Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

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

Debate: Does God Exist?

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Christian apologetics don't do much to support the notion that God exists“Does God Exist?” This was the topic at a public debate I attended on Monday. Here’s a brief summary. See how you would respond to the points that were raised.
The moderator started with Ian Barbour’s four criteria for assessing hypotheses:
1. Agreement with Data. We never have proof (outside of mathematics and logic), but we can provisionally accept the hypothesis that fits best with the data.
2. Coherence. A new hypothesis should be consistent with and support already-accepted theories. If not, it had better be a pretty compelling hypothesis. Simpler is better.
3. Scope. Broader is better.
4. Fertility. What new things can this hypothesis tell us? What predictions can it make? What new questions does it invite?
The two speakers were Lutheran pastor Gary Jensen (also a member of Reasons to Believe, an old-earth Creationist organization) and humanist and lawyer Jim Corbett.
I felt that Corbett won the event. Call me biased, but his arguments were much more concrete. Rev. Jensen was comfortable speaking to the crowd of roughly 200 people, but his arguments were shallow. I’ll do my best to give highlights of each speaker’s points. For Rev. Jensen, I’ll add occasional comments.
Jensen spent much of his opening statement speaking in what (to my mind) were tangential generalities: quoting famous people, asserting that we must follow the evidence wherever it leads (Socrates? Sartre?), showing how the Bible encourages a sensible interaction with nature, giving a summary of the progress of the modern cosmological view, and so on. He said that the Bible is the only religious story with a cosmic beginning. (Huh?)
He got to his first claim with a reference to the fine tuning argument, but he simply pointed to Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees. (Okay, that’s a data point, but it’s hardly an argument.)
In talking about cosmology, he threw in the term “Darwinism.” (Ouch—that may due to too much hanging out with the Reasons to Believe guys.)
He talked about God as a given and made a mistake that I see frequently—confusing statements about his beliefs (which he made) with an apologetic argument (which he didn’t).
He cited Sir William Ramsay’s argument that Paul’s journeys documented in Acts are accurately described and therefore the gospel story is likely also accurate. (No: that the names and places Paul documents are the least we’d expect of a book that claims to be historical. This is no argument that the supernatural claims are accurate. The Harry Potter books accurately refer to London, but that is no evidence that the supernatural elements are accurate.)
He cited Antony Flew’s There is a God as evidence of a smart person who changed his mind. (This was a mistake. I’ve read the book. First, it was ghost-written, and second, the arguments that supposedly turned Flew into a deist are scientific arguments. The critique by a non-scientist of scientific arguments is uninteresting to me.)
Modern science was hatched in a Christian culture. (Okay, and it was a carnivorous culture as well. So what? I see no cause and effect here. To argue that a Christian culture was necessary to birth Science, you must provide evidence.)
Jensen made a vague reference to professors “kicked out” for being Creationists and gave Guillermo Gonzalez as an example. (I wonder if he’s read the other side of the story. That there is another side doesn’t make Jensen’s claim wrong, but it is mandatory that he at least be aware of it.)
He says that he encourages free inquiry but that scientists who reject the supernatural are therefore closed-minded.
He referred to information in DNA (that some protozoa have 200 times the DNA that humans do shows that DNA isn’t “designed” as we use the term) and absolute morality (that we see considerable social evolution from biblical morality to today’s morality overturns this notion).
Corbett had some interesting points (any transcription errors are my fault):

  • We have a moral responsibility to treat supernatural claims with skepticism. Otherwise we open ourselves to every snake oil salesman.
  • Religion is the only impediment to science education in America, and science education is tied to national security.
  • We’ve found clues of python worship in Botswana from 70,000 years ago, our earliest evidence of God of the Gaps thinking—that is, God lives in the gaps where science says, “we don’t know.” In this pre-scientific world, this was understandable and even laudable. But in the 21st century, it’s inexcusable.
  • Lawrence Krauss called God of the Gaps thinking “cowardly.”
  • When Christianity was in charge, we called that the Dark Ages.
  • One imam helped stifle the Islamic Golden Age, and we’re seeing the same thing in America.

Corbett concluded with an interesting parallel. It took about 300 years from Christianity to go from having negligible impact (at the death of Jesus) to being the official religion of the Roman empire (by the Council of Nicaea). If you count Darwin’s Origin of Species as the beginning of modern atheism in the West, we’re halfway through our 300-year transition period. Polls indicate that religion is declining, new knowledge explains away God, and God of the Gaps thinking is no longer necessary.
I’m not sure if that should be seen as optimistic (we’re making good progress) or pessimistic (we have a long way to go) or even unrealistic (Christianity has weathered storms before and we mustn’t count it out), but it’s an interesting parallel.
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Word of the Day: Genetic and Ad Hominem Fallacies

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Christian apologetics in the big bookThe Heartland Institute recently put up a series of billboards featuring Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Charles Manson (a cult leader), and Fidel Castro (a dictator). The text read: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?”
These are examples of the genetic fallacy. We’re asked, “How plausible can the claim of global warming be if these nutjobs accept it?” A genetic fallacy ignores any actual evidence or argument and looks instead at the origin (think genesis) of the argument. It’s a fallacy because it offers no relevant argument.
Another example would be, “You’re a vegetarian? Don’t you know that Hitler was a vegetarian?”
But consider this: “You can’t tell me that those new phosphorescent zucchinis are safe! Don’t you know that the research that supports that claim was funded exclusively by MegaCorp, the company that patented that vegetable?”
This claim is more compelling. Though it is genetic, it does more than make a simple origins claim. Compare that with “Don’t tell me that phosphorescent zucchinis are safe! MegaCorp says they’re safe.” Stripped of the evidence, it becomes an example of a genetic fallacy. (Of course, the evidence provided by MegaCorp could be weak or invented, but with it the claim at least avoids the genetic fallacy.)
Now consider these claims: “Christianity was influenced by myths of dying-and-rising saviors; therefore, the resurrection of Jesus must also be a myth.” Or, “The Noah flood story came from a society influenced by neighboring flood stories like that of Gilgamesh; therefore, the Noah flood story is a myth.”
These are (1) genetic, since they make conclusions based on origins, (2) unsubstantiated, since these claims will need lots of supporting evidence, and (3) fallacies. I would argue that these aren’t genetic fallacies, however. They fail in my mind because the unequivocal conclusion (“… must also be a myth”) can’t be built on evidence that simply points in that direction.
The fallacy vanishes when we make a conclusion that could follow from the evidence: “Christianity was influenced by myths of dying-and-rising saviors; therefore, we must consider that the resurrection of Jesus may also be a myth.” We still have work to do to establish that Christianity was influenced as claimed, but the fallacy is gone.
The genetic fallacy is the term for any argument that points solely to origin as its evidence, but there are many subsets based on the specific origin.

  • Ad hominem: attacking the person rather than the argument. “Senator Jones wants to raise taxes, but he beats his dog; therefore, raising taxes is a bad idea.”
  • Tu quoque: saying, in effect, “Oh yeah? Well you do, too!” This argument tries to respond to a problem by claiming that the other person suffers from it also.
  • Argument from authority fallacy: using an authority as a relevant source when that person is not an authority in the field at hand, rejects the consensus view (if any), or is biased.
  • Credential fallacy: rejecting an authority because that person doesn’t have the right degrees.
  • Ad feminam: rejecting an authority because that person is a woman.

And so on.
Avoid making thoughtless charges of these fallacies. Not every attack on a person is an ad hominem fallacy. “Just ignore that fire alarm; that’s nutty Mrs. Smith” may be a fallacy, but “Ignore that fire alarm; that’s Mrs. Smith, and she’s phoned in a false alarm about every week for over three years” isn’t. (It may not be the safest response for the fire department, but it’s not a logical fallacy.)
And as seen above, not every genetic (origins) argument is a fallacy.
Photo credit: Simon Varwell
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Pastors Speak Their Mind (and Flout the Rules)

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Jesus, God, and all thatIt’s another dreaded election year, and the leaders of many religious organizations somehow feel put upon by the IRS because they can’t preach about politics.
But why? No one forced tax-exempt donations on them—in fact, they took them willingly—so it’s surprising that they’re now chafing at the regulations that come along for the ride. The solution is easy: if nonprofit status is a deal with the devil, then don’t accept nonprofit status.
The Internal Revenue Service makes clear that churches and pastors may organize non-partisan voter education activities, voter registration, and get-out-the-vote drives (with an emphasis on non-partisan). Religious leaders speaking for themselves can say whatever they want, and they can speak “about important issues of public policy.”
However, all nonprofit organizations, including religious organizations

are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made by or on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. … Religious leaders cannot make partisan comments in official organization publications or at official church functions. …
[Nonprofits] must avoid any issue advocacy that functions as political campaign intervention. Even if a statement does not expressly tell an audience to vote for or against a specific candidate, an organization delivering the statement is at risk of violating the political campaign intervention prohibition if there is any message favoring or opposing a candidate.

But many pastors can’t accept this. I don’t know if they honestly think that it’s unfair or if they figure that they’ve already tipped the playing field so much in their favor that they’ll try their luck for even more, but the Alliance Defense Fund has organized the annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday (October 7 this year). On this day:

The pastors will exercise their First Amendment right to preach on the subject [of the moral qualifications of candidates seeking public office], despite federal tax regulations that prohibit intervening or participating in a political campaign. …
The point of the Pulpit Initiative is very simple: the IRS should not be the one making the decision by threatening to revoke a church’s tax-exempt status. We need to get the government out of the pulpit.

Wow—strange thinking. Tax-exempt status is granted by the government. It’s a contract, not a right, and it comes with strings attached. If we the public will be subsidizing an organization, we are entitled to limit its actions. No one’s strong-arming the church, and they can drop both the nonprofit status and the strings attached any time they want.
To some extent, it’s a zero-sum game. (For example, when Mormon desires for polygamy clashed with the needs of the state, someone had to lose.) The head of the IRS addressed this conflict of tax-exempt status and freedom of speech:

Freedom of speech and religious liberty are essential elements of our democracy. But the Supreme Court has in essence held that tax exemption is a privilege, not a right, stating, “Congress has not violated [an organization’s] First Amendment rights by declining to subsidize its First Amendment activities.”

If the IRS constraints against speaking out on political issues are a problem, then don’t enter into a contract with the IRS. Drop your nonprofit status, tell church members that they can no longer deduct donations, and then you can give your opinion about any candidate or issue.
But to keep your nonprofit status, you must follow the rules.
See the first post in this series: What do Churches Have to Hide?
Photo credit: Wikimedia
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Word of the Day: Argument from Authority (and How Consensus Fits In)

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An authority could argue that God exists, but why believe them?I can’t count the number of times that I’ve said something like, “I accept evolution because it’s the scientific consensus” and gotten the response, “Gotcha! Argument from Authority Fallacy!”
Let’s take a look at this fallacy and see where it applies and where it doesn’t.
Suppose I said, “Dr. Jones is smarter than both of us put together and he agrees with me, so I’m right!” This statement could fail due to the Argument from Authority Fallacy for two reasons: (1) we haven’t established that Dr. Jones’ expertise is relevant to the question at hand, and (2) even if Dr. Jones is an expert on the subject, that he agrees with my position doesn’t make me right—at best, it would make me justified in holding my position.
Chastised at my poor argument, I go back and rework it. Now I’m careful to first establish Dr. Jones’ relevant expertise and I modified my claim this way: “Dr. Jones, an established authority, agrees with me, so therefore my position is well justified.” This is better, but my statement could still fail due to this Fallacy. What if Dr. Jones is a maverick in his field? He could be a cosmologist still holding on to the Steady State model of the universe now that the Big Bang model is the overwhelming consensus. Conversely, imagine that it’s the 1930s and he is arguing for an expanding universe when that was the minority position. Either position makes Dr. Jones a maverick, and the layman (as an outsider) has no grounds from which to conclude that this minority position is the best approximation.
The Argument from Authority is not a fallacy when the person indicated (1) is an expert in the field and (2) is arguing for the consensus. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make you right, but being in line with the relevant consensus is the best that we can hope for.
I’m amazed when I hear people reject evolution who aren’t biologists. I can imagine browsing biology textbooks and concluding that evolution is a remarkable claim. I could even imagine thinking that the evidence isn’t there (though the fact that I’ve only dipped my toe into the water would scream out as the explanation for this). What I can’t imagine is concluding, based in my “research,” that the theory of evolution is flawed. I mean—on what grounds could I possibly make this statement? On what grounds could I reject the consensus of the people who actually understand this stuff? The people who actually have the doctorate degrees and who actually do the work on a daily basis?
And yet I hear people justifying this step all the time.
Let’s move on to another topic, the question of consensus. After many discussions that have forced me to carefully think my position, let me offer my views on consensus from different fields. Note that this is the view of a layman—someone who is an outsider to these fields.

  • Scientific consensus: I always accept this.
  • Historical consensus: I always accept this.
  • Consensus of religious scholars about their own religion: I always accept their statements of what their beliefs are. For example, when the consensus of Catholic scholars says that within the Catholic church the eucharist (the communion wafer) is believed to transubstantiate into the body of Christ, I accept that.

But don’t accept everything. I draw the line at supernatural claims, whether by scholars or believers, and whether the consensus or not. I will consider evidence for these claims, but so far I have always rejected them.  If I were to accept these claims, that would probably be based either the scientific or historical consensus.
Supernatural claims are in a very different category than scientific or historical claims.  For more, see my post Map of World Religions.
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Book Review on “Bible Geek” Podcast

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Dr. Robert Price gives a review of the novel "Cross Examined"I’m a big fan of Dr. Robert Price’s Bible Geek podcast as many of you know. If you’re interested in the Bible and the culture from which it came, this podcast is a fire hose of information. His other (more recent) podcast is The Human Bible. I recommend both.
On a recent Bible Geek podcast (scroll to 5:45), Dr. Price was good enough to give a review of my novel, Cross Examined.
Very flattering!
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The Bible’s Dark Ages

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Parchment and whether Jesus is divineWe’re taking a trip through time, from our English New Testament, back through the translations and various copies (Part 1), back through the textual variants to our best guess at the original Greek manuscripts (Part 2). We’ve arrived at our best reconstruction of the canon determined by the Council of Nicaea (325 CE).
The novel The Da Vinci Code portrayed the Council as the stereotypical politicians’ smoky back room where the features of Christianity and the books that represented it (the canon) were haggled over. Many Christian sources have argued against this characterization, saying that the canon had largely been decided by the early churches by that point, but this doesn’t avoid the problem. Selecting the canon would’ve been a popularity contest either way. If the bishops at Nicaea didn’t vote it into existence, then the weeding-out process in the early church created a de facto canon that the bishops accepted with minimal change. Either way grounds the canon on the imperfect shoulders of ordinary people.
Let’s take the next step. We have a big gulf to cross from 325 CE to roughly 70–90 CE, when the originals were written down.
Suppose that Mark was written in Rome in the year 70. Copies are made and it gradually makes its way to Alexandria, where it is copied over and over until it finds its way into the Codex Sinaiticus in about 350. What happened to it in those 280 years? How does the version that we have vary from the original manuscript, now lost to history? That’s a lot of time for hanky-panky.
The issue isn’t that I’m certain that the books were changed significantly; rather, we aren’t certain that they weren’t. This period from Nicaea back to the originals is the Bible’s Dark Ages, a period with very little documentation. We have just a few dozen Greek manuscripts that precede the complete codices. The papyrus manuscripts are all fragments, containing at most a chapter or two of one book. These manuscripts are remarkable finds, but that does nothing to change the fact that we’re bridging a large gap with little information. We can’t say that our copies differ little from the originals because we don’t have the originals.
This biblical Dark Ages was a period of much turmoil in the Christian community. The divisions in early Christianity were much bigger than the modern Lutheranism vs. Presbyterianism distinction, say. Instead of French vs. Spanish, think French vs. pre-Columbian Mayan. And these divisions were all fighting for survival, fighting for their place in the canon.
Historians know of four primary divisions in the early Christian church.
Proto-Orthodox. This is Bart Ehrman’s term for the early Christian sect that would become Christianity as we know it today. Paul’s writings (which changed Jewish law to reject circumcision, the kosher laws, and so on) form the heart of this division.
Ebionites. These may have been the first Christians, because they saw Jesus as a Jew. This was the Jesus who said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets” (Matt. 5:17). The New Testament documents the struggles between the James/Peter sect and Paul in Galatians 2:11–21. Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus says,

According to the Ebionites, then, Jesus did not preexist; he was not born of a virgin; he was not himself divine. He was a special, righteous man, whom God had chosen and placed in a special relationship to himself.1

Marcionites. This Christian variant was put forward by Marcion in about 144 CE. The Marcionites had no use for the Old Testament, since it documented the Jews’ god, who was different from the (unnamed) father of Jesus. Marcion argued that you could answer to Yahweh if you wanted, but Jesus offered a much better option. This Jesus was divine and only appeared to be human. Consider John 20:26: “Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them.” Marcion considered only Paul’s writings to be canonical.
Gnostics. The Gnostics rationalized the evil in the world by saying that the world was created by a demiurge (craftsman) who didn’t intend to or wasn’t able to create a perfect world. While most people on the earth were just animals, some held a divine spark. For that special few, Jesus’s hidden knowledge would be necessary after death to see them safely back to heaven. We see this in Luke 8:10: “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, ‘though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.’”
Biblical redaction is the deliberate change or concatenation by a later editor, and the Bible is full of examples. For example, the Old Testament has two creation stories, two flood stories, two contradictory Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 vs. 34), and even two David and Goliath stories.
The New Testament holds clues to this kind of change as well. For example, John ends with chapter 20 and then again with chapter 21.2 The authorship of Peter’s two epistles is unclear. Jesus says, “But about that day or hour [of the end] no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matt. 24:36), but some scribes omitted the startling phrase “nor the Son” from their copies.
The Ebionite, Marcionite, and Gnostic passages above suggest that our Bible is a conglomeration of different traditions, with verses or chapters added as necessary to dull the edge of an unwanted concept.
This isn’t meant to be a thorough discussion of New Testament redaction. Rather, I want to show just a few places where it is suspected and to suggest that it could have been even more widespread. Claims as remarkable as those of the gospels must be built on more than “Well, they might not have been changed.”

The message of James differs from the message of Paul; the message of Paul differs from the message of Acts; the message of the Revelation of John differs from the message of the Gospel of John; and so forth. Each of these authors was human, each of them had a different message, each of them was putting the tradition he inherited into his own words.3

Would writings be deliberately changed? The author of Revelation apparently knew it was widespread enough to end with a curse against anyone who would modify his book. The famous Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus (“Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man …”) is almost universally said to have been added by later copyists. With the pull of competing Christianities, the urge to “improve” a book might have been irresistible.
Would competing writings be destroyed? It happened in Islam. The “Uthmanic recension” was the process through which one version of the Koran was accepted and all competing versions destroyed. The Nag Hammadi library seems to have been buried. Why hide these books unless there was reason to fear destruction? Perhaps, like the Koran, the Bible has been modified through destruction.
While historians have told us a remarkable amount about the societies from which Christianity arose, our understanding is changing even in our time. For example, consider “Gabriel’s Revelation,” a recently discovered first century BCE writing that talks about a suffering messiah, not Jesus but Simon of Peraea. “In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice.” Do we conclude from this that resurrection after three days wasn’t a new concept to the Jesus-era Jews? In this revelation, the messiah sheds blood, not for the benefit of sinners but for the redemption of Israel.
Of course we don’t discard the clues we have about the original New Testament documents, but let’s proceed with humility about how little we can say with confidence.
Read the first post in the series here: What Did the Original Books of the Bible Say?
Next time: the last post in the series will take the step from gospel originals to the figure of Jesus.
1 Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (HarperOne, 2005), p. 156.
2 Ehrman, 61.
3 Ehrman, 215.
Photo credit: Walter Noel