Monthly Archives: April 2019

Bad Atheist Arguments? Let’s Investigate 16 of Them. (Part 3)

Posted on by

This is part 3 of our look at a Christian’s list of 16 supposedly bad atheist arguments (part 1). Take a look and see if your critique is the same as mine. We’ll pick up with #9.

Argument #9: Science disproves God

“This is one of the most broad arguments in the list. There are many fields in science, and some concepts about God are completely unrelated to those fields. What exactly is being said here? There needs to be more detail given before any substantial discussion can take place.”

Here again, there’s a glimmer of good advice. “Proves” or “disproves” are tough claims to defend. It’s not smart to say that science disproves God since science never proves or disproves anything. Science is always provisional.

And again this is an uncharitable Christian response. It’s an easy out to declare your opponent’s argument invalid or flawed so you can dismiss it, but that’s cowardly or even dishonest. A better response would be to encourage the atheist to recast the argument to be more defensible so that any valid elements of the atheist argument could be considered.

That improved atheist argument would be something like this: we don’t need a disproof of unicorns to go through our lives believing that they probably don’t exist. Science hasn’t proven they don’t exist, but that’s where the evidence points. Absence of evidence (assuming you’re looking where you’d expect evidence to be) is most definitely evidence of absence. Christian claims for God fail by the same logic.

Argument #10: Stories of Jesus changed like the game of telephone

“You know the game of telephone? You start with a sentence and then it gets changed after being passed down from person to person? Well, that’s what happened when stories of Jesus were passed from person to person.

“This objection does not take into account the communal aspect of oral tradition—people could check their stories against one another. The objection also causes the reliability of all ancient history to be called into question.”

Yes, people could check their stories against one another, but when they differ, who’s right, if anyone? What authority do you consult? The game-of-telephone analogy applies during the period of oral tradition, when there were no written documents to be that authority. Sometimes the Jesus story was simply shared person to person—who validates it then? And when the story was told within a group, a listener might interject a correction, but without a reliable authority, this debate could settle on the erroneous version as easily as the correct one.

This objection fears that the sinking of Jesus claims would drag down all of ancient history as well, but consider the difference between conventional ancient history and the gospels. Not much rides on the accuracy of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War or Livy’s History of Rome. If historians found errors, the consensus view of that historical event would change, and life would go on as before. Few laypeople would know or care. Compare that with the discovery of a major, dogma-threatening correction to the Bible.

If you remove the supernatural from the lives of Alexander the Great or Caesar Augustus, you have their remarkable accomplishments as documented by history. But take away the supernatural from the gospel story, and you’re left with an ordinary, uninteresting man. Jesus is nothing without the supernatural.

Historians today debate what sources the gospel authors used. How old were they and how reliable did the authors think they were? Were they trying to document history, write literature, or create holy scripture? We don’t even know who the gospel authors were. We’re used to giving the gospels a pass on these points, since rigorous historical standards didn’t exist back then.

Except that they did. The Secular Web gives as an example Roman Antiquities. This book was written in Greek, just like the gospels, but it preceded the gospels by a century. The introduction to that book shows that ancient authors could indeed identify their sources and thoroughly critique their reliability. They could write biography, showing warts and all, rather than just flattering hagiography. The gospels have none of this. (So much for archaeologist Sir William Ramsey’s famous 1915 conclusion, “[Luke] should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”)

Finally, the game of telephone understates the amount of change in the oral transmission of a story. The game of telephone passes a message of a few sentences from person to person in a few minutes. The gospel story is far longer and more complicated, and its period of oral history was decades long.

(Click for more on the gospels’ reliability and the game of telephone and how historians would treat the supernatural in the gospels.)

Argument #11: If you grew up somewhere else you would believe something else

“This is one of the most common objections to Christianity—if you grew up in a middle eastern country, you would be a Muslim, not a Christian! While this concept does have some truth in it, it packs a load of unsupported assumptions. It also has little effect on the question of if God actually exists or not.”

Ten countries are 99+ percent Muslim. What’s the likelihood that a baby born and raised in one of those countries will become Muslim? Religion is learned as a cultural trait, like customary attire or language. A Pakistani baby doesn’t evaluate Urdu against other languages to pick the best one; it just learns the language of its environment. The same is true for religion.

As for the question of whether God exists, this argument shows that belief in Allah doesn’t need Allah to exist. The same is true for belief in other gods. Natural explanations are sufficient to explain religious beliefs, and when people adopt a religion, it’s almost always the religion of their culture.

(Click for more on religion as a reflection of culture and how Christianity would fare if people didn’t learn it as children.)

Argument #12: Atheists can be good without believing in God

“This statement is true in the sense that people who do not believe in God can make choices that are moral choices. But the statement ignores the grounding of the good—the question of what caused the existence of objective moral duties. [What do atheists suppose] caused “good” and “bad” to exist in the first place?”

What objective moral duties? William Lane Craig defined objective morality this way: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” I’ll grant that moral statements can be deeply or universally felt, but that doesn’t make them objective by this definition.

The dictionary makes the same point. Look up morality, good, evil, or similar words, and you won’t find an appeal to anything objective. The Christian can’t assume objective moral duties but must first show (1) that they exist and (2) that humans can reliably access them.

As for what caused good and bad to exist in the first place, evolution explains human morality. We’re all the same species, so we have a intuitive sense of morality that’s largely shared. We’re a social animal (like wolves or elephants), so we praise pro-social concepts like trust or compassion.

Concluded in part 4.

Scientists do not coddle ideas.
They crash test them.
They run them into a brick wall
at seventy miles per hour
and examine the pieces.
If the idea is sound,
the pieces will be those of the wall.
— unknown researcher

.

Image from Jamison Riley, CC license
.

Being on the Wrong Side of History on Same-Sex Marriage? Worse than You Think.

Posted on by

It’s easy to believe passionately in the rightness of our moral position. What’s often ignored is the importance of being on the right side of history.

Friction over same-sex marriage

Same-sex marriage is one example of a contentious moral issue in America today, and passions still run strong on both sides. The National Black Church Initiative, a coalition of 34,000 churches, left the Presbyterian Church USA a few years ago after they liberalized their definition of marriage to “two people, traditionally a man and a woman.”

Acceptance of same-sex marriage within society has pushed many conservatives to fear the sky is falling. Rick Santorum, a Republican presidential candidate, thought he saw in American culture the gradual erosion of rights that Jews and Christians experienced in Nazi Germany. The title of Santorum’s 2015 documentary film reveals how soon he imagines that his religious rights could be lost: “One Generation Away.”

Worries about the 2015 Supreme Court Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage had a conclave of Christian leaders clutching their pearls. One proclaimed,

Once you elevate same-sex marriage to the level of protected status, whether on the federal or the state level, you begin to change and transform the face of society. In my view it will result in the beginning of the end of Western Civilization.

What will history say?

These Christian leaders see themselves as fighting the good fight, but how will this fit with the judgment of history?

Here’s one answer. Jennifer Morse, president and founder of the Ruth Institute (“Helping the Victims of the Sexual Revolution”), was asked if she feared being embarrassed by the seeming inevitability of same-sex marriage. She replied:

I am not the slightest bit worried about the judgment of history on me. This march-of-history argument bothers me a lot. . . . What they’re really saying is, “Stop thinking, stop using your judgment, just shut up and follow the crowd because the crowd is moving towards Nirvana and you need to just follow along.”

You’ve got to admire that. She’s standing up for what she feels is right, unconcerned about whether it’s popular or how history will judge that position.

But let’s not pretend that the judgment of history is irrelevant. Remember George Wallace’s infamous 1963 declaration, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Was Wallace fighting the good fight with his stand for racial segregation? He would’ve said yes. History says he got it wrong.

Those opposed to freedom for Southern slaves, women’s suffrage, and minorities’ civil rights were all fighting the good fight, like those opposed to same-sex marriage today. Just remember that history wins in the end.

Indeed, Jennifer Morse does think about the evaluation of history, it’s just that she thinks that she’ll be on the right side of it:

[Same-sex marriage proponents] are the ones who are going to be embarrassed. They are the ones who are going to be looking around, looking for the exits, trying to pretend that it had nothing to do with them, that it wasn’t really their fault.

Those fighting the good fight think that they will eventually be judged on the right side of history. I’ll propose that as the definition of fighting the good fight: taking a minority position now that you think will eventually, if only decades in the future, be seen as the morally correct one.

And there’s the problem—reading the tea leaves to see where society is moving. There is no reliable route to objective moral truth (I argue that what we imagine as objective moral truth is actually just widely shared or strongly felt moral beliefs). There is no celestial library where the answers to all moral questions are in a big book. The judgment of history is the best we’ve got, and we fool ourselves when we think that moral rightness is ultimately determined by anything more lofty.

It might seem shallow to base one’s moral convictions on what society will conclude fifty years in the future rather than on one’s conscience today. But make no mistake: the strength or sincerity of your convictions—about same-sex marriage or any moral issue—are irrelevant. Your stand today will be judged by the conclusions of that future society, and being on the right side of history is all that ultimately matters. Get that wrong, and you’re just another George Wallace.

Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world,
for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.
― René Descartes

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/2/15.)

Image credit: Shutterstock
.

Bad Atheist Arguments? Let’s Investigate 16 of Them. (Part 2)

Posted on by

This is part 2 of our look at a Christian’s list of 16 supposedly bad atheist arguments (part 1). Take a look and see if your critique is the same as mine. Let’s pick up with #5.

Argument #5: The gospels are full of myths

“This objection completely ignores the definition of a myth in ancient literature. A myth looks back at the past to understand how something in the present came to be. The gospels were written as a historical narrative, discussing things that were happening at the time.”

Let’s first find what’s valid within this argument. Words like “myth” can have both a vernacular definition and a scholarly definition. From a scholarly standpoint, a myth is a sacred narrative that explains some aspect of reality. For example, the Prometheus myth explains why humans have fire, and the raven myth of the Salish people (from a region that includes present-day Seattle) explains where the sun came from.

Using this scholarly definition, someone saying that the gospels contain myths (1) would not be correct since the gospels don’t have explanations of where things come from (the Old Testament does) and (2) would not be saying anything dismissive (there’s nothing wrong with arguments that explain where X came from or why Y is true to this day).

Where this objection fails is that “the gospels are full of myths,” said by a layman is correct using a colloquial definition of “myth” such as, “a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone.”

(Click for more on myths, legends, and all that.)

The objection declares that the gospels were written as historical narrative, but that’s a claim that can’t just be assumed but must be supported with evidence. (I argue that the Jesus story is legend.)

Unfortunately, this objection falls into the category of errors that has ensnared so many other Christian arguments, the category of uncharitable interpretation. If someone uses a word incorrectly, don’t dismiss the error and declare victory. Instead, point out the error and allow them to correct their argument. (Click for more on apologists attempting to dismiss an argument on a technicality.)

Argument #6: Faith is belief without evidence 

“This definition of faith is a clear strawman of the Christian position. Most Christians view faith as involving some sort of personal trust. The trust aspect of faith is simply ignored by the ‘no evidence’ definition.”

Huh?? This article is in Frank Turek’s blog, right? That’s the same Frank Turek who co-authored I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, right? The “faith” in that title is obviously some sort of blind faith, belief based on wishful thinking, and/or belief based on insufficient evidence. To hammer this home, the book says,

The less evidence you have for your position, the more faith you need to believe it (and vice versa). Faith covers a gap in knowledge (p. 26).

Don’t tell me that “faith is belief without evidence” is a deliberate strawman of the Christian position when this site supports that very definition.

Getting clarity on Christian definitions can be like chasing a greased pig. “Faith” is belief firmly grounded in evidence when the Christian is being judged by outsiders, but within the fold it might switch as necessary to belief regardless of evidence. We see this, for example, in Jesus’s response to Doubting Thomas’s demand for evidence: “[Thomas,] you believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me” (John 20:29).

Fifth-century church father Augustine had a similar position:

If you chance upon anything [in Scripture] that does not seem to be true, you must not conclude that the sacred writer made a mistake; rather your attitude should be: the manuscript is faulty, or the version is not accurate, or you yourself do not understand the matter.

Tell me that faith can mean belief firmly grounded in evidence, but don’t tell me that faith is never defined differently by Christians or that saying otherwise is a deliberate strawman.

While we’re talking about faith, why do Christian sites often talk about how to deal with doubt, but you never see that within science? (More: a critique of faith)

Argument #7: There’s no evidence for God

“Christians claim to have philosophical arguments for God’s existence. It seems like those arguments could provide at least a tiny bit of evidence for God, even if an Atheist doesn’t consider the evidence close to satisfactory. Atheists who use this phrase are overstating their case.”

This turns on what “no evidence” means. Is there no evidence for a flat earth? Some believe this claim. Is there no evidence that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri? Millions of Mormons believe it was.

Here again, this objection contains a scrap of useful advice: don’t overstate your case. If you believe that the evidence for the Christian claims is insufficient or even insignificant, then say that rather than the convenient shorthand of declaring that there is no evidence.

My approach is to say that the evidence for Christian claims is insufficient (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence) simply to avoid getting in the morass of this objection. I think there is as much evidence for God as for leprechauns, but hairsplitting over what the “no” in “no evidence” means is a tangent I have no time for.

Argument #8: God is a maniac slavedriver

“The idea here is that God is some sort of dictator who tells us what to do and believe and threatens to send us to hell if we don’t listen. But this characterization of God contrasts from the understanding that God offers a choice for us to escape the ‘slavery’ of sin and to experience life as it was meant to be lived.”

“God offers a choice”? I don’t even think that God exists; I certainly have no belief in this nutty plan of salvation. The first step is for me to believe in God. Belief is driven by evidence, and I can’t choose to believe. (If you disagree, show us how that works by choosing to believe in unicorns.) Give me sufficient evidence, and I’ll have no choice but to believe. (More: the problem of God’s hiddenness)

Now on to God and sin. Imperfections in a product are the fault of the designer or the manufacturer, and if humans are God’s creation, then God is to blame for any imperfections.

Jesus made clear that few make the grade:

Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it (Matthew 7:13–14).

It’s a poor teacher who graduates a minority of their students. Christian dogma tells us that some of us are destined for hell, and yet God knowingly made us anyway. You’ve got a lot of ’splainin’ to do with that message.

As for God telling us what to believe, the Evangelical position is more, “believe what you will, just know that believing the wrong thing is thoughtcrime, and you’ll be punished for it.”

Finally, how are we to “experience life as it was meant to be lived”? We’re told Jesus set the example for a perfect life, and yet God in the Old Testament (who is the same god as Jesus) has an old-fashioned take on genocide, evil, human sacrifice, and slavery. Taking the Old Testament at face value—and seeing morality through an Iron Age lens—these barbaric practices were just fine from God’s standpoint.

“God’s ways are not our ways” is the Get Out of Jail Free card played when an apologist is in a corner and can’t explain God’s actions or motivations using modern morality. But then what are God’s ways? Is he bound by anything or is he just capricious? What would constitute an immoral act for him when he has committed pretty much every immoral act a person could do?

Continue to part 3.

Everyone has the right to believe anything they want.
And everyone else has the right to find it fucking ridiculous.
— Ricky Gervais

.

Image from Vasily Koloda, CC license
.

Bad Atheist Arguments? Let’s Investigate 16 of Them.

Posted on by

Are you ready to test your wits by responding some (supposedly) bad atheist arguments?

I began a series of posts looking at bad Christian arguments almost five years ago. I titled it “25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid,” and after an initial flurry of posts highlighting 25 stupid arguments, more posts have trickled out so that now we’re almost to 50.

But two can play that game. The Bizarro World version of this blog is Frank Turek’s crossexamined.org, an evangelical Christian ministry aimed at college students. Turek’s blog recently reposted an article titled, “16 Bad Atheist Arguments and How to Respond to Them” by Jeremy Linn.

Do atheists have bad arguments as well? Let’s take a look.

Argument #1: Who created God?

“This question is asked under the assumption that God needs a creator. This assumption misrepresents the Christian understanding of God, where God is the necessary cause of all creation.”

Suppose a Christian apologist explains that the universe was created by God. An atheist might respond, “But who created God?” and the apologist would then say that God needs no creator by definition.

The apologist imagines a chain of causation that goes back to the ultimate cause, God, and there the chain ends. But simply making that claim isn’t the same as backing it up with evidence. If all those other things had causes, why not God? You can define God as “the necessary cause of all creation” (or anything you want), but that doesn’t bring it into existence.

Back in the real world, physics resolves the question of the infinite sequence of causes by arguing that some quantum events don’t have causes and that the beginning of the universe may have been one such quantum event.

(Click for more on the atheist justification for asking, “But Who Created God?” and the Cosmological Argument.)

Argument #2: Jesus never existed

“This objection flies against the conclusions of almost all scholars invested into Biblical and Roman history, along with evidence from both the New Testament books and extrabiblical sources.”

I don’t make this argument for two reasons. First, I haven’t read enough on each side of the argument to have an informed opinion. Second, and more importantly, I don’t see this as a practical argument. My focus is on apologetics—arguments and evidence for and against Christianity’s supernatural claims. From that standpoint, I don’t care whether at the beginning of Christianity there was an actual man or not. Each is compatible with my position that Christianity is false.

That doesn’t make this a bad argument (which was the initial claim), and maybe with more research I’d find that it is a bad argument. It’s just that other arguments make my case quicker and easier.

Argument #3: Atheists believe in just one less god than Christians

“There is a huge difference between a Theist (such as a Christian) and an Atheist. Theists believe in a supreme, personal creator of the Universe. Atheists don’t. This difference has huge implications for how each carries out their lives.”

But on the other hand, Christians reject Poseidon, Xenu, and Chemosh for the same reasons that atheists do—the claim that they are gods is remarkable, and there isn’t enough evidence to support it. Maybe theists and atheists aren’t so different after all.

Let’s not overestimate the commonality among theists. They can’t even agree on the most fundamental specifics: how many gods there are, what their names are, or what they want from us. Theists may all sense the supernatural, but either that sense is so muddled as to give radically contradictory views of the supernatural, or belief in the supernatural is just a many-sided cultural (and all-natural) phenomenon. My guess is the latter.

(Click for more arguing that “I just believe in one less god than you do” is a valid argument.)

Argument #4: Believing in God is like believing in Santa or leprechauns.

“The Christian claims to have evidence for God, and hardly anyone claims to have evidence for a real Santa. The alleged evidence for God cannot be simply dismissed with this silly statement.”

It all comes down to “the alleged evidence for God.” When atheists ask for it, what they get are the same tired, unconvincing arguments. The best that they’ve got are deist arguments that argue for the Christian god as convincingly as any other. These are arguments like, “Why does the universe look fine tuned?” or “Why does life look designed?”

Sure, let’s say that the evidence for God is not zero. For example, the 2+ billion Christians on the earth right now is evidence that their god exists. That doesn’t count for much—5+ billion non-Christians argue that they’re wrong, and 45,000 denominations argue that their perfect god is imperfect in getting his message across—but let’s grant that it counts for something.

Let’s not delude ourselves that evidence is what brings people to faith. Christians don’t monitor Shintoism or Jainism on a religious stock exchange, ready to jump ship if the evidence for another offering exceeds that for their current holding. In almost all cases, they don’t believe because of evidence, their intellectual arguments rationalize a position they hold for emotional reasons, and their preferred religion wasn’t chosen but was adopted from their culture.

I realize that God has a stick and can punish me, but Santa could put me on the naughty list. Neither entity is part of my worldview, so neither punishment bothers me.

Is there more evidence for God than for Santa or leprechauns? Adults do believe in God (unlike Santa), but Yahweh is just one of the gods that is in vogue at the moment. Millions of Romans believed in Apollo, whom Christians today quickly dismiss as mythology. The Christian argument begins to become compelling when they show how Yahweh isn’t merely fashionable (unlike Apollo) and isn’t a manmade god (unlike Allah or Shiva).

You’ve got evidence? Without it, God is indeed like Santa Claus.

Continued in part 2.

 If you can’t trust your own thinking,
and if you therefore cannot trust the arguments leading to atheism,
then wouldn’t it stand to reason that you similarly
cannot trust the arguments that led to a belief in God?
— Neil Carter, Godless in Dixie blog

.
Image from Aimee Vogelsang, CC license
.

More of the Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions (Part 6)

Posted on by

With Easter coming up, let’s stick with the theme from last time and explore interesting contradictions in the Passion narrative.

23. Women brought spices to the tomb (or not)

The importance of spices from a plot standpoint is that they’re the motivation for the women’s visit to the tomb on the Sunday after Jesus’s crucifixion. You need to get someone there to discover the empty tomb.

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” (Mark 16:1–3)

Several commenters (and the author of Mark himself) have noted another plot hole: why would the women bother to make the trip with no way to roll back the stone at the doorway? The previous verse makes clear that the women had watched the burial and knew about the stone.

But set that aside. The gospel of John tells a different story about who applied the spices. Rewind to Friday afternoon:

With Pilate’s permission, [Joseph of Arimathea] came and took the body away. He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. (John 19:38–40)

Seventy-five pounds of spices? Have you ever carried a 75-pound backpack or lifted a 75-pound weight at the gym? That sounds like an impractical weight and a pointlessly extravagant gift, but let’s set that aside as well. Now the story has men applying the spices. In John’s story, the women (or woman) goes for no reason: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb” (John 20:1). No reason, that is, except as a literary prop to discover the empty tomb.

As an aside, note that a body encased in an enormous mound of spice bound in place with linen strips (I’m envisioning the Michelin Man oozing aloe and smelling of myrrh) is not what the Shroud of Turin image shows, and John talks about strips of linen rather than the Shroud of Turin’s long sheet, so John’s story can’t coexist with such a relic.

Depending on the gospel you pick, women go to the tomb to apply spices Sunday morning (but didn’t actually use them) or men successfully apply the spices Friday afternoon.

24. Peter’s denials

This example is of less importance, but it’s well known and shows yet another set of contradictions. At the Last Supper, Jesus said that his disciples will scatter once he is taken away, but Peter protests that he won’t. Jesus tells Peter that he will disavow him three times before the rooster crows, and indeed that’s what happens.

But read the accounts, and the story differs in each of the gospels.

  • In Mark, Peter is accused of being one of Jesus’s followers by a slave girl, then the same girl again, and then a crowd of people (Mark 14:66–71).
  • In Matthew, it’s a slave girl, another slave girl, and then a crowd of people (Matthew 26:69–73).
  • In Luke, it’s a slave girl, a man, and then another man (Luke 22:54–60).
  • In John, it’s a girl at the door, several anonymous persons, and one of the high priest’s servants (John 18:15–17, 25–27)

We can try out a popular Christian tactic and try to resolve contradictory accounts by claiming that they’re both true. For example,

  • there were wise men (Matthew) and shepherds (Luke) at the birth of Jesus,
  • there was one angel (Matthew and Mark) and a second angel (Luke and John) at the empty tomb, and
  • Mary Magdalene (John) and other women (the other gospels) went to the tomb.

Allowing for synonymous descriptions (Mark’s slave girl could’ve been John’s girl at the door, for example) and squashing these confrontations together, we have Peter denying Jesus to a slave girl, another slave girl, a crowd, a man, another man, and perhaps more. That’s a lot more than Jesus’s promised three.

Continue with more contradictions here.

Only the atheist recognizes
the boundless narcissism
and self-deceit of the saved.
Only the atheist realizes
how morally objectionable it is
for survivors of a catastrophe [like a hurricane]
to believe themselves spared by a loving God,
while this same God drowned infants in their cribs.
— Sam Harris

.

Image from Eva Blue, CC license
.

More of the Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions (Part 5)

Posted on by

bible contradictions

I recently summarized my Top 20 list of the Bible’s most damning contradictions. But wouldn’t you know it—like zombies that just keep coming, there are more!

These aren’t trivial contradictions—something such as the number of years of a king’s reign reported differently in two places. No, these are contradictions that can’t easily be dismissed.

Christian apologists have had 2000 years to notice the problems and come up with something, but that doesn’t mean their answers are satisfactory. If anyone points out that my examples here are wrong or misleading, I’ll correct them and identify the helpful reader.

21. Jesus predicts his death and resurrection, but everyone forgot

Some of these aren’t contradictions so much as plot holes—two plot elements that can’t coexist. This is an example.

The gospels clearly and repeatedly show Jesus predicting his death and resurrection. Here are just a few of more than ten examples:

[Jesus said,] “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will deliver Him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. And on the third day He will be raised to life.” (Matthew 20:18–19)

Then He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and that He must be killed and after three days rise again. (Mark 8:31)

They know that Jesus will soon be crucified, and they know how long until he’s raised from the dead. But if everyone knows this, why then are they morose after the crucifixion? Why are women going to the tomb with spices, expecting to find a dead body? Why does the empty tomb surprise them? And why wasn’t there a crowd to witness the miraculous event themselves—if not the multitudes that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday just a week earlier, then at least his inner circle?

You see what I meant about the plot hole—a good editor would’ve noticed that a straightforward consequence of Jesus’s many clear declarations about rising again would’ve brought people eager to see the promise fulfilled—or at least unsurprised when it was.

(h/t Debunking Christianity)

22. Jesus and the zombies

Clear your mind of that problem and let’s review the empty-tomb story from a different angle. The women visit the tomb of Jesus to apply spices to the body and are shocked to see the tomb empty. They run back to tell the male disciples (or not, according to Mark) who are likewise astonished. Later that evening, Doubting Thomas, who surely performed more laudable actions in his life than just doubt, did what he’s best known for.

But why would it have been astonishing, on Sunday morning, to find Jesus risen from the dead? Remember this incident:

[At the moment of Jesus’s death,] the earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. (Matthew 27:51–3)

Here’s the chronology. Jesus died on Friday evening, and at that moment many worthy dead people came to life. Jesus resurrected (he was to be “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” [Matt. 12:40], which Friday evening to Sunday morning isn’t, but let’s ignore that), and then the newly undead people left their tombs to walk around Jerusalem. Next, the women found the empty tomb, and then word spread among the male disciples. The gospels differ over whether the women were the first to see the risen Jesus at the tomb (Matthew and John), or the disciples were the first see him Sunday night (Luke), or nobody sees him (Mark). Finally, a week later, Doubting Thomas saw Jesus.

Though the zombies are never connected to the Jesus story, the literary goal is easy to imagine. The resurrection of Jesus was the first fruits of his triumph over death, with the zombie resurrection in Jerusalem a demonstration to emphasize the point.

The problem is that surprise is an important part of this story, but no one would be surprised by a risen Jesus once they’d seen the crowd of undead. What’s one more, particularly when he was the instigator of the process? Word of the remarkable sight of walking dead would’ve traveled quickly through Jerusalem.

When the women returned, breathless with the news of having seen Jesus (or just the empty tomb), the disciples could’ve replied that Jerusalem was crawling with zombies, so what’s one more? Or, if that news hadn’t reached the disciples by the time the women returned, everyone in the city would’ve surely heard by the time Doubting Thomas finally saw Jesus a week later. Knowing of the zombies days earlier, how could Thomas have been surprised that Jesus had risen as well? Jesus showing his wounds and Thomas touching them for confirmation wouldn’t have happened.

About a wide range of Christian commentaries on this passage, Patheos blogger Neil Carter said, “Almost none of them think this really happened.” Nevertheless, the contradiction remains: Thomas, knowing about the zombies as everyone in Jerusalem surely did, would’ve dropped his demand that Jesus prove that he really rose from the dead.

(h/t to Neil’s post, which is where I learned about this contradiction.)

Continue to part 6.

If Jesus sees his shadow on Easter morning
it means 3,000 more years without a second coming.
— comment at Debunking Christianity

.

Image from Daniel Jensen, CC license
.