Faith statements may seem reasonable at first glance. There’s plenty to criticize, but let’s first see them from the standpoint of the Christian organizations that use them.

What’s a faith statement?

Faith statements are declarations like these.

• “The mission of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is to advance the understanding that human beings and nature are the result of intelligent design rather than a blind and undirected process.”
• A fragment from the faith statement of Houston Baptist University: “[Those connected with HBU must believe] that man was directly created by God, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, as the Son of God, [and] that He died for the sins of all men and thereafter arose from the grave.”
• A fragment from Answers in Genesis: “By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.”

These are the opposite of a summary of how the scientific method works.

If you want to donate to a Christian organization, you need to see if their beliefs line up with yours since there are lots of interpretations of Christianity. The faith statement helps make that evaluation.

Christian scholars’ parallel world is just a play table with clay and crayons.

Academic freedom and conflicts of interest

Faith statements are good for donors, but they’re crippling for the institutions that have them. A faith statement is a commitment to a conclusion. By accepting the conclusion beforehand, institutions governed by them forfeit their ability to defend or even comment on the points in those statements.

By committing to the faith statement, scholars are ruling out certain conclusions before they’ve done any research. For example, the HBU statement says Jesus was born of a virgin. By signing that statement, a professor is publicly stating (among other things), “I promise to never conclude that the virgin birth was just a myth.”

And when they conclude that the virgin birth is history, why believe it? That’s just the faith statement talking, and they were obliged to reach that conclusion. The same is true when the Discovery Institute reports that intelligent design beats evolution or Answers in Genesis argues for a 6000-year-old earth.

Might the scholar simply have come to an unbiased conclusion? That’s possible, but how would we know? The scholar has no reputation for reliability because their institution doesn’t have one. The faith statement destroyed it.

Mike Licona is a Christian scholar who found out the hard way that faith statements have teeth. In 2011, he lost two jobs because, in a 700-page book, he questioned the inerrancy of a single Bible verse.

There is a stick raised above these Christian scholars that demands that they toe the line or else. With some conclusions predetermined to be correct and others incorrect, how do we know that their work is an honest search for the truth? We don’t, and indeed the work of every Christian scholar constrained by a faith statement is suspect.

Accepting and rejecting claims because of dogma rather than science got the Church into an embarrassing situation when it rejected Galileo’s heliocentric solar system. They only publicly retracted their error in 1992.

There are close to a thousand religiously affiliated U.S. colleges and universities plus many more ministries that make intellectual claims. The cloud of scholarly untrustworthiness hangs over a lot of Christians.

Disclosure: how things work in the real world

Faith statements are a restriction on academic freedom according to The American Association of University Professors. And in other areas of intellectual discourse, this kind of constraint would be disclosed. For example, many medical journals have policies that demand that authors disclose conflicts of interest. The same is true for science journals (source). The American Historical Association’s “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct” calls for historians to disclose any research assistance that could bias their conclusions.

Journalists are careful to avoid not only conflicts of interest but even the appearance of such conflicts. You’ve probably seen articles with an aside such as, “Full disclosure: I have a close relative who works for the company that is the subject of this article.”

The equivalent in judicial, legal, or governmental fields is called recusal—abstaining from participation in an issue that would cause a conflict of interest.

Does it matter when research about climate change is funded by a fossil fuel company rather than Greenpeace? Does it matter when research about smoking is funded by the Tobacco Institute rather than the National Institutes of Health? Does it matter when research about gun violence is funded by the National Rifle Association rather than the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence?

Just because research is funded by an organization with an interest in the result doesn’t mean that the research is flawed. The point is simply that that all potential biases should be made public.

Carry this thinking into Christian scholarship. Every blog post, journal article, book, or lecture from a Christian scholar constrained by a faith statement should disclose that constraint.

The parallel world of Christian scholarship

Christian scholars seem to admire the respect given to fields like journalism, medicine, science, and so on. But rather than earning that respect the old-fashioned way, Christian scholarship creates a parallel world with training wheels.

Creationists can’t get published in Nature or Scientific American? No problem—Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis has created its own “peer-reviewed journal,” Answers Research Journal. The problem is that this is a journal constrained by yet another faith statement. The author submission guidelines make clear that any paper will be rejected if it “conflicts with the best interests of [Answers in Genesis] as judged by its biblical stand and goals outlined in its statement of faith.”

Christian colleges can teach whatever they want and call it “science.” That they have a religious shibboleth for science means that it’s surprising and even newsworthy when they teach evolution—that is, when they teach actual science.

They give themselves the right to domesticate science to avoid anything that steps on their theological toes and have their own science-y books, conferences, and home-schooling curriculum.

But Christian scholars’ parallel world is just a play table with clay and crayons. They only dream that they’re sitting at the adult table. Christian scholarship has sold its soul.

Here’s the cause-and-effect relationship. Donations power the Christian machine, and they don’t happen without a faith statement; a faith statement means that any “scholarship” is suspect; poor scholarship means that Christian scholars can’t play with the big boys; and that leads to their parallel Christian world with a forlornly low bar that they can cross.

Correcting the problem

With this article, I’m calling on Christian scholars to disclose any faith statements they’re bound by. This is a mandatory first step toward legitimacy. I suggest something like, “The conclusions in this article are suspect because the [institution] faith statement obligates the author to reach this conclusion” prominently displayed where appropriate.

Not admitting to a faith statement that prevents honest research is to break the ninth commandment against lying. Unfortunately, any who read this will ignore it because to do otherwise would risk breaking the spell. It would call attention to a weakness.

What’s surprising is that they will ignore it without embarrassment. They don’t need to whisper about damage control among themselves. They can publicly use the word “recant” when demanding that an errant scholar return to the fold, unconcerned that it makes them very unlike the scientists, historians, and the other conventional scholars they admire. That was the word used against Mike Licona, the Christian scholar called to account (above). They used “recant” four centuries ago for Galileo, and they were unafraid to use it for Licona a few years ago.

But times are changing. In the time of Galileo, the church wasn’t questioned in the West. They held the intellectual high ground. That’s no longer true, and I expect that the need for credibility will increasingly conflict with the need for donations. Ignoring conflicts of interest and doing “scholarship” with Christian training wheels will become increasingly ridiculous.

This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests
for the purpose of defending doctrines
not able to take care of themselves.
— Robert Green Ingersoll

Christian apologist John Lennox has responded to ten short atheist arguments with his own short Christian responses. This is the conclusion of a three-part series (part 1). We’ll cover arguments 8 through 10.

(BTW, have you signed up for writer alerts? See all OnlySky authors in one list and pick your favorites to get email notifications of new articles.)

8. Morality

“The Bible is immoral.” (The atheist argument is in quotes, and Lennox’s response is in italics.)

Lennox: With what morality do you trump the Bible’s morality?

The core of human morality came from evolution, and it’s not hard to get a consensus that many of God’s actions in the Old Testament were immoral—regulated slavery, human sacrifice, a worldwide flood, and so on. If you were president of the world, would you feel comfortable doing any of these? If not, then why give God a pass? It’s odd that mankind’s morality is more enlightened than God’s.

An omnipotent god who wanted a relationship with us would have a relationship with us. That’s how omnipotence works.

Lennox: Atheists often contradict themselves. Consider this by Richard Dawkins:

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Given this, how can Dawkins question morality? He says things are evil after he’s abolished the very categories of good and evil.

I assume you’re saying that the atheist can’t point to objective good and evil (that is, moral truth that is binding whether there are humans here to appreciate it or not). But this isn’t part of the standard definitions of these words.

If you say that objective morality exists, you must demonstrate that. Here’s what I need: (1) show me moral truths that are objectively true (not just strongly or universally felt), and (2) show me that these truths are reliably accessible to all of us (not just to you). You can start with abortion and same-sex marriage and then move on to resolve society’s other frustrating moral debates.

I’ve asked Christians dozens of times over the years to justify their claim that objective morality exists and have never gotten anything satisfactory. We all know what morality is—it’s the non-objective kind that’s defined in the dictionary. When two people disagree over a moral issue like abortion, there is no reliable source they can consult to resolve the matter. We all know this—why else would there be moral disagreements? Non-objective morality is all we’ve got, and we make it work.

This Christian all-or-nothing approach to morality—objective morality or nothing—makes no sense. To see this, suppose you like ice cream. Would you push it away if it weren’t a perpetually full dish of the best flavor ever? It’d be nice to have the never-ending versions of things we enjoy, but that’s not reality. We make do with the regular kind.

That’s how morality is. It’d be nice to have the objectively correct answer to every moral question, but we don’t. We’re adults, so let’s accept this reality and move on.

9. A literal Bible

“Surely you don’t take the Bible literally?”

Lennox: Language is more versatile than that. There are more ways than that to interpret the Bible. For example, Jesus said “I am the door.” Must we conclude that Jesus is an actual wooden door?

We understand metaphor. We’re all on the same page that Jesus is a metaphorical door. But what about the six-day creation story? The Garden of Eden? The Tower of Babel? Noah’s flood?

For these examples and a hundred more, Christian interpretations are all over the place. Did God literally take six 24-hour days to create the earth and everything on it? Or is “days” an elastic idea that can be stretched into eons? Or is this just a fable tailored to pre-scientific Iron Age people?

Given this, it’s unsurprising that Christianity has splintered off major religions like Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Pentecostals, Christian Science, and more, plus tens of thousands of nondenominational churches. We’re back to myriad interpretations causing myriad denominations of Christianity.

10. Evidence

“What is the evidence for God?”

Lennox: Atheists who ask this may be missing the point or even deliberately avoiding the real issue.

That we even must ask for evidence for God argues that there isn’t one. An omnipotent god who wanted a relationship with us would have a relationship with us. That’s how omnipotence works. It’s step 0 in a relationship, and it’s not hard. Humans show they exist all the time. 

Lennox: The real question is this: “Suppose I could give [evidence for God], would you be prepared right now, to repent and trust Christ?”

No, the real question is this: Suppose you had the winning lottery ticket for a $100 million jackpot. What would you buy first?

Is my lottery dilemma off topic? So is Lennox’s misdirection.

Lennox’s question puts the cart immensely far before the horse. Show me compelling evidence for Christianity’s unbelievable supernatural claims and then we can discuss which god(s) I should worship. It’s amusing that Lennox is concerned about atheists demanding evidence as a smokescreen to avoid having to deal with the elephant (that is, God) in the room. That’s exactly what he does when he dismisses a legitimate request for evidence.

But let’s respond to Lennox’s question. If he provided convincing evidence of God, what would I do?

I’ve spent a decade researching the God question and have found nothing remotely convincing, so if Lennox convinced me that God exists, that would be earthshaking. But Lennox just walks past this amazing idea, seemingly unaware how different and comprehensive that new evidence would have to be. (This might explain why his ten uninspired, stock responses seemed to him worth sharing with the world.)

But set that aside. Once I see that he exists, would I worship the God of Abraham? Nope. I’ve read about him in the Old Testament, and I have better morals than he does. And I can’t imagine eagerly giving worship to a being that demanded worship. What kind of omniscient, all-good god would want that?

When we remove all the unevidenced beliefs
[from] supernatural beliefs,
we are left with naturalism.
If we remove all the unevidenced beliefs
from naturalism,
we are left with naturalism.
— commenter Greg G.  

Apologist John Lennox has responded to ten short atheist arguments with short Christian responses. You’d think that a guy with three doctorates would find better arguments.

I’m responding to “Ten quick responses to atheist claims” (2014) in which Heather Tomlinson summarizes Lennox’s points.

This is part 2 of a three-part series (part 1). We’ll cover arguments 5, 6, and 7.

5. Proof

“You can’t prove that there is a God.” (I’ve put the atheist argument in quotes and the Christian response in italics.)

(This is another strawman—I never ask for proof, just compelling evidence.)

Lennox: “The kind of “proof” we can present [is] arguments to bring someone beyond reasonable doubt. For example, rational arguments such as those from philosophers Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, the personal experience of Christians, and the witness of the gospel accounts in the Bible.”

I agree that Plantinga and Craig are seen as some of Christianity’s best apologists, but being the best doesn’t make them good when you’ve backed the wrong horse. I’ve responded to many of their arguments, and they’re poor.

See also: Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #51: 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga

See also: The Problem of Divine Hiddenness, Answered Poorly by William Lane Craig

“The personal experience of Christians” also counts for little. One person’s personal experience of the divine isn’t trustworthy. They could have been confused, hallucinating, drugged, or even lying, and any of these options is far likelier than that Jesus got them that job promotion or that God sent Aunt Mary’s cancer into remission. What I want to see instead is a scientific study of hundreds or thousands of these personal experiences to see if they can be best explained by natural reasons or if only the supernatural will explain them.

Studies have been done. The best-known example may be the Templeton Foundation’s STEP prayer experiment, which showed no evidence of supernatural intervention.

Because science and statistics have validated no supernatural results, Christians aren’t clamoring for more studies. Unscientific anecdotes passing from person to person are more compelling. Of these anecdotes, healings may be the most dramatic, but if faith healers actually helped people, how they operated would look much different than what we see today.

Finally, Lennox points us to the 2000-year-old gospel stories, but these supernatural tales wouldn’t be believable even if they were claimed to have happened yesterday. When we take the New Testament seriously, we find the manuscript evidence is poor. The average per-chapter gap between original document and our oldest copies is 200 years for Matthew. The gap is longer for the earliest gospel, Mark. Toss in the 40-to-70 year oral history period between events and original documents, and you have more than enough time for the story to drift. This gives us little confidence that we know what happened in one tiny Jewish sect long, long ago.

[God] could speak the universe into existence, but he was unable to create an unambiguous Bible?

6. Faith

“Faith is a delusion. I’d no more believe in God than I would in the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

Lennox: These comparisons are only good for mockery.

Lennox probably means that it’s ridiculous to compare the Flying Spaghetti Monster against the super-powered Creator of the Universe.

But what attribute of the FSM compares poorly to God? Whatever it is, shore it up. If God is omnipotent, make the FSM omnipotent. Is God omniscient? Is he all-good? Does he have a jetpack? The FSM gets those, too.

And no, this isn’t cheating. God didn’t have all his omni-properties in Genesis. God evolved. So be fair and level-up the FSM, too. The apologists’ favorite arguments—Design Argument, Teleological Argument, and so on—point to our improved FSM as much as they do God. If the name FSM doesn’t fit this new god, then level-up his name, too.

Why is the FSM any less believable? God is just a venerable version of the FSM, with all those improvements hidden by time.

See also: BSR 25: Believing in God Is Like Believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster   

Lennox: “Stephen Hawking said, ‘Religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.’ I say, “Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the Light.”

I take Lennox to mean that atheists hide in the shadows, afraid the Light of Jesus will reveal the sin that they know they have.

No, I’m pretty sure that atheists don’t think that they’ve sinned against their supernatural creator—such people wouldn’t be atheists. But Hawking’s quote is on target, if only for a subset of Christians. People are afraid of the dark (death, life’s hardships, their own embarrassing imperfections, and so on), and Christianity claims to offer access to the narrow road and the small gate. Christianity appeals because it has a pleasing story, not because it’s accurate.

7. Christianity can’t get its own story straight

“Christianity claims to be true, but there are loads of denominations and they all disagree with each other, so it must be false.”

(Is Lennox incapable of nuance? The “it must be false” is much harsher than I’d put it. I’m just looking for where the evidence points.)

Lennox: Why conclude that it’s false? “[Perhaps] Christians have very different personalities and cultures—or even that Christians aren’t good at getting on with each other—but not that Christianity isn’t true.”

Agreed—one congregation might split over some doctrinal disagreement. There are now more than 45,000 Christian denominations. But where was God in this? He could speak the universe into existence, but he was unable to create an unambiguous Bible?

You’ll say that this doesn’t prove no God, but that was never the goal. I’m just looking for where the evidence points, remember?

Jesus actually addressed this very thing.

[Jesus said,] 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 (John 17:20–23; see also 1 Corinthians 1:10).

Oops. That prayer has crashed and burned.

Lennox: “There are all kinds of different kinds of teams in football, but they all play football.”

Yes, by one set of unambiguous rules! If humans can do this for a game, why can’t God do it to convey the most important message ever?

Concluded next time.

You may have heard it said that
“The ends don’t justify the means.”
To which I issue the challenge:
If the ends can’t justify the means, what can?
— commenter Richard S. Russell

Here’s an interesting challenge. Apologist John Lennox has responded to ten short atheist arguments with short Christian responses. I will hit the ball back over the net.

The article I’m responding to is “Ten quick responses to atheist claims” (2014) in which Heather Tomlinson summarizes Lennox’s points.

Lennox is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and has three doctorates. Let’s see what all that intellectual horsepower can do against these atheist arguments.

1. We’re all atheists to some extent

“You don’t believe in Zeus, Thor and all the other gods. I just go one god more than you and reject the Christian God.”

Lennox: But the Bible reveals a very different god. Those gods were products of the universe, while the Christian God was the source of the universe.

You want creator gods? Here’s a bunch of creator gods. Christianity isn’t unique in having an answer for how it all started.

You may protest that the Christian god is different from all these gods. That’s true, and the converse is also true. So what? We return to the fact that Christians and atheists both can look out over a sea of gods that societies have created and agree that they’re all made up. Christians reject gods by the hundreds for lack of evidence, just like the atheists. Gods can give comfort even if invented, and Yahweh looks like just one more. Making an exception for the Christian god is special pleading.

The Bible’s creation stories were borrowed from other cultures in the Ancient Near East. This shared archetype is called the Combat Myth, and it begins with a threat to the order of the council of gods. From this council, a champion steps up to fight the chaotic threat, defeats the monster, becomes the new leader of the council, and uses the monster’s carcass to build our universe. Yes, that’s all in the Bible. The six-day creation and the Garden of Eden aren’t the only creation stories.

See also: “I Just Believe in One Less God Than You Do”: an Atheist Fallacy?

2. Science is sufficient

“Science has explained everything, and it doesn’t include God.”

(Who says that science has explained everything? This is one of several strawman arguments that are easier to mock than what atheists actually think. My phrasing would be: science has the track record, and we have learned nothing about reality from Christianity [except religion as a social experiment].)

Lennox: Science has an important role, but it doesn’t teach us everything. What is ethical? What is beautiful? We turn to other disciplines to answer important questions like these.

And you propose finding what is ethical from the Bible? Last time I checked, the guy in charge supported slavery, demanded genocide, needed human sacrifice, and drowned the world. Christian apologists make clear they’re embarrassed by God’s barbarity given the shelves of books reframing God’s actions.

You can look to the life of Jesus as a pinnacle of goodness, but he was a god. It’s hardly surprising that he lived a virtuous life, and literature is full of noble people we might want to emulate.

As for beauty, burning up a cow to ashes to release its energy is beautiful to God. This is a “pleasing aroma” from a “food offering.” But it takes science to show you galaxies and nebulas and to see the reasons behind what we see in nature.

If the point is that there are other disciplines besides Science to learn from like History or Literature, that’s true. But that list doesn’t include religion, which can’t even agree on how many gods there are let alone who they are or what they want from us.

Science has the track record, but let’s be clear. This isn’t like two rival football teams where one team has won 70 percent of the games. No, Science has won 100 percent of the games. Religion’s conclusions have been overturned uncountably many times. We’ve tried both ways, and following the evidence works.

Alchemy ends and chemistry begins; astrology ends and astronomy begins; religion, magic, and superstition end and science begins.

3. “Science is opposed to God”

(This is another strawman. As before, I’d say instead that science has the track record, while religion explains nothing.)

Lennox: This doesn’t apply to the Christian God. “There might be certain kinds of ‘gods’ that are invented to explain things we don’t understand, but they’re not Christian.”

God was indeed used to explain things we didn’t understand, as with pretty much any religion. “God causes thunder” is like “Thor causes thunder,” so there’s no justification for seeing Christianity as a special case.

How many things has the Christian god explained? God has been given credit for floods, war, drought, illness, tsunamis, famine, and more. On the positive side, he has brought good harvests, warm sun, and sufficient rain. But these are far better explained by science.

Seen charitably, Religion was Science version 0.1. Religion explained and tried to control parts of reality. Christians thought that self-flagellation would make the Black Death go away, and Mayans thought that sacrifices to the rain god Chaak would make the drought go away, but only through science could society make real progress.

Christians and atheists both can look out over a sea of gods that societies have created and agree that they’re all made up.

4. Faith

“Faith is believing without any evidence.”

Lennox: “Christian belief has never been about having no evidence: the gospels were written to provide evidence, as the beginning of Luke attests.”

The Bible has verses where faith is belief without evidence and others where it’s belief well grounded in evidence. Lennox admits to these two interpretations but argues that the gospels were written to provide evidence.

One popular example that defines faith is the book title I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Geisler and Turek. Aimed at Lennox’s audience, the Evangelical Christian, this title makes clear that faith is widely understood to mean belief without evidence.

The gospels look like legend and myth. They belong with the thousands of other supernatural stories in the Mythology bin.

See also: Faith, the Other F-Word?

Continue to arguments 5 through 7.

Atheism must be accounted
among the most serious problems of this age
— the Vatican, Gaudium et Spes (1965)  

Let’s wrap up our look at the popular Christian platitude “God is love.” In part 1, Christian apologist Peter Kreeft handwaved a clever yet ridiculous argument about how God being love made the Trinity mandatory.

Let’s continue with more of Kreeft’s groundless speculation of what God’s love is all about.

God is like a father

Imagine the progression in wisdom from a fool, to an ordinary human, to a sage, to God. Along this progression, positive qualities are amplified—patience, consideration, kindness, thoughtfulness—and negative qualities reduced—impatience, anger, jealousy, ego. “My way or the highway” is replaced by a yielding, selfless, whatever’s-best-for-you approach.

Peter Kreeft gave his insights about what the God end of the spectrum looks like as he spoke about God’s love in “God’s Existence” (@1:05:45). He gave the example of a child who didn’t want to show his bad report card to his father. Why not, since the father loves him? Because he’s afraid that the father will get mad at how the child fell short of his potential.

Now dial up that relationship from father/child to God/us. When we adults show our report card to God, does he respond in a patient and considerate way, trying to work with our limitations to find what’s best for us? Apparently not. Kreeft says that God’s perception of our failings is far more acute than the father’s and God gets into a justifiable rage when we make a mistake. So, you see, God’s throwing us into hell forever for the smallest sin is not petty vindictiveness but Deep Love. (And the inmates of hell get to feel the warmth of God’s love for a long, long time.)

Kreeft is our Virgil as he guides us through the afterlife. You might think that injuring or offending God would be as likely as injuring Superman. You might think that God is far more sage-like than any human sage.

Nope. Kreeft tells us that “Love makes God more formidable, not less,” and “Infinite love is utterly intolerant in any imperfection in the beloved.” Gee—who’d’ve guessed? Heaven sounds like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where War is Peace and Love is Hate.

Christians use a marriage metaphor when they imagine the Church to be the bride of Christ. But since the Church is filled with sinners, and the Godhead is “utterly intolerant of any imperfection in the beloved,” Jesus should logically run from the altar screaming. Why would Jesus be stupid enough to even get engaged?

(Christians: when you puzzle over what atheists could possibly find troubling about your philosophy, this groundless, contradictory handwaving is part of the problem.)

See also: Why is God Hidden?

Does the Bible show us that God is loving?

“Love” is not the punch line of the Job story. Job was the pawn in a wager between Yahweh and Satan, and Job’s life was destroyed. In the end, God gives Job another set of children to replace the ten that were initially killed, and that’s supposed to make it all good.

Job complained about his undeserved bad fortune, but God made clear to Job that he (God) could do whatever the heck he wanted, and Job could just shut the hell up.

“God is love” isn’t the takeaway from the Old Testament. It isn’t interested in showcasing God’s love but rather his majesty and power in cases like drowning the Egyptian army or burning Sodom and Gomorrah. The lesson from the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac was not love but obedience. “Love” is not what this Bronze Age bully leads with.

“Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. “Should you not tremble in my presence?” (Jeremiah 5:22)

Think about the challenge of introducing the children of Christian parents to Old Testament stories. Toys can be a start, but they omit the full story. The Noah’s Ark playset contains a handful of toy animals and people that survived, not the millions who drowned. The David action figure doesn’t come with a bag of 200 Philistine foreskins, Samson doesn’t come with the jawbone of an ass (with which he killed a thousand men), and Joshua doesn’t come with the corpses of any of the millions killed in the conquest of Palestine.

Then what about the New Testament?

The New Testament isn’t much better, and it invented hell for most of us. Jesus makes this clear: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13–14).

Love isn’t the obvious theme in individual human lives around the world today, but as love-poor as the earth is, the empty space that composes almost all the God’s marvelous universe contains none.

Former pastor Rob Bell wrote Love Wins, in which he argued for a kinder, gentler afterlife than the traditional Christian view. That was a little too much love for one traditionalist who spoke for many when he said, “Adjusting the gospel to placate human rebellion against God transforms the good news into a compromise with worldliness, something we should earnestly avoid.”

Since [the Church is] filled with sinners, … Jesus should logically run from the altar screaming.

 Tough love

Let me close with a fragment from a modern hymn.

Scorned by the ones He came to save.
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied.

This portrait of God was so unpleasant that the hymn was recently removed from a hymnal.

There’s not a lot of love happening here. When listing God’s attributes, love isn’t on the short list.

“Do you, God, take humanity,
to have and to hold only when they’re perfect,
in health but not sickness,
only for better but not for worse?”
That doesn’t sound like an omni-merciful God.
It sounds more like Ming the Merciless
from Flash Gordon.
— commenter eric

Is God love? Christians delight in telling us that he is (1 John 4:16)—as if this cherry-picked verse is the obvious summary of all the Bible says about God—but what does this even mean? We can compare this to other New Testament declarations that God is truthful, faithful, and just, but these are adjectives. This doesn’t help us understand God’s relationship to love, which is a noun.

We can find “God is light” (equating God to a noun), but this sounds like a metaphor.

Is this phrase saying that “God” and “love” are synonyms? That makes no sense. Love didn’t destroy Sodom and Gomorrah or drown everyone in a global flood.

Or maybe the goal was to assign love as one of God’s properties. Why not then say, “God is loving”? And is love to God what love is to humans? If so, how can these relationships be equivalent when we wouldn’t say “Love is one of Mary’s properties”? No, we’d simply say, “Mary is loving” or “Mary is a loving person” or something similar.

Never mind. The original epistle was written in Greek, which gives Christians some ambiguity to play with as they create their own interpretation. Endless articles have been written about how fabulously loving God is, and I don’t much care how Christians spin “God is love.” What’s more interesting is the tangled tales apologists weave as they improvise their fantasy world.

We can’t even agree among ourselves what the best moral actions are. Why then think our morals are universally correct?

Love and the Trinity

Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft uses love to defend the bizarre idea of the Trinity. He argues that the Trinity is actually an asset to grounding this love question.

If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them. If God were only one person, he could be a lover, but not love itself. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit is the love proceeding from both, from all eternity. If that were not so, then God would need us, would be incomplete without us, without someone to love. Then his creating us would not be wholly unselfish, but selfish, from his own need.

So Kreeft imagines the three members of the Trinity loving each other for eternity before the universe was created. The only thing in existence was the Trinity, but how would that work? There was no development, progress, or even change of any kind, so what would love mean in this static environment? The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might as well have been marble statues. Where’s the love?

See also: William Lane Craig Misrepresents Christianity and Insults Islam

Keep these statues in mind as we think about how love works with humans. We’ll sacrifice for our beloved. We’ll forgive our beloved’s errors and trust in the same courtesy in return. We value a loving relationship because it is temporary and uncertain. We contrast loving relationships and feelings of loving bliss with the far greater number of ordinary relationships and periods of time.

None of this is possible for the omniscient, invulnerable, unchanging Trinity. So tell me again how “love” could describe the relationship between the persons of the Trinity (more on love and the Trinity).

WLC piles on

Apologist William Lane Craig has a similar take. Here he’s favorably comparing Christianity’s Trinitarian concept against Islam’s strict monotheism.

If I am right that love is of the very essence and nature of God then when there was nothing (when there were no human beings to love) then whom did God love? There isn’t anybody else to love other than God…. And this is, I think, a very good argument for a plurality of persons within God over against Unitarianism which says that God is just one person…. A Unitarian God cannot do that; cannot be essentially loving. This gives, I think, a very persuasive reason for thinking that there is a plurality of persons within God himself so that within the godhead there are eternal love relationships that have existed forever and now are manifested toward human beings with the creation of the world.

Uh huh. Show me that you got that from the Bible instead of your imagination. The biblical characters of Abraham, Moses, and even Jesus would have no concept of a religion that’s both monotheistic and Trinitarian.

The role of love

“Good” emotions like love and compassion and “bad” emotions like jealousy and anger each have their role. We categorize them as good and bad simply because we typically see too little of the good ones and too much of the bad ones.

The palette of human emotions that we have exists simply because it provided survival benefit on our evolutionary path. I’m sure Kreeft and Craig want to imagine that they’re grounded in something less arbitrary than evolution, but they have no good reason to say that or to elevate love to the pinnacle of emotions. The naturalistic explanation is sufficient.

Why imagine that love is that big a deal from a cosmic perspective? We think it is, but that’s our evolutionary programming talking. Our emotions and morals make sense to us because of evolution, but they’re in no sense objectively the best. If we were Romulans or Vulcans or Klingons or even Spartans, we’d think differently. Maybe honor would be at the top if we were Klingons, or maybe respect for wisdom if Vulcans. When competing Neolithic tribes had to fight for scarce resources, anger would’ve been valuable.

We can’t even agree among ourselves what the best moral actions are. Why then think our morals are universally correct?

It’s like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Humans are like the guy who grabs a leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree.” Okay, from that perspective, it is. And for humans, love might be the pinnacle of human emotional expression. But let’s not take it any farther than that. In a universe that might have millions of independently evolved intelligent species, what is obvious to us is just a relative interpretation.

Continue: How God’s love works, apparently

We have just enough religion to make us hate,
but not enough to make us love one another.
— Jonathan Swift