Category Archives: Deep Dive>Religion

Revisiting Hitchens’ challenge and the value of hope

Posted on by

Atheist Christopher Hitchens had a moral challenge for Christians: identify a moral action taken or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer that couldn’t be taken or uttered by a nonbeliever—something that only a believer could do and an atheist couldn’t. Part 1 is here.

A second apologist, this time a Catholic, also has some pushback for the Hitchens Challenge. Towards that end, he makes some nutty claims about the value of Christian hope.

Hitchens assumed—like many secular thinkers—that the only good is the good of social or material progress. An atheist can ladle soup in a soup kitchen—same as a Christian—so Christianity must not bring anything to the table….

It’s just not true that soup ladles are the sole measure of value. Catholicism, in particular, for all its good works and charity, has always rejected the idea that religion should aim for Utopia in this world or that it exists only to promote material wellbeing. “The Church is not an NGO,” as Pope Francis says frequently.

You got that right—the church is a terrible NGO! Americans give $100 billion annually to religion. The Roman Catholic Church’s annual intake worldwide must be far larger. The Catholic Church gives a lot of money to charity, but that’s only because it is huge. As a percentage of the Church’s expenses, I’m guessing that charity accounts for two percent. That’s an educated guess, but it’s just a guess because churches’ books are (unaccountably) closed (one wonders what they’re trying to hide).

With 98% overhead, they’d be the world’s most inefficient NGO.

This response sounds like, “Hitchens was right, but that’s okay because the church never claimed to produce progress.” I can accept that. (More on Christianity’s disinterest in social progress here.)

An aside on Mother (now Saint) Teresa

Back to the article: 

Perhaps this is why Hitchens hated Mother Theresa [sic] so much. (He wrote viciously about her.) He understood her mission better than many. He knew that her main goal was not social work, but mysticism. “We are misunderstood, we are misrepresented, we are misreported,” Mother Theresa said. “We are not nurses, we are not doctors, we are not teachers, we are not social workers. We are religious, we are religious, we are religious.”

That’s an embarrassing admission, that “her main goal was not social work, but mysticism,” but I appreciate the honesty. Now show me the check box that donors to Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity had to mark to acknowledge that they understand that “We are not nurses, we are not doctors, we are not teachers, we are not social workers. We are religious.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars went into this charity, and an enormous fraction—I’m guessing most of it—was because the donors assumed that they were funding healthcare.

Hitchens might have hated Mother Teresa, but that would’ve been because of the disconnect between her public image as a healer and the reality of her homes for the sick being little more than comfortable places to die. Her charity received vast donations, but Forbes reported that “only seven percent of the donation received at Missionaries of Charity was used for charity.”

The greatest thing faith brings is hope

Nope, Teresa wasn’t focused on improving life here on earth.

Mother Theresa knew (and struggled with the fact) that the greatest value of religious faith in this life is not material wellbeing, but the gift of transcendent hope. That’s something a believer can give that Hitchens can never give.

Just to be argumentative, I could see an atheist claiming transcendent hope. Imagine a story about aliens coming to free us from our mortal coils as with the Heaven’s Gate cult. An extraterrestrial technology claim is as groundless a claim as a supernatural one (though less farfetched), but that could be a transcendent hope.

The key point isn’t that it’s transcendent hope but that it’s evidence-less hope, hope that can be in anything because it needn’t have evidence to support it.

But you’re right that atheists avoid giving groundless transcendent hope. Is that a problem? Science gives reality and grounded hope. Science is what’s working on cures for disease or ways to improve food yields. Science is where improvement comes from, and that’s where atheists usually get their hope.

Note the contrast. Christianity has put all its eggs in the “gift of transcendental hope” basket. It’s not like it’s simultaneously using its own methods to solve society’s problems. Christianity is static. A thousand years of Christianity’s “transcendent hope” in a desperate society gives you a thousand years of the same desperate society, while a thousand years of science can transform that society to one that is happy and healthy, one where groundless hope is much less needed.

Christianity can still flog its claims of a beautiful afterlife, but so what? Yes, it’s a remarkable, possibly desirable claim, but so what when there’s no evidence for it? Science has nothing to offer except a continually improving reality (and mountains of evidence that it delivers).

Faith, hope, and love are precisely the formula for happiness even in the midst of material deprivation.

Not when that faith, hope, and love paper over the actual problems in society. A life that is drugged to block out a horrible reality is a wasted life. I’m in no position to criticize someone who falls back on hope to endure a desperate life, but see how it directs our attention to feeling better and away from solving problems.

This was where Karl Marx was going with his observation that religion is the opium of the people. He was complimenting religion—it helps when society is in bad shape. But in the same way that opium only addresses the symptoms of a broken leg (you should still get medical treatment), religion only addresses the symptoms of bad society (you still need to fix that society).

The research of Gregory Paul is relevant here. He not only points out that religious belief correlates with worse social metrics, he also hypothesizes that poor social conditions cause more religion (more). In other words, when you see religion embraced by some subset of society, those people have social problems that need fixing.

How to get a better society

But even if nonbelievers do good things, there is still no reason to conclude that unbelief is the best stance for advancing material and social wellbeing. [One source compellingly argued,] “Human development is best advanced by transcendent hope.”

We’re just going to hope our way to an improved society? Not going to do anything about it, just hope? That reminds me of William Lane Craig’s portrayal of life here on earth as “the cramped and narrow foyer leading to the great hall of God’s eternity.” Wow—what an empty view of the one life we can all agree that we actually have.

Instead of making do, instead of wringing our hands in despair, perhaps we should get busy trying to improve the status quo by solving problems.

The fact is that atheists don’t ladle as much soup as Catholics. It was the Catholic Church that invented the modern institutions of benevolence.

You mean modern institutions of benevolence like Social Security, Medicare, medical insurance, and modern hospitals? The Catholic Church’s small contribution to charity is appreciated, but let’s not exaggerate it. U.S. churches together contribute a few billion dollars to the problem annually while the U.S. government and other institutions devote a few trillion dollars to the problem.

You could sneer at that and say that that’s just money returning to the taxpayers or the insured who provided it in the first place. And that’s true. But it’s still citizens caring for other citizens, redistributing wealth to help the orphans and widows that Jesus cared so much about. The Church in America makes a tiny fraction of this impact.

As for atheists vs. Catholics, even if Catholics do more per capita on assuaging pain (and I’m not sure that’s the case), atheists probably focus more on the fix-society side of the problem.

[The Catholic Church invented the modern institutions of benevolence] precisely because Catholics believe in the transcendent dignity of human beings.

This is what the Hitchens Challenge addresses. There is no benevolent act that Catholics do that couldn’t be performed by an atheist.

See also: When Christianity Was in Charge, This Is What We Got.

The Hitchens Challenge, part 2

Hitchens has more. Once you’ve seen that a nonbeliever can perform the same good moral actions that a believer can, think of the reverse: think of something terrible that only a believer would do or say. Now, lots of examples come to mind.

  • Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac (and modern apologists defending God’s indecipherable actions)
  • The Canaanite genocide
  • “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” and witch burnings
  • “God hates fags” from Westboro Baptist Church
  • Flying a plane into a building or blowing yourself up to kill people you don’t like

Or any hateful or selfish conclusion justified by “because God (or the Bible) says” such as condemning homosexuality, blocking civil rights, limiting stem cell research, or dropping adoption services or hospital funding in protest of some law.

The article responds that, sure, religion can make people do evil things, but that’s “obviously true of secular ideology. All ideology is subject to abuse and manipulation.”

So we’re to believe that anything bad done in the name of Christianity is just an “abuse and manipulation” of Christianity and that Christianity, read correctly, doesn’t actually justify that? Who will be the judge to sift out the correct interpretations from the many incorrect ones?

The Bible is a sock puppet that can be made to justify just about anything. Let’s not pretend that there’s one objectively correct interpretation when thousands of Christian denominations squabble over the correct path.

The Hitchens Challenge remains a helpful illustration that Christianity has no moral upside (atheists can be just as moral as Christians) but has a big downside (religious belief can justify in the believer’s mind moral evil that an atheist would never imagine).

With or without religion,
you would have good people doing good things
and evil people doing evil things.
But for good people to do evil things,
that takes religion.
— Steven Weinberg

When Christians confuse an explanation with an argument

Posted on by

Years ago, I came upon a fascinating psychological experiment. Like the best of these, it was very simple.

It’s called the Copy Machine study. In 1977, when giant copy machines were shared office equipment, psychologist Ellen Langer had her research assistants try to cut into the line of people waiting to make copies. They tried three ways. The first approach was to say, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” It was polite but minimal, and it worked 60 percent of the time.

Next, they added a reason: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?” This worked 94 percent of the time.

But the final approach was a surprise. They asked, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?” It worked 93 percent of the time. It had the form of the second one, with the “because” clause, but there’s no real reason here.

Langer concluded that the form of the request was the trick, and having a “because” clause is important. It satisfies the subconscious need for a reason, regardless of whether there’s a good reason in there or not.

We find something like this empty “because” clause in many Christian arguments.

Explanation vs. argument

There’s a difference between (1) explaining how you see things or how your worldview fits together and (2) making an argument with evidence to convince me to adopt your worldview. Said another way, the two options are explaining how you see it (explanation) vs. how I should see it (argument). Apologists sometimes focus on (1) and forget that the words coming out of their mouths are backed by zero evidence.

The Strange Notions blog has an example of a Christian explanation.

[Atheist objection:] God is supposed to be all good. But he both permits evil to exist and even causes it through punishments. So God must not be all good.

[Catholic reply:] God is so good and so perfect that he permits evil to exist, and brings greater good out of it.

This reply is Catholic dogma. It’s how Catholics are supposed to think about the problem, and, as an atheist, it may be helpful for me to understand. But use it as an argument, and questions surge forward. How do we know God is good? Why should we think that all the evil in the world is there for a greater good? Why is this the best a perfect God can do? How do we even know he exists? And so on.

As “Here is how I see things,” it does the job. As an explanation that resolves reasonable questions, it fails.

“God did it” is the premiere example of an explanation rather than an argument. It explains part of someone’s worldview, but it’s no convincing argument.

The best explanations are prefaced with something like, “Okay, here’s how it makes sense to me.” For example, “Here’s how it makes sense to me: there is evil in the world, but God permits it and uses it to create a greater good” or “Here’s how it makes sense to me: God did it.” The Christian is making clear that this isn’t intended as a convincing argument.

An explanation has its place, and it may help you understand how something makes sense in a Christian’s mind. But it can be dismissed without consideration if it’s given instead of an argument.

Example 2: Trinity

Another example is the Trinity. The Athanasian Creed explains the incompatible properties that the Trinity must have. That creed is an explanation, not an argument. Imagine trying to explain to a Muslim, who shares the same god of the Old Testament, that the Trinity is not polytheism.

Example 3: consciousness

Apologist Sean McDowell insists that human consciousness must be explained.

Any honest atheist or naturalist would say at least minimally they don’t know the mechanism of how consciousness or mind can emerge from matter. But this actually isn’t a problem for a Christian or a theistic worldview, because God, who is a mind, exists before matter. We’re made body and soul, mind and matter. So it makes sense, if God is spirit, that we would be beings with spirit (@21:45).

God is a mind. God existed before matter. Humans are body and soul. I need to make copies.

Explanations are not arguments.

Example 4: providing evidence

At the “There’s no hate like Atheist love” Facebook page is a meme that reads, “Science is the study of God’s Creation. Therefore, if it doesn’t acknowledge His handiwork in all things it’s not science—it’s pseudoscience.”

In the comments beneath was this (abbreviated) exchange between Carl, who created the meme, and Alec:

Alec: Nice claim. Where is the evidence?

Carl: This is an axiom of science.

Alec: You claim there is a god and it is the work of said god. So, where is the evidence?

Carl: Everywhere

In an open exchange, in response to Alec’s request for evidence, Carl would’ve said, “Hold on—let me be clear. I’m not claiming to make an argument. I’m just explaining how it fits together in my mind. I’m making no demands on you.” In other words, he’d clarify that he was giving an explanation only, not an argument. And, of course, if Carl didn’t feel this way but was presenting the meme as an argument, then it can be dismissed without consideration.

Example 5: illusionist

This example comes from Barry Goldberg’s Common Sense Atheism blog.

Suppose you see a stage magic show with some friends. Everyone loves it. Afterwards, you mention your favorite trick and say that it seemed completely impossible.

One of your friends says that he is something of an amateur illusionist himself and can explain the trick. Everyone leans in.

He says, “The magician used real magic. He cast a spell.”

Is this satisfactory? Of course not—again, it’s an explanation where an argument is expected. To be an argument, it would need to resolve the questions it provokes. Is all stage magic real magic? How did the illusionist get magical powers? How does spell casting work from the standpoint of physics? And so on.

It’s like “God did it”—a claim that generates more questions than it resolves. How did God do it? What laws of physics (both known and unknown) were used or violated?

Another example is the Shroud of Turin, the claimed burial cloth that holds a faint image of Jesus as he was supernaturally zapped back to life. “God did it,” of course, but the same questions are unanswered.

Conclusion

We see Christianity’s explanation-over-argument problem everywhere. Jesus needed to die for humanity’s sins. Why? How does this make sense to someone outside your worldview?

Only with faith can you please God. Why?

Every human is tainted by Adam’s sin. Why?

Next time you read a Christian apologetic, be careful to separate it into explanation and argument. Discard any explanation pretending to be an argument and see if any substance remains.

“God did it” isn’t an argument. It’s just an explanation. You might as well say, “I need to make copies.”

See also: Stupid Argument #20a: Science can’t explain everything; therefore, God

(I apologize for the lack of articles last week! I was vacationing in sunny Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and, in the last-minute rush, didn’t have time to fill the queue. I’m now back where I belong, in windy, rainy Seattle, dreaming of summer.)

[Many Christians believe in] a God greater than which
none can be conceived
but also in a gospel greater than which
it’s totally easy to conceive.
— Josh Watson on Twitter

Easter potpourri: a look at the crucifixion, resurrection, and much more

Posted on by

(Easter news! John Loftus is the prolific force behind the fantastic Debunking Christianity blog. In a curious fit of Easter enthusiasm, he’s giving away Kindle copies of his book The Case Against Miracles. The offer is just for 24 hours, Easter only, Pacific Daylight Time. Click here!)

What’s the first Sunday after the first full moon after the March equinox? It’s Easter! Here are some Easter articles.

I regard the brain as a computer
which will stop working when its components fail.
There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers;
that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
— Stephen Hawking

Hitchens’ Challenge: How well has it stood up?

Posted on by

Identify a moral action taken or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer that couldn’t be taken or uttered by a nonbeliever—something that only a believer could do and an atheist couldn’t.

This was Christopher Hitchens’ famous moral challenge. He said that he had never been given a satisfactory answer.

Amy Hall from Greg Koukl’s Stand to Reason ministry thinks she is up to the challenge. Let’s take a look.

1. Hitchens misunderstands the theist’s point

[Hitchens thinks the Christian is saying] that without God, we couldn’t know right from wrong, when the actual objection is that there wouldn’t be any right or wrong.

I believe Hitchens was responding to the assumption that being a Christian provided some moral advantage. (And, according to Christianity, it does: “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin” (1 John 5:18).)

And if you want to argue that morality exists only because God put it there, that needs some evidence. You’ve provided none (more on Christians’ inability to defend the claim of objective morality here).

2. The Challenge is unanswerable

This is a clever observation: if Hitchens the atheist is the judge of the Hitchens Challenge, the Christian can’t win because he decides what is moral.

There might be certain acts that only theists would recognize as being moral. Atheists, not recognizing those acts as being good, would not attempt to do them as moral acts.

The first problem is that this undercuts another popular Christian apologetic argument. What’s wrong with Hitchens as judge—don’t you say that morality is objective? If morality is objective (defined by apologist William Lane Craig as “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not”) and we humans can reliably access those values, Hitchens or any honest atheist would be as good a judge as anyone.

Since it is logically impossible to give an answer that will satisfy Hitchens, he may as well ask us to draw him a square circle and then declare himself the winner when we fail. In the end, his challenge is nothing but a rhetorical trick, and it should be exposed and dismissed as such. Hitchens should never get away with even asking it, let alone demanding we give him an “acceptable” answer in order to defend theism.

I’m reminded of the lawyer’s maxim, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.” There’s a lot of table pounding here along with the demand that the Challenge be dismissed as inadmissible.

The resolution is simple: insist that objective, unbiased third parties must judge this Challenge. If Christians like those from Stand to Reason believe that objective moral facts can be reliably found, they can find judges who are infallible at finding objective morality. Prove to everyone that they are reliable with public tests. Now we have judges that everyone admits are reliable, and Hall’s concern is satisfied.

As it happens, there is an answer to Hitchens’s question—one that seemed obvious to me immediately—and it illustrates perfectly the problem with the challenge. The highest moral good a person can do is to worship the living, true, sovereign God—to love Him with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. Not only will no atheist ever do this, no atheist can do this.

That’s the pinnacle of morality? It’s an odd definition of morality that has nothing to do with doing good to living beings, but I guess Christians can define their dogma as they choose. And that’s the point: this is dogma that is specific to Christians. Our objective, unbiased third party judges would reject this. (More on how praise applied to God makes no sense here.)

Now it looks like it’s you who’s playing the rhetorical trick.

If we all share Adam’s sin, we must all have the moral wisdom of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. How then can atheists not agree with you that worship is the highest moral good?

Let’s return to the Challenge. Hitchens was simply saying that Christians can claim no moral high ground over atheists and that Christianity brings nothing moral to the table that wasn’t already part of humanity’s social interaction. God pretends to generously gives morality to humans, but, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, it was theirs all along.

Concluded in part 2 with one more Christian response.

If there is a God,
He will have to beg my forgiveness.
—  written on a wall in
Mauthausen concentration camp

Polygamy (and other outdated institutions that God approves of)

Posted on by

Our Christian guide to the Bible’s response to polygamy has let us down, so let’s take a look ourselves at what the Bible says.

We’ve been responding to an article by Robby Lashua of the Stand to Reason ministry (part 1). We’ll conclude with a focus on what the Bible actually says.

The Bible’s strong stand against polygamy … or not

The Bible lays out the rules for polygamy (just like it does for another awkward social institution).

  • An additional wife shall not cause prior wives to be shortchanged (Exodus 21:10).
  • A man’s inheritance isn’t divided based on which wife he loves most but on the birth order of his sons (Deuteronomy 21:15–17).
  • “When Solomon became old, his wives shifted his allegiance to other gods; he was not wholeheartedly devoted to the Lord his God, as his father David had been” (1 Kings 11:4). Again, this is no criticism of polygamy directly, just that this was a pitfall to avoid.
  • A leader in the Christian church must be “faithful to his wife” or “the husband of one wife,” which suggests monogamy (1 Timothy 3:2, 3:12; Titus 1:6). While the New Testament doesn’t criticize polygamy, as is true for the Old Testament, this wasn’t much of an issue. Polygamy had been unpopular for centuries by the time of Jesus.

Lashua adds one more Bible rule:

Not only does God never command or condone polygamy, but he also condemns it. In Deuteronomy 17, God gives instructions for the future kings of Israel, and he specifically condemns taking on many wives. “He shall not multiply wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away” (Deut. 17:17). In other words, God wasn’t okay with David and Solomon having multiple wives, and they disobeyed his commands.

Bravo for admitting the limitation in this verse: it applies only to kings. This is no condemnation of polygamy in general.

Let’s build on our vocabulary lesson on prescriptive norms, proscriptive norms, and mere descriptions (see part 1). Lashua says, “Not only does God never command or condone polygamy, but he also condemns it.”

There’s a lot wrong here. No, God didn’t command polygamy, but neither did he condemn (proscribe) it. The Bible describes polygamy without criticism, and God lays out the rules for (prescribes) polygamy.

Lashua says, “God wasn’t okay with David and Solomon having multiple wives.”

No, God was fine with David having multiple wives. After David slept with Bathsheba and then arranged for her husband Uriah to be killed, God spoke through Nathan the prophet to criticize David’s ungratefulness: “I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more” (2 Samuel 12:8). God had complaints about David, but his polygamy wasn’t one of them.

I have higher standards for God. If he had a problem with polygamy, I’m sure he could have clearly said so.

Grasping for Bible verses

Lashua is wrapping up his argument.

What does God prescribe for marriage? Monogamy. From the very beginning, God said marriage was one man and one woman becoming one flesh for one lifetime (Gen. 2:24). We can deduce this from the fact that God only gave Adam one wife, not multiple. We can also see that marriage comes with the command to be fruitful and multiply, something that only requires one male and one female.

Let’s first remember God’s stand on sex and marriage. It’s crazy—or, at least crazy when seen from a modern standpoint.

  • God prohibited interracial marriage.
  • He allowed marriage through rape (Deut. 22:28–9).
  • He decreed that captured girls be used as sex slaves (Numbers 31:17–18).
  • A male Jewish slave could be released after his term was up, but any wife given to him by his master remained the master’s property.
  • Levirate marriage demanded that if a man died before having children, that man’s brother must marry his sister-in-law to create an heir for the dead man.
  • Jesus overruled Moses on divorce, and Paul rejected divorce entirely (1 Cor. 7:10–11).

More: Biblical Marriage: Not a Pretty Picture

Returning to Lashua, no, “monogamy” isn’t the summation of God’s thoughts on sex and marriage. Until Christians accept all the Bible’s Iron Age rules, they have no grounds for saying about polygamy, “God said it; that settles it.” Anyway, God didn’t prohibit polygamy.

And since most Christians are fans of objective morality—morality that exists whether there’s anyone here to appreciate it or not—I’m also looking for a solid case that polygamy is objectively wrong. The only defense of objective morality I’ve ever seen is some variation of, “we can all agree that this is immoral, right?” This is no defense at all.

That Adam had only one wife in the story is hardly a proscription against polygamy. You shouldn’t be looking for a man marrying a woman; you should be looking for his not marrying a second woman. A man marrying his first wife is just the first step to polygamy.

Monogamy was also Jesus’ view.

But it wasn’t Paul’s. Paul felt that celibacy was the best path. He said, “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: it is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:8–9).

Hail Mary pass

We’re almost out of time, and the coach puts in Jesus as quarterback. Let’s see what he comes up with.

[Jesus said:] “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (Matt. 19:4–6).

“Two become one” is a powerful image for marriage, but a man can become one with wife #1, then become one with wife #2, and so on. Polygamy isn’t one big group marriage but successive individual marriages.

If the Ten Commandments had room for don’t covet, it could’ve had room for no polygamy. I have higher standards for God. If he had a problem with polygamy, I’m sure he could have clearly said so.

Remember that polygamy wasn’t really a thing within Jewish culture during the time of Jesus, so we shouldn’t expect Jesus to have addressed it.

In short, polygamy is described as having devastating consequences for those who practice it and for those born as a result of it.

Nope. You’re using the Bible as a sock puppet. God gives guidelines for how to do polygamy properly, but God didn’t proscribe polygamy.

So, how should we view the patriarchs of the Old Testament who practiced polygamy? First, we must recognize that polygamy is described as something they practiced but never as something God prescribed.

God did indeed prescribe polygamy. See the list of rules at the beginning of this article, above.

Monogamy and slavery—God gave rules for each

Consider commerce, an institution with minimal moral baggage. Sure, there are plenty of ways to be an immoral merchant, but, with wise rules governing commerce, the good outweighs the bad. Look in Proverbs, and we see some of these rules: “The Lord detests differing weights, and dishonest scales do not please him” (Proverbs 20:23). In fact, Proverbs insists on accurate weights and measures four times.

We see God setting rules—prescriptive norms—to make sure commerce runs correctly. We see the same thing with slavery—God set rules to guide slavery rather than prohibiting it. And here we see the same thing with polygamy—God created rules to guide it, and he has no problem with the institution overall.

Lessons learned

Let’s take a step back and sift out lessons from our journey.

  1. If the Bible plainly says one thing, but you feel the urge to whitewash it with a nicer interpretation, think about what that means. Which alternative is more honest, and why are you not drawn to the plain interpretation? Don’t be a liar for Jesus. Let the Bible speak for itself.
  2. Hitler was a bad man, and he was a vegetarian. If you want to claim a cause-and-effect relationship (Hitler was bad because he was a vegetarian, for example), you need to do the work to make a compelling case. Similarly, was Lamech a murderer because he had multiple wives? You can’t just claim that; you need to show your work. I realize that this is an elementary error, but unfortunately, Lashua’s article needs this fundamental point to be made clear.
  3. Old Testament culture had commerce, slavery, and polygamy. We don’t get to apply today’s moral evaluation but must let the Bible speak for itself. For all three, the Bible is both prescriptive (it makes rules for how to do things properly) and descriptive (it mentions these institutions without stopping to criticize). If God wanted to prohibit any of them, I’m certain he could’ve made that clear.

Millions long for immortality
who don’t know what to do with themselves
on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
— Susan Ertz

The problem of polygamy: how to refurbish the Bible’s good reputation?

Posted on by

Polygamy in the Bible embarrasses today’s Christian apologist. If it’s wrong today, how could it have been moral in Old Testament times? Or is it not wrong today?

The problem with polygamy

A recent article (“Polygamy in the Bible is Not Prescriptive”) from Robby Lashua of Stand to Reason agrees:

The ugly truth is that many of the heroes in the Old Testament were polygamists. Jacob had two wives and Esau had three. King David, the man after God’s own heart, had at least eight wives. Solomon, not to be outdone, had a staggering seven hundred wives.

Right from the beginning, the moral evaluation of various pieces of the argument are made clear. (1) Polygamy is “ugly,” bad, embarrassing. And (2) the Bible makes plain that many Old Testament heroes were polygamists, and that’s awkward. Lashua’s goal is soon clear: we must find a way to acknowledge polygamy in the Bible while salvaging the moral positions of God and the Bible. The reputations of the patriarchs are expendable, and they can be thrown under the bus as necessary.

Our goal is to understand how polygamy is really presented in the Bible. We’ll follow along with Lashua’s argument, taking it as a representative Christian response to polygamy. Along the way, we’ll see how not to make a defense of the Bible.

There’s no more disgrace in “Patriarch X had two wives” than in “Patriarch Y had a hundred sheep.”

Prescriptive, proscriptive, or descriptive?

How is polygamy treated in the Bible? Is it good, bad, or just a trait of society with no more moral value than where the utensils go on a dining table?

Lashua gives a Bible example.

The first mention of polygamy in Scripture says, “Lamech took to himself two wives” (Gen. 4:19). We are then told that Lamech, a descendant of Cain, boasted to his wives about murdering a boy (Gen. 4:23). Lamech was a bad man, and polygamy is something he practiced.

Huh? I agree that murdering someone is morally wrong, but what’s that got to do with polygamy? Where is the cause and effect in “Lamech was a bad man, and polygamy is something he practiced”? Was Lamech bad because he practiced polygamy? The Bible doesn’t say this, and Lashua has done nothing to make this connection.

His article suggests we get our terms straight, and finally there’s something to agree on.

  • A prescriptive norm is something we should do. It might be a law, like paying taxes. Or maybe just shared wisdom, like the importance of brushing your teeth regularly.
  • A proscriptive norm is the opposite—it’s something we shouldn’t do. For example, drinking and driving is proscribed.
  • Finally, a custom can simply be described.

In the Bible, God’s commandments are prescriptive if they’re demands to do something (animal sacrifice, for example). Or commandments can be proscriptive when they prohibit or condemn something (the rules in Leviticus about who not to have sex with, for example). Finally, the Bible is simply descriptive when it documents society’s customs without giving a moral critique—clothing, housing, herding livestock, commerce, and so on … and polygamy.

How does the Bible see polygamy?

Let’s put this new vocabulary to use. Lashua says,

Are these passages about polygamy prescriptive or descriptive? Are they prescribing how we are supposed to live, or are they describing events from the past?

Many passages in Scripture describe events God doesn’t condone. Lot’s daughters getting him drunk and having sex with him comes to mind (Gen. 19:32–36). But many passages of Scripture prescribe how we are to live as followers of God, such as when Jesus prescribes loving God with all of our heart, soul, and mind (Matt. 22:37).

Is polygamy prescriptive? The short answer is no.

Is polygamy in the Bible made mandatory? No. But this is the wrong question. We must ask if the Bible proscribes polygamy—that is, prohibits it. It doesn’t.

In lieu of an actual argument, the article gives more guilt-by-association tales of polygamists with no indication that polygamy causes anything.

Jacob’s firstborn son, Reuben, by his first wife Leah, had sex with Bilhah, Jacob’s concubine (Gen. 35:22). David’s son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar and was then killed by Tamar’s full brother Absalom (2 Sam. 13). Absalom then tried to usurp the throne from his father David and had sex with David’s concubines (2 Sam. 16:22). Solomon “had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned his heart away” (1 Kings 11:3). These descriptions are sad reminders that polygamy is sin and has destructive consequences.

Rape, adultery, treason, and murder? I’m not sure polygamy is the worst thing here. Anyway, this list of polygamists behaving badly does absolutely nothing to show that polygamy caused anything bad.

I gotta tell ya, bro—you’re doing all the lifting and the Bible isn’t helping. Maybe you should reconsider if it deserves all this effort.

Examples of polygamy

Polygamy was just what some people in Bible stories did. There are plenty of examples, and never do we see any divine condemnation of the institution—condemnation of polygamists, yes, but not of polygamy. The Bible mentions Gideon’s many wives without criticism (Judges 8:30). And that Elkanah had two wives (1 Samuel 1:1–2), as did Ashhur (1 Chron. 4:5). Mered had multiple wives (1 Chron. 4:17), and “Rehoboam … had eighteen wives and sixty concubines” (2 Chron. 11:21). And there are more. None of these examples are stated with complaint. There’s no more disgrace in “Patriarch X had two wives” than in “Patriarch Y had a hundred sheep.”

God has no trouble pointing out and punishing moral errors. When David sleeps with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, God makes his disapproval known, and the son they produced quickly dies. No confusion—God disapproves of adultery.

Show this clear disapproval of polygamy in the Bible.

Concluded in part 2.

Learn from the mistakes of others.
You can’t live long enough
to make them all yourself.
— Eleanor Roosevelt