone would have enough food and have a place to sleep when it's raining. Fairness basically is that we are rewarded for our work and punished for our crimes without uncontrollable variables - be them someone else's bad behavior or something natural and entirely unavoidable. Fairness is that someone who really didn't do anything wrong to deserve to starve to death wouldn't.

Equality is the concept that we are all equal, or that we should be equal, and that we should therefore be treated equally and all be held to the same standards. It is by these reasons that pure equality can actually be unfair in itself, which makes it odd that people would so confuse the two as the same.

The world is also innately unequal. Inequality is the natural state of the world and attempting to change that is impossible and futile.

While certain kinds of equality are present in the Christian worldview - for example, the punishment for sinning against a perfect being is the same for every sin - in the same breath, we see inequality. The earthly consequences of different sins are different. We incorrectly believe that "all sin is equal," due to the former reason - all sin is punished the same way. But all sin is not equal - the bible explicitly states that certain sins have different consequences on this earth. This should be obvious - we often see arguments about how it could possibly be "fair" (there it is again) that murdering 50 children is somehow just as bad as lying about your friend looking good in that awful outfit. Well, it's not. Lying about whether or not your friend looks like a sideshow in a circus isn't equal to murdering fifty children - they have different consequences on this earth. This should be obvious. Do we go to prison for white lies? Do we go to prison for murder? Hopefully you know the answer to this one.

In the same way, our souls will be hurt more by the obviously worse transgression of stealing the lives of innocent children in an act of pure sadistic violence than by a small lie you told because you didn't want to hurt your friend's feelings. We suffer greater guilt for particularly nasty sins specifically because some sins are greater than others. Excruciatingly nasty sins have the added consequence of possibly hardening our hearts against God for the rest of our lives - if you are the kind of person who could murder someone let alone 50 children, you have a much harder road to travel to find your humanity within yourself than if you just took some of your friend's french fries while he wasn't looking.

This is of course not the only inequality found in the bible. As much as we are taught otherwise, men and women are not equal. The roles of a husband and wife are not equal. However, contrary to worldly belief, the roles of the husband are arguably more difficult than the wife's. We all know that "wives are to submit to their husbands," but they are curiously not called to literally die for them, as husbands are to their wives. Husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Well, He died for the church.

And, just like before, we still see equality and inequality in the same breath - Christ died for everyone. All people are able to accept the free gift of salvation through Jesus' sacrifice. Just as before, that doesn't mean that all people are actually equal. However, this follows the same pattern - as we can see, the eternal reality is equal while the worldly reality is unequal. Christian truth explicitly and specifically clarifies multiple times that this world is unequal.

So what about the naturalist? Does a naturalist worldview produce an equal society, or does it, like fairness, simply attempt to legislate the unrealistic and futile goal of equality in a naturally unequal world?

As before, without a standard of what equal means, there is no argument to truly be made about whether or not the world is equal. Natural, impersonal forces cannot be equal or unequal. We can only look at the state of the nature world and compare it to our basis of what equal would be.

This is particularly a hot button issue right now - as we see demonstrably, different demographics of people produce different results on the same kinds of variables. We see that women on average are not as physically strong as men and we see that Asians outperform every other race in test scores and education. On individual levels, we see that some people are better at some things than others - some people are adept artists, some people can't cook worth a squat. If the world were equal - if we were all equal, wouldn't all of these different people and different types of people produce the same results?

We can see, demonstrably, that they do not. Therefore, we are not all equal.

A particular problem this statement creates is the incorrect assumption that this therefore means some people are better than others. Inequality is seen as synonymous with "one is better than another." This is another false definition - there is nothing about two things being unequal that makes one better than another. Things being unequal merely means that they have different attributes - there is nothing to be said about the quality of these differences. Four is not equal to five. Is five better than four? Depends on if we're talking about number of delicious candies or number of times you were stabbed in the face. Apples are not equal to oranges - this doesn't mean one is better than another. In the same way, saying that men and women are not equal does not mean one is better than another. In the same way that fairness is simply a description, equality is a description. What has happened is this false parallel has been taught, through some means or another, that inequality is in its nature wrong - it is a problem that must be fixed. There are some inequalities that are bad, but the basic concept of something being unequal is not automatically bad.

The reality is that man-made inequality can be bad, while natural inequality is not. Natural inequality cannot "be bad," it simply is. It also cannot be changed - it is futile to attempt to legislate a world in which men and women are equal, because they are observably and demonstrably not equal. This naturally occurring inequality has been conflated as a wrong that must be righted, due to our understanding of man-made inequality, which can sometimes be bad.

It is in this very understanding that we see where attempting to force unequal things to be treated equally actually creates an unfair situation. If on average men are statistically stronger than on average women, then legislating a situation in which women and men were both expected to perform equally in categories relating to strength, what you are actually doing is forcing women who are naturally not equipped to perform these same functions into an explicitly worse position than the men. While some women may be strong enough to perform this function - and maybe some men may not be strong enough and be as disadvantaged as the women - the reality is that you have created an unfair situation for the women in this situation due to a forced declaration of an idea of "equality" that does not exist.

This applies fully down to the very basic individual reality. If you have two people who have different abilities, it would not only be unfair to expect both of them to perform the same functions equally well, but it would be, bluntly, stupid. It is stupid to take two unique individual people and expect that they will both produce the same results in all categories. Each person has their own strengths and weaknesses - and treating these people unequally is the most reasonable approach.

When we learn how to teach, we learn that different people have different learning styles. Some people learn better through seeing, some learn better through doing. We recognized this within the school systems and realized that people were appearing to do poorly were actually just struggling with learning in ways that they as individuals were not attuned for. When we teach people in different ways, we try to reach as many different people and their different learning styles.

This is an example of inequality actually producing fairer results. Why is it that we can recognize situations in which inequality is actually better than attempting to treat unique people all the same, and yet turn around and declare that inequality is naturally bad?

If I have twenty kids and twenty bags of peanuts, but one kid is allergic to peanuts, it's is an example of unequal treatment for me to get this kid something he won't die from eating. However, it would be unfair - and wildly irresponsible - to attempt to legislate equality and give him peanuts because I gave everyone else peanuts.

Sure, some equality is good. For example, all people everywhere being able to accept the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ is good. If you and your coworker both work 8 hours at the same job and produce the same results, you should get paid the same. If you and your coworker both work 8 hours but he keeps leaving the room and does half the work as you, it is equal for you both to be paid the same, but it is unfair. See the difference?

This false understanding of equality being naturally good is actually hazardous to our society. The natural state of the world is that it is unequal, and there is nothing wrong about that - legislating equality actually creates a worse situation for society. Some people may find an advantage from it - like your lazy coworker, but equal treatment for all people in all aspects ignores the incredibly obvious reality that we are not equal and should not be treated equally all the time.

Equality is not naturally good and treating people unequally actually tends to produce better results. "Inequality" has been misidentified as an innately negative thing, but as we can see, it is illogical and unreasonable to treat unique and individual people as if they are all the same. While man-made inequality can be bad, this is actually a misnomer - it is not that we are treating different people unequally, it is that we are treating some people as better or more important than other people. Yes, this is something that can fall under the category of "unequal," but it is not the unequal attributes of those people themselves that are causing the problem. The problem stems from a "x is better than y" attitude, not the naturally existing inequality of the people involved.

I'm not attempting to argue that treating some people worse than others is okay. This again is a conflation of the realities of equality with "goodness" or "badness." We should not refer to poorer treatment of people who are different than others as "inequality" as this creates the false idea that inequality is bad. What happened is we took "treating people badly based on their attributes" and called it "unequal treatment." Again, it is "unequal" from a very basic understanding, but it is not bad due to it being unequal. It's bad because you are treating people poorly based on arbitrary factors, or we can narrow it down even more and say it's bad because you are treating people poorly. The inequality part is simply part of the equation, but it doesn't become bad until you add in the "poor treatment" part.

It is unequal to punch someone because of their skin color and not punch someone else because of their skin color. The problem is that you don't find any goodness or badness within the "unequal" aspect of this situation. The problem lies explicitly in the kind of treatment, i.e., the punching, and the fact that the punching is bad paired with the fact that you're only doing it to people of a certain attribute. This is obviously wrong. It is unequal treatment, but it being unequal treatment isn't what makes it wrong - the fact that it is explicitly worse treatment due to arbitrary judgements is what is bad.

If someone expects their 16 year old son to clean up his room, but don't expect their infant child to clean up his own room, this is also unequal treatment. What is distinctly missing is that there is no goodness or badness involved. Besides, wouldn't it be wrong - or at least stupid - to expect someone who poops their pants to clean their own room?

The intent behind the unequal treatment is important, as well at the type of treatment. Nothing is so straightforward that we could really take "inequality" and classify it all as badness. This is a childish and simplistic view of the world. Whether or not something is equal should not be the qualifier that we are using. We should be looking at the morality behind the inequality, and the reality of existing inequality. Is it wrong to treat a person worse than another person for no reason other than their physical attributes? Yes, obviously so. Is it wrong to treat a distinctly and demonstrably unique person differently than another based on the realities of their differences in constructive and beneficial ways? No, obviously not. Both of these things are examples of "inequality," and it is for this reason that we must understand the reality of the concept of "equal" is not synonymous with "bad".

To Conclude:

The world is innately unfair and unequal. It is so through a Christian worldview and it is so demonstrably by observing the world around us. To deny this is folly. To attempt to alter the very foundation of this is also folly. To work around it and with it is not simply the best choice, but our only choice, as any attempts to do otherwise will ultimately fail due to the unchangeable reality that these factors exist as they do. It is possible to accept that things are unfair and work to help those treated unfairly without adhering to a utopian feverdream of a world that operates in complete fairness. It's unworkable, the very laws of existence itself will not allow it. Similarly, natural inequality is simply part of life and understanding and respecting it is the only way forward. Humanity-induced inequality is not natural inequality, and is typically morally wrong, but not always. Equality and fairness interact on certain levels, but not all. The layman's understanding of these terms has been misunderstood and we would all do well to recognize where we have incorrectly identified these phenomenons.