Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

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

Defending the Bible with undesigned coincidences

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Searching for undesigned coincidences is an exciting new pastime within Christian apologetics. Well, maybe not new—it’s an exciting revived pastime. Undesigned Coincidences in the Writings Both of the Old and New Testament was published in 1854, and other books preceded it.

So what is an undesigned coincidence?

Example 1: “Prophesy!”

Here’s an example. In Matthew 26:67–8, we read about Jesus being arrested and brought before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council. After the high priest concludes that Jesus has spoken blasphemy,

Then they spit in his face and struck him with their fists. Others slapped him and said, “Prophesy to us, Messiah. Who hit you?”

Huh? Why is prophecy mentioned here? And why demand that Jesus identify who hit him when they were all standing right there?

But turn to Luke 22:63–4, and we get more details.

The men who were guarding Jesus began mocking and beating him. They blindfolded him and demanded, “Prophesy! Who hit you?”

Aha! Jesus was blindfolded—that’s why prophecy is mentioned. They were mocking Jesus’s inability to identify who hit him. Surely a “Son of God” could see even if blindfolded. Now the incident in Matthew makes sense.

But note that the surprise vanishes if you just read them in the opposite order. Luke reports the blindfold, and the reader will then correct the omission when reading Matthew.

More important, these two gospels don’t tell the same story. In Matthew, the beating comes from members of the Sanhedrin, at the end of the trial. But in Luke, it’s guards who beat Jesus, and then he’s taken to the Sanhedrin.

Perhaps apologists should avoid drawing attention to incompatibilities between two versions of a story, because that often just makes the Bible look more flawed.

So what is an undesigned coincidence? Tim McGrew defines it this way:

Sometimes two works written by different authors incidentally touch on the same point in a manner that cannot be written off as copying or having a copy made from some third source.… The two records interlock like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Let’s look at another couple of examples.

Example 2: Feeding the five thousand

In the story of the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus was teaching a large crowd. It was late in the day, and Jesus wanted to give them food (one Christian source explores this here). In Mark 6:39, we read:

Then Jesus directed [the disciples] to have all the people sit down in groups on the green grass.

Green grass—that’s an interesting detail. Isn’t this the desert? Should we expect green grass?

But this is explained in John’s version of the story when he adds this detail:

The Jewish Passover Festival was near (John 6:4).

The Passover is always shortly after the March (spring) equinox, spring is when it rains in Palestine, and rain makes the grass turns green. Like a jigsaw puzzle with a piece neatly added, the mystery is solved.

Okay, but grass must be green sometime, even if there’s a dry season. The Bible frequently mentions livestock, so it’s no surprise that the grass must periodically be green to feed them. Is this much of an aha?

Example 3: Philip of Bethsaida

Early in the gospel of John, we read that Philip was from Bethsaida (John 1:44). A few chapters later is John’s version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Jesus asks Philip where to buy bread for the crowd (John 6:5–7). But why Philip? He seems a random choice—he’s not a prominent disciple, and he wasn’t in charge of the money.

But read the parallel story in Luke, and we find that the gathering takes place at Bethsaida (Luke 9:10–17). So that’s why Jesus asked Philip—being from that town, he might know the best place for bread (source).

What’s the big deal?

Let’s accept that one story might be incomplete but that a clue far from that context (in another chapter or even in another book) plausibly explains some small puzzle. So what? Sure, let’s say that the books of the New Testament have omissions. That makes them look like ordinary books written with no supernatural oversight. How does this help the apologist?

Here’s one apologist’s answer:

Once you have considered the massive weight of the evidence from untold numbers of undesigned coincidences, can you really maintain your skepticism of the historicity of the Bible?

Huh? Where is this massive weight of evidence?? You seem to imagine that only the supernatural explains this. But how?

One final source makes a popular argument for the value of undesigned coincidences.

Much like a puzzle, it fits like a hand into a glove. This is not at all the type of pattern that one would expect to see in the event of some kind of conspiratorial manufacturing of the story. When taken as a cumulative argument—many instances considered collectively—one has a powerful argument for the overall general reliability and integrity of the gospel narratives.

In other words, this is just the tired “Why would anyone invent the Jesus story?!” thesis.

My answer: I dunno why anyone would invent the Jesus story. I never claimed they did.

And this is a powerful new argument in the apologists’ arsenal? From the stew of oral history, the basic story will be written in different ways in different places in the Christian world, and this confusion is cited as reason to believe the Bible more strongly? Why is this even a thing? Perhaps apologists should avoid drawing attention to incompatibilities between two versions of a story, because that often just makes the Bible look more flawed.

This is like the Argument from Accurate Place Names, which praises the Bible for recording the names for many places that are later confirmed by history or archaeology. Big deal.

Now it’s the skeptics’ turn

Let’s invert this idea of illuminating a story told in one place with a clue from another. Take Mark 3:21, where the family of Jesus came to take him away because, “he is out of his mind.” But after the death of Jesus, his brother James became a leader in the Jerusalem church (Acts 1:18). That is, first James (and the rest of his family) thought Jesus was crazy, and then James changed his mind to become a leader in the church. But Mark was written after both of these. Why did Mark only include the first part, leaving out the conversion of James? Mark ends with us having a completely wrong understanding of James’ relationship to the church. How about that for an undesigned coincidence?

Or see this from another angle. Take the same “Jesus is crazy” incident in Mark and pair it with the nativity stories from Matthew and Luke. Mary saw the magi with their gifts and was visited by an angel. How could she or anyone in her family later think Jesus was crazy?

Or, how could John the Baptist baptize Jesus and see the Holy Spirit and hear God’s voice (Matthew 3:16–17) but then months later ask Jesus if he was the One (Matt. 11:2–3)? (More on this incident here.)

Or, how can Jesus explain to his disciples how the end game was going to play out, including his crucifixion and resurrection, three times in each synoptic gospel and yet the disciples are despondent at the crucifixion? A little forgetfulness doesn’t explain this. (More on this here.)

Christian apologists encourage students of the Bible to pull together facts from throughout the Bible, hoping to strengthen one story with another. But they must remember the embarrassing contradictions that will also emerge.

Birds born in a cage
think flying is an illness.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky

The atheist has the moral foundation, not the Christian

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God allows suffering, Christians tell us, but it would be morally wrong for that suffering to be justified in any way except that it benefits the sufferer. The common excuse made for God is that suffering can be for the greater good, but that kind of suffering is exploitative and immoral. That means that suffering is a good thing, and we would be immoral if we tried to stop it.

Said another way, conventional morality is possible only with atheism.

That is the surprising conclusion from the argument in “Atheism and the Basis of Morality” by Stephen Maitzen. Let me summarize the argument. To see how the conclusions are supported, I want to make the argument as transparent as possible, so I’ve added a bit of formality and labeled the steps.

The argument

Here are some axioms (statements taken to be true without proof) to help us start on the same page.

Axiom 1: For simplicity and to avoid disagreement, “ordinary morality” has been simplified to “we have the moral obligation to prevent easily preventable extreme suffering by a child.” That’s it.

Now, some basic assumptions about God’s properties.

Axiom 2: God
(a) is aware of all human suffering,
(b) knows how to prevent that suffering,
(c) has the ability to prevent the suffering,
(d) can do anything logically possible (indeed, is unlimited in knowledge and power),
(e) knows if suffering is necessary for the well-being of the sufferer, and
(f) won’t do anything morally imperfect.

And here’s the moral problem we need to wrestle with. How we should respond is the focus of the argument.

Axiom 3: There is, right now, a child experiencing terrible suffering.

God knows about the suffering child (Axiom 2a); nevertheless, he’s allowing the suffering to continue. Let’s understand God’s attitude toward that suffering by considering the following supposition.

Supposition 1: God allows the suffering to continue because it will ultimately benefit the child.

If supposition S1 is false, then it’s not the case that the suffering will ultimately benefit the child—maybe it will benefit others or maybe there’s no reason at all. I will show that S1 must be true.

Axiom 4: A morally perfect being can’t act immorally.

Corollary 4: From Axiom 4, a morally perfect being can’t have the excuse, “My action was immoral, but that’s okay because it was the lesser of two evils.” Said another way, a morally perfect being can’t face a moral dilemma.

Since God never has moral dilemmas (corollary 4), he never says, “Gee, I hate to see that kid in pain, but it’s for the greater good.”

Therefore, God can’t exploit people (that is, use them primarily for some purpose other than to help them).

Therefore, S1 must be true, and any suffering allowed by God must be for that person’s benefit (like the pain from a vaccination) and not justified because it’s for someone else’s benefit (for the greater good).

Objections

Let’s pause for a moment and consider a couple of objections. The first objection says that exploiting people can’t be a problem because we do it ourselves. An example would be quarantining someone with a contagious illness, where we’re making one innocent person suffer for the benefit of others.

Response: Yes, we do exploit people that way, but that’s only because we’re not omnipotent. However, God is omnipotent (Axiom 2b). We have an excuse for exploiting people, but God doesn’t.

Here’s another objection: maybe God could compensate sufferers materially even if the suffering wasn’t required for their benefit. How many years of life in Paradise would it take to overshadow a poor life on earth, no matter how miserable?

Response: No, compensation is not justification. If I punch you but then immediately apologize and give you a million dollars, my action was still morally wrong. You’ve been well compensated, but that doesn’t justify my action (thinking otherwise is stupid Christian argument #25a.) Remember, the kind of non-exploitative harm we’re talking about is unavoidable suffering for that person’s own benefit, like jabbing a kid with a needle (suffering) to deliver a vaccine (the justifiable good).

Conclusion

From that groundwork, we can reap a few startling conclusions.

Given that there are suffering children (A3), how do we respond? “We have the moral obligation to prevent easily preventable extreme suffering by a child” (A1). But God ensures that any suffering is neither gratuitous nor exploitative but is for that person’s benefit (S1).

Therefore, it’s bad to stop suffering (from S1).

Therefore, A1 is false since it contradicts S1.

Therefore, our moral duty to help suffering children (A1) vanishes. In fact, it’s more than that: getting in the way of someone’s suffering is getting in the way of their moral medicine. Mother Teresa’s crazy medieval zealotry actually fits in fairly well with this thinking. She said, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

We’ve seen this before. Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod was criticized for messing with the natural order. If God decided that a building needed to be struck with lightning, who was Franklin to say otherwise (more)?

Seen another way, our moral instincts are backwards: the worse the suffering, the more obvious that it’s for that person’s benefit and not just a trivial bump in the road of life, and we should leave it alone to avoid messing with God’s plan. (One wonders how it could be so easy for us to overturn God’s plan, but that’s a tangent.)

So where does this leave morality? If our most fundamental moral axiom—that we should prevent the suffering of children if easily done—is gone because suffering must be a good thing, what’s left? What sense is a prohibition against lying or theft when an intuitively more fundamental axiom is gone? Can this morality be salvaged despite its gaping hole?

But drop the theistic assumptions, and Axiom A1 is back in force, and ordinary morality works just like everyone intuitively thinks it should. Atheism, not theism, is compatible with morality.

Religion does itself no favors
by declaring itself immune from rational scrutiny.
— Dan Brown

Prove that God exists with a public test

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Perhaps you’ve read Jesus saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7). Forget that—God is happy to be tested.

The prophet Elijah from the 9th century BCE organized a public competition between his god Yahweh and Baal (1 Kings 18:16–40). On Baal’s side were the hundreds of his prophets, and on Yahweh’s side was only Elijah, Yahweh’s last prophet. The test was to see which side could get his god to light a sacrificial fire, and all of Israel was summoned to watch.

The priests of Baal called on their god all day with no effect. Elijah taunted them, suggesting that maybe Baal was deep in thought or out for a moment or sleeping.

When it was Elijah’s turn, he made the demonstration more difficult by having his sacrifice and the wood underneath soaked in water. He then called on Yahweh, and fire from the sky consumed the sacrifice, wood, water and even the stones of the altar.

Don’t you miss those days, when God would make clear that he existed with an awesome demonstration of power? God may be kinda cute as the shy wallflower whose action in the world today looks just like no action at all and whose religion looks like an ancient superstition that evolved into a crazy-powerful global empire, but don’t you want a demonstration to show that he actually exists? Wouldn’t you like to resolve those doubts for good? How about a “No more Mr. Nice Guy” god who takes names and kicks butt?

A new test for Yahweh

No one today demands a Yahweh vs. Baal contest because those who thought that Baal was real have died out. But what about Yahweh vs. science? Science does exist, and positive results from science and technology pop up daily to embarrass Yahweh. True, science isn’t omniscient, though it does get a lot right. Our modern technology-rich society admits to science’s power. It was science that eliminated smallpox, produced anesthesia, and created the airplane, internet, and GPS. Science makes life safer, healthier, more comfortable, and more interesting.

In response, we’ve learned nothing new about the world from Yahweh. We get nothing but handwaving. Christians’ use of technology should taunt them daily, since it makes clear how their lives have been improved by science, not by revelations from Yahweh. It’s almost like society takes far better care of people than Yahweh does. Superstition and supernatural belief were what people had before science, but now we have something much better. Yahweh should’ve gone the way of Baal, since he has nothing to point to in the making-life-better department.

If Yahweh worship were a custom, just a thing people do to give them comfort or a sense of community, that would be fine—it’s easy to see that Christianity delivers that. But Christianity goes far beyond this, and its bold claims are measurable. For example:

The Lord will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life (Psalm 121:7).

The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles (Psalm 34:17).

A public challenge

Inspired by Elijah, I propose a test of Yahweh vs. science. And I know the perfect loudmouth to be Yahweh’s advocate: Pat Robertson. A few years ago, Pat rebuked hurricane Florence, demanding that it steer away from his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He demanded, “Hurricane Florence, we speak to you and we command the storm to cease its forward motion and go harmlessly into the Atlantic. Go up north away from land and veer off, in the name of Jesus.”

It didn’t go “up north away from land” but hit the U.S. coast in North Carolina, eventually causing 45 deaths and $38 billion in damage, but that didn’t stop Pat from taking credit. His university campus and holy satellite ministry are okay, and that (apparently) is all he cares about. He said about this hurricane, which was never expected to directly hit Virginia Beach anyway, “This is a miracle ladies and gentlemen…. When we pray, God does miracles.”

I would’ve judged Pat’s prayer experiment as a complete failure (see the path of the hurricane to see if it “[went] harmlessly into the Atlantic”). Wouldn’t a miracle be more like the hurricane poofing out of existence? Perhaps I have a different idea of “omniscient god” than Pat does, but no matter. If Pat is convinced that God listens to him and does public miracles, then Pat is our man.

Pat Robertson, I challenge you to a contest, a public Elijah-vs.-the-priests-of-Baal type contest. I’m open to the specifics. For example, we could look forward. The resolution of open scientific questions could be the goal, something like this: “Attention, scientists and priests! The first group to explain where life on earth came from, with evidence to back it up, wins!” Or maybe explain why there was a Big Bang or why we dream or what the universe is made of.

Hilariously, many Christian apologists will say that they’ve already answered some of these. They have answers to where life and the universe came from—God did it. The problem is, of course, that they have no evidence. They’re simply saying that they can reshape the clay of their religion to be compatible (more or less) with what science says, which counts for nothing.

Practical problems are another class of forward-looking challenges. The contest could be a race to demonstrate how to make a room-temperature superconductor, how to get electricity from fusion, or how to eliminate cancer.

Or, we could look backwards at things science has already done: “Science can put a computer on a silicon wafer; Yahweh, beat that,” or “Science has eliminated several diseases from the earth; Yahweh, beat that.” Or, a challenge we’re living through right now: “Science prevented millions of deaths from covid; beat that.”

(Let me anticipate a challenge: “Science has a dark side, too, y’know. Think of nuclear weapons or computer malware.” First, a quibble: science is reliable new claims about reality. Applying new discoveries to do harm is indeed a problem, but that’s technology. Second: yes, science can be employed to do harm, but then so can religion—cults like Jim Jones or Aum Shinrikyo, conservative conspiracy theories like “covid is a hoax,” and so on. This experiment ignores that and is focused on the positive applications of science vs. Christianity.)

The fact that the questions themselves came from science, not Christianity, emphasizes what an underdog Christianity would be in this contest. But a guy who actually thinks that he disciplined a hurricane that later killed dozens and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage might be just the one to think that he can demonstrate God’s power in the domain of science.

How about it, Pat? You’re quick to look for a chance to publicly demonstrate God’s power. Are you ready for the big leagues? Oh, and I’m eager to hear what stakes you propose for the winner. Remember that, in the original Bible story, every priest in the losing worldview was killed.

All we did was claim to speak for God
and suddenly we’re held to a higher standard?
— SMBC’s interpretation of priests’ response
to Catholic child sex abuse scandal

Embarrassing misuse of the Criterion of Embarrassment

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Historians confronted with differing versions of ancient manuscripts have developed helpful principles of Bible criticism. These are simple but powerful ways scholars use to better understand the Bible (or any book from history). For example, multiple historical sources are better than a single one, and independent sources are better than sources that all copied from a single authority. Or: older documents are probably better than newer. Or: eyewitness testimony is better than secondhand.

Here’s a clever one: a passage that is embarrassing is more likely to be true than a variant interpretation that makes the heroes of the story look good. This is the Criterion of Embarrassment (CoE).

Consider this example from Mark 1:40–41.

Now a leper came to [Jesus] and fell to his knees, asking for help. “If you are willing, you can make me clean,” he said. Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing. Be clean!”

A tiny minority of manuscripts replaced “moved with compassion” with “moved with anger” or “indignation.” If no other factor were present, scholars would go with the majority reading, “compassion.” But the powerful Criterion of Embarrassment asks us to imagine two possibilities. It’s easy to imagine the original being “anger/indignation,” which was then changed by a scribe to “compassion.” But if the original reading were “compassion,” that’s almost impossible to imagine being changed to “anger” or “indignation.” Why would a scribe do that?

Conclusion: anger/indignation—the more embarrassing option—is the likelier original word.

William Lane Craig’s use of the CoE

Apologist William Lane Craig illustrates a related way to use the CoE.

Because the early Christian church believed in the deity of Christ, you’d expect that if the Gospel accounts were largely the product of the church rather than accurate records of the life of Jesus, the Gospels would suppress or omit embarrassing or awkward traces of Jesus’ weakness and humanity. But they don’t! (Source)

Craig lists some of the gospels’ embarrassing incidents.

  • Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, which suggests that Jesus was the lesser figure who needed forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:9).
  • Jesus didn’t know when he would return. He said that only God knew (Matthew 24:36).
  • His own family thought he was crazy (Mark 3:21).
  • He couldn’t do miracles in his hometown (Mark 6:5).
  • He needed two tries to make a blind man see (Mark 8:22–5).
  • A man called Jesus good. Jesus replied, “Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone.” (Mark 8:10)
  • How important can the Trinity be when it’s not clearly explained in the Bible?
  • Jesus was betrayed by one of his own followers.
  • He was crucified as a common criminal.

Here’s Craig’s reaction:

These are not the sort of features someone who believed in Jesus’ deity would just invent. They are therefore indications of the historical credibility of the accounts in which they appear.

No, we’re not talking about someone deliberately making up parts of the gospel story. Rather, it’s easy to imagine the Jesus story as decades of legendary embellishments on the story of a first-century Jewish teacher. Everyone will agree that legends and Jewish teachers exist, and it’s easy to imagine that combination creating a supernatural result. This is a much likelier explanation of why the gospels say what they say than that the gospels’ supernatural claims are true.

You can’t make a case for the Criterion of Embarrassment without being embarrassed!

Jesus as messiah—embarrassing?

Here Craig talked about another fact that embarrasses Christians, that the idea of Jesus as messiah—a king who would kick the occupying Romans out of Israel—is incompatible with the gospel story.

The crucifixion of Jesus was a disaster for the disciples, not simply because their beloved master was gone, but because it exposed any Messianic pretensions that he might have had as being utterly vacuous and unfounded.… How do you explain the origin of the disciples’ belief in this very un-Jewish and outlandish idea? … When you look at the Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament, they give virtually no clue that Messiah isn’t going to be this triumphant warrior king that was expected. (Source)

He’s again using the Criterion of Embarrassment: how could the gospel authors call Jesus messiah, referring to the Old Testament’s idea of a conquering king, and yet document his complete defeat through crucifixion? That’s not the Old Testament’s promise.

What do other scholars say?

Other scholars see the conflict as Craig does. Atheist Bart Ehrman said,

Wasn’t the Messiah supposed to suffer horribly for the sins of others and be raised from the dead?  Not according to ancient Jews.

Christian C.S. Lewis also looked for an optimistic view of the Bible’s embarrassing claims.

The evangelists have the first great characteristic of honest witnesses: they mention facts that are, at first sight, damaging to their main contention.

The damaging facts that Lewis was responding to were (1) Jesus promising that “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” when Jesus’s promised end still isn’t here, and (2) Jesus appealing to God from the cross, “Why have you forsaken me?”

Perhaps the most extreme statement of the CoE is this one, which throws reality out the window. It is attributed (probably wrongly) to second-century church father Tertullian:

The Son of God died: it is wholly believable because it is absurd; he was buried and rose again, which is certain because it is impossible.

Craig is trying to take lemons and make lemonade. Yes, the gospel stories are at odds with the promise of a messiah, but the gospel authors plowed ahead anyway, knowing their Jesus didn’t fit. Why record that embarrassing mismatch if it weren’t true?!

But he wants it both ways. If the gospel story has embarrassing claims that conflict with the Bible’s earlier promises or with modern Christian tenets, those must be true! And if there is no conflict—as when Matthew points to Isaiah to say that Jesus was born of a virgin and to Micah to say that he was born in Bethlehem—that must also be true! Craig wins when the Bible is embarrassing, and he wins when it’s not.

Problem 1: make sure it really is embarrassing

Apologists often stumble over two problems with the CoE.

Take the well-known story of Peter’s denial of Jesus. In all four gospels, Jesus predicts that Peter will deny knowing him. Peter insists that he won’t but then does it three times to avoid capture by the Romans.

That’s quite an embarrassing element to include … unless you don’t like Peter. The New Testament documents the friction between Christians allied with Peter and those allied with Paul. It’s easy to imagine a Pauline faction adding this story.

Another embarrassing Bible story is unreliable women finding the empty tomb on Sunday morning. Once again, apologists attack the idea of anyone making this up. Who would invent the idea of women at this critical moment of the story if they were seen as poor witnesses? It’s awkward and therefore true.

But I don’t think it was made up. In fact, if anyone is going to discover an empty tomb, it would be women since women were typically responsible for tending to the dead in this culture. Women finding the empty tomb isn’t surprising—it’s necessary.

Lesson 1 for using the CoE is to make sure that the story really was embarrassing to the source.

Problem 2: you must pay to use the CoE

You can’t make a case for the Criterion of Embarrassment without being embarrassed! That is, you must pay a price when using the CoE. This is obvious, and yet apologists never seem to acknowledge this.

William Lane Craig wants to use the CoE when he confronts embarrassing facts like Jesus being baptized by John, his inability to do miracles in Nazareth, and no Trinity in the Bible. It’s embarrassing that the gospels imagine Jesus as messiah—a butt-kicking king who will expel the Roman occupiers—and yet they document Jesus’s humiliating death by the Romans, just like countless other criminals. These are embarrassing incidents, so they must be true.

But hold on. We’re all on the same page. Craig is admitting what the rest of us can see, that these incidents and many more are embarrassing to the Christian. There must be payment for playing the CoE card, and that payment is admitting that the Bible story doesn’t hang together. One story collides with another. If Jesus is messiah on one hand but glaringly doesn’t fit the Bible’s description on the other, the entire religion is called into question. The CoE won’t get you out of this bind, and the New Testament looks like just another manmade collection of books.

Apologists like Craig refuse to acknowledge the embarrassment, but this isn’t how it works. You can’t say that something is embarrassing and therefore likelier to be true without confronting the fact that it’s embarrassing. If the Bible is reliable, then you can’t hide from its telling you that Jesus really ought not have been baptized by John; he should have been able to do miracles anywhere; the relationship between Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit should be evident in the Bible; and Jesus wasn’t the messiah.

Lesson 2: make sure that playing the CoE card costs something.

The naturalistic explanation

Why does the Bible have internal clashes? Because it was written over the course of a thousand years by dozens of people with differing agendas. The Bible isn’t even a fixed target. The Protestant Bible has different books than the Roman Catholic Bible, and both are different from the Georgian Orthodox Bible. Of course the books contradict.

With a naturalistic interpretation, the power of the Criterion of Embarrassment vanishes. It was never an honest ally to apologists when they refused to admit what it cost them. And on the other side of the coin, no longer is it a spell that turns an embarrassing contradiction or admission into truth. The naturalistic explanation is the better explanation.

See also: Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #50: The Argument from Biblical Consistency

Argument from Divine Embarrassment.
If you were God,
looking upon your earthly representatives,
Wouldn’t you want to hide?
Ergo: God exists.
— Maarten Boudry

What Christians won’t do to defend God’s Marvelous Plan®

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God can’t defend or even explain his policies, but he has self-appointed people eager to put words in his mouth.

Christian apologist Greg Koukl was given the opportunity to stand up for God since God never bothers, and Koukl didn’t disappoint. He was asked this question:

If you [a Christian] found yourself on Judgement Day standing next to an unbeliever you cared for and liked, and Jesus offered to either annihilate you both or send you to heaven and your friend to hell for eternity, which would you choose and why? (audio @21:05)

God knows best, I guess

Koukl unsurprisingly chose option two. His justification: “because that’s God’s system” and God knows best.

So we’re supposed to accept an insane interpretation of justice—infinite punishment in hell for finite crimes here on earth—and just assume that God must have good reasons? This does nothing to justify the Christian position and would be satisfying only to Christians (and maybe only some of those).

This question is like God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac—it looked like an obedience test, but it was actually a morality test. The correct response for Abraham was: “No, of course I won’t sacrifice Isaac.” And this wasn’t presumptuous of Abraham. Since Man was supposedly created in God’s image (or the gods’ image), Man’s understanding of morality should be in sync with God’s, and the natural instinct of revulsion against killing one’s own son should be reliable.

Now apply that attitude to this question of annihilation vs. heaven for you and hell for your atheist friend. Any mentally healthy person would be horrified at the idea of anyone, let alone a friend, being tormented forever and would immediately choose the alternative. How could you enjoy heaven if you knew that, because of you, he was burning in hell? Besides, this hypothetical situation assumes that “God’s system” has suddenly become flexible, so that your choosing is allowed, and your God-given sense of morality would be an appropriate response.

Koukl has unwarranted confidence in his interpretation of God’s wishes. Christians can’t explain the logic behind the Trinity, they’re divided over hell (eternal torment vs. “the gates are locked from the inside”), they can’t agree on whether Christianity is at odds with science or not, and so on. Christians have found loads of contradictory interpretations of the Bible to justify various attitudes toward slavery, civil rights, same-sex marriage, abortion, health care, and so on. That Koukl is comfortable with his particular set of responses to the dozens of questions that divide Christians says a lot about him but little about what the Bible says.

(Aside: this clumsy justification reminds me of Koukl’s dancing around the issue of whether women getting abortions should be punished.)

Consequences in heaven

Koukl moves on to the question of how this will affect heaven. Will knowing about a friend (or billions of people) writhing in agony “tarnish our enjoyment of heaven”?

Yeah, that’d be a shame if someone else’s anguish rained on his enjoyment of heaven. He explained that when we get heavenly enlightenment, we will understand that “God’s judgments are just.”

Yet again, I’m not sure how humans can be so radically out of sync with God’s “morality” when we were supposedly created in his image. You’re an enlightened being in heaven (presumably greatly elevated from your flawed, limited human shell on earth), and you know about the billions in torment, and you’ll be okay with that?!

“We [in heaven] will rejoice in the good,” Koukl tells us, but what kind of Bizarro World are we talking about, when Christian belief obliges them to label as “good” a punishment system that makes the 11 million deaths in the Holocaust look like a church picnic? It’s pretty much the most inhumane situation conceivable, and it’s held up as a divine good.

And Christians wonder why atheists are occasionally peeved at Christian dogma.

Koukl isn’t alone in his evaluation. Plenty of other apologists have no reluctance in celebrating God’s perfect inhumane plan. Here is thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas doubling down:

That the saints [in heaven] may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly and give more abundant thanks to God for it, a perfect sight of punishment of the damned is granted them.

(More on the history of Christians not tap dancing way from but celebrating the idea of hell here.)

If you’re in hell, it’s your own fault

As usual, we can’t demand that God answer for his barbaric justice. God is a fragile baby, and it would be too harsh to treat him like an adult. Luckily, we have Christian apologists happy to pull the strings on the God marionette and speak for him. Koukl defends God’s system:

On this system, forgiveness is available and [the damned] did not avail themselves of it, and they are justly punished for what they did and I am unjustly … forgiven.

See, I told you! If you’re roasting on a spit in hell, that’s too bad, because it’s your own fault.

Let’s reconsider this claim that forgiveness is available, because it’s not available to me. Who can believe the unbelievable? I need evidence, and Christianity has pretty much none. The Christian can demonstrate to us how this is supposed to work by believing in leprechauns. When they show me that believing in the unbelievable is possible, then we can move on to the question of whether it’s a smart thing to do.

And let’s just set aside the claim that Jesus taking on our sin with substitutionary atonement makes any sense (it doesn’t).

Is Koukl being selfish?

Koukl anticipates the charge that he’s being selfish, that he’ll make the other person go to hell just so he gets heaven.

It is the consequence of the plan that God has put in place, and it’s an expression of two appropriate things, justice being done to somebody who deserves it and grace being extended based on God’s plan and purpose, both good things.

“Justice”? Ask anyone if hell is the justice they’d impose if they were the boss. Koukl here is judging God’s plan as reasonable and good when it obviously isn’t according to any human interpretation. Hell would make a sadist recoil. If he means that hell only sounds brutally unjust, but we must trust God, then he should (1) admit that it sounds crazy and that he doesn’t understand and (2) explain why that trust in God’s plan would be justified. When the divine plan unravels like this, go back and question your assumptions. Maybe God isn’t good. Maybe he doesn’t exist.

And let’s return to the original scenario, annihilation vs. heaven for Koukl and hell for the atheist. If neither of them deserves heaven, why does Koukl get forgiven and the atheist get “justice”? Wouldn’t the other way around make as much sense? And suppose they did switch places. Could Koukl have any grounds for protesting that this was unfair? After all, he does insist that he deserves hell, and he’s taking as a given that God’s plan is perfect. Would he celebrate the fact that eternity in hell would support God’s plan?

Or consider another scenario: now it’s Koukl and a Muslim friend standing in judgment, and Allah gives the friend the choice. Greg Koukl, you decide: should the friend choose annihilation or paradise for the friend and hell for Koukl?

Koukl has done nothing to help his Christian audience defend hell. God’s Marvelous Plan® still sounds like Bronze Age insanity.

God never fails, because he never tries.
He’s not even a loser.
He doesn’t show up to the game.
— commenter Jack Baynes, Sandwichmaker

Christian defense of praise and worship: give praise to get presents

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We’ve been looking at how the Christian god has been shaped into a narcissistic Donald Trump. This is the concluding article in this six-part series. Part 1 is here.

The final reason Christians give for praising God:

10. Because praise brings goodies 

[Praise] paves the way for God’s power to be displayed, [and] miracles ​[do] happen. People’s lives are affected and changed. (Source)

Praise discharges strength in faith, which causes God to move on our behalf…. God inhabits the atmosphere of praise…. If we want to see a clear manifestation of God’s blessings and grace, all we need to do is to praise Him with all our heart, our mind, and our soul. Source

So what happens if we praise God, and nothing happens? God moves nothing on our behalf, and there are no miracles? Let me guess: you weren’t wrong, and it’s never God’s fault. The blame is always on the individual Christian.

Next time, back up these bold claims of miracles with evidence.

Confirmation bias

The evidence for God is so paltry that he’s indistinguishable from a being who doesn’t exist at all. Confirmation bias is one of Christians’ few friends supporting their belief that their praise and worship has a target that actually exists. (Confirmation bias is our tendency to accept evidence that supports our preconceived ideas and ignore evidence that goes against them.) Changing our minds is difficult and unpleasant, and confirmation bias is like air bags for the psyche, protecting us from reality.

One of our apologists shows us how it’s done:

[God provides encouragement] along the way, letting us know how He feels about us…. Reminders of particular lessons arrive at the moment when they’re most needed, and we become aware that God knows how we’re feeling and knows precisely what we need to hear…. The man who has the skills to repair our stove appears just when we need him; a job comes open at just the right time; we hear a chance word that settles the secret worry of our heart. (Source)

Only with confirmation bias could anyone buy this claim. Everyone experiences happy coincidences, but they’re infrequent. The Christian who thinks that God is clearly moving the chess pieces of their life (and that any observer would agree) is making a scientifically testable claim. They need to demonstrate this to the world through something like the JREF Million-Dollar Challenge (now terminated).

This apologist continues with an example of Christian magic that could only be supported through confirmation bias.

My wife, for example, sees significance in colors. When God has something to say to her, she notices a particular color that stands out, and over the years she’s come to associate specific colors with specific meanings. Also, when God wants to get her attention, she loses something; she might misplace her car keys, for example, and whenever she finds them, the location where she finds them and the nature of how she misplaced them will give her insight into some problem she’s facing at the moment.

Seriously? I’ll bet that’s as reliable a divination tool as picking a Bible verse blindfolded and then parsing it for God’s meaning. You might as well read tea leaves or animal entrails.

He concludes:

All of the interaction I’ve described goes on subtly, without fanfare. God is seldom ostentatious; He does what He needs to do to get His point across with a bare minimum of disturbance, and He leaves no tracks.

Which is what you’d have to say if “God” were nothing more than coincidence and wishful thinking.

Conclusion

I marvel at the god Christians have collectively created with these ten rationalizations (realizing, of course, that not every Christian would embrace them all). God becomes a Donald Trump, drunk on power and demanding that he get all the praise he’s due. On a sticky note above God’s computer screen is “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” from the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

This God is no sage, determined to reduce his ego. On the contrary, his ego is bigger than a Trump Baby balloon.

And yet these apologists must explain why this thin-skinned God is unaccountably hidden. If praise were so important, that’s all the more reason for him not to be hidden. A God unwilling to step into this spotlight of praise is as likely as Donald Trump avoiding the opportunity to be the center of attention.

We’ve looked at ten reasons Christians give to praise and worship God. Now it’s my turn.

  • Focusing on praise and worship keeps Christians compliant and submissive. They’re repeatedly shown how insignificant they are and how dependent they are on the church. Like a battered woman, the Christian is continually told that they can’t do it alone and that they’re inherently worthless. This benefits those in power at the top, the priesthood and politicians.
  • Praise and worship can help the Christian feel better, like music or the grandeur of a big church. It’s comforting and infantilizing (more on how Christianity infantilizes churchgoers).

These natural explanations are sufficient to explain why a religion might incorporate praise and worship. No gods are required. Religions evolve, and these are two of the beneficial traits that stuck around.

I cannot believe in a God
who wants to be praised all the time.
— Friedrich Nietzsche