Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

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

Should an Atheist Pray?

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Praying personI enjoy polite (or spirited) conversations with Christians. As an out atheist, I’ve attended church small groups and chatted with “Repent or Else!” sign carriers on street corners enough so that I’m rarely surprised by new arguments in favor of God’s existence. Still, the debate keeps me on my toes, and a well-educated Christian can teach me a lot about the church.
When the conversation turns to my atheism, I’m occasionally asked if I’ve ever asked God into my heart. The question never makes sense. Granted, a visitor at my front door ought to wait to be invited in, and perhaps God ought not barge in and force his way into my life. But that’s not the first step. In the case of the visitor at my front door, I have no doubt that that person exists. The Christian always glosses over that first step. Sure, I might ask God into my heart … after I know that he exists.
I don’t ask Osiris, Shiva, Xenu, or Quetzalcoatl to come into my heart (or anywhere else) because I have no reason to believe that they exist and cornucopian reasons to believe that they don’t. The same is true for the Christian god.
But my antagonist persists. “Have you tried it? Just try it. Just ask God into your heart.”
You mean, like, right now? Okay—so I try it. I think: God, if you exist, please make yourself known. And nothing happens.
I’m told that I just wasn’t sincere.
Well, yeah. Of course I wasn’t sincere. I ask God into my heart with the same sincerity as the Christian would ask Odin into their heart. Why would either of us do that with sincerity or enthusiasm?
But what if we dialed it back a bit? Drop the demand for sincerity and just pray. This is the upcoming project of the UK-based Unbelievable radio show and podcast. The instructions for participants are here. In brief:

We are asking each atheist who wishes to take part to pray for 2 to 3 minutes a day for 40 days for God to reveal Himself to them.

I presume the subjects are to go through a test for 40 days to parallel Jesus’s 40 days of trials in the wilderness (40 having the numerological meaning “lots and lots”). The experiment is to run from September 17 through October 26.
But what about that sincerity thing?

The prayer should be kept as open as possible, e.g., rather than “God of Christianity; if you’re out there, turn this water into wine for me”, “God, if you’re out there, reveal yourself to me” would be better.
We only ask that anyone taking part commits themselves to finding a quiet meditative “space” and praying there for two to three minutes each day as earnestly as they can for any God that there might be to reveal himself/herself/itself to him or her, and that he or she remains as open as possible to ways in which that prayer could be answered.

Okay—I’m in. I don’t expect that I’ll be able to be all that earnest—frankly, I don’t have much expectation of anything supernatural happening or even much desire for God to exist—but I’ll have a go. To any Christian who says that I’m not approaching this with much sincerity, you’re right. As I read it, none is required—as it should be. Sincerity comes after the fact; sincerity is earned.
Let’s take a step back to consider this interesting approach to evangelism. It’s different. More typically, a Christian will advance a particular logical argument for God, and I’ll ask if this is what convinced them that God exists.
“Oh no, of course not,” they’ll usually say.
Okay, if it didn’t convince you, why expect that it’ll convince me?
They almost always became a Christian either because they were raised that way or because they had some sort of mystical experience. They give me intellectual arguments because that’s the best they’ve got; they can’t give me the mystical experience. Maybe we have a parallel with a Zen koan—the koan doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s the point. Words are an inept vehicle for conveying the truth of Zen. Are Christian apologetics an inept way of making the case that God exists?
This prayer experiment follows the road less taken. I’ll probably have more to say about walking the walk and whether that’s a reasonable request as I get into the experiment.
Will I do a Leah Libresco? Leah (of the Patheos blog Unequally Yoked) dramatically switched sides, from atheist to Catholic, in June.
No, I don’t think that will happen to me. I don’t read her blog as regularly as I’d like, so I don’t understand her position well, but if I may speculate, I think her personality is such that Christianity appealed to her in a way that it just won’t with me. (And I could be totally wrong in that guess.)
Not only do I think that I won’t convert, I think that that’s impossible. My hypothesis is that atheists like me are stuck in atheism once they get there (I’ve written more here: “I Used to be an Atheist, Just Like You”).
I now have a chance to test that hypothesis.

Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
— Psalms 34:8

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Dr Johnson: Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

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Can science say anything about religious claims? Does religion have anything to say in the domain of science?
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) a paleontologist, biologist, and popularize of science wrote of many things, and one was this clash between religion and science (Rocks of Ages, 1999).
Like Rodney “Can’t we all get along?” King, Gould tried to get everyone to play nice. Science and Religion, he said, are two magesteria—areas of authority—that don’t overlap. He described the different domains of these two Non-Overlapping Magesteria (NOMA) this way:

Science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, and religion how to go to heaven.

No one steps on anyone’s toes, and everyone’s happy.
I heard a variation of this in a lecture by Oxford mathematics professor John Lennox a year ago (“John Lennox Responds to Stephen Hawking”). Lennox argues that the two domains overlap but overlap contentedly. For example, Isaac Newton had no problem accepted both gravity and God. Gravity could both be studied scientifically and also be the product of God’s hand.
Yet another reaction is by Richard Dawkins. About Gould’s make-nice accommodation, he says in The God Delusion, “Gould carried the art of bending over backwards to positively supine lengths.” About Gould’s quote above, Dawkins says:

This sounds terrific—right up until you give it a moment’s thought. What are these ultimate questions in whose presence religion is an honoured guest and science must respectfully slink away?

Lampooning NOMA further, he imagines that scientists discover DNA evidence that Jesus really did lack a biological father. Would Christian apologists who favor NOMA say that the magesteria don’t overlap and that scientific evidence is irrelevant to the study of theology? Would they dismiss the scientists with their useless evidence?
Of course not. Within certain circles of Christianity, this would be the discovery of the century. Given the choice of NOMA or evidence, they’ll take the evidence. Faith is nice as far as it goes, but it’s second best when the alternative is hard science that supports the Christian position.
Most Christians have learned from the Galileo fiasco and have no problem with evolution, though Dawkins sides with the other Christians. He agrees that they are rightly concerned that evolution and Christianity are incompatible.
NOMA is a nice idea, but given the continued clash between science and science deniers with a religious agenda, it has had little impact.

The Holy Spirit intended to teach us in the Bible
how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go
— Galileo

See all the definitions in the Cross Examined Glossary.

Nazi Soldiers Indoctrinated with Darwin? Yeah, Right.

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Koukl apologetics evolutionWhy were the Nazis so unpleasant? Because they were force-fed evolution, of course! Christian podcaster Greg Koukl thinks that he’s uncovered the missing link.
In a 2011 Stand to Reason podcast (starting at 5:00), Koukl spoke of being informed that all German soldiers during World War II were issued two books, Goethe’s Faust and a German translation of The Origin of Species. And it was Hitler himself who insisted that they get them.
About the logic behind Hitler’s assigning these books, Koukl says:

It’s because the ideas in The Origin of Species served [Hitler’s] purposes well, and if a person actually believed what Darwin taught, then they would make good Nazis.

My first complaint is that Koukl accepted the story uncritically. This story nicely supports his worldview that evolution is both harmful and wrong, so he passes it on with no fact checking. I do my best to take the opposite approach: when I find a delicious story that skewers an opponent (either a person or idea), I want to make sure that I have strong evidence so that I don’t look ridiculous after passing on flawed hearsay.
In doing my own research on books issued to German soldiers, the only page I came across was a post in another atheist blog who’d heard the podcast and asked the very same question. That blogger raised a great point: Why issue those two books but not Hitler’s own Mein Kampf?
And remember that Nazis liked to ban books. Or burn them. The official Nazi library journal in 1935 listed twelve categories of banned books. One category was:

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism.

That Origin of Species supported Nazi thinking seems unlikely.
Let’s move on to Koukl’s ill-informed ramblings on evolution. One of Koukl’s favorite ploys is to try to tie eugenics with evolution.
First off, Darwin himself rejected eugenics. In The Descent of Man, he said, “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that [not culling the inferiors] must be highly injurious to the race of man.” Creationists enjoy quoting just the paragraph that contains this sentence and ignoring the very … next … paragraph where he overturns this argument. (I’ve written more on Creationists taking Darwin out of context here.)
Darwin rejected eugenics, Greg. Of course, you’ll quickly backpedal and argue that Darwin’s own personal opinions say nothing about the validity of evolution. Agreed! Which is why whether or not Hitler kept his copy of Origin under his pillow or had an autographed photo of Darwin on his night table says nothing about the central issue here: Is evolution the best explanation of why life is the way it is?
Which is why this entire topic is simply mudslinging.
“Hitler was bad, and Hitler and Darwin were BFFs! And Darwin was ugly! And … and he probably ate babies! And didn’t recycle!” Whether true or not, this is irrelevant.
This is what one does when one doesn’t actually have a real argument.
Science is not policy. Evolution is science (the domain of scientists), and eugenics is policy (the domain of politicians). Any scientist who advocates eugenics has left the domain of science and jumped into policy. Eugenics isn’t science, and criticism of eugenics is no criticism of science.
Which brings up the last point: Did Hitler base his eugenics policies on evolution? Koukl seems to imagine a sweet and gentle Adolf Hitler, picking up litter and helping little old ladies cross the street, being turned to the scientific Dark Side after reading Darwin. But we don’t need to imagine any such nudging. Germany had plenty of anti-Semitism around already. In fact, Martin Luther himself wrote the violently anti-Semitic On the Jews and Their Lies.
This bypasses the issue: Is evolution correct? Bringing up eugenics is not only flawed but irrelevant.
It’s the white flag of surrender.

[Jews are a] base, whoring people,
that is, no people of God,
and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law
must be accounted as filth.
— Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies, ch. 4

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/24/11.)
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What Makes a Good Prophecy (and Why Bible Prophecies Aren’t)

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What makes a good prophecy?
Most of us are pretty skeptical of bad prophecies and can spot them easily—tabloid predictions by psychics such as Jeane Dixon or Sylvia Browne, for example. Not even many Christians are sucked into the end-of-the-world predictions by such “prophets” as Harold Camping. (There’s a great infographic of Christianity’s many end-of-the-world predictions here, and I write about Harold Camping’s ill-advised venture into prophecy in 2011 here and here.)
And now there’s the (new ’n improved!) prediction by Ronald Weinland that Jesus will return on May 19, 2013.
I’d like to propose some rules for good prophecies against which we can compare the gospel prophecies.
1. The prophecy must be startling, not mundane. “Barack Obama will be re-elected president” isn’t very startling. “Michelle Obama will be elected president” would be startling.
We regularly find big surprises in the news—earthquakes, wars, medical breakthroughs, and so on. These startling events are what make good prophecies.
2. The prophecy must be precise, not vague. “Expect exciting and surprising gold medals for the U.S. Olympic team!” is not precise. “A major earthquake will devastate Port-au-Prince, Haiti on January 12, 2010” is precise.
Nostradamus is another example of “prophecies” that were so vague that they can be imagined to mean lots of things. Similarly, the hundreds of supposed Bible prophecies are simply quote mining. You could also apply the identical process to War and Peace or The Collected Works of Shakespeare to find parallels to the gospel story, but so what?
3. The prophecy must be accurate. We should have high expectations for a divine divinator. Edgar Cayce could perhaps be excused if he was a little imperfect (that he showed no particular gift at all is damning, however), but prophecy from the omniscient Creator should be perfect.
4. The prophecy must predict, not retrodict. The writings of Nostradamus predict the London Great Fire of 1666 and the rise of Napoleon and Hitler … but of course these “predictions” were so unclear in his writings that the connection had to be inferred afterwards. This is also the failing of the Bible Code—the idea that the Hebrew Bible holds hidden acrostics of future events. And maybe it does—but the same logic could find these after-the-fact connections in any large book.
5. The prophecy can’t be self-fulfilling. The prediction that a bank will soon become insolvent may provoke its customers to remove all their money … and make the bank insolvent. The prediction that a store will soon go out of business may drive away customers. The prediction that Harry Potter would kill him drove Voldemort to try to kill the infant Harry first, but in so doing he inadvertently gave Harry some of the abilities that Harry used later to kill Voldemort.
6. The prophecy and the fulfillment must be verifiable. The prophecy and sometimes the fulfillment come from long ago, and we must be confident that they are accurate history.
7. The fulfillment must come after the prophecy. Kind of obvious, right? But some Old Testament prophecies fail on this point.
Isaiah 45:1 names Cyrus the Great of Persia as the anointed one (Messiah) who will end the Babylonian exile (587–538BCE) of the Israelites. That would be pretty impressive if it predicted the events, but this part of Isaiah (Deutero-Isaiah) was probably written during the time of Cyrus.
Or take Daniel. Daniel the man was taken to Babylon during the exile, but Daniel the book was written centuries later in roughly 165BCE. Its “prophecies” before that date are pretty good, but it fails afterwards. There’s even a term for this, vaticinia ex eventu (prophecy after the event).
8. The fulfillment must be honest. The author of the fulfillment can’t simply look in the back of the book, parrot the answers found there, and then declare victory. For example, that Mark records Jesus’s last words as exactly those words from Psalm 22 could be because it really happened that way, or that Jesus was deliberately quoting from the psalm as he died, or (my choice) Mark knew the psalm and put those words into his gospel.
I think that any of us would find this a fairly obvious list of the ways that predictions can fail. We’d spot these errors in a supermarket tabloid or in some other guy’s nutty religion.
But the Jesus prophecies are rejected by this skeptical net as well. Consider Matthew: this gospel says that Jesus was born of a virgin (1:18–25), was born in Bethlehem (2:1), and that he rode humbly on two donkeys (21:1–7). It says that Jesus predicted that he would rise, Jonah-like, after three days (12:40) and that the temple would fall (24:1–2). It says that he was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver (26:15), that men gambling for his clothes (27:35), and it records his last words (27:46).
Are these the records of fulfilled prophecy? Maybe all these claims in Matthew actually did happen, but if so, we have no grounds for saying so. Because they fail these tests (primarily #8), we must reject these claims of fulfilled prophecy. The non-supernatural explanation is far more plausible.

In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated
is a refusal to be educated
— Margaret Halsey

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Do We REALLY Trust in God?

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Is it really true that “In God We Trust”? With what do we trust him? It might indeed make Christians feel warm and fuzzy to see that motto on U.S. currency, but do they actually believe it?
Using prayer as a little extra insurance when times are tough is one thing. But who would pray instead of using evidence-based means? Who would pray for safe passage across a busy street rather than looking and using good judgment? Who would pray that God would fix a car rather than a mechanic? Who would pray for healing rather than use a cure proven effective by modern medicine?
That is, who would actually trust that God will take care of important things without some sort of safety net?
Indeed, the government has made clear that that’s not the way things work. In response to preventable deaths among minors within the Followers of Christ church, Oregon recently removed laws protecting parents who rejected medical care for their children in favor of faith healing.
As noted in the excellent American Humanist article “In God We (Do Not) Trust,”

It is tantamount to the state saying, “Sure, it looks great on a coin, but come on you idiot, it’s not as though this god stuff actually works.”

For atheists, “In God We Trust” on currency and as the official motto of the United States is one of those pick-your-battles things. It’s in blatant violation of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …”), but issues such as injury from faith healing are more important and deserve more attention.
But let’s look for a moment at what we discarded to make room for this motto. E Pluribus Unum (Latin for “Out of many, one”) was the de facto motto before the adoption of “In God We Trust” in 1956. That certainly showed those atheist commies which side of the theological fence we were on, but this came at a price.
One trait that is special about America is that we’re composed of people who came from all over the world to pull in the same direction to make a great country.
Out of Many, One. Which country would this motto fit better than America? Out of Many, One—a custom-made inspirational reminder of who we are and where we came from.
And we flushed it down the toilet in favor of “In God We Trust,” a one-size-fits-all poncho that could be worn by a hundred countries.
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/23/11.)
Photo credit: kevindooley

Probability Proves Bible Prophecy (or Not)

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Now and again I come across bold statements that are widely accepted within Christian circles, but they’re often passed along without evidence, like urban legends. The Christian who shares them usually doesn’t know why they should be believed.
For example, the claim that Mark was the assistant to an eyewitness and wrote the gospel named Mark (I wrote about that here).
That the apostles wouldn’t die for a lie (I wrote about that here).
And that the probability of just eight of Jesus’s 300 fulfilled prophecies coming true randomly—that is, without him being the real deal—is 1 in 1017.
Cover the state of Texas in silver dollars two feet deep and find a particular one, blindfolded, by dumb luck—that’s the equivalent probability. In other words, probability shows the reliability of the evidence for Jesus. Who’s going to argue with probability?
At least, that’s the question we’re meant to focus on. The proper question: Who says the probability is 1:1017? And what was the calculation?
I finally had a chance to explore this claim when I recently stumbled across the source, Science Speaks by Peter Stoner, originally published with a different title in 1944. The online version is here (go to chapter 3).
The computation examines eight different prophecies, determines the likelihood of their happening to anyone, and then multiplies them together to get the minuscule 1:1017.
Stoner was the chair of the departments of Mathematics and Astronomy at Pasadena City College, so he should know something about reasoning. Let’s step through these eight prophecies and see.
1. Jesus was born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). Stoner asks the probability of someone being born in Bethlehem as opposed to anywhere else in the world and concludes that one birth of every 280,000 worldwide happens in Bethlehem. In other words, if Jesus could have been born anywhere, that he was born in Bethlehem was quite unlikely.
Let’s ignore the fact that a character in a book about Israel was far likelier to be born in Bethlehem than in Bermuda, Brazil, or Borneo, so comparing Bethlehem against the rest of the world is unrealistic. Let’s also ignore that Stoner simply assumes that Jesus was divine.
At least we have it on good authority that the Micah reference, “out of you [Bethlehem] will come … one who will be ruler over Israel,” actually refers to Jesus, because the gospel of Matthew says so (Matt. 2:6).
Or do we? When you actually read Micah 5, it is clear that this ruler of Israel will be a warrior who will turn back the Assyrians, the empire that began conquering Israel piecemeal beginning in 740 BCE. “Your hand will be lifted up in triumph over your enemies, and all your foes will be destroyed” (Micah 5:9) doesn’t sound like any event in the life of Jesus.
Additionally, Stoner takes the historical accuracy of the gospel story as a given, but why assume that? The authors of Matthew and Luke were obviously literate, and they would have read Micah. Did they accurately record Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus, or did they just throw in Bethlehem to jazz up the story with a “fulfilled” prophecy?
2. Jesus didn’t enter Jerusalem carried in regal splendor but riding humbly on a donkey (Zech. 9:9). Stoner asks: Of all the men who entered Jerusalem as a ruler, what fraction did so on a donkey? He gives this a probability of 1 in 100.
But again, this simply assumes the historicity of the gospel story. It’s like asking, “How many people who walked the Yellow Brick Road did so after landing on a witch in a house?”
Let’s take a closer look at Zech. 9:9. It says that the victorious king will come

lowly and riding on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

What are they saying here? Is this a mother donkey with its colt? No, this is synonymous parallelism, a poetic form found in the Old Testament, where the last line simply echoes or restates the previous line.
All four gospels have Jesus enter Jerusalem on a donkey, and Matthew and John both mention the prophecy. But Matthew doesn’t understand the poetic structure and thinks that it means two donkeys: “They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on” (Matt. 21:7).
What’s more likely—that Jesus rode two animals like a circus acrobat or that Matthew was inventing the fulfillment of a prophecy?
And like the previous prophecy, the king is a warrior. This time, his domain after his victories will extend from sea to sea, which (again) doesn’t match the Jesus of the gospels.
3. Jesus was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver (Zech. 11:12). Stoner’s question: “Of the people who have been betrayed, one in how many has been betrayed for exactly thirty pieces of silver?”
The gospel fulfillment (Matt. 27:9) refers to Jeremiah, not Zechariah. Oops—I guess divinely inspired authors are only human. But even when we find the reference in the correct book, the Zechariah story has nothing to do with betrayal.
And so on. There’s no need to dig into the remaining prophecies; you see how this plays out. Not only are these “prophecies” poor matches for the Jesus story, the probability calculations for these eight examples simply beg the question by assuming that the gospels are history (which is the question at hand) and make meaningless estimates of probability to create the fiction that actual science is going on here.
Are we dealing with actual prophecies? No—the allusions to Old Testament stories are easily explained if we suppose that the authors of the gospels simply searched the Scriptures for plot fragments that they could work into the Jesus story. The probability calculations are meaningless.
Don’t suppose that the gospel authors were journalists writing history. Scholars don’t categorize the gospels as biography but as ancient biography, which is not the same genre. An ancient biography isn’t overly concerned about giving accurate facts but with making a moral point.
When we have a plausible natural explanation like this, the supernatural explanation doesn’t hold up.

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint.
When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist.
— Archbishop Helder Camara

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