Monthly Archives: February 2018

25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God (Part 4)

Posted on by

Do we live in a world with a god? There are many reasons to reject that idea (part 1 here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world:

8. Because of unnecessary physical pain

It’s easy to see the evolutionary benefit of physical pain. If you touch something hot, you pull away quickly and minimize the damage. If you touch something sharp, you learn to avoid that. If your leg still hurts after an injury, you give it more time to heal. If you’re climbing over rough ground in a way that scrapes your palms or knees, you adapt to protect yourself.

These examples are pain that you can do something about, but what about chronic pain? There’s no value in pain from cancer, headaches, phantom limbs, and many other kinds of injury or illness. This kind of pain is gratuitous, and it doesn’t push the patient to take steps to avoid or reduce injury.

Evolution explains this nicely, but it’s not what you’d expect in a world with God.

9. Because God gets credit for good things, but he’s never blamed for bad things

God is the most powerful being in the universe, and yet Christians want to protect him from honest criticism. Praise for his good actions is fine, but we can’t condemn anything that we find bad. As if he were a baby, we must tiptoe around the drunk driving accident that killed an innocent teenager or the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people. God is good no matter what he does (or allows to happen), and mankind gets any blame.

Whether you get what you asked for in prayer or you don’t, God’s failures to deliver as promised in the Bible are reframed as life lessons or tough love. “God is good” is assumed up front, and any evidence is shoehorned in or ignored. The worship of a real god wouldn’t need to reject troublesome evidence (more here).

10. Because the universe doesn’t look like it exists with mankind in mind

The Bible makes clear that the universe was created for man. Unlike other living things, man was made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26) and was given authority to rule over “every living creature” (Gen. 1:28). We read something similar in Psalms: “You [God] have made them [men] a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet” (Psalm 8:5–6).

Just to eliminate the possibility that the Bible was just talking about this planet, with God having other plans for living things elsewhere in the universe, note that the Bible’s cosmological picture is completely earth-centric. From the vantage point of the earth, there is the sun, the moon, and a bunch of cute little points of light that were literally little (for example, “The stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind” in Revelation 6:13). The earth is clearly the focus of this universe, and Man is the purpose.

Science tells a different story. The universe is unnecessarily big for it to have been created as part of God’s plan for humanity. In addition, the universe is a very inhospitable place. The vast majority is a cold, life-forbidding vacuum. Even on earth, life is not Eden-like, and most of the earth’s surface is inhospitable to human life.

Earth is a Petri dish, and all sorts of organisms grow here, both good and bad. Along with butterflies, puppies, and robins, the earth has cholera, Ebola, and smallpox. Parasites like guinea worm, malaria, and hookworm. Famine, drought, and crop failure. Genetic diseases. Natural disasters.

Life doesn’t look like it was created by a Designer. God could’ve custom-designed each species for its niche, and yet we find sloppy, imperfect instructions that point to common descent. Each species is a variation on its ancestors, and the record of these variations is evident in the DNA. Sure, God could’ve designed life on earth in a way that mimics how evolution works, but there’s no evidence for that. All evidence points to evolution. (More)

The apologist may respond that a huge, old universe is necessary to create life-giving conditions on earth, but the evidence doesn’t point there, either. First, it’s nature that needs second-generation stars to create the heavy elements that we need for life. God can just use magic like he did in the Genesis creation stories. (Which, by the way, is the problem with the fine-tuning argument. Nature would need conditions to be in a life-permitting range. God is omnipotent and has no such constraint.)

Second, just one galaxy is enough, and our universe contains roughly 200 billion galaxies. Cosmologist Sean M. Carroll argued that you’d predict none of this extravagance in a God World. He said, “Everything we know about physics tells us that none of those other galaxies is necessary to explain what we have in our neighborhood here” (video @46:55).

An apologist might try to salvage the God hypothesis by saying that God just made a galaxy-making machine and stepped back to let it do its (excessive) work, or God made life as variations on a theme, leaving unintentional clues that evolution was the cause instead. But these are just excuses to save the God conclusion. God is unnecessary.

Continued in part 5.

How in the world can you think
that the reason for [the universe]
is to let us be here?
— Sean Carroll

 

Image via YJ Jeon, CC license

 

25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God (Part 3)

Posted on by

Do we live in a world with a god? There are many reasons to reject that idea (part 1 here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world:

5. Because nothing distinguishes those who follow god from everyone else

A few years ago, I visited a museum exhibit of the jewelry of Russia’s imperial family, the Romanovs. The focus was on the Faberge jewelry, with several of the famous Easter eggs as the centerpiece, but there was more. I was most taken with the Christian icons—paintings and statues of religious figures, crosses, and so on—from Tsarina Alexandra. She was extremely religious, and as Tsarina she performed daily religious rituals, humbled herself by embroidering linen for the church, read little but religious material, and consulted wandering “men of God” like Rasputin.

Her devotion did nothing to help her family, and they were murdered shortly after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

We can find many other examples where Christians took to heart Christianity’s promise of answered prayer. Christian faith was strong on both sides of the U.S. Civil War, and yet roughly 700,000 died, about as many as in all other wars involving the U.S.

Francis Galton conducted an innovative prayer experiment in 1872. Since “God save the king” (or something similar) was a frequent public prayer, members of royal families should live longer. Few will be surprised to hear that they did not.

I recently wrote of hypocrisy from a radio ministry on the question of prayer. The ministry first mocked atheists’ stupidly observing that God didn’t save the lives of Christians in a Texas church shooting, along the lines of, “Who doesn’t know that Jesus promised tribulation to his followers rather than luxury?” But six weeks later, the ministry was asking for prayers to speed the recovery of a staff member with a serious injury, insisting now that prayers do benefit believers.

If there’s a God, then they got it right once—prayers and devotion from believers should have an effect. Here again, the pro-Christian evidence you’d expect doesn’t exist.

6. Because televangelists make clear that prayer doesn’t work

Watch a televangelist show. You will see periodic appeals that first ask the audience for prayers and then for money. Sometimes you’ll see a text crawl across the bottom with the phone number euphemistically labeled “prayer request” (which sounds better than “place to give me money”).

But doesn’t that sound strange? If prayers get God to do something, then the televangelist could just pray himself. Or, if the power of prayer is proportionate to the number of voices, the televangelist could just harness the audience to turn his small voice into a holy airhorn. God’s actions make any human generosity pointless. What could money do that God couldn’t?

Televangelists make clear the uncomfortable truth: prayer doesn’t work. Money (or filthy lucre, if you prefer) does. A real god who claimed that prayers work would deliver on that promise.

7. Because Christians want help from the government

The U.S. Constitution is secular, and the separation between church and state is made mandatory with the First Amendment. Even if crossing the line weren’t unconstitutional, what would it say about the weakness of Christian claims that it needs to lean on the government to support itself?

Despite the prohibition, Christianity isn’t content to stay on its side of the back seat. Think of the accommodations it already gets: the President has been obliged to issue a proclamation declaring a National Day of Prayer since 1952, “In God We Trust” is the national motto, conservative voters punish politicians who aren’t sufficiently Christian (bypassing Article VI of the Constitution, which prohibits a religious test for public office), and the IRS has for years failed to revoke churches’ nonprofit status when they violate the Johnson amendment’s prohibition against politicking from the pulpit. Conservatives are continually pushing for Creationism and prayer in public schools, “In God We Trust” displays in government buildings, Ten Commandments monuments and manger scene displays on public property, the ability to deny service and government licenses to people their god doesn’t like, and prayer to start meetings in venues from Congress down to city councils.

Christians who value the rights that Western society grants us today—voting, no slavery, no torture, non-coercive marriage, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom of speech, fair trial, democracy, and so on—must remember that these all came from secular sources. Biblically based society would have none of these (more here and here). Don’t think that Christianity is the foundation on which is built American democracy; instead, American Christianity is permitted by the Constitution (more).

When Christian leaders push against constitutional limits on religion, they admit that Christianity’s arguments are so weak that they need to push the government to support their cause. A real God wouldn’t need such help.

Continued in part 4.

When religion is good, I conceive it will support itself;
and when it does not support itself,
and God does not take care to support it
so that its professors are obliged
to call for help of the civil power,
’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.
— Benjamin Franklin

Image via roobislem, CC license

Is War Just an Invention? Maybe Religion Is, Too.

Posted on by

Why do humans engage in war? A typical answer has been that resource scarcity drives war. This is the Malthusian model—if you have more water or oil or farm land than I do, I might be tempted to take yours. But studies have shown no clear correlation between war and scarcity.

Maybe there’s some sort of masculine drive for conquest. But this doesn’t explain why war is relatively recent in human history. If war were just “boys being boys,” we should see more widespread evidence in the archeological record. Indeed, some societies today have violence but are unaware of the concept of war.

Margaret Mead

Let’s consider another explanation, Margaret Mead’s 1940 theory about war.

With so many examples of war throughout history, you might expect that we could find the traits that always accompany belligerent societies and never accompany peaceful ones. Societies can be highly- or poorly-developed, resource rich or resource poor, large or small, and so on, but any of these societies can engage in war or not. From Scientific American’s Cross-Check blog:

War is both underdetermined and overdetermined. That is, many conditions are sufficient for war to occur, but none are necessary. Some societies remain peaceful even when significant risk factors are present, such as high population density, resource scarcity, and economic and ethnic divisions between people. Conversely, other societies fight in the absence of these conditions. What theory can account for this complex pattern of social behavior?

What’s the answer? Mead argued that war is an invention, not an innate part of humanity. Once invented, war is contagious. When your neighbors become infected, your society must get infected for its own safety. Adopt it or get wiped out—the war meme wins either way. A society reluctant to go to war might conclude that a preemptive strike would be the safest move, making the idea of war self-fulfilling.

One approach is to turn war on its head to come to a peaceful result, to push it to be so destructive as to be unthinkable. Alfred Nobel said, “Perhaps my [dynamite] factories will put an end to war sooner than [peace] congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” This hope has been expressed about poison gas, machine guns, and Nobel’s dynamite, though these have only served to make war more efficient.

Getting past war

Let’s return to Mead’s theory. If war is innate, we’re stuck with it, and war will be a perpetual threat. But Mead argues that it’s not innate. It’s an invention, and society can rid itself of it—maybe not easily, but theoretically.

Consider our closest primate relatives. Chimpanzees seem to have in inherent violent streak, but bonobos have a “make love, not war” attitude. We’re genetically equally close to each species.

And we’ve actually done this sort of thing before. We’ve gotten rid of poor social inventions such as slavery, genocide, mental illness as demon possession, witchcraft as a capital crime, and so on. We’ve adopted lots of good social ideas: democracy, universal education, universal suffrage, trial by jury, bankruptcy instead of prison, and prison instead of capital punishment (in some regions, at least). We can change.

War certainly isn’t obsolete, though Steven Pinker argues that it’s trending that way. Maybe the answer is something as straightforward as: democracies never attack each other, so make all countries democracies. That’s not easy, but it’s conceivable.

Getting past religion

Now that we’ve asked the remarkable question, “Is war simply a poor invention for which we can invent a replacement?” let’s ask the same about religion. Is religion innate and an inherent part of human makeup? Many Christians think that we are given God-radar, which points us unerringly to the Creator of the Universe, but that’s obviously false given the many incompatible religious directions to which this imagined “radar” sends us. Others say that we’re built with a vague and undirected desire for the divine, but we mustn’t confuse this spirituality with the existence of the supernatural.

If religion is innate, we could suppress it, but then it would reassert itself. But if it’s an invention, perhaps it would stay gone once we replaced it with something better.

Christianity once ruled Europe, but today it’s seen in much of Europe as a quaint custom from the past, like chamber pots or chewing tobacco. Perhaps it’s not too optimistic to see religion as nothing more than an invention that needs improving.

It doesn’t have to be the Grand Canyon, 
it could be a city street, 
it could be the face of another human being—
everything is full of wonder. 
— A. C. Grayling

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/2/14.)

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration / Image public domain

 

25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God (Part 2)

Posted on by

Why think that we live in a world with a god when there are so many reasons to reject that idea? For those who want to convince us that God exists, let’s continue our list of things that they need to show us don’t exist (part 1 here).

The next clue that we live in a godless world:

3. Because God needs praise and worship

Is it obnoxious to see Donald Trump bask in effusive praise, as if he were Kim Il Sung, Stalin, or some other dictator? Why then would we expect God to want that kind of praise?

There’s a progression of wisdom from sociopath, to average person, to wise person, to sage. As we move along this spectrum, base personality traits such as the desire for adulation fall away, but the opposite is true for the Christian god. Not only do we hear this from Christianity itself (“Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever,” according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism), we read it in the Bible (“At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth”).

What’s the point of praise? Obviously, God already understands his position relative to us. We’re informing him of nothing new when we squeal, “Golly, you’re so fantastic!”

Imagine a human equivalent where you have an ant farm, and the ants are aware that you’re the Creator and Destroyer. It would be petty to revel in the ants’ worshipping you and telling you how great you are. Just how insecure would you need to be?

This sycophantic praise makes sense for a narcissistic and insecure king, but can God really want or need to hear this? We respect no human leader who demands this. Christianity would have us believe that the personality of a perfect being is that of a spoiled child.

Praise makes sense when you’re praising something surprising, but God mindlessly goes from one perfect act to another. Sure, he did a perfect thing, but that can’t be surprising. He’s like water that flows downhill. It could do nothing else!

Another opportunity for praise is when an act came at some expense, like giving food to a needy person or risking your safety to help someone. This too doesn’t apply to God, who is limited by no finite resource and who can’t be injured.

Praise is particularly odd when you consider how unpraiseworthy God is. He’s the guy who demanded genocide and sanctioned slavery in the Old Testament and created hell in the New.

God should be a magnification of good human qualities and an elimination of the bad ones. But the petty, praise-demanding, vindictive, and intolerant God of the Bible is simply a Bronze Age caricature, a magnification of all human inclinations, good and bad.

4. Because there’s a map of world religions

There is no map of world science, with the geocentrists in the green region and the heliocentrists in the blue, where the Creationists are over here and the evolutionists are over there. There are disagreements over unresolved questions in science, but they’re rarely regionally based. And when those disagreements get resolved, (1) the process will have taken years or (at most) decades, (2) the resolution will have come due to new and better evidence, and (3) the new consensus view will be adopted peacefully and quickly by scientists worldwide.

Contrast that with religion. (1) Disagreements between religions don’t get resolved. Will Muslims ever accept Christianity’s idea of the Trinity? Will Christians ever accept Hinduism’s idea of reincarnation? Will Protestants and Catholics set aside their differences? After many church councils, some Christian questions have been answered (with the losing side declared a heresy), but there is no objective Christianity. Christianity continues to fragment at a rate of two new denominations per day.

(2) Evidence may be the currency of science, but in religion, it’s power. Disputed points of dogma are resolved and became the consensus view, not because a plain reading of the Bible show them there but because those are the views that happen to win. While arguments are made for the various positions, in the end, it’s a popularity contest.

(3) Consensus within Christianity is sometimes imposed. The conclusions of ecumenical Christian councils (there have been 21 since the first one in Nicaea in 325) are imposed on Roman Catholics by the Vatican.

It’s not always peaceful. The Cathars were a Christian Gnostic sect whose members were exterminated in thirteenth-century France for not being Catholic. Catholic vs. Protestant wars have killed millions.

This bloodshed has done nothing to consolidate supernatural belief worldwide. There is not even consensus on the number of god(s), let alone their names or what is required to placate them. When believers have gotten their story straight, they can let us know.

If this were God World, we’d expect to see a single understanding of God worldwide.

Continued in part 3.

(1) If we live in a world with a God,
then there wouldn’t be any apologists.
(2) There are apologists.
(3) Therefore, we live in a world without a God.
— commenter Tommy

Image via Red Junasun, CC license

 

A Response to Pascal’s Wager (Fiction)

Posted on by

After more than 1000 posts at this blog, I’d like to return to the project that started it all, my 2012 book, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey. I’ll run a few excerpts from the book over the next couple of months. These may run a bit longer than the usual post, but the fiction format is an interesting way to explore apologetics arguments.

A bit of background: Jim is a wealthy, housebound, and somewhat obnoxious atheist, and Paul is the young acolyte of a famous pastor, doing his best to evangelize. It’s 1906 in Los Angeles, and they’re in Jim’s study. Jim is working on an electric fan.

Paul cleared his throat and began. “Okay, I’m sure you’ll agree that you possess only a tiny fraction of all knowledge.”

“Of course.”

“Then isn’t it possible that there is compelling evidence that God exists, but you just don’t know it? Doesn’t this throw great doubt on your belief that God doesn’t exist?”

“Great doubt? Hardly,” Jim said as he strung the power cord through the fan’s base. “I’m also not certain that leprechauns don’t exist. No good evidence argues that they do exist, so I assume they don’t. By this logic, I also think God doesn’t exist. Give me the information that would convince me otherwise. If he exists, that fact is apparently not well publicized or not convincing.”

“Evidence for God’s existence is both well publicized and convincing,” Paul said. “The Bible tells us, ‘Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities have been clearly seen, so that men are without excuse.’ ”

“How can his invisible qualities be seen?”

“What I mean is, the majority of your fellow citizens believe in God.”

“And the majority of people don’t. The preponderance of evidence says that there is no God, so that’s what I believe. That’s what I must believe. If I stumbled across new information that showed my position was wrong, I should indeed change it.”

Jim mounted the motor on its base. “You raise a dangerous challenge. Turn it around: given the tiny fraction of all knowledge that you possess, how can you reject the hundreds of belief systems that exist today and have existed through history? Aren’t you concerned about being a bad Muslim? You don’t want to spend eternity in Muslim hell. Or a bad Buddhist? I’ve seen pictures of the hell of Tibetan Buddhism, and you don’t want to go there either.

“We’re both atheists. We agree that the thousands of gods in history are fiction, with the single exception of the Christian god—you think that particular god, out of all the others, actually exists. I rejected the Christian god with much more deliberation than you used when you rejected all the others. If you think that I’m obliged to consider Christianity’s claims, surely you’re obliged to consider the claims of the other religions.”

Paul said, “I consult my feelings and know the Christian path to be the true one. Faith is believing what you know in your heart to be true.”

“That’s something a believer from any tradition could say. What religion would you claim if you grew up in Egypt or Morocco or the Ottoman Empire? If you were of a spiritual bent, you would almost surely be a Muslim. You’d be a Hindu if raised in certain parts of India, a Confucian in China, and so on. Were you just extraordinarily lucky to have been born in a place and time in which the correct religion happened to be dominant?”

Jim poked his screwdriver toward Paul. “Why are you a Christian? Not because Christianity is the truth. It’s simply because you were raised in a Christian community. It’s the same with language—you speak English because you were born in America. You didn’t evaluate the world’s languages and rationally decide which one to speak—it was a decision made for you by society. You’re simply a product of your culture.”

Paul squeezed his hands into a fist so hard that he could feel his fingernails digging into his palms. “Then how do you explain the hundreds of millions of Christians? Christianity is the most popular religion the world has ever seen.”

“Truth is not a goddamn popularity contest.” Jim slashed with the screwdriver to punctuate his words like a manic orchestra conductor. “Some religion will be the most popular—does that make it the correct one? And how do you explain the hundreds of millions of Muslims? Or Hindus? Or any of the other religions that have been around for centuries and seem to satisfy the spiritual needs of their adherents? Is it delusion? Superstition? Custom? Indoctrination? However you explain the success of those religions should answer your question about why Christians believe. Look at the new variants of Christianity that have sprouted in this country in just the last century—Mormonism, Christian Science, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Why is your flavor of Christianity not invented just like these were?”

Sweat tickled Paul’s skin as it ran down his sides. He couldn’t control this slippery conversation. Now would be a good time to help, God, he thought as he launched into Samuel’s approach to Pascal’s Wager.

“All right, let’s think of this like a bet,” he began, “the most important bet imaginable. Suppose your concerns are correct and there were just one chance in a hundred that Christianity is correct. Let’s suppose the time, energy, and money you would invest in the church amounts to ten thousand dollars over your lifetime. For it to be an even bet, the return on a win—Christianity being true—must be a hundred times your expense, or a million dollars. That is, you wager ten thousand dollars for a one-in-a-hundred chance to win a million dollars. Would you say that that’s a fair bet?”

“Yes, that’s a fair bet,” Jim said, smiling.

“But wouldn’t you also say that the prize of eternal bliss instead of torment is much more valuable than a million dollars? Doesn’t that make betting on Christianity the obvious choice?”

“Sam and I came up with that argument on our own. We were quite pleased with ourselves—only later did I discover that Pascal had beaten us by 250 years.” Jim wiped his hands with a rag as he stood and walked to the bureau holding the chessboard. “I don’t know about Sam, but I’ve thought quite a bit about these arguments over the years. What seemed very compelling to us long ago has a lot of holes under close examination. If all you’ve got is Sam’s arguments from twenty-five years ago, then I’m afraid he hasn’t armed you very well.” He pulled open a wide drawer, poked through its clutter for a few moments, and returned to the sofa with a deck of cards. The low table in front of the sofa held several open books, which Jim closed and dropped with a thump on the blue and white Oriental rug.

“Since we’re talking about betting, let’s simulate your argument with cards,” Jim said, as he held the cards face down in one hand and fanned them with the other. “What card shall we use to represent the Christian jackpot?”

Paul groped for a symbol, and the image of the princess mother from the fairy tale came to mind. “How about … the queen of hearts.”

“Okay, and let’s improve your odds. Let’s say that you must pay just a thousand dollars for the privilege of picking a card, but if you pick the queen of hearts, you get a million dollars. That’s about what you’re saying, right?”

“Sure.”

“But is that really analogous to our situation?” Jim turned the cards over and leafed through them until he found the queen of hearts. He put that card face up on the sofa beside him and fanned the remaining cards as before, offering them face down to Paul. “How about now? Would you pay a thousand dollars to play now?”

“Of course not,” Paul said. “There’s no chance of winning.”

“Right. So which game are we playing—the one with the winning card in the pack or the one with no winning card?” Jim looked at Paul for a moment before slapping the cards onto the table. “There’s no winning card here! Show me why that’s not completely analogous to your wager. If you said that you worshipped the sun, at least I could know that what you worshipped actually existed. And this wager applies to you as well. You can’t offer this wager to me without making a similar bet yourself with a thousand other religions.”

Jim returned to sit on the floor in front of the fan and pushed the blades onto the motor shaft. “Another thing: I can’t choose to believe. I won’t pretend to believe either—I don’t respect hypocrisy, and if God exists, he doesn’t either. I can’t choose to believe in God or Jesus just like you can’t choose to believe in Zeus or Hercules. Christians seem to imagine faith in Jesus like a plate of sandwiches passed around at supper—I can take or not as I choose. But belief doesn’t work that way, so don’t imagine that your religion has provided eternal salvation for the taking.”

“But what if I’m right?” Paul asked.

“And what if I’m right? Then you will have missed seeing your life for what it truly is—not a test to see if you correctly dance to the tune of an empty set of traditions; not a shell of a life, with real life waiting for you in the hereafter; not drudgery to be endured or penance paid while you bide your time for your reward. But rather the one chance you have at reality. We can argue about whether heaven exists, but one thing we do know is that we get one life here on earth. A too-short life, no matter how long you live, that you can spend wisely or foolishly. Where you can walk in a meadow on a warm spring day, and laugh and learn, and do good things and feel good for having done them. Where you can strive to leave the world a little better than you found it. Where you can play with children, and teach someone, and love.”

Jim gestured with increasing vigor until he sprang from the floor and paced like a preacher, looking at Paul as he did so. “There’s simply no reason to imagine that there’s a beneficent Father in the sky to lean on, to take care of us, to clean up our mistakes—the evidence says that we’re on our own. That reality can be sobering, but it’s also empowering. We’re the caretakers of the world, and if we blunder, we pay the price. But if we create a better world, then we and our descendants get to enjoy it. This is no hollow philosophy. It’s joyous and empowering—and it’s reality. I would rather live in reality than in a delusion, no matter how delightful. I don’t want my mind clouded by superstition just like I don’t want it clouded by opium. And making the most of today is better than living for an imaginary tomorrow in heaven.” Jim stared at him with his hands on his hips.

“Well …” Paul stared at his note card, looking for his next move. “Well, let me ask you this: what would you say if you died and found yourself standing in judgment before God?”

“I would say that I followed reason, not faith,” Jim said as he walked back to the towel and set the brass cage in place around the blades. “That I didn’t allow superstition to govern me and saw no sin in being intellectually honest. That I tried to lead an ethical life driven solely by my love of my fellow man, not by fear of punishment or desire for reward in the afterlife. And what about you? If there is a God, maybe he will say to you, ‘You had no evidence to believe and yet you did. Is that what I gave you brains for—to follow the crowd? You had a powerful tool that you didn’t use. I gave you brains for you to think.’ ”

Jim set the rebuilt fan on the floor next to the bureau. He plugged it in and the blades swung into motion with a hum, sending a cool breeze across the room.

“Remember the story of Jack and the Beanstalk?” Jim asked as he returned to the sofa, wiping his hands. “Jack sells the family cow for five magic beans. His mother throws out the beans and scolds the boy. But the next day they find an enormous beanstalk. Jack climbs up, finds an evil giant, takes all his treasure, and kills him—a happy ending.”

He threw the rag onto the center table. “But is this good advice? Should we all be like Jack? Would you recommend that someone trade his most valuable possession for some magical something, with no proof?”

“But look at what happened,” Paul said. “Jack made the bet and won. He took the leap of faith, and things worked out well for him.”

“It’s a story! It’s just pretend. Is Christianity compelling in the same way—because it’s also a story?” Jim jabbed his finger in the air to punctuate his words. “You should not … take your life lessons … from a fairy tale. You should not trade a cow for ‘magic’ beans, and you shouldn’t trade away your most valuable possession, your life, on a mythical claim without evidence.”

“My life isn’t my most valuable possession—my soul is.”

“Show me that your soul is any more real than magic beans and I’ll see your point.”

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/30/14.)

 

Test Drive a Foolproof Method for Separating History From Legend

Posted on by

Let me share with you an article that I enjoyed. And when I say “enjoyed,” I mean, “was baffled by.”

The article is “The Bible and Miracles: Fact or Fantasy?” and it proposes rules for separating history from myth and legend. It concludes that the Bible’s miracles are history.

Four simple rules

The author proposes four rules for identifying historical accounts.

1. Unlike myths, biblical miracles are presented in a historical context, that is, in conjunction with actual historical events, many of which can be verified by archaeology.

Yes, myths are often unconnected with human history, but that’s a quibble for this conversation (more on the distinctions between myths and legends here). Let’s consider legends instead, which typically are presented in a historical context. For example, the legend of King Arthur and Merlin the shape-shifting wizard was set in England around 600. The legend of William Tell was set in Switzerland around 1300. The legend of Jesus the miracle worker could be set in Palestine around 30.

Archeology supports biblical miracles no more than it does the supernatural stories in the Iliad. Yes, there was a Jericho and yes, there was a Troy, but archeology gives no support to the supernatural.

2. Miracles are presented in a simple, matter-of-fact style. No fanfare, sometimes not even a comment.

I don’t think that Jesus’s miracles are treated any more matter-of-factly than Merlin’s magic, the gods’ supernatural actions in the Iliad, or Paul Bunyan’s overlarge feats.

Fiction can also be presented in a matter-of-fact style. Witches and wizards can do magic (Harry Potter), and vampires and werewolves fight (Twilight).

3. Miracles occur in a framework of reason and logic. There are no miracles just for the sake of miracles. They are not performed for show; they are not “magic tricks” designed to entertain the reader.

The Bible’s miracles are not entertainment, but they are done as demonstrations. Jesus performed his miracles “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Matthew 9:6).

4. Miracles are performed in the presence of hundreds, sometimes thousands of witnesses; and many of the witnesses are still alive at the time the events are written down.

No, the stories claim that miracles were performed in the presence of many eyewitnesses. There is no independent historical documentation of a single miracle. I discuss the weakness of Paul’s claim of 500 eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus here.

Let’s test drive these rules

To illustrate a false claim, the author gives this example:

Even now, over 200 years after the fact, would anyone believe someone today who wrote that George Washington calmed the Delaware River and walked across it while his soldiers rowed?

We have the author’s own foolproof 4-part method to separate miracle from legend. Let’s try it out on this example.

1. “Washington walked across the Delaware River” is in a historical context. No one doubts that the Continental Army crossed that river the night of December 25, 1776 to attack enemy forces in Trenton.

2. Matter of fact style? Check. It’s easy to imagine the story told in this style.

3. Not performed as a trick or entertainment? Check. Washington had to get across somehow, and he could’ve walked across the water as a morale booster for the troops.

4. Performed in the presence of hundreds of witnesses? Check. History records 2400 soldiers in the group that crossed with Washington.

You might argue that Washington walking on water is nonsense, and those soldiers would rebut the claim. But if that’s the case, show me the letters from these men saying, “There’s a crazy rumor going around that General Washington walked on water. Let me make clear: I was there, I saw Washington, and it didn’t happen like that.” You can’t provide those letters? Then you begin to understand the weakness in the Naysayer Hypothesis, the idea that a claim that lasted until today must not have been defeated by any contemporary naysayers and so must be true (more here).

According to the author’s own checklist, he would be obliged to accept this account of Washington walking on water as an actual miracle. Since this account about Washington would be written in Modern English, it would be more reliable and accessible than gospel stories written in 2000-year-old Greek from an ancient culture (more here).

Parallel the gospel story with a modern analogy

The author bristles at the concern that the gospel story is unreliable history because it was initially passed on as oral history and written long after the events. He proposes a parallel. Compare Jesus known only through gospels written decades after his death with Mahatma Gandhi known only through the film Gandhi (1982), which was produced decades after his death.

To understand the early readers of the gospels, consider ourselves learning about Gandhi only through the film. But the author wants us to imagine a very different Gandhi. This Gandhi does the things that Jesus did: he proclaims himself divine, heals the sick, and multiplies loaves and fishes. Would you believe it?

Now go further. Would you believe that this Gandhi died and resurrected? That He died for your sins? Would you drop everything to accept this Gandhi’s call to follow Him?

Of course not. That’s a helpful parallel, and this Christian author has nicely demonstrated that the gospel claim is ridiculous. If you wouldn’t believe an account of Gandhi doing miracles, produced decades after his death, why believe the same thing for Jesus?

[SFX: record scratch]

Nope, that’s not the conclusion of this author. He tries to salvage his situation, not by running from, but actually embracing his ridiculous situation:

No one could have fabricated a story as that told in the gospels with the expectation that people would believe it. Yet believe it they did. Why? Because it happened, that’s why! And the apostles that preached the gospel must have demonstrated its truth by performing the same miracles. It’s the only answer that makes sense. No one in their right mind would have concocted those stories,* because no one in their right mind would believe them without reason.

* I argue that the gospel story is legend, not that it was deliberately invented.

Wow—you can’t make this stuff up! This author admits that the gospel story is crazy but tries to salvage his position by spinning this as a good thing. It’s so crazy it has to be true. It’s like early church father Tertullian who is quoted as writing, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Yeah, seek out the absurdity. That’s a good way to find truth. Or maybe not.

This reminds me of Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian spiritual leader who died in 2011 with millions of followers. He is claimed to have performed almost all of Jesus’ miracles, including raising from the dead. That the absurd stories are true is the only answer that makes sense, right?

The Son of God died:
it is wholly believable because it is absurd;
he was buried and rose again,
which is certain because it is impossible.
— Tertullian, early church father

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/25/14.)

Image via See-ming Lee, CC license