The Atheist Bus Campaign has been all over the news lately, sending 800 buses out in the UK and elsewhere having a poster reading, "There's Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life." It's a great comeback against religious ads that basically berate nonbelievers and others for not believing, and I think these ads will brighten many people's days.
Now I think there's some sort of law of nature that states, "no matter how gentle and benign an atheistic statement is, it will be attacked as offensive and attempts to censor it shall be made by religious people." Following this law, the ads are being attacked as offensive and have been reported to the Advertising Standards Authority. The main claim to the ASA is that the ads violate this statement:
[M]arketers must hold documentary evidence to prove all claims, whether direct or implied, that are capable of objective substantiation.Steven Green, national director of Christian Voice, said that the statement on the ads is
…given as a statement of fact and that means it must be capable of substantiation if it is not to break the rules. There is plenty of evidence for God, from people’s personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.From that quotation, I would be amazed if his arguments hold up. First off, the ads say there's probably no "god." It isn't specifying any one god, and each of the mass of gods can be argued for with Green's weak rationale. Probabilistically speaking, the statement on the ads is much more likely to be true than any one of the gods that remain unspecified by the ads.
Second, Green's arguments are embarrassingly weak (embarrassing for him). Personal experience, again, can be argued for any god, but Green presumably only thinks the Christian god is legitimate. So what about all the other gods whose followers have "personally experienced" his/her/its presence?
The "complexity, interdependence, beauty and [apparent] design of the natural world"? One word: Evolution*. This argument is a tepid grope at trying to explain himself in some way other than "I was offended by the ad and want to censor it. Period."
These ads are so gentle as to make it amazing to me that religious people would blatantly display their double standards and want to remove them, despite religious ads that tell you you'll burn in hell unless you believe our particular stories and myths.
By the way, I just bought one of the campaign's T-Shirts! They can be ordered here: link.
*and science in general.
