Monthly Archives: November 2019

The Quantum Logic of Christian Apologists

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Many technology companies are working on different approaches to quantum computers, and Google recently claimed an impressive success. Their Sycamore quantum processor did in a few minutes what the most powerful supercomputer would take 10,000 years to accomplish. Performing a calculation with a quantum computer that would be practically impossible for a conventional computer is called “quantum supremacy.”

IBM rained on the parade by stating that that supercomputer would’ve completed the calculation in just 2.5 days. Regardless of whether a conventional approach would’ve taken 10,000 years or 2.5 days, it was an impressive achievement, but it did lead to an amusing article title, Google both has and hasn’t achieved “quantum supremacy”.

We need a brief detour to make sure we’re on the same page about why this title is clever, and then we’ll search for that quantum feature within Christianity.

Quantum computers use quantum superposition. A quantum particle that could be in one of two states—let’s say spin up or spin down—can be spin up, spin down, or a superposition of probabilities for being in either one. The superposition goes away if the particle is forced to pick one or the other. It’s a quantum particle’s ability to hold two states at once (or something like that) that allows remarkable parallelism compared to a conventional computer, which uses bits that are either 0 or 1, and that’s it.

Superposition of two states—two states being held at once—is the key to quantum computing, and that was the allusion behind the title, “Google both has and hasn’t achieved quantum supremacy.”

We can find that superposition within Christianity, too.

Christian superposition: what is prayer good for?

My macro-world example of superposition is not Schrödinger’s Cat but Christian apologists. Christians often respond to challenges without considering the consequences so that they’re saying one thing to respond to a challenge but the opposite to respond to another. They answer with blinders on, determined to find a pleasing answer but uninterested in or unaware of how their conclusions will affect the rest of their Christian worldview.

As an example, I wrote about a blatant contradiction within Greg Koukl’s Stand to Reason ministry. During Christmas season last year, one of their staffers (Melinda) suffered a serious head injury. Koukl said:

I don’t know what God’s thinking about things, but I know what Christians are doing and I hope you’re doing with us—you’re praying like crazy. And that’s what we want you to keep doing—praying Melinda out of this.

That’s not surprising. That’s a typical Christian approach to prayer. But six weeks earlier, Koukl responded with a very different response to another tragedy, a mass shooting in a church that killed 25 and injured 20. Those people were very likely praying, but it obviously didn’t do much good. Ever eager to explain away God’s absence, Koukl inverted his argument and stated that it’s foolish to expect God to answer prayers for protection.

Why expect God to help Melinda’s injury but ridicule the idea that God would help Christians praying for their lives in a church? Koukl treats God as a sock puppet whose viewpoint can change completely if necessary.

Christian superposition and the structure of a sitcom

Seeing unchanging and omniscient “God” dance between alternatives as his master demands reminds me of a popular structure for a television comedy. TV Tropes calls it the “Fawlty Towers Plot” (Fawlty Towers was a British sitcom) though it’s evident in I Love Lucy and many others. First, someone tells a small lie. To avoid getting caught, they tell a larger lie, and so on. The snowball rolls downhill until eventually crashing into reality in the end.

In a similar way, the Christian feels obliged to defend Christianity, the Bible, or God regardless of the evidence or the consequences. When that answer is shown to be in conflict with something else, out comes another rationalization that may in turn come back to bite them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Christian superposition: contradictions

Perhaps the clearest example of this superposition is monotheism vs. the doctrine of the Trinity. Muslim apologists gleefully point out the contradiction since both Islam and Christianity inherited the primacy of monotheism from Judaism. Nevertheless, it’s hard to shoehorn “the Father is Almighty; the Son Almighty; and the Holy Ghost Almighty” (from the Athanasian Creed) into a single god.

I attended a Sunday school class on biblical inerrancy. The teacher’s stock answer when faced with two seemingly incompatible Bible passages was, “They’re both true.” The differing numbers of women or angels at the tomb? Jesus’s differing genealogies? How Judas died? Somehow, both options are always true.

Useful homework for Christian apologists would be to create a gospel harmony, a single document that attempts to collect and make sense of every declaration in the four canonical gospels. Tatian’s Diatessaron from the second century is the most famous, but many harmonies have been created. None resolve the contradictions. The naturalistic hypothesis is hard to beat: the Bible is a manmade document composed of mythology, legend, and wishful thinking, plus some accurate history.

The fundamental that apologists always seem to miss is that their goal isn’t to find an answer to every challenge but to find the best answer.

Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird
and therefore equivalent.
(Or not: see SMBC comic for more)

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Image from IBM
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Silver-Bullet Argument #27: Christianity Is Full of Symbolism

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symbolism

Christianity and the Bible are full of symbolism. For example, during the Flood it rained for forty days, not just a good long time. Baptism rinses away sins like water rinses away dirt. In Communion, the faithful consume the flesh and blood of God—at least in a symbolic fashion.

Why doesn’t the Bible read like a history book? That Christianity needs and uses symbolism is a silver-bullet argument against Christianity.

(This is argument 27 in a list that begins here.)

Symbolism in everyday life

Consider first the symbols we see around us. Red means stop and green means go, but together they mean Christmas. Thanksgiving, Halloween, and other holidays have their own colors, as do sports teams, political parties, and political movements. Green means concern for the environmental, or maybe it means concern for money (at least in the US). White means purity, though in China, it means death. In Japan, “death” is a homonym for “four,” which is why gift tea sets for the Japanese market have five cups, not four. Hoping to attract Japanese gamblers who want to avoid unlucky room numbers, there are hotels in Las Vegas where the floor numbering has no 4s, and the floor after 39 is 50.

Movies and television use standard symbols as shorthand. Fireworks might mean sex. Pages can fly off a wall calendar to show the passage of time. The dismantling of a small piece of the Berlin Wall or the toppling of statues of Lenin or Saddam Hussein in themselves meant little, but they are convenient and photogenic symbols of an enormously significant regime change.

Another area of fiction where symbolism can be important is literature. Water at night can be used as a symbol for the unconscious. Fog or a squawking bird might suggest danger. Spring and flowers represent youth and vitality, and falling leaves and snow represent age and death. Mention a rose to suggest love or beauty, or focus on its thorns to suggest danger or deception. The town in the 2016 Preacher television series is Annville (think “anvil”). In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, guilt drives Lady Macbeth to imagine her hands stained with blood that won’t wash off (a denial of another symbol, the cleansing effect of water through baptism).

Red meaning “stop” is arbitrary, but literary symbolism makes a more universal appeal. One purpose of symbolism is to engage the reader. Instead of writing, “Bill’s wicked side slowly overcame his good side in his mind,” you might show a black crow picking at a dead white dove. Readers enjoy figuring things out for themselves. In addition, a symbol can be taken as a more universal statement than, say, the moral contest in a single person’s mind.

Symbolism in science and history

Contrast storytelling in literature or on the screen with science and history, which have no use for literary symbolism. There is no point in the reader having to figure out what the author means. Here, good writing is clear and straightforward.

Let me mention one apparent counterexample. Take one aspect of quantum physics—for example, that the nucleus of an atom has protons and neutrons. This is just a model. We don’t know for certain that this model is exactly how it is in reality, but if we assume that model, we can make very accurate predictions. The theoretical model correctly predicting or explaining experimental results is as good as it gets.

Notice the difference. A scientific model is as clear as possible, like a window. A symbol is something to figure out and think about.

Symbolism in Christianity

Christianity claims to tell us true things that happened in the past (history) and true things about reality (science). Nevertheless, we find lots of symbolism, which puts it in the fiction camp with literature and movies. If there really were a God with a message we needed to understand, he’d just present himself and give us the message. He’s not even constrained by a limited timeframe so that he would need to document his message for posterity in a book. He could effortlessly be on call to every person on earth throughout history.

As an example of Christian symbolism, baptism claims to rinse away sins like water rinses away dirt. You do something in the real world (baptism), and something parallel happens in the supernatural realm (sins washed away).

Christian pilgrims may dial it up by getting baptized in the Holy Land. But baptism is baptism, and there are no bonus points for doing it a second time, doing it in the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized, or doing it while wearing a white robe. But they do it anyway. There’s no doubt that these are important to the Christian pilgrims, but they’re just symbolic additions to a symbolic ritual.

Communion is another ritual. As background, remember that this comes from a religion where God was fed with food offerings. The energy of the sacrificed animal would rise up as smoke, which the Bible tells us 37 times is accepted by God as a “pleasing aroma.” We also learn that the food value varies depending on the sacrifice. Larger animals are more valuable than smaller ones, human sacrifices are more valuable than animals, and a god (Jesus) is more than a human. Communion is the Christian’s opportunity to participate in this nourishment, because it is a weekly celebration of the sacrifice of Jesus commemorated by symbolically consuming his flesh and blood (or actually consuming it, according to most Christians).

We see more symbolic blood magic with the idea of “the blood of the Lamb” washing things clean (see Revelation 7).

Number symbolism is also popular. God rested on the seventh day, and Revelation has lots of sevens (bowls, trumpets, and more). There are ten Commandments and ten plagues of Egypt, and some of the parables have tens (ten virgins, ten talents). There were forty days of rain in the Flood and forty years of wandering in the Sinai desert, and Jesus fasted in the desert for forty days.

Harold Camping’s embarrassing prediction of the end of the world on May 21, 2011 was based on that date being, by his calculation, (5 × 10 × 17)² days after the crucifixion. What do those numbers mean? According to Camping, 5 = atonement, 10 = completion, and 17 = heaven, so the Rapture would happen after a time period of (atonement × completion × heaven) squared days. (More on Brother Camping’s $100 million absurdity here.)

There’s more number symbolism, of course. The number of the Beast is 666 (or is it 616?). The disciples made a miraculous catch of 153 fish. There were twelve disciples and twelve tribes. There are four authentic gospels (out of dozens) because there are four winds and four points of the compass. But let’s move on.

The new kingdom as described at the end of Revelation was made with “every kind of precious stone.”

Jesus was described as a lamb, a reference to the unblemished lambs in the Passover meal.

The symbol of a fish (ichthys in Greek) was a secret symbol in the early church. The word was an acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”

Jesus died to respond to original sin.

Flames symbolized the Holy Spirit visiting the apostles on Pentecost.

A rainbow symbolized God’s promise to stop destroying the planet.

Conclusion

That was a cursory tour, and you can probably think of more instances of symbols within Christianity—things that mean something different in the supernatural world than they do here.

But symbolism is what you do when you’re trying to bridge a gap. Symbolism is used by art and literature, not history and science. You don’t need to conjure up the supernatural with mystical ideas, symbolism, coincidences, numerology, and so on if it really exists.

If the Bible is God’s message, its purpose is presumably to explain his plan. There’s no room for and no need for symbolism. That the Bible has symbolism argues that it has a different purpose than history.

See also: Why Not Call What God Does “Magic”?

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person
for doubting or denying its teachings,
and most of these teachings have been true;
but religion has murdered millions
for doubting or denying her dogmas,
and most of these dogmas have been false.
— Charles L. Wallis, Stories on Stone (1954)

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Image from Thought Catalog, CC license
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Not Even Hitler Can Help This Christian Argument

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In my reading I occasionally come across an argument that makes simple and important observations about a familiar argument that I had missed. I love such occasions, and I wish it happened more often. Let me summarize one case for your benefit, a video and article by NonStampCollector. I’ve added a bit of my own material, but the credit for most of the good stuff goes to the original author.

He begins with a quote that is almost surely by William Lane Craig. (NonStampCollector uses a direct quote to show that he’s responding to authentic Christian arguments but keeps it anonymous to avoid tangents related to the source.)

Introducing Nazi World

William Lane Craig (WLC) uses Nazi Germany’s Holocaust as an example to argue for objectively true morality.

Say Hitler had won the war, and we now lived in a society where because of that, and the propaganda, everyone believed that anti-Semitism was good, and gassing Jews was fine. Would that mean then that that was simply the morality that we accept? Is morality simply, at the end of the day, what society thinks about a matter? Or would it still be wrong even though nobody thought it was wrong?

WLC wants to use our shared revulsion of mass murder and attempted genocide to argue for a God-based grounding of that shared morality, but ignore that. Let’s just use his thought experiment of Nazi World, where Germany’s victory plus propaganda has convinced everyone that the genocide of Jews was right.

Some people living in Nazi World might accept this worldview reluctantly. They might say that, though the Holocaust was a necessary evil, it was still evil. Nevertheless, in this world, the person who labels the Holocaust as irretrievably wrong would be like today’s Nazi skinhead—a member of a tiny, ridiculed, dangerous minority. In Nazi World, Americans would see Hitler as another Lincoln—a man who had the courage to make the tough moral call.

You can be sure that Nazi World historians and public intellectuals would have hammered together detailed arguments to justify the Holocaust. This is a crazy notion in the West in the 21st century, but it is an interesting thought experiment (indeed, more interesting than I’d realized).

I’ve responded to this argument of WLC’s in a prior post, but here’s where NonStampCollector’s argument moves into new territory.

Déjà vu?

Pause and take a long look at Nazi World. It’s outrageous and inconceivable at first glance, but is it really? Think about it. Some traits should seem quite familiar to us today. They surround us. Any Christian who remembers their Sunday School Bible stories will have come across this very thing.

Genocides as unpleasant but necessary? Tribes killed because they deserved it? Those wielding the sword held up as heroes doing unpleasant but necessary work? The Old Testament is full of this!

“[Joshua] left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the [Lord] had commanded” (Joshua 10:40).

“The Lord heard the voice of Israel and delivered up the Canaanites; then they utterly destroyed them and their cities.” (Numbers 21:3).

“[God said:] Strike the Amalekites and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant” (1 Samuel 15:3).

“David attacked the land and did not leave a man or a woman alive” (1 Sam. 27:9).

“You shall consume all the peoples whom the Lord your God will deliver to you; your eye shall not pity them” (Deuteronomy 7:16).

“Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deut. 20:17).

(I’ve written more about God’s passion for genocide and Christian apologists’ weak arguments in God’s defense here, here, and here.)

Christians like WLC tell us that mass murder and genocide are objectively wrong and that the Bible backs up that instinct. They point to the Bible when they say that the Holocaust was immoral, but look at where this takes them. With their blind defense of the Bible, Christians have created Nazi World, that terrible and inconceivable world in which genocide is accepted, both by them and their god!

Could a German victory plus propaganda really create a long-lasting and widespread assurance that genocide was correct? We have an example that’s already lasted longer than Hitler’s hoped-for thousand-year Reich—the widespread belief among the world’s 2.17 billion Christians that the Israelite genocides in Canaan were morally correct.

When apologists like WLC describe Nazi World, they describe Christianity today—a brainwashed dystopia in which genocide is accepted. They’ve simply replaced Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Hitler with Joshua, Moses, Gideon, and God.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on this (or perhaps luxuriating in schadenfreude), let’s rewrite the WLC quote above.

Say the Israelites had driven out the inhabitants of Canaan, and we now lived in a society where because of that, and the propaganda, everyone believed that genocide was good, and killing Canaanites was fine, would that mean then that that was simply the morality that we accept? Is morality simply, at the end of the day, what society thinks about a matter? Or would it still be wrong even though nobody thought it was wrong?

“Killing Canaanites was fine” is indeed the morality that Christians typically accept.

Christian rebuttal

In response, Christian apologists demand to know the standard by which we atheists judge the Bible wrong. They’ll charge atheists with appealing to an objective moral standard and so acknowledging an Objective Moral Standard Giver. If instead atheists reject this Morality Giver, they’ve lost their moral foundation. They’re left with whatever morality they can cobble together themselves, but all that gives you is a subjective, changeable, culturally specific morality. (I respond to apologist Greg Koukl trying this trick here and here.)

But whatever reasoning an atheist uses to conclude that Old Testament genocides and murder are barbaric is already better than basing any reasoning on the Bible, because that reasoning is circular: the moral decisions made in the Bible are right because the Bible’s morality says they are. Judging the god who ordered genocide by the standards given by the god who ordered genocide is like saying that Hitler was moral because Hitler said so. The atheist is able to make the obvious call and declare genocide wrong. The Christian response: “It’s complicated.”

Where could you find justification for the Holocaust? Today you find that only in ancient holy books that justify genocide. NonStampCollector ends with this observation: “If there’s a worldview that leads people to excuse and condone appallingly cruel behavior, it’s not atheism, it’s theism.”

Religion is a byproduct of fear.
For much of human history,
it may have been a necessary evil,
but why was it more evil than necessary?
Isn’t killing people in the name of God
a pretty good definition of insanity?
— Arthur C. Clarke

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/13/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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