In our final thrilling episode with the author and his friend Fred, they are in a natural history museum. Fred wonders if he’s Alexander the Great’s chief eunuch. More precisely, how can he prove that he’s not? He then wonders if history in general is reliable. With forgeries, mistakes, interpretation, and conspiracy, how can we trust any of it?

This is the last post in our series on The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist by Andy Bannister (part 1), which critiques a number of atheist arguments.

So how can we trust history?

Bannister begins with an anecdote. He’s careful to avoid a reasonable question—something like, “Given that we only see Jesus through 2000 years of history and legend, how certain can we be of the Christian story?” No, he tells of someone proposing to dismiss all history as completely unreliable. Bannister explains in careful detail how he publicly humiliated his antagonist.

Bannister tells us that Jesus is a problem for atheists. “Of all the major world faiths, it is really only Christianity that is a ‘historical’ religion, in the sense that history matters to it.” He doesn’t make clear why history matters more to Christianity than, say, Islam.

His complain about Islam is different: “Muslim theology is exceedingly clear that Muhammed was just an ordinary human being.” Yeah, and Mark, the first gospel, makes clear that Jesus was, too. It opens with Jesus being baptized. There’s nothing about Jesus being part of the Trinity or having existed forever. Avoid the Christian dogma, and a plain reading of Mark likewise tells of Jesus as an ordinary human being.

Bannister declares that to defeat Christianity, you must address Jesus and his claims. Of course, we don’t have any claims of Jesus; we have gospels saying he made claims. How reliable is that record? And if history is that big a deal, you must acknowledge that historians scrub out the supernatural. No, historians aren’t the apologist’s friend.

Dawkins uses the game of telephone (“Chinese whispers” in British parlance) to show how the Jesus story is unreliable, but Bannister isn’t buying it. He mocks this approach:

We mustn’t think of Thucydides, or Josephus, or Tacitus, or St Luke as carefully interviewing eyewitnesses, reading sources, and weighing the evidence—goodness, no, they were ignorant ancient yokels, relying on what they half-heard, whispered into their ears, after the stories had made their way through a long line of pre-school children, high on sugar and gullibility.

Where do you start with someone so afraid of honest skepticism that he hides behind straw man arguments like this? Josephus said nothing about Jesus, and Tacitus wrote in the early second century. Thucydides died in about 400 BCE and so is irrelevant; presumably, Bannister uses him to say that the period produced well-respected historians. So therefore all ancient documents are reliable? Nope, that doesn’t follow.

Let’s review some of the historical weaknesses of the Jesus story that follow from Dawkins’ example of the game of telephone.

• There were decades of oral history from event to documentation in the gospels.
• There is a centuries-long period of Dark Ages from the New Testament originals to our best copies (more here and here). We can’t be certain what was modified during that period.
• Much of Christianity comes from Paul, who never saw Jesus in person (more).
• We don’t even know who wrote the gospels (more), which undercuts any claims that those authors were eyewitnesses.
• The gospel of Luke promises that the author is giving a good historical analysis, but why is that believable? You wouldn’t believe an earnest supernatural account from me, so why is it more believable if it’s clouded by the passage of 2000 years?
• Matthew and Luke copy much of Mark, something that an eyewitness would never do.

These are some of the actual problems with the Christian story. For Bannister’s next book, I encourage him to respond to them directly rather than laugh nervously and hope that he can misdirect us elsewhere.

Bannister continues: “If Dawkins is right, then all history is bunk.”

Who’s surprised that that is a mischaracterization of what Dawkins said?

“Historical skepticism is a universal acid, destroying everything it touches.”

If you’re a Bannister fan like me, you’ll remember the “universal acid” argument from earlier in the book. Historians do indeed reject the  supernatural. Universally. And yet history continues along just fine, with skepticism an important tool that is used judiciously.

He declares that the gospels are biographies. Wrong again—they’re better described as ancient biography, which is a quite different genre. An ancient biography isn’t overly concerned about giving accurate facts but with making a point. (For more, see Charles Talbert, What is a Gospel? p. 93–98.)

I’ll distill some of the highlights from the remaining blather.

• Jesus really existed; don’t believe Jesus mythicists! I don’t make the Jesus-was-a-myth argument, and I don’t care whether he was a myth or not. My point is that you have no reason to accept the supernatural claims in the gospels.
• The gospel story isn’t fiction. If it were fiction, why invent these impossible-to-follow moral rules like looking at someone with lust equals adultery? Right—I never said the gospels were fiction. (Though fiction is still more plausible than the supernatural.)
• The gospels weren’t myth. Right—they’re closer to legend. (Jesus probably a legend here; the differences between myth and legend here.)
• He says that the gospels have lots of place names with details about each, which refutes their being fiction. Right—I don’t say that they’re fiction. This is the Argument from Accurate Place Names fallacy.
• He marvels at the fluency of Jesus’s rebuttals to the bad guys. What’s surprising? The Jesus story was honed over decades—I should hope that some compelling anecdotes would come out the other end. The stories that flopped didn’t make the cut.
• He appeals to the Criterion of Embarrassment (the more embarrassing a story, the likelier it’s true) and gives as an example a passage from Mark in which a man calls Jesus “good teacher.” Jesus responds, “Why do you call me good?” Yeah, that’s indeed embarrassing, and you’ve undercut your claims of deity. How does this give me confidence in the supernatural parts? Bannister notes that Jesus died when he should’ve been a conquering hero. So much for him fulfilling the prophecy of the Messiah, eh?
• “If we were dealing with theological fiction, one would expect the edges to be straighter, the language more doctrinally polished.” More to the point, we’d expect that if we were dealing with the words of the omniscient creator of the universe. You’ve nicely shown that it doesn’t hang together and could never have been inspired by a perfect being.
• He gives Lewis’s (false) trilemma—the only possible bins to put Jesus in are Liar, Lunatic, or Lord. Wrong again. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t address the obvious genre: not fiction but legend.

Come to Jesus!

Unsurprisingly, he ends the book with an altar call.

The God of Christianity, the God of the Bible, the God seen in Jesus is a God who isn’t willing to lurk in the shadows, but one who, the Gospels claim, has stepped into space-time and walked into history, who has his nose up against the window and is tapping loudly on the glass, demanding our attention.

Could you get him to tap any louder?

This is the Problem of Divine Hiddenness, which to my mind is the biggest obstacle to Christian belief. How can a god who desperately wants a relationship with us not make that happen? How can he not make his mere existence plain to us? He is omnipotent, right?

Bannister characterizes the tough spot the atheist is in: “Arguments are thus needed, any arguments, no matter how bad, provided we can hammer them like planks across any possible opening [through which God might enter].” We all, deep down, fear that “we are more broken and messed-up than we realize.” But don’t worry, kids! “All is not acidic skepticism, or unyielding despair, or hopeless lostness, or the utter blackness of the void, but that everything that is broken can be mended.”

I know of no atheist suffering from hopeless lostness. Christianity is the solution to a problem that Christianity invented. I think I’ll just discard both problem and solution since I’ve been given evidence for neither. And with it, that condescending characterization of atheists’ desperate position.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/27/17.)

Image from Forsaken Fotos (license CC BY 2.0)

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In today’s episode, our hero is about to enjoy a quiet lunch when he spots Fred, who looks shockingly thin. When offered some lunch, Fred not only rejects the idea but knocks our hero’s sandwich onto the ground. “Haven’t you heard of the Panini poisoner of Pimlico?” Fred asks. It turns out that Fred is now terrified of eating a randomly poisoned sandwich. He refuses to put his faith in the government’s health and safety agency and won’t eat anything without certainty that it’s not poisoned, though by playing it safe, he’s starving himself.

This continues our review of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist by Andy Bannister (part 1), which critiques a number of atheist arguments. This is mercifully the last chapter where he does his childish best to attack atheist arguments. (There’s one final one where he works on the case for Christianity.)

What use do atheists have for faith?

Many atheists say that there is no room for faith in modern society. Bannister gives Sam Harris as an example: “Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse—constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor.” Richard Dawkins says that faith is belief “in the very teeth of the evidence.”

Bannister then mocked the 2012 Reason Rally (which I attended) as an event where “20,000 people rallied for a noun.” You mean a noun like “justice”? Would that be worth rallying for? What about love or peace? Those are nouns—would they get you off the couch? If so, what’s wrong with a rally for “reason”? (And is this what passes for intellectual critique?)

In his typical long-winded style, he imagined an atheist attending the Reason Rally who wondered, How do I know that these other atheists really exist? He mulls over implausible explanations—he could be imagining them, or they could be robots. Could he prove these other “atheists” were who they appeared to be? And then, another question comes to mind: How do I know that any of this is real? He could be a brain in a jar, or he could be hallucinating. Then more questions: How do I know the world is ancient? How do I know hackers aren’t emptying my bank account right now? How do I know my return flight will go safely? How could he be certain? (To give an idea of Bannister’s style, he stretched the story in this paragraph to fill four pages.)

Bannister says that indeed we can’t know for sure, and that’s the role of faith.

“Faith is the opposite of reason!” may make a great bumper sticker or tweetable moment, but when it bangs into reality—the small matter of how each and every one of us lives, every day, in the real world—it fails spectacularly. Try if you wish to live a totally faith-free existence, but that will require doing nothing, going nowhere, and trusting no one. . . . Faith is part of the bedrock of human experience and one on which we rely in a million different ways every day.

Predictably, he’s determined to obfuscate the word “faith.” In fact, it can mean two different things:

• Faith can be belief that follows from the evidence. This belief would change if presented with compelling contrary evidence, and it is often called “trust.”
• Or, faith can be belief not held primarily because of evidence and little shaken in the face of contrary evidence; that is, belief neither supported nor undercut by evidence. “Blind faith” is in this category, though it needn’t be as extreme as that.

(I explore the definitions of “faith” and how they are deliberately misused here).

Acknowledging these two categories, assigning different words to them (may I suggest “trust” and “faith,” respectively?), and exploring the different areas where humans use them isn’t where apologists want to go. In my experience, they benefit from the confusion. They want to say that faith can be misused, but we’re stuck with it, which allows them to bolster the reputation of faith while it opens the door to the supernatural.

Let’s return to the atheist fretting about the safety of his return flight. Bannister wants to compare how we approach those worries—you will never be certain about the safety, but near certainty should be enough—with worries about God’s existence. However, he ignores the fundamental differences between airline flights and God. On one hand we have pilots, planes, mechanical failure, the science of aerodynamics, weather, and so on, and on the other, the supernatural. Not only do theists disagree about the supernatural such that they can’t all agree how many gods there are, every single trait about it could be made up.

See also: How Reliable Is a Bridge Built on Faith?

Putting your faith into practice

Bannister moves on to Christian applications of faith. He imagines falling down a cliff and reaching for a branch to save himself. “What I know [about trees] can’t save me; rather, I have to put my facts to the test and exercise my faith. Now what goes for the tree goes for everything else in life. Facts without faith are causally effete, simply trivia, mere intellectual stamp-collecting.”*

Here again, the comparison fails. Botanists are in agreement on the basic facts about trees, but not even Christians agree among themselves about the basic facts about God. First let’s get a reasonably objective factual foundation for your hypothesis and then we can worry about accepting it. You haven’t gotten off the ground.

With his definition (of the moment) of faith as a quest for evidence, Bannister encourages us to think about some tough questions, questions that he thinks he can answer best. But no, these are not much trouble.

• Why is there something rather than nothing? I’ve responded here.
• What about fine tuning? I’ve responded here and here.
• What holds up the laws of nature? I’ve responded here and here.
• Why does mathematics work? I’ve responded here.
• Where did beauty, meaning, and purpose come from? We can’t be like Douglas Adams’ puddle that marveled that its hole was perfectly tuned to fit it. We adapted to the conditions of our environment; it wasn’t tuned for our benefit or pleasure.

Making a list of God evidence

Bannister proposes that we consider different factors to see if they argue for God, against God, or neither. He gets us started with a few examples.

• Evolution. He uses the Hypothetical God Fallacy (let’s assume God first and select facts to support this conclusion) to say that this fits in the Neither bin (that is, it’s neither pro- nor con-God). Who’s to say that God couldn’t use evolution? Nope: evolution doesn’t prove God, but it explains a tough puzzle, why life is the way it is. And it does it with a natural explanation. This is a vote against God.
• Evil. He concedes that this may be a vote against God, though he falls back on the “How can an atheist say anything is objectively wrong?” fallacy. Atheists don’t make that claim. Atheists are waiting impatiently for evidence that objective morality exists (see here and here).
• Reason. How can there be reason without God?? This is a vote for God. Nope. Reason is an emergent phenomenon. If you’re saying that science has unanswered questions about how human consciousness works (say), that’s true, but Christianity doesn’t win by default. Christianity has never answered any scientific question, so there’s no reason to imagine it will this time. This topic is related to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, to which I responded here.

Bannister concludes: “Do you see how this works?”

Sure, I see how this works: you put your thumb on the scale to get what you want.

“As I fill in these three columns, where does the growing weight of evidence gather?”

You’re 0 for 3 so far. Are you sure you want to continue? Only your cherry picking of the evidence helps support your presupposition.

And then, a page from the chapter’s end, he agrees that, yes, faith can be dangerous, too. But how is this possible, when he’s made clear that it’s how anyone knows anything, from that it’s safe to cross the street to that God exists?

This is the problem he makes for himself when he refuses to make the obvious distinction between belief well-grounded on evidence and not. He doesn’t like this dichotomy because God belief would largely be lumped into the same category as “I just know I’m going to win the lottery this time!”

I’ll wrap up with a comment he made as he encouraged all of us to read or listen to people outside our comfort zone. I agree, of course; I read his book. He says he values Dawkins and the New Atheists “for forcing me to think.”

And I wish he’d force me to think a little more.

See also: Top 10 Most Common Atheist Arguments—Do They Fail?

Final post in this series: Bad atheist arguments: “History is unreliable”.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/23/17.)

Image from flickr (license CC BY 2.0)

*Completely off topic: here’s a clever xkcd cartoon that picks up on that.

You may be saying that atheists and in particular scientists don’t claim that science can explain everything. I agree. Someone needs to tell Bannister that, since he spent a chapter heroically punching at this strawman.

This post will conclude my response (part 1 here.)

You know how authors sometimes put a slogan somewhere on their desk to focus their attention on the core idea of their project? If only Andy Bannister had put up the subtitle of his own book, “The dreadful consequences of bad arguments,” perhaps he would’ve caught a few of his stupid blunders.

The limitations of science

Bannister tells us that science is a great tool, but it’s only a tool. You can’t paint a portrait with a shovel—each tool has limitations. “We need more tools in our philosophical toolkit than just science if we’re going to answer all the wonderfully rich and varied questions that are out there to be explored.”

What do you have in mind? Of course, I agree that physics, chemistry, and geology have limits, but show me a discipline that gives reliable new information that doesn’t use evidence and hypothesis testing—that is, scientific thinking.

As an example of a discipline that’s not strictly science using scientific thinking, consider history weighing the clues for the dating of a particular document. Or philosophy recommending ethical constraints on a new technology. Or economists learning how people respond to incentives. Can disciplines that aren’t science teach us new, correct things? Of course! But they use scientific thinking to get there.

Atheist scientists admit their bias?

To support his position, he quotes geneticist Richard Lewontin who states that scientists “have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. . . . Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Aha! Have the scientists finally admitted their biases? Not at all, if we read what comes next (which Bannister omitted):

. . . we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Lewontin wasn’t saying that we must conclude beforehand that the supernatural isn’t possible but rather that using science with a God option is like blowing up a balloon with a hole in it. You can’t get anywhere since everything must have a God caveat. It’s “F = ma, God willing” or “PV = nRT, if it pleases God.” When you make a measurement in a world where God messes with reality (that is, you “allow a Divine Foot in the door”), what part of that measurement is explained by scientific laws and what part was added by some godly hanky panky?

Where does science fit in?

Bannister wants us to know that he’s a reasonable guy. He doesn’t hate science—far from it.

I’m simply arguing for “science and”—science and the humanities; science and philosophy; science and art; science and history; science and theology. . . . Why can’t we throw open the shutters, fling wide the doors, and embrace a world of knowledge that is vastly bigger and more glorious than just the physical sciences?

That sounds fine, but let’s stick with the scientific method. Andy “Mr. Reasonable” Bannister doesn’t look so reasonable when you notice that he slipped Theology in, hoping we weren’t paying attention. Theology doesn’t use the scientific method, and it’s completely unreliable as a result.

Tell you what, Andy: when Theology can get its own story straight, get back to me and we can reconsider if this discipline actually has anything worth telling us. At the moment, it can’t even figure out how many gods there are or what their names are (more).

In one final attempt to show those smug scientists the limitations of science, he asks about the origin of the universe. He ticks off a few options—it came uncaused from nothing, there’s a multiverse, and the obligatory “God did it.” What’s common about these, he says, is that “each one takes us outside science. . . . [Science] is entirely the wrong tool . . . to explain how we got stuff in the first place.” A hammer is good for hitting nails but bad for telling us where nails came from.

But what tool do we have to study this question besides science?? Bannister wants to drop science, the discipline that has actually told us uncountably many new things about reality, in favor of theology, the discipline that uses faith rather than evidence and has never taught us a single verifiably correct new thing. We know for certain that theology doesn’t work for teaching us new things because it has been tried, and it fails. And if he can’t sleep at night for lack of an explanation for our universe, “God did it” doesn’t help. God becomes just one more thing that needs an explanation.

The obligatory Hypothetical God Fallacy

Bannister wraps up with an appeal to God.

[And if there is a god,] we need to ask the next question: is there more that can be discovered about God than simply what we can discern about him from his handiwork as revealed in the structure of the universe? Is it possible to learn about the artist himself, not just his works?

When I read, “If there is a god,” I might as well have read, “If unicorns exist.” Unicorns don’t exist, so what follows must be unconstrained by reality. And gods don’t exist—certainly not as far as Bannister has convinced us—so what follows can only be speculation about a world that we don’t live in and is therefore completely irrelevant to me. (More on the Hypothetical God Fallacy here.)

I marvel that any Christian can casually drop “If there is a god,” oblivious to how astonishing that speculation is. This progression might help: think of something incredible (say, a unicorn). Now, make it more incredible (a thousand unicorns). Now make it more incredible (a thousand unicorns that grant wishes and cure disease). Keep going with this, and you get to the Christian claim: a god created everything, knows everything, can do everything, is everywhere, cares about you, and will do what you ask him to. It’s the biggest possible claim. Don’t make it without evidence to back it up.

Continue with “Morality doesn’t come from God”

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/18/17.)

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Image from Hey Paul (license CC BY 2.0)

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