Monthly Archives: June 2020

Response to “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection” (4 of 5)

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resurrection

On to part 4 of our critique of Mike Licona’s “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection” (part 1 here).

(Blue text is the myth, green is Licona’s rejection of the myth, and black is my response to Licona.)

Myth 7: It Was Merely Legend.

We don’t know what really happened. All we have is legends that developed long after the events. In the gospels we read these legends, not history.

Finally! Lucky number seven is the correct answer! Yes, all evidence points to the resurrection in the Jesus story as legend. C. S. Lewis’s famous “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?” argument is quite popular in Christian circles, and he misses Legend as the obvious fourth possibility (more here). I respond to twelve reasons given by apologists who argue against the legend hypothesis here.

Unfortunately, Licona handwaves a weak rebuttal and becomes an example of Winston Churchill’s dictum, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” Licona says, “We have reports that go back to the original apostles.” Paul said that Jesus died, was buried, rose, and appeared to others (1 Corinthians 15). “We know Paul was teaching what the Jerusalem apostles were teaching.”

Reports that go back to the original apostles? Is he seriously going to point to the story itself to justify the validity of the story? The claim that the gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John isn’t history but is itself a legend. And sometimes centuries separate our best copies from the originals (more). That doesn’t make them useless, but that’s insufficient evidence on which to base a supernatural claim.

Licona says that the disciples confirmed Paul’s approach, which is probably a reference to Galatians 2:2–6, in which Paul reports that the Jerusalem crowd had no corrections to make to his teaching. However, Paul’s conclusion shows a fair amount of friction between the two camps: “As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me.”

And how reliable is Paul anyway? The post-resurrection appearances in his famous 1 Corinthians 15 passage don’t match the gospel accounts (more here and here). Perhaps the reason Paul didn’t have more respect for those who lived with Jesus—unlike his own Jesus experience, which was only through a vision—was because he thought they’d all seen him as a vision. He uses the same verb for his personal interaction with Jesus as those of the apostles.

Paul says that the Jerusalem faction supported him . . . but then he’d be motivated to claim their support, wouldn’t he? Just because a claim is in one of Paul’s epistles, that doesn’t make it history.

“This goes back to the eyewitnesses themselves. You can accuse them of lying or hallucinating or whatever you would accuse them of, but a legend? Can’t happen because it was the original apostles of Jesus who were making the initial proclamation that Jesus had been raised and had appeared to them.”

Licona has done nothing to move any component of the New Testament from the story/legend column into the history column. The gospels don’t even claim to be written by apostles; that’s yet another part of the legend.

Myth 8: Science proves that resurrections cannot occur.

“Science does prove that the dead do not return to life by natural causes. . . . But does that prove that Jesus could not have been raised from the dead?” No, because Jesus rising from the dead wasn’t due to natural causes; rather, God raised Jesus. “If God exists and wanted to raise Jesus, well then . . . that makes things different.”

If God exists? This is the Hypothetical God Fallacy—assuming God and then proceeding from there. But showing God’s existence is exactly what we’re trying to do here. It’s a deceptive tangent to begin a sentence with “If God exists. . . .” That line of reasoning might be useful only if I claimed to be proving that God doesn’t exist, which I don’t.

“If God exists” is just pointless speculation like “If I were a billionaire.” Until I am, anything that proceeds from this is just a daydream.

There is no evidence here and no argument. Licona might as well say, “If God exists, well, then I’m right!” That’s true, but it does nothing to advance the argument.

Licona illustrates his point by imagining people trying and failing to walk across the water in a swimming pool. And now Licona shows how to do it: he walks along the side of the pool, holding a small boy by the wrists over the water as the boy walks on the water. You’ll say that this worked only because Licona was an external force. That’s right, and God was the external force that raised Jesus from the dead.

Yes, we understand that God is the not-natural, external force that you say came in to cause the resurrection. Any reason to accept your claim? Do you have evidence? You don’t seem to want to use science here, but what other tool do we use to evaluate a claim about reality like this?

“So science only proves that dead critters stay dead apart from an act of God. It doesn’t prove that God couldn’t raise Jesus from the dead.”

True and irrelevant. Proving that God couldn’t raise a dead man isn’t the goal. We start with the assumption that this is just a story, and you shoulder the burden of proof. I’m waiting.

Concluded in part 5.

Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing,
“Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith!
I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up
must come down, down, down. Amen!”
If they did, we would think they were
pretty insecure about the concept.
— Dan Barker

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/28/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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BSR 22: There Is No Evidence for God’s Existence

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We’re in the home stretch! Three-quarters of the 28 Quick Shots now have responses. I hope these condensed replies to popular Christian arguments have been useful for you.

Summary of reply: There is neither direct nor indirect evidence for the case for God’s existence; science has the track record in answering questions about reality, not Christianity; and a non-biologist’s critique of biology is irrelevant.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: There is no evidence for God’s existence.

Christian response #1: There is both direct evidence (testimony of those who saw Jesus’s miracles, including the Resurrection) and indirect evidence (clues from modern science that point to God).

BSR: Testimony? What we have are copies separated by centuries from the originals. And those originals contained fanciful supernatural stories unlikely to be history. And those stories had been oral history for decades before they were written down. So, no, we don’t have reliable testimony. That doesn’t prove that the Jesus stories we have today at the end of that long process are false, but it’s scant evidence that they’re true. And it’s preposterously flimsy evidence with which to support Christianity’s massive supernatural claims.

Let’s move on to the indirect evidence, science’s clues to God. The Christian argument mentions (1) the universe coming from nothing, (2) the fine tuning of the universe, and (3) the origin of life.

(1) No, science doesn’t say that the universe came from nothing. That might be true, but science has no consensus on the question. In fact, not even Genesis says that God created the universe from nothing.

(2) The multiverse is predicted by cosmic inflation, for which we have good evidence. With 10500 possible universes in the multiverse, it’s not surprising that one might appear fine tuned.

(3) Science doesn’t have a consensus theory of the origin of life. Maybe in twenty years it will. Christianity also doesn’t have a well-evidenced explanation for the origin of life. And it still won’t in twenty years. Or ever.

No, we aren’t forced to hypothesize a supernatural Creator.

There is neither direct evidence (reliable eyewitness testimony) nor indirect evidence (clues from science) that God exists. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: How can you accept naturalistic explanations for information in DNA, fine tuning, the appearance of design, and more when there isn’t sufficient evidence to support such claims?

BSR: Where’s the problem? Where science doesn’t have an answer, there is nothing to accept. Science and laypeople just say, “We don’t know.” Unanswered questions aren’t embarrassing to science. They help focus research.

Christian apologists like to raise questions, but they’re just repeating questions that they got from science. Attacking science by raising unanswered questions neither attacks science nor argues for God. A supernatural explanation wins only when it explains things better than the natural explanation, and when that natural explanation is the scientific consensus, it explains things very well. Christian apologists often imagine that pointing out an unanswered scientific question (such as, where did life come from?) advances their position, but an unevidenced “God did it!” will never replace a scientific hypothesis.

This argument distills down to, “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, Christianity.” Making this non-argument, even with bravado, only highlights the fact that Christianity has never taught us anything about reality. Let’s instead go with the discipline with the track record.

A popular but pointless Christian argument is “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, Christianity.” This is just embarrassing. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Philosopher Antony Flew was famous for his arguments against God, but when he examined DNA as evidence, he concluded that its information couldn’t be explained without an intelligent Creator.

BSR: Who cares what Antony Flew concluded about DNA? He wasn’t a biologist! His critique is worth nothing.

DNA is a sloppy mess. It (more or less) gets the job done and it’s very complex, but complexity doesn’t mean designed. A Rube Goldberg machine is deliberately complex, and the reason they’re amusing is that designers don’t actually design that way. In particular, DNA doesn’t look like how a human programmer would do it. Of course, God might have his own way of doing things that isn’t at all how human designers work, but then the Design Hypothesis, which states that DNA looks designed, fails.

You don’t seek complexity but rather elegance when looking for the clues of design.

BSR 20 looked into DNA more closely, so I’ll just summarize that argument: human DNA has 20,000 nonworking pseudogenes, it has genes that code for vestigial structures and atavisms, and eight percent is made of virus fragments. No designer would put this junk in DNA; therefore, it doesn’t look designed; therefore, the Design Argument fails.

Antony Flew was a famous atheist philosopher. He turned from atheism after misunderstanding biological arguments. Sorry, Dr. Flew, but no one cares how a non-biologist critiques biology. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 23: Moral Truths Are a Matter of Personal Opinion

For further reading:

Science doesn’t know everything.
Religion doesn’t know anything.
— Aron Ra

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Image from Joe Beck, CC license
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BSR 21: Earth Is Insignificant in a Huge Hostile Universe

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Summary of reply: the Argument from Incredulity fails, “Life is so improbable!” fails since we don’t even understand life here on Earth, intelligent design is unnecessary to explain anything, and our inconceivably vast universe looks like nothing an actual god would create as an incubator for human life.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Earth is just a pale blue dot in a huge hostile universe. Why would God create all that extra wasted universe?

Christian response #1: The odds of a life-supporting planet like Earth is more than just statistically improbable. It’s miraculous.

BSR: Miraculous? Citation needed.

This is the Argument from Incredulity—“I can’t imagine how this could have happened naturally, so it must’ve been God!” If you don’t know how something works, that doesn’t mean that you do know and it was God.

We don’t even understand life on the one planet where we know life exists. Biologists keep uncovering new species in surprising places thought inhospitable to life. Worms have been found miles deep in rock, in glaciers, and in hot, cold, or frozen places at the bottom of oceans. Not only is extraterrestrial life possible in the universe, it might exist in our own solar system. Maybe on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Maybe on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. The difficulty for life beyond Earth may not be inhospitable conditions but our constrained imaginations.

Let’s turn to the idea of Earth as a “pale blue dot.” That metaphor came from astronomer Carl Sagan, who suggested that the Voyager 1 spacecraft turn its camera back to where it came from to take a photo of Earth (see that 1990 photo above). The Earth is less than a pixel in size, the bright dot in the right of the image. Some of Sagan’s poetic summary of our tiny home in a vast and inhospitable universe is in the quote at the end of this post. “Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Through science we see reality accurately, far more amazing and awe inspiring than religion’s impoverished and baseless cartoon.

We don’t even understand life here on Earth, so it’s premature to say that it’s all so complicated that God must’ve done it. It’s even possible that we have extraterrestrial life in our own solar system. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Imagine coming across a message in English on a rock. Would you dismiss it as just one more rock, as a curious natural happenstance? Of course not. We know intelligence when we see it.

BSR: No one would explain a clear, detailed English message as a curious natural event when we have millions of English messages as precedents. We know about such messages, and we know where they come from. Any of us would put this rock with its English message into the bin “Messages written by humans,” not “odd natural marks on rocks.”

We occasionally experience pareidolia where we see a face in a cloud or an image of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. But detailed English messages still look manmade, and the occasional curious rock still looks natural. Pareidolia in effect means “weird thing that looks intelligent but is just natural.”

Paley’s famous watch argument for God (“Say, this pocket watch I just found in the forest looks very different from the rocks and twigs laying nearby!”) actually defeats itself. If the pocket watch looks different and looks designed, then those rocks and twigs (which look so very different) must not look designed.

We know of plenty of things designed by intelligent people and plenty of undesigned things made by mindless forces in nature. We know of zero examples of things made by the supernatural. The supernatural is an enormous claim that isn’t unnecessary to explain anything.

We know of designed things made by intelligent people and undesigned things made by mindless Nature. We know of ZERO things made by the supernatural. The supernatural is still unnecessary to explain anything. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Suppose you make a single cupcake completely from scratch—you plant the wheat and grind the flour, you milk the cow and make the butter, and so on. Then someone criticizes the cupcake because of the enormous waste and effort to make one tiny beautiful thing. Does that deny the existence of the baker?

BSR: We know about cupcakes and bakers. We all accept the countless precedents of bakers baking. Contrast that with zero supernatural claims we can all agree with.

You can complain about waste or ask if all that time and effort were worth it since humans can be inefficient. However, God has no such limitation. If he wanted to make one perfect cupcake out of nothing with no waste, he could. And if he wanted to make one simple, efficient, waste-free environment for the creatures he made in his own image, he could.

But look at the universe—it’s about as far from that perfect human world as it is possible to be. It has 200 billion galaxies, each holding 200 billion stars. The universe has existed 7 million times longer than Christianity, and the mass of the universe is 27 orders of magnitude (powers of ten) greater than the Earth. Look to the heavens and wonder about mankind’s place, and you’ll see the wasteful work of nature, not the precise and efficient hand of God.

Imagine being dropped onto some random spot on the Earth without technology—no shelter or clothes, no food or water. Maybe you’ll wind up in a jungle in central Africa or on tundra in Siberia. More than likely it would be in the ocean. Even worse, imagine being dropped into some random spot in the universe. Does the universe look like God’s Petri dish for his most precious creation?

If Earth is God’s Petri dish for humans, he could’ve done it with zero waste. A universe with 200 billion galaxies and one dust speck with humans is the opposite of what a god would’ve done. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 22: There Is No Evidence for God’s Existence

For further reading:

[Look at] that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know,
everyone you ever heard of,
every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. . . .
Every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,
every king and peasant, every young couple in love,
every mother and father, hopeful child,
inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals . . .
every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—
on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
— Carl Sagan

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Image from JPL, public domain
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Response to “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection” (3 of 5)

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Let’s continue with part 3 of our critique of Mike Licona’s “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection” (part 1 of the critique here).

(Blue text is the myth, green is Licona’s rejection of the myth, and black is my response to Licona.)

Myth 5: It’s a Matter of Faith.

You can’t prove the resurrection because it’s a matter of faith.

Imagine this conversation between an atheist and a believer.

Atheist: I don’t believe in God but instead think that we’re all here because of blind naturalistic forces.

Christian: Can you prove that? Perhaps there’s no point in even trying because that’s just a statement of faith.

Response: We have scientific evidence!

Christian: And we have historical evidence for the resurrection.

Historians have already evaluated your evidence and rejected it. The resurrection is a religious belief, not a historical one. The historical consensus rejects the supernatural.

And science never proves anything. It’s always provisional. Acceptance of science as a reliable (though imperfect) source of information isn’t a matter of faith. We trust in science because it has earned that trust—contrast that with religion.

Licona: “When you subject that historical evidence to strictly controlled historical methods, the resurrection of Jesus is not only the best explanation, it is by far the best historical explanation for the known historical data.”

Now that’s a faith statement! You’ve already tried and failed to convince historians. You’ve not even convinced Muslims of the resurrection, and they’re fellow believers in the supernatural and Jesus. Why should I accept your version of the crucifixion story over the Muslims’ version?

You’ll likely say that Muslims are biased by their beliefs to not follow the evidence, but first show me that this criticism doesn’t apply to you as well.

Myth 6: Apparent Death Theory.

Jesus really didn’t die; he just seemed to die, and then he revived in the tomb. This is also known as the swoon theory.

The chance of surviving a crucifixion is very small. Even if taken down from the cross alive (Josephus gives examples of this), the trauma would probably be too much to survive.

Uh, okay. For your next trick, I suggest you analyze the likelihood of the Wicked Witch of the East surviving the fall of Dorothy’s house.

Labeling part of the gospel narrative as history and then demanding that the skeptic give a naturalistic explanation for what comes next is a waste of time. The resurrection is an accretion of legend and history and we’re not sure which is which, but the supernatural explanation isn’t necessary. The God hypothesis adds nothing.

“The problem with the apparent death theory is: there’s not a shred of evidence for it.”

And the problem with the claim that George Washington didn’t fly around with a jet pack is that there’s not a shred of evidence for it, either. There are no testimonies from friends who say he didn’t, and there is no comprehensive inventory of his possessions that convinces us that a jet pack couldn’t have been hidden somewhere or given to a friend when he died.

So must we be agnostic on the jet pack question? Of course not. Common sense is a reliable tool, and we can reject the claim. Similarly, the resurrection would be an incredible, unprecedented event, and all evidence is against it.

Licona apparently wants contemporary evidence to overturn a claim from history. I wonder then what he makes of the claim of the “Eight Witnesses,” eight men who publicly stated that in 1829 they saw and handled the golden plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. Even after some of them fell out with Joseph Smith and were excommunicated, there is little evidence that they retracted their position. This statement is in every copy of the Book of Mormon.

The statement of the Eight Witnesses does nothing to increase my belief in the reliability of Joseph Smith’s story, and I don’t need to see any contemporary evidence to undercut it. Is it any different for Licona? If he sees things the same way, what does that say about his demand for evidence supporting the swoon theory? In fact, only his Christian bias prevents him from seeing pretty much any natural alternative as more plausible than a divine resurrection.

“These reasons and some others are why no widely respected scholar in the world today holds or posits that Jesus survived his crucifixion.”

Every Muslim scholar thinks that he wasn’t crucified at all. This suggests that to Licona, “scholar” just means “Christian scholar.” Muslims and atheists need not apply. His brand of scholarship requires an echo chamber with only supportive voices.

Why bother with the apparent death theory? Licona wants to focus here rather than respond to the best challenges to the resurrection, that it’s a combination of myth and legend. It’s easier to wrestle with a strawman than with a real argument.

To be continued.

Poetry, mythology, and religion represent the world
as man would like to have it,
while science represents the world
as he gradually comes to discover it.
— Joseph Wood Krutch

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/25/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, public domain

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BSR 20: Christianity Is Anti-Science

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Summary of reply: We’ll wonder why there’s a map of world religions but not of world science, follow the evidence for the universe (it’s not looking good for God), and look for clues to a Cosmic Designer in human DNA.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Christianity is anti-science.

Christian response #1: Christianity isn’t anti-science, it’s just that there are many kinds of truth besides scientific truth. For example, truth can come from logic, mathematics, metaphysics, morals, history, or aesthetics.

BSR: Science makes “testable explanations and predictions about the universe” (Wikipedia). But take science’s methods—to follow the evidence honestly, to collaborate and critique, to reward the finding of errors and overturning of accepted truths, and so on—and apply them in other areas, and you can also have reliable results. History and mathematics are examples. Theology and perhaps metaphysics are not.

Theology not being a route to truth has a silver lining for the Christian because it prevents the Scientologist, Satanist, or Mormon from demanding that their contradicting supernatural views be taken seriously.

Christians imagine that the Big Questions—Why are we here? What is our purpose? Where did we come from?—is exclusively theirs to answer. But religion’s answers are dependent on the society. In India, Hinduism has one set of answers; in Yemen, Islam has different answers; and in Alabama, Christianity has different answers again. And it’s not like the answers from the world’s religions are gradually coming together. In fact, the opposite is true. Here again, following the evidence is the way to go. It turns out that Science does have answers to these Big Questions; it’s just that religion doesn’t want to hear them.

Look at a map of world religions and ask yourself why there is no equivalent map of world science.

Look at a map of world religions and ask yourself why there is no equivalent map of world science. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Christianity isn’t anti-science. Some of the most famous scientists in history were Christians, as are many scientists today. And these scientists are bold enough to ask the Who question.

BSR: It’s true that Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and many other scientists from centuries ago were Christian. But at that time pretty much everyone in Europe was a Christian. Newton’s chair at Cambridge required not only that he be a Christian but that he be an ordained Anglican priest.* Christianity was pretty much the only intellectual game in town, even though it explained little, and that poorly. How many of Europe’s early scientists would be Christian if they were living today, witnessing the explanatory power of modern science?

As for asking the Who question (in addition to asking What, How, and so on), Newton’s science never had a “then a miracle occurs” in step 2. His explanations were natural at every step. He did write a lot about Christianity (and alchemy, too, for that matter), but that was a separate project from his physics.

That’s true for modern scientists like Francis Collins as well. God is never cited as a cause in any of his work.

Might the Cosmic Salamander have snotted out the universe? We can’t prove it didn’t, but that’s not where the evidence points. Let’s follow the evidence. It doesn’t point to the Cosmic Salamander, to God, or indeed any Who at all.

Might the Cosmic Salamander have snotted out the universe? We can’t prove it didn’t, but that’s not where the evidence points. Let’s follow the evidence—and it doesn’t point to the Cosmic Salamander or to God. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Don’t use science to reject the existence of God when the scientific evidence is most reasonably explained by God.

BSR: The argument claims that two scientific facts are important support for Christianity. First, (1) that the universe came from nothing and (2) that this was caused by “something powerful, non-spatial, non-temporal and non-material.”

(1) No, science has no consensus position on what preceded the Big Bang or if the idea of preceding even makes sense before time started. Christians must also explain how God created the universe from nothing if they claim to be following the science.

(2) The Big Bang could’ve been a quantum event, and some quantum events need no causes. Furthermore, if the zero-energy universe hypothesis is correct, the universe contains zero total mass and energy, and the need for a powerful something-or-other to kick things off vanishes. And remember that science’s uncertainty is never support for God.

The second claimed fact in this argument is that DNA is strong support for the Design Argument—that the universe looks designed, so there must be a Designer. But this fails, too. DNA alone neatly defeats the Design Argument.

To see this, first consider what the hallmarks of human design are. A designer might optimize for strength, efficiency, cost, speed of assembly, durability, lightness, or even beauty. What you never see is deliberate junk, and yet junk is just what you see with DNA. Human DNA has 20,000 nonworking pseudogenes. Archaic genes are sometimes switched on due to DNA copying errors (these are atavisms, like tails in human). Vestigial structures are flashbacks to body features from ancestor species (such as blind eyes in cave fish). A surprising eight percent of human DNA is fragments inserted from viruses.

Might God have a reason to put this junk in human DNA? Maybe, but the claimed parallel between human designers and God—that is, the Design Argument—fails. Human DNA certainly looks like it was the result of a sloppy process like evolution rather than the precise design of an omniscient Designer.

Human DNA alone defeats the Design Argument. It’s a record of the twists and turns evolution made. No Designer would add this junk. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

*An exemption from the king allowed Newton to accept the Lucasian chair at Cambridge without taking holy orders because Newton had heretical views about the Trinity.

Continue with BSR 21: Earth Is Insignificant in a Huge Hostile Universe

For further reading:

Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison
we’d be watching TV by candlelight?
— Al Boliska

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Image from Mary Loftus, CC license
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BSR 19: Jesus Was Just a Man

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Summary of reply: The Caesar of history doesn’t need supernatural tales, but Jesus is nothing without them. And that “You’re biased against the supernatural!” charge doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Jesus was just a man

Christian response #1: “If you trust what history tells us about Caesar (who was just a man), why wouldn’t you trust what history tells us about Jesus (who was described as God incarnate)?”

BSR: An account of Julius Caesar as a man isn’t surprising. We know of many men in history who did remarkable things. That he conquered Gaul or was on the winning side of a civil war or was the Roman Republic’s dictator for life are facts that every student of history will agree to. By contrast, claims about the supernatural are never universally agreed to.

The Roman historian Suetonius reported that Caesar, pausing before taking the monumental step of crossing the Rubicon river with his army, saw a divine messenger urging him to cross. Historians scrub supernatural claims like this from history. Give historians the gospels, and they’ll do the same.

How do we know about Julius Caesar? Unlike the gospels, it’s not just copies of ancient documents that refer to him. We have copies of books he wrote. There are inscriptions mentioning him. There are coins, busts, and statues with his likeness. There’s a calendar and even a month named after him! Remove the supernatural from the Caesar story, and you’re left with the remarkable Caesar of history, but remove it from the gospels, and you’re left with just the story of an not-particularly-interesting peasant from a distant culture. Jesus is nothing but his supernatural story.

If a claim is believed because it’s dogma rather than because evidence has convinced the historians, it’s not worth believing in.

Remove the supernatural from the Julius Caesar story, and you’re left with the remarkable Caesar of history, but remove it from the gospels, and you’re left with just the story of an uninteresting peasant. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Why trust the gospels when they say that Jesus existed but not when they say that he was a god?

BSR: Because reports of humans are common and typically trustworthy. Reports of gods are fiction, legend, or mythology, not history. If there is an exception in the case of Jesus, you need a mountain of evidence to support this remarkable claim. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Alexander the Great, and other historical figures from two millennia ago often have supernatural tales in their biographies, but historians accept none of them as history.

Even the part about Jesus existing isn’t certain. Some religions were started by a real person, and some weren’t. Either is possible in the case of Christianity.

This is a bias against the supernatural, though not an exclusion of that possibility. It’s a bias because the supernatural is unnecessary to explain anything about religion—not its origin, its affect on people, or its growth. Sure, I have a bias against the supernatural. Who doesn’t? List the supernatural claims of Hinduism, Scientology, or Mormonism, and the Christian will be as skeptical as I am. My bias for the plausible natural explanation is no different from the Christian’s . . . in every domain but Christianity.

Sure, I have a bias against the supernatural. Who doesn’t? List the supernatural claims of Hinduism, Scientology, or Mormonism, and the Christian will be as skeptical as I am. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 20: Christianity Is Anti-Science

For further reading:

Virtually every major technological advance
in the history of the human species—
back to the invention of stone tools
and the domestication of fire—
has been ethically ambiguous.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

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Image from Vidar Nordli-Mathisen, CC license
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