Monthly Archives: December 2022

More counter-arguments from a Muslim apologist

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An article in Pakistan Today attacked nine atheist arguments. Though they probably came from a Muslim perspective, I responded with rebuttals as if these were Christian arguments (part 1 here). Let’s wrap up the final five arguments.

“5. Free will and belief in God are incompatible.” 

Nobody can believe in responsibility and culpability of humans, and at the same time believe in an omniscient God. If God already knows what one is going to do, how is one free to do anything to change the future (which is already known to God)? Either we are automatons or are responsible for our actions; and the latter rules God out.

Nicely stated! I leave free will arguments alone, knowing only enough to realize that it’s a big, contentious topic about which I have nothing interesting to add. But that’s not really where the author is going:

The error in this form of argumentation is that it places God inside the framework of time. According to any sophisticated theistic concept …

Whoa—stop there. Any sophisticated theistic concept? What does that mean? Confusing? Complicated? And how is “sophisticated” measured? A claim about reality should be measurable by how well it fits with the evidence, but somehow I think that evidence isn’t what the author wants to use here.

Perhaps “sophisticated” means thoughtful. I’ve read countless apologetic arguments that claim to be thoughtful but turn out to be a witches’ brew of confirmation bias, ad hoc thinking, rationalization, cherry picking of evidence, and cognitive dissonance. Just because someone is smart and able to semi-plausibly defend nonsense doesn’t mean that what they say is correct (for examples that we can all agree on, look to apologists from any foreign religion). Give William Lane Craig a year to build a case for the flat earth hypothesis, and he’d have as compelling a case as the one he uses for Christianity.

And I can’t ignore the slightly tangential Courtier’s Reply. This fallacy imagines one of the emperor’s courtiers responding to those rubes who declared that the emperor was newly unclothed and then maps this situation onto Christian defenders annoyed at Richard Dawkins because of his book The God Delusion. The Reply ends: “Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste.”

In the same way, too many apologists try to shield poor, defenseless God from critique by inventing ever more roadblocks for atheists to get around. “You haven’t responded to McConnell’s Inverted Counterclockwise Free Range argument for God,” they’ll say. “I can recommend a couple of books that cover that one thoroughly. And if you get past that one, which I doubt, I’ve got plenty more.”

The Pakistan Today author isn’t making that argument, but I do get a sense of “you’re disqualified from offering an argument until you have far more theological training” when I read that only “sophisticated theistic concepts” need apply.

Back to the article:

According to any sophisticated theistic concept, God is independent of time, and therefore it’s meaningless to apply words such as ‘future’ or ‘already’ to God.

Be careful: a god outside time is frozen and inert. Only with time can God judge, decide, take pleasure in things, and so on—all actions that the typical Christian apologist says God does. God can’t be “independent of time” without being outside time and therefore inert.

All this science fiction needs to be justified. Apologists try to say something profound, but then they expect a pass so they needn’t justify their exuberant claims.

“6. Where’s the proof for the existence of God?”

Just to be clear, I don’t ask for proof, just for compelling evidence that God is better than any other explanation.

What would be so special about a god who existed like everything else?

So if your claims about God’s existence were easily tested, that would be too easy? That would be cheating?

Nope—you make a claim, and then I see if I can verify it. That’s how it works with everything else, and that’s how it must work with this, the claim that you say is the most important of all. That’s certainly what you’d demand from an evangelist from another religion.

You claim God exists? Okay, I’m listening, but don’t expect any special accommodation. I demand at least as much evidence as you’d demand from a foreign religion.

God is Absolute (the most Basic) and is the reason for all existence. He is not a theorem that can be proved by starting from more basic assumptions.

So God is both hidden and eager for us to know him? You may want to recheck that.

It’s easy to make this claim—that everything relies on God—but I need evidence. Show us, for example, that since everything including our familiar logic rests on God, a godless universe would have different logical axioms.

“7. Theists usually behave horribly.” 

This is text-book ad-hominem. This is like rejecting relativity on ‘grounds’ that Einstein abandoned his daughter. How a person behaves has no bearing on the validity (or otherwise) of his belief systems.

You underestimate the New Testament, which makes clear that someone sins if and only if they are not “born of God”:

No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him…. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God (1 John 3:5–9).

(My goal here has been to respond to these arguments as if they’d come from a Christian source, but of course a Muslim is not tied to the New Testament. This quote from 1 John wouldn’t be a response to a Muslim argument.)

No, it’s not an ad hominem fallacy; it’s yet another example of putting the Bible’s claims to the test and seeing them go down in flames. (And I would never make this argument anyway.)

“8. Theism causes strife.” 

Sometimes it does. But, so does soccer.

Cleverly said! The author continues:

Not enough reason to cast aside either.

I’m interested in whether God exists, and strife is irrelevant. This is the negative side of popular Christian arguments like “Christians have less divorce” or “Christians are more generous.” Christians in the U.S. actually don’t present themselves particularly well in comparisons like this (studies show that they have more divorce than average and are no more generous than average), but that’s not my point. I’m happy to concede that if you pick the right subset (American Christians or worldwide Christians or Fundamentalists or Baptists or whatever), you’ll find some areas where they are better than average on some positive social metric.

All this is irrelevant to the interesting question, which is, “Does God exist?”

“9. It’s cool to be an atheist.”

There was a time when being an atheist was cool; when merely by being an atheist one appeared sophisticated and enlightened. In many cases it had some justification too, because being an atheist was rare, and usually it wasn’t something inherited. Now atheists can be found under most rocks and it’s no more fashionable because of being rare.

Dang! Now I’ll have to return to wearing my baseball cap backwards to prove I’m cool. More to the point, I’m surprised to hear that “atheism is cool” was ever a thing in Pakistan, where atheism is punishable by death.

As for no longer being rare, that’s correct. The Rise of the Nones is one of the biggest news stories of American Christianity in the twenty-first century. “No religion” as a belief category was steady in the U.S. through the seventies and eighties but then began to climb. It went from 6% in 1990 to 20% in 2012 and continues to climb.

Here’s a projection of that trend into the future.

Graphic copyright 2015, Pew Research Center. Permission to reprint graphic provided by Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/

The rise of the Nones (those whose religion is “none of the above”) is a big story, whether atheism is cool or not. But here again, this is irrelevant to the truth of theistic claims. Atheism isn’t a fashion statement or an act of youthful rebellion. Rather, I see theism’s fundamental claims being challenged with increasing boldness, and the statistics report a steady decline, first in western Europe, now in the U.S., and perhaps later in the rest of the world.

Truly I tell you,
if you have faith as small as a mustard seed,
you can say to this mountain goalpost,
“Move from here to there,” and it will move.
Nothing will be impossible for you.
— a tweak on Matthew 17:20
from commenter Lark62

Response to ‘Nine Not-so-Good Reasons To Be an Atheist’

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Here’s something new—apologetics from a Muslim source. The article, “Nine not-so-good reasons to be an atheist” is from Pakistan Today. Since Islam is the official religion of Pakistan and 96+ percent of the population is Muslim, we can assume that this article is defending Islam. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few British spellings, this is just what an American Christian apologist would argue. Since the focus of my column is Christianity in the West, I will respond to these arguments as if they came from a Christian apologist.

Here are nine “not-so-good reasons to be an atheist” that, in the words of the author, “leave a lot to be desired.” See if you agree with me that the problem has been overstated.

The first not-so-good argument for atheism:

“1. There’s so much suffering in the world.”

This comes in many forms: There’s no justice in the world. Faith is rewarded to the same degree as unbelief. The resources are so unjustly distributed among people. If an omniscient, omnipotent and an all-good God doesn’t choose to prevent evil, He’s not all-good; if He is unable to prevent evil, He’s not omnipotent. All these arguments feature anthropomorphism—casting the deity in the image of man.

Read your Bible—God is very much cast in the image of man. In Genesis 1:26 we read, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.’ ” Think of all the ways God and man are similar: God walked in the Garden of Eden like an ordinary man. God regretted making Man. God lied. God got a good thrashing by Chemosh, the god of Moab. Abraham changed God’s mind on Sodom. Moses talked with God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”

The Bible evolved over time. In the early years, the Bible’s religion was polytheistic. Yahweh was similar to the Greek and Roman gods, only gradually becoming omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

But anthropomorphism isn’t the issue. Some of these atheist arguments are valid. The Problem of Evil is indeed a problem for Christianity. An omniscient god could achieve any purpose he wanted without causing any pain. And a god who desired a relationship with humanity wouldn’t be hidden—excuses for his hiddenness are what you’d see if the god were manmade.

Good and evil are themes of mankind, not of God. Good and bad (like hot and cold, beneficial and harmful) are relative terms…. An Absolute God cannot be judged according to something else.

What absolute god? You give me a proposition such as “Yahweh is a good god,” and I must evaluate it. I judge claims for Yahweh, just like the Christian or Muslim would judge the claims for a god foreign to their worldview. And when I judge claims that Yahweh is good, he fails that test by his own holy book (read more on Yahweh’s failings in the areas of genocide, evil, human sacrifice, and slavery).

“2. Belief in God is an accident of birth.” 

You would probably believe in Allah if you were born in Pakistan, probably in Jesus if born into a Christian family, in Krishna or Vishnu if born to a Hindu Brahmin. In much the same way as the Greeks believed in Zeus, or so the argument goes.

Yes, that correlation does indeed exist. I make this very argument: “Your Religion Is a Reflection of Your Culture—You’d Be Muslim if You Were Born in Pakistan.”

Here’s the author’s concern:

The fallacy at play here is called the genetic fallacy: trying to invalidate a position by showing how a person came to hold it. The accident of birth theory—whether true or false—in no way invalidates all belief in God.

The genetic fallacy is about the origin of something (think genesis). Here’s an example: “Hitler was a bad man, and he was a vegetarian. Therefore, vegetarianism is bad.” There is no plausible cause-and-effect link.

But the argument here doesn’t fail for that reason. “You would probably believe in Allah if you were born in Pakistan” is obviously a true statement. More than 96 percent of Pakistanis are Muslim, and a baby born there today will likely grow up to be a Muslim adult. People tend to mirror their environment.

We can clumsily shoehorn correlations like this into an absolute statement like “People tend to reflect the religion of their environment so therefore all religious belief is false and a mere cultural artifact,” but that’s not my claim. I say instead that people tend to reflect the religion of their environment, and this gives weight to the naturalistic hypothesis that religious belief is a cultural artifact. There’s no fallacy here.

“3. I am throwing in my lot with science.”

While science is wonderful in many respects, it’s a mistake to think that it addresses all aspects of humanity…. [For example,] there’s no matter-only explanation of consciousness yet. Probably there never will be.

Let’s assume that this is correct, and science will never fully explain consciousness (which I doubt, but forget that). So what? You think that supernaturalism will? Science may not be able to explain everything, but supernaturalism has never explained anything that we can verify as true. Countless supernatural “explanations” have been overturned by reliable scientific explanations based on evidence, and the opposite hasn’t happened once.

“4. How can one believe in flying gods and the like?”

Starting with the question of whether to believe (or not believe) in God means that one has already skipped a vital question; namely: what does one mean by the word ‘God’?

Yes, that is an important question. There are 45,000 denominations within Christianity with their own answers. Even Islam, which isn’t as fragmented, has more than just the well-known Sunni and Shia divisions. Like Christianity, there are also nondenominational Muslims who don’t fit into the handful of large denominations.

But that was an aside. The author has a different concern:

It pays immensely if this is addressed and the childish concepts of gods are ruled out.

So childish is your concern? You’re living in a glass house. Are there god concepts that are not childish?

Yes, there is much metaphysical or philosophical dust thrown up about God, but that doesn’t mean it’s not at root childish. I remember hearing world-famous theologian William Lane Craig argue that the noncanonical gospels didn’t deserve to be canonical because they were nutty. He asked, Did you know that the Gospel of Peter has a walking, talking cross?!

But Craig also needs to avoid throwing stones. Has he ever read his own stuff?? It’s ridiculous—floating ax heads, talking donkeys and snakes, raising the dead, three gods who are instead just one god, and an “all-good” god who condones slavery, demands human sacrifice, and drowns everyone.

Try seeing Christianity or Islam as an outsider. Only because you’re accustomed to your own view do you not see that it looks as childish from the outside (in its own way) as all the others do.

(h/t commenter Tawreos.)

This list of nine arguments will be concluded next time.

He’s your god; they’re your rules—
you burn in hell.
— seen on the internet

How did the Star of Bethlehem move like Tinker Bell?

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Can the Star of Bethlehem be explained naturally? That’s the odd claim of the video The Star of Bethlehem by Rick Larson (explained here). We’ll finish up our critique by examining the last claim, that the “star” led the magi and then stopped over Bethlehem (part 1 of the critique here).

As a final example to illustrate that compelling stories don’t always have substance, let’s remember Harold Camping. He was an engineer, and while fiddling with some biblical calculations, he stumbled across the fact that there were 722,500 days between the death of Jesus and May 21, 2011, a date (at that time) in the near future. Things become more interesting when you realize that 722,500 factors into 5² × 10² × 17². Biblical numerology assigns traits to those numbers: 5 = atonement, 10 = completion, and 17 = heaven. So that date was the day of (Atonement × Completeness × Heaven) squared. Armageddon, here we come!

I’ve written more about Brother Camping’s ridiculous project.

And there are other intriguing stories that can’t support their weight. Procter and Gamble’s moon-and-stars logo had a Satanic meaning. Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950) presented an imaginative natural cause for the ten plagues. The Beatles dropped hints that Paul was dead. Popular rock music contained hidden satanic messages, revealed when played backwards. John Hagee invented the idea of four blood moons.

Let’s finish up Larson’s star-of-Bethlehem theory.

4. The star stops over Bethlehem

This is the final step in Larson’s 4-step explanation of the Star.

The magi visited Herod, who was surprised to hear of the astrological signs and worried about a potential rival for his throne. The magi expected to find the new Jewish king in Jerusalem, but Herod’s priests showed the Bible reference with Bethlehem as the prophesied birthplace. The magi were directed to Bethlehem, five miles south, and the star “went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.”

Micah prophecy

Micah chapter 5 has the Bethlehem reference: “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel.” As usual with claims that see Jesus behind every rock in the Old Testament, when you look at the context, the prophesied ruler doesn’t sound at all like Jesus.

Micah was written after Assyria had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and little Judah might be next. During these troubled times, Micah predicted that there would be a king from Bethlehem (since King David was born here, this may simply mean “a king in the line of David” rather than a literal birth in Bethlehem). God will abandon Israel, but then countrymen (presumably scattered Israelites from the aftermath of the conquest) will return to support the new king. With God’s renewed support, the king will bring peace to Judah, defeat any invasion by Assyria, and be celebrated worldwide.

This doesn’t sound like the career of Jesus. And there’s no mention of the punch line to the Jesus story, the sacrifice and resurrection of mankind’s savior.

What actually happened was that the Babylonians conquered Judah in the sixth century, so Micah’s prophecy was wrong.

(The composition of the book of Micah is complicated. Part appears to have been written just after the Assyrian conquest of Israel, but it was likely put into final form after the return of exiles from the Babylonian conquest of Judah. The king narrative in Micah 5 may date to an earlier time because it refers to Assyria, which hadn’t existed for a century when the exiles returned from Babylon.)

The perspectives of the magi and Herod

Let’s think about the magi. Who were they, and what was their motivation? We’re to believe that they knew enough about Judaism to make the lion = Judah connection and cared enough to make an expensive, dangerous, and time-consuming trip. Nothing says that they were ambassadors from a royal court, so they funded this trip themselves. However, if magi from the east didn’t visit Herod or any other Judean ruler on their ascension to the throne, why (besides literary reasons) is it plausible that the magi would visit this time?

If they were knowledgeable about Judaism, why did they have to be told about Bethlehem? Perhaps they only knew of a Jewish canon with no Micah, but the book of Micah would’ve been over 500 years old at this point. They might have been isolated from mainstream Judaism, but then we’re back to the question of why they would make the difficult trip to connect with a Judaism they were isolated from.

Since God spoke to the magi directly when he warned them in a dream to avoid Herod on their return, why couldn’t he just have told them, “Go to Bethlehem, avoiding Jerusalem, by date X to visit the new king of the Jews”? Why would the ambiguous motion of Jupiter be preferable? Avoiding a visit to Herod would’ve also avoided tipping him off to the rival king, which caused the Massacre of the Innocents (not that avoiding bloodshed is much of a priority in the Bible).

Of course, if we’re questioning God’s motivation, we could ask why he celebrated the most important event on earth since Creation with a vague light show that would be understood by a few strangers rather than something grand that would alert the world. God could’ve told everyone or he could’ve told no one, but instead he gave just a hint to a few men hundreds of miles away from the birthplace of Jesus. Apparently, God moves in stupid ways.

Now consider Herod’s motivation. He was so concerned about being replaced by this new “king” that, after the magi returned home secretly to avoid telling Herod where Jesus was, an enraged Herod ordered all boys two years old and under in Bethlehem area to be killed to make sure he eliminated his rival. A guy that ruthless would’ve simply had guards escort the magi to Bethlehem and then kill the boy once they found him. Sure, you could imagine a miracle that kept Herod in check, but then you could imagine a miracle behind the star, and Larson wants a natural argument.

How could Jupiter stop?

Finally, let’s consider how Jupiter “went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.” Since Jupiter moved across the sky east to west each night, it was over Bethlehem for just a moment. When was that moment? And how far must you go in that direction? “[The star] stopped over the place where the child was” is not something Jupiter could ever do.

Larson’s attempt to salvage his theory uses one of Jupiter’s switches between forward and retrograde motion (it switches directions twice a year) as a “stopping” point. Yes, Jupiter’s motion relative to the fixed background of stars would apparently stop for several days, but this does nothing to get us to “it stopped over the place where the child was.”

Remember the Bible’s cosmology. Stars weren’t light years away but were close enough to fall to the ground after the tribulation. The author of Matthew could have easily imagined tiny stars moving like Tinker Bell (a fairy in Peter Pan who looks like a darting light) to direct the magi to the house where Jesus lived, but this doesn’t fit with magi supposedly knowledgeable enough to know how planetary motion actually worked.

So back to the title of this article: how did the Star of Bethlehem move like Tinker Bell? Answer: it didn’t. At least not with a natural interpretation, which was the goal of the video we’re critiquing.

Fun with interpretations

So where does this leave us? Larson sees the king planet crowning the king star in the constellation of Judah and then a remarkable conjunction between the king planet and the Mother Planet.

Alternatively, we could use similar logic but pick different data. Remember that Satan is personified as a lion in 1 Peter 5:8 (this may be an allusion to “roaring lions that tear their prey” in Psalm 22). Now we have the king star crowned in the constellation of Satan followed by a conjunction between the king planet and the morning star Lucifer (Venus as the morning star representing Lucifer is discussed in part 2).

One interpretation might give you “a new king is born in Judah,” but the other gives you “Satan is the new king.” Sure, I forced the facts into a conclusion—I could’ve instead picked equally plausible facts such as, “the constellation of Babylon” or “the king is in the lion’s den” or “a Jupiter/Venus conjunction means war.” But if I forced the facts, so did Larson. If one interpretation is biased, so is the other.

Another interpretation

North Korean legend says that the birth of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il was celebrated by the appearance of a new star. Was there an agenda here? Of course, but Matthew might’ve had one as well, and the decay of time has blurred Matthew’s story even more. Is the historical credibility of the North Korean tale any less than Matthew’s?

Matthew was written in roughly 80 CE. That’s 80 years after the supposed visit of the magi. Suppose the conjunctions Larson mentions were noted at the time. After many decades of oral history, the author of Matthew (who wasn’t an eyewitness to the conjunctions) wrote a garbled prescientific account through a Christian lens.

Or, suppose that the magi story was entirely fiction, an opportunity to show praise for Jesus from foreign dignitaries while creating a threat from Herod. This sets up the flight to Egypt and the Moses-like fulfillment of “out of Egypt I have called my son” (from Hosea 11:1). In this case, Matthew is writing literature or hagiography, not history.

We can find precedents for Matthew’s nativity story. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas is a Trojan hero whose mother is the goddess Venus. He escaped Troy after its defeat by the Greeks in the Trojan War and was guided to Italy by his mother’s star, the planet Venus.

A precedent for the trip of the magi took place shortly before Matthew was written. The king of Armenia and his magi traveled to Rome in 66 CE to pay homage to Emperor Nero.

There is plenty of room to make a plausible skeptical case against Matthew’s nativity story. Enjoy Larson’s video as a clever tale, not an adequate explanation.

Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines,
which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer.
When this is done, the same question shall be
triumphantly asked again the next year,
as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject.
— George Horne

Jupiter, Venus, Regulus, and Revelation: the fireworks of a real Star of Bethlehem?

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Planetary conjunctions, a prophecy in Revelation, and more: do these all point to an actual Star of Bethlehem?

I summarized the video The Star of Bethlehem by Rick Larson here. Let’s continue the critique of the logic behind the claims by moving on to the four astronomical phenomena that were visible in 3 BCE and 2 BCE (part 1 here).

Let me first warm up the crowd with another example of a plausible argument like Larson’s star of Bethlehem. Here’s a viral video from 2014 of an earnest Christian woman who wants to expose the satanic forces behind Monster energy drink.

First, look at the green M. Those aren’t three scratch marks. No, that’s three separate instances of the Hebrew letter vav (ו), which is used to represent the numeral 6. That’s right—Monster energy drink proudly says 666. The 32-ounce can says “BFC,” which stands for “Big F-ing Can.” It says “MILFs love it” on the side of the carton. None of this sounds very Christian, and the slogan “Unleash the beast” sounds positively Satanic.

The word “Monster” has a cross in the letter O. Tip up the can to drink, and the Christian cross is inverted, which is just what Satanists like to do. (“Bottoms up, and the devil laughs,” she says)

Some of these elements may be deliberate, edgy appeals to a young audience, but some may have had unintended satanic meanings. With much patient effort, an innocent thing can seem like a conspiracy. (Snopes rejects the claims.)

A Lucifer/Venus connection is probably not what Larson was hoping for, but it’s no less valid than his claims.

1. Jupiter/Regulus conjunction

The first astronomical phenomenon in the star-of-Bethlehem argument is Jupiter making three passes above Regulus, a star in the constellation of Leo, beginning in 3 BCE. That is, the king planet Jupiter “crowned” the king star Regulus in the constellation of the lion, the sign of Judah.

The first concern is pairing Judah with any Babylonian constellation, given the Bible’s prohibitions against astrology, but Larson pushes ahead. He gives verses such as “Like a lion [Judah] crouches and lies down” (Genesis 49:9) to make his case that “lion” means Judah, but Judah is also personified in other ways. It’s a wild ox in Numbers 23:22 and a scattered flock chased by lions in Jeremiah 50:17.

Lions are often personified as the adversary: “The Lord [rescued] me from the paw of the lion” (1 Samuel 17:37); “Rescue me from the mouth of the lions” (Psalms 22:21); “Rescue me from their ravages, my precious life from these lions” (Ps. 35:17); and Daniel in the lion’s den. Babylon is a lion (Daniel 7:4); God is a lion when he punishes Israel and Judah (Hosea 5:14); and Satan is a lion (1 Peter 5:8).

Countries were often identified with animals in antiquity, but the lion for Judah wasn’t one of the associations.

Jupiter in the constellation of Leo isn’t that big a deal. Jupiter makes one orbit of the sun every twelve years, and there are twelve constellations in the zodiac, so Jupiter is in Leo for roughly one year every twelve years. And the three Jupiter/Regulus conjunctions—the “crowning” of Regulus—wasn’t like fireworks. This was a slow-motion event that took close to a year. It’s not like you could’ve gone outside and seen the event over the course of hours, like a lunar eclipse. It likely would have seemed mundane, if it were noticeable at all. The magi could’ve known enough about Jupiter’s movements that they could anticipate how the entire retrograde phase would play out. They could’ve tracked it night after night to gradually piece together its movements over months, but why would they?

Seeing the “crowning” in seconds with a modern computer simulation, as Larson talks about doing, is a very different experience, and seeing it in (glacial) real time would not have been noteworthy.

2. Revelation and the woman “clothed with the sun”

Revelation 12:1–5 speaks of a heavenly sign, “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.” The woman is usually interpreted as Mary giving birth to Jesus.

At the beginning of the Jupiter/Regulus series of conjunctions, the sun and moon were both in Virgo. That is, the virgin was clothed in the sun with the moon at her feet, as predicted by Revelation. (Larson has nothing for the “twelve stars on her head.”)

The obvious question is why magi in 3 BCE would care about a prophecy in Revelation, a book that wouldn’t be written for another century.

Another issue is that the sun in Virgo is something that you could deduce, but you couldn’t see it since the background stars that form the constellation aren’t visible during the day. Like the “crowning” of Regulus in painfully slow motion, Virgo “clothed in the sun and moon” wouldn’t have been a stunning visual display but at best an intellectual conclusion.

Note also that the sun is in Virgo for one month out of twelve, and the moon joins it in Virgo for a few days. This isn’t a rare event; it happens every year.

3. Jupiter/Venus conjunction

Next up was an unusually close planetary conjunction. Jupiter and Venus were less than one minute (1/60 degree) apart on June 17 of 2 BCE.

There is a Jupiter/Venus conjunction roughly once per year. In 2016, there was a Jupiter/Venus conjunction just four minutes apart, and there are 17 conjunctions less than 30 minutes apart in the seventy years 1990–2060. Add in conjunctions between other planets, and surprising conjunctions aren’t that unusual. Close conjunctions appear to be little more than opportunities to observe, “Oh, cool—look at that. You don’t see that every day!”

Larson calls Venus the “Mother Planet,” but the Bible has another interpretation.

How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! (Isaiah 14:12)

This is a reference to Lucifer, the morning star (another name for Venus). A Lucifer/Venus connection is probably not what Larson was hoping for, but it’s no less valid than his claims.

Larson opted for a planetary conjunction as the Bethlehem star because he says that comets and novas were often seen by the ancients as bad omens. Unfortunately, the same might’ve been true for Jupiter/Venus conjunctions. In Assyria, this was considered a sign of war or danger to the king. Assyria was a long-time neighbor of Babylon, the region where the magi might’ve come from.

Concluded in part 3 with the last claim plus some final thoughts.

In the last 3500 years, what do we absolutely know
about God and the supernatural realm
that wasn’t supposedly known by the shepherds and fishermen
who claimed to be in contact with the divine then?
Think about that.
Within religion, is there any information there
that we can act on with any degree of certainty,
knowing and seeing that a given result will follow?
— Mr. Deity video @5:05

Critique of ‘The Star of Bethlehem’ video

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Are you anxious for a takedown of Rick Larson’s The Star of Bethlehem video? I certainly am.

Now that we’ve let the Christian side state their case (part 1 here), it’s time to respond. If you’ve been biting your tongue with rebuttals, let’s turn the tables. This’ll be fun.

That video argued that the conjunctions of Jupiter with Regulus and Venus during the years 3 and 2 BCE explain the story of the magi following the star in Matthew chapter 2. Volumes have been written with many other attempts to explain the star, but this video is a popular explanation, and I will use it as a representation of the field.

The video makes a clever and intriguing argument, but an intriguing argument doesn’t carry the day. Let me illustrate that with this question: Why is the mathematical constant e = 2.718281828459045…? One answer:

It has a lot to do with a $20 bill.

Note that Andrew Jackson’s picture is on a twenty. He served two terms, hence the 2. He was the seventh president, now giving us “2.7”. He was elected by a vote that was held in 1828 and since he served two terms we will repeat this, giving us “2.718281828”. If you fold the bill in half then fold it corner-to-corner you end up with a 45–90–45 degree triangle. Append that sequence and you get “2.718281828459045”. That makes the answer to your question pretty clear, doesn’t it?

Of course, the author of this ingenious answer wasn’t being serious, but it does illustrate how it may not be that remarkable to weave an interesting argument when you’re not following evidence but selecting it to pave a path to a conclusion you’re determined to reach.

Larson knows that he wants to find celestial fireworks at the time of the birth of Jesus to map onto Matthew’s Bethlehem star story, so he sifts and hammers the data to reach that conclusion. The result is an interesting argument, but it ultimately fails under the weight of many questions. The New Testament contains two nativity stories, but Larson, without apology, doesn’t bother to reconcile them. He ignores Luke and focuses on Matthew. And like the zombies stumbling through the streets of Jerusalem in Matthew 27:52–3, we’re left to wonder why the star and magi are also only in Matthew. If it was important enough for Matthew and it actually happened, why wasn’t it reported in the other gospels?

When was Jesus born?

Matthew’s nativity account says that Jesus was born before King Herod died. 4 BCE is the traditional date of Herod’s death, but this prevents Larson from using the celestial events of 3 and 2 BCE to make his story. Larson tries to salvage his theory by arguing that Herod died in 1 BCE.

4 BCE is the scholarly consensus, and the defense of that date sounds convincing to me (Wikipedia summary here). A summary of the debate is tangential to the purpose of this post, but I do want to highlight one point. I have no problem considering minority views in religious scholarship, but the people who want to reject the consensus view here are probably the ones who ridicule those who challenge the consensus view of the historicity of Jesus. For example, “Aside from a very small [handful] of mythicists who don’t hold professorship in any relevant fields, the consensus [that Jesus was a historical figure] is just as universal among historians as the theory of evolution is among biologists.” I’m just asking for consistency—if you object to the rejection of the scholarly consensus of the existence of Jesus, then don’t attack the consensus of historians elsewhere.

Herod dying in 4 BCE defeats Larson’s argument, but let’s ignore that and continue.

Astronomy vs. astrology

Larson said that the Bible’s warnings against astrology gave him pause, and we can see why. For example,

If a man or woman … has worshiped other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars in the sky, … take the man or woman who has done this evil deed to your city gate and stone that person to death. (Deuteronomy 17:2–5; see also Isaiah 47:13–15, Job 31:26–8, Deut. 4:19 and 18:9–14, Jeremiah 10:1–3)

The constellations come from the Babylonians, the civilization that conquered Judah in the sixth century BCE. God’s rejection of astrology built on Babylonian constellations is understandable, and yet Larson imagines God using that invention to communicate Jesus’s birth.

We’ll ignore the Bible’s protests as well and move on.

Continued with the astronomical phenomena in part 2.

When the facts change, I change my mind.
What do you do, sir?
— attributed to John Maynard Keynes
(probably falsely)

The Star of Bethlehem, a real event?

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The Star of Bethlehem was (drum roll, please), the planet Jupiter! That fits the Matthew story best, according to the video The Star of Bethlehem by Rick Larson. But taking as a given that Matthew is history isn’t the objective route to truth, and we’ll get to that. First, let’s finish summarizing Larson’s argument.

In part 1, I listed the nine points needing explanations that Larson pulled from the magi/star story in Matthew 2. He claims that Jupiter is the key player in a story that the magi would’ve been able to interpret for its symbolic meaning. He identifies four events in his Bethlehem star scenario that extend for a little over a year beginning in 3 BCE.

1. Jupiter/Regulus conjunction

From a human standpoint, the stars in the sky seem fixed. Planets, however, gradually move against the fixed background of stars (the word “planet” comes from the Greek for “wanderers”). While they do move, and the magi could’ve known this, the motion is subtle. Only by looking night after night is this motion apparent.

Jupiter had not one but three conjunctions with Regulus (September of 3 BCE, then February the next year, and finally in May). Regulus is actually a four-star system, but the magi would have known it as a single, bright star in the constellation Leo.

Planets farther from the sun than earth (Mars and beyond) sometimes move backwards against the background of stars. This is called retrograde motion. For example, from the earth, Jupiter appears to move forward for nine months, backward for four months, and then forward again.

The three Jupiter/Regulus conjunctions are because of Jupiter’s retrograde motion. Looking at the symbolic meaning, the king planet Jupiter moved past the king star Regulus three times. Larson sees this looping motion as Jupiter crowning Regulus. And this happened in the constellation of the lion, the symbol of Judah (for example, “Like a lion [Judah] crouches and lies down, like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?” [Genesis 49:9–10]). He says that the magi would’ve known that Judah was getting a new king.

2. Revelation and the woman “clothed with the sun”

Revelation is full of unfamiliar symbolism, and Christians argue about precisely what it means. We’ll go with Larson’s interpretation.

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon…. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” (Revelation 12:1–5)

The woman is Mary, the child is Jesus, and the dragon is Herod (or Satan in the guise of Herod). On September 11 of 3 BCE, during the Jupiter/Regulus conjunction, the sun and moon are both in the constellation of Virgo. In other words, Virgo the virgin is clothed with the sun and has the moon at her feet (as mentioned in Revelation) while the king planet is crowning the king star in Judah’s constellation.

3. Jupiter/Venus conjunction

Next on the calendar was a very close Jupiter/Venus conjunction on June 17 of 2 BCE, so close that the distance separating them was about the apparent width of either planet. Specifically, they were about 40 seconds apart. (There are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a degree and 360 degrees in a full circle. For comparison, a full moon is 30 minutes, or 1800 seconds, in diameter.)

The magi would’ve been familiar with conjunctions, and the remarkable thing about this conjunction wasn’t the brightness but the closeness. Conjunctions this close aren’t that rare astronomically, but they would’ve been unusual or unique in the lifetimes of these men.

4. The star stops over Bethlehem

The last element in this lightshow was the stopping of the star (Jupiter) over Bethlehem. Larson says that Jupiter’s switching directions from regular motion to retrograde or vice versa (there are two such switches every 13 months) counts as “stopping.” One of those “stopping” points was December 25 of 2 BCE (though he’s quick to state that this being Christmas day is just a coincidence, since the magi aren’t thought to have visited Jesus as a newborn).

Does this sound like an intriguing story? Don’t get your hopes up.

Critique

This is an interesting set of facts, but Larson benefits from 20/20 hindsight. He knows what he wants to find, so he scans the possibilities (and moves the date of Herod’s death to open up more possibilities) to find what he wants. The Bible’s nativity story is feeble evidence that any magi could or did draw the conclusions Larson would like.

Perhaps you’ve had some questions as you read along. Here are some that come to mind for me.

  • Revelation was written a century after Jesus’s birth. Who would marvel about seeing a fulfilled prophecy from Revelation before Revelation had ever been written?
  • How could the magi make the Leo = Judah connection and care enough about the tiny state of Judah to make a difficult trip but not know the Old Testament enough to know about the Bethlehem reference in Micah 5:2?
  • How can Jupiter be deliberately over anything on earth? It moves across the sky each night. From a vantage point in the Middle East, it’s “over” lots of things—pretty much everything to the south of you, depending on the time. Matthew says that “[the star] stopped over the place where the child was.” This could apply to Jupiter only if you had a precise moment at which to take its position. And only if the star were like Tinker Bell (rather than something that might as well be infinitely far away like Jupiter) could you identify “the place where the child was.”

Those questions and more discussed next in the critique.

It takes a certain maturity of mind
to accept that nature works
as steadily in rust
as in rose petals.
— Esther Warner Dendel