Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

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

BSR 8: All God Expects of Us Is Sincerity

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If you’re earnestly doing what you think is God wants, that should be enough. How could God complain?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: All God expects of us is sincerity. If we’re doing our best to do what God wants, that’s enough.

Christian response #1: “God values truth over sincerity, because it’s possible to be sincere, yet sincerely wrong.”

This sincerity/truth confusion is not an issue with works. For example, you don’t sincerely think you’re digging a hole when you’re actually painting a fence. And Jesus supported good works to the point that he said that they were the key to heaven. Remember the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew 25. It makes clear that works get you into heaven. Jesus spoke of a king who judged everyone in the world as sheep (the good people) and goats (the bad ones). “Then the King will say to [the sheep], ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.’ ” The king explains that those sheep had sustained him during his many troubles.

The sheep were surprised and asked when they had ever taken care of him. “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ ”

Where the sincerity/truth issue does become a problem is with belief. You can sincerely believe something that is not true, especially in religion.

You can be sincere, yet sincerely wrong. However, this confusion applies to belief, not works, and Jesus said that works are enough to get you into heaven (Matthew 25:31–46). Apparently, sincerity IS enough for God.  [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Sincerity and truth are two very different things. You might sincerely believe a plant is safe to eat, but your sincerity means nothing if it’s actually toxic.

Sincerity vs. truth is an odd thing for a Christian apologist to be worrying about since Christianity practically invented the idea of being sincere but wrong. It now has 45,000 denominations, which suggests a lot of ways even within Christianity to be sincere but wrong.

Why is this? Because the Bible is ambiguous. It’s unclear. It’s contradictory. What’s worse, Jesus explicitly prayed for unity among his followers: “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one. . . . I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.” That’s a prayer that went unanswered.

This blizzard of alternatives puts a lot of anxiety on Christians who must avoid the many paths to hell. Jesus said, “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

The Christian responding to these challenges can’t just demand that we find the true way to satisfy God. They should show us the way! That they haven’t suggests that their answer would be as untrustworthy as anyone else’s.

With 45,000 denominations, Christianity has a lot of ways to be sincere but wrong. Why is this? Because the Bible is ambiguous, unclear, and contradictory. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 9: Truth Can’t Be Known With Any Certainty

For further reading:

The only time religious freedom is invoked
is in the name of bigotry and discrimination.
— Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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Image from r e n a t a, CC license
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BSR 7: If God Existed, He Wouldn’t Be so Hidden

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In an ordinary relationship, the existence of the other person is the last thing you’d question. With God, it’s the first thing.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: If God existed, he wouldn’t be so hidden.

Christian response #1: Maybe God has good reasons. For example, love can’t be coerced, and God might want to step away to allow us to honestly love him rather than fear him.

It’s not a healthy relationship if the other person’s very existence is in doubt, and that Christians want to paper over this glaring problem shows the desperation of their position. The Bible makes clear that knowing God’s existence with certainty shouldn’t be a problem. Moses spoke to God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” The same was true for Abraham. The Bible offers no support to the idea that God can’t or won’t make his existence known.

In addition, the gospels tell us that the disciples were with Jesus for three years. Did that coerce their love of Jesus? Was their love not authentic somehow? If not, why can’t we also know that Jesus exists by seeing him?

If God wants a loving relationship, he must earn that love, and a perpetual game of hide and seek isn’t the way to do it. God can either deliberately remain hidden, or he can be eager for a relationship with us. Christians imagine both, but that’s not an option.

“Does the other person exist?” is what no one in a genuine loving relationship ever said, but it’s what honest Christians must ask about their relationship with God. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: We can see God, in nature: DNA, the Big Bang, objective moral laws. God is the best explanation for these.

No, God is a terrible explanation. Religion has so far taught us nothing about reality, and this isn’t religion’s lucky day. Far from being God’s signature, DNA is full of junk that no Designer would put in: pseudogenes, snippets of endogenous retrovirus, and DNA that codes for vestigial structures and atavisms. It was Science that taught us about the Big Bang (the unanswered questions that remain aren’t pointing to God). And before Christians can point to objective morality, they must show that (1) it exists and (2) humans can reliably access it. This Christian argument pretends that only a supernatural mind could explain these, but that’s just wishful thinking.

Christians have made “God did it” unfalsifiable, and by answering everything, “God did it” answers nothing. Only by withstanding attacks that could plausibly overturn it can we gain confidence in a hypothesis.

Science has unanswered questions, but this gives no support for the God hypothesis. Scientific conclusions are always provisional. That’s why science is so successful.

Christians have made “God did it” unfalsifiable, but by answering everything, it answers nothing. Scientific conclusions are always provisional, but that’s why science is so successful. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: How many times have we misattributed God’s help in our lives as a coincidence, medical misdiagnosis, or close call?

This is a biased question that presupposes God. And look at the trickster they’ve invented. God becomes like the Norse god Loki. When we see something spooky in our lives, maybe that was God. Or maybe it wasn’t. If a bad thing happened, maybe that was God taking a roundabout route to something good. And if a good thing happened, maybe that was Satan’s route to something bad. Nothing is solid in a world with supernatural pranksters lurking in every shadow.

Take a step back and consider the three responses this argument uses to rationalize God’s hiddenness: God must be hidden to make love authentic, God is behind phenomena at the frontier of science, and God is behind daily surprises. The God-as-parent analogy is out the window, and God is no longer someone you could have coffee with. He’s become the clockmaker who’s wound up the clock and is now long gone.

Notice the concession. This argument admits that God is hidden, and these weak arguments are the best that Christians can find to rationalize this odd trait. This evanescent mirage is the loving God you’re to bring your problems to. If God existed and wanted a relationship with us, as we’re assured he does, he’d do it like humans do. He doesn’t because he can’t, and this god is indistinguishable from nonexistent.

If God existed and wanted a relationship with us, as we’re assured he does, he’d do it like humans do. He doesn’t because he can’t. This god is indistinguishable from nonexistent. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 8: All God Expects of Us Is Sincerity

For further reading:

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,”
the King remarked in a fretful tone.
“To be able to see Nobody!
And at that distance too!”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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Image from Vlad Fara, CC license
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The Bart Ehrman Blog Now Free

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Bart Ehrman has been blogging about early Christianity for eight years, five posts a week. He’s written six New York Times bestsellers and dozens more books, both for academic and general audiences. I think his textbook (seventh edition) is the bestseller in its category. And he’s a tenured professor, and he’s an agnostic atheist.

I can’t even match him on blog word count, so I’ll stop looking for accolades.

His blog is worth reading for anyone, atheist or Christian, who wants to get into scholarly details of how Christianity came to be and how we know. Unlike most blogs, it isn’t free. Anyone can see some of the content, but it’s $25 per year to see all of it. The money, 100 percent, goes to charities that fight hunger and homelessness. So far, that’s been a remarkable $700,000. I’ve subscribed for a few years, and there’s fascinating stuff in there that I haven’t found anywhere else.

But at the moment, it’s free. In response to the pandemic, anyone who signs up in April or May gets two months free. Sign up, kick the tires, and see if you like it. Here’s Bart’s introduction to the new offer, and here’s where you register.

What the heart loves,
the will chooses,
and the mind justifies
— Thomas Cranmer,
Archbishop of Canterbury (1489 – 1556)

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Image from Ben Perrin, CC license
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BSR 6: All Religions Lead to the Same Place

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Do Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity all take you to the same place?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: All religions lead to the same place.

Christian response #1: Some mushrooms are good for you, and some are toxic. The same applies to religious worldviews.

The mushroom/religion analogy won’t illustrate your argument until you show that the points of comparison are valid. Yes, some mushrooms are healthy and others not. Why conclude from that that some religions are true and others not? Maybe they’re all wrong.

Don’t send someone on a quest to sift through religions, looking for the ones that are spiritually okay to eat and avoiding the ones that are toxic, before you’ve shown that any are okay to eat. Scientology and Mormonism are just pretend. And Baha’i and Shinto. Why imagine that Christianity is the lone exception? The burden of proof is yours.

Religions aren’t like mushrooms, with some good and some bad. They’re more like snakebites. Some are very poisonous and some are not, but none are good for you. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: “The major religious worldviews disagree far more than they agree. They could all be wrong, or one of them could be right.”

Don’t look at just the handful of major religions. Consider the entire landscape, both throughout the breadth of human societies today as well as throughout human history. Human society has invented religions by the thousands. The “just one of them could be right” option looks a lot less likely.

You’re right that there’s a lot of disagreement between religions. They can’t even agree on the number of gods, the name(s) of the gods, or how to placate them. The primary debate isn’t Christianity vs. atheism. The first order of business is for believers in the supernatural to get their own house in order, and your argument about religious diversity emphasizes this point.

I’m no Christian, so I’m happy to dismiss “all roads lead to God” pantheism. Religions continue to fragment, making clear that there’s no supernatural force nudging humanity toward a single cosmic truth. This fragmentation is a problem for Christianity, too. If Christians can’t unify, it’s obvious that the Bible delivers no single, unambiguous message.

Human society invents religions by the thousands. Why imagine that just one (your favorite) is correct? Far likelier is that they’re all inventions. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 7: If God Existed, He Wouldn’t Be so Hidden

For further reading:

So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century
with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo,
standing as a tail-light behind other community agencies
rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.
— Martin Luther King,
“Letter From Birmingham Jail” (1963)

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Image from Mike Scott, CC license
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BSR 5: The Bible Is Full of Contradictions

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Let’s run through a few Bible contradictions and consider what real eyewitness testimony would look like.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: The Bible is full of contradictions.

Christian response #1: There’s a difference between a contradiction and a variation. Two reports about the same thing may not be identical, but that doesn’t mean they contradict.

The gospels all have women telling the disciples about the empty tomb, except for Mark. In that gospel, the women are told by a man in the tomb to report the resurrection to the disciples. But “trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” And there Mark ends. That’s a contradiction.

Here’s another. The second Commandment against worshiping idols has this: “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (Exodus 20:5). In a more sober frame of mind in a later book, God changed his mind: “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16). That’s a contradiction.

There are thick books like The Big Book of Bible Difficulties that have rationalizations for hundreds of cases like these, but this shouldn’t give the Christian much solace. These books admit the apparent contradictions, which is precisely what a book inspired by the perfect Creator of the universe should not contain.

There are rationalizations for hundreds of Bible contradictions, but this shouldn’t give the Christian much solace. These rationalizations admit the APPARENT contradictions, which is precisely what a book inspired by God should not contain. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: “Why wouldn’t there appear to be contradictions in the gospels? This is the nature of all reliable eyewitness testimony.”

All reliable eyewitness testimony has contradictions? That’s doubtful. Contradiction seems to be the nature of legend and fiction much more than eyewitness testimony. Which of these two categories seems the better fit for the Bible?

Surely we should have higher standards for a book that claims to be inspired by God. At no stage was God’s divine hand apparent: not at the writing of the originals, not by preserving through copying, not through flawless translation. Every opportunity God has to show that he exists, he ignores. The Bible is error-prone at every step because it’s people all the way down.

Here’s what eyewitness testimony looks like: “I Simon Peter and Andrew my brother took our nets and went to the sea” (from the Gospel of Peter). “I Thomas, an Israelite, write you this account” (the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down” (the Gospel of Thomas). But this is apparently unconvincing because these books aren’t in the New Testament! And Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have no clear, identified eyewitness claims like these.

At no stage of the Bible was God’s divine hand apparent: not at the writing of the originals, not the copying, not the translation. The Bible is error-prone at every step because it’s people all the way down. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 6: All Religions Lead to the Same Place

For further reading:

Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark
or the adult afraid of the light?
— Maurice Freehill

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Image from Federico Pitto, CC license
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Christian Prophets vs. Tabloid Psychics

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I remember the tabloid magazines from years ago at the grocery store checkout stand. Every new year’s first edition had famous psychics’ predictions splashed across the cover. What Hollywood or royal celebrities would get embarrassed, arrested, or divorced? What gaffes would various world leaders commit? What natural disasters or wars would happen, what scientific or medical breakthroughs would develop?

What was surprising was how they could keep doing this, year after year, when the issue just one week earlier had the end-of-year scorecard showing how badly the prior year’s predictions had done.

Kidding! There was no scorecard, not at the end of the previous year or ever. No need to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

The tabloid fan might admit that if you really want to get precise about it, sure, the occasional prediction wasn’t completely accurate. If the prediction was that a celebrity would lose a child from a drug overdose, but what actually happened was that their ex got divorced, that was close enough, right? Blur your eyes and score generously, and those psychics were still worth reading.

This has been called the Jeane Dixon effect after a prolific psychic. From her oeuvre, you can find loads of preposterously wrong predictions as well as the occasional correct one. Knowing what sells, the media celebrated the hits and forgot the misses. (One author called this kind of selection bias the Jeane Dixon defect.)

And isn’t it fun to believe? For the tabloid buyer, maybe, just maybe, the psychic will be right, the predicted natural disaster will happen, and they can say they knew it all along.

For the kid waiting for Santa, maybe, just maybe, they’ll get that pony they asked for.

And for the Christian, maybe, just maybe, their prayer for a miracle will be answered.

Christian predictions

This naïve belief is widespread in many Christians today. The fraction of Americans who say that we’re living in the end times as described by the Bible is 41 percent. Of American evangelicals, it’s 77 percent.

When you or I hear a terrible news story—a pandemic virus, for example—we likely see this in the context of bad stuff that happens across the world from time to time. For apocalyptic Christians convinced that Armageddon is around the corner, however, any tragedy neatly confirms their conclusion.

John Hagee’s hysterical 2015 blather about the four blood moons scratched that “All aboard!” itch that these apocalyptic Christians seem to have. They’re playing the poker game of eternity, they’re all in, and they’re eager to show their cards. About the four blood moons, Hagee said, “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon,’ ” and “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”

(You didn’t notice the world ending in October, 2015? No four horsemen? Nothing to suggest the End? Me neither. The only blood is Hagee’s bloody nose when he walked face-first into reality.)

Just like psychics’ failed predictions in tabloid magazines, Christian prophets have no final reckoning. The Jeane Dixon defect is in play, and failed predictions are either ignored or reinterpreted to be close enough.

One relevant difference is that the Bible demands the death penalty for false prophets.

A prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded . . . is to be put to death. (Deuteronomy 18:20–22)

How can we identify this false prophet? The passage continues:

You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?” If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously.

Hagee’s flock haven’t picked up stones. He hasn’t even been shunned or exiled. It’s almost like Christians aren’t consistent and are selectively reading the Bible.

Comparison: psychics vs. prophets

The National Enquirer psychics seem not to be on the covers anymore, but they did predict big things for 2015: an assassination attempt on Pope Francis, a Hollywood job offer for Barack Obama, significant volcanic activity in the Pacific Northwest, and a deathbed confession that that moon-landing thing really was a hoax. Wrong, as usual.

And notice what they missed. No 2015 prediction about ISIS or the Paris attacks or Charlie Hebdo. Nothing about the Obergefell decision or Christian bakers or Kim Davis. Nothing about Donald Trump and the sycophantic comedy that American politics would become.

We can laugh at how badly the psychics got things wrong, but then the Christian prophets, perpetually crying wolf about the latest disaster, were just as laughably wrong. My prediction for 2020: more empty and irresponsible predictions from both psychics and Christian prophets.

Risky predictions have been successfully made
thousands of times in science,
not once in religion.
— Vic Stenger

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/1/16.)

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