Monthly Archives: June 2019

Your Religion Is a Reflection of Your Culture—You’d Be Muslim if You Were Born in Pakistan

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Don’t be too confident in the correctness of your Christian beliefs—they’re just the reflection of your culture. You’d be a Muslim if you were born in Pakistan (or Saudi Arabia or Iran or any other overwhelmingly Muslim country).

This argument feels right—it’s hard to imagine a baby born in Yemen growing up as anything but a Muslim—but let’s put our confidence on hold until we explore some popular objections.

Objection 1: The argument fails when stated in absolute terms.

There are people born in Pakistan and Somalia who grow up to not be Muslims. Some come from Christian communities, and some grow up to reject the Islam of their birth. Ayaan Hirsi Ali (raised as a Muslim in Somalia) is one well-known example. And a large fraction of the American atheist community must’ve rejected their Christian upbringing.

You’re right. We’re talking about a tendency or correlation, not a certainty. “You’d be a Muslim if you were born in Pakistan” is a concise way to express the observation, but it isn’t precisely correct. Better would be: “People tend to reflect the religion of their environment.” Or: “We find a very strong correlation between belief and the environment of the believer. Why is that?”

While adults can switch religions, this is rare. A 2015 Pew Research study of the changes in world religions estimates that of the 8.1 billion believers in 2050, just 65 million (less than one percent) will have switched into their belief (chart).

People don’t randomly pick their religion by throwing a dart at a grid of the hundreds or thousands of religions of history. They don’t even roll the dice and pick a religion based on its popularity at the moment (31% Christian, 23% Muslim, 15% Hindu, etc.). The religion of young adults is very strongly correlated with that of their culture.

Objection 2: So there’s a correlation; so what?

Does it therefore prove one’s religious beliefs are false? This is the genetic fallacy (think “genesis”—the genetic fallacy criticizes an argument based on where it comes from).

No, this argument doesn’t prove anything. It simply points out a correlation that must be explained. When someone’s religion can easily be explained naturally—that they are a reflection of their culture—then we don’t need to reach for a supernatural explanation.

Alan Shlemon of the STR ministry said, “[This argument] confuses motivation with justification. It makes no difference what motivates a person to arrive at their belief. It only matters whether or not the belief is true.”

When we have a very plausible natural explanation for their beliefs, that doesn’t prove those beliefs wrong, but the natural explanation is the way to go.

Shlemon again: “If a challenger wants to undermine your faith, they must first show why it is false with reasons or evidence. . . . It only makes sense to ask why someone came to believe something false after you’ve done the hard work of refuting that belief.”

Here again is the familiar Christian response: the atheist has the burden of proof. I don’t want it.

Uh, no. You’re the one making the incredible claim. The burden of proof is yours. Atheism is the default position.

Objection 3: A pro-Christian argument stands on its own.

When I present an argument for Christianity, you must respond to the premises. Let’s say I’m biased. Or let’s say that I’m a Christian because I come from a Christian society—so what? That does nothing to prove my argument wrong.

Agreed, but we’re not talking about your arguments. The issue is that upbringing correlates with belief, and therefore religion looks like nothing more than a cultural custom.

Objection 4: The atheist is hoist with his own petard.

The argument applies to the atheist as well. Was the atheist raised in an atheist environment? Then his conclusions about religion must be as suspect as those of the Muslim raised in Pakistan! Was the atheist instead raised in a religious environment? Then since the atheist is confident in his beliefs, adults can then be trusted to correctly wade through the possibilities, whether they arrive at atheism or Christianity (or any other religion).

Imagine four people. One has malaria, one smallpox, one yellow fever, and one is healthy. Which of these is not like the other? “Healthy” isn’t a kind of sickness just like bald isn’t a kind of hair color. We don’t see four people with different sorts of sickness; rather, we see three people sick and one healthy.

In the same way, the symmetry that you imagine doesn’t exist. Children raised in a religion-free environment usually aren’t atheists because they were taught to be atheists but because they were not taught to be religious. By contrast, Christians are Christian because they were taught to be. Remove tradition and religious books, and Christianity would vanish. There is no objective knowledge from which to rebuilt it. (I explore religions vanishing in such a scenario here.)

No supernatural beliefs are self-evident. Atheism is the default position. To see this, suppose we see this religious correlation of Muslims in Pakistan, Christians in Alabama, atheists in Sweden, and so on. So we dismiss them all and say that each is a biased worldview. They’re all invalid. So what’s left? What’s left is no opinions about supernatural beliefs at all—in other words, the default view is simple atheism.

Remember the chart of religious switching mentioned above. Religions must continually get new recruits to thrive, and adults switching in isn’t where they get them. They get them through childhood indoctrination: they get them through making babies (discussed more here).

These four objections are representative of the dust raising that I’ve found on the internet in response to this argument. But when the dust settles, the problem remains. The strong correlation between adult beliefs and environment must be answered: almost all religious adults got their religion from their families, friends, or elsewhere in their environment.

Glass House rebuttal

Christians must be careful about pushing back too much. If they deny that the correlation between upbringing and adult belief means much, they’re left explaining why there are 29 countries that are 95+% Muslim and ten that are 99+% Muslim. Is it because the claims of Islam are correct? Or is it (dare I say it?) that people tend to adopt the religion of their culture?

What explains this?

Religion is a cultural trait like customs, fashion, or traditional foods. If there really were a god, we would expect people to be drawn to the true religion over all the others because its claims were supported by far better evidence, not that people would mirror their environment and religions would fill their ranks by indoctrinating children before their critical thinking skills are developed.

Religion is like language. I speak English because I was raised in the United States. I didn’t evaluate all the languages of the world before I picked the best one; it was just part of my environment.

Language, customs, fashion, and food aren’t things that are evaluated on a correct/incorrect scale. English isn’t any more correct than French or Chinese or Farsi; it’s just what some people are accustomed to. It’s not incorrect to understand or speak or prefer French; it’s just uncommon in the United States.

In the United States, one speaks English—not everyone, of course, but mostly. And in the United States, one is a Christian—not everyone, of course, but mostly. There’s no value judgment behind either one. Religion and language are simply properties of society.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that,
wherever you happen to be born,
the local religion always turns out to be the true one.
— Richard Dawkins

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/8/15.)

Image from Arian Zwegers, CC license

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Response to Atheists’ “Five Worst Arguments” (2 of 2)

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Evangelical blogger John Mark Reynolds is trying to help out atheists with a survey of “The Five Worst ‘Arguments’ (or Claims) Made by Internet Atheists.” It’d just be rude to not open this gift.

Part 1 looked at the first three arguments. Let’s continue to see if these atheist arguments are all that terrible.

Bad argument 4. “Stalin was trained in a seminary and his tyranny was really a religion not True Atheism.” 

Atheism is just one answer (“No”) to one question (“Do you have a god belief?”). So, yeah, you can’t find Stalin’s tyranny in atheism. There is no atheist bible that would guide Stalin’s actions.

Reynolds falls back on his 2015 post that took “Stalin was bad,” combined it with “Stalin was an atheist,” and spun a scary tale to spook the kids at the campfire.

Stalin was an atheist before he was a communist. He found a worldview to fit his atheism. He allowed a “state church” since atheism is so counter-intuitive that even with great persecution, theism kept cropping back up.

Stalin was bad because he was a dictator. Atheism is relevant only because a dictator couldn’t have a competing source of power, the Russian Orthodox Church, second-guessing his orders. Shutting down the church and imposing atheism was a consequence of his being a dictator, not the other way around.

Atheism isn’t at all counterintuitive, but religion thrives in desperate times. That a familiar and comforting religion pops up in a bleak Soviet Union says nothing about religion’s truth value, and if the traditional Russian religion had been something besides Christianity, that would’ve “kept cropping back up” the same way.

Atheism says nothing about morality. Christianity, on the other hand, says a lot about morality, and much of that sucks (more on genocide, the Flood, and slavery).

I rebut Reynolds’ Stalin argument here.

Bad argument 5. “Faith is believing things despite the evidence.”

“There are out of the two billion Christians (not even counting the other theists) surely someone who asserts this.”

I bet more than someone asserts it. The popular book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek makes clear in its very title that “believing things despite the evidence” is exactly how they’re defining faith. Just in case it wasn’t clear, they say in the book:

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)

If Reynolds wants to say that Christians using this kind of faith is embarrassing, I get it—it is. But he can’t pretend that it isn’t a widespread idea within Christianity.

Here are a few more examples of this interpretation.

[I don’t understand to believe but rather] I believe to understand. (Anselm of Canterbury)

If all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. (Dr. Kurt Wise, geologist)

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa. (Dr. William Lane Craig, philosopher)

Snake handlers have much of the unevidenced kind of faith. Pastor Jamie Coots died after a snakebite in 2014. If anyone knew that God doesn’t protect believers from snakebite it was him, since that was his ninth snakebite. In the face of this evidence, these Christians maintain faith in the (noncanonical) words of Jesus, “In my name . . . they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all.”

Here’s a final quote, this time from Reynolds himself:

Almost all the world’s Christians will use the world “faith,” but they have varied understandings of what “good faith” would be. . . . When Soren Kierkegaard uses “faith,” the term is different in important ways than when Saint Thomas Aquinas uses it.

Returning to Reynolds’ quote above, yeah, I guess someone thinks that “faith is believing things despite the evidence.” If Reynolds is frustrated by the various ways evidence and faith fit together, I suggest using “trust” to mean belief well supported by evidence and leave “faith” for the fuzzier version.

Reynolds says that he’s annoyed when atheists tell him what he means by faith, and I see the problem. Important words like “faith” often have multiple meanings, so we should make sure we’re not talking past each other.

6. “Bonus: Jesus did not (or probably did not) exist.”

“This is so foolish, I have never met more than one relevantly trained atheist who believed it.”

You need to get out more. I’ve met two, Dr. Richard Carrier (doctorate in history) and Dr. Robert M. Price (two doctorates: one in Systematic Theology and another in New Testament).

I’m not well read on the historical Jesus issue and so don’t make this argument, but I also avoid it because it’s tangential. There are much simpler and more effective attacks on Christianity.

Some religions start with real people who actually lived (Joseph Smith for Mormonism, Mary Baker Eddy for Christian Science, Bahá’u’lláh for Bahá’í), and some may not have (Buddha for Buddhism, Lao Tzu for Taoism, Zoroaster for Zoroastrianism). “Jesus was just a myth” is hardly a radical claim. Said another way, providing overwhelming evidence that Jesus was historical would be a difficult challenge.

If having good historical foundation at the birth of a religion is important, I’m surprised that Mormonism isn’t more attractive to evangelicals like Reynolds. No one doubts that Joseph Smith existed. We have a painting of him and might even have photos. And every historical argument Christians make about the New Testament (lots of manuscripts, short time from event to autograph, short time between autograph and best copies) has a much stronger equivalent within Mormonism. If they value historical grounding as much as they say they do, these Christians should become Mormon.

Agreements

Reynolds is right that some atheist arguments are poorly framed or thought out. I’ll summarize these six arguments and try to highlight points of agreement.

  1. The church had enormous power in Europe for 1500 years, and yet this was a period during which social conditions regressed before progress returned. Since God promised bounty on those who followed him, what we should’ve seen instead was Europe making remarkable, unexplainable (from natural means) growth to a universally healthy and prosperous society. What we saw instead was natural growing pains in a society handicapped by wars, famine, and disease.
  2. I agree that we should confidently comment only on those things we have competence in. Nevertheless, Plantinga’s modal ontological argument was a bad example. That argument doesn’t point to a God, and Plantinga himself admits it. Reynolds’ rejection of evolution undercuts his demand that we rely on competent experts.
  3. Science delivers. Philosophers who pretend to be scientists add nothing.
  4. Yes, Stalin was a bad man. No, atheism didn’t drive his ruthless policies. Atheism was a consequence of his being a dictator, not the other way around.
  5. Faith defined as “believing things despite the evidence” is a perfectly good definition and is widely held within Christianity. If you want faith to mean trust, I suggest you start using “trust.”
  6. The Jesus-was-a-myth argument is widely rejected by New Testament scholars. I don’t use it, partly for that reason, but also because it’s a tangent.
In response to my quoting the Bible, I got
“You shouldn’t quote the Bible unless you read it every day.”
I resisted the temptation to respond,
“Does it change that often?!”
— seen on the internet (paraphrased)

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Image from Simone Berna, CC license
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Response to Atheists’ “Five Worst Arguments”

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A blogger in the Evangelical Christian channel at Patheos has helped us out by identifying atheists’ worst arguments. The post is The Five Worst “Arguments” (or Claims) Made by Internet Atheists by John Mark Reynolds.

Are these arguments as shallow as Reynolds tells us? Let’s put on our waders and jump in.

1. “The Middle Ages were the Dark Ages, because ‘religion.’” 

This isn’t quite the argument I make, though it’s an intriguing area of research. During the medieval period in Europe, the church punished incorrect science (which to them wasn’t science poorly backed by evidence but science that offended or contradicted the church). Galileo wound up on the wrong side of this, for example.

What if there had been no Christian church dominating the conversation? No Witches Hammer to guide the torture and punishment of witches. No easy “God did it” answers or “That’s blasphemous!” restrictions to shut down inquiries about nature. No Index librorum prohibitorum (list of forbidden books).

On the other side of the ledger, the church did create religious colleges and primitive hospitals, and it funded artwork and cathedral building.

But that’s not the issue here. Let’s return to Reynolds.

Historians do not call the period of Western European history the “dark ages.” They were not dark.

The Dark Ages (roughly 400 – 1000 CE) can mean several things. The term can refer to the lack of historical records (that is, our view of that period is dark), or it can refer to the slow progress during the time between Roman times and the Renaissance (that is, it was a time of intellectual darkness).

Richard Carrier argues for the latter interpretation with charts showing dips during the Dark Ages for metal production, shipwrecks, urbanization, and wealth over time.

Quibbling over labels isn’t interesting. What is interesting is that Christianity presided over a regression of progress. In much of Europe during the Dark Ages, old Roman roads, buildings, and aqueducts were still in use but beyond the engineering ability of the civilizations that inherited them (more here and here). That sounds pretty dark to me.

Second, the discussion ignores the Eastern Roman Empire that maintained a secular “university” tradition for almost all her history as a Christian area.

Guess what event shut down higher education in Constantinople. It was the capture of Constantinople in 1204 during one of the Christian Crusades.

And support for higher education (not really universities) in the Byzantine Empire doesn’t change the fact that Christianity had a huge influence in Western Europe during this time with little to show for it.

Remember what the Bible promises. Jesus said, “Give, and it will be given to you” (Luke 6:38). He made many assurances that prayers will be answered without qualification. For example, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:14). The Bible tells us the beneficence of God:

No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (Mark 10:29–30).

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it (Malachi 3:10).

The religion of this generous god was in charge of Europe for 1500 years? You certainly wouldn’t know it from the slow rate of progress.

2. “I do not know modal logic, but Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument is bad.” 

If I can’t read Russian, I shouldn’t judge the Russian version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “Since I do not read Russian, I must go with the consensus or cite and follow responsible dissident scholars. . . . In the same way, I cannot evaluate a modal argument, if I cannot read a modal argument.”

Let’s go to the source. Here is Plantinga’s conclusion on his own argument: “Our verdict on these reformulated versions of [Anselm’s ontological] argument must be as follows. They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion.” Plantinga himself says that nothing can be built on this argument.

I put in the tedious hours to understand this argument, and, just as I suspected, this was just more dust thrown up to obscure things. The various ontological arguments are effective, not because they’re accurate but because they’re confusing. They’re caltrop arguments. Lay Christians can easily point to arguments like this that are opaque to them and demand that the atheist answer it. It doesn’t convince them, and it’s not important to support their faith, but it’s an effective apologetic tool because it’s a confusing argument put forward by a respected scholar. Gee, the atheist thinks, maybe there’s something to this one . . .

Nope, they’re crying wolf again. My critique is here.

But back to Reynolds: he’s right, of course, that we should have good reasons for our conclusions and fall back on the experts (where there is a consensus) in areas where we’re unqualified. He concludes, “Opining or constructing counter-arguments with no training or ability is like attacking Tolstoy’s Russian with no Russian.”

There’s more than a bit of hypocrisy in this good advice when we discover that he’s a young-earth creationist, even though he’s not a biologist, cosmologist, or geologist.

3. “Philosophy is useless. We just need science.” 

“This is, of course, a statement of philosophy and not science. The statement refutes itself.”

Then fix it. Don’t say, “Aha! You didn’t say ‘Simon says’!” to get off on a technicality. I’ve written more about the cowardice that’s sometimes behind Christian charges of self-defeating statements here. (Reynolds does, to some extent, strengthen this argument and respond to it.)

I’m happy to give philosophy its due. I do notice, however, that there are annual top ten lists of science and engineering developments but none for philosophy. Science delivers.

Was Werner Heisenberg doing philosophy when he came up with his uncertainty principle? Maybe so. But that was a physicist putting on a philosopher’s hat. The problem is when a philosopher puts on a physicist’s hat as (for example) William Lane Craig tries to. His bringing philosophical truisms (“Whatever begins to exist has a cause” or “Out of nothing, nothing comes”) to a cosmological issue is to bring a knife to a gun fight.

I explore the limits of philosophy here.

To be concluded in part 2.

I broke up with Jesus. People often ask me why.
There were plenty of reasons but one of the main ones
was that he wouldn’t return my calls.
— Neil Carter, Godless in Dixie blog

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Image from micadew, CC license
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Which Does Technology Benefit More: Christianity or Atheism?

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I attended an atheist conference in Seattle about seven years ago and met a woman who was falling away from religion. In the early years of her marriage, she and her husband had both been conservative Christians. Decades later, he still was. She wasn’t.

Openly reading The God Delusion to explore the other side of the issue wasn’t an option—at least not as a conventional book. But using a Kindle, no one could see if she were reading Richard Dawkins or Billy Graham. This was the first time the advantage that technology gave to the spread atheism became clear to me.

Cambrian Explosion, Technology Explosion

Daniel Dennett compared the effect modern technology is having on religion with the Cambrian Explosion. This explosion of new life forms is thought to have been triggered by oceans finally becoming transparent. Evolution could then select for eyesight, and prey could see predators and vice versa. This led to an arms race of not just improved eyesight but camouflage and armor (on the defensive side) and strength and teeth (on the offensive side).

Compare the sea beginning to become transparent 543 million years ago with the early Web in 1991. Now, 28 years later, technology has brought transparency to religion with Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other technologies, plus the smart phones and computers with which to view it. Secrecy has become much more difficult.

Technology has played a role in religion for centuries. Just decades after Christianity’s beginning, scribes began to create codices (books) instead of scrolls, first on papyrus and then on parchment. The printing press (1455) made Bibles, the Book of Hours, and other Christian books more widespread. The Bible became available in local languages, not just Latin.

As revolutionary as Gutenberg’s press was, its design didn’t change much for close to 400 years until the early days of the Industrial Revolution. But with the steam press in the early 1800s, printing rate increased tenfold. With the rotary press shortly afterward came another tenfold increase. Religious books and tracts of all sorts became economical.

Then radio, then movies, then television—each was used by Christianity to drive its message.

Technology harnessed by atheism

Technology has changed the landscape. Atheists have recently begun getting the message out with books (perhaps the most important “new” in New Atheism is the new bestseller status of some of their books), but with many thousands of new titles per year for the last few hundred years, atheists have always had a voice here.

Instead, it’s the new technologies that have really changed things: podcasts, blogs, e-books, print-on-demand technology, and the searchable internet to let doubting Christians (or even just curious or studious Christians) bypass the traditional gatekeepers of pastors or parents to find the often-embarrassing truth.

Of course, Christians can use this new technology, too, but they’ve always had the technological edge. They’ve had no competition in radio or TV, for example. But with the internet, all voices can get a hearing. The barrier to entry is now much smaller. Information that flows easily is a disadvantage to the group that discourages questions, values faith or unthinking obedience, or has skeletons in the closet.

Sure, potential Christians can search for arguments for Christianity online, but what non-Christian in the West hasn’t heard the Christian message? By contrast, there are plenty of Christians who until recently had no easy way to get a second opinion. The free flow of information helps atheism.

Faith statements vs. reality

Consider that many Christian organizations have faith statements that bind their professors, researchers, or staff. As a personal example, I’ve considered attending Frank Turek’s Cross Examined Instructor Academy for Christian apologists, but it had an obligatory faith statement that I couldn’t sign. (This makes me wonder how these future apologists will fare against someone like me in the real world if they must be protected from arguments from actual atheists in the classroom.)

The constraints of faith statements were highlighted in 2011 when Christian scholar Mike Licona got into hot water over a book in which a single brief topic didn’t come to the conclusions predetermined by his faith statement. Imagine that approach to reality trying to compete against Google and Wikipedia. “But you can’t say that—it contradicts my faith statement!”

How will things change in the future? Technology is infamously hard to predict. (My favorite quote on this subject: “When you get the urge to predict the future, better lie down until the feeling goes away”). Nevertheless, business will continue to demand ever easier access to information and freer flow of ideas. Advancing technology can only make it more difficult for religion to keep secrets.

We’ve seen how this plays out

A few years ago, the man in charge of the Mormon Church in Europe recently faced questions from parishioners. In answering them, he had to deal with how his church’s story differed from what he found on the internet, and his faith failed. The church recently responded to the crumbling dike with honest information about Joseph Smith’s polygamy—common knowledge to historians but startling news to many Mormons.

Or consider Scientology. The church’s story had been doled out to students who paid thousands to learn Scientology’s secrets. Now that uninspired story is available for free on Wikipedia.

In some surprising candor, Christian apologist Josh McDowell sees the situation just as we do, that the internet levels the laying field and that Christianity doesn’t like a level playing field.

As another example of Christianity’s pushback against open access to information, consider the response to each of Bart Ehrman’s bestselling books that shine a light into Christianity’s dirty recesses. Christians can’t attack his credentials, so they often try to dismiss the information by saying that this isn’t new. Seminaries have been teaching this to religious scholars and pastors for centuries, they tell us.

Uh, okay, but then why did your flock have to hear this from a non-Christian? Why is Bart Ehrman spilling the beans to the world instead of you? It almost sounds like you’re embarrassed by this information. And for every bestselling Bart Ehrman (or Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris), there are ten thousand podcasters, bloggers, and self-published authors adding to the conversation.

I expect that this clash of orthodoxy and internet is a growing problem for every large Christian denomination in the West and will become one in the developing world as the internet becomes more available.

A Christian response

What if religion simply absorbs the new truth and keeps going? So what if Joseph Smith was flawed and the church covered that up? So what if the New Testament story stands on a poor historical footing? So what if the virgin birth story is false, the Old Testament has two completely different versions of the Ten Commandments, the Jesus in the New Testament had no concept of the Trinity, or Christianity is full of contradictions?

If Christianity adapted by becoming less interested in reality and evidence, it would have abandoned the intellectual question, Is Christianity correct in its claims? If Christianity must simply withdraw from reality because it can’t compete in the intellectual town square, pause and consider what that means. It’s already easy to find apologists who make, “Yeah, but which story would you rather be true?” as an actual argument.

Changes to Christianity over time

I recently wrote about demographic changes predicted for Christianity and other religions. The make-more-babies growth phase is waning, and Christianity will soon have to compete in the marketplace of ideas. It will not be pretty, and technology will hasten the exit of religion. There might even be an unanticipated tipping point where falling Christian belief triggers the growth of the Nones to accelerate.

The Nones in the U.S. have recently become as large a belief system as Evangelicals and Catholics. The difference is that, while Evangelicals and Catholics have been to slowly shrinking, the Nones fraction continues to surge. There’s an interesting chart that tracks the rise in Nones with the fraction  internet users.

What does it say about Christianity that it survives best in a hypoxic environment that enables censorship and discourages questioning and straying? Expect technology to continue to provide increasing access, showing religion for what it really is.

Bible Belt near-Christianity is teetering.
I say let it fall.
— Russell Moore, president of the
Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/3/15.)

Image from Sue Clark, CC license

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The Value of the Writings of the Early Church Fathers

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We recently explored what the writings of the early church fathers aren’t good for: they aren’t good for recreating the New Testament. But what are they good for? Of course, they’re useful for understanding the evolution of early Christian thought, but (surprisingly) they actually do have value in reconstructing the New Testament.

We’ve put to rest the popular claim that they could be used to reconstruct the entire New Testament with the exception of 11 verses. But in many cases, the copies of the writings of an early church father (these are called patristic writings) can be used alongside copies of New Testament books when trying to find the original text of a questionable verse. If you want to learn a bit about the detective work used in textual criticism, let’s go.

(As my source, I’ve used a series of articles by Bart Ehrman (partial paywall). I’m primarily distilling Ehrman’s content here and am adding little new.)

Codex Bezae and Luke 3:22

To see the value of patristic evidence, consider Luke 3:22b. After the baptism of Jesus, a voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (NIV).

Or does it? Another source (let’s call it the variant reading) says instead, “You are my son, Today I have begotten you.”

This variant is wrong in several ways. Luke opens with the virgin birth story, so we’ve already seen that Jesus was divine from birth. But then at his baptism, God says, “Today I have begotten you”? Did God forget that Jesus was (1) already born and (2) already divine?

Problem two: the fifth-century Codex Bezae is the only copy of Luke that has the variant reading, and each of the hundreds of other Greek manuscripts of Luke has the other reading.

Those would be excellent reasons to reject this single, late outlier as an incorrect copy, but consider two more factors that argue that the variant is actually correct. Would a scribe be likely to convert “with you I am well pleased” (which is what Mark and Matthew also say) to the problematic “Today I have begotten you”? Obviously, the pressure on the scribe would be the reverse: to eliminate the crazy reading and harmonize it with the other two synoptic gospels. This is an application of the Criterion of Embarrassment, which says that the more embarrassing passage is likelier to be the original.

Second, and here we get back to our main subject, we see a very different picture when we bring in patristic evidence. When this verse in Luke is quoted or referred to in second- and third-century writings, it’s the variant reading that predominates.

The patristic evidence is essential in putting this strange variant reading in play as a viable candidate.

Patristic evidence

Scholars rarely know where the original of a New Testament book was written. Knowing when a New Testament book was copied can be known by paleography (the study of handwriting) to within fifty years or so, but this is art as well as science.

The patristic documents, by contrast, can give us more information. Irenaeus lived in Gaul (France). Tertullian lived in Carthage. You can guess where Clement of Alexandria lived. Not only do we usually know where they wrote, we also have trustworthy data on when most of them lived. With more reliable information on when and where the originals were created, scholars can put a date/location stamp on any New Testament quotes found in those documents.

Here’s how this might be used. Suppose there were two variants of a verse. Version 1 was found in manuscripts from Gaul while Version 2 came from everywhere else. Or maybe Version 1 was in manuscripts from the fifth century onward, while the earliest copies of Version 2 were from the third century. Each would argue that Version 1 is a corruption.

Problems with patristic evidence

While there are new opportunities with patristic evidence, there are new problems.

  • As with the New Testament books, we don’t have the original document but only copies. Copyists might have felt the need to “correct” any quote that didn’t conform to the scripture as they knew it, thus erasing that variant from history.
  • Was the quote copied accurately from a New Testament manuscript, or was it incorrectly quoted from memory? Was it even an attempt at a direct quote or was it meant to be just the sense of a New Testament passage?
  • “As the scriptures say” as an attribution doesn’t tell us what book it came from. Maybe it came from a book now seen as noncanonical like the Didache or the Diatessaron. Maybe it came from one of the synoptic gospels (which often contain variations on the same story, as seen above with Luke), but which one?

Despite the problems, scholars are often able to wring trustworthy information out of this source.

The original claim that started us on this journey (“The early church fathers . . . quoted the New Testament so much . . . that all but eleven verses of the New Testament can be reconstructed just from their quotations”) is wrong in many ways. But while this macro claim fails, the micro claim shows the value of patristic writings: they can provide date and location information to help in the detective work of evaluating competing versions of New Testament verses.

How can they tell [if a communion] wafer
is transubstaniated anyway?
Hold it up to a vampire—
if it’s trans the vampire will back off,
if not the vampire will bite you.
It’s basic theological science.
— commenter Bob Jase

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Image from Bill Tyne, CC license
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Theology, the Queen Clown of Sciences (Plus the Argument From Dullness)

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Father Dwight Longenecker (a Patheos blogger in the Catholic channel) has developed a new Christian apologetic, the Argument from Dullness. Here it is: atheism is really dull.

That’s it. There’s not really any substantive conclusion like “God exists” or “The gospel story is historically accurate” like the typical apologetic.

Genesis

I may have instigated this groundbreaking new argument. I wrote two posts about the new Pew study showing how religion would change over the next 35 years and had a few discouraging words for a commentary Longenecker had written. I alerted him in case he wanted to respond. Nope. He finds theism/atheism arguments to be dull—“one gigantic yawn,” he said.

So I like intellectual arguments and discussion, and he doesn’t. That’s fine. But apparently that inspired him to respond with “Atheism is Just So… Dull.”

The problem

Here’s the problem as Father Dwight sees it.

[Atheists are] all so serious all the time. So unimaginative. So pedantic and literal and dull.

I mean, what can be more tiresome than someone who’s always rabbiting on about “Facts” or “Evidence” or “Arguments for the Existence of God . . .”

Yeah, that’s atheists all over—trying to sift reality from nonsense. It’s a thankless job, but someone has to do it. You certainly aren’t. You make the incredible claims and don’t much care to back them up with evidence, and the atheists must hold you to account.

Stop being so seriously dangerous to society, and we won’t have to be so serious in return. You’re a clown saying, “Turn that frown upside down!” but we’re cleaning up your mess. For example:

  • “In God We Trust” as a motto in a country governed by a secular constitution
  • Christianity in government, with politicians climbing over each other to show how Christian they are and bragging how little they care about science plus a de facto religious test for public office.
  • Creationism in schools
  • Ken Ham’s Ark project allowed to both discriminate in hiring and get state tax benefits
  • pedophile priests
  • Catholic takeover of hospitals, where Catholic dogma overrides patients’ needs
  • Catholic opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage

The wall of separation between church and state is a dike leaking with a thousand constitutional insults. Father Dwight is the Cat in the Hat who leaves a wake of destruction, but he’s fun! Who cares whether his supernatural worldview is correct?

Religion is interesting!

Dwight lists examples of how fun religion is, but atheists can see eccentric religions as an anthropologist just like any Catholic.

  • “We have Christmas with all that good stuff like presents and St Nicholas and Black Peter”! (You mean the Black Peter who hauls off bad children in a sack back home to Spain? Yeah, fun.)
  • “They swim naked in the Ganges and say [it’s] something holy—and are they wrong?” (Hemant Mehta said: “Yes, they’re completely wrong. I’ve been to the Ganges. It ain’t holy. It’s disgusting.”)
  • Jews have cool hats! And Catholics have fun hats, too! (Don’t forget the dresses. You do know that everyone else is laughing at Catholics’ outlandish clergy, not with them, right? They look like wizards.)
  • “Snake handlers and people who speak in tongues and faith healers and televangelists”! (Yeah—Protestantism’s greatest hits. These are no asset.)
  • “Even the wacko religions are more interesting than atheism”! He lists Mormons’ special underwear, Scientologists’ e-meters, and Jehovah’s Witnesses’ obsession with the End. (You want wacko? How about a pope that rejected condom use to help prevent the spread of HIV? Or the Catholic hierarchy that moves pedophile priests around to avoid prosecution? Or a church that thinks nothing about the carrying capacity of the earth and fights against not just abortions but contraception as well?)
  • Cathedrals! (Each is a celebration of Man’s inventiveness and skill.)
  • “Show me an atheist building as wonderfully kooky as a Baroque church”! (I give you the Large Hadron Collider—$10 billion of shameless awesomeness.)

Atheism is one big denial of most everything that is infinite, that is wonderful, that is far out and unbelievable and unbelievably true. Religion, on the other hand, is interesting because, rather than close down all that is infinite and wonderful and strange and inexplicable it opens up to all that.

Wrong. Religion is mental shackles, it’s blinders, it’s make-believe. Drop religion to see reality clearly. Read stories of ex-Christians who are much happier now that they can follow the evidence where it leads rather than shoulder religion’s cognitive dissonance.

Religion is constrained by Man’s limited imagination. Replace the God goggles with science glasses and you get the universe.

And atheism is boring

Father Dwight’s initial post got pushback from the Friendly Atheist and Danthropology, so he published a rebuttal in which he doubled down on his original position: Christianity is fun, while atheism is “mind crushingly boring.”

This is one of the distinctive marks of a true religion: [its] followers are joyful. They know how to laugh.

Hey there, starving boy—here’s a Bible and a happy-face shirt! Now let’s see a smile!

Joyful is nice, but don’t give me that in place of accuracy. I hate to be a buzz kill, but is it true? First show me that your supernatural beliefs are correct—y’know, sift through all that boring argumentation and evidence—and then we’ll have something to celebrate.

[Believers] take God seriously, but they do not take themselves seriously.

You think this describes all Christians? You need to get out more.

[Believers] laugh at the human foibles and frailties in their religion.

That’s what you take from the Bible? The Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the genocide of the Canaanites, advice on how to beat slaves—each a reason for a good chuckle? You’ve got a god cobbled together from human foibles and frailties.

Don’t have such a dangerous religion and we’ll have more to laugh at.

For anyone to slam atheists as dull
because we rely on evidence and reason
to decipher the truth is hardly a criticism at all.
It’s a sign that the best your side has to offer
is creative fiction.
— Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/27/15.)

Image from Tao WU, CC license
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