Monthly Archives: February 2019

9 Tactics Christians Use to Dismiss Bible Embarrassments

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I’ve written about the Bible’s confused relationship with science and have explored Bible contradictions with a Top 20 list of the most embarrassing. Now let’s look at how Christian apologists respond to Bible contradictions and similar embarrassments.

The perfect message of an infallible god has a lot more contradictions than you’d expect. Was John the Baptist the reincarnated Elijah? Yes (Matthew 17:10–13) and no (John 1:19–21). How many donkeys did Jesus ride on Palm Sunday—one (Mark 11:7) or two (Matthew 21:7)? Who killed Goliath—David (1 Samuel 17:50) or Elhanan (2 Samuel 21:19)?

You won’t be surprised that Christians have a lot of tactics with which to resolve awkward questions like these. Let’s review some of them and see how they hold up.

Tactic 1: Technically, it’s not a contradiction

This excuse splits hairs about the word “contradiction.” A contradiction, they’ll say, is a sentence X that clashes with a sentence not-X, and nothing less precise will do. The two statements must directly and unambiguously contradict each other.

They might apply this to the number of women at the empty tomb. Each gospel identifies a different number of women. For example, John says that it was Mary Magdalene, but Luke says Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James “and the other women.” Apologists will defend the Bible by saying that John didn’t say Mary and only Mary was there, so it’s not a contradiction—at least not technically.

This approach might work if the question of women at the tomb were the only problem, but there’s much more than that. And, of course, apologists always resolve the contradiction in favor of their conclusion, which is a supernatural fantasy that is about as far-fetched as it is possible to be. (More “apparent” contradictions in the four resurrection accounts here.)

While you’re haggling with them over the definition of “contradiction,” the Bible problem is ignored, which they count as a win.

What does “contradiction” mean?

To remember how we evaluate contradictions in everyday life, suppose you’re a newspaper editor. Matthew and Luke have been assigned to the Jesus beat—this is such an important story that you want two journalists working on independent articles—and they drop off their stories (their respective gospels) on your desk. How satisfied would you be?

Not very. You’d call them back and tell them to try again. This isn’t merely Luke having the Parable of the Prodigal Son but Matthew omitting it, and Matthew having the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant but Luke omitting it. Space is limited, and those editorial decisions are understandable, but it’s more than that. Did wise men visit the baby Jesus, or was it shepherds? Was Jesus whisked off to Egypt for his protection or not? Did the dead rise at the crucifixion, who first witnessed the empty tomb, and how many angels were at the tomb? Matthew and Luke disagree on each of these and more. In common parlance, these are contradictions. Relabel the problem if you want, but don’t dismiss it.

We could debate how essential these story elements are (very essential for the flight to Egypt and less so for the shepherds), but with enough of these differences, the stories become unreliable—both of them.

Tactic 2: Use or discard evidence based on whether you like where it points

Here’s an example of an apologist wanting to have it both ways, inconsistently using contradictory information as it suits his agenda. After accepting that Jesus spent two years in Egypt (a claim given only in Matthew) but dismissing the idea that he also visited India, Greg Koukl concluded:

The record that we have of Jesus’ life indicates that he was there [in Israel] for his entire life except for that brief sojourn in Egypt, which is recorded. (@ 23:44)

Let me illustrate the problem with an imagined dialogue:

Bob: Why say that Jesus went to Egypt? Matthew is the only one with that. Luke has a birth narrative, but it doesn’t mention Egypt. If the flight to Egypt actually happened, it’s hard to imagine Luke omitting that.

Greg: Luke doesn’t say, “And by the way, Jesus never went to Egypt.” Luke apparently pared down his narrative, and the Egypt journey was cut. This was an editorial choice, not a contradiction.

Bob: Luke also doesn’t say, “And by the way, Jesus never went to India.” So maybe he did.

Greg: We have a record of his life before his adult ministry in two of the gospels. There’s no mention of India, so we have no reason to consider it.

The problem here is that you can’t ignore the omission of Egypt and then point to the omission of India as important evidence.

To be clear, I’m not saying that there’s strong evidence that Jesus went to India. I doubt there is, and support for such a hypothesis would need to be put forward with data from outside the New Testament. But you must be consistent—don’t decide whether to ignore or highlight an omission in your holy book based on whether it will support your conclusion.

Continued in part 2.

How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—
in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
— Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great

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Image from Jenni Jones, CC license
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How Christian Apologists Teleport Across Lessing’s “Ugly, Broad Ditch”

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Eighteenth-century German philosopher Gotthold Lessing gave us the concept of Lessing’s Ditch, the “ugly, broad ditch” of doubt that he couldn’t cross with only the assurance of history. The gospel story of Jesus as the son of God? Sorry—the record of history is insufficient to carry us to belief on the other side of that ditch (discussed here).

You say that the gospel authors were inspired by God so that their writings are trustworthy? That is itself a historical claim, and Lessing argues that it fails along with all the rest.

If nothing hangs in the balance then I might believe. Alexander conquered Asia, historians tell us? Sure, I’ll buy that. But now you say that Jesus died to satisfy the sense of justice of a Bronze Age god, the one and only god who created everything? That’s perhaps the most incredible claim possible, and it comes with a lot of consequences. That isn’t to be accepted lightly. Not only does history not back this up (the discipline of History accepts no supernatural stories), but the gospel story looks just like other unbelievable stories from a more gullible time. I can’t cross that ditch.

Evaluating different kinds of claims

Let me take license with Lessing’s metaphor by exploring different kinds of ditches. Let’s say that the depth of the ditch represents the consequences, what you risk if you’re wrong. And the width of the ditch is the evidence gap, how plausible the claim is. This creates four categories.

  • Shallow and narrow: the consequences of being wrong are minimal, and the evidence is good. An example of this kind of ditch might be anything mundane that I’ve seen myself—what I had for lunch yesterday or the color of my car.
  • Shallow and wide: minimal consequences but poor evidence. One of the stories told about Alexander the Great was that he tamed the unridable horse Bucephalus as a teenager. Believing this and then being proven wrong would have negligible consequences.
  • Deep and narrow: big consequences but good evidence. “Driving to the store will be a safe errand” is almost always true, though the unlikely bad outcome can be fatal.
  • Deep and wide: big consequences and poor evidence. The claim of the resurrection of Jesus is an example. About this kind of claim, Lessing says, “The problem is that this proof of the spirt and of power no longer has any spirit or power but has sunk to the level of human testimonies of spirit and power” (emphasis added). For some, going along with one’s community has minimal downsides, but for many of us, one’s self-respect is on the line. I must evaluate the claims of the Christian with the same standard that I evaluate the claims of Scientology, Islam, or Harold Camping’s rapture day.

Enter Alvin Plantinga

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has this take on evidence and belief.

Lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

Plantinga is lumping together a shallow ditch problem (Is the number of stars even or odd?) with a deep ditch problem (Does an omnipotent god exist who created the universe?). No one cares whether the number of stars is even or odd at any instant, but Plantinga’s God proposal demands to remake one’s worldview.

I agree with Plantinga that the right stance with respect to the star question is agnosticism, because we have absolutely no reason to pick one answer over another. But do we also have no way to evaluate claims about leprechauns, fairies, unicorns, Blemmyes, or toves? In the sense that we don’t know with certainty, yes, that’s agnosticism. But we don’t consider the existence of mythical creatures like leprechauns to be equally in balance like the even/odd star question so that we have no opinion. Do we think leprechauns exist? Do we live our lives as if they do? Of course not. Lack of evidence is the reason for not believing in leprechauns.

Consider other religions: Islam, Shinto, Hinduism. Is the question of the accuracy of these worldviews equally balanced, with observers unable to make a tentative conclusion? Do we throw up our hands in befuddlement? Of course not—believers in those religions have the burden of proof, and it hasn’t been supported.

Now consider the question of the Christian god. Here again this bears no resemblance to the even/odd star question, because the Christianity has had millennia to support its burden of proof. We can be agnostics because we don’t know, but we can also be atheists because the burden of proof has not been met.

Enter another philosopher

William Lane Craig cuts through the problem in his usual blundering way.

It was the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who, I believe, provided the correct response to Lessing. Through an existential encounter with God Himself every generation can be made contemporaneous with the first generation. We are therefore not dependent on historical proofs for knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Rather through the immediate, inner witness of God’s Holy Spirit every person can come to know the truth of the Gospel once he hears it. . . .

So that’s how I leap Lessing’s ditch. Christian belief is confirmed by the historical evidence for those of us fortunate enough to be epistemically so situated as to be able to appraise it correctly; but Christian belief is not based on the historical evidence.

These kinds of arguments help make apologetics the poor cousin to magic. (More on Craig’s uncomfortable tension between evidence and belief here.)

Conclusion

If you can’t get over the ditch with evidence, don’t bother. You can’t cross; get over it. Teleporting over on a lavender cloud of make-believe works for children but not adults who want the truth rather than The Secret.

Craig hasn’t leapt Lessing’s ditch; he’s fallen in,
and in order to compensate,
has decided the world is upside down.
— commenter Dys

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How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded,
“This is better than we thought!
The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said,
grander, more subtle, more elegant?”
Instead they say, “No, no, no!
My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”
A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence
of the Universe as revealed by modern science
might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe
hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
— Carl Sagan

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/16/15.)

Image credit: elyob, flickr, CC
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3 Fatal Flaws Hidden Within the Dogma of Progressive Revelation

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Progressive revelation is the doctrine that God doled out his message over time. I agree with the problem—the Bible message does change over time. But apologists have traded one problem—the Bible contradicts itself (or a forgetful God can’t keep his story straight)—for another: God gave humanity an imperfect message and is now slowly correcting it.

The natural explanation is sufficient: the Bible is the blog of an ancient people, a fascinating and invaluable historical document but obviously not the perfect message from a perfect god.

Part 1 summarized the problem. This post will conclude with three problems that infect the doctrine of progressive revelation.

Problem 1: Conflict with Old Testament

Christian apologists rarely consider their claims all at once to see if the patch they made over here to cover up one embarrassment conflicts with the band-aid they put somewhere else. The first problem is that the Old Testament doesn’t say that God will dribble out the truth. It doesn’t say that he will contradict himself. Only in the minds of apologists does God reserve the right to change his mind in the future.

(Still, if you’re going to change your mind as the story unfolds, at least that gives you a chance to correct earlier embarrassments. Unfortunately, God’s barbarity isn’t overruled by any new teaching. Jesus does raise the standards on murder, adultery, and others in the Sermon on the Mount, but he doesn’t bother prohibiting slavery, genocide, human sacrifice, and other oldies but goodies from the Old Testament.)

Problem 2: Inconsistent rules

Progressive revelation looks like a makeshift, better-than-nothing rationalization. If Christians can justify Jesus’s message overruling what came before, how can they object to Joseph Smith pulling the same trick with his new ’n improved Mormon version of Christianity? How do they justify that Christians (and only Christians) get a pass?

Problem 3: What does this say about the current Christian message?

Once you’ve let the progressive revelation genie out of the bottle, how do you shove it back in? You can’t show that God’s message won’t change again. If the Jews were wrong that they had the correct message, maybe the Christians are, too. Maybe Christian doctrine has barely begun the process—a thousand years are to the Lord like a day, after all. This is the bed Christians have made for themselves with this argument.

This is theological relativism, but this isn’t an unintended consequence, an unfortunate side effect that’s attached to a larger good. Progressive revelation is theological relativism, deliberately and overtly, and the “perfect message” now changes with time. Accept this doctrine, and no Christian from any time in history can say that they understand God’s truth, regardless of whether they rely on scripture, church tradition, or personal revelation.

Another casualty is objective morality, moral values that are both obligatory for humans (whether or not humans even exist) and reliably accessible by those humans. Modern Christian morality in the West has evolved substantially from biblical morality even though Christians say that God approved of each, and with progressive revelation still in force, who knows what God will dictate next? And without objective morality, the popular Moral Argument collapses.

When Christianity is this flexible and Christians give themselves this much license, it’s no wonder you have 45,000 denominations with the attendant contradictions in doctrine.

Progressive revelation has created an unchanging god with a changing message. It’s not a clever save for Christians to show that they’re right but a declaration that they’re wrong.

[If all that] really WAS God talking,
but the things he said kept changing over the years,
what does that tell us about this form of communication?
If God can only reveal to us at any given point
what our own minds have expanded to be able to handle,
then is it really “revelation” at all?
Maybe that’s just “progress” and not “revelation.”
— Neil Carter, Godless in Dixie blog

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Image from Stephanie Chapman, CC license
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Contradictions in the Bible? No, It’s Progressive Revelation!

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Did you know that the Quran has no contradictions? This isn’t due to God’s guiding hand but to a clever loophole within Islam called the law of abrogation. If two passages in the Quran seem to conflict, the one written later abrogates (overrules) the earlier one. While Muslim scholars disagree on the number of conflicting passages, this rule is the backstop that resolves such questions.

Christianity also has a contradiction problem. We can see some of those problems when we look at how the Bible reboots its fundamental message. First, God makes a covenant with Noah, and then with Abraham, and then with Moses. Finally Jesus comes, and the rules change again. Jesus redefined murder, adultery, divorce, and more in the Sermon on the Mount. He changed the afterlife from a vague and uninteresting existence in Sheol to the ultimate celebration of a worthy life (or the ultimate punishment of a wicked one). He changed Yahweh from the god of just the Chosen People into the god of everyone. Circumcision and kosher food laws became unnecessary. Sacrifices are gone. The worship day changed.

Even after Jesus, the change continued. Some reboots didn’t take (Marcionism, Gnosticism), but others did (Trinitarianism). But wait—there’s more! Islam was a reboot. Mormonism was a reboot. Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church was a reboot.

The simplest explanation for the chaos in what is supposed to be the perfect plan from a perfect creator drops the idea of anything divine behind the Bible and chalks it up to a primitive people inventing supernatural stories to make sense of a scary existence. But that’s throwing in the towel, and modern Christians who want to support their belief respond in a different way.

Christianity’s secret weapon: progressive revelation

Let’s see how Christians explain progressive revelation.

The Scriptures testify to a progression of God’s revelation of Himself to humanity. He did not reveal the fullness of His truth in the beginning, yet what He revealed was always true. Each portion of Scripture was built on the previous one. (Don Stewart)

That’s one interpretation. The obvious alternative is that the Bible is (among other things) a 1000-year-long record of the evolution of supernatural thought within a primitive tribe in the ancient Near East. That it changed is hardly surprising—manmade religions do that.

The United Church of Christ embraces the idea of progressive revelation with a marketing campaign built around the slogan, “God is still speaking.” This evolved from a quote from Gracie Allen, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”

Okay—show us in the Bible where God makes clear that his perfect plan is a work in progress. Was the Ten Commandments just a first draft? Were the rules against homosexuality temporary? Was God’s plan for marriage a moving target?*

Another source has this interpretation.

God delivered what we were ready for, a bit at a time, when we were ready for it. In other words, his revelation has been progressive. (Tom Gilson)

That’s just what you’d say if you were trying to salvage a contradictory text. Your challenge is showing that this is God’s idea, not yours. Give us the verses in the Old Testament supporting this. Here, let me get you started: God made “a covenant for all generations to come” with Noah (Genesis 9) and then “an everlasting covenant” with Moses (Genesis 17).

Whoops—sorry. Those examples show how God doesn’t dribble out laws but makes them and then says that they are perpetual. Good luck finding the verse that says that God makes laws that he knows he’ll later correct.

And what does “when we were ready for it” mean? How are moderns any more ready to accept a supernatural message than people 3000 years ago?

We know more of God than the Old Testament prophets did: we know him through Christ.

But why stop there? If you like progressive revelation, then take the Muslim update from Mohammed. Or the LDS one from Joseph Smith.

Every student of church history knows that knowledge of God continued to grow long past the time John put down his pen after writing the Revelation.

You mean the doctrinal inventions from the 21 ecumenical councils from the Council of Nicaea in 325 through Vatican II in 1965? Or the many schisms within the Christian church? Or the countless denominational conferences? Yes, those were important for making doctrine. For example, the Bible has no clear statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, and it had to be invented in the first two councils.

But this isn’t an explanation as much as an admission. Much of “Christianity” comes from tradition and debate, not the supposed words of Jesus or God, both of whom are quoted extensively in the Bible. If the Bible were complete and unambiguous, these later interpretations wouldn’t have been necessary.

Why not deliver something useful in the new revelation?

Why would God want to dribble out his message? One answer is that the original audience for the Bible were just too primitive to understand. I’ll admit that the modern Christian message is confusing, but humans living in Palestine 3000 years ago were just as capable of understanding (or being confused by) today’s Christian message as we are.

Contrast that with a different message. The Bible gave us no science or technology that wasn’t part of that culture. That’s a message that might need dribbling out. A culture doesn’t go from the Iron Age to the Computer Age in one step.

When challenged with this, apologists often say that the Bible is a book of God’s message, not a science textbook. It’s hard to believe that basic health rules or a prohibition against slavery aren’t at the top of God’s list of tips to pass on, but let’s forget that. According to their reasoning, it sounds like God would be motivated to reveal the science and technology related to spreading God’s message. Where then is the progressive revelation of transportation or communication technology? As Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar observed, “If you’d come today / You could have reached a whole nation. / Israel in 4 BC / Had no mass communication.”

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Thanks to a couple of my favorite sources of wisdom, Jesus and Mo and Why Evolution is True, for mentions of this post.

Continue to the fatal objections to progressive revelation in part 2.

I said it, God believes it, that settles it!
— paraphrase of the fundamentalist position,
Robert M. Price, Human Bible podcast

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*Actually, yes, the Ten Commandments was a first draft, because there were two of them. The Bible doesn’t object to homosexuality in the way that conservative Christians think (here, here). And biblical ideas of marriage were radically more expansive than they would have you believe. Nevertheless, the burden is on the advocate of progressive revelation to show that a constantly changing doctrine is what God planned from the beginning.

Image from Alicia Lee, CC license
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