Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

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

God is Always the Worst Explanation: 8 Reasons

Posted on by

For the answer to any of life’s big questions—such as “Why are we here?” or “What is the meaning of life?”—God is always the worst guess. Super-smart aliens would be better. Fairies would be better. “I dunno, but there’s gotta be something better” would be better.

“God did it” is perhaps the most remarkable claim possible since it assumes, without compelling evidence, that a supernatural being created everything.

Let’s explore why God is the worst explanation for anything.

1. “God did it” is unfalsifiable. It explains too much.

“God did it” is the ready answer to explain any scientific puzzle—what caused abiogenesis (the first life, which allowed evolution to begin), what caused the Big Bang, and so on. Of course, science keeps answering those puzzles, meaning that “God did it” was both wrong and premature, but apologists never seem to learn that lesson.

I can never prove that “God did it” is not the explanation for anything. What about a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands of people, God’s hiddenness despite earnest prayers, or anything else within Christianity that confounds us? The Christian can always say that God might have his own reasons that we simply aren’t entitled to know or aren’t smart enough to understand.

(A god who made knowing about him a requirement to avoiding hell in the afterlife and yet remains hidden is not the omnibenevolent Christian god, but let’s ignore that for now.)

Handwaving away challenges to the God hypothesis is exactly what you’d do if there were no God.

The problem is that “God did it” can never be falsified, which makes it useless. By explaining everything, it explains nothing. More here and here.

2. “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable answer. Don’t stretch to fill the void—if you don’t know, just say so.

Christians will say that they have the answers to life’s big questions. They seem to imagine a time limit, with the teacher saying, “Time’s up! Pencils down. Pass forward your quizzes.” Yes, Christianity does have answers to life’s big questions; it’s just that those answers suck. They’re given without evidence.

Things are clearer when we pull back to take in all the world’s religions. The map of world religions makes clear that religion’s answers to these questions depend on where you live. If you live in Tibet or Thailand, Buddhism teaches that we’re here to learn to cease suffering. If you live in Malaysia or Morocco, Islam teaches that we’re here to submit to Allah. Christianity, Scientology, and all the rest—they each have their own supernatural answers to these big questions, and each answer must be taken on faith.

3. Popular apologetic arguments don’t point to God.

The most popular Christian apologetic arguments today—the Cosmological, Moral, Transcendental, Ontological, Design, and Fine Tuning arguments and so on—are all deist arguments. The Christian god is never the conclusion; all these arguments can do is allude to some sort of vague and undefined Creator. Yahweh fits the bill no better than the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

4. The Principle of Analogy tells us where to put supernatural claims.

We’re familiar with supernatural stories. Even the most secular society has in their history some approximation to Grimm’s Fairy Tales or the Greek pantheon of gods or magical folk such as fairies, leprechauns, and elves. We have a bin for these stories labeled “Mythology and Legend.” Zeus, Odin, and Merlin go in the bin, and so does Yahweh. More.

Concluded in part 2.

I’m afraid I don’t believe there is such a thing as blasphemy,
just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.
— Stephen Fry

Image credit: Bob Seidensticker

Spectrum Argument for Abortion, Revisited

Posted on by

blue green spectrum

Since conservatives seem determined to get votes by making an issue out of abortion, I’d like to look at some of these arguments. At the Secular Pro-Life Perspectives blog, Clinton Wilcox rejected my spectrum argument supporting abortion. This is a particularly relevant response since he doesn’t use religious pro-life arguments.

The spectrum argument

My argument is more fully discussed in this post, but I’ll summarize it here briefly.

Consider the above figure of the blue-green spectrum. We can argue where blue ends and green begins, but it should be easy to agree that blue is not green. In other words, the two ends are quite different.

The same is true for a spectrum of personhood. Imagine a single fertilized egg cell at the left of the nine-month-long spectrum and a trillion-cell newborn on the right. The newborn is a person. And it’s far more than just 1,000,000,000,000 undifferentiated cells. These cells are organized and connected to make a person—it has arms and legs, eyes and ears, a brain and a nervous system, a stomach and digestive system, a heart and circulatory system, skin, liver, and so on.

The secular pro-life response

Wilcox begins by praising the argument as having substance rather than simply demonizing pro-life advocates, so we’re off to a good start.

His first concern:

The immediate problem with this argument is that he gives no attempt to argue at what point we actually do become persons.

Yes, it’s important to get the OK/not-OK dividing line for abortion right, but that’s not my interest here. Legislators deal with tough moral issues all the time. Take the issue of the appropriate prison sentence for robbery. Six months? Five years? What mitigating circumstances are relevant? Does it matter if a gun was involved? What if the gun was used as a threat but it wasn’t loaded? What if some other weapon was used? What if someone was hurt?

It’s a person’s life we’re talking about, so the sentence must be decided carefully, and yet penalties for this and a myriad other specific crimes have been wrestled with and resolved in 50 states and hundreds of countries.

The same is true for the cutoff for abortion—it’s a tough decision, but it’s been made many times.

My focus here is not on the cutoff line. I’ll leave that to medical experts and policy makers who have more expertise and interest than I do.

Potential

Back to Wilcox:

He resorts to the tired old arguments that an acorn is not an oak tree (no, but it is an immature oak tree) ….

Nope. An acorn is not a tree at all. It’s a potential tree, and it may become one in twenty years, but it’s not a tree right now.

Wilcox next responds to my comparison of a brain with 100 billion neurons versus a single neuron. I said that the single neuron doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast; it doesn’t think at all.

It may be true that a brain with one neuron doesn’t think nearly as fast as a brain with 100 billion neurons, but he misses the point that it is still a brain. It is just an immature brain.

No, it is a potential brain.

Analogy to the personhood spectrum

Let’s consider the brain by first considering an analogous situation with water. A single molecule of water does not have the properties of wetness, fluidity, pH, salinity, or surface tension, but these and other properties emerge when trillions of trillions of water molecules come together.

Wetness is an emergent property—we see it only when enough water molecules get together. Similarly, thinking and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain. A single neuron doesn’t think slower; it doesn’t think at all. A “brain” that doesn’t think is not a brain—immature or otherwise.

It hasn’t had the chance to develop into a fully mature brain.

Bingo! That’s precisely the issue. Wilcox is making the Argument from Potential: the single neuron isn’t a brain now, but it will be. The single fertilized human egg cell isn’t a baby now, but it will be.

He’s right, of course—it will be a baby. But the point is that it isn’t now. A future baby is not a baby. It’ll be a baby in the future.

The vastness of the spectrum

The spectrum argument fails to adequately address the fact that there is a continuity of human development that begins at fertilization and doesn’t stop until after birth. Logically, that suggests that teenagers are “more of a person” than toddlers ….

I addressed this in the original argument, but let me illustrate the issue with a quick round of “One of these things is not like the others.” Our candidates today are an adult, a teenager, a newborn baby, and a single fertilized human egg cell. Okay, candidates, raise your hand if you have a brain. Now raise your hand if you have a pancreas. If you have skin. Eyes. Nose. Bones. Muscles.

Now raise your hand if you have hands.

The difference between newborns, teens, and adults is negligible compared to the single cell at the other end of the spectrum, which has nothing that we commonly think of as a trait of personhood. The commonality across the spectrum is that they all have eukaryotic cells with Homo sapiens DNA. That’s it. That’s not something that many of us get misty-eyed about. Very little sentimental poetry is written about the kind of DNA in the cells of one’s beloved.

What do we call the spectrum?

The unborn may be less developed at the single-cell stage than the 100 trillion cell stage, but it is still a human person at that stage.

Take the spectrum from single cell to newborn. Wilcox argues that it’s not a spectrum of humanness because a single cell and a newborn are both human. But it’s a spectrum of something. I call it a spectrum of personhood, but I’m flexible. You tell me: tell me what a newborn is that a single cell isn’t. I say that a newborn is a person and the single cell isn’t, but I’m open to better terms.

Wilcox wants to skirt the spectrum and say that it’s irrelevant or meaningless, but it’s everything to this discussion. A newborn is something that a single cell isn’t. Think of the many words we have for subtle distinctions after birth: newborn, baby, infant, toddler, and so on. Surely English has a label that Wilcox will find acceptable for capturing the difference between the cooing, crying, pooping, sleeping, eating newborn and the microscopic, insensate cell.

Be honest with the facts. Don’t try to pretend that this immense spectrum doesn’t exist.

Miscellaneous arguments

[Seidensticker’s] comparison of the pro-life argument to PETA’s slogan of “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” is simply a false analogy.

Sounds like Wilcox missed my point. PETA tries to collapse a spectrum with this slogan. They want to argue that, no, we shouldn’t put animals into bins along a spectrum (in this case: vermin, livestock, pet, and human). Animals are animals—all the same.

Does Wilcox accept this? If he rejects PETA’s attempt to collapse or ignore this spectrum, then perhaps he sees the problem with ignoring the vast difference between newborn and cell.

Seidensticker’s point about how evangelicals thirty years ago supported abortion is simply irrelevant.

Not to people who bring up Christian arguments! If it doesn’t apply to a secular perspective, fair enough, but I was addressing more people than just you.

I have . . . soundly refuted the “spectrum argument.”

Gotta disagree with you there. You’ve mischaracterized it and sidestepped the argument. If you want to address it squarely, I’ll consider responding to your reaction.

If my oven quits working in the middle of making a cake,
do I call the undercooked mess a cake?
— Nate Frein

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/24/14.)

 

Make Your Very Own Prophecy (That Actually Comes True!)

Posted on by

Christian apologists sometimes claim that the Bible records hundreds of prophecies and their fulfillment. Impressive, aside from the small problem that these claims don’t hold up.

For example, Micah’s prediction of a Bethlehem birthplace doesn’t fit the details of the life of Jesus. Zechariah’s prediction of a king entering Jerusalem on a donkey is likewise talking about someone besides Jesus. Zechariah’s anecdote of the payment of 30 pieces of silver has nothing to do with betrayal as in the Judas story.

But let’s not worry about that. Instead, imagine a Bible prophecy that came true. Let’s say that the Jews returning to Israel is a fulfilled prophecy. As evidence, apologists might cite verses such as these.

I will bring you from the nations and gather you from the countries where you have been scattered—with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath. (Ezekiel 20:34)

[In that day, the Lord] will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; he will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth. (Isaiah 11:12)

I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number. (Jeremiah 23:3)

The first question, of course, is the context of these verses. Conquest, exile, and repatriation are important topics in the Old Testament because they’re part of Israel’s history. The ten tribes in the northern kingdom of Israel were conquered by Assyria in 722 BCE and their inhabitants scattered. The southern kingdom of Judea was conquered by Babylon, and Jews were taken there as captives beginning in 605 BCE. After Babylon was conquered by Persia, exiled Jews returned home beginning in 538 BCE. Is this the re-gathering that these Old Testament books are talking about?

Some Christians don’t think so. They imagine instead that the Old Testament said that Jews will return to Israel and, sure enough, Israel once again became a Jewish state in 1948. Let’s ignore that the objection that the predictions listed above weren’t satisfied by the return from exile. How plausible is modern Israel as the fulfillment?

Not very. The “prediction” is vague—no time is mentioned. It’s also mundane—exiles have scattered and returned in many other situations, including the nation of Judea itself. It was also potentially self-fulfilling when Passover Seders within the Jewish diaspora worldwide concluded with the wish, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

See also: 8 Tests for Accurate Prophecy and Why Bible Prophecies Fail

But if National Enquirer-caliber predictions are all we’re looking for, they’re not hard to make.

You, too, can be a prophet!

To see how to create a record of correct prophecies, imagine a commodities broker who wants to attract new wealthy clients. He buys a mailing list of 1000 candidates who live in the rich part of town, and he makes up a fancy name for his proprietary technique of predicting the swing in commodity prices. To half of his candidates, he mails an introductory letter saying that he is able to take on a few select new clients. To prove his capability, he gives a free prediction: the price of gold will rise in the next month. To the other half, he predicts that the price will fall.

A month later, gold has either gone up in price or gone down, and he’s lost credibility with half his audience. No matter—to the other half, he mails another letter to remind them of his accurate prediction and gives another free prediction, this time about sugar (or natural gas or soybeans or pork bellies). To half, he says the price will rise, and to the rest, that it will fall.

And so on with a few more commodities. He discards the failures along the way. At the end of this process, he has 50 to 100 wealthy individual to whom he can say, correctly, that he has given them three or four accurate commodity swings in a row using his special method.

He has “predicted” the future by predicting in hindsight. The unskeptical potential clients don’t see the big picture.

You see the same thing in the days before a presidential election. There’s always the news story about the U.S. county with the longest streak of picking the winning president. Obviously, some county will be the most accurate, just like some path through a tree of random commodities predictions will be the most accurate.

With low standards like those that satisfy many Christian apologists, some of the many prediction-like verses in the Bible are bound to satisfy them.

And they wonder why the rest of us aren’t convinced.

A visitor to the home of 
Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr
noticed a horseshoe on the wall. 
“Can you, of all people, 
believe it will bring good luck?”
“Of course not,” said Bohr,
“but I understand it brings luck 
whether you believe it or not.”

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/22/14.)

Image credit: Chris Gladis, flickr, CC

 

Christian Magic Doesn’t Work if You Don’t Believe It

Posted on by

video gameA Finnish karate master can defeat opponents without a punch or kick (see video on The Friendly Atheist). He used what he calls “Empty Force.”

You can, too—for a fee.

The video shows opponents falling to the floor, but these were students of the master. When he tried his magic on skeptics, nothing happened.

The Friendly Atheist noted that the students falling to the ground in response to the master’s touch was like Benny Hinn’s celebrated public healings, where sick believers are “slain in the Spirit” as they fall back and writhe on the floor in response to Hinn’s magic wave. But you have to be a believer for it to work—or be in on the scam. When faith healers do their mumbo jumbo on children, the children don’t know that they’re supposed to flop backwards. Hilarious!

What if the opponent isn’t your own student?

Another example is Kiai Master Ryukerin, who has a touchless energy technique similar to Empty Force. Here’s a demonstration of the master sparring with and knocking over his students.

It looks like a stunt but is still intriguing. How would this work in an actual fight? Surprisingly, Master Ryukerin was confident enough not only to offer to fight anyone but to put up prize money. An MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter accepted the challenge, and the results are predictable. Though respectful, he quickly thrashed the old man. The magic force field was only in the mind of his students and had no hold over an outsider.

The Christian energy field

The naïve Christian street preacher or door-knocking missionary is similar to Master Ryukerin. They care what the Bible says, so they’ll support their argument with Bible quotes. They had a compelling personal experience of Jesus, so they’ll share it. They are swayed by emotional (rather than intellectual) arguments, so they’ll use them.

They’ll talk about how the church community is important to them, or that the pastor is charismatic. It works on them, so it should work on others, right?

But this has as much impact on skeptics who demand evidence as Master Ryukerin’s energy field does to a fighter not in on the gag.

More experienced evangelists faced with such an atheist may try intellectual arguments or move on to look for easier conquests.

Christians know what I’m talking about when it comes to cult leaders like Jim Jones or disgraced televangelists like Jim Bakker. They might enjoy a video of Benny Hinn fighting demons with video game sound effects. How could people have not seen through them? But, of course, to the people in their circles of influence, these frauds were very persuasive.

As was Master Ryukerin to his students.

If your religious faith 
is what stops you from raping and murdering, 
that doesn’t make you a good person, 
that makes you a sociopath on a leash.
— commenter Sven2547

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/20/14.)

Image credit: VGjunk

Does Christianity Lead to a Better Society?

Posted on by

field of yellow flowersStudies have compared believers and atheists on lots of issues—compassion, mental health, happiness, intelligence, quality of marriages, and even antidepressant consumption. I have little interest in the game where the Christian and atheist each present studies to show how their group is superior in this or that social category. My interest lies more in which worldview is more accurate.

Nevertheless, we often hear that Christianity leads to a better society—or, perhaps more often, that the loss of Christianity leads to a worse society. In this scenario, God is furious about our acceptance of homosexuals or abortion or whatever, so he allows the 9/11 attack or Hurricane Katrina or the latest school shootings.

But this is a claim that we can test.

Researcher Gregory Paul used public records of social metrics such as suicide, lifespan, divorce, alcohol consumption, and life satisfaction to compare 17 Western countries (the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, and 12 European countries). He concluded:

Of the 25 socioeconomic and environmental indicators, the most theistic and procreationist western nation, the U.S., scores the worst in 14 and by a very large margin in 8, very poorly in 2, average in 4, well or very well in 4, and the best in 1. . . .

Because the U.S. performs so poorly in so many respects, its cumulative score on the [Successful Societies Scale is lowest,] placing it as an outlier so dysfunctional relative to the other advanced democracies that some researchers have described it as “sick.” (p. 416)

The metrics in which the U.S. ranks worst out of the 17 countries are homicides, incarceration, under-5 mortality, gonorrhea, syphilis, abortions, teen births, marriage duration, income inequality, poverty, and hours worked.

But it’s #1 in God belief, prayer, belief in heaven and hell, and in rejection of evolution! That’s not much consolation to the Christian, however, because this study destroys the notion that religious belief is correlated with societal health.

What causes what?

Why do we find this correlation of secularism with social health? And in what direction should a society move to improve social health?

Conditions in America are decent in spite of the strong influence of Christianity, not because of it. From a related article by Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, here are the secrets to making a secular society:

It is to be expected that in 2nd and 3rd world nations where wealth is concentrated among an elite few and the masses are impoverished that the great majority cling to the reassurance of faith.

Nor is it all that surprising that faith has imploded in most of the west. Every single 1st world nation that is irreligious shares a set of distinctive attributes. These include handgun control, anti-corporal punishment and anti-bullying policies, rehabilitative rather than punitive incarceration, intensive sex education that emphasizes condom use, reduced socio-economic disparity via tax and welfare systems combined with comprehensive health care, increased leisure time that can be dedicated to family needs and stress reduction, and so forth.

As a result the great majority enjoy long, safe, comfortable, middle class lives that they can be confident will not be lost due to factors beyond their control. It is hard to lose one’s middle class status in Europe, Canada and so forth, and modern medicine is always accessible regardless of income. Nor do these egalitarian cultures emphasize the attainment of immense wealth and luxury, so most folks are reasonably satisfied with what they have got. Such circumstances dramatically reduces peoples’ need to believe in supernatural forces that protect them from life’s calamities, help them get what they don’t have, or at least make up for them with the ultimate Club Med of heaven.

The U.S. is the anomaly among its peers. Why does its large, educated, comfortable middle class cling to belief in a supernatural creator? Paul and Zuckerman say that it’s because they are insecure: salaries and jobs are under pressure from companies eager to cut costs, health insurance is uncertain, social pressure to keep up with the Jones increases debt, and so on. A single extended illness can bankrupt a family.

They also reject the popular hypothesis that America’s separation of church and state has encouraged a vibrant mix of Christian denominations that have had to fight for market share, making a stronger Christianity. They cite Australia and New Zealand who both have a strong separation of church and state but far less religiosity.

What use is faith?

They conclude that a healthy society eliminates the need for faith.

Every time a nation becomes truly advanced in terms of democratic, egalitarian education and prosperity it loses the faith. It’s guaranteed. That is why perceptive theists are justifiably scared. In practical terms their only . . . hope is for nations to continue to suffer from socio-economic disparity, poverty and maleducation. That strategy is, of course, neither credible nor desirable. And that is why the secular community should be more encouraged. . . .

The religious industry simply lacks a reliable stratagem for defeating disbelief in the 21st century.

So perhaps many of us have it backwards. This is not a contest between religion and secularism that will determine the quality of society. Rather, the quality of society will determine whether religion or secularism will thrive. In a dysfunctional society, religion helps pick up the pieces, but in a society where life is secure, religion is unnecessary and withers away.

Do you want a religious society or a healthy one? You can’t have both.

Incredibly, I’m sure many American Christian leaders would happily choose a religious society over a healthy one.

Celebrate life: live better, help often, wonder more.
— Motto of the Sunday Assembly

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/6/14.)

Image credit: Peter Mooney, flickr, CC

Oral Tradition and the Game of Telephone: A. N. Sherwin-White’s Famous Quote

Posted on by

WhisperThe time from the death of Jesus to the writing of the first gospel was about forty years. An exciting story being passed along orally in a world full of the supernatural seems bound to be “improved,” deliberately or inadvertently, as it moves from person to person.

While some epistles were written earlier, the details Paul gives about the life of Jesus can be summarized in one short paragraph (more here). How can we dismiss the possibility that any actual history of Jesus is lost through a decades-long game of telephone?

Christian rebuttal

Christian apologist William Lane Craig says that forty years is too short a period for legend to develop. He points to a claim made by A.N. Sherwin-White in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (1963).

According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be “unbelievable.” More generations would be needed. (Source)

Craig’s summary has been quoted widely and was popularized in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (2008), and it sounds like a thorough slap down of the legend claim. However, when we see what Sherwin-White actually said, we find that Craig’s confidence is unwarranted.

(From this point forward, I’ll use “SW” to refer to historian A.N. Sherwin-White.)

SW never said “unbelievable”

Incredibly, the word “unbelievable,” which Craig puts into the mouth of SW, is not used by him in the relevant chapter in this book. If the word comes from another source, Craig doesn’t cite it. Craig also quotes the word in his essay in Jesus Under Fire (1995).

We all make mistakes, but it’s been twenty years. Where is Craig’s correction?

What did SW actually say?

From his Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament:

Herodotus enables us to test the tempo of myth-making, and the tests suggest that even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition. (RSRL, 190)

SW proposes an interesting experiment. If we can find examples in history where legend has crept into oral history and we have more reliable sources that let us compare that with what actually happened, we can measure how fast legendary material accumulates.

Notice the limitations in what SW is saying.

  • He cites several examples where historians have (tentatively) sifted truth from myth, but Herodotus is the only example used to put a rate on the loss of historic truth. This isn’t a survey of, say, a dozen random historic accounts that each validates a two-generation limit.
  • He isn’t saying that myth doesn’t accumulate, and he’s not proposing a rate at which it does. He’s writing instead about the loss of accurate history (“the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core”).
  • He is careful to use the word “suggest” above. William Lane Craig isn’t as careful and imagines an immutable law that SW clearly isn’t proposing.

What is SW’s point?

Here is more of what SW is saying.

All this suggests that, however strong the myth-forming tendency, the falsification does not automatically and absolutely prevail. (RSRL, 191)

The point of my argument is not to suggest the literal accuracy of ancient sources, secular or ecclesiastical, but to offset the extreme skepticism with which the New Testament narratives are treated in some quarters. (RSRL, 193)

Craig imagines that myth never overtakes historic truth in two generations. By contrast, SW says that myth doesn’t always overtake historic truth.

Consider Craig’s difficulty. He proposes what may be the most incredible story possible: that a supernatural being created the universe and came to earth as a human and that this was recorded in history. We have a well-populated bin labeled “Mythology” for stories like this. If Craig is to argue that, no, this one is actually history, SW’s statement is useless. “Well, myth might not have overtaken historic truth in this case” does very little to keep Craig’s religion from the Mythology bin.

More limitations in SW’s statement

  • SW gives no procedure for reliably winnowing the myth out of the history.
  • It’s been more than fifty years since his book, which is plenty of time for scholars to weigh in. If they’ve said nothing, that gives us little reason to think that SW is onto something useful. But if a consensus response has emerged, that is what we should be considering, not SW’s original proposal.
  • The examples that SW considers—Tiberius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and others—are all important public figures. Jesus was not. Legendary drift is slow when everyone experienced the impact of the figure directly and might correct a story themselves. By contrast, only a handful of people could rein in an errant Jesus story (more here).
  • SW’s examples are all secular leaders. Is Herodotus a relevant example when we’re concerned about the growth of a religious tale? Consider Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian guru who died in 2011 with millions of followers. Supernatural tales grew up around him in his own lifetime. (More on the growth of legends here and here.)

SW proves too much!

Craig must walk a fine line since he can’t completely reject mythological development. Myth is his enemy when it comes to the New Testament books written forty to seventy years after the death of Jesus. He must downplay myth to label these as history. But myth is his friend when it comes to the noncanonical books of the second century—the Gospel of Thomas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and so on. Here he imagines the mists of time separating the authors of those books from the actual history.

Worse, the Bible itself documents legendary accretion in just months or a few years. When Jesus asked the disciples who people said he was, “They told him, ‘John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets’ ” (Mark 8:27–8). According to the gospels themselves, there was legendary accretion during Jesus’s own lifetime!

This observation cuts twice. First, it argues for much quicker development of legend than Craig wants. Second, it defeats the Naysayer Hypothesis, the claim that no false statement about the gospel story would last while the eyewitnesses were alive to stamp it out. Apparently not, if Jesus himself can’t stop the flawed rumors. (h/t Robert M. Price)

And incredibly, Craig’s own quote supports the skeptics’ concern about legend creeping into the gospels! Apologists don’t read SW’s chapter directly; they prefer Craig’s quote. It’s a much better data point with which to argue that the gospels are accurate—if you can get past that small issue of it being completely inaccurate.

Sticky, not accurate, is what gets passed along. This is true for Craig as it is for the gospel story.

In the beginning, God created man in his own image. 
Man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
— Rousseau

References: These sources provided much valuable material for this post.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/30/13.)

Image credit: Jamin Gray, flickr, CC