Monthly Archives: November 2012

Jesus a Legend: A Dozen Reasons

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C.S. Lewis is famous for his Liar, Lunatic, or Lord trilemma—Jesus must be a liar (he knew that his claims of deity were false), a lunatic (he was crazy, which explains his nutty claims), or he was who he said he was, the Lord. But, of course, this ignores the bin into which we put similar claims—Legend. (For more background, read the introductory post.)
Let’s consider possible Christian rebuttals to the legend hypothesis.
“Legend” isn’t the consensus view among scholars. You lampoon Creationists for rejecting the scientific consensus, but you’re guilty of the same error here.
Who are these scholars? Are they Christian theologians as well? If so, could they be (dare I say it?) biased? Historians filter supernatural explanations out of history, labeling supernatural claims myth or legend.
Consider the consensus response of Muslim scholars to the gospel story. They reject it, and yet they have no bias against supernatural explanations and they’re experienced with ancient documents. If Christian scholars accept the gospel story but Muslim scholars don’t, then it looks like religious scholars can shoehorn data to fit their religious worldview. My conclusion: the consensus of religious scholars is quite different from a scientific consensus.
Jesus claimed to be God. The tomb was empty. The disciples believed they’d met the risen Lord. These facts can’t be simply dismissed.
The story says that Jesus claimed to be God. The story says that the tomb was empty. The story says that Merlin could change his shape. The story says that Grendel was a big, scary monster. We must go beyond the stories to figure out the actual history.
The empty tomb, the risen Jesus, the martyred disciples, and so on are part of the story. The entire story is suspect—the New Testament isn’t even internally consistent on whether Jesus remained on earth for one day or forty days—so Christians can’t use one part of the story (crucifixion plus empty tomb) to support another (resurrection).
And beyond the earliest days of the religion, early Christians were believers because they’d been converted, not because they were witnesses to supernatural events, just like today. The 9/11 hijackers believed in Paradise for martyrs, but that doesn’t mean that that’s true. We have no good reason to imagine that eyewitnesses wrote the gospels rather than someone simply documenting the Jesus story as it had developed within their church community.
Arguments explaining away the resurrection have all failed. These claim that Jesus “swooned” and wasn’t killed by the crucifixion, the women mistakenly went to the wrong tomb, the disciples stole the body, and the “risen Jesus” was just a hallucination. These are universally rejected by scholars.
Christians love these arguments because they’re easily knocked down, but I don’t use them and I don’t know of any modern atheist who uses them either. These arguments assume that the empty tomb is history; I say that it’s just a story.
The Jesus story is corroborated by non-Christian historians.
Josephus (born about 7 years after the death of Jesus), Pliny (31 years), Suetonius (39 years), and the others said little more than “there are people called Christians who worship a man called Jesus,” and sometimes a lot less than this. These are natural claims and do nothing to support the Bible’s supernatural claims. It’s not like we have an objective article from the Jerusalem Times written immediately after the each miracle.
You don’t think much of the evidence of the gospel story, but you must admit that it’s something. It’s more evidence than you have. You have no case without positive evidence of your own. For a scientific issue, you provide a scientific argument, but you’re in the domain of history now, and you must play by its rules. You have an alternate explanation of the gospel story? Then provide your historical evidence.
I don’t have contemporary evidence that refutes the claim that George Washington could fly. Must I provide evidence of contemporaries reporting Washington not flying before you’ll reject that claim? Couldn’t I simply refute such a claim by pointing to likelier explanations of the facts?
We will never have documentation by someone who saw Jesus not walk on water. Never. (And how compelling would that be anyway?) So what does that mean—that the gospels are historically accurate? No—the plausible natural explanation always trumps the supernatural.
The Christian claim is: Nothing explains the facts better than an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent god creating the universe and sending Jesus to spread his message. This is about as remarkable a claim as could be stated, and yet it is tossed out lightly. Christians seem to imagine that “God did it” is as plausible as the natural explanation that stories grow with the retelling.
The Christian has the burden of proof, and it’s an enormous burden given this enormous claim.
The disciples died martyr’s deaths. Who would go do their death defending a lie?
I don’t argue that it’s a lie; I argue that it’s a legend. Both are false, but the error in a legend isn’t deliberate. (I’ve already responded to the argument “Who would die for a lie?”)
I don’t imagine a sinister mastermind behind the creation of Christianity, just like there is no reason to imagine one behind Zoroastrianism or Mithraism, and there is none behind the corruption of a message in the game of Telephone. It’s just a story—a legend that grew over time.
I admit that I don’t know that the gospel story is false, and I don’t know that the supernatural elements were added during the decades of oral history. What I’m saying is that this is the null hypothesis; this is where we start. Only with extraordinary evidence (which doesn’t exist) can a supernatural explanation replace this.
The gospel story, the story of the George Washington of Galilee, the savior who was going to come back any day now to save the Jews’ bacon but who still hasn’t returned after 2000 years, evolved during 40 years of oral transmission. It was finally written down during a time when supernatural explanations were accepted and, indeed, were often the most plausible explanation people had. It came from Palestine, the crossroads between Greek, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures, each of which brought their own competing god claims.
Given our own experience with stories quickly getting out of hand (consider celebrities’ lives, for example), the Jesus story being a legend seems exceedingly plausible. The Christian position has the burden of proof, a burden that has yet to be met.
This list of Christian arguments is concluded in the next post.

If [Christianity] offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected,
I should feel we were making it up.
But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up.
It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Photo credit: Liliane Polak

C.S. Lewis Gets it Wrong: Liar, Lunatic, Lord … or Legend?

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Some say that Jesus wasn’t divine but was still a great sage. C.S. Lewis has no use for this foolish argument. Here is his widely quoted rebuttal:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.

“Patronizing nonsense”? We have no problem with wisdom taken from the Koran or the story of Gilgamesh or the Upanishads or any other book of religion or mythology despite their being wrong about the supernatural stuff. Assuming that the Bible’s supernatural claims are false, why must that invalidate its wisdom, too?
But let’s return to Lewis’s famous trilemma: Jesus must have been a liar (he knew that he wasn’t what he said he was), a lunatic (he was crazy, so that explains his wild claims), or … maybe all that he said was true. In that case, he must be Lord.
But this ignores the ferociously obvious fourth possibility, that the entire Jesus story is legend.
We understand that stories can evolve into legends with time—the Iliad, Merlin, William Tell, John Henry, the Roswell UFO story, and so on. I wrote about the legendary growth of the Angel of Mons tale here. Are we to set aside all that we know about nature and imagine instead that a supernatural God sent supernatural Jesus to earth to do supernatural things? We need a lot of evidence to make that jump.
The plausible natural explanation for the Jesus stories is that they were told orally for decades, and they grew with the retelling, changing to fulfill prophecy from the Law or to ensure that Jesus took on the traits of competing religions. Remember that Palestine was the crossroads of Greek, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures.
As Jewish Christianity was reinterpreted through Greek culture, the recipients wouldn’t have just known about Dionysus and Friends, many would’ve been followers, all the more reason to expect an amalgam as the result. (I’ve written more about Dionysus vs. Jesus here.)
I’ve discussed this with Christians in the past and have some idea of the objections that they raise. In the next two posts, I will discuss and hopefully resolve twelve Christian objections to the Legend hypothesis.

Whenever you find any statement in Christian writings
which you can make nothing of, do not worry.
Leave it alone.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Final Thoughts on the Atheist Prayer Experiment

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I completed the Atheist Prayer Experiment, 40 days of prayer that ended October 26. Roughly 70 atheists prayed for several minutes daily in a nonspecific way. This was basically a “Hello, anyone there?” to the spiritual world.
I blogged about that experience here, here, here, and here. “Unbelievable,” the radio show and podcast that hosted the project, discussed the results with Tim Mawson, the philosopher whose paper formed its foundation, in two parts (part 1 and part 2). I was interviewed for part 2.
I’d like to touch on some ideas that came out of the experiment.
First, the big question: did I find God(s)? No, I did not. But you can tell me if God tried to speak to me.
I’ve already mentioned a couple of interesting coincidences during the experiment, but I should report on something interesting that happened the day after the experiment was over. I was vacationing in Hawaii, and I stepped outside our rented condo. I noticed a leaf driven by upcurrents, and I caught it in midair. It was a clump of bougainvillea, three white petals stuck together.
Remember Francis Collins’ conversion story, where he turned a corner on a winter hike and saw a waterfall frozen into three columns? That suggestion of the Trinity was enough to convince him that God was speaking to him. And here, with the Prayer Experiment just completed, the wind (or perhaps the Holy Spirit?) pushes into my hands three petals in a clump. Three, yet one. (And guess what floor our condo was on.)
As you can imagine, this initially struck me as barely noteworthy. With some work, I was able to make it into a curious coincidence, but I see nothing supernatural about it.
Here’s part two: that afternoon, there was a magnitude 7.7 earthquake in the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia that caused a tsunami that hit Hawaii about five hours later. We evacuated, though the tsunami turned out to be insignificant.
Some might say that God’s Hand calmed the seas. I say that it was an interesting adventure with a satisfactory natural explanation.
My conclusion: I’m glad I did the experiment so I can show that I’ve been open to the possibility of the supernatural, but it has only provided more evidence that it doesn’t exist.
(Maybe I wasn’t doing the prayers right? If every field has an associated particle—the famous Higgs boson is a consequence of the Higgs field, for example—perhaps prayers are conveyed by prayons, and I wasn’t capturing them properly. The photo above shows one view on how to improve the signal strength of prayer.)
A more substantive criticism of the experiment’s deist approach came from a commenter.

The “anonymous deity” profile you have in mind, which sort of uses comparative religion to abstract away all distinctives, seems to me scarcely even to allow for Zeus, but to allow for Zeus far better than YHWH. It seems like an exercise in averaging together the phone numbers of a lot of celebrities, coming up with the number 555-5555, and calling that. I don’t suppose anyone has that number, so I don’t suppose anyone will “answer.”

I come back to the simple, naïve, obvious question: why is the existence of God not obvious? Said from the other direction, why is the clear and plain absence of God insufficient evidence to show that he doesn’t exist? When you pray to a guy who desperately wants to have a relationship with you but get no reply, what can we conclude from that?
C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters explains it this way:

The Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of [God’s] scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.

Sorry, Lewis fans, but that’s utter crap.
I meet new people all the time. Their forcing their existence on me is no imposition on my free will. Why pretend that it would be different for God? This is simply a clumsy argument to support Christian presuppositions. I almost feel embarrassed hearing some of these rationalizations, like watching someone in a play who’s forgotten his lines.
One suggestion that I received during the experiment was to just walk the walk. Act like a Christian for a while and you’ll slowly believe. Yes, I suppose that might work. I could suppress Reason and act more on Faith … but why should I do that? Why do that any more than you’d walk the walk of a Mormon or a Hari Krishna?
Similarly, I could try out crack or heroin. If I gave them a try, I just might like them. But why would I want to do that? Isn’t using reason the best way to see reality? I’ll believe things the old-fashioned way: because there’s sufficient evidence to convince me that they’re true.
Maybe prayer is an avenue, not to God, but to atheism. Mawson says that atheists are logically obliged to investigate the possibility of the supernatural, but most of us who were raised in a religious setting have already conducted our own prayer experiments. That’s why we’re atheists. Some ex-Christians never got the sense that God was answering prayers. Some discovered that God just stopped answering and then realized God was never there.
Nothing fails like prayer.
Imagine a world without God, where prayers are unanswered, where prayer is just you talking to yourself, where you only imagined that a loving deity supported you in adversity, where bad things happen to good people for no reason, where only wishful thinking supports the ideas of heaven and hell.
Open your eyes, because that’s the world you’re living in.
But this isn’t an anarchist’s paradise—it’s a world where people stand on their own two feet, where they live and love and grow, where every day ordinary people do heroic and noble things for the benefit of strangers. Where warm spring days and rosy sunsets aren’t made by God but are explained by Science, where earthquakes and hurricanes happen for no good reason, and people pitch in to help clean up afterwards.
We’re like a kid learning to ride a bike. Picture the parent running alongside holding the bike steady. The kid feels confident, but then the parent lets go without the kid realizing it. He still pedals along happily, perhaps even talking to the parent who’s fallen behind. Suddenly he’s shocked to find that he’s on his own, maybe shocked enough to fall. That belief was reassuring.
We’re also on our own. Is that realization debilitating or exhilarating? I can’t fault anyone raised in a Christian environment for not wanting to give up that omniscient and loving deity, but society simply can’t support large fractions of people ignoring reality.
Training wheels are for children. C’mon in, the water’s fine.

Prayer must never be answered:
if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
— Oscar Wilde

Photo credit: Spiritual Science Research Foundation

Tips for Dealing with Creationists

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I hang out with Creationists occasionally and have seen many of the arguments they make. I’d like to tell you what I’ve found.
This isn’t a rebuttal against Creationist arguments (perhaps in a future post). Rather, I’d like to sensitize you to general errors that they make. Consider this a list of cautions when evaluating a Creationist presentation.
Check the speakers’ credentials. Almost no one who speaks as a Creationist or Intelligent Design proponent has credentials in the field he’s criticizing. I’m simply asking for speakers with doctorates in the field plus work credentials. That is, a biologist speaking about biology, a geologist about geology, a cosmologist about cosmology, and so on. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists. That this seems to be a lot to ask says a lot about Creationism and related dogmas.
There are journalists without scientific degrees who popularize science, but they follow the consensus. They don’t try to apply their own agenda to overturn it. Creationists attempting to overturn the biological consensus from outside biology—that’s something different.
Check dates of quotes or criticisms. Words can’t express how uninterested I am in what Darwin wrote or thought or did. Almost every Darwin quote that I’ve seen used by the Creationist/ID side has been taken out of context. Anyway, Darwin’s writings are not binding on evolutionary biologists today.
And don’t get me started about Darwin’s personal life—whether Darwin ate babies with barbeque sauce or plain (actually, he lived a pretty laudable life) says nothing about the question at hand: whether evolution is the best explanation for why life is the way it is.
Focus on the right bin. A popular complaint is to say that evolution led to eugenics, or that the teaching of evolution in public school correlates to the tragic downward spiral that society has made in the past 50 years, and it wasn’t like this when I grew up, and don’t get me started about the kids these days, and blah, blah, blah.
Evolution is science. Eugenics is policy. The scientists give society the best approximation of the truth, and the politicians decide what to do with this information. Don’t blame science for policy.
Watch for Hitler entering the conversation. Godwin’s Law states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Whether Hitler embraced evolution or not (unlikely, since Darwin was on the Nazi list of banned books—more at “Nazi Soldiers Indoctrinated with Darwin? Yeah right”), what Hitler liked has no bearing on the accuracy of evolution.
Beware lists of Science’s errors. I’m thinking of lists such as the greatest hits of evolution’s mistakes—Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, “Flipperpithecus,” and so on. Or theories that have been discarded—ether, phlogiston, geocentrism, the steady-state universe.
Yeah, science makes mistakes. Get over it. And what process discovered the errors? No, not Christianity or Creationism or divine revelation, but science!
Science clearly delivers pretty good approximations of the truth. For one glaring example, consider the science underpinning all the technology by which I communicate to you right now.
Watch for lots of quotes. Lots of quotes by scientists (often with missing or old dates) is another bad sign. Quotes simply invite counter-quotes, where I try to trump your science-y quote with one of my own, back and forth. For discussions between non-scientists, it’s better to stick with the consensus, which needs a reference but not a quote.
Expect “We’ve seen that evolution is wrong, so Creationism must be right!” This is simply a false dichotomy. Evolution might be wrong (though the evidence is so overwhelming that this is hard to imagine), but even if we discarded it, that wouldn’t leave Creationism the victor.
Did some Creator put life on earth? Wow—that’s an enormous claim. Provide the evidence.
Beware the “Gish Gallop.” Duane Gish pioneered this underhanded debate tactic. When interviewed with a biologist, he would say something like, “Well, what about X? And Y and Z? Evolution can’t explain these things.” The biologist probably has explanations for these puzzles and so begins a tedious (for the audience) explanation of why these are nicely handled by evolution. But when the biologist stops for a breath, Gish is back, piling on more examples. If your goal is winning the argument rather than engaging with the truth, these kinds of games can make an effective approach.
What I find especially annoying is hearing an issue get properly rebutted but then used by the Creationist in the very next encounter. How many times has a biologist destroyed Ray Comfort’s “Where’s the crocoduck?” argument? And yet it pops back up like we’re playing Whac-a-Mole. Does he just value effectiveness over integrity?
Beware lying. Okay, that sounds harsh, but I don’t know what else to make of nonsensical claims from people who should know better.
In 2007, I attended a lecture by someone from the Institute for Creation Research, a young-earth Creationist organization. This lecture was remarkable because the topic was geology, and the speaker actually had a doctorate in geology. He described taking rock samples from an amphibolite layer in the Grand Canyon and getting various radioisotope dating results. Though the rocks were all from the same layer, the date estimates were all over the map. His unsurprising conclusion: this dating technique is flawed, and the Grand Canyon layers were laid down by Noah’s flood, thousands of years ago, not hundreds of millions.
Only after the lecture, after I’d done some research, did I realize that amphibolite is a metamorphic rock, and radioisotope dating is typically used only to date igneous rocks. You’d think that a geologist would’ve made that clear in the lecture.
Beware “Science backtracks all the time!” Science does find errors and correct itself, but don’t imagine that the next correction to evolution is as likely to be a small tweak as the overturning of the entire theory. Once a field is well understood, changes obey a power law, like with the magnitude of earthquakes, the frequency of word use, or the size of cities and towns. For every big earthquake we see thousands of tiny ones, and for every huge correction in a theory we see many small tweaks. The overturning of a well-established theory is very unlikely.

Debating with a creationist is like playing chess with a pigeon.
It jumps on the board, knocks all the pieces off, craps on the table,
and flies off to its flock to claim victory.
— Anonymous

Photo credit: FreeThoughtPedia

Imagine a Christianity Without Indoctrination

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Suppose we re-categorized Christianity as an adult activity. It would be like smoking, alcohol, voting, driving, sex, marriage, and (in some states) pot—things that you must be mature enough to handle wisely.
How long would this adults-only Christianity survive? My guess is that, starved of its primary source of new members, it would die out within a few generations.
We all have inside us what could be called a BS Detector—that common sense that helps us believe as many true things and reject as many false things as possible. For example, present most American adults with a case for Islam or Hinduism or Sikhism, and they will be extraordinarily unconvinced in the same way that claims for miracle cures, alien abduction stories, and great deals on swamp land in Florida would typically be rejected.
As adults, we’re far better at sifting truth from BS than we were as children. And that’s why Christians must be indoctrinated as children, before their BS Detectors are mature. This is the idea behind the Jesuit maxim, “Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man.”
(The full version ends with “… but give me the man, and he will say, ‘Dude, are you insane? Who would believe that??’”)
Getting a 50-year-old who’s never smoked hooked on cigarettes is like getting a 50-year-old who’s never heard of Jesus hooked on Christianity. It’s possible in both cases, but it’s far easier when you make the appeal early in life.
Imagine this conversation between the father of a 6-year-old child and the grandmother.

Grandma: “Little Johnny is old enough for me to take to Sunday School now.”
Dad: “You can take him when he’s 18, but I’d prefer he stay out of church until then.”
Grandma: “But 18 is too late! By then he’ll be set in his ways. He won’t accept the truth then.”

What kind of “truth” is it that must be taught before people are mature, before their BS Detectors are fully functioning? Grandma realizes that only before someone’s BS Detector is operating correctly can the beliefs of religion be put into someone’s head. This is a very poor stand-in for truth.
Many Christians will agree that Christianity needs access to immature minds to survive. But what does this say about the evidence behind the Christian claim that God exists?

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—
and you are the easiest person to fool.
— Richard Feynman

(This is a modified version of a post originally posted 9/8/11)

Christianity 2.0: Secular Christianity

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I remember, years ago, being startled by the idea that “Jewish” could be an ambiguous term. It might mean an ethnic identity, or a cultural one, or a religious one. In other words, someone could be a Jewish atheist, identifying with Judaism culturally but not religiously. Indeed, Israeli Jews are predominantly secular.
Christian belief within America has changed continuously, going through Great Awakenings and spawning new flavors of Christianity such as Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh-Day Adventist church, and the Christian Science church. At the turn of the early twentieth century, during the Golden Age of Freethought and decades after Darwin’s The Origin of Species, observers saw Christianity on the wane. But Christianity rebounded, with Pentecostal and other new charismatic churches. Today, Christianity continues to change, lately becoming more polarized within America while Europe becomes more secular.
Since Christianity will continue to evolve, might it follow the example of Judaism, creating secular Christianity as a viable position?
Consider what this might be like. A secular Christian—I could be a candidate, for example—might go to church for the beautiful or traditional or inspiring music. The church building might be a draw, whether it were awe-inspiring or quaint. Sermons about finding the right path or avoiding the shallow temptations in life or even Bible stories might be edifying. Services could mark the important events in life such as births, marriages, and deaths. Whether the secular Christian went weekly or only a few times a year, the community of good people, eager to help others, would be welcoming. It might give focus to good works, providing opportunities for volunteering and direction for charitable giving.
But—and here’s the interesting bit—secular Christians would reject the supernatural origin of Christianity, would be open about their atheism, and would be accepted within the church community. The Christian church has millions of members who are secular Christians except for the last part. They’ve lost their faith in the supernatural claims, they’ve admitted this to themselves, but they can’t come out to their church community. The concept of a secular Christian would allow these people to keep their community, charitable, and even family connections.
The Christian church isn’t pleased with these ex-Christians simply leaving the church, and this broadening of the church community, as is done in many Jewish communities, could provide a soft landing for many mainstream churches hurting for members. Conservatives will insist that a no-compromise position be taken, but the church is determined to evolve, and this direction seems to be a win-win.
Of course, keeping the good parts of Christianity and discarding the supernatural beliefs wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems. There would still be human folly. But perhaps there would be just a little bit less.

Even if atheists removed all religion from our planet,
it would still not mean that people are engaged
in more fact-based thinking than before.
I would argue that religion is a symptom of belief-based thinking,
but there is all sorts of New Age and superstitious thinking
that is just as damaging.
— Tyson Gill

(This is a modification of a post that was originally published 9/14/11.)