Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

I'm an atheist, and I like to discuss Christian apologetics.

Computing the Probability of God

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probability of god

Have you heard of the Drake equation? It’s a simple product of seven values, and it attempts to compute the number of civilizations in our galaxy with whom radio communication might be possible.

Now that we have found clear evidence of planets around other stars, the equation is slightly more practical than when it was first proposed over a half-century ago, but it still demands reliable figures for factors we can now only guess at: the fraction of planets in the average solar system that could potentially support life, the fraction of those that produce life, that continue on to develop intelligent life, whose intelligent life develops technology, and so on.

How likely is God?

We have a similar problem when we evaluate the claims of Christianity.

Physicist Stephen Unwin wrote The Probability of God (2004) and, yes, he proposes to compute the likelihood that God exists. He uses Bayes’ theorem (I wrote an introduction to Bayes’ theorem here). You can take his equation below as a given, or you can see how it is derived from a more conventional form of Bayes’ theorem in the appendix. You’ll soon see that the interesting part isn’t the math but the assumptions that Unwin makes.

Probability of God

We start with a beginning probability of God’s existence, Pbefore. Use a scaling factor D—Unwin’s “divine indicator,” which is a measure of the likelihood of God given certain evidence—we compute Pafter. Unwin uses values of D from 10 (given a particular bit of evidence, God is much more likely to exist than not) to 0.1 (given this evidence, God is much less likely to exist).

Once he has a new probability Pafter, he uses that value as his new Pbefore and repeats the computation with another value of D, reflecting the likelihood of God given another piece of evidence. The computation is quite simple. The unreliable part, as with the Drake equation, is determining the probabilities.

Unwinding Unwin

We need an initial probability—the likelihood of God given no evidence. Unwin uses Pbefore = 0.5 and calls this “maximum ignorance.”

His first bit of evidence is evidence for human goodness. For this, he uses D = 10 (God is much likelier given that human goodness exists). Plug in the numbers, and the equation gives Pafter = 0.91. The equation simply provides a way to merge these different factors into a single probability for God. Here are his six factors with their associated D values:

  • Human goodness, such as altruism (D = 10)
  • Existence of moral evil—that is, evil done by humans (D = 0.5)
  • Existence of natural evil such as natural disasters (D = 0.1)
  • Minor miracles such as answered prayers (D = 2)
  • Major miracles that break the rules—a dead person brought back to life, for example (D = 1)
  • Evidence of religious experience such as feelings of awe (D = 2)

And after all that, the probability of God is 0.67. God is likelier to exist than not.

It’s math! How you gonna disagree with that?

(Let me note that I haven’t read Unwin’s book but instead have relied on helpful critiques by Vic Stenger and The Friendly Atheist.)

I take exception to Unwin’s assumptions. First, let’s revisit our starting probability about God. Does Zeus exist? Thor? Osiris? Shiva? Quetzalcoatl? If the answer is “Are you serious? Of course not!” then why do we start with a 0.5 probability for Yahweh, especially when he looks like just another Canaanite god?

If Unwin wants to dismiss this information at the starting gate, I can accept that. But then let’s add it in as a new factor:

  • Humans have a passion for inventing supernatural gods. Believers make contradictory claims, so most of these claims must be false. Yahweh looks like just one invented god. (D = .001)

Next, let’s reevaluate Unwin’s six factors.

  • Goodness: Altruism exists in humans. This isn’t surprising since we’re social animals. Evolution has selected us with an innate sense of the Golden Rule. The Christian view also explains good traits in humans, so this gives no preference either way. (D = 1)
  • Moral evil: Humans do terrible things sometimes, and the natural explanation has no trouble with this. But Man made in God’s image with an innate sense of God’s existence? The popular free will defense fails. No, this Christian claim maps poorly to the unpleasant reality. (D = 0.01)
  • Natural evil: Indiscriminate killers like natural disasters, disease, and other calamities—things that an omnipotent God could eliminate—are hard for Christianity to explain. Birth defects and other gratuitous evil compound the problem. (D = 0.0001)
  • Miracles: The Bible says, “Ask and ye shall receive,” but prayers aren’t answered the way the Bible promises, not even the selfless ones. Coincidences abound, but we have little besides wishful thinking to imagine that they are the work of God. (D = 0.001)
  • Rule-breaking miracles: Jesus promised, “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these,” but science knows of zero amputated limbs that have grown back or dead people supernaturally returned to life. Surely there have been millions of earnest prayers for these, but they have been unanswered. (D = 0.0001)
  • Religious experience: We feel awe in response to both natural realities and supernatural claims. (D = 1)

The probability is now down to 10–16, but we’re just getting started. There are lots more uncomfortable facts about Christianity.

Piling on: more factors to consider

The probability of God is now basically zero (10–38 if you’re keeping score at home).

The apologist might demand equal time for the Transcendental Argument, the Design Argument, the Moral Argument, and so on. I don’t think they get out of the gate (click on the links for more).

The underlying problem with Unwin’s argument is that different people will weigh the factors differently. Clues for God’s existence aren’t unambiguous. I’m sure you thought that at least some of my numbers above were off, and you may have thought of other facts that have been overlooked. Nevertheless, the attempt to make the God question quantitative, interesting though it may be, seems hopeless.

The subtitle of Unwin’s book is A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth. Yes, it’s a simple calculation, but no, it doesn’t prove God. In fact, the evidence points in the opposite direction.

All Westboro [Baptist Church] was 
was evangelical Christianity minus polite behavior.
— Frank Shaeffer interview on Point of Inquiry

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 04/09/14.)

Photo credit: Andy Melton, flickr, CC

 

Appendix:

Bayes’ theorem is easy to understand visually by using a probability tree. See my introductory post for a discussion of that. It’s less easy to understand (for me, anyway) through equations.

Here’s the derivation of the equation used by Unwin, starting with Bayes’ theorem. We’re computing P(G | E), the probability (P) of God existing (G) given (|) the evidence (E). Bayes’ theorem says:

Probability of God

where P(~G) is the probability of God not existing. Define D as follows:

Probability of God

D is Unwin’s “divine indicator,” the scaling factor that represents how likely the evidence E would be if God existed rather than God not existing. Now multiply top and bottom of Bayes’ equation by 1/P(E | ~G):

Probability of God

Since P(~G) = 1 – P(G),

Probability of God

Or, using the terminology of Unwin:

Probability of God

Dismantling the Noah Story

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noah

We’ve explored “Noah” the movie. Now let’s turn to Genesis to see what the Noah story actually says: Yahweh saw that mankind had become wicked, and he regretted his creation. “It grieved him to his heart.” He resolved to wipe man from the face of the earth, plus all the animals, “for I am sorry that I have made them.” (Genesis 6:6–7)

Noah was the one righteous exception, so God told him to take his family into an ark. God also commanded that he take seven pairs of all clean animals plus one pair of all other animals. After a week to get everything on board, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. Water covered even the highest mountains, drowning everything—animals, birds, and humans.

After 40 days [this was presumably an additional 40 rain-free days, though the text is unclear], Noah sent out a dove to scout for dry land, but it returned. After a week, he tried again, and the dove returned with an olive leaf, showing that some land was dry. He sent out the dove again a week later, and it didn’t return.

Noah went to the top of the ark and saw that the land was dry. He left the ark and built an altar and sacrificed one of every clean animal to Yahweh. Yahweh was pleased, and he thought: I will never again destroy life on earth, because man is inherently evil. While the earth exists, I will preserve it.

Another version

Does that sound familiar? See what you think about this version:

Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Noah was righteous, but the earth was corrupt, and man was violent. Elohim decided to flood the earth and kill everything, and he gave Noah instructions for building an ark. It had to be 300 × 50 cubits in area, and 30 cubits tall. It needed three decks, with a door in the side and a roof on top, and it must be covered in pitch.

Noah, his family, and one pair of every living thing would be safe in the ark. They must bring provisions for them and the animals.

When Noah was 600 years old, on the 17th day of the 2nd month [I’ll abbreviate this as 2/17], “the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened.” Noah, his family, and the chosen animals boarded the ark. Everything else—animals and human—drowned.

The water covered the earth for 150 days, but then Elohim made a wind blow, and the water receded. The sources of the water closed. On 7/17, the ark rested in the mountains of Ararat. By 10/1, the tops of the mountains were visible.

Noah sent out a raven to see when the land was dry.

By 1/1, the ground was dry [presumably just the nearby land], and by 2/27, the earth was dry. Noah, his family, and the animals left the ark, and Elohim told them to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Contrast the two accounts

Both versions are in Genesis. The first version was from the J source (J because this source refers to God as “Jehovah,” which is another way of saying “Yahweh”). The second version was from the P (“Priestly”) source. They are interleaved to make Genesis chapters 6–8. (I used Richard Friedman’s The Bible with Sources Revealed and Who Wrote the Bible? to identify the two sources.)

Note the differences in our Noah accounts.

  • God has different names: Yahweh in J and Elohim in P.
  • Yahweh acts like a human—he regrets and grieves—while Elohim doesn’t.
  • In the J account, the flood comes from rain. In the P account, water poured in from the two great sources—the fresh water underneath and the salt water in the dome above: “the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened.” This cosmology comes from the Sumerian creation myth, which we see in Genesis 1, which is also from the P source:

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.”

And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:6–10)

  • J uses a dove, and P uses a raven.
  • J demands seven pairs of clean animals, but P demands only one pair. This is because only J has a sacrifice at the end of the trip, and you can’t sacrifice animals if they’re the only ones of their species.
  • P gives details of the ark’s construction and detailed dates (Noah was 600 years old, plus the precise dating of milestones), while J has none of this.
  • In J, the rain lasts for only 40 days, and the entire ordeal takes less than 100 days. In P, 150 days is mentioned, and Noah’s family is on the ark for over a year.

Note also what is the same. Both stories have an introduction that explains that the world was wicked but Noah was good. In the interleaved story, this appears redundant, but this is an additional clue that they were originally independent stories that needed their introductions.

Amusingly, one of God’s justifications is that the earth was full of violence (Gen. 6:11). So what does he do? He responds with a record-setting amount of violence. (Maybe irony hadn’t been invented yet.) It’s also interesting that when God told Abraham about his plans to destroy Sodom, Abraham protested (Gen. 18), and when God wanted to destroy the Israelites after the golden calf fiasco, Moses protested (Exodus 32). But when God wants to destroy the entire world, Noah says nothing in protest.

I’ve written more about the illogic of the Noah flood story here.

Documentary Hypothesis

The theory explaining many of the duplications and different perspectives jumbled throughout the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) is called the Documentary Hypothesis. It hypothesizes four different sources, with J and P being two of them. There are other doublets besides the two Noah stories—two creation stories, two Goliath stories, two stories of Abraham lying about his wife Sarah to a king, and so on—and the Documentary Hypothesis nicely explains them.

60% of Americans insist that the Noah’s ark story is literally, word-for-word true, but a far better explanation is that it is a composite of several sources of Mesopotamian mythology.

The man who prays is the one who thinks
that god has arranged matters all wrong,
but who also thinks that he can instruct god
how to put them right.
— Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/31/14.)

“Noah” Movie Review

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Noah movie

I expected the Noah movie to be a fairly careful following of the Bible story, where the fun would be in quibbling about how various verses were interpreted, but the movie was (surprisingly) more interesting than that.

It has Noah, his wife, and the three sons. There’s the enormous ark, the animals, and the flood. And then there are tangential bits that are nevertheless still in the Bible—the Nephilim, Methuselah, Tubal-Cain, and Noah the angry drunk.

But that’s about it for the Bible. The rest is Hollywood. Perhaps that’s to be expected when you must expand four Bible chapters into 138 minutes.

Spoiler alert: you’d think that everyone already knows the story of Noah (“Omigod! You mean that everyone else drowned? Wow—I didn’t see that coming!”). Not this interpretation.

The Nephilim

In the verses immediately before the Noah story (Gen. 6:1–4), the Bible introduces the Nephilim. Before the Flood, angels came to earth and fathered children with women, and these were the “heroes of old, men of renown.” It’s unclear whether “Nephilim” refers to the angels or their children, but the Bible doesn’t condemn them.

Other ancient Jewish texts do. The Nephilim taught man the secrets of metalworking and weaponry, as well as makeup and jewelry (read: adultery and killing), and one of the purposes of the flood was to get rid of them.

Noah shows these Nephilim as fallen angels and calls them “Watchers,” the term used in these ancient Jewish texts. They came to earth to help man with the gift of technology (nothing about getting frisky with their women), but were cursed by the Creator so that they became gigantic multi-armed rock monsters (duh—what else would cursed angels look like?). Since their previous contact with humans led to no good, the Watchers are ready to kill Noah and his family, but he befriends them and they help build the ark.

There’s nothing like a dozen 20-foot-tall immortal monsters to help make that tough job go a little easier.

The Others

Noah is in the line of Seth, Adam’s third son. They’re the last of their kind. But there are thousands of others living nearby who descended from Cain, Adam’s first son—the one who killed Abel. These are the bad people corrupted by the art of metalworking. They’re led by Tubal-Cain, who the Bible tells us was the first metalsmith—again, with no hint of condemnation.

This distinction between the bad men of Cain, corrupted by weapons and killing, and Noah’s noble line of Seth doesn’t hold up, however. Noah uses metal, both as tools and as weapons, and he kills people when he has to.

The Plot

This is a world of magic. There are visions, spells, incense that makes the animals on the ark hibernate (nicely solving the problem of how to feed them and their eating each other), and lots of magical plants. (The clash between those on the side of magic and those who favor technology reminded me of the 1977 movie Wizards. Technology loses in that one, too.)

The harsh terrain (it was filmed in Iceland) and the clothes (more Viking than Bedouin) made me think of Middle Earth rather than the Middle East.

The Bible says that the three sons have wives. Not so here. There is only an adopted daughter, found as an injured girl, and she and the oldest son are something of a couple. Noah tries to find wives in the Man Village, but the savagery is so extreme that he returns empty-handed and convinced that their job is simply to convey the animals safely on the ark, not to continue humanity. Humans are so inherently evil that their line must end.

On the boat, Noah passes on to his little band the seven-day creation story. Though the flood is accurate to the Bible when geysers burst from the ground, which points to the Sumerian cosmology of water beneath the earth and in a canopy above, the visuals that accompany Noah’s story would be at home in Neil deGrasse-Tyson’s Cosmos series. We see the solar system coalescing and a protoplanet crash into the young earth to form the debris that became the moon. Evolution is shown, as animals evolve from fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals to primates. Creationists will find no support in this depiction.

Noah says that the Creator demands that humanity must end with them. This causes some friction on the boat when the son and daughter get pregnant with twin girls. It’s not enough that they ignored the sounds of the drowning multitude at the beginning of their voyage, but now Noah is determined to kill the babies. Luckily, love overcomes the wishes of the homicidal Creator in the end.

One wonders where girls will find a husband. I suppose the logical choice is the last of Noah’s sons, their uncle.

Noah the drunk

The Bible says that Noah took to drink after the ark landed (Gen. 9:18–27). Perhaps he was due a little celebration after all that work, but it got a bit out of hand, and he passed out naked in his tent. His son Ham saw his father in this embarrassing state, but the other two brothers covered him without peeking. Noah discovered this and bizarrely responded by cursing Ham’s son Canaan, presumably to support Israel’s future conquest of the land that Canaan’s tribe would occupy.

Bible scholars have woven many interpretations out of this odd curse, trying to figure out what is euphemism and what is literal, but the Noah film takes a different approach. It presents this wine scene literally, but Ham and Noah had friction that went back a long time. Before the flood, Ham had found a girlfriend, but Noah refused to help save her. On the boat with every eligible female in the world dead, Ham was angry enough that when he discovers the single stowaway—Tubal-Cain, of course—he listens to him.

Tubal-Cain says that the Creator (“God” is never mentioned in the movie) made man in his image to subdue nature. And he kinda has a point. In the creation story that Noah just told, the Bible says, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28). But you can imagine who wins in the fight scene.

The trailer ends with the text, “The film is inspired by the story of Noah,” which tries to placate everyone. It’s a “story,” so that doesn’t offend those who don’t follow the Bible. It’s “inspired by,” so it apologizes to Christians, Jews, and Muslims who think that it takes too much license. At the premiere, the director Darren Aronofsky said, “Anything you’re expecting, you’re f***ing wrong.”

I explore the various story strands that make up the Bible’s Noah story here.

No prophet of God hates people. . . .
“Noah” is wrong about everything.
— Glenn Beck

[Christians are] mad because this made up story
doesn’t stay true to their made up story.
— Bill Maher

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/28/14.)

Photo credit: IMDb

“God’s Not Dead” Movie Review

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God's Not Dead

You know Chick tracts, those small Christian cartoon pamphlets used to evangelize? One pamphlet tells the story of a gallant Christian student who stands up for Christian truth in a classroom run by a dictatorial atheist. My summary is here. That tract might as well have been the first draft of the screenplay for God’s Not Dead.

The first thing to get past in this movie is that real-world plausibility is out the window. In this world, philosophy professors can bully a Christian student to renounce his faith without consequences, then demand that the student debate him in front of the class and put a large fraction of that student’s grade on the outcome.

Show me such a situation, and I’ll show you a professor who is in trouble with the college administration. Not only is that unethical, it is crying out for a lawsuit. Every atheist I know would be allied with the Christians to say that that’s way out of bounds.

Sure, Christian students can have their beliefs challenged when they go to college. I see no problem with that. But school-sanctioned humiliation of Christians doesn’t happen in the real world. Despite the long list of court cases at the end, I’ve yet to see one real example. This is simply Christians’ David and Goliath fantasy.

Let’s step through the main points of the movie.

Atheist journalist gets cancer

A liberal atheist journalist discovers that she has cancer, and as a result she’s immediately dumped by her rich go-getter boyfriend. Then we see her talking with the doctor about her MRI results. The doctor asks if she has anyone that she’d like to be there with her. But no, she has no one. She’s alone and afraid.

At the end, she barges in on the Christian rock group about to play at a concert (that’s her journalistic style), and we realize that God pushed her to do that. Then they have a good pray.

But there was no mention of the helpful elephant in the room: science. That is, medicine, MRIs, surgery, chemotherapy, and all that. Yes, that’s coldly clinical, and a warm and loving friend would be a comfort, but science is the only thing that will actually, y’know, do anything about the problem. Even the prayer at the end was intended to do nothing more than encourage God to support her through the treatment.

Muslim tensions

Ayisha wears a niqab so that only her eyes are showing, or at least she does until her father drives away. You see, she’s become a Christian in the previous year. When her father finds out, he beats her and throws her out of the house. He’s torn apart by his misguided devotion to a ridiculous faith, and he collapses in tears.

Yes, that happens. Yes, it’s tragic. But why show it happening in a Muslim family when there are so many more Christian families in America broken up over religion? If the point is that religion can make you do crazy things, a Christian example would be far more relevant.

Apologetics

There are other subplots to critique (and if you want more of a plot summary, I recommend the Geek Goes Rogue review), but I’d rather focus on the apologetics arguments. I’ll use David to refer to our plucky student and Goliath to refer to the dictatorial professor.

No one can prove God? Well, no one can disprove God, either! True, but that’s not how we make conclusions. We don’t believe in Bigfoot or unicorns because their nonexistence hasn’t been proven; rather, we follow the evidence. The evidence points to no Bigfoot, no unicorns, and no God. Let’s be open-minded enough to consider new contradicting evidence if it comes in, but for now, we have no justification for belief.

You want an explanation for the Big Bang? Look to Genesis: “Let there be light.” (Despite being unprepared for this challenge, David has unaccountably awesome presentations.) No new science has come from the Bible. You can try to show that, now that we know how things work thanks to science, the Bible was sort of pointing in the right direction (it wasn’t), but let’s not pretend that the truth was right there in the Bible all along.

Atheists say that the universe came from nothing, and they must defend that. First, it’s scientists who do the saying (not atheists), and second, no they don’t say that the universe came from nothing. Maybe it did, but the jury is out.

There’s nothing embarrassing or unreasonable in science saying, “We don’t know.” That’s how we focus on new questions to answer. Science not knowing something gives no grounds for the Christian to jump in and say, “But I do!!” Finally, note that any cosmological argument is a deist argument. Even if we accepted it, we’re a long way from Christianity.

Atheists ask, Who created God? but God was uncreated! Backatcha, atheists! You don’t respond to a scientific question with a theological claim. “My religion says that God was uncreated” is no answer in the real world.

“But who created God?” is a reasonable question. More here.

Both Christians and atheists must explain how the universe started. Wrong again. Science always has unanswered questions. That’s no evidence in favor of Christianity. Science has explained much in the real world; Christianity has explained nothing. Weigh the evidence and choose the best explanation.

What about the sudden arrival of animal species? The Bible nicely explains it: “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens.” More theology in place of science. No, science doesn’t come from the Bible.

Note that Goliath made none of these rebuttals. He does little besides mock, and destroying David has become a personal mission. In one brief attempt at holding up his end of the debate, he quotes Stephen Hawking: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”

This is just an Argument from Authority. Hawking is a smart guy, but just because he said it doesn’t make it true. This is a data point, nothing more. But does David point this out? Nope, since he wants to respond with his own Argument from Authority by bringing up John Lennox. (I’ve responded to Lennox’s embarrassingly shallow apologetics here.)

In the end, David hammers Goliath with, “Why do you hate God?” And then it comes out, in front of his class: it’s because God killed his mother. As a 12-year-old, little Goliath had prayed to God to cure his mother’s cancer. God didn’t, and he’s held a grudge ever since. So, it turns out that Goliath actually does believe; he’s just mad at God.

The students then stand, one by one, to render their unanimous verdict: “God’s not dead.” The professor walks out, humiliated.

Marketing God? Or marketing the movie?

Our Christians celebrate at the concert at the end. David’s noble battle is publicly acknowledged, and everyone at the concert is encouraged to text “God’s Not Dead” to all their friends. (Wait a minute—isn’t that also the name of a Christian movie?) And, of course, we in the real audience are next encouraged to tell all our friends that “God’s Not Dead.”

If the flabby arguments in the movie are any evidence, however, there is scant reason to think so. This movie is nothing but persecution porn.

Continue with the review of the thrilling 2016 sequel, “God’s Not Dead 2.” Or jump to the review of GND3.

The Almighty deserves better advocacy
than he gets in this typically ham-fisted
Christian campus melodrama.
— Scott Foundas critique of the movie in Variety

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/25/14.)

 

Ray Comfort Says We’re in the End Times® (2 of 2)

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House fire

Let’s wrap up Prophet Ray Comfort’s Top Ten list of surefire clues that “the end of the age is happening now,” as he puts it. We’ve explored the first half in part 1. Let’s finish up to see if Armageddon really is around the corner.

Ray’s Bible verse #6:

For [although] they hold a form of piety (true religion), they deny and reject and are strangers to the power of it [their conduct belies the genuineness of their profession]. (2 Timothy 3:5, Amplified Version)

Fortunately, we have Ray to translate: this means that religious hypocrisy will be prevalent. He illustrates this by interviewing people on the street who claim to be Christians but who attend R-rated movies and have premarital sex. This is hardly a statistically sound study showing that hypocrisy within Christians worldwide is markedly greater now than it was in the past, which would be necessary to show that conditions have gotten much worse. (I’m beginning to sense that scientific rigor isn’t one of Ray’s goals.)

In the last days scoffers will come. . . . But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. (2 Peter 3:3, 5–6)

So in the last days, people will deny that God created everything and flooded the world.

Ever the evolution denier, Ray scratches his head trying to figure out the logic behind panspermia. He interviews people who also don’t understand it to make his point. (No, I don’t see the relevance, either.)

Ray asks, “Do you think 70% of the earth being covered with water is a good clue that there was a worldwide flood?” Nope. The water likely came from comets, the earth may have been seeded with the components needed for abiogenesis from planets with different initial conditions than earth (that’s panspermia), and there is no evidence of a worldwide flood.

Next, Ray defends the plausibility of the Noah story. He says that the ark was enormous and that only representatives of biological families were taken on board, not species. (I’ve written about the many problems with taking the Noah story seriously here.)

Ray is right that people reject the ridiculous Flood story, and they’ve been doing so ever since science provided an alternative. I wonder, though, if gullible acceptance of Bible stories is more prevalent in recent decades with the success of fundamentalist Christianity. Ray’s concern on this point may be unfounded.

People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. (Luke 21:26)

In this long description of how the end will unfold, Jesus says six verses later, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

Didn’t happen. Apologists have tried to reinterpret this to avoid the embarrassing fact that the Son of Man was wrong, but their attempts are themselves embarrassing. The real test is to imagine Jesus actually saying this and then asking how his followers would have interpreted it—obviously, that the end would come within a few decades.

Awkward.

… in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” (2 Peter 3:3–4)

Good question! Where is this imminent “coming” he promised 2000 years ago? Of course there are scoffers. Given the Bible’s poor track record, what else would you expect?

The rest of this chapter clumsily tries to rationalize away the problem. You see, God has a different sense of time than we do. And isn’t it handy that the end has been delayed since it allows more people to be saved? Still, you must be ready! It could come at any minute!

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:37–39)

Ray takes this as license to give his famous Ten Commandments test. He asks people if they’ve ever stolen something (even once), ever lied (even once), and so on. He concludes by declaring that, by their own admission, each person is a lying, thieving, blasphemous adulterer at heart. The next logical step, apparently, is to assume God’s existence and ask these sinners how God should treat them on Judgment Day.

Sorry, Ray. The Ten Commandments test assumes what you’re (ineptly) trying to prove. Your Top Ten list of Signs of the End is no better.

Religion is regarded 
by the common people as true, 
by the wise as false, 
and by the rulers as useful. 
— Seneca the Younger

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/15/14.)

Image credit: Modern Event Preparedness, flickr, CC

 

Ray Comfort Says We’re in the End Times®

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Meteor destroys London

We dodged an apocalyptic bullet a few days ago. The number of years of Jesus’ life and the number of times the Bible mentions “Elohim” (the other name for God) are both 33. Count 33 days from the date of the solar eclipse, and you get September 23! There you go—end of the world.

You want a second opinion? No problem: the eclipse was on the 21st of August, hurricane Harvey began on the 25th, and flooding started on the 26th. Use those numbers to point to Luke 21:25–26:

There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.

How much more evidence do you want that the End will come last week? You just can’t argue with science—though you can certainly argue with numerology, wishful thinking, and whatever other nonsense is behind this argument.

Time to bring in an expert

End times prediction is strangely attractive to some apologists (I’ve written more here and here). It’s a shiny thing to a baby. Ray Comfort has made a movie about our own imminent end (“Noah and the Last Days”), and it has that je ne sais quoi that only Ray can provide. Or maybe it’s WTF.

Ray gives ten New Testament passages that make clear that we’re in the end times. “The end of the age is happening now,” he says. Let’s take a look to see if we can see it as clearly as Ray can.

He begins with 2 Peter 2:1–3:

But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute. In their greed these teachers will exploit you with fabricated stories. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping.

Yes, there are lots of false prophets in our time—Hal Lindsey vaguely predicted the end in 2000, Harold Camping in 2011, Ronald Weinland in 2013, John Hagee in 2015, and there have been others. But don’t imagine that naively idiotic prophecies are a recent thing. There’s the Great Disappointment of 1844. And the many failed predictions by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is no sign of the end. These Christian doomsday prophets have always been with us.

And now Ray Comfort is yet another prophet. Give us a specific date, Ray, so we know when to add you to the false prophets list. But be careful: the passage you just gave us says that God will judge these liars like he judged the wicked people he drowned in the Flood.

On to Ray’s next verse of what to look for in the end times:

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. (Matthew 24:7)

Yes, there are wars, but no more now than in the past. The incidence of famine and pestilence is far less today (no thanks to Christianity), and science is helping predict earthquakes and make cities more resilient. This argues against Ray’s claim. And the movie itself was shot in tourist areas of Southern California, with beautiful blue sky and palm trees (not desolation and death), a poor location to make the claim that social conditions are going downhill.

Next up:

The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2:20)

Consider the context of this verse. The disciples were gathered for the feast of Pentecost, shortly after Jesus had returned to heaven, and the Holy Spirit descended on them. They all spoke in tongues, and passersby marveled that each could hear God praised in their own language. In this verse from Acts, Peter is explaining that this was a fulfillment of a prophecy from Joel.

Now consider the entire quotation (2:17–21). Joel was listing what will happen in the last days, and Peter said that this visitation of the Holy Spirit indicated that Joel’s clues to the end were happening at that moment. Yes, the sun will turn to darkness and the moon to blood, but it will happen in the time of Peter and the apostles.

Another fail, Ray. You’ve really got to read these things more carefully.

There will be terrible times in the last days. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, blasphemers . . . (2 Timothy 3:1–2)

Ray’s focus here is naughty words used in movies. I’ll grant that there are more R-rated movies now than centuries ago, but this seems a tiny point to put in a Top Ten list. And he’s concerned about f-bombs in movies but not concerned about the insane violence in Passion of the Christ? I’d rather have a society comfortable with rude words than violence.

It was the same in the days of Lot. . . . But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:28–30)

Ray interprets this as an increase in the acceptance of (shudder!) homosexuality.

You know you live in strange times when the atheist has to explain to the Christian what Bible passages mean. No, Ray, that’s not what we’re talking about here. The point is suddenness. The wicked people during Noah’s time were going about life as usual and were caught unawares by the Flood. The people in Sodom were surprised by the hail of destruction. The section continues with admonitions against going back to your house for your stuff when the end comes—just run for safety.

Yes, we’re more accepting of homosexuality. No, that’s not what this passage is about. In fact, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 isn’t even about homosexuality (more).

Finish up Ray Comfort’s Kant-Fail® Signs of the End in part 2.

If you’re a “Bible prophecy scholar,”
then everything is a sign of the End Times—
eclipses, earthquakes, floods, droughts, Wednesdays, dandelions,
war in the Middle East, peace in the Middle East,
Middle Eastern restaurants in the Midwest. . . .
— slactivist

 (This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/14/14.)

Image credit: Ben Sutherland, flickr, CC