Monthly Archives: March 2019

“Four Blood Moons” Film, John Hagee’s Intellectual Train Wreck

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John Hagee likes to get overwrought about astrology, which is odd given that he’s a Christian pastor.

Background: Hagee’s thesis

The Bible speaks of a blood moon: “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Joel 2:30–31). Hagee proposed a fun new way to look at that. The Jewish spring festival of Passover and fall festival of Sukkot always begin on a full moon. Lunar eclipses only happen during full moons, and with an average of two per year, an eclipse at the beginning of these festivals (somewhere in the world, anyway) is common.

Hagee’s innovation was to (1) call a lunar eclipse (which often makes the moon reddish) a “blood moon,” (2) assign significance to these events happening on the Jewish festivals, and to (3) declare that four in a row (not three or five or some other number) is God telling us something. With the launch of his 2013 book, Hagee said, “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”

Remember that period? Who hasn’t said, “Where were you during the period April 2014 through October 2015 when that really dramatic thing happened?” We’re lucky to be here talking about it!

It’s refreshing to see a Bible scholar with no reluctance to make God’s unchanging word into a marionette that tells us a new story.

Hagee’s Four Blood Moons became, not only a bestseller (I’ve critiqued Hagee’s book), but a movie. I attended the premiere and made it out to tell the tale.

The Movie

The single showing in my neighborhood was a nearly packed house, and the Christian audience murmured occasional appreciation.

The movie was a string of supposed scenes from history to illustrate the three times in the past 500 years when we’ve had these tetrads (four blood moons on four consecutive Jewish festivals six months apart) interspersed with commentary by various experts.

A JPL scientist was an early expert, and he explained why lunar eclipses are usually red (what little sunlight remains passes through the earth’s atmosphere so that the moon is illuminated only by sunsets), so we’re off to a good start with a grounding in science and logic.

That didn’t last.

Hugh Ross, a retired astrophysicist who’s now an evolution denier, played a surprising and refreshing role as skeptic, but more on that later.

As we began the look at prior tetrads, John Hagee told us to “put doubt aside and believe.” But why? Don’t you have a burden to show us a reason first? He repeated the book’s subtitle, “Something is about to change.” I wondered if the omniscient creator of the universe could be a little clearer—or am I asking too much?

Tetrad 1: Spanish Inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion, 1492

I’m sure the script writers couldn’t get a “damn!” or a bare breast into this Christian script, but they have a torture scene where an ex-Jew, passing as a Catholic during the Inquisition, is tested for his loyalty. I must get offended at the wrong things.

Next, Christopher Columbus is portrayed as a Jewish patriot carrying these Spanish Jews to safety in the New World. A girl in one of the families gives the great explorer a yellow cloth star, an obligatory label the Jews had to wear. (In Nazi Germany, yes, but in Spain five centuries ago? I wasn’t able to find anything to support this, and it sure sounds like artistic license.)

While Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 did have colonization as a goal, it carried just 1200 men (Wikipedia mentions nothing about the Jewish families shown in the movie). The voyage began over a year after Spain’s 100,000 Jews were supposed to have left.

Also a year late was the first blood moon. Hagee would have us believe that God’s 18-month show began a year after the problem. Hagee says that God is shouting his message, but he needs to enunciate a little more clearly.

The movie continues with scenes in America. The goal was to show Jews as part of the American fabric from the beginning, which invited blather from history revisionist David Barton about America as a Christian nation.

Tetrad 2: Establishment of Israel, 1948

This event lines up with a tetrad no better than the previous one. Here again, the first blood moon was a year late. Notice also that the most significant recent event for Israel, the Holocaust, apparently didn’t deserve a tetrad.

We’re told that Israel’s victory in the war launched by Arab states the day after independence was a miracle. If you want surprising tales of victory, you can read about Hannibal’s victories over the Romans or Alexander’s over the Persians or even George Washington’s over the British. No effort was made to show how Israel’s victory—which might indeed have been unexpected—rose to the level of miracle.

Hagee tells us that God has blessed the U.S. because the U.S. has blessed Israel, and we come to see that this is the point of the movie: the U.S. must continue to support Israel financially, militarily, and diplomatically. Or else something.

Tetrad 3: Six-Day War, 1967

We see scenes from the war. Two Israeli soldiers capture an Egyptian platoon. A bomb landed among some civilians but didn’t explode. There’s a story of Egyptian soldiers surrendering to an army of angels.

Happy events? From the standpoint of Israel, sure. Evidence of divine intervention? I don’t think so.

Another expert tells us that our moral compass is broken when we leave God and Judeo-Christian values.

Tetrad 4: 2014 and 2015

Hagee says that this tetrad is even more super-duper than the previous ones since it overlaps a Shemitah (Shmita) year. The Shemitah is the seventh year in a 7-year cycle. It’s a time to let the land go fallow and to forgive debts with fellow Jews. However, Wikipedia says, “There is little notice of the observance of this year in Biblical history and it appears to have been much neglected.”

Hagee has dusted off this old concept and declared that this confluence is unique in human history. First, I’m sure that if we go back before Hagee’s cherry-picked tetrads, we’ll find Shemitah years in there and periods where no dramatic event happened to Israel or to Jews, even with Hagee’s generously sloppy criteria. Second, this Shemitah year only overlaps two of the eclipses. And third, why expect divine wrath if Shemitah is a time of forgiveness?

Panel discussion

The movie ended with a panel discussion with astrophysicist Hugh Ross, rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg, pastor John Hagee, and history revisionist David Barton.

Hagee was asked why this wasn’t astrology. He said that astrology is a false science, not at all like what he does. The movie had tried to ground the idea of getting wisdom from the sky with the Star of Bethlehem, but it sounded to me more like seeing portents in comets.

(One of many interpretations of the star of Bethlehem story is full of astrology, and full of holes.)

The biggest surprise in the movie was Hugh Ross saying that this was all just a coincidence (prediction after the fact) and that the number of eclipses was arbitrarily chosen—why four? He also noted that the eclipses couldn’t be seen in Israel—wouldn’t that be important if Israel is the focus? So, yeah—it’s astrology.

Hagee wrapped up with a threat. God said: “I will bless those who bless you [that is, Israel], and whoever curses you I will curse” (Gen. 12:3). God is working through America to support Israel. Stop supporting Israel, and you’ll regret it. We were told to think of the countries who opposed Israel: Babylon, Greece, Rome. But what do we conclude from this? Empires come and go. This is like God’s warning about the fruit in Eden: eat it, and you will surely die. Uh yeah—eventually.

And if God is working through America, what’s the concern? Surely God can’t be stopped by gay-loving liberals who are soft on Israel.

As the movie ended, the audience applauded. And the screen showed an ad for yet another Hagee book.

Damn.

Ardency and sincerity
are no substitute for veracity.
— Richard S. Russell

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/24/15.)

Image from Four Blood Moons movie page, CC license

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4 Steps Christians Must Take Before Responding to the Problem of Evil (2 of 2)

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In part 1, we looked at the Problem of Evil, which is a powerful attack on Christianity. Christians often respond by saying that God is unjudgeable by mere humans. That fails in a number of ways, but that’s not the point of these two posts. Rather, I want to insist that Christians delay their God-is-unjudgeable argument until they’ve taken four steps that lay the groundwork necessary to support such a claim.

The first step is to admit that the Problem of Evil makes God look like a sociopath.

2. You say that God has his reasons? Like what?

There’s a second necessary step before we can consider rationalizations for God’s apparent immorality. Don’t just tell me that God could have a good reason for a child dying of leukemia or a parent killed in an accident or 100,000 dead from a tsunami, tell me what those reasons are (or could be). Give it your best shot and sketch out something plausible. If you’re embarrassed by the result—maybe it makes God look petty or immoral or not particularly omnipotent—you need to own that.

3. Are you confident that “God” even exists?

The third step is showing that trust in this God is justified. Here’s what we must avoid: an elaborate “God’s ways are not our ways” kind of argument that merely concludes that we can’t rule out God belief. Okay, but “You can’t rule out God” is no more compelling than “You can’t rule out Zeus” (or Quetzalcoatl or Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster). Now that we’ve not ruled out pretty much everything, the Christian must show that God is likely.

This is another variation on the Hypothetical God Fallacy: “Well, if God exists (and is omnipotent and all-good), then he must have good reasons for evil.” Is there any reason to accept that if-clause?

If it’s plausible, like “If you wake up with chest pains,” then what follows is something that might be relevant in the real world. If it’s not plausible, like “If you wake up in Wonderland,” then what follows is irrelevant. It has no bearing on the world we live in.

Which one is “If God exists”? Our Christian opponent must show that there is a good reason to believe that this God exists so that “God could have his reasons” isn’t built on fantasy.

4. Why would God allow suffering?

The idea of the Christian god has a lot of baggage, so let’s simplify things and just imagine the Greatest Possible Being (GPB). Would the GPB allow suffering?

The GPB would be omnipotent and morally perfect and would therefore prevent all unnecessary suffering. Any necessary suffering must achieve some goal, and this goal must be logically possible to achieve. Since the omnipotent GPB could do every logically possible thing, it could achieve every such goal itself, which means that achieving those goals through suffering would be unnecessary. Given the choice, the GPB would obviously opt for achieving its goals without suffering. Therefore, a world ruled by a GPB would have no suffering.

(This is a bit dense. I’ve also made this argument slightly differently, if you want a different take.)

If God is a GPB, then he, too, would achieve his goals without suffering.

Conclusion

Next time you argue the Problem of Evil, look for responses of the form, “God’s ways aren’t our ways” or “We imperfect humans can’t judge God.” Those responses skip over four steps that the Christian must address first.

  1. Acknowledge that, even if they’re hoping that God isn’t a sociopath, he certainly looks like one. Our world is full of unevenly distributed pain and hardship. In addition, God’s actions in the Old Testament make him look as cuddly as Genghis Khan.
  2. Make a plausible (even if embarrassing) list of any reasons God could have to kill innocent people, either individually or in the hundreds of thousands.
  3. Show that trust in this god is justified. There has to be a real being, not just mythology, to be the god who has these incomprehensible reasons for evil in the world.
  4. Show that either God is not a Greatest Possible Being or that a GPB would be obliged to allow suffering.

The Bible can be made to say that God operates on moral principles that are incompatible with those that make sense to humans, but it can also be made to say the opposite. Christians take a path through the Bible’s doctrine, picking up a piece here and ignoring a piece there to create their concept of God.

The point of insisting on these steps is to force Christians to pause and see what they’re cobbling together. Like Dr. Frankenstein, you must face your Creature. Have you created a god, or have you created a fallen angel?

We stopped looking for monsters under our bed
when we realized that they were inside us.
— Charles Darwin

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Image from Eden, Janine and Jim, CC license
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4 Steps Christians Must Take Before Responding to the Problem of Evil

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Here’s where discussions of the Problem of Evil go wrong.

Focusing on the wrong part of the Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil is the question, “Why would an omnipotent, all-good god allow so much evil in the world?” Christians often respond by saying that we can’t judge God because his ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8).

Let’s get one rebuttal out of the way first. Their response makes no sense because we’re made in God’s image and so should share his moral instinct.

It makes no sense because Abraham talked God down when he was planning destroy Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:25) and Moses talked God down when he was planning on destroying the Israelites and starting over (Exodus 32:9–10). They could do this because they shared a common moral vocabulary with God.

It makes no sense because Jesus said,

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29–31)

If God notices all and cares deeply, then we’re back to where we started: why is there so much evil in the world?

1. Christians need to admit what God looks like because of the Problem of Evil

Christians can rationalize a response to the problem only after first admitting the problem: God’s actions are those of a sociopath. You would be an evil person if you could prevent gratuitous pain but didn’t.

Let’s not worry about examples like a vaccination, where the long-term good outweighs the short-term pain of an injection. The issue is gratuitous pain like a child dying from cancer, a robbery victim dying from a stab wound, or a deer in a remote forest dying from an injury. At the other extreme, it’s catastrophic disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (200,000+ deaths) and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (100,000+ deaths). The world is full of this kind of pain, and yet examples like these are unnecessary. God is magic and could prevent natural disasters. Even if his goal was to remove a future Hitler, he could do it more surgically than with a natural disaster. On an individual level, God could improve people without the pain (but more on this later).

Sure, God (assuming he exists) is smarter and wiser than we are. He might know things we don’t know or couldn’t understand. But it’s backwards to imagine God into existence, see the contradictions in the god you’ve created, and then rationalize (without evidence) excuses so that the original God assumption can still be held. The honest approach is to first evaluate the God claims from a logical and moral standpoint. Once we have good reasons to believe in God, then we can wonder why his morality seems odd. (And why imagine God has a different moral sense? What—besides having to defend the God claim—would cause us to even imagine that?)

The Bible tells us that God is immoral

Consider how God is portrayed in the Old Testament. He isn’t a sage, floating through the story and gently correcting wrongs, passing out insightful judgements, and illustrating morality by example. No, he’s just like the other gods of that place and time such as Marduk or Chemosh. He’s the power behind the throne who demanded genocide, regulated slavery for life, approved of human sacrifice, and permitted sexual slavery.

The New Testament is no better, because this is where God (or Jesus) had the idea to create hell. Don’t tell me that the gates of hell are barred from the inside and that the inmates in hell want to be there. Jesus with the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16) makes clear that hell is a terrible place and that the damned want to get out.

Christians sometimes respond by challenging the words we use. We understand what “good” means. It’s a word with a definition, and much of what God does in the Old Testament isn’t good. Said another way, if you did it, you wouldn’t be “good,” and God isn’t good for the same reason.

The Christian response is often to say that our imperfect minds are unable to judge God, but they don’t actually mean that. Rather, they mean, “we shouldn’t judge God as bad.” They’re happy to apply to use that same imperfect mind to judge God as good.

The final three steps are in part 2.

If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.
— Woody Allen

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Image from Ryan Hyde, CC license

Recent comments at the Cross Examined blog here.
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25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid (Part 15 and counting)

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Doesn’t time fly? It seems like forever since we checked in with our favorite sitcom, “Christians say the silliest things,” our list of stupid arguments Christians would do well to avoid.

We’ve blown past our initial goal of 25 arguments and are now at argument #46. If you want to start at the beginning, that’s here.

Stupid Argument #46: “God is like a father” and similar comparisons

We don’t see supernatural beings in daily life, so Christian apologists try to compare God to things we do see. In this blog, we’ve seen claims that God is like a father who gets angry when we make mistakes (here and here). God is like a child or an artist who deserves praise (here). Or maybe God is like a romantic partner (here).

Whenever I read such a comparison, I feel like a cat chasing paper tied to a string. As soon as I grab for the analogy to make sense of it, the apologist jerks it away and tells me that it’s not a perfect analogy.

No, it’s not a perfect analogy. It’s not even a good analogy. These comparisons fail because the most boring thing about the person God is compared to (he’s like a spouse, like a father, like a judge) is that that person exists.

A “God is like” analogy is a deepity: to the extent that it’s true, it’s trivial and unhelpful, and to the extent that it’s useful and insightful, it’s false.

More here.

Stupid Argument #47: Appeal to ego

This argument sounds like this: “Don’t be a wimp! You’re smart enough to weigh the evidence for evolution [or climate change or vaccinations or the Big Bang or some other scientific issue]. You don’t need scientists—figure this out yourself.”

An example of this is a long, fruitless discussion I had with Dr. Jay Wile about evolution here. He’s a scientist (nuclear chemistry), but he’s not a biologist. He can speak with authority in his field, but that’s no warrant to correct errors in other scientific fields. Nevertheless, he dumped on me his version of the Appeal to Ego:

If you are a lazy layperson who doesn’t want to think for him/herself, then you have no choice but to accept the scientific consensus. However, if you are a layperson who actually enjoys learning and thinking for him/herself, you can examine the evidence and come to your own conclusion.

Golly—my options apparently are to be an indolent puppet in the hands of my betters, or to stand like a man and decide for myself.

Or maybe there’s a third option: that sciences like biology are very specialized fields that I will always be an outsider to, and, as a result, I am obliged to accept science’s consensus view (where it exists) as the best approximation to the truth. That doesn’t mean that the consensus is necessarily right, just that it’s the layperson’s best bet.

That this is simply a desire for a more pleasing reality rather than a quest for the truth becomes clear when these tough-minded skeptics only challenge the science they don’t like—evolution, Big Bang, climate change, and so on. Their agenda shows when they let stand the science that is truly counterintuitive like Relativity or quantum mechanics.

Sometimes this is an attempt to bypass science. Science isn’t saying what they want to hear, so these armchair scientists bypass science and appeal directly to other laypeople. The Disco Institute is an Intelligent Design thinktank that does this. They don’t spend their money on unbiased research that might change the scientific consensus. They’ve already lost that war, so they write popular-level books and newsletters to appeal to individuals.

The most popular example that I come across is the typical fundamentalist attitude toward evolution. No ivory-tower geeks are going to shove nutty atheist science down the throats of these red-blooded Americans. And yet they accept Christianity! It would be nice if a little of that tough skepticism were applied to Christianity.

Or, we can look at it from the other side. Christians often tell atheists to drop their arrogance and have some humility, to admit they don’t know everything, and to open their minds to the possibility of the supernatural. The irony is when some of these Christians go on to push the Appeal to Ego, which is 190-proof arrogance.

More about the scientific consensus here and here.

Stupid Argument #48: Wishful thinking

The idea here is to adopt a worldview simply because it’s more pleasing than the one with the evidence. The SMBC comic above neatly illustrates this view with this syllogism:

If P is false, I will be sad;

I do not wish to be sad;

Therefore, P is true.

(h/t Greg G.)

Here’s a specific example. Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell illustrated the Problem of Evil with the example of a dying child and asked how a good god could allow such a thing. Christian apologist Greg Koukl answered this way:

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig offered this response: “What is the atheist Bertrand Russell going to say when kneeling at the bed of a dying child? ‘Too bad’? ‘Tough luck’? ‘That’s the way it goes’?” No happy ending? No silver lining? Nothing but devastating, senseless evil?

What??? “No happy ending?” The child is dying! No, there’s no goddamn happy ending. (And notice that the original problem remains: they’ve offered no defense for why this would be part of an all-good god’s plan.)

An atheist comforting the dying child would do what a Christian would: read books or tell stories or remember happy events or in some way help the child feel comfortable and loved. The difference would be that the atheist wouldn’t handwave comfort, either for themselves or the child, through stories from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Greek myth of Hades, the Hindu idea of reincarnation, Christian heaven and hell, or whatever afterlife story happens to be popular in the local culture.

Koukl responds with claims about the Christian worldview—God is patient and merciful, God has a plan, and so on—without evidence, as if that counts for something. He skips over that messy supporting-evidence step and just takes his worldview as a given, claiming the win because he thinks his worldview is happier.

This is the Pragmatic Fallacy—some custom or practice is worthwhile because it makes me feel better, not because its claims are true. More here and here.

Continue with #49, Science is Built on Christianity.

If your faith is so fragile
it cannot handle questions, doubts, and honest inquiry,
if it is so threatened by the full engagement of your heart & mind
it runs from potential challenges,
that’s not faith; it’s fear.
— Christian apologist Rachel Held Evans

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Image from SMBC, used with permission
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10 Skeptical Principles for Evaluating the Bible (2 of 2)

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Let’s conclude our ten principles for evaluating the Bible. This list is in response to a Christian version by Jim Wallace, “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions,” critiqued here. Part 1 of my skeptical list is introduced here.

Let’s continue.

6. Missed opportunities count

God could’ve given us soap or told us that the earth is a sphere. Jesus could’ve eliminated all disease—and poverty, war, and famine while he was at it. But they didn’t.

What does that tell you? Apologists will say that the Bible isn’t a science textbook (though many will then take the Creation story literally). They’ll say that it simply wasn’t part of the plan for God to make life easy or even make the Bible message obvious so that there would be no need for the thousands of denominations of Christianity.

Even though the Bible doesn’t tell us anything that wasn’t already known to people of that time and place, that doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. But what can we learn from the fact that the Bible is ambiguous and contradictory, that life on earth sucks for many people, and that the “God” character has no more knowledge or wisdom than the primitive people who wrote his story? This world and all the problems in it do not look like they were created by an all-loving and omnipotent deity.

7. If it looks like a book written by a primitive people, it almost certainly is

The best explanation for the Bible is that primitive people of the time wrote the story and that the Bible is just the blog of an early Iron Age desert tribe. We can’t ignore the many examples of mythology from other ancient cultures, and the Bible looks like just one more.

We need an enormous amount of evidence to conclude that Babylonian Enuma Elish or the Hindu Vedas are mythology, but the Bible, which looks so similar, is actually history.

8. Natural evidence provides poor support for a supernatural conclusion

Many Christians “just believe,” but to get there by an intellectual route takes much evidence. On one hand, we can suppose that an omniscient god who wanted to convince us that he existed would be able to reach the most skeptical atheist. For example, God could reveal himself to everyone on the same day so that we would have everyone else’s verification that our senses are reliable.

But how would you rule out very intelligent aliens? Imagine if you went back just 200 years in time with today’s modern technology—antibiotics, telephones, CGI movies and Photoshopped photos, airplanes, weapons, and so on. It would be easy to convince many people that you were a god.

Now imagine how we’d respond to someone from a technology 200 years more advanced than us. Now make it two million years. If they wanted to convince us that they were the creator of the universe, how would we know any different? (More.)

Consider from a more abstract level the problem of finding proof for the supernatural. Using natural evidence to prove the existence of the supernatural may be like Flatlanders using evidence in their 2D world to prove that there is a 3D world out there. (More.)

9. Don’t read in your own desires

Was God wrong to demand genocide or not? Did God demand human sacrifice or not? Did God approve of slavery and polygamy or not?

Christians are often quick to come to God’s rescue to find counter-verses to argue that God shares our modern sensibilities on these matters. (One wonders why God can’t make things clear himself, but never mind.) These apologists are certain that they and God are on the right side of these moral matters despite what a plain reading of the Bible indicates.

And while they’re at it, they’ll find support for their own particular views on homosexuality, abortion, and other social issues—either pro or con, it doesn’t matter because the Bible can be mined to find support for just about anything..

The honest critic lets the Bible speak for itself. If it seems to contradict itself, that may be explained by the many books of the Bible coming from many authors from different cultures and with different ideas of God.

10. Don’t presuppose God

The Christian set of 10 principles ended with this one: “Remember who’s boss.” That is, don’t forget that God is in charge and that we aren’t empowered to judge him. Whether the problem is ambiguity or contradictions in the Bible or evil in the world, we can’t even understand the situation enough to convict him.

But of course this simply starts with the conclusion. We can’t start by assuming that God exists and the Bible is his word any more than we’d start a critique of Islam, Mormonism, or Scientology with an assumption that they were correct. We’re not trying to judge God but simply decide if the Bible is anything more than what it looks like, an ancient myth.

Bonus: #11. Don’t abdicate your role as judge

There is no objective authority to lean on. As a Christian, you might rely on a pastor, televangelist, or biblical scholar. You can read the Bible, trying to resolve its various interpretations applied by its various partisans. And still the problem remains—you take their input, but the buck stops with you.

You ain’t much, but you’re all you’ve got.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is,
it doesn’t matter how smart you are.
If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
— Richard P. Feynman

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/16/15.)

Image from Martin Thomas, CC license
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10 Skeptical Principles for Evaluating the Bible

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I recently analyzed “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions” (here) from Christian blogger Jim Wallace. I didn’t think much of them.

I’d like to offer my own version. Here are ten skeptical principles for evaluating the Bible that I think are more honest than Wallace’s.

1. Don’t confuse genres

Wallace is a murder investigator, and he tries to find parallels between the analysis done by the legal system and the study of evidence in the Bible. He finds this parallel with Bible contradictions:

It’s my job, as the investigator, to determine why the eyewitnesses appear to contradict one another, even though there is no doubt the event occurred and the witnesses were telling the truth.

A murder that you’re sure happened because you’ve read the coroner’s report and seen the body at the crime scene is quite different from a resurrection that is only a poorly evidenced story told 2000 years ago within a credulous prescientific culture.

In the case of the Bible, we don’t begin our study certain that a single word is true. It might be no more factual than the story of Gilgamesh. We have stories far removed from whatever actual events triggered them, while in a murder investigation we start with the fact of the dead body.

2. Never begin with the assumption that the Bible must be right

Making sense of the Bible isn’t easy—there are 45,000 denominations of Christianity based on different interpretations of God’s plan. The hypothesis that the Bible is wrong at a particular place needs to be one of the candidates since it sometimes makes the most sense of the evidence.

For example, consider the simplicity of the Documentary Hypothesis (that the early books of the Bible are an amalgam from four primary sources). Many facts are explained by few assumptions, the mark of a good theory.

If your religion demands that you begin with the conclusion that the Bible is right, you’re no longer following the evidence.

3. Science wins

For learning about reality, science has an excellent track record, while Christianity has taught us nothing. Science isn’t perfect, but it’s the best that we’ve got, and when the Bible says something that contradicts the science, what can we do but go with the discipline that delivers?

Apologists like William Lane Craig admit the value of science when he cites the Big Bang. He wants a beginning to the universe, and the Big Bang gives him that. It has the backing of famous scientists that he can quote (he likes quotes from famous scientists). Unfortunately, evolution steps on his theological toes, so he rejects it.

This nonscientist imagines himself the Judge of All Science, able to sift out the good stuff (Big Bang) from the nonsense (evolution), but with this ridiculous and ill-informed position, he has lost any standing as a commenter of science.

Laypeople like Craig and me have no option but to accept the scientific consensus where it exists. It’s not perfect, but we have nothing better.

Apologists often praise science where they can but fall back on handwaving when the evidence is inconvenient. Beware.

4. Be consistent: use the same standard to evaluate all truth claims.

Whenever you reject a pseudoscientific claim like astrology or a supernatural worldview like Islam, check to see if your reasoning would also reject Christianity. And whenever you accept a Christian claim (the Resurrection, a Jesus miracle, the Bible’s creation story), see if your criteria would also accept similar stories from other religions. Don’t demand tough standards for the other guy but give your cherished beliefs a pass.

Prophecy is a good example. Don’t laugh at people impressed by Nostradamus or who find clues in the Bible Code or who got caught up on Harold Camping’s hysteria about the end of the world if you apply the same poor thinking to the Bible’s claims of prophecy. We all know what a good prophecy is, but Christians seem to forget that when it’s their own claims in the spotlight.

(I’ve explored prophecy claims in Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, the virgin birth, and Daniel.)

5. Don’t judge competing interpretations based on your agenda. Let the Bible speak for itself.

What if the Bible seems to contradict itself? For example,

  • The Bible says that faith alone is required for salvation (Romans 3:28) but also that works are sufficient to earn eternal life (Matthew 25:31–46).
  • Jesus had a physical body after the resurrection (Luke 24:37–43). Or did he (Luke 24:31, 36)?
  • The Bible’s six-day creation story conflicts with the Garden of Eden story.

The context should be the whole Bible.

Apologists pick their way through the minefield of verses, highlighting the ones that make their case and ignoring those that don’t. I suppose they depend on their readers’ ignorance (or complicity).

Don’t make the Bible into a sock puppet that says whatever you need it to. If the Bible says contradictory things, let it speak for itself. Don’t apologize for it.

Maybe (remember rule 2) the Bible is simply wrong.

To be concluded in part 2.

A god unexamined is a god not worth believing in.
A god examined is a god not possible to believe in.
— commenter MNb

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/12/15.)

Image credit: Olga Berrios, flickr, CC
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