Monthly Archives: October 2022

Christians changing the definition of “miracle”

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Words can have more than one definition. For example, “organic” can mean “having to do with life” or “food grown without non-natural chemicals,” or even simply “contains carbon.” But when justifying the unjustifiable, Christian apologists are often forced to invent new definitions that aren’t supported by the dictionary.

In the previous article, we saw apologist John Mark Reynolds trying to deal with the reality that God’s answers to prayer are indistinguishable from no answers at all. That Reynolds doesn’t even acknowledge his predicament and isn’t embarrassed by it might give him points for bravado, but this makes his handwaving no more convincing.

Miraculous good fortune?

Let’s move on to another pious redefinition, this time for the word “miracle.” Our apologist this time is Jim Wallace, and he analyzed a claimed miracle. A couple in Tennessee parked at their apartment and got out of their car. Only then did they notice three bullet holes in the side of the car and two more in the trunk. The wife soon found something else. One bullet had come through and lodged in her purse. Without the purse, that bullet might have hit one of them. Her interpretation of the purse stopping that bullet: “Just by the grace of God. It’s a miracle to keep me or him from getting hit.”

Consider the title of Wallace’s article: “Woman Says It’s A Miracle Her Wallet Blocked Bullets – Why Not Believe Her?”

I’ll tell you why not. It’s because natural explanations are sufficient. Natural explanations are far, far better than supernatural ones. There are many supernatural claims but zero supernatural explanations that are accepted in the same way that countless natural explanations are (the scientific explanation for lightning, for drought, for disease, and so on). Even that the miracle claim was made up is far likelier than that this is the report that finally will prove to the world that the supernatural does indeed exist.

This was clearly an emotional experience for the woman who made the claim. She was lucky that she didn’t get hit. If she says that, to her, it was a miracle, that’s fine. But the rest of us can see it with more rational eyes.

Remember the woman’s claim, “It’s a miracle to keep me or him from getting hit.” About this, Wallace said, “When I was an atheist, I would roll my eyes at statements like this.”

Amen to that. Why didn’t God just stop the shooter? Or why didn’t he redirect the shooter’s life years ago so that he wouldn’t turn to violence?

Alternatively, if you imagine God saving this couple, what explains him not saving the other 10,000 people that die from gun violence in the U.S. each year? Your happy miracle story morphs into the problem of justifying God’s capriciousness. “God works in mysterious ways” won’t do—if you say that God performed a miracle in this case and had good reasons to let the bullets kill someone in another case, you must support that incredible claim with evidence.

Why not just call this a lucky turn of events, where a situation was bad but not so bad that anyone got injured? The naturalistic explanation (lots of gunshots are fired in public, and this just happened to be one of the cases where no one was hurt) explains all the facts. God performing a miracle is an unnecessary complication to the story.

But no, none of these interpretations are where Wallace wants to go. Now that he’s a Christian, he says that he’s reconsidered his position on miracles. He wants to label as “a miracle” events like this injury-free shooting.

Perhaps miracles are more common than you think

You say that you don’t accept miracles? Wallace argues that all naturalists accept miracles. Here’s his argument.

1. The Big Bang is the standard explanation for the origin of the universe.

2. The Big Bang tells us that the universe—that is, space, time, and matter—had a beginning.

3. “Everything came into existence from nothing.”

4. What caused the Big Bang? It couldn’t have been anything to do with space, time, or matter, since they hadn’t been created yet.

5. “See the dilemma? My naturalistic belief in ‘Big Bang Cosmology’ required an extra-natural ‘Big Banger.’ ”

6. The dictionary defines “miracle” as having a supernatural cause, and “supernatural” as “above or beyond what is natural,” so the Big Bang drags the naturalist into accepting at least one miracle, that of the origin of the universe.

7. The Bible agrees. It says that the origin of the universe was due to God (and therefore a miracle), and if that’s the case, God could surely pull off something as trivial as a resurrection. Or stopping a bullet with a purse.

Why didn’t God just stop the shooter? Or why didn’t he redirect the shooter’s life years ago so that he wouldn’t turn to violence?

Correcting that poorly defined argument

Let’s highlight a few problems.

Step #2. There are plausible models of the universe that have no beginning.

3. No, the Big Bang doesn’t say that everything came from nothing. That’s one possibility, but that’s not the consensus view. And if “coming from nothing” is startling and needs an explanation, Christians say that God created the earth from nothing. Explain that.

4a. Does it make sense to ask for a cause before there was time? And if the Big Bang were a quantum event, it might’ve had no cause (not all quantum events have causes).

4b. The only life we know of depends on space, time, and matter. If God was putting the universe together in a time before time (and in a space before space), how did he exist? You might say that he doesn’t need those things or he’s outside of them, but you need evidence. We know of no life for which this is true.

5a. “Big Banger” deliberately suggests an intelligence, but if the Big Bang were just a quantum event, that would be a natural cause with no mind required. Maybe our universe is just one of many universes that started with this natural cause.

5b. If God is a mind, what is that mind stored in? The only minds we know of reside in brains. Yes, I realize God isn’t supposed to have a brain, but again, you can’t just handwave this claim. You need evidence. Tag—you’re it.

At best, this argument points out that cosmologists have unanswered questions about the Big Bang. That’s true, but that’s no excuse to inject a supernatural explanation involving your favorite god. If science doesn’t have the evidence to justify an answer, don’t pretend that your religion does. We need evidence, not dogma. And if “God did it” explains the origin of the universe, what explains the origin of God?

What happened to the good, old-fashioned miracle?

You want a miracle? During the famous Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War, English and Welsh archers delivered a stunning victory over French cavalry. Almost exactly 500 years later during the Battle of Mons during World War I, in the same part of Europe as Agincourt, ghosts of those archers materialized to save the British from a vastly superior German force.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t match the history. That’s always the problem, isn’t it? The good stories don’t stand up to scrutiny, and the true ones are just luck, like the woman whose purse stopped a bullet.

So if bullet-stopping purses are what pass for miracles in society today and you can’t raise the quality of miracles, then just pull down the definition so that there’s a match. That was the goal of the “you naturalists believe in miracles, too!” argument. Like the redefinition of “answered prayer” in the previous post, just redefine “miracle.”

Christians, this may be what you need to help you sleep at night, but this is not an honest way of looking at the evidence. By changing definitions, your argument has lost any power. You’ve salvaged your words—“answered prayer” and “miracle”—but at what cost? Convince yourself that you’ve won the battle if you must, but with these dishonest games you lose the war.

The Bible will give you answers
like your horoscope in the newspaper
will give you answers.
It’ll be so vague as to apply
to anyone in any situation.
— commenter watcher_b

How to salvage claims of God’s capabilities? Change the definitions!

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What do you do when your preferred definition of an important religious word clashes with reality—a fundamental word like miracle, prayer, faith, or good? A popular Christian tactic is to dilute the definition so that they can still use the words, but this tactic has consequences.

I’ve already looked into redefinitions of the words “good” and “faith.” Now let’s look at two more fundamental words, “prayer” and “miracle.”

How do prayers work?

Evangelical blogger John Mark Reynolds wrote “Prayers amid Hurricane Harvey” a few days after that hurricane hit Houston, Texas in August 2017. He writes of being huddled (with his family, I presume) in an interior closet in his house. They were doing what they could to stay safe from Harvey, which made landfall in Texas as a category 4 hurricane. It killed 106 in the U.S. and is second to hurricane Katrina as the costliest U.S. natural disaster ($141 billion).

How did he respond to this frightening experience? He begins, “Prayer is the best action one can take in a storm” but soon admits, “We prayed to be spared this test, but God said ‘no.’ ”

God said no? Did Odin say no, too? Why pray to God if Odin (or even a jug of milk) delivers the same results? And if you say that praying to God produces better results, show us. Give us evidence.

Here’s where wishful thinking about prayer gets tripped up by reality. Instead of getting what you pray for, which is what Jesus promised, and instead of prayer at least improving the probability of getting what you need, prayer must be redefined. Prayer is now asking for something and then reframing the result so that God looks good whether you got what you asked for or not. Apparently, God is sensitive. He must be treated like a baby.

We see more rationalization when he says:

Hurricane Harvey came despite our prayers—and that is good. It is good for us to ask, and God helps as He can.

God helps as he can? There’s some limit to what he can do? This world is the best that he can produce, and he would have done a better job if he could have? I must have a higher estimation of what omnipotence can do.

We asked that the storm would pass over us.

Do you ask that for every hurricane? Or only the ones that hit the United States? Or only the ones that hit you? Who does the disaster hit if God nudges it to avoid you (and can you live with that)?

Taking a step back, what’s prayer (even this watered-down version) good for? You aren’t telling God something he doesn’t already know, and you can’t be so arrogant as to ask God to change his perfect plan for you. Prayer doesn’t work as advertised.

God can’t lose

Reynolds rationalizes why God would allow a hurricane Harvey.

[God] is all powerful, but He is also good. He will not do a superficial good for us today at the cost of greater evil tomorrow…. If He who can does not, it must be better so.

This is an empty and meaningless claim. Without evidence, are we supposed to accept that Harvey was a net good? Give us examples of what might have offset the cost of $141 billion and 106 lives.

Here again, I have a higher estimation of what omnipotence can do. A hurricane was as surgical as God could be? He needed to destroy something, but he couldn’t do it precisely with magic and avoid the collateral damage of a category 4 hurricane?

Sure, a god might exist who used a hurricane for a good that we can’t yet understand, but why imagine this? Where’s the evidence? Why is this anything more than a rationalization to help Christians maintain their unevidenced beliefs?

Don’t give us a hypothetical. Support your claim with a specific situation where God allowed (or caused) harm to prevent a worse harm later. Can’t do it? Then you’re making the Hypothetical God Fallacy.

To squarely address the Problem of Evil—why an omnipotent and good god would allow so much evil in the world—the first step is admitting that God does indeed look terrible. Natural disasters, childhood diseases, cancer, and all the rest would not happen on the watch of a good god.

(I investigate this in more depth in “4 Steps Christians Must Take Before Responding to the Problem of Evil.”)

God continues to be a solution looking for a problem. It’s a hypothesis that complicates the picture while answering nothing better than the naturalistic explanation, that nature is a mindless force and sometimes people get hurt.

I want to give Reynolds the benefit of the doubt—surely he acknowledges the value of prayer in the here and now. Is that what he’s focusing on?

Not really. He says, “This is not just a meditation technique” as he doubles down on prayer as an actual conversation with an actual person who actually delivers. But, of course, any error is his, not God’s: “Just as I can misunderstand any person, I can and do misunderstand what God is saying, but still, He is there and is not silent.”

“He is there and is not silent”? Then he’s about as invisible and mute as you could be without actually being nonexistent.

Does the dictionary say what you think?

He moves on, only to trip over yet another common English word.

Government may fail me. Community may be sundered and cold waves wash over me, but God never fails.

Government is what provided the hospitals, rescued people in peril, and got the power back on. When you compare government and God, you’re right that only one came through for you, but it wasn’t God. If you say that the government help was imperfect, I’m sure you’re right, but God’s help was nonexistent. God “never fails” only if you carelessly redefine words to suit the moment.

Why pray to God if Odin (or even a jug of milk) delivers the same results?

Let’s return to that quote—government may fail, but God never fails—to see if that word is used consistently. What would “government fail” mean? Presumably it means that incompetence might get in the way of a prompt response, shortsightedness years ago might have postponed necessary infrastructure maintenance, and so on. You expect the government to do something, but then it’s not there for you.

Isn’t that exactly what God does? The Bible promises that prayer works, but where is God when disaster strikes? Didn’t he fail you in being indistinguishable from nothing? Remember that this isn’t a human-caused disaster such as murder. Nothing could be more an act of God than a hurricane.

Is even the word fail a problem word that you must redefine? What does it say about your fragile worldview that you must redefine so many words to maintain your beliefs?

Inspiration for the Bible?

Reynolds concludes with this optimistic line: “Thank God prayer works.” And, sure, prayer “works” if you redefine away definitions that get in your way. “Answered prayer” no longer means what you’d think it means. Whatever happens is now “answered prayer.”

It’s like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where 2 + 2 = 5, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. God knows all that you do, which parallels “Big Brother is watching you.” Christianity has also embraced thoughtcrime, where every private thought is known to God and lustful thoughts are adultery (see Matthew 5:21–28).

By giving itself permission to redefine troublesome words, Christianity has added doublethink to the list of Nineteen Eighty-Four parallels.

Continue on to see an apologist wrestle with the troublesome word “miracle.”

I’ve responded to John Mark Reynolds several other times:

Believers:
Think of the one thing you would do
to improve the world if you were God.
Now realize that he hasn’t done it.
— seen on the internet

More Puzzles

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I’ve posted puzzles before because they can teach us about how the human brain works. Spoiler: it works imperfectly.

Part 1: Counterintuitive Puzzles that Should Be Easy

Part 2: 12 More Puzzles

You may remember this one:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

An answer will probably pop to mind—10 cents—but that’s wrong. (This and related puzzles were discussed in part 1.) Whether you give the intuitive answer or analyze further to find the correct answer says something about how you think. This is explored in an article provocatively titled, “3-Question Quiz Predicts Whether You Believe in God.”

Here are some more puzzles, just for fun (hints and answers are at the bottom).

Quick puzzles

1. “Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?” Answers: (a) Yes, (b) No, (c) Not enough information. Source

2. Start with 100, then add 10% and then subtract 10%. How much do you have now?

3. Cup 1 holds milk, and cup 2 has an equal amount of coffee. Take a spoonful of milk from cup 1 and pour it into cup 2. Now take a spoonful from cup 2 and pour it into cup 1. Which cup is now more concentrated? Answers: (a) Cup 1 has a higher fraction of milk than cup 2 has coffee, (b) cup 2 has a higher fraction of coffee than cup 1 has milk, (c) the fractions are equal. Source

Puzzles about the real world

4. What happens to a helium balloon in a car when the car accelerates? Source

5. Why is a mirror left-right reversed? Why isn’t it top-down reversed, too?

6. Your canoe overturns, and you swim to shore. You’re looking for shelter, and it’s getting dark. Luckily, you find a cabin. Inside, there’s a box of matches and a kerosene lamp. While there is kerosene in the base of the lamp, the wick is too short to reach it. You’ve checked the cabin, and there’s no more kerosene or wicks. How do you light the lamp to signal for help?

Math puzzles

7. “Three people with different salaries need to find out their average salary without revealing individual salaries to each other. How?” Source

8. Three people rent a hotel room for $60, so they each pay $20. Later, the manager realized he charged too much—it was only supposed to be $55. He sends a porter to the room with $5. Each of the three guests keeps $1, and they give the porter the remaining $2 for a tip. Now each person has paid $19 for the room. But $19×3 = $57, and the porter got $2. They started with $60, and $57 + $2 = $59! Where is the other dollar? [I saw this one about 50 years ago.]

9. Joanne and her friends are seated around a large table. A plate with 25 cookies is passed around. Each person in turn takes a cookie and passes the plate along until it’s empty. The plate might go around once or several times, but the only rule is that the plate must start and end with Joanne (that is, she takes the first and last cookies). What are the possible values for the number of people sitting at the table? (h/t commenter Dave Gardner)

Hints and Answers are below.

Whatever Nature has in store for mankind,
unpleasant as it may be,
men must accept,
for ignorance is never better than knowledge.
— Enrico Fermi

Hints:

Problem 1: “Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?” Answers: (a) Yes, (b) No, (c) Not enough information.

Hint: Okay, I’ll give you the answer: it’s (a). Now tell me why.

Problem 2: Start with 100, then add 10% and then subtract 10%. How much do you have now?

Hint: You’d think you’d return to 100, wouldn’t you?

Problem 3: Cup 1 holds milk, and cup 2 has an equal amount of coffee. Take a spoonful of milk from cup 1 and pour it into cup 2. Now take a spoonful from cup 2 and pour it into cup 1. Which cup is now more concentrated? Answers: (a) Cup 1 has a higher fraction of milk than cup 2 has coffee, (b) cup 2 has a higher fraction of coffee than cup 1 has milk, (c) the fractions are equal.

Hint: What if you used a really big spoon to make the transfer? How about a really small spoon? (And problem #2 is vaguely relevant.)

Problem 4: What happens to a helium balloon in a car when the car accelerates?

Hint: How does the balloon act compared to the air around it?

Problem 5: Why is a mirror left-right reversed? Why isn’t it top-down reversed, too?

Hint: Note that it’s not because you have two eyes—if you close one eye, the person in the mirror still raises the opposite hand that you do.

Problem 6: Your canoe overturns, and you swim to shore. You’re looking for shelter, and it’s getting dark. Luckily, you find a cabin. Inside, there’s a box of matches and a kerosene lamp. While there is kerosene in the base of the lamp, the wick is too short to reach it. You’ve checked the cabin, and there’s no more kerosene or wicks. How do you light the lamp to signal for help?

Hint: You don’t have anything to make the wick longer. You could tear your clothes to make material for a wick, but the clothes are wet. Really, really wet. They’re just full of water …

Problem 7: “Three people with different salaries need to find out their average salary without revealing individual salaries to each other. How?”

Hint: The answer involves a random number.

Problem 8: Three people rent a hotel room for $60, so they each pay $20. Later, the manager realized he charged too much—it was only supposed to be $55. He sends a porter to the room with $5. Each of the people keeps $1, and they give the porter the remaining $2 for a tip. So now each person has paid $19 for the room ($19×3 = $57) and the porter got $2. But they started with $60, and $57 + $2 = $59! Where is the other dollar?

Hint: It’s true that $60 ≠ $59, but is that really a problem?

Problem 9: Joanne and her friends are seated around a large table. A dish with 25 cookies is passed around. Each person in turn takes a cookie and passes the dish along until it’s empty. The dish might go around once or several times, but the only rule is that the dish must start and end with Joanne (that is, she takes the first and last cookies). What are the possible values for the number of people sitting at the table?

Hint: 24 people would work, because Joanne would take the first and 25th cookies, but 23 people wouldn’t work, since Joanne would take the next-to-last cookie but not the last. What’s the smallest number of people that would work? Also note that Joanne always gets one more cookie than everyone else.

Answers:

Problem 1: “Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?” Answers: (a) Yes, (b) No, (c) Not enough information.

Answer: You’d think it would be (c), but it’s actually (a). If Anne is married, then she is a married person looking at an unmarried person. If Anne isn’t married, then Jack is a married person looking at an unmarried person. QED

Problem 2: Start with 100, then add 10% and then subtract 10%. How much do you have now?

Answer: 100 + 10% (10) = 110; then subtract 10% (11) to get 99.

Here’s another problem: Start again with 100. Now subtract 10% and then add 10% (close your eyes and figure it out before reading the answer).

Answer: This second computation is: 100 – 10% (10) = 90; then add 10% (9) to get 99.

But that raises yet another problem: why did the result get lower both times? Aren’t they symmetric? Doesn’t it seem like you should get something like 101 the second time?

Answer: You did the subtract-ten-percent bit on the bigger number both times.

Problem 3: Cup 1 holds milk, and cup 2 has an equal amount of coffee. Take a spoonful of milk from cup 1 and pour it into cup 2. Now take a spoonful from cup 2 and pour it into cup 1. Which cup is now more concentrated? Answers: (a) Cup 1 has a higher fraction of milk than cup 2 has coffee, (b) cup 2 has a higher fraction of coffee than cup 1 has milk, (c) the fractions are equal.

Answer: The answer is that they’re the same. What’s really crazy is that it doesn’t matter if you stir up the coffee with milk before you make the second transfer—the concentrations are the same either way.

Let’s explore a few different spoon sizes to see that this intuitively makes sense. Imagine that you start with one 8-ounce cup* of milk and another of coffee. Now imagine that the spoon is also one cup in volume (that is, you dump all the milk from cup 1 into the coffee and then take one cup of the mixture back to the empty cup 1). You have a 50/50 mixture in each cup but, more importantly for our puzzle, the amounts are equal. Now imagine that the spoon is a dropper. After the transfer, you’ll have cup 1 with 99+% milk and cup 2 with 99+% coffee. We didn’t do the math, but again, it looks like the amounts are the same. Now imagine that the spoon was so small that it had no effect—each cup would be at 100%, and again they’re equal.

Commenter MR suggests a discrete approach—have 16 white checkers in one pile and 16 black in another. Move n white checkers into the black pile, and then take n random ones from that pile back over. Say that n = 4, and try all five possibilities of the second transfer, from 4w + 0b (4 white and 0 black) to 0w + 4b. I find this a more intuitive approach.

Problem 4: What happens to a helium balloon in a car when the car accelerates?

Answer: A helium balloon acts the opposite of the air around it. When everything is pushed back in the car, the balloon goes forward. If the car turns left, you will feel pushed to the right … but the balloon is pushed left. Think of the vector of apparent gravity. When you’re motionless, it’s straight down, but when you’re accelerating, that vector changes to point more back. The balloon in air goes in the opposite direction of this vector.

Seen from a buoyancy standpoint, the air in the car is more affected by acceleration and gravity than the balloon is. The acceleration pushes the balloon back, too, but the air is pushed back more forcefully, pushing the balloon forward.

Problem 5: Why is a mirror left-right reversed? Why isn’t it top-down reversed, too?

Answer: Say you’re facing a wall with your right hand up and left down, and someone takes a picture of you from behind. Imagine a life-size version of that picture placed on the wall in front of you. That’s you from the back. It’s not reversed, since the image has its right hand up and left down, just like you.

Now imagine the camera was magic so that it captured, not the side facing it, but the side facing away. That is, it didn’t capture the appearance of the nearest atoms of you but the farthest atoms. Now put that image up in front of you, and it will look like a mirror. There’s no left-right reversal going on, it’s simply showing you the image of your front, seen from the back. It’s like you were transparent except for your front surface. That’s what a mirror shows you—a mirror image, not a reversal.

Problem 6: Your canoe overturns, and you swim to shore. You’re looking for shelter, and it’s getting dark. Luckily, you find a cabin. Inside, there’s a box of matches and a kerosene lamp. While there is kerosene in the base of the lamp, the wick is too short to reach it. You’ve checked the cabin, and there’s no more kerosene or wicks. How do you light the lamp to signal for help?

Answer: The kerosene floats on water, so pour enough water into the base of the lamp to raise the kerosene to reach the wick. You could put rocks in instead, but that wouldn’t be as efficient.

Problem 7: “Three people with different salaries need to find out their average salary without revealing individual salaries to each other. How?”

Answer: The first person adds a random number to their salary and secretly passes that to the second person, who adds their correct salary and secretly passes the sum to #3, who does the same. Then #1 subtracts the random number and divides by 3 to get the average salary.

Problem 8: Three people rent a hotel room for $60, so they each pay $20. Later, the manager realized he charged too much—it was only supposed to be $55. He sends a porter to the room with $5. Each of the people keeps $1, and they give the porter the remaining $2 for a tip. So now each person has paid $19 for the room ($19×3 = $57) and the porter got $2. But they started with $60, and $57 + $2 = $59! Where is the other dollar?

Answer: It’s meaningless to compute $57 + $2 = $59 because that mixes the before room rate ($60) with the money paid after the room rate was corrected (that is, after each guest got $1 and the porter got $2). The room’s cost afterwards was $55, so the computation should be $57 – $2 = $55. A different problem is, “Hey—what happened to the $60?” To answer that, you start with the $55 in the manager’s possession and then return the dollar refund from each guest and the tip from the porter ($1×3 + $2 = $5). 

Problem 9: Joanne and her friends are seated around a large table. A dish with 25 cookies is passed around. Each person in turn takes a cookie and passes the dish along until it’s empty. The dish might go around once or several times, but the only rule is that the dish must start and end with Joanne (that is, she takes the first and last cookies). What are the possible values for the number of people sitting at the table?

Answer: We need to figure out how many complete turns of the table will work by finding integer solutions to nm + 1 = 25, where n is the number of friends at the table and m is the number of turns. For example, for the 24-person case, n = 24 and m = 1. Add 1 because lucky Joanne always gets one more to get one answer: n + 1 = 25 total people at the table.

So what integer values of n and m will work? We know that m = 1 works, and that gives n = 24. Other (m, n) pairs that work are (2, 12), (3, 8), (4, 6), (6, 4), (8, 3), and (12, 2). But our equation doesn’t have integer values for n if m is any of the remaining values: 5, 7, 9, 10, or 11.

Remember that n is the other people sitting at the table, so the answer to “how many people are at the table, in total (including Joanne)?” is n + 1. That means that the possible values for the number of people at the table are 25, 13, 9, 7, 5, 4, and 3.

*Yes, I’m using God’s own units, and I won’t apologize for that. If Liberia and Myanmar don’t need the metric system as their official system of weights and measures, then neither does Uncle Sam.

Why accept evidence that didn’t convince Jesus’s contemporaries?

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The gospel story is from long ago and far away, and yet Christians insist it’s history. Even if we could accept the gospel story as true, why should we accept any element of the story that wasn’t convincing at the time?

The gospel story didn’t convince Paul

Paul was a dedicated Pharisee (the Pharisees were an influential Jewish group during the time of Jesus), and he emphasized in his letters how enthusiastically he persecuted Christians. Though he didn’t make his motivations clear, we can assume that he was offended by this upstart Christian movement within Judaism. That suggests that he understood Christianity’s claims but wasn’t convinced

He certainly had the opportunity. Paul heard Stephen’s long speech just before he was killed and was unmoved by Stephen’s reference to Jesus. Paul had the opportunity to discuss Christianity with the Christians he arrested.

Only after the death of Jesus, on a trip to Damascus to arrest more Christians, did Paul become a Christian. If Paul was unconvinced by the arguments of Christians of the time, at least one of whom had been a disciple, why should they convince us when we are far more separated from Jesus by language, culture, and time? If Paul was only satisfied by a personal vision from Jesus, why should we be satisfied with less?

See also: How Reliable is Apostle Paul When He Knew Very Little About Jesus?

The gospel story also didn’t convince John the Baptist

The skepticism of John the Baptist is even more remarkable. John knew exactly who Jesus was when he baptized him. He heard God’s voice from heaven proclaiming Jesus as God’s son and saw “the Spirit of God descending like a dove” (Matthew 3:16–17). He reported afterwards, “I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One” (John 1:34; see also 1:29).

John knew this even before he was born. Mary (when pregnant with Jesus) visited her relative Elizabeth (when pregnant with John). We read, “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb” (Luke 1:41), and she was filled with the Holy Spirit.

But John apparently forgot all that. During Jesus’s ministry, John was in prison, and he sent some of his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” Jesus said that he was, and he pointed to his healing miracles to support his claim (Matt. 11:1–5).

John needs to ask if Jesus is the One despite having heard the voice of God and seen the Holy Spirit descend to Jesus?! If John was entitled to question given that banquet of evidence, what are we to do with the watery gruel that we’re given?

If Paul was only satisfied by a personal vision from Jesus, why should we be satisfied with less?

Jesus explains the end game to the disciples and they … forget?

The end of the gospel story is pretty remarkable: Jesus will die by crucifixion and then rise from the dead. That is probably not the way the disciples expected it to end. But that’s okay, because Jesus explained it all to them.

From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. (Matthew 16:21)

When they came together in Galilee, he said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised to life.” (Matt. 17:22-23)

“We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!” (Matt. 20:18-19)

Crucified, three days, raised back to life—the key points are all there. And that’s just Matthew. The other two synoptic gospels explain this three times, and John has a few instances as well.

Since this was public knowledge, at least among the disciples, why the sad faces after the crucifixion? Why did the women go to the tomb with spices? The disciples should’ve been camped out in front of the tomb with picnic baskets and blankets to witness the most remarkable miracle since the creation of the world.

And if the disciples can get it this wrong, no one can fault modern Christians for being very skeptical given that they have the faintest whisper of evidence compared to what the disciples had.

In Mark, it’s like Jesus was
the 1000th customer of John the Baptist
and won the grand prize.
— commenter Greg G.

Magic bones

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The book of 2 Kings has a brief story about Israelites burying a man (2 Kings 13:20–21). When they saw bandits approaching, they threw the body into the tomb of the prophet Elisha and fled. The body touched the bones of Elisha, and the man came to life.

This two-verse story fills me with questions! Consider how it impacts the Christian worldview.

  • Were Elisha’s bones permanently curative, or was the cure haphazard like a slot machine, or did this happen only once? Why is there no mention of other people using this marvelous discovery? Surely word would have spread, and others would have taken advantage of this cure.
  • How many ancient sages’ or prophets’ bones had this property? Do we have any today that can do this, or does the magic fade with time? Besides bones, what other body parts were magical? And what could they do besides restoring life? You’d think that something that can restore life would be able to perform lesser cures like fix a broken bone or cure a cold. Could they cure baldness? If so, that would be surprising since Elisha was famously bald.
  • Surely some holy relics in churches today have magical properties. If they can’t restore life, maybe they can perform lesser miracles. Which relics are real, and which are fake? Why aren’t these used to reliably cure people today (especially today, since we know that we are saddled with the trials of life, unlike Jesus, who thought that the End was just around the corner). And if relics can’t reliably do anything, why revere them?
  • If the communion wafer and wine, once blessed, become the body and blood of Jesus (in the Roman Catholic church, anyway), what magic can we expect from that? As an aside, if consuming the eucharist and wine have an effect in the supernatural world, why consume it every time it’s offered? Shouldn’t once be enough?
  • The dead man was restored to life by touching Elisha’s bones, but isn’t it odd that Elisha himself stayed dead?

We can wonder why this miracle story was put in. But now that it’s in, the Bible must justify it.

Imagine a biologist dropped onto an isolated island who wanted to catalog the strange new plants and animals. That’s who I feel like—I want a taxonomy of this magical world we apparently live in. Perhaps the bigger question is, why isn’t everyone else similarly intrigued? Why don’t they ask the questions above?

It seems that Christians see these Bible miracles as a hierarchy. There are the big ones: the parting of the Red Sea, the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus, the raising of Lazarus, and others are central to the Christian belief. It’s hard to be a Christian and not know these stories.

But other miracles are not as well known: in addition to Elisha’s magic bones, Jesus reattaches a man’s ear (Luke 22:49–51), cloth that had touched Paul magically heals the sick (Acts 1:11–12), Balaam’s donkey speaks (Numbers 22:28), Elisha makes a lost ax head float on water (2 Kings 6:1–7), and Jesus predicts that a coin will be found inside a fish (Matthew 17:27).

This dichotomy is a problem. You can’t embrace the fundamental set of miracles and think deeply about why they’re in the Bible and what they mean to the ordinary Christian but then ignore the not-so-fundamental set and what it says about the world we’re living in. Christians can’t dismiss these peripheral stories with a careless, “Well, I guess I’ll have to ask God when I see him in heaven!” If the Bible is history, these miracle stories define our world as much as the famous ones.

Could Elisha’s bones really restore a corpse to life? Maybe. Or maybe we take the easy route and say that the Bible is just what it looks like—a collection of myths and legends.

I’m really excited
to be going to the World Series!
I just wish God didn’t hate
<insert the team we just beat>
so bad.
— seen on the internet

If prayer doesn’t work the way Jesus promised, make it more complicated

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St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna, Austria has a curious box. It’s for prayer requests (see below). The English appeal is, “Lord, hear our prayer!” (Besides German, the other languages are French, Polish, and Italian.) In the front, there’s a worn slot labeled “Drop in” for written prayer requests. In the bottom right, we read, “My intentions will be prayed for during the following Mass:,” and a handwritten note on a piece of tape identifies that time as “Donnerstag, 29.9, 19:00 Uhr” (Thursday, 9/29, at 7:00 pm).

Prayer request box in St. Stephen cathedral.

Why is this prayer box here? Presumably, the idea is that more congregants hearing the prayer (and perhaps murmuring an amen) will speed it along to heaven or nudge God to listen to it. Or maybe the hope is that Cardinal Schönborn, whose seat this cathedral is, will be present and put in a good word.

(By the way, a cathedral isn’t simply a church that exceeds a certain size or a certain amount of grandeur. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop, rather than a priest. For example, Paris’s Sacré-Cœur and Sainte-Chapelle are both magnificent, but neither is a cathedral.)

More is better for prayer?

It may be natural to think that if one voice is good, many are better, but Jesus didn’t say this about prayer. Here’s what he did say.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (Matthew 7:7).

Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours (Mark 11:24).

You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it (John 14:14).

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer (Matthew 21:22).

These verses may be hard to believe since we know prayer doesn’t work this way, but they’re easy to understand. Despite what the church says, Jesus is indeed claiming to act like a vending machine or a genie, and you don’t need a megaphone to amplify your prayer.

But what about this passage?

Truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them. (Matt. 18:19–20)

Why the mention of “two or three”? Does this mean that more is better?

No. This is part of a larger passage (verses 15–20) instructing how to discipline someone who sins. First, approach them yourself and encourage them to stop. If that doesn’t work, try again with one or two additional people. And if they still won’t accept the correction, make their sin public in the church.

So these verses aren’t saying that two or three Christians are necessary for Jesus to answer prayer, but if you come as a small group to correct a sinner, Jesus will be with you.

The rules for prayer

Jesus gives rules for prayer in Matthew 6:5–15, and there’s not much to it: don’t make a public show of righteousness but pray in private. Don’t babble on and on but get to the point since God already know what you need. And forgive others so that God will forgive you.

So then if you pray as Jesus dictates, will you receive whatever you ask for in prayer? If you seek, will you find? Will the door be opened to you?

No more than if you hadn’t prayed. And that’s where the prayer box comes in. If “ask and you shall receive” (John 16:24) doesn’t work, despite it being the promise of Jesus, maybe getting more people involved is the ticket.

Or maybe you should pray through heavenly intermediaries. If God or Jesus don’t seem to be listening, then pray to Mary or one of the saints. Incredibly, there are more than 10,000 saints recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. If your prayer still isn’t answered, maybe try a different saint.

Does your church have a relic? They’ve been said to be responsible for miracles. Maybe work that into your prayer somehow.

St. Stephen cathedral makes room for lots and lots of candles.

Maybe you need to light a candle. The photo above is also from St. Stephen. Candles to carry a prayer to God mimics the Old Testament’s description of sacrifices as a food offering, with smoke carrying the magic up to heaven.

If that doesn’t work, have you tried ending your prayer with “This I pray in Jesus’ name”?

Or think up some other ritual to add a little complexity to your prayer.

Jesus is indeed claiming to act like a vending machine or a genie, and you don’t need a megaphone to amplify your prayer.

Jesus promised that a simple request to God would be sufficient. These extra complications preserve the church’s good name and support the hypothesis that it’s always the petitioner who was at fault.

In an environment where evidence isn’t valued, endless excuses can be found to protect the words of Jesus from critique, and endless excuses can be found for Christians to maintain their own shaky beliefs. Faced with the obvious explanation that prayer doesn’t work because Christianity is made up, Christians are usually eager to shore up the weak parts and move on.

See also: The last thing Ukraine needs is prayer

Prayer:
God isn’t a vending machine,
he’s a slot machine.
— commenter Hector Jones