Monthly Archives: November 2019

You Don’t Like the Scientific Consensus? Ignore it Away.

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Imagine this problem: you’re a layperson, and you dislike the scientific consensus on some issue. I’ve argued that laypeople have no grounds by which to reject a scientific consensus. How could they when they’re outsiders to that discipline? But if you’re part of a vocal minority on the political Right, you just declare the consensus stupid and substitute your own.

Those who give themselves veto power over science sometimes argue that smart people (and who wouldn’t put themselves in that category?) are perfectly able to come to their own conclusions. Or they might poke around the internet to find conclusions they like better and point to those arguments, unconcerned that these are fringe opinions, already evaluated and rejected by the relevant scientists.

Let’s take an example. Dennis Chamberland is not a climate scientist, but he’s good and mad at the current consensus within that discipline that climate change is happening and that it’s primarily caused by human activity (“The Tyranny of Consensus”). That’s not going to stop him from finding more pleasing conclusions on the internet and adopting those.

The dark cause behind all this

He begins by rooting out the underlying cause.

[Infecting science with politics] was accomplished for a reason, of course: specifically so that billions of dollars in global taxes may be levied at the point of a gun against the specter of anthropogenic climate change.

What’s next—black helicopters? The United Nations as world government? Reptoid shape-shifters controlling Congress? The Antichrist? And why would any government be eager to dump billions into a boondoggle?

There seem to be lots of dog-whistle terms in this article to wake up the faithful. If I were in this community, I’d probably understand what he’s trying to say. I suppose that for those people, this vague claim works, but let’s move on to the more interesting point, Chamberland’s attack on the use of the scientific consensus.

Government’s conflict of interest?

Science struggles to do the right thing, but we’re told that government isn’t helping.

The task is made even more difficult by an across-the-board failure of ethics within the profession [of science], created by the billions of research dollars poured into anthropogenic climate change [by government].

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Government money with an agenda bothers you, when on the opposing side is the energy industry? I’ll see your billions of dollars and raise you the many trillions of dollars of market capitalization of those companies.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the publicly traded energy companies Exxon Mobile, Petro China, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, and British Petroleum. They have a market capitalization of close to $1.5 trillion. Then there’s the world’s largest company, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco, which is valued at $2 trillion. Don’t forget the enormous state-owned oil companies in Mexico, Venezuela, Kuwait, Malaysia, Algeria, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, and other countries.

The fossil fuel industry is enormous and powerful, and they like the status quo just as it is, thank you very much. They’re not particularly motivated to study climate change, so if we are to understand this issue, government-funded science is the obvious route.

The “follow the money” strategy has now turned on and bitten the author. But that’s okay, as he hurries on to concern about the Dark Forces:

[The government is] entirely biased against any approach, study or theory except the one championed and paid for, solely reflecting the government’s predetermined, ethically conflicted, politically and economically motivated, self-serving theories.

Again, I’m missing the big conspiracy (and more importantly, what would drive it), so let’s set that aside. Was research on GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) burdened by some demand for a government-imposed conclusion? Smallpox vaccine? Internet? Cancer research? Or if they’re too goal-driven, consider work on the Large Hadron Collider to find the Higgs boson or the Cassini spacecraft’s visit to Saturn. Science often just follows the evidence.

Evil consensus

This has been somewhat tangential to the main point, the attacks on the scientific consensus when it is unwanted. Nevertheless this has illustrated the kinds of games that can be played to defend an anti-consensus position.

As an example of the misuse of consensus, Chamberland gives the book A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, published in German in 1931 as a criticism of Relativity. His conclusion:

This consensus-based, adolescent pile-on of Einstein historically backfired in a rather spectacular way, as all consensus schemes are wont to do.

Let’s consider this example. Suppose that

  • There were just 101 physicists in the world, Einstein and 100 others who wrote this book.
  • Einstein proposed Theory X.
  • The other 100 all thoroughly understood Theory X and Einstein’s reasoning.
  • The other 100 all rejected it.

Given that the relevance of a consensus is its value for outsiders like us rather than the practitioners, what do we conclude? Of course, we conclude that Theory X is not ready for prime time. What else could we conclude? Maybe the theory will mature to sway the other physicists, but we go with the consensus. When the consensus changes, so must our opinion.

Chamberland might handwave, “But Einstein was right with Relativity!” I agree, but how do we know? Because, and only because, it’s now the consensus! When it’s Einstein vs. the Hundred, it’s not like there’s an arbiter who can settle the argument. Consensus as our arbiter is imperfect, but it’s the best we have.

Let’s return to A Hundred Authors Against Einstein. It was a useful example to explore the issue, but in fact it doesn’t even make Chamberland’s point because it wasn’t the clean thought experiment I’ve just outlined. By the publication date of this book, Relativity was already well accepted within the scientific community, and the consensus was on Einstein’s side. More important, there was only a single physicist in the list! This wasn’t even an attempt at a scientific consensus.

This is like the Disco Institute’s inept attack on evolution, “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” In it, roughly a thousand scientists, doctors, and engineers skeptical of evolution have added their names, but how many are active biologists whose critique of evolution would be relevant? As with the Relativity attack, few have credentials relevant to the issue at hand.

How does Chamberland expect we laypeople to respond to the scientific consensus? Maybe he likes the Kim Davis approach where every elected official makes their own conscience the ultimate arbiter for any action. “Sure, I’ll follow the law,” she says, “as long as it satisfies my morality.” A Kim Davis world would have county clerks deciding who can get married, Jehovah’s Witness doctors avoiding blood transfusions, Christian Science business owners refusing to provide health insurance, Muslim police officers arresting women dressing immodestly, pharmacists filling only those prescriptions that seem moral, and racist judges deciding cases based on white supremacist principles (for which they find support in the Bible).

Chamberland analogously imagines each of us deciding things on first principles. “Sure, I’ll accept germ theory” (or quantum theory or evolution), Chamberland says, “once I see that it feels right.” Nothing is settled for us, and a 6000-year-old earth is no less an option than one 4.5 billion years old. Creationism, phlogiston, ether, bodily humors, astrology, alchemy, flat earth—they are all in play if there is no consensus. In fact, this is playing out right now as an Ohio bill would require that religious answers (rather than, y’know, accurate answers) on public school tests be acceptable.

In his next tirade, I recommend that Chamberland acknowledge the elephant in the room, that he accepts scientific theories based on whether he likes the conclusion or not.

Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact
as the roundness of the Earth.
— NewScientist, 2008.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/9/15.)

Image from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC license

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Can God Be Benevolent if He Sends Your Children to Hell? (3 of 3)

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What do you think about a god who would send children to hell? Let’s finish our critique of an article by William Lane Craig (WLC) in which he defends God’s honor (part 1).

On to the philosophical question

Remember that WLC said that the first question, the psychological one, was a red herring. Having stumbled through that response, he moves on to the question he says is significant, the philosophical one. Since philosophy is his discipline, you’d expect an intellectual tsunami. You’d be disappointed.

As for the philosophical question, “How can you think that is a fair and reasonable thing for anyone or anything to do?”, I’ve already alluded to the answer, and I’d refer you to my debate with Prof. Ray Bradley on this topic.

He’s spent 90 percent of his article discussing what he says is a red herring, but for the question that he admits deserves an answer, you must sit through a 75-minute debate. Maybe it’d just be easier to take his word for it.

Fortunately, I’ve already responded to his argument from that 1994 debate. If WLC won’t summarize it, I will.

WLC admitted in the debate that “God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell” sounds bad. He tried to turn the tables and argued that the atheist must show two things.

  1. If God is all powerful, then God could create a world in which everyone freely lives their life in such a way that they merit getting into heaven.
  2. If God is all loving, then he would want such a world.

He insisted that, “Both of these assumptions have to be necessarily true, in order to prove that God and hell are logically inconsistent with each other. So as long as there’s even a possibility that one of these assumptions is false, it’s possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell.”

Step back and admire that message: it’s possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell. Said another way, God does look like an immoral tyrant, but you can’t prove it. Yeah, that sounds like a compelling message.

Let’s return to his two points and play the game as he defined it. Christian doctrine seems to accept point 2—an all-loving God would want a world in which everyone merited heaven. In fact, WLC himself said in this article, “God’s heart breaks for the lost far more than mine does!”

So we’ll focus on point 1: could an all-powerful God create a world in which everyone freely lives such that they merit heaven? Surprisingly, God has apparently already created such a world: that world is heaven itself.

Consider two properties that heaven must have. First, people in heaven must have free will, given how vital Christians say it is. For example, Christian apologists say that God won’t step on people’s free will, and that’s why there’s so much evil in the world. They also inform us that God is a gentleman who won’t force people to love him—that would make them zombies. (For more on the bizarre uses apologists make of God’s love, go here.)

Given that Christians insist that our love of God be freely given, we can assume that free will is also mandatory in heaven. But heaven must be a lot better than just a continuation of life on earth. The secret ingredient that makes heaven work must be wisdom. Free will is a clumsy tool in the hands of imperfect humans on earth, but add perfect wisdom, and all the sinful uses of free will (robbery, rape, murder, and so on) vanish. The perfectly wise inhabitants of heaven would have the free will to commit a sin, but they’d have the wisdom to know that that would be foolish.

Conclusion: God could’ve made heaven on earth by giving us the wisdom to use free will properly. That meets the two criteria WLC set out. Therefore, “God is all loving” is indeed in conflict with “Some people go to hell.” Therefore (returning to the subject of this post series), God is indeed not benevolent when he sends your children to hell.

WLC attempts a final defense of hell

This is his conclusion.

There are no good defeaters of this doctrine [of hell], given such facts as (i) the universal reality of human evil and our profound need of forgiveness and moral cleansing, (ii) God’s holiness and justice, (iii) God’s will for universal human salvation and efforts to draw everyone freely to a saving knowledge of Himself, and (iii) human freedom.

No good defeaters? I think we’ve just seen one. But let’s look at his points.

  1. The universal reality of human evil and our profound need of forgiveness and moral cleansing. Our “need for forgiveness” and a fallen world is a Christian invention. That’s not an objective fact of our world.
  2. God’s holiness and justice. God is just pretend, and God is a Bronze Age dictator. Show us that he exists and that biblical morality rises above being merely an anthropological curiosity.
  3. God’s will for universal human salvation and efforts to draw everyone freely to a saving knowledge of Himself. Salvation is a solution to a problem (hell) that Christianity invented. I don’t need either, thanks. As for universal human salvation, remember that Yahweh was initially just the god of the Chosen People, not a source of universal salvation.
  4. Human freedom. Yes, humans like freedom. No, God is no champion of free will.

God’s one-size-fits-all hell, completely at odds with modern Western ideas of proportionate justice, is ridiculously immoral. Justifying it is a desperate attempt to justify one’s belief in the unbelievable.

More posts on hell:

A magician asked me a trick question.
I still don’t know how he did it.
— commenter Greg G.

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Image from Marco Verch, CC license
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Four Blood Moons: Revisiting John Hagee’s Embarrassing Failure (2 of 2)

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In part 1, I summarized John Hagee’s “Four Blood Moons” hysteria, which culminated with its final lunar eclipse four years ago.

So what was supposed to happen?

We need to learn from Reverend Hagee precisely what was supposed to happen and when. Hagee told us, “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”

Okay, but that’s rather vague. Hagee said (in a video that is, embarrassingly, still in the Hagee Ministries channel), “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon.’”

Surely the creator of the universe can do better? “Something is about to change,” according to the book’s subtitle.

Okay, forget it. Hagee won’t be specific because he can’t. Perhaps the purpose of the book wasn’t to enlighten the flock but (dare I say it?) to make money. It turns out that Pastor Hagee wasn’t the first to think up the four blood moons idea, though you wouldn’t know it from his movie, where he claims to have come up with this connection. Hagee loves money like sharks love chum.

Others piled on and predicted financial disaster after the end of the Shemitah year (didn’t happen—the Dow was up on the next trading day). Unsurprisingly, those financial prophets didn’t conclude that their game is groundless. One pundit concluded that God simply didn’t want to make himself predictable. It’s clear that no lesson has been learned, and the next breathless, invented crisis among gullible Christians is in our near future.

One element of this hysteria is a “the sky is falling” attitude. Prophecy-hungry Christian charlatans point to the worrisome news of the moment—Iran’s nuclear ambitions, ISIS, problems in Israel, Ebola, police shootings, droughts and forest fires, same-sex marriage, and more—and imagine that these are the signs of the End.

No, that’s not bad. You want bad? How about the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) that killed between three and eleven million people in Europe? That was bad. Or how about 1942–43 when it looked like the Axis powers might succeed and carve up the world? Or the 1918 flu pandemic that killed up to 100 million people? Or the Black Death in Europe (1346–53), which killed 20% of the world’s population?

Remember when you were a kid in history class, and you asked why you had to learn all that stuff? This is why. It’s so you can immunize yourself from people like Hagee who hope you are ignorant of events like those—events so world-shakingly calamitous that they plausibly could have signaled an end of the world.

Sorry, Christian apocalypticists, same-sex marriage doesn’t compare.

Consequences

I believe a quote from the Good Book is relevant here.

The prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die (Deuteronomy 18:20).

Wow—that’s tough love. I wonder if pastor David Berzins, who was eager to stone gays to death, might have been happy to carry out that punishment since Hagee obviously wasn’t speaking for God since his prophecy didn’t come true.

Hagee had to walk a fine line. He had to be specific enough to mesmerize his flock into buying his books and mailing in checks but not so specific that he could be easily called on a prophecy when it didn’t come to pass. That was the error that Harold Camping made. He spent $100 million to advertise a very specific date for the Rapture, May 21, 2011. Things became uncomfortable when May 21 came and went just like any other day.

After several years of planning, you could imagine a crescendo at Hagee’s web site on the eve of the fourth “blood moon.” Nope—out of a bunch of ads, a single one read, “The final blood moon is coming . . . are you ready?”

Ready for what? Hagee pretty much ignored the blood moons non-event and moved on to the next apocalyptic message so we can get good and scared all over again. John Hagee has become Pastor Freddie Krueger of the (Nightmare on) Elm Street Church. And like the groundless claims in John Oliver’s much-missed megachurch, Hagee’s far-reaching but empty claims are, incredibly, all legal.

If there were justice where you could pull a stunt like this once but then you’d lose all credibility after a failure, I wouldn’t mind. The problem is, there are no consequences. When Hagee and others tap dance away from their false claims, no one will stone them. Their flock will continue to do what they’re told. Like a stage magician, Hagee will focus his flock’s attention on some new book or outreach. While I wonder how Hagee can live with himself, the whole thing looks like a smart financial move in hindsight.

What’s it like on the inside?

Patheos atheist blogger Captain Cassidy wrote about what it was like growing up as a Pentecostal teenager during the “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988” scare. On why this kind of thing is effective, she said that being on the inside flatters one’s ego. You know that you’ve got it figured out and the naysayers will get theirs soon enough, and then who’ll be laughing? Chillingly, she observed, “Fear lies at the heart of Christianity, not love.”

To remind us of how common end-of-the-world prophecies have been in history, I’ll wrap up with this much-mended “The End is nigh!” sign envisioned by Kyle Hepworth. The End has been predicted more often than you may know.

Christians who know that there’ve been
other Rapture scares in the past
look at new Rapture scares
like other folks look at lottery tickets:
sure, they’ve always failed to win in the past,
but this time might be the big payoff.
The problem is that their payoff
happens for the worst reasons
and at the expense of those who disagree with them.
— Captain Cassidy

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/26/15.)
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Can God Be Benevolent if He Sends Your Children to Hell? (2 of 3)

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Are Christians okay with a god who could send their children to hell? Let’s continue our critique of an article by William Lane Craig (WLC) in which he defends the Christian position (part 1).

The doctrine of hell

WLC had divided the question into a psychological question (“How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?”) and a philosophical question (“How can you think that is a fair and reasonable thing for anyone or anything to do?”).

His point about the psychological question is that if this is just someone’s personal opinion, “it would have no implications at all for the truth of the doctrine of hell.”

Hell? So much for Good News. But what is the doctrine of hell? Is it C.S. Lewis’s “gates barred from the inside” or fire ’n brimstone® or something else? He must make sure his answer is in harmony both with every afterlife passage in the Bible and with the doctrine of hell in every other Christian denomination. Don’t give us your interpretation; rather, show that the Bible defines a single unambiguous doctrine about hell.

Objective vs. subjective morality

WLC moves on to emphasize the critic’s relative (rather than objective) position on moral issues.

Suppose I were one of those persons who would not or could not bring himself to do X. That implies nothing about the rightness/wrongness of doing X or the truth/falsity that someone does X. It’s just about me and my personal psychology.

Uh . . . did you just deny the existence of reliably accessible objective morality? Well done, Dr. Craig. You’ve convinced me. I guess even if objective morality exists, that doesn’t matter because we humans can’t reliably access it. One wonders, though, why you keep pretending like such a thing does exist.

Children and the age of accountability

WLC next wants to make a special case for young children.

Neither God nor I would send small children to hell, for they are not morally accountable.

Show me, and again don’t just cherry pick verses to support your position. Make sure that no Bible verse contradicts your claim.

The age of accountability (the idea that children below a certain age are too young to be held accountable for their sin) comes from tradition, not the Bible. But the Bible makes clear that everyone has a sin nature and falls short.

Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Psalm 51:5).

The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies (Ps. 58:3).

So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God (Romans 14:12).

There is no one righteous, not even one (Rom. 3:10).

These verses argue that children don’t deserve an exemption.

(An insightful video by Underlings argues that God’s plan is either that (1) dead babies go to hell or (2) they don’t. But knowing that most adults do go to hell, option (2) means that murdering babies is morally proper because it saves them from hell. With either option, God loses.)

The Bible and thoughtcrime

Back to WLC:

Neither God nor I would send anyone to hell “simply because of thoughts in their heads.” Where in the world did you get that idea?

Uh, from the Bible? The tenth Commandment demands “no coveting.” Jesus added a few of his own thoughtcrimes in the Sermon on the Mount: “I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.” And, “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Coveting, anger, and lust are thoughts in your head, they’re evidently all sins, and you know the penalty for sin.

God’s provision to get us out of the mess we’re in

And now it’s time for WLC to hurry to God’s defense because, Lord knows, he can’t defend himself.

People go to hell because they willingly reject God’s forgiveness and resist His every effort to save them.

How can I willingly reject what I’ve never been given good evidence for? Christianity’s sin/salvation story is nonsense. “God made you sinful, but that’s okay because if you believe in the unbelievable, he’ll not burn you forever” isn’t coherent, loving, or fair.

It’s misleading to talk about God’s “sending” people to hell. He desires and strives for the salvation of every person, but some freely resist His grace and so separate themselves from Him irrevocably. It’s not His doing.

Did he make the rules? Then it’s his doing. If I’m imperfect, blame my Maker. And even if humans are sinful, God could just forgive, since that’s how we do it and he’s done it before.

As for “freely [resisting] His grace,” I’ve never seen evidence of God’s grace, but apparently you think I deserve hell nonetheless.

God’s offer of salvation: take it or regret it

WLC moves on to discuss salvation.

What do you mean by “don’t believe that Jesus Christ died for their sins”? If they don’t believe because they are ignorant of the Gospel message, then they will not be judged on that basis. But if you mean that they knowingly and willfully reject Jesus Christ as their Savior, then, yes, God will judge them on that basis.

Or, option three, they understand the gospel message but have no good reason to believe that it’s anything but legend and myth. They might understand the message of countless other religions, but they probably don’t believe that they’re anything more than legend and myth, either.

I can reject a serving of potatoes at the dinner table, but that assumes I believe those potatoes exist. I don’t reject unicorns or leprechauns, I just don’t have enough evidence to believe in them, or a thousand other mythical creatures, or gods.

The problem is not that they simply lack a certain belief but rather that they repudiate God’s provision for their sin.

You mean the sin that God made unavoidable? Yeah, my bad. Sorry about that.

Anyway, Paul made clear that we’re all good. In Romans 5:18–19, he said that humanity didn’t need to opt in to inherit Adam’s sin, but it also didn’t need to opt in to get Jesus’s salvation. So I guess I’ll see you in heaven, Dr. Craig.

Conclusion for the psychological question

So to sum up the psychological question, “How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?” I guess I would answer that I know He would condemn them only if they deserved it. I trust in His justice.

Why trust God’s justice? It doesn’t match what we think of justice in the West. God ordered genocide on the Canaanites (here, here). He set up the rules for slavery. He flooded the world. Much of humanity today live in substandard conditions, which he could easily correct but won’t. These would be crimes against humanity if done by a person. WLC apparently wants to redefine justice so that whatever God does is just. No, God doesn’t get a pass, and Christians don’t get to redefine “justice” to make it easier for God to meet.

He goes on to liken non-Christians who ignore God’s offer of salvation to a drowning man who refuses a life preserver. The obvious flaw in this feeble analogy is that we all know that life preservers exist. A ticket to heavenly paradise, on the other hand, sounds like make-believe.

In part 3, WLC responds to the philosophical question, the one he said deserved attention.

Democracy doesn’t guarantee
an educated and logical populace,
but it does depend on one.
— Daniel Miessler (Daniel’s Unsupervised Learning)

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Image from Steve Shreve, CC license
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Can God Be Benevolent if He Sends Your Children to Hell?

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Why does God do the crazy stuff that he does—demand genocide, support slavery, flood the world? He’s the one with the perfect morals, and yet his actions and rules don’t even meet the moral standards we have set for ourselves today. In particular, how can he be “benevolent” if he sends children to hell?

Is it reasonable to criticize God?

Since we’re asking why God would send children to hell, let’s critique “Asking Why God Would Do X Is Crazy.”

Sometimes you’ve just got to admire the audacity of some Christian authors. The article begins by assuming God and then browbeating any reader who would question God.

What [God’s critic] sees the world to be like, he finds inconsistent with how he believes God should have done things, and he believes that since God has failed at doing things the way he would have done them, that therefore He does not exist.

What does not exist is the Christian God as an all-good being. You need only read the Bible to see that the tyrant described there isn’t all-good. (Or you can redefine “good,” which seems to be a popular fallback.)

One aspect of the article’s argument is pointing out that the critic is a mere human. How can humans judge God? But of course they don’t judge God; they judge claims about God. Sure, we’re imperfect, but we’re all we’ve got. We evaluate claims to the best of our ability. Christianity can ask nothing more of us.

Moving on, the article jumps the shark with its God assumption, all backed with no evidence:

The audacity to think that God’s ordering of reality based on His omnipotence is faulty compared to the way we would order reality given our limited knowledge.

At the heart of the question is the implicit belief that the person asking knows more than God.

[The critic thinks] that he himself has the more rational view of how, if he were God, would have dealt with the world.

Are the atheists good and chastised?

No, the error is not critiquing God claims but assuming God into existence. Starting by assuming God is the Hypothetical God Fallacy. As for the challenge about the critic having the more rational view, no it’s not arrogant to think that the modern-day critic is more rational than the 10th-century BCE tribesmen who began documenting the mythology that became our Bible.

The author concludes with roughly the response that God gave when Job questioned God’s cruel actions.

God’s purposes are God’s business. If He had intended for us to know something, the answer would be available. Things He did not intend for us to know, we may merely speculate about.

So STFU, stop complaining, and accept that God exists and has good reasons whether you understand or not.

Contestant #2

Let’s move on to another response, this one from William Lane Craig (WLC). Will he bring a higher caliber argument?

His article is, “Worshiping a God Who Might Damn Your Children,” in which WLC responds to a question from Dale:

How can you worship a God who might send your children to Hell?

Would you send your child to an eternity of suffering, simply because of thoughts in their heads? If your children lead wonderful lives, but don’t believe that Jesus Christ died for their sins, would you send them to hell? What if they just can’t wrap their heads around the concept? . . . How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?

WLC begins with a point of order.

There are actually two different questions here which are being run together, the first a psychological question (“How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?”) and the second a philosophical question (“How can you think that is a fair and reasonable thing for anyone or anything to do?”).

Okay, let’s go with that. WLC then dismisses the “psychological question” as a red herring.

It is [just] a request for an autobiographical report about one’s subjective condition. As such, its answer will be person-relative and have nothing to do with objective truth.

Objective truth? Does such a thing exist for morality? You’ve certainly never given a reasonable defense of objective morality that I’ve ever seen (more here, here). Don’t base your argument on objective morality without first showing it exists.

A Word to the Wise: Whenever people pose questions beginning “Would you . . .” or “If you were . . .,” then you know immediately that it is a question designed merely to put you in an awkward position, not to get at truth.

A word to the wise: whenever you read an apologetic article, make sure the Christian actually answers the question. Don’t be swayed with bluster and confidence so that you overlook them running from the question.

The kind of question he’s trying to avoid here is one that taps into our shared moral values. For example, “If you think that X is bad, what does it mean when God does it?” is a valid question. If humans are created in God’s image, we share a moral sense, and indeed the Bible confirms that. That God’s morality is so incompatible with ours argues that God’s moral actions are, not divine, but simply a reflection of the primitive culture from which he came.

No, this isn’t a rhetorical trick to put Christians in an awkward position. That the question might make them uncomfortable isn’t the issue. They want to get the challenge dismissed on a technicality so they don’t have to answer it. Don’t let them.

The critique of WLC’s response continues in part 2.

If your choice of religion is subjective
so are your morals.
— commenter Otto

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Image from Andrae Ricketts, CC license
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Four Blood Moons: Revisiting John Hagee’s Embarrassing Failure

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Televangelist windbags get away with too much. Let’s hold their feet to the fire. Today, let’s revisit John Hagee’s nonsensical Four Blood Moons hoax.

It was useful, of course—useful to Pastor Hagee in shearing the flock of their money and keeping them subservient to his “Oh dear, oh dear, the end is nigh!” message. While this was important to him, it wasn’t helpful to those of us who care about truth.

Hagee’s four scary lunar eclipses ran from April 2014 to October 2015. (Do you remember any world news during that period much more noteworthy than usual for an 18-month period? Me neither.) So weak was his story that not only was there no scientific evidence that anything dramatic should’ve been expected, the Bible itself couldn’t even support his claims.

Astronomical background

Because the plane that the moon orbits in is off by five degrees from the ecliptic (the plane defined by the orbit of the earth around the sun), an opportunity for either lunar or solar eclipses only happens twice a year. Lunar eclipses are quite common, with total lunar eclipses somewhat less so. Much less likely is a total eclipse and then six months later, another, and then another, and then another—four total lunar eclipses over 18 months. Since the year 1 CE, there have been 57 such “tetrads.”

Why are these eclipses interesting religiously?

Now consider the religious connection. The Jewish festivals of Passover and Sukkot begin on full moons, and they are also six months apart. A lunar eclipse tetrad can line up with them—four lunar eclipses on successive Passovers or Sukkots—and there have been eight such alignments since 1 CE, with the last concluding in 2015.

What’s the religious significance of this alignment? None. Joel 2:30–31 talks about the moon turning to blood, but there is nothing about four of them, so Christian Zionist opportunist John Hagee invented a connection. Since total eclipses usually look red, he calls a lunar eclipse tetrad that aligns with the Jewish festivals “four blood moons,” and he says they line up with significant events in Jewish history. He argues his theory by looking at the three alignments that preceded the most recent one (the dates below are of the first eclipse in the tetrad).

  • 1967 was the Six-Day War
  • 1949 was the establishment of Israel
  • 1493 was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain

The sharp-eyed reader will notice that the Jews were actually expelled from Spain one year earlier. The date for the establishment of Israel is also off. Omnipotent God apparently isn’t so good at lining things up.

Apparently, Hagee’s hypothesis was that tetrads mean either good or bad things happening to the Jewish people, with the date a little fuzzy. Note also that not all significant events get a tetrad. The Holocaust during World War II is glaringly absent. God’s message then becomes, “Something good or bad will soon happen to the Jewish people, or has happened, and I might’ve missed a few.” I have far higher standards for Hagee’s god than Hagee does.

What about those tetrads that were omitted?

It gets worse when we consider the four ignored alignments, which began in the years 162, 795, 842, and 860. Hagee doesn’t bother wondering what God was saying with these, because they don’t support his flabby hypothesis. But if God wanted to point to important events for the Jewish people, obvious candidates would have included the three Jewish-Roman Wars. Hagee apparently doesn’t credit his flock with much knowledge, but even they will know the first omission.

  • The First Jewish-Roman War (66 – 74 CE) included the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70, the deaths of 1.1 million Jews (according to Josephus), and the enslavement of the survivors.
  • The Kitos War (115 – 117 CE) began with ethnic Judeans outside of Palestine rising up to slaughter Roman soldiers and noncombatants—reportedly half a million. The empire violently put down the revolt.
  • The Bar Kokhba Revolt (132 – 136 CE) was, like the First War, conducted in Judea. One source called it a genocide and more significant in damaging Judaism in Judea than the First War.

(For further detail on Hagee’s ill-advised dabblings into prophecy, I’ve written more here. And about his movie. And about what actually makes a good prophecy.)

Piling on with more apocalypse fear

This recent tetrad provided an opportunity for opportunists like Hagee to pile on more stuff with vague, unsupported claims that it is meaningful to Christianity or Judaism says.

  • The last year in a seven-year cycle in the Jewish calendar is a Shemitah year, and Hagee’s tetrad included such a year (which ended 9/13/15). Shemitah is a time to let the land go fallow and forgive debts with fellow Jews. Some said that this was meaningful, but Wikipedia says, “There is little notice of the observance of this year in Biblical history and it appears to have been much neglected.” And why imagine divine wrath when Shemitah is a time of forgiveness?
  • This entire celestial farce was invisible in Israel, with the exception of the final lunar eclipse.
  • Four days before the last of Hagee’s eclipses was the September 23, 2015 apocalypse. Oddly, that didn’t happen, either.

Perhaps the real calamity is the gullibility of Christians who give credence to charlatans like Hagee.

Let’s conclude by trying to figure out what’s actually supposed to happen in part 2.

There’s a sucker born every minute.
— Barnum 3:16

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/25/15.)

Image from krheesy, CC license
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