Monthly Archives: March 2023

Scientist argues that both science and faith play a role

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“I am an astrophysicist. I am also a Christian.”

This is the title of a 2022 article by Deborah Haarsma, formerly a professor at a Christian university and now the president of BioLogos, a Christian advocacy group that says about itself, “BioLogos explores God’s Word and God’s World to inspire authentic faith for today.”

That’s not an encouraging start for the skeptics out there, but note that BioLogos was founded by Francis Collins, a firm Christian who led both the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes for Health and has been a vocal and valuable proponent of evolution within Christianity. For example, he has said, “If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.”

BioLogos has a doctrinal statement, but their mission is to find common ground between science and Christianity, and they have decent responses to typical Christian anti-science arguments.

Dark clouds on the horizon

While not exactly fighting the good fight, Dr. Haarsma seems to at least be fighting a decent fight, which is worth investigating and celebrating. She gives four values that she claims are common to science and Christianity, which we’ll get to shortly.

We begin to see a problem when Haarsma describes BioLogos as “an organization that shows how faith and science can work hand-in-hand” and declares that “science and faith fit together.”

How do we categorize this—naïve? wrong? dangerous? Where science and faith disagree, we must follow science. Science follows the evidence, and it has an incredible track record of results. The only way science and faith can coexist is if they don’t overlap.

Science can only work by assuming that God never interacts with reality.

Christians’ selective rejection of science

Haarsma understands the problem Christians have made for themselves and summarizes it nicely.

Aren’t White evangelical Christians the group with the lowest vaccination rates? The people most opposed to climate change? The ones who built a whole museum opposed to evolutionary biology? Sadly, this is all true. Even worse, anti-science views on COVID and climate are more than a difference of opinion; opposition is leading directly to increased illness, suffering, death, and harm to the planet.

She blames “cultural forces” and “social media” for this split in society but doesn’t mention politics.

This is surprising—even shocking. Is politics more of a third rail than religion? Can you disagree with a literal view of the Bible, but you can’t criticize Christians for mindlessly swallowing conservative Republican politics and QAnon?

What caused this split if not politics? Her thinking is hard to believe:

This conflict didn’t come out of nowhere. Debates over creation vs. evolution date back decades, driven by Christian commitment to the authority of the Bible. The writings of militant atheists didn’t help. When Richard Dawkins and others claim that science rules out God and religion, Christians have good reason to be skeptical of what scientists say.

What a shame! And we were getting along so well.

I don’t remember any popular arguments from atheists claiming that science proves no God. The closest Dawkins has come, in my memory, is to say, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (The Blind Watchmaker, 1991), which is no attack on Christianity at all.

And the conclusion she draws is flawed. Atheists claim that science proves no God, so therefore “Christians have good reason to be skeptical of what scientists say”? Christians would be justifiably skeptical of scientists if they made bad arguments, but she’s talking about atheists attacking Christianity, which says nothing about what scientists say about science. Even if scientists were the ones making an argument and they were attacking Christianity, Christians would logically respond with either agreement or a rebuttal. None of this gives grounds for Christians to be skeptical about scientists’ arguments about covid, climate change, or evolution.

The same is true for atheist attacks on Christianity—Christians can be upset at how effective they are, but this is no reflection on the accuracy of science.

Science has Christian roots?

(Going forward, I’ll give Dr. Haarsma’s statements in italics.)

“The historical teachings of Christianity actually support the methods and values of science.”

If we’re generous, it’s not hard to imagine that the Bible and Christian tradition holds examples for us to follow that would make a good foundation for science. Knowing what you want ahead of time, you can pick out just the good bits.

But that’s hardly the predominant message of the Bible, and the reverse is also true. Geneticist Richard Lewontin illustrated what science would look like if God were active in our world. At any moment, God might override the natural laws for his own good purposes. But science can’t operate in an environment where every measurement is due to some (unknown) fraction from nature and the remainder from God. Science can only work by assuming that God never interacts with reality.

Another trait that Haarsma sees in Christians is, “a willingness to correct one’s ideas in the face of data.”

Wow—Haarsma needs to get out of her ivory tower. Following the evidence and correcting one’s conclusions is conservative Christians’ worst thing. Whatever the opposite of a superpower is, it’s that.

This is a tangent, but one problem she probably should have mentioned is the backfire effect, when people dig in their heels when shown a correction such that correcting their errors makes them double down on their original, false belief. With great care, we can avoid the backfire effect (see here and here).

“If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.”

Francis Collins

Christianity produced many scientists

“In the earliest years of the Scientific Revolution, leaders like Galileo and Robert Boyle wrote extensively about their faith. They showed how the Bible and Christian virtues fit with their work as scientists.”

I guess we should’ve expected it—the “great scientists like Galileo and Newton were Christian!” argument. In Europe in their day, Christianity was the only game in town. Of course they were Christian centuries ago.

Modern science has steadily undercut any claim Christianity had to be a reliable worldview. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Indians, and more had their time in the spotlight, and they did just fine without Christianity. The Islamic Golden Age—five centuries of remarkable scientific progress in the Muslim world, during which time Europe was stumbling through the medieval period—is no proof of the rightness of Islam, and similarly, European science populated by Christians is no proof of the rightness of Christianity.

“Christians were leaders in bringing the benefits of science to the poor and marginalized as they founded schools and hospitals.”

Which sounds impressive until you look more closely.

See also: Yeah, but Christianity Built Universities!

See also: Yeah, but Christianity Built Hospitals!  

Next, we’ll get into “Four values common to science and Christianity.” They certainly apply to science, but let’s see how well supported they are within Christianity.

Continue with part 2.

No theologians were consulted
in the search for the Higgs Boson.
— commenter ORAXX

Damning Bible contradictions: 2 Ten Commandments, 2 creation stories, 2 Flood stories, and more

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Here’s the final batch in our goal to explore the top 20 most damning Bible contradictions. Here are the final five (part 1 is here).

16. The Bible has two incompatible Ten Commandments

You know the story: Moses got the Ten Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai in Exodus 20. The list of commandments had the familiar rules—no blaspheming, no murder, no lying, no stealing, and so on. But the Israelites were impatient and anxious during his long absence. When Moses returns, he finds them were worshipping a golden calf, a familiar religious idol from Egypt.

Moses smashed the tablets in his rage, 3000 Israelites were killed in the opening round of punishment, and Moses eventually went back up for a duplicate set (Exodus 34), which was put in the Ark of the Covenant.

Except that it wasn’t a duplicate set. It’s a list that few Christians are familiar with. For example, number 5 is “The first offspring from every womb belongs to me.” Number 7: Celebrate the Feast of Weeks. Number 10: “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” This set is referred to as the “Ten Commandments” in Exodus, not the other set.

We can debate which set fundamentalists should try to illegally place on government property, but despite God’s assurance, these are two very different sets of rules.

See also: The Irrelevant Wisdom of the Ten Commandments

See also: Atheist Monument Critique: Ten Commandments and Ten Punishments

17. The Bible has two creation stories in Genesis

There are also two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis. First is the six-day creation story that enumerates the things God created day by day, after which God rested. Next is an older creation story, the one about the Garden of Eden.

Apologists try to harmonize these two, saying that the Garden of Eden story is just an in-depth look at the last day of creation, but details in the two stories disagree. The 6-day story says that humans can eat from every tree, while the Eden story says that one is forbidden. The 6-day story has plants and animals before humans, while the Eden story has the opposite. And so on.

See also: Illogic of the Garden of Eden Story

18. There are even two Flood stories

You see the trend: the Old Testament often has two different, incompatible stories. Each was too precious for ancient editors to discard, so both were jammed together somehow. The two Ten Commandments stories are separated by over a dozen chapters, the two creation stories are back to back, and the two Flood stories are interleaved.

In Flood story 1, the older story, Noah takes seven pairs of all clean animals plus one pair of all the others. Once on board with his family, it rained for forty days and forty nights (forty being the symbolic number for “quite a lot”), and everything outside the ark was killed. Noah sent out a dove to scout for dry land. On the second try, it returned with an olive leaf. Back on dry land, Noah sacrificed one of every clean animal to Yahweh, and Yahweh promised to never again destroy life on earth (with a flood, anyway).

In story #2, God is named, not Yahweh, but Elohim, and specifics about the design of the ark are given. With just one pair of each animal plus provisions, Noah (now 600 years old) and family go into the ark. This time, the water comes, not from rain, but from “the fountains of the great deep” and “the windows of the heavens.” Water had covered the earth for 150 days when Elohim made the water recede. This time it was a raven that helped scout for dry land, and they were back on dry land after a year in the ark. God told them to “be fruitful and multiply.”

A leading explanation of the Old Testament’s story pairs is the Documentary Hypothesis. It answers a lot of questions and proposes four original documents that were merged to make the Pentateuch, the Bible’s first five books. Read more on the two Flood stories and the Documentary Hypothesis here.

19. Resurrection contradictions

Forty percent of the gospels focus on the last week of Jesus’s life, from the triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the crucifixion, resurrection, and final teachings, and they differ on many points.

A popular Christian response is to say that just because only Matthew wrote about the dead coming out of their graves and walking around Jerusalem doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. (Yeah—the other gospel writers must not have thought that Jesus causing the dead to reanimate, seen by many, wasn’t worth writing about.)

Or that just because John says, “Mary Magdalene went to the tomb,” that doesn’t mean that many other women weren’t also with her as Luke says (“Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them”).

Or that just because only Matthew has Jesus riding on two donkeys, that doesn’t mean the other gospels’ reference to just one disagrees. (Yeah, it pretty much does.)

Or that Paul’s reference to 500 eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus might’ve been compelling to him, but it wasn’t worth writing about in any gospel (more).

The various accounts differ, from who Peter spoke to when denying Jesus, to Jesus’s last words, to who the women saw at the tomb, to whether Mary Magdalene recognized Jesus or not, to how many days Jesus stayed after his resurrection.

See also: Contradictions in the Resurrection Account

20. Jesus forgets the plot

At some point the three persons of the Trinity—Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit—agreed that Jesus should live as a human on earth. Jesus was born as a divine being (except in Mark, where he becomes divine with his baptism) and lives out a life that ends with crucifixion.

So we’re all on board? Apparently, Jesus wasn’t when he prayed with his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. To the few disciples with him, he said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38). Then he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup [he’s referring to the upcoming crucifixion] be taken from me.” He prays this three times. The story is the same in Mark, and in Luke, an angel strengthens Jesus.

Why did Jesus go off-script? He was part of the Trinity that decided this, so how could he be second-guessing the plan now?

We can look for a human comparison. It wouldn’t be surprising for an ordinary human to have second thoughts before a suicide mission, but in this story we’re talking about a god. Even if agony were a thing that he would find unpleasant, why would an omniscient being second-guess a plan that he knows is perfect?

The puzzle vanishes if we reinterpret the Jesus story as legend.

My god believes in self-sacrifice
then going on about it forever.
— Oglaf.com (h/t Richard S. Russell)

Damning Bible contradictions: Who Would Jesus Convert? and more

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We’re in the middle of tossing Christianity’s dirty laundry onto the lawn for everyone to examine. Here are five more Bible contradictions that call into question foundational Christian claims.

I’m hoping to find 20 contradictions, and this is part 3 (part 1 is here).

11. Do people deserve punishment for their ancestors’ sins?

The Bible demands intergenerational punishment so that children must be punished for their parents’ sins.

I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me (Exodus 20:5).

[God justified a calamity to the people:] It is because your ancestors forsook me (Jeremiah 16:11).

But the opposite claim is recorded in the Bible as well.

Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin (Deuteronomy 24:16).

Everyone will die for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—their own teeth will be set on edge (Jeremiah 31:30).

The one who sins is the one who will die (Ezekiel 18:4).

Where does this leave Original Sin? This is the idea that we’re born fallen and deserve hell because of Adam’s sin, which infects us all. What foundation remains for Original Sin if it is undercut by the Bible itself?

12. What day was Jesus crucified on?

The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) say that the Last Supper was the Passover meal and that Jesus was crucified after the Passover meal.

On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Where do you want us to make preparations for you to eat the Passover?” (Matthew 26:17)

Three verses later, Jesus is at the Passover meal, the Last Supper. But in John, the order is reversed: it’s the crucifixion and then the Passover meal.

Now it was the day of Preparation [the day of preparing lambs for the Passover meal], and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies [of Jesus and the two thieves] left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. (John 19:31)

A “historical account,” as the gospels are claimed by some to be, should get the order of important events correct, and the Passover meal and the crucifixion are both important events.

13. Who should the disciples convert?

At the end of the gospel story, Jesus has risen and gives the disciples their final instructions.

Make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19).

This is the familiar Great Commission, and it’s a lot more generous than what has been called the lesser commission that appears earlier in the same gospel:

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.” (Matthew 10:5–6)

This was not a universal message. We see it again in his encounter with the Canaanite woman:

[Jesus rejected her plea to heal her daughter, saying] “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” (Matthew 15:24–6)

You might say that a ministry with limited resources had to prioritize, but that doesn’t apply here. Jesus was omnipotent.

Going back to the Old Testament, we don’t find an all-inclusive message there, either. The Israelites were God’s “Chosen People,” and God had harsh things to say about neighboring tribes.

No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of Jehovah, not even in the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:3).

God also forbids intermarriage with these foreign tribes (Deut. 7:3; Ezra 9:2, 10:10; Nehemiah 13).

Let’s revisit the fact that Matthew is contradictory when it says both “Make disciples of all nations” and “Do not go among the Gentiles [but only] to the lost sheep of Israel.” There are no early papyrus copies of Matthew 28 (the “Make disciples of all nations” chapter), and the earliest copies of this chapter are in the codices copied in the mid-300s. That’s almost three centuries of silence from original to our oldest copies, a lot of opportunity for the Great Commission to get “improved” by copyists. I’m not saying it was; I’m simply offering one explanation for why the gospel in Matthew has Jesus change so fundamental a tenet as who he came to save, from only Israel’s “lost sheep” to the entire world.

14. Jesus should’ve returned to Earth already.

Jesus promised to return within the lifetimes of those listening to him. This Apocalyptic message (Apocalypticism claims that the end times are very close) is found in the three synoptic gospels. It takes a passage in Isaiah 13 that predicts calamity for Babylon—that the sun and moon will darken and the stars will fall—and repurposes it as a prediction of the end. It also predicts:

[All people on earth will] see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds. (Matthew 24:30–31)

The prediction ends saying that this will all happen soon.

This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened (Matthew 24:34).

Let me emphasize those two points: “these things” will happen soon (within months or years, not centuries), and “these things” are obvious and world-destroyingly calamitous. The popular Christian response that this referred to the fall of the Temple won’t fly.

Earlier in the same gospel, we find other references to the imminent coming of the Son of Man:

When you are persecuted in one place [as you spread the gospel], flee to another. Truly I tell you, you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. (Matthew 10:23)

Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom (Matthew 16:28).

It’s been a lot longer than one generation. Jesus made a mistake.

15. Jesus promises that prayers are answered

Jesus says a lot about prayer, and he makes big claims for it.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (Matthew 7:1).

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

He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do (John 14:12).

Apologists say that Jesus isn’t like a genie, but they need to reread their Bibles. Jesus really does say, “Ask, and ye shall receive”—it’s in John 16:24. He says it without caveats. That promise has been tested uncountably many times, often by desperate people, but if Jesus answers, he’s indistinguishable from chance. (More on prayer here and here.)

Our list of the top 20 damning Bible contradictions is concluded here.

Religion is just superstition
which has been around long enough
to have become respectable.
— J. B. R. Yant