Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

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

Christian Historical Claims Are Surprisingly Fragile: a Case Study

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weak christian historical claims

I’d like to investigate a Christian claim that’s both trivial and profound and that delivers an important takeaway for all of us.

The claim

The claim is the mid-second century conversation between Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and the Roman proconsul (governor) of Asia, the Roman province in what is now western Turkey. Polycarp was apparently charged with refusing to honor Caesar as a god. Though he was treated with respect and encouraged that stating a simple oath to Caesar would avoid death as punishment, Polycarp refused and famously said, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

This is trivial in that nothing of significance changes whether Polycarp said this or not. A Christian saint expresses great loyalty to Jesus—where’s the problem? Can’t we let the Christians have their heroes?

Why this is interesting

I recently listened to a lecture that included this story, and the Christian presenters commented how powerful this story was to them. That got me thinking: how do we know that the story of Polycarp’s martyrdom is accurate? More importantly, how can we trust hundreds of claims made about the early church?

I’ve recently explored the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts on which our modern copies rely (here, here). We’re now turning to the question of the reliability of stories documented outside the New Testament. Checking the weaknesses in the Polycarp martyrdom story is the goal of this post, but we would go through a similar process with any other story from the early church.

I hope that this post will do two things. First, I want to suggest by example some approaches with which you might test other church claims as you come across them. Second, I want to encourage you to be skeptical when claims about the early church are made. These claims are often part of apologetic arguments for Christianity, but those arguments are no stronger than their claims. Taking the supporting claims on faith won’t do.

Does the story hold up?

The story comes from The Martyrdom of Polycarp, a letter written by an unknown author from the church in Smyrna. Our first concern with the reliability of the story comes from the miracle claims in the story itself. When Polycarp was thrown on the fire, “he was within it not as burning flesh, but as bread that is being baked, or as gold and silver being refined in a furnace. And we perceived such a fragrant smell as the scent of incense or other costly spices.” Since he wouldn’t die, the executioner stabbed him, which released his spirit as a dove and enough blood to put out the fire, and still his body wasn’t burned.

The faithful statement of loyalty, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong,” is by itself easy to believe, but it’s part of a story containing miracles. The challenge to show that the entire story is history (or that a non-supernatural, historical core was corrupted by miracle claims) just got much tougher.

Problem 2

Next, the story parallels Jesus’s Passion narrative. Polycarp was betrayed, and the author wished that “they who betrayed him should undergo the same punishment as Judas.” Like Jesus and Pilate, Polycarp was publicly tried by the local Roman high official. In both cases, that official looked for a way to avoid the punishment of death. The Jews in the crowd were opponents to both Jesus (Matthew 27:25) and Polycarp. Polycarp was affixed to a wooden apparatus, to which the victim was typically nailed. With so many parallels, plus many direct quotations, one wonders how much is history and how much fan fiction.

Problem 3

We don’t know the time gap from the death until the letter was written (Polycarp is variously said to have been martyred in 155 or 156 CE or in 166 or 167). Oral history is no friend of accuracy, and the letter has clues that it was written decades after the event. It makes a clear statement against voluntary martyrdom, though this wasn’t a problem in the church until the late second century. The letter also cautions against venerating human remains as relics (not a problem until the third century) and worshipping martyrs over Christ (not a problem until the fourth century). People don’t usually warn against something that’s not a problem, so the date of authorship is arguably during a period when those issues were problems. (Sources here, here.)

We’ll finish up in part 2 with two more problems with the Polycarp claim. As we move through these issues, imagine applying these questions more broadly. Imagine applying them to other claims about the early church. These might be the claim about Pliny the Younger’s correspondence with the Emperor Trajan about the Christians in his province, for example. Or the popular claim that all disciples except for John died martyr’s deaths.

A skeptical approach and a few good questions can expose the weak foundation in many such claims.

Concluded in part 2.

Atheism must be accounted
among the most serious problems of this age.
— “Joy and Hope,”
one of the four constitutions
from the Second Vatican Council, 1965

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Image from Wikimedia, public domain
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The Argument from Mathematics Doesn’t Add Up to God

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World famous Christian apologist William Lane Craig has a fun new argument: the universe is describable by math, and this cries out for designer. He’s impressed by “the uncanny effectiveness of mathematics.” He said:

It was very evident to me that [naturalists are not] able to provide any sort of an explanation of mathematics’ applicability to the physical world. . . .

The theist has explanatory resources that are not available to the rationalist.

So mathematics does impressive things; therefore, God? And if the theist has useful “explanatory resources,” I wonder if they’re built on evidence.

I’ll resist the temptation to respond for the moment. Let’s first fill out the argument.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

Uncharacteristically, Craig brought expert backup this time. He points to a 1960 paper by Nobel Prize-winning physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Wigner says, “Mathematical concepts turn up in entirely unexpected connections.” More to Craig’s point, he says:

The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural science is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.

Some examples of the applicability of math to the physical world include the ideal gas law, PV = nRT; the inverse-square law; Ohm’s law, V = IR; Newton’s law of gravity, F =Gm1m2/r2; and Maxwell’s equations:

These and myriad other examples illustrate math’s power in describing nature. Wigner concludes:

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Wigner points to the mystery but only hints in the religious direction. It’s Craig who is determined to resolve the mystery with God.

Meta observations

This Argument from Math is just a variant of the Transcendental Argument (discussed at length here), which in turn is just one of many arguments where Christian apologists can only hope to provoke the reaction, “Say, that is curious!”

These are caltrop arguments—they succeed not because they’re correct but because they’re confusing. A successful argument instead follows Hoare’s Dictum: you can make your argument so simple that there are obviously no errors, or you can make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors.

Note too that this Argument from Math is just a deist argument. If you found it convincing, you could only justify becoming a deist. At that point, you’re no closer to Christianity than to Pastafarianism.

The puddle problem

We may find ourselves in the situation of Douglas Adams’ puddle that thought that its hole was made to fit it perfectly, rather than the other way around.

Reality is the hole, and math is the puddle—reality is what it is, and the math adapts as necessary. If one formulation of a law does a poor or incomplete job of explaining the physics (say, when Newton’s law of gravity didn’t work perfectly in environments with extreme gravity), the math can be changed (in this example, by adding corrections to account for General Relativity).

We don’t start with math and then marvel that the universe comports to it; instead, we see what the universe does and then invent stuff (tensors, quaternions, differential equations) that economically describes what we see. Math is a description of reality.

Also note that math has been tuned by reality to be simple. Mathematicians came across matrix operations so often that they developed shorthand versions—the del operator (∇), for example. Expand that out into a more elementary formulation, and it’s not so simple anymore. Or, replace an advanced mathematical idea with its explanation (“What does ‘integral’ mean?”), and you’ve got a textbook chapter—again, not so simple. It’s simple only in its terse form, unhindered by explanations that we laymen would need, but that hides the complex mountain on which it’s built.

Wigner said, “The only physical theories which we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.” Here again, this may not be nature giving us miraculous math but scientists being trained by reality to see what works (and is therefore beautiful) and what doesn’t.

Physicist Max Tegmark responded to Wigner’s idea. He said that a question like “Why is math so good at describing reality?” is like “Why is language so good for conveying ideas?” Language was tuned and adapted to be good for what we need it to do, and the same is true for math.

What is surprising?

Wigner said that Newton’s law of gravity “has proved accurate beyond all reasonable expectations,” but what are these reasonable expectations? That the universe is mathematically describable is surprising only if we expect it to be otherwise (I’ve discussed a related topic here). What then should we expect? Should we expect the same laws of nature but different fundamental constants? Different constants in different parts of the universe? Different laws? Or maybe a structure so chaotic that no equation would be accurate for more than an instant?

Why are any of these possibilities more expected than what we actually have? What’s unreasonable about how math works in our world? Once we study hundreds of other universes, we’ll get a sense of what they look like to compare with our own, but without this data, we have nothing to go on, and we have no grounds on which to formulate “reasonable expectations.”

That’s a big burden on Craig’s shoulders, which he doesn’t even acknowledge. I doubt he has even thought of the problem, and he certainly doesn’t respond to it.

“God did it” is simply a synonym for “we don’t know.” That explains nothing.

To be concluded in part 2.

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe
is that it is comprehensible.
— Albert Einstein

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 02/07/15.)

Image from stuartpilbrow, CC license

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New Testament Manuscript Reliability: the Visual Edition

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poor evidence for new testament bible

Christian apologists say that our copies of the New Testament are backed by early manuscript evidence.

Not really. I’ve responded to that argument in depth here, but let’s revisit the argument visually.

Matthew manuscripts

Here’s the manuscript data for Matthew. Start at year 1 at the bottom of the chart. The years advance moving up, along the left side.

The crucifixion is at about 30 CE, and Matthew was written in about 80. The reddish bar representing this original Matthew, the document we’re trying to recreate, is at year 80 (on the left side). That bar is 1071 verses wide (see the verse count along the bottom).

Cross Examined blog at Patheos.com
Moving up the chart, the first manuscript data point is at the year 150, papyrus #104 (P104) with 7 verses.

Next are three more small manuscripts containing 9, 5, and 10 verses, dated to roughly 200.

At the year 250, we have four more, including Matthew’s largest early manuscript, P45, which has 62 verses.

In 300, we get four more, including our first uncial manuscript, U171, which has 15 verses.

(The oldest New Testament manuscripts are categorized as papyrus [written on papyrus] and uncials [written on parchment using capital Greek letters]. Minuscules [small Greek letters on parchment] and lectionaries [Bible selections used for church services] are additional categories, but those manuscripts aren’t old enough to be on our list.)

Finally, at the top, is Codex Sinaiticus from about 350 CE, which is our oldest complete New Testament.

There are lots more manuscripts containing Matthew, but none older than these. This is the data that attempts to support the argument that our copies of Matthew were built on a reliable foundation of early manuscript evidence.

These 12 pre-Sinaiticus manuscripts were once complete copies of Matthew, but time has eroded them down to just this. What would we learn about Matthew and the volatile message of the early church if these 12 manuscripts were complete? What would we learn if we had every early manuscript copy of Matthew? There might have been dozens. Maybe hundreds.

This chart helps illustrate what little we have to go on when trying to narrow the 300-year gap from originals to the fourth-century codices like Sinaiticus. New Testament scholars do impressive work when finding the likely earliest reading from contradicting sources, but they’re putting together a jigsaw puzzle that has all the pieces but no certainty that any of those pieces are correct. Seen another way, suppose a new papyrus fragment were uncovered that had the vocabulary of a Christian document but didn’t match any known New Testament or noncanonical document. Who’s to say that that’s not actually part of the New Testament but in so early and different a form that we just don’t recognize it?

Finally, let me repeat two caveats. The dates are just educated guesses, and the copies are fragmentary. P45, a few pages of which are shown above, doesn’t contain 62 complete verses of Matthew but contains fragments of 62 verses.

Manuscripts of Paul’s epistles

Let’s look at another section of the New Testament, the seven authentic Pauline epistles, and we’ll find a slightly different story. These epistles are Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.

Cross Examined blog at Patheos.com

The big difference is P46, which has ninety percent of the verses in these 7 letters. While that’s an important contribution, let’s not read too much in it. Instead of one large early manuscript, as with Matthew, we have two for Paul. Remember that the apologist bragging point that started this series of posts was, “There are 25,000 New Testament manuscripts, making it the most reliable ancient document!” It doesn’t really work that way in practice, when only a handful of the oldest manuscripts form the Greek core that is used to make a modern translation.

As discussed in that earlier post, four manuscripts (P45, P46, P66, and P75) are early and large enough to give new insights into the complete New Testament that we have with Sinaiticus. Another 65 manuscripts that also precede Sinaiticus are useful but tiny (some can be seen in the charts above).

Acknowledgement: a thoughtful suggestion from long-time commenter epeeist pushed me to analyze the data visually.

Related posts:

[Why doesn’t God ever appear?]
We only ever seem to get the monkey,
never the organ grinder.
And the monkey always says,
“This is what I say my god wants.”
— commenter epeeist

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Image from Wikimedia, public domain
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New Testament Manuscript Reliability Less Than You’ve Been Told

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We’ve analyzed New Testament manuscript evidence twice to poke holes in claims for its reliability. In short, the manuscript evidence is pretty good considering that it’s so old, but let’s not pretend that we know with certainty what the originals said.

Let’s review those two analyses and move on to a third. Remembering that the New Testament isn’t a book but is actually a library, our third analysis looks at manuscript support for those 27 books individually.

1. 25,000 New Testament manuscripts sounds more impressive than it is

Yes, there are 25,000 New Testament manuscripts, and that’s more than any other book of antiquity. Homer’s Iliad comes in second place, with 1757 manuscripts. On the other hand . . .

  • Only 5800 of those manuscripts are in the original Greek. The rest are translations, are less reliable, and should be discarded in the quest for the best manuscripts.
  • Plot a histogram of the creation date of those Greek manuscript copies. There’s an enormous time gap between the original authorship in the first century and most of those copies. On average, it’s over a thousand years. One amusing instance of ignoring this was in the movie The Case for Christ where a priest showed an illuminated page from Homer, emphasizing that it was written 800 years after the original. What he didn’t mention was that 800 years is better than 90 percent of those Greek New Testament manuscripts (my review of that movie here).
  • The 5800 Greek manuscripts have now become just the hundred or so from before 400 CE that are closest to the originals.

That argument in detail is here.

2. The chapter-by-chapter dates tell a similar story

Codex Sinaiticus, copied in roughly 350 CE, is our oldest complete New Testament. It is a codex (that is, a book rather than a scroll), and it was written on parchment (rather than papyrus, which was the material used for the earliest copies).

It would be easy to simply point to that manuscript and be done with it, but that would mean a three-centuries-long gap from Codex Sinaiticus back to the original authorship in the first century (as early as the 50s CE for Paul’s epistles to 100 or later for John, Revelation, and many of the other epistles). We can reduce that gap with these early manuscripts but by how much?

I’ve found the date of the oldest manuscript for every chapter in the New Testament and charted the time gap to the original here. Matthew’s per-chapter average from original to oldest copy is 200 years. The per-chapter gap for Mark is a little more and for Luke and John a little less. Note that these early chapters are usually incomplete. If a fragment has only a single verse of a chapter, that counts as a “manuscript.”

The average per-chapter gap for the entire New Testament is close to 200 years. That’s a long dark ages period during a tumultuous time for the Christian message.

(Let me apologize for the upcoming deluge of details in this post. I think you’ll be interested in how the clues fit together, and I’ll try to highlight the conclusions so you can clearly see the finished puzzle.)

3. The per-book number of manuscripts is quite small

And now to the topic of this post: let’s look more closely at that handful of manuscript copies that are Greek and early (made before 400 CE).

Image from Cross Examined blog (onlysky.media/bseidensticker)

New Testament Greek manuscripts are sorted into categories. Papyrus copies, usually scrolls, tend to be the oldest. Parchment copies, usually codices, were written on animal skins. The source data for this table is Wikipedia here and here.

To improve on Codex Sinaiticus, this is what we have to work with. The gospels have a decent number of manuscripts—16 for Matthew and 22 for John—but 16 books have 3 or fewer early manuscript copies, and 3 of those have none.

(I erred on the cautious side when making that table, including all manuscripts from 400 or earlier.)

The Matthew manuscripts

Let’s take Matthew as an example to see how the puzzle pieces come together as we move forward through time. Start with the original Matthew, written in 80. Our oldest manuscript is P104 (papyrus #104), dated to 150. It has 7 fragmentary verses from one chapter of Matthew. Keeping in mind that these dates are just educated guesses, that means that 70 years after the original we have less than 1% of the total.

By 200, we have 4 manuscripts and 3% of the verses of Matthew.

By 250, 9 manuscripts and 13%.

By 300, 13 manuscripts and 16%.

And by 350, we have 20 manuscripts and our first complete one, Codex Sinaiticus. At this point, most verses still have only a single version, but at least we have a copy for each.

The other gospels

The numbers are similar for other books, but there’s a new wrinkle. Early manuscripts of Mark would have just 6 verses (less than 1%) before Sinaiticus except for manuscript P45. Add P45, and now we have 23% of the verses in Mark.

The story is similar with John and Luke. They have a decent number of manuscripts (9 for Luke and 22 for John), but manuscripts P75 and P66 along with P45 probably double their pre-Sinaiticus percentage.

Add in P46, which contains a lot of the epistles, and we see these early manuscripts in a new light. We’re trying to recreate the original book with the oldest manuscripts, and our tools are now one complete codex (Sinaiticus) and four good-sized papyrus fragments (P45, P46, P66, and P75). The remaining 65 manuscripts from before 350 are of secondary importance because they typically hold only a dozen verses or so.

Manuscripts: a closer look

Let’s return to Matthew to look at a couple of manuscripts in more detail. Remember that “by 300 CE, we have 16% of the verses of Matthew” means that we have one or more words of 16% of the verses. Consider Papyrus P62, which has Matthew 11:25–30. That’s it—those six verses are a “manuscript.” But it’s not even that since each of those six verses is incomplete.

And don’t imagine that these early manuscripts do little but boringly validate each other. This summary of the character of manuscript P45 is from E. C. Colwell, a paleographer (expert in ancient handwriting).

As an editor the scribe of P45 wielded a sharp axe. The most striking aspect of his style is its conciseness. The dispensable word is dispensed with. He omits adverbs, adjectives, nouns, participles, verbs, personal pronouns—without any compensating habit of addition. He frequently omits phrases and clauses. He prefers the simple to the compound word. In short, he favors brevity.

This scribe, writing in roughly 250, apparently felt little hesitation to improve the text of the Bible, so we should anticipate that from the scribes of other manuscripts.

If the few manuscripts that we have admit that the early Christian centuries were a turbulent time for the biblical message, we must expect at least the same amount of volatility in the perhaps hundreds of manuscripts that are lost. We can only imagine the changes made in the journey from originals to our best copies.

Conclusions

We’ll pull back from all these details to find some conclusions.

  • Let’s review some definitions. “Early” in this domain needn’t be especially early. An early New Testament manuscript could be from 400 CE or earlier, which makes it three centuries or more after the original. “Manuscript” might only be a fragment containing a few verses, and a “verse” need only be a single word.
  • Remember that we started with 25,000 New Testament manuscripts and the claim that that’s a far better foundation than any other ancient document. That number became 5800 Greek manuscripts. Then it became the oldest manuscripts, less than 100. And now the focus is on a single complete codex (Sinaiticus, made roughly 300 years after the originals) plus 4 primary papyrus manuscripts with other manuscripts secondary. This is the foundation that scholars use in recreating the New Testament originals. Those scholars do impressive work, but let’s remember the fragmentary evidence they are stuck with. We can’t be certain what any verse originally said. I have a thought experiment that is helpful to make this point.
  • Even where we have an impressively old and comprehensive manuscript such as P45, we still have a big confidence gap. P45 was written a long time after the gospels—close to 200 years—and it has a unique voice so that merging it with other sources to recreate the original isn’t a simple process.
  • We must be appropriately cautious about manuscript dating. Perhaps you’ve heard about the recent fiasco about a claimed first-century Mark. New Testament scholar Daniel Wallace announced in 2012 that a papyrus manuscript containing a fragment of Mark had been reliably dated to the first century. After six years of rumors (and much bragging by apologists), this manuscript has been re-dated to the late-second/early-third century timeframe. Paleography is a tricky business.
  • All this is a process to get back to the original books, but even if we had them, they would still tell an ancient supernatural story with nothing more to recommend it than any other ancient supernatural story.
  • Let’s accept the popular apologetic argument that the New Testament manuscripts make a better record than that for any other ancient author—Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Sophocles, Julius Caesar, and so on. So what? Nobody much cares if Caesar’s On the Gallic War is full of errors. We don’t take any of their supernatural claims as history, and we certainly don’t use their writings as a template for how to live. A comparison with the Bible is meaningless.

Continue: see this data in visual form here.

Belief in God is based on nothing
but wishful thinking and a fear of the dark.
— commenter Bob Pattinson

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Image from Jakub Kriz, CC license
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God Created the Universe From Nothing—Or Did He?

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The Christian idea of creation ex nihilo, that God created the universe from nothing, is a doctrine within many denominations. The problem appears when Christians try to find it in the Genesis six-day creation story. It’s not there.

Like so many confidently stated doctrines, the Bible doesn’t cooperate. Letting the Bible speak for itself exposes the unsupported claims.

“In the beginning . . .”

The first verse of the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, NIV). It doesn’t say that God created out of nothing, and only the lack of specified materials that God worked with supports creation ex nihilo.

Look more closely at the word created (the Hebrew word bara). This word is used 55 times in the Old Testament. Most instances are translated as “create,” but not all, and few could be read as “create from nothing.” For example, it’s “make a signpost” in Ezekiel 21:19 and “create in me a pure heart” in Psalm 51:10, which are obviously talking about forming out of existing material. The NET Bible agrees: “The verb does not necessarily describe creation out of nothing . . . it often stresses forming anew, reforming, renewing.”

Early church fathers like Justin Martyr and Origen also held that the Genesis creation was from something.

One intriguing hypothesis is that that verse should read, “In the beginning God separated the heavens and the earth” since the universe in Genesis 1 is built with separations. Light is separated from darkness (verse 1:4), water above is separated from water below (1:7), and land is separated from water (1:9).

You can respond that this is educated guesswork and that “create” might still be the best word, but it still doesn’t say “create from nothing.” (And, of course, centuries separate the original Genesis from our best copies and it was oral history before that, so it’s also guesswork what the original said.)

The next story in Genesis, the centuries-older Garden of Eden story, also has God creating, but here he creates using something else—for example, Eve was created from Adam’s rib, and Adam was created from dust.

God did use existing matter—water

Let’s continue the Genesis 1 creation story with verse 2: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The “deep” is the ocean, and the metaphorically relevant aspect here is the ocean as chaos. The six-day creation story shows God creating order from chaos.

This water wasn’t made by God but was material that he worked with. He separated the water into two parts, the sky (held up by a vault) and the ocean (Gen. 1:7). Next, we read “Let [the ocean water] be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear,” so God didn’t create the land either.

The New Testament agrees:

By God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water (2 Peter 3:5).

Combat Myth

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have already noticed hints of the Combat Myth (also known as Chaoskampf, German for “struggle against chaos”). This is a common story structure that appears in the mythology of many cultures. Some of the cultures in the ancient Near East with this myth are (oldest to youngest) Akkadia, Babylon, Ugarit, and Israel. The details were unique to each culture, but the outline is largely the same (more).

First, there’s a threat to the status quo. The threat isn’t evil, it’s chaos. The council of the gods argues about what to do, and none of the older generation of gods steps up to fight the chaos monster. A younger god (unimportant to this point) volunteers. After a fierce battle, this god defeats chaos, order is restored, and he takes his place as the chief god. The human world is formed from the body of the slain chaos monster.

For example, the Akkadian myth has Enlil as the king of the gods. Anzu steals the symbol of kingship, creating chaos. Ninurta steps up to fight Anzu. A clever trick allows Ninurta to defeat Anzu, and he becomes the new king.

Elements of the Genesis story are a little easier to see in the Babylonian version of the combat myth, documented in their creation myth, the Enuma Elis. Tiamat (the female dragon who represented salt water) and Absu (the male fresh water god) were the first gods, and their children formed the younger generation of gods.

Absu eventually grew annoyed with his noisy children and planned on killing them, but they discovered his plan and killed him first. His consort Tiamat was furious and planned revenge. Marduk the storm god responded to the threat, and he killed Tiamat, making him the king of the gods. He formed our world from the body of Tiamat, splitting it and making the heavens from one half and the earth from the other.

Note the similarities:

  • Yahweh and Marduk were both storm gods. Each fought and defeated a threat by chaos, the sea monster. For Marduk, it was Tiamat. For Yahweh, it was Leviathan (also known as Rahab). Job 41 is an entire chapter devoted to its description: “double coat of armor . . . fearsome teeth . . . its back has rows of shields . . . flames stream from its mouth.”
  • The Babylonian story begins with the gods of salt water and of fresh water. Water is also essential in the Genesis story, and “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
  • Marduk creates the heavens and the earth from two halves of Tiamat’s body. Yahweh separates the waters into two parts, the sky and the earth.
  • Another connection is linguistic. The word Tiamat is a linguistic cognate with the Hebrew tehom (the deep).

What we don’t find in Genesis is the beginning of the combat myth, though fragments of that are elsewhere in the Bible. Given the obvious parallels, the earlier Babylonian story must be in the lineage of the Genesis story somewhere, but not every story element made it.

Genesis not only doesn’t say that God created ex nihilo, it makes clear that he didn’t. He used pre-existing water to bring order to chaos. Genesis strongly parallels earlier combat myths, which very explicitly didn’t create from nothing but used the body of the defeated chaos monster.

Related posts:

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
— David Hume

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Image from Wikipedia, CC license
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Turning the Tables on Same-Sex Marriage? Not with THIS Argument (2 of 2).

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In part 1, we reviewed an inept attempt to prove the hypocrisy of same-sex marriage proponents. You say it’s wrong for a Christian baker to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake? Let’s see how you like it when the tables are turned! So they surveyed pro-gay bakers and asked them to bake a wedding cake for a straight wedding.

Kidding! There’d be no story in that case, because the bakers would’ve all been happy for the business. And why not? Same-sex marriage advocates (going forward, I’ll sometimes call them “liberals”) are embracing marriage, not disparaging it. No, the experiment was actually to ask pro-gay bakers to bake a cake with the slogan, “Gay Marriage is Wrong.” I discussed the problems with this experiment in part 1.

Blogger Tom Gilson has wrestled with problem of why the anti-same-sex (“conservative”) position has done poorly.

Six steps to a stronger conservative position.

How do the conservatives improve their strategy? Gilson offers some suggestions.

“First, we need to do our homework.” He encourages his side to study the argument thoroughly.

No, he doesn’t want to reconsider his position.

Or consider that same-sex marriage expands marriage rather than attacks it.

Or observe that it does absolutely nothing to harm the marriages of straight people and that if straight people don’t like gay marriage, they can just not get gay married.

Or wonder if maybe there are far bigger problems in the world that deserve their attention or ask what Jesus would do.

No, he just wants to double down on the conservative position and work on positioning the message with better PR.

“Second, we need to identify the other side’s rhetorical weakness.” The pro-same-sex marriage side shows a sympathetic face when arguing for their position, he says, but they’re nasty when attacking the conservative position. He gives some examples of weak points in his opponents’ position.

2a: Liberals say the conservatives are haters. But when they disagree, they’re just as hateful.

We can say that disagreement = hatred, and with that definition the two sides would be symmetric. But the goals are different, and expanding marriage is a far more loving goal than making it a gated community. Your rhetorical problem remains.

2b: Liberals blather on about marriage equality, but they don’t really believe that. They put constraints on marriage, too.

A definition makes clear what is included as well as what is not. Obviously, everyone puts limits on the definition of marriage just like they do for every other word. Gilson imagines that “marriage equality” must mean no constraints at all and that it accepts incestuous, bigamous, and other controversial unions. A quick look at how the term is used makes clear that this disingenuous complaint is groundless.

And note that his examples are arguably harmful options. Same-sex marriage isn’t harmful to anyone, not even to Christians. If it makes Jesus sad, he should let us know.

“Third, we need to be wiser about finding points of rhetorical symmetry.” Instead of demanding that gay bakers make hateful cakes (which he never sees the rhetorical problem with), he says that it would be rhetorically more productive to ask them to cater conferences for the anti-same-sex marriage position. “If they refuse, then that’s clearly discriminating.” Gotcha!

No, it doesn’t work that way. U.S. federal law recognizes protected classes that can’t be discriminated against. A business that provides public accommodation must (with few exceptions) serve all the public and can’t discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, sex, disability, age, and other categories. States have added additional classes. For example, Colorado made discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal in 2008. This was the law broken in the 2012 Masterpiece Cakeshop case in which a Christian baker refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Retail stores have rights to free speech and can limit their customers, but those rights have limits. They violate the law if they refuse to serve someone simply because they’re in a class that’s protected. You can’t refuse to serve someone because they’re a Christian, a woman, or a Mexican, and (at least in Colorado) you can’t refuse to serve someone because that person is homosexual. On the other hand, a baker breaks no law when refusing to cater a National Organization of Marriage conference against same-sex marriage or a Westboro (“God Hates Fags”) Baptist Church picnic.

Again, I make the challenge: ask pro-gay bakers to bake wedding cakes for straight weddings. Show me one who won’t make an inoffensive wedding cake for a straight, Christian couple, and I’m on your side.

“Fourth, we need to put real faces on our position.” He suggests finding adult children of same-sex couples who have bad stories to tell.

Sure, you can find people who had a bad experience growing up with same-sex parents. But you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who had problems growing up with straight parents. What does that tell us? Seems to me that it says that marriage in the real world is imperfect. If you want to fret about marriage, focus on the social conditions that put pressure on all marriages.

“Fifth, even though it’s an uphill battle, we need to continue to explain and defend moral truth.”

Your “moral truth” is looking pretty hateful right about now; that’s why it’s an uphill battle. You still want to go with that as your final answer? Thirty years from now, the predominant Christian message on this subject will celebrate Christian leaders who took the tough stand to embrace homosexuals and accept same-sex marriage. History is listening.

“Finally and most importantly, we need to bear in mind that there is a spiritual asymmetry here as well.” The point here seems to be that Christians can’t forget the biblical reasons to reject same-sex marriage.

First, biblical reasons mean nothing in the secular public square. U.S. local, state, and federal government can’t make laws to advance a religious goal. In this domain, an argument that has only a Christian justification has no justification.

Second, the biblical argument against same-sex marriage is nonexistent (here, here). The Bible is a Rorschach test, and you read yourself into it. Don’t pretend that the Bible speaks unambiguously on this subject.

Look around you. There are millions of Christians happy to accept the liberal position. Two adults want to celebrate their love for each other—what’s not to like? These Christians feel no tension with their religious beliefs. What does it say about you that you can’t go there?

Some points of agreement

I think there’s more common ground than Gilson wants to admit. Obvious fact #1: the definition of marriage has changed over time. Biblical marriage, with its polygamy and other weird rules is a distant memory, and marriage continues to change today. Just in my lifetime, laws in the U.S. restricting marriage to people of the same race have been eliminated, divorce has become much easier, adultery is being decriminalized, and marital rape is now illegal. Even today, there are subtle differences between states’ definitions of marriage—different ages of consent, different restrictions on whether cousins can be married, different eligibility requirements, and so on.

Obvious fact #2: a definition imposes limits. Whether same-sex marriage is legal or illegal, there is no slippery slope problem. Conservatives don’t want to broaden marriage so that someone can marry their sex toy, and neither do liberals.

When you drop the fantasy that marriage is an unchanged institution since Adam and Eve, the same-sex marriage position seems a lot more reasonable. I doubt this will be persuasive, though. I think that Gilson is stuck with his position and doesn’t care which side has the stronger argument. He uses his substantial intellect to defend the conservative position, right or wrong.

A final jab

Gilson concludes his article by doubling down on the original message.

Before [this] experiment, no one ever seems to have thought of doing anything so thoughtlessly rude, except for the gays who asked conservatives to make cakes for their celebrations.

Seriously? Gays are thoughtlessly rude to expect equal access in public accommodation? Understand the law.

Gilson wants to know what the big deal is. So Straight-laced Christian Cakes won’t serve “your kind”? Not a problem:

I thought about the reported responses the conservatives gave: respectful, offering advice on other places people could be served, and compared it to [the angry responses] reportedly heard in response to [the request to bake “Gay Marriage is Wrong” cakes].

Are you also okay with a baker telling the Chinese couple or mixed-race couple that he didn’t approve of their marriage, but that there were other bakers in town without his high standards who might stoop to serve them?

And if same-sex marriage doesn’t exist for you, then what’s the problem? As far as you’re concerned, this is just a cake for a party. (h/t commenter Kodie)

While we’re offering “respectful” advice, let me offer some: if a wedding cake baker can’t follow the law, they can bake something besides wedding cakes or find another job.

And then I thought, Why do they accuse us of being the haters?

A trick question, perhaps? In this case, it’s because the experiment you applaud was hateful! And I keep coming back to the central issue. We’re not talking about a cake sculpture illustrating a lynching, a massacre, or the Kama Sutra. It’s a cake for a wedding! I can hardly imagine a worse event for conservative Christians to line up against.

You’re trying to improve your PR, but you’re still stuck with opposing a wedding cake. And you’re baffled why you’re labeled as haters?

Think about it for a minute.

Why is it that the same justices so eager
to bestow human rights upon corporations
are so reluctant to recognize them
as applying to actual human beings?
— Richard S. Russell

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/28/15.)

Image credit: andrluXphoto, flickr, CC

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