Monthly Archives: February 2020

Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #51: 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga (2 of 3)

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Alvin Plantinga is an eminence within the Christian apologetic community, but even he can only play the hand he was dealt. He was interviewed by the New York Times and gave three arguments (or sub-arguments) so stupid that a high school student shouldn’t be allowed to get away with them (part 1 here).

One Christian responded to comments to the interview:

It appears that many of the commenters either didn’t read the interview carefully or didn’t understand Plantinga’s arguments. They’re much more sophisticated and formidable than some of the superficial dismissals of the commenters might lead one to believe.

Sophisticated and formidable? That certainly doesn’t apply to these arguments. See what you think.

#2. Moon no longer connected to lunacy

Plantinga’s interviewer asked about the God-of-the-gaps problem: explanation is a zero-sum game, and things that science explains well—like lightning, drought, and disease—no longer need the God hypothesis. The list of things that God could plausibly cause continues to shrink. The interviewer gave evolution as an example of something that science now explains much better than Christianity ever could and asked, “Isn’t a major support for atheism the very fact that we no longer need God to explain the world?”

Plantinga responded:

As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified. A-moonism on this ground would be sensible only if the sole ground for belief in the existence of the moon was its explanatory power with respect to lunacy.

Right—we have lots of reasons to believe the moon exists. Drop “Of course the moon exists—how else would you explain lunacy?” and you have more reasons. By contrast, we have pretty much zero reasons to believe God exists, and Plantinga in this article does nothing to change that.

The same thing goes with belief in God: Atheism on this sort of basis would be justified only if the explanatory power of theism were the only reason for belief in God. And even then, agnosticism would be the justified attitude, not atheism.

As we saw in part 1, Plantinga’s definition of an atheist is someone who says, “I’m certain God doesn’t exist” rather than “I have no God belief, but I’m not certain.” I agree that evolution’s explanatory power doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist (and so can’t help atheist #1), but then that’s not my definition. I go where the evidence points (atheist #2), and by explaining the diversity of life on earth by evolution, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Richard Dawkins).

Here’s my distillation of Plantinga’s argument: we have many reasons to believe the moon exists, so if one reason goes away, we’re still justified in believing in the moon. No one questions the existence of the moon, in no small measure because can all see it! Contrast that with God: before modern science, Christians explained puzzles in nature with the stock answer, “God did it.” There was no evidence to support this claim, but (in Europe) Christianity was pretty much the only game in town. Now with science explaining things far better than Christianity ever could, Christians have even fewer reasons to accept the Christian claims.

Plantinga tries to salvage his discouraging situation by acknowledging that there are fewer reasons to believe in God now but pointing out that the number of reasons isn’t yet zero.

Let’s return to the opening point, “as a justification of atheism, [God being replaced by science] is pretty lame.” Redefine atheism as most of us see it (lack of god belief), and science’s incredible track record for explaining reality vs. Christianity’s inability to teach us anything new actually makes a powerful argument. Not only does the Bible not pass on any useful science (how about a recipe for soap or an explanation of how to avoid spreading disease?), but many of its claims about nature are wrong.

Imagine someone saying that just because some of the miraculous claims for alchemy are false, that doesn’t make them all false. That’s true, but we now know that they are indeed all false. Christianity has traveled the same road.

Concluded in part 3 with the claim that beliefs provided by evolution are as likely false as true.

Madness is rare in individuals,
but in groups, states, and societies,
it’s the norm.
— Friedrich Neitzche

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Image from Marc Arias, CC license
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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #51: 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga

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Famous Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga was interviewed in 2014 for the New York Times. He used three arguments that may have originated with him. These are not your typical arguments that end with “So therefore, God exists; QED,” but they could be elements in a larger argument.

The good news is that these are, at least to me, fresh arguments . . . but that’s the extent of the good news. Still, if you want some new chew toys, here you go. Have your way with these arguments and then read my critiques to see if I covered every point.

#1. Are there an even number of stars?

Plantinga said:

Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?”

His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’”

But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism. . . . Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.

Let’s first address his statement, “lack of evidence . . . is no grounds for atheism.” For most of us, lack of evidence is excellent grounds for atheism.

The problem is his definition of “atheism.” A few sentences earlier, Plantinga had defined atheism as “the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.” That’s also the leading definition in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This strong atheism, which accepts the burden of proof, is probably not how most of us define atheism, but Plantinga is on solid ground with that definition, and he did make his definition clear.

That means his “lack of evidence . . . is no grounds for atheism” applause line is correct using his definition, but it’s irrelevant to the question of God’s existence. Lack of evidence is indeed grounds for atheism if “atheism” is simply a lack of god belief.

Plantinga said, “The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism,” and I am indeed an agnostic because I don’t know. I’m also an atheist because I don’t believe.

Determining the number of stars raises practical questions, but let’s ignore that tangent and simply imagine a star counter changing rapidly (perhaps thousands of times a second). All we care about is that last digit—is it odd or even at any moment? This is identical to the question of whether a flipped coin landed heads up or not. It’s a 50/50 question (that is, 50 percent likelihood of odd or even, or a probability of 0.5).

But is the God question just a coin flip? Is God’s existence as likely as not? Of course not, and his comparison fails.

Plantinga seems to imagine “God exists—true or false?” to be like a stranger saying, “I have a bumfuzzle in this box—true or false?” We don’t know what a bumfuzzle is, how plausible it would be to have one, whether it would fit in a box, and so on, so without any data, we’re stuck at 50/50. If forced to guess at this point on the truth of the bumfuzzle claim, we might as well flip a coin.

By contrast, we already know much about the claims for God. We don’t start at 50/50 (that is, complete ignorance) on the God question. For example, I’ve written a series of silver bullet arguments against Christianity. Any one of these arguments make the God hypothesis very implausible, and I’ve written 26 such arguments (and counting).

Would Plantinga give a 50/50 chance to the likelihood of every supernatural being existing—Xenu, Poseidon, Quetzalcoatl, and all the rest? If instead he assigns the existence of each of these gods a very low probability (as I’m guessing he does), then consistency demands that he accept our doing the same for his god.

Burden of proof

I suspect apologists like Plantinga are simply tired of shouldering the burden of proof, and they want to start the debate at parity with atheism. To see why this fails, let’s return to the two relevant kinds of burdens of proof from a recent post.

  1. The person making the extraordinary claim has the burden of proof, and the person making the mundane claim doesn’t. For example, if I state that many world leaders aren’t human but actually alien reptoids (and you argue that this hypothesis is false), I have the burden of proof because I’m making the extraordinary claim. If I fail to make my case, you are logically obliged to reject it.
  2. Anyone who makes a claim is obliged to defend that claim, whether it’s extraordinary or mundane.

In that post, I examined cases where apologists confused these two burden-of-proof situations. Plantinga argues that God exists, which clearly puts him in category 1.

No one cares about the number of stars, but religious views are enormously consequential for some. I can appreciate that Plantinga may be tired of shouldering the burden of proof, but in that case he should stop making nutty claims.

Notice the irony in this comparison. We know stars exist. We know that countless things exist. God is the odd exception where we can’t get into a discussion of his properties until his very existence has been demonstrated, and there’s a mountain of evidence against it.

Bertrand Russell’s teapot

The interviewer asked Plantinga about Bertrand Russell’s hypothesized teapot orbiting the sun. Wouldn’t that be a better comparison than even-star speculation? Yes, such a teapot might exist, Russell said, but we have no good reason to think so, and the same thinking applies to God.

Plantinga responded:

Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism.

He goes on to list a few things that argue against an orbiting teapot. Such a project would be in the news (like Elon Musk’s personal Tesla, which now orbits the sun), and a secret rocket launch would be unlikely. Space programs don’t have the budget for frivolous projects like this. Therefore, we have good evidence against Russell’s teapot.

Yes, Dr. Plantinga, I agree. Now apply that same skepticism to the God hypothesis and think of things that we would see if God were real.

  • Europe during the 1000+ years when Christianity was in charge would’ve looks a lot more enlightened than other world societies. It wasn’t.
  • Religion wouldn’t look like just another societal trait. It does.
  • The Christian god wouldn’t need praise and worship, like an Iron Age dictator. He does.
  • Christian televangelists would know that God’s favor would be far more consequential than mere financial donations, and yet they still ask for donations.
  • And lots more here.

So the God question isn’t a 50/50 proposition about which we have no good information (like the number of stars), and it’s very much like Russell’s teapot (which has strong evidence against it). Plantinga is now back at square 1, advancing a ridiculous hypothesis.

And where is Plantinga’s evidence for God? He handwaves a reference to his famous “two dozen or so” arguments for God. He didn’t argue for them, so I won’t respond here, but if you want a critique, Richard Carrier did his typically thorough job on them here.

These Christian arguments are embarrassing and stupid. According to reputation, Plantinga is one of the best that Christianity has to defend their position, but smart high school students could take his arguments apart.

Continue to part 2 for an argument involving the moon.

If your Bible (et al) cannot get the natural right,
why would I trust it to get the supernatural right?
— commenter from Castilliano

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Image from Lucky Lynda, CC license
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Which Is Worse—an Abortion Clinic Shooter or the Clinic Itself? (2 of 2)

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A 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic that killed three people prompted a conservative response by Matt Walsh (part 1). Walsh denied that pro-life vitriol could’ve played a role in motivating the shooter while reserving the right to trowel on large amounts of that same vitriol.

His denial of responsibility failed.

Dismissing murder

Walsh admitted that the shooter’s actions were bad, but. He couldn’t ignore a grandstanding opportunity to argue the other side of the issue, that the shooter’s target—the abortion providers—are the worst possible people.

George Tiller, the heinous late-term baby executioner who ruthlessly slaughtered thousands of viable and fully developed infants, is the only abortion worker to be killed by an abortion opponent this century. That’s it. One. And he was one of the most dangerous, vicious, and murderous human beings to have ever lived.

You make it sound like working at a Planned Parenthood clinic is no more risky than being a librarian. Not so: there have been 11 murders and 26 attempted murders on U.S. abortion clinic workers. There have been 42 bombings, 188 arsons, and an additional 100 attempts at bombing or arson. And there’s more: vandalism, acid attacks, bioterrorism threats, assault and battery, death threats, kidnapping, burglary, stalking, and more—over 10,000 incidents in all.

Go research why women went to Tiller to get abortions. Was it because they didn’t want to be so fat? Or was it a more substantial reason—birth defects, mother’s health, catastrophic changes in financial status, or something similar?

And let’s pause to listen to your rhetoric. Was Tiller seriously “one of the most dangerous, vicious, and murderous human beings to have ever lived”? Few of us would morally object to going back in time to assassinate Joseph Mengele or Heinrich Himmler or Adolph Hitler. You’ve intentionally put Tiller with this company, so why then do you object to the shooter’s actions?

This hypocrisy is the problem that Walsh can’t acknowledge. He wants to say that the shooter was a killer and Planned Parenthood kills, so they’re in the same boat. But not him—he’s cut from different cloth because he’s pro-life.

But the rage he reveals in this article gives just as strong an argument for a very different arrangement of these three parties: now it’s the killer with Walsh in the same boat because of his venomous rhetoric that could easily provoke violent action. Planned Parenthood is the odd man out because it provides legal abortions before the fetus is a person.

As the article progresses, Walsh is on a roll, and the indignant “Of course we deplore violence—we’re pro-life!” attitude is gone. With no ear for irony, he repeats the line the killer is said to have used:

Planned Parenthood sells the parts of dead babies.

Wrong again. Selling body parts is illegal, and Planned Parenthood doesn’t do that. The mother can choose to donate the fetus for research, and Planned Parenthood can be reimbursed for their costs.

Planned Parenthood is a rotten, corrupt, depraved, vile, disgusting, brutal, murderous conglomerate of butchers and mercenaries.

And yet you wonder how anyone could possibly be incited to violence?

Abortion fanatics hate pro-lifers personally. They hate Christianity. They hate children. They hate life itself. Theirs is the sort of hatred that destroys the soul and dissolves the human conscience. We hate what is evil; they hate what is good.

And now it’s just a rant. This kind of rhetoric is what drove the shooter to kill.

Improving society

Why don’t you [Planned Parenthood] just shut up and work on not killing babies?

And what are you doing, Matt Walsh? Are you focusing on reducing the cause of abortions, unwanted pregnancies?

Among countries in the West, the U.S. compares poorly. In the United States, the annual pregnancy rate was 57 per 1000 women aged 15–19. This was, by far, the highest rate in the 21 countries studied. Compare this to 8 in Switzerland. What are we doing wrong (or what is Switzerland doing right)? There is ample room for improvement.

Is it better sex education? Is it easier and subsidized access to contraception? Whatever it is, cutting the number of abortions by as much as 90 percent simply through honest and open discussion by parents and more effective education and policy by society seems possible. Why are you approaching it the hard way? Instead of swimming upstream, you could work with pro-choice people who want the same thing. It almost sounds like you’re not really serious about this, and abortion isn’t the holocaust you claim it to be.

More to the point, making it “illegal” isn’t the way to do it. The abortion rate was more than twice as high as the current rate in the U.S. before Roe v. Wade made it legal nationwide, and safe and effective abortion by medicine would make it easy to skirt a ban.

The trolley problem

Almost everyone has heard of this thought experiment, but here’s a brief summary. Imagine a trolley that’s heading toward five unsuspecting workers on the track. If it continues, it will kill them all. But there’s a switch, and you can reroute the trolley down another path with only one worker. Would you switch the trolley?

Most people say they would. But what if you’ve got the same trolley heading for the five workers, and you’re on a bridge over the tracks. The only way to stop the trolley is with a large weight in its path. You’re not heavy enough to stop it, but there’s a large man on the bridge who is. Do you push him over?

Most people say they wouldn’t, but it’s the same calculation, five deaths vs. one.

The Planned Parenthood shooter in effect pushed the large man over. He’s taken the unthinkable but logical step—logical given Walsh’s own analysis. Walsh is left fuming about decorum—it’s one thing to label abortion providers as the most wicked scum on the earth, but in polite society one doesn’t actually act on this! He wants his rage but won’t accept the consequences.

Additional pro-choice resources:

But the consequence of using language like that
can be very dangerous.
I think candidates need to step back,
take a deep breath, and understand . . .
we have a responsibility to use
thoughtful and careful language.
— Wendy Davis, the former Texas state senator
who filibustered to block legislation
that would restrict abortion

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/4/15.)

Image from Kit Clutch, CC license
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Which Is Worse—an Abortion Clinic Shooter or the Clinic Itself?

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After a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs four years ago that killed three and injured nine more, I came across a response on TheBlaze, Glenn Beck’s entertainment and news network. The article was “Abortionists and Planned Parenthood Shooter Are Just Two Sides Of The Same Coin” by Matt Walsh. It tried to walk the line between putting pro-choice advocates and the shooter in the same bin (as the title makes clear) and handwaving that the outrageous rhetoric of pro-life fanatics didn’t encourage the gunman.

It failed.

Violent talk has consequences

I’m not Walsh’s audience. He was preaching to his choir, using terms like “pro-aborts” and “abortion fanatics” to refer to people like me, but the article gave an insight into the hostility of and rationalization by this community.

Walsh tried to walk away from any consequences of violent rhetoric from extreme quarters of the pro-life movement.

[Clues that the shooter was unlike the typical pro-life terrorist] has not prevented abortion enthusiasts on the left from gleefully spiking the football as if some point has been proven by the random violent outburst of a paranoid hermit.

Yes, there’s a point: speech can have consequences. Spin a story about how Planned Parenthood is an evil organization, and this kind of violence may be a consequence. If you don’t think it through, impressionable readers might not either. As the Bible says, you’ve sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.

As if we need more examples of speech having consequences, one mother tried to kill herself and her two daughters to avoid the Tribulation predicted by Harold Camping for May 21, 2011 (more here and here). Did Camping deserve no condemnation for saying that the world would end, knowing that some of his gullible flock might take him seriously?

Another example is the person who took the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (invented to discredit Hillary Clinton in her 2016 presidential bid) seriously and shot up the pizza restaurant.

Here’s an example of extreme anti-abortion speech from video evangelist Joshua Feuerstein:

I say, tonight, we punish Planned Parenthood. I think it’s time that abortion doctors should have to run and hide and be afraid for their life. (7/29/15)

After the Colorado shooting, pro-lifers tried to prop up their position by tweeting about “babies” saved. Yes, pro-life rhetoric can have bad consequences.

How pro-life is the pro-life movement?

Walsh says it goes without saying that he was shocked by the shooter’s actions.

It goes without saying because, for one thing, we’re pro-life.

No, you’re pro-birth. How about being pro-health care? Or working to improve the society into which these babies are born? And isn’t it inconsistent when most of those who oppose abortions also accept the death penalty?

For another, there’s no logic in it.

Wrong. You went on and on about the deaths of “over 50 million babies.” That’s nonsense, of course—there’s a spectrum of personhood across the gestation period, and a single cell isn’t a baby, a human being, or a person—but it is quite logical to kill a few lives to save many. You can’t argue that abortion is murder but then claim that murder to reduce abortions is illogical.

The lives that were snuffed out in the front of the building weren’t any more or less human than the lives exterminated in the back. Our humanity does not exist on a spectrum.

Walsh imagines that Homo sapiens DNA is all that makes someone human, but with this he invents single-celled humans. Indeed, humanness does exist on a spectrum. A single cell isn’t very human, while the trillion-cell newborn nine months later is. (If you’d prefer a better word choice, say that the single cell isn’t a person while the newborn is.)

Why shoehorn gestation into a binary situation? Drop the ridiculous idea that a single cell is a “baby” or “person.” Say that the single cell isn’t a person, the newborn is, and it’s a spectrum in between.

[A pro-choice advocate outraged at pro-lifer vitriol is] like a Nazi standing up at Nuremberg and scolding society for hating him.

Nope. The Nazi was on trial for crimes against humanity. Planned Parenthood kills a fetus that isn’t yet a person. Walsh would predictably respond that it will be a person if given time, but this simply becomes the Argument from Potential—it isn’t inherently worth protecting now, but it will be—which is no argument at all.

Apologies

Walsh rejects the shooter’s actions, but he chafes at this obligation.

We’re the ones who have to be seen condemning murder, as if there’s any reasonable question at all about where we stand on the subject?

You demand that moderate Muslims apologize for Muslim violence, don’t you? If so, you can appreciate how we’d like some assurance from the pro-life community that they reject the shooter’s actions that they might have triggered, but there’s still an asymmetry in your favor. The Friendly Atheist blog noted how Muslims were treated after terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 and how much better anti-Planned Parenthood activists are treated.

Unlike the seemingly endless stream of demands and condemnations [aimed at Muslims] that followed the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, no one has suggested that churches in which Planned Parenthood are routinely depicted as the devil’s spawn be closed; no one has demanded that Evangelicals who believe performers of abortions are committing crimes against humanity should be issued with special identity cards; and no one has called for arresting or deporting the inciters who exploit such incidents to whip up hate (and garner more votes).

No, conservative churches and ministries that inspire Christian terrorists are safe. They’re still able to get outraged at women seeking treatment for unwanted pregnancies while denying any responsibility for the consequences.

Concluded in part 2, where the Christian author works himself into a righteous lather.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/4/15.)

Image from sandy Poore, CC license
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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #50: The Argument from Biblical Consistency (2 of 2)

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In part 1, we began our critique of the popular argument that the Bible is uncannily consistent, without historical error or contradiction, despite having been written by many authors from diverse locations over 1500 years. We’ll conclude our critique with a search for the Bible’s promised common theme and then wrestle with a challenge aimed at those who doubt the value of this argument.

Problem 2: what’s the Bible’s “common theme”?

Clue #2 to the Bible’s divine authorship, according to these apologists, is its common theme. Here it is in their words:

The Bible has 66 books by 40 authors, written over 1500 years, in 3 languages, on 3 continents, and yet there is one consistent theme: the glory of God in the salvation of man through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel. (Source)

This collection of books shares a common storyline—the creation, fall, and redemption of God’s people; a common theme—God’s universal love for all of humanity; and a common message—salvation is available to all who obey the Gospel and follow God with all of their heart, soul, mind and strength. (Source)

Yet despite this marvelous array of topics and goals, the Bible displays a flawless internal consistency. It never contradicts itself or its common theme, . . . [God’s] love, grace, and mercy [extended] to unworthy people who deserved to be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity. (Source)

Since Jesus isn’t on every page of the Bible (or even in every chapter, or even in every book), this fails.

Even when you look at the Christians’ favorite prophecies of Jesus (Isaiah 53 or Psalm 22), at best you find clumsy parallels with the crucifixion story. If this imagined common theme existed, it would surely be found in these prophecies of Jesus. But read those chapters, and there is no mention of love, grace, mercy, or salvation from hell. There isn’t even death by crucifixion or the resurrection.

A challenge to skeptics: duplicate the Bible’s marvelous record

One source demanded that the skeptic find an example comparable to the Bible’s consistent message despite diverse authorship.

I challenge you to go to any library in the world, you can choose any library you like, and find 66 books which match the characteristics of the 66 books in the Bible. You must choose 66 books, written by 40 different authors, over 1500 years, in 3 different languages, written on 3 different continents. However, they must share a common storyline, a common theme, and a common message, with no historical errors or contradictions.

This challenge flops since the Bible is not particularly consistent. It’s full of contradictions and errors.

But let’s forge ahead and respond to the challenge anyway. Can we find another set of books that comes from comparably diverse origins while being internally consistent? I think we can. Let’s use books written about World War II. Here’s how we can respond to these criteria.

  • 66 books written by 40 different authors. There are 60 thousand books written about World War II. Let’s imagine sorting through these books to find the one percent that fit most harmoniously together—that’s 600 books from 600 authors. Of course, these books could be eclectic and range from high level, comprehensive histories of all theaters of the war to narrow aspects such as the SS, Hitler, Allied air power, the Manhattan Project and so on. But of course the Bible’s books are eclectic as well. Genesis begins with mythology, the books of Kings and Chronicles document history, Esther is the story of a Jewish woman who saved the Jews in Persia, and Amos was a prophet in Israel in the mid-700s BCE.
  • Three different languages. We can find books written in English (from the U.S.), French or Arabic (from Tunisia), and German (from Germany). This was a world war, and we could probably find books from sixty modern countries, compared to a tenth that number for the Bible.
  • From three different continents. The U.S. gives us North America, Tunisia gives us Africa, and Germany gives us Europe. But we can do better. Add books written in Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Tagalog, and more, and we have Asia. We can also add Australia—that’s five continents. How many languages have WW2 books been written in? Certainly dozens. Perhaps hundreds.
  • Written over 1500 years. No, the Bible wasn’t written over 1500 years. A better estimate is 1000 years: 900 BCE (for parts of Genesis) to 100 CE (Revelation and some epistles). This is where the Bible wins, because the period of authorship of our WW2 books would probably only start in the 1930s. That means that the Bible has a roughly 10× greater date range.
  • No historical errors or contradictions. The Bible is a bigly failure here. It’s hard to quantify this on a Scale of Embarrassment, but one percent of WW2 books, deliberately selected to avoid contradiction, sounds like they would make a more consistent story than the hodge-podge in the Bible. Any Christian apologist who disagrees can start with responding to my list of Bible contradictions.

So how did we do? The Bible wins on timespan by a factor of ten, but our WW2 collection has ten times the number of books, ten times the number of authors, ten times the number of languages, ten times the number of modern countries of authorship, and five continents instead of three.

Instead of WW2, there are many other historical events that would reduce the Bible’s timespan advantage—say, the Battle of Agincourt, the Battle of Hastings, or the Roman Empire—though I don’t know if they could beat World War II on the other criteria.

But this is a tangent. The biggest embarrassment for the Bible in this contest remains. Its errors and contradictions make clear that no omniscient divinity was behind it.

Continue to #51, 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga

Related articles:

Why should one think that God performed the miracle
of inspiring the words of the Bible
if he didn’t perform the miracle
of preserving the words of the Bible?
— Bart Ehrman

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Image from Ryan Wilson, CC license
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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #50: The Argument from Biblical Consistency

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If you’ve read much apologetic commentary, you’ve seen this one: the story in the Bible is marvelously consistent despite it being composed of 66 separate books. From 40 authors from all walks of life. In 3 languages. From 3 continents. In different literary genres. Over 1500 years. No, not marvelously consistent—supernaturally consistent! Praise the Lord.

But poke at this argument, and it unravels quickly.

The Christian claim

We’ll start with claims for the Bible’s consistency in apologists’ own words.

The Bible is comprised of 66 Books written over a period of about 1,500 years by over 40 authors from all walks of life, with different kinds of personalities, and in all sorts of situations. It was written in three languages on three continents, and it covers hundreds of controversial subjects. Yet, it fits together into one cohesive story with an appropriate beginning, a logical ending, a central character, and a consistent theme. (Source)

The unity of Scripture demonstrates its supernatural inspiration. Only the one true, holy God could provide us with such a flawless Bible that reveals such a matchless message: the Lord’s staggering love for His creation. (Source)

One of the remarkable features of the Bible is its magnificent continuity. This is because God Himself is the source of the Bible. (Source)

Wow—this sounds like the sycophantic praise North Koreans give their various Great, Dear, and Brilliant leaders. But it’s simply wrong.

Problem 1: the Bible isn’t consistent

In the first place, no, the Bible isn’t consistent. Not even close: the Bible says that Christians sin and that they don’t, that God can’t be seen and that he can, and that works save and that only faith saves. There are two incompatible Ten Commandments, there are two creation stories, and there are two Flood stories.

It can’t get Jesus’s genealogy straight. It’s unclear who the disciples should evangelize. It contradicts itself about whether people deserve punishment for their ancestors’ sins or not. “God is love,” and yet he demands genocide and drowns the world. It says that Satan works for God and then says that he’s God’s enemy. It admits that there are many gods and then says that Yahweh is the only one. The epistles of Paul don’t say the same thing as the gospels, and the gospels don’t even agree with each other. Jesus is wrong about the timing of the End.

And then there are the contradictions about the crucifixion and resurrection. What day was Jesus crucified on? Who brought the spices? Did the women spread the word about the resurrection? The 45,000 Christian denominations show the result of the ambiguity.

Christian apologists will say that these aren’t contradictions, but they agree that they’re apparent contradictions. Consider these book titles that attempt to seal the leaking dike: The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, The Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, Hard Sayings of the Bible, and Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. These books admit to at least apparent contradictions in a Bible that they say is supernaturally consistent. No omniscient god would create a Bible with contradictions of any sort, apparent or actual, and a Bible full of apparent contradictions that needs weighty books with rationalizing excuses isn’t consistent. More.

You might be able to sidestep a contradiction by labeling an incident or story as allegory, but then you’ve lost any biblical authority. The authority now rests on the person who decides what can be taken literally and what must be allegorized.

The Bible’s canonization process

Some versions of this argument say something like, “When Moses sat down to write Genesis, how could he have known that all the future books would fit nicely together like jigsaw puzzle pieces? Only the hand of God explains this!” But of course the canonization process (the picking of the official books to include in the Bible) worked the other way around. They didn’t look from Moses forward but from their present backwards, picking books that fit with the consensus view as they understood it. The Marcionites, Gnostics, and others were considered heretics from the standpoint of the winners, and the books from the hundreds of candidates were the ones that best fit the Christianity of those winners. It’s odd to celebrate that these books fit well together when they were deliberately chosen to fit well together.

The canons of Christian sects don’t even agree. For example, the books of 3 and 4 Maccabees are included in the Georgian Orthodox Bible, and Tobit and Judith are included in the Roman Catholic Bible, but none of these books are included in the Protestant Bible. “Magnificent continuity” is apparently in the eye of the beholder.

And, as noted in the previous section, these books don’t fit particularly well together. Each individual book was written to serve the purposes of that author, and those purposes varied. The books of the Bible are asked to do what they were never written to do—be consistent. For example, it would make no sense to scold the author of one gospel for telling a different (and contradictory) story from that in another gospel when he had no goal to tell the same story. He was giving his message, not writing a news article.

No, Jesus isn’t on every page of the Bible

Another popular Christian claim is that Jesus is on every page of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. But if that’s the case, Jews should be an important authority, since the Christian Old Testament is their scripture. And since Jewish scholars haven’t converted, they obviously reject this argument.

Arguing that their bias prevents them from seeing Jesus can be turned around with just as much authority, and now the Christian’s bias is the obstacle to an honest assessment.

When you look at the Bible, the stories it tells are about a lot more than Jesus. In just the Pentateuch (the first five books), we get a just-so story that explains creation. Then God gets annoyed and destroys the world in a flood. Then God promises a great people to Abraham. Then God gives the Promised Land to Moses. Each of these stories reaches a conclusion, and a The End could plausibly wrap up each one. None is about Jesus.

After more adventures of a small country in a dangerous world, we get Jesus in the New Testament. The Christians will tell you that now you can say The End. They will explain these repeated reboots of the story by appealing to progressive revelation—God apparently dribbles out his perfect message over time. But this cuts both ways, and Muslims will tell you that that process continued, and only after adding the Quran can you say The End. And the Mormons tell you that only after adding the Book of Mormon can you say The End. And every cult leader and reincarnation of Jesus will say the same thing.

Concluded in part 2 with a challenge to the skeptic.

Related articles:

That first moment a Christian realizes
he’s wrong about something,
that Christian is going to wonder exactly what else
his onetime hero is wrong about.
(Spoiler: Everything.)
All it takes is one realization
that one thing is drastically in error,
just one brick removed to start the Jenga tower shaking
like the mythic Walls of Jericho themselves.
— Captain Cassidy, Roll to Disbelieve blog

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Image from Andrew Ridley, CC license
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