Category Archives: Deep Dive>Religion

Downsides to the hope offered by Christianity: believing because it’s consoling

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Here’s an interesting thought experiment from Tracie Harris of The Atheist Experience podcast. Suppose I put an ad in the local paper and say that I help people find jobs. I’m retired from business and have experience and contacts that I’d like to share. I only ask that job candidates come to my house, give me their resume, and tell me about their background. That usually takes an hour or two, but my help is free.

But there’s more to the story. When the applicants leave, I throw their resumes in the trash. I give them hope that I can help them, but I don’t actually help them. The truth is, I have no real business experience at all.

What do you make of this story? I am a caring and helpful person who offers hope to people? Or a jerk who wastes their time, plays with their emotions, and deludes them? Have I replaced their drive to get a new job with complacency?

Christians make much of their religion’s precious gift of hope, but these same pointed questions could be asked about that as well.

What’s the harm with Christian hope?

Christians will point to elderly people who’ve been Christians all their lives. What’s the harm in their believing that they’ll soon be in heaven, reunited with loved ones? Surely you don’t want to attack Grandma’s Christian beliefs at her age.

Another example is someone living in abysmal circumstances—a child soldier in Somalia or a prostitute in Thailand, say. Or someone in a Third World prison or a young mother with a disease that will shortly kill her. Christianity can give hope when things are hopeless.

I agree that there’s no point in attacking a frail person’s worldview, and I have little argument with someone who clings to a delusion they need to get through the day. It’s the rest of humanity that I’m asking to throw away their crutches.

Let’s consider six problems caused by Christian hope.

1. “It’s consoling” isn’t good enough

Sam Harris in The End of Faith says,

[Belief in the afterlife] is deeply consoling if believed, but you really shouldn’t believe it simply because it’s consoling. For example, say I believe that a diamond the size of a refrigerator is buried in my backyard. If you ask me why I believe that, I would reply, well, it makes me feel good, it gives my life meaning. That’s clearly a crazy answer. For a belief to [tell us something useful about the world], it can’t be held just because it feels good to hold it.

Christians may respond that the difference is one person who believes in the giant diamond vs. a couple of billion who believe in Christianity, but of course this is just the argumentum ad populum, the bandwagon fallacy. Here is Robert Pirsig’s response: “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”

Lots of people believe in astrology and homeopathy, but that doesn’t make them true. Evidence should be the guide, and you shouldn’t believe Christianity’s claims without good evidence.

Steven Pinker pokes holes in the idea that false beliefs should be comforting:

Saying that something is so doesn’t make it so, and there’s no reason why it should be comforting to think it so, when we have reason to believe it is not so. Compare: if you’re freezing, being told that you’re warm is not terribly soothing. If you’re being threatened by a menacing predator, being told that it’s just a rabbit is not particularly comforting. In general, we are not that easily deluded. Why should we be in the case of religion? It simply begs the question.

Some answers come to mind. Maybe the appeal is Christianity’s promise of an afterlife. Or maybe it’s a cultural custom. Shermer’s Law notes that as an adult, you use your intellect to defend indefensible beliefs you hold only because they were part of your upbringing. Whatever the reason, believing just because it’s consoling is indefensible for most adults in the West.

Read more in this series: Downsides to the hope offered by Christianity: not seeing reality clearly

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file
has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake,
since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
— Albert Einstein

Why believe Jesus when legends develop in our own time?

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Horace Fletcher, “The Great Masticator,” might be the most interesting character to come out of the health food fads during the Victorian period—a period that nurtured many interesting characters. He advocated a low-protein diet, said that more efficient digestion could halve the amount of food a person needed, and claimed that capacity for work would increase and the need for sleep decrease with his methods.

Health fads and foods aren’t new. New foods such as Kellogg’s corn flakes, Grape-Nuts cereal, and graham crackers all came from this time, but Fletcher was an innovator with new ideas about digestion and metabolism.

Chewing was the key. He famously warned, “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate” and advised, “Chew all solid food until it is liquid and practically swallows itself.” Success could be measured when bowel movements (“digestive ash,” as he called it) were negligible and had “no more odor than a hot biscuit.”

At age 54, he easily performed the exercises given to the Yale varsity crew though he “had for several months past taken practically no exercise other than that involved in daily walks about town.” At 58, he beat Yale athletes in tests of strength and endurance. He said that “perfect alimentary education” would deliver to society “no slums, no degeneracy, no criminals, no policemen, [and] no criminal courts.”

Impressive! Should we all become Fletcherites?

Some of these are just handwaving promises (calories halved or no criminals, for example). But some are tests with places, dates, and quotes from named professors, such as the claims of physical strength and endurance. What do we make of this?

I’m skeptical. Maybe Fletcher embellished his claims. Maybe other authors reporting on the benefits of Fletcherism were caught up in the excitement and passed on stories without checking the facts. Fletcherism might have been popular, but we must distinguish popularity from the truth. Astrology is also popular, but that doesn’t mean that the planets influence our lives.

The biggest issue is that we’ve had a century of scientific progress since Fletcher, and no science predicts that his simple regime could deliver what he claimed. Society today gives plenty of encouragement for new eating regimes, valid or bogus, and yet nothing has come of Fletcher’s philosophy.

Fletcherism vs. Christianity

This is an over-the-top story about a guy a century ago that we can see through. How should we respond to the far more fantastic story of Jesus?

Fletcher made bold claims, but they were all natural claims. They’re easy to test. By contrast, the Jesus story is nothing without its supernatural parts. We can apply the “like what?” test: you say Jesus is supernatural? Like what? There is no accepted precedent for the remarkable supernatural claims made about Jesus.

We have originals of Fletcher’s story, written in our own language and coming from our own Western culture. There are no copyist errors and no puzzling idioms to decipher. Contrast that with the difficulty of reading the Bible. Native speakers from millennia past didn’t provide us with Ancient Greek-English or Ancient Hebrew-English dictionaries, so modern scholars must create their own imperfect ones. Not all words are easy to interpret. For example, the Hebrew reem was a puzzle, as in this sentence: “Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the reem.” It’s now translated as “wild ox,” but the King James Version translated it nine times as “unicorn.” Scholarly theological papers are written analyzing single Bible verses or phrases.

Fletcher’s story can be explained by some combination of wishful thinking, error, deliberate lie, and legendary growth. Why wouldn’t that very unsurprising explanation apply to the gospel story as well? We don’t have the originals of the New Testament books, and an average of 200 years separates the individual chapters of Matthew from the originals, to take one example that should caution us.

For more: Long Time Gap from Original New Testament Books to Oldest Copies

I’ve made a similar comparison between the claims of Mormonism and Christianity (guess which one wins), and I argue that the Jesus story is a legend here.

The Argument from History

A popular Christian argument from history goes like this: you say the historical record for Jesus is poor? We Christians show the gospel story is true in the same way that historians show the story of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar is true, through the historical record. You want to discard the gospel story? Then be consistent and discard the story of every great figure in ancient history.

In the first place, the evidence for Alexander and Julius Caesar is far better than that for Jesus. And second, historians scrub out supernatural claims for historical accounts. Remove the supernatural from the stories of Alexander and Caesar (yes, there was plenty), and you have the accounts of those great men from history. But remove the supernatural from the Jesus story, and you’re left with nothing—just an ordinary, uninteresting man.

Let’s zoom out from this critique of Jesus vs. Alexander to bring in a more contemporary giant of history, Horace Fletcher. Point by point, the Fletcher story beats the Jesus story on its own criteria—smaller cultural gap, shorter period of oral history, more reliable copies, no supernatural claims, and so on. Until Christian apologists embrace the great truths of The Great Masticator, I will conclude that they are applying their standards inconsistently.

This is an over-the-top story about a guy a century ago that we can see through. How should we respond to the far more fantastic story of Jesus?

More modern legends

Let me pile on with more modern legends. With each one, ask yourself: if these can convince people today, with our modern understanding of science, geography, anthropology, and what’s plausible, how reliable a foundation can Christianity have been built on?

  • According to a story begun in the early 1980s, astronaut Neil Armstrong heard the Muslim call to prayer on the moon and converted to Islam. Who would give such a ridiculous story credence? Enough people, apparently, that it was worth Armstrong denying the story in 2005.
  • Did you hear the one about how Pope Francis would sneak out of the Vatican disguised as an ordinary priest and minister to the homeless? This was popular early in his papacy, but it is false. How can a false story about the whereabouts of one of the world’s most famous people get going? And if that’s possible, what might you expect 2000 years ago after forty years of oral history in a prescientific melting pot of different religious beliefs?
  • Atheist Hector Avalos, in a 2004 debate with William Lane Craig, said that as a Pentecostal preacher, he had people raised from the dead in his own church.
  • The story of John Frum and cargo cults is a fascinating modern example of legend developing among pre-scientific people.
  • Is Barak Obama a Muslim? A 2015 CNN poll showed that 29 percent of Americans think so (and more than half of Republicans, depending on the poll).
  • How many people thought that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11? It took more than two years for the fraction of Americans who thought that he was behind it to drop below fifty percent (source).
  • The Gilligan’s Island sitcom began airing on television in 1964, and the U.S. Coast Guard received telegrams urging them to rescue the stranded people. And this was a show with a laugh track.
  • Did you know that North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was the world’s best golfer, despite only playing the game once? He shot eleven holes in one in a single 18-round game. He was also a fashion trendsetter, he had a supernatural birth, and he didn’t poop.
  • Remember the violence in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina? The Associated Press reported, “Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy today” (“today” being September 1, 2005). The reports were wildly exaggerated. There was looting, though most of it seemed to have been people looking for food and water. There were close to 2000 dead, but these were caused by the hurricane, not violence. There were several shooting deaths, but these were from police.
  • You can’t buy an electric fan in South Korea with a simple on/off switch. They all come with timers. This is because of the widespread fear of “fan death,” the idea that being in a closed room with a fan running is potentially deadly.
  • The idea that blood types determine personality had been popular in Japan, and the idea that children born in the year of the dragon are more successful is popular in China. Science supports neither idea.

(And that doesn’t even touch on politically motivated conspiracy theories.)

Christian apologists might demand, “How could the story about Jesus get traction if it weren’t true??” But this is like, “How could the modern legend about <pick your favorite> get traction if it weren’t true?” The same answer would be reasonable for both.

God is a comedian
playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
— Voltaire

Christians changing the definition of “miracle”

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Words can have more than one definition. For example, “organic” can mean “having to do with life” or “food grown without non-natural chemicals,” or even simply “contains carbon.” But when justifying the unjustifiable, Christian apologists are often forced to invent new definitions that aren’t supported by the dictionary.

In the previous article, we saw apologist John Mark Reynolds trying to deal with the reality that God’s answers to prayer are indistinguishable from no answers at all. That Reynolds doesn’t even acknowledge his predicament and isn’t embarrassed by it might give him points for bravado, but this makes his handwaving no more convincing.

Miraculous good fortune?

Let’s move on to another pious redefinition, this time for the word “miracle.” Our apologist this time is Jim Wallace, and he analyzed a claimed miracle. A couple in Tennessee parked at their apartment and got out of their car. Only then did they notice three bullet holes in the side of the car and two more in the trunk. The wife soon found something else. One bullet had come through and lodged in her purse. Without the purse, that bullet might have hit one of them. Her interpretation of the purse stopping that bullet: “Just by the grace of God. It’s a miracle to keep me or him from getting hit.”

Consider the title of Wallace’s article: “Woman Says It’s A Miracle Her Wallet Blocked Bullets – Why Not Believe Her?”

I’ll tell you why not. It’s because natural explanations are sufficient. Natural explanations are far, far better than supernatural ones. There are many supernatural claims but zero supernatural explanations that are accepted in the same way that countless natural explanations are (the scientific explanation for lightning, for drought, for disease, and so on). Even that the miracle claim was made up is far likelier than that this is the report that finally will prove to the world that the supernatural does indeed exist.

This was clearly an emotional experience for the woman who made the claim. She was lucky that she didn’t get hit. If she says that, to her, it was a miracle, that’s fine. But the rest of us can see it with more rational eyes.

Remember the woman’s claim, “It’s a miracle to keep me or him from getting hit.” About this, Wallace said, “When I was an atheist, I would roll my eyes at statements like this.”

Amen to that. Why didn’t God just stop the shooter? Or why didn’t he redirect the shooter’s life years ago so that he wouldn’t turn to violence?

Alternatively, if you imagine God saving this couple, what explains him not saving the other 10,000 people that die from gun violence in the U.S. each year? Your happy miracle story morphs into the problem of justifying God’s capriciousness. “God works in mysterious ways” won’t do—if you say that God performed a miracle in this case and had good reasons to let the bullets kill someone in another case, you must support that incredible claim with evidence.

Why not just call this a lucky turn of events, where a situation was bad but not so bad that anyone got injured? The naturalistic explanation (lots of gunshots are fired in public, and this just happened to be one of the cases where no one was hurt) explains all the facts. God performing a miracle is an unnecessary complication to the story.

But no, none of these interpretations are where Wallace wants to go. Now that he’s a Christian, he says that he’s reconsidered his position on miracles. He wants to label as “a miracle” events like this injury-free shooting.

Perhaps miracles are more common than you think

You say that you don’t accept miracles? Wallace argues that all naturalists accept miracles. Here’s his argument.

1. The Big Bang is the standard explanation for the origin of the universe.

2. The Big Bang tells us that the universe—that is, space, time, and matter—had a beginning.

3. “Everything came into existence from nothing.”

4. What caused the Big Bang? It couldn’t have been anything to do with space, time, or matter, since they hadn’t been created yet.

5. “See the dilemma? My naturalistic belief in ‘Big Bang Cosmology’ required an extra-natural ‘Big Banger.’ ”

6. The dictionary defines “miracle” as having a supernatural cause, and “supernatural” as “above or beyond what is natural,” so the Big Bang drags the naturalist into accepting at least one miracle, that of the origin of the universe.

7. The Bible agrees. It says that the origin of the universe was due to God (and therefore a miracle), and if that’s the case, God could surely pull off something as trivial as a resurrection. Or stopping a bullet with a purse.

Why didn’t God just stop the shooter? Or why didn’t he redirect the shooter’s life years ago so that he wouldn’t turn to violence?

Correcting that poorly defined argument

Let’s highlight a few problems.

Step #2. There are plausible models of the universe that have no beginning.

3. No, the Big Bang doesn’t say that everything came from nothing. That’s one possibility, but that’s not the consensus view. And if “coming from nothing” is startling and needs an explanation, Christians say that God created the earth from nothing. Explain that.

4a. Does it make sense to ask for a cause before there was time? And if the Big Bang were a quantum event, it might’ve had no cause (not all quantum events have causes).

4b. The only life we know of depends on space, time, and matter. If God was putting the universe together in a time before time (and in a space before space), how did he exist? You might say that he doesn’t need those things or he’s outside of them, but you need evidence. We know of no life for which this is true.

5a. “Big Banger” deliberately suggests an intelligence, but if the Big Bang were just a quantum event, that would be a natural cause with no mind required. Maybe our universe is just one of many universes that started with this natural cause.

5b. If God is a mind, what is that mind stored in? The only minds we know of reside in brains. Yes, I realize God isn’t supposed to have a brain, but again, you can’t just handwave this claim. You need evidence. Tag—you’re it.

At best, this argument points out that cosmologists have unanswered questions about the Big Bang. That’s true, but that’s no excuse to inject a supernatural explanation involving your favorite god. If science doesn’t have the evidence to justify an answer, don’t pretend that your religion does. We need evidence, not dogma. And if “God did it” explains the origin of the universe, what explains the origin of God?

What happened to the good, old-fashioned miracle?

You want a miracle? During the famous Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War, English and Welsh archers delivered a stunning victory over French cavalry. Almost exactly 500 years later during the Battle of Mons during World War I, in the same part of Europe as Agincourt, ghosts of those archers materialized to save the British from a vastly superior German force.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t match the history. That’s always the problem, isn’t it? The good stories don’t stand up to scrutiny, and the true ones are just luck, like the woman whose purse stopped a bullet.

So if bullet-stopping purses are what pass for miracles in society today and you can’t raise the quality of miracles, then just pull down the definition so that there’s a match. That was the goal of the “you naturalists believe in miracles, too!” argument. Like the redefinition of “answered prayer” in the previous post, just redefine “miracle.”

Christians, this may be what you need to help you sleep at night, but this is not an honest way of looking at the evidence. By changing definitions, your argument has lost any power. You’ve salvaged your words—“answered prayer” and “miracle”—but at what cost? Convince yourself that you’ve won the battle if you must, but with these dishonest games you lose the war.

The Bible will give you answers
like your horoscope in the newspaper
will give you answers.
It’ll be so vague as to apply
to anyone in any situation.
— commenter watcher_b

How to salvage claims of God’s capabilities? Change the definitions!

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What do you do when your preferred definition of an important religious word clashes with reality—a fundamental word like miracle, prayer, faith, or good? A popular Christian tactic is to dilute the definition so that they can still use the words, but this tactic has consequences.

I’ve already looked into redefinitions of the words “good” and “faith.” Now let’s look at two more fundamental words, “prayer” and “miracle.”

How do prayers work?

Evangelical blogger John Mark Reynolds wrote “Prayers amid Hurricane Harvey” a few days after that hurricane hit Houston, Texas in August 2017. He writes of being huddled (with his family, I presume) in an interior closet in his house. They were doing what they could to stay safe from Harvey, which made landfall in Texas as a category 4 hurricane. It killed 106 in the U.S. and is second to hurricane Katrina as the costliest U.S. natural disaster ($141 billion).

How did he respond to this frightening experience? He begins, “Prayer is the best action one can take in a storm” but soon admits, “We prayed to be spared this test, but God said ‘no.’ ”

God said no? Did Odin say no, too? Why pray to God if Odin (or even a jug of milk) delivers the same results? And if you say that praying to God produces better results, show us. Give us evidence.

Here’s where wishful thinking about prayer gets tripped up by reality. Instead of getting what you pray for, which is what Jesus promised, and instead of prayer at least improving the probability of getting what you need, prayer must be redefined. Prayer is now asking for something and then reframing the result so that God looks good whether you got what you asked for or not. Apparently, God is sensitive. He must be treated like a baby.

We see more rationalization when he says:

Hurricane Harvey came despite our prayers—and that is good. It is good for us to ask, and God helps as He can.

God helps as he can? There’s some limit to what he can do? This world is the best that he can produce, and he would have done a better job if he could have? I must have a higher estimation of what omnipotence can do.

We asked that the storm would pass over us.

Do you ask that for every hurricane? Or only the ones that hit the United States? Or only the ones that hit you? Who does the disaster hit if God nudges it to avoid you (and can you live with that)?

Taking a step back, what’s prayer (even this watered-down version) good for? You aren’t telling God something he doesn’t already know, and you can’t be so arrogant as to ask God to change his perfect plan for you. Prayer doesn’t work as advertised.

God can’t lose

Reynolds rationalizes why God would allow a hurricane Harvey.

[God] is all powerful, but He is also good. He will not do a superficial good for us today at the cost of greater evil tomorrow…. If He who can does not, it must be better so.

This is an empty and meaningless claim. Without evidence, are we supposed to accept that Harvey was a net good? Give us examples of what might have offset the cost of $141 billion and 106 lives.

Here again, I have a higher estimation of what omnipotence can do. A hurricane was as surgical as God could be? He needed to destroy something, but he couldn’t do it precisely with magic and avoid the collateral damage of a category 4 hurricane?

Sure, a god might exist who used a hurricane for a good that we can’t yet understand, but why imagine this? Where’s the evidence? Why is this anything more than a rationalization to help Christians maintain their unevidenced beliefs?

Don’t give us a hypothetical. Support your claim with a specific situation where God allowed (or caused) harm to prevent a worse harm later. Can’t do it? Then you’re making the Hypothetical God Fallacy.

To squarely address the Problem of Evil—why an omnipotent and good god would allow so much evil in the world—the first step is admitting that God does indeed look terrible. Natural disasters, childhood diseases, cancer, and all the rest would not happen on the watch of a good god.

(I investigate this in more depth in “4 Steps Christians Must Take Before Responding to the Problem of Evil.”)

God continues to be a solution looking for a problem. It’s a hypothesis that complicates the picture while answering nothing better than the naturalistic explanation, that nature is a mindless force and sometimes people get hurt.

I want to give Reynolds the benefit of the doubt—surely he acknowledges the value of prayer in the here and now. Is that what he’s focusing on?

Not really. He says, “This is not just a meditation technique” as he doubles down on prayer as an actual conversation with an actual person who actually delivers. But, of course, any error is his, not God’s: “Just as I can misunderstand any person, I can and do misunderstand what God is saying, but still, He is there and is not silent.”

“He is there and is not silent”? Then he’s about as invisible and mute as you could be without actually being nonexistent.

Does the dictionary say what you think?

He moves on, only to trip over yet another common English word.

Government may fail me. Community may be sundered and cold waves wash over me, but God never fails.

Government is what provided the hospitals, rescued people in peril, and got the power back on. When you compare government and God, you’re right that only one came through for you, but it wasn’t God. If you say that the government help was imperfect, I’m sure you’re right, but God’s help was nonexistent. God “never fails” only if you carelessly redefine words to suit the moment.

Why pray to God if Odin (or even a jug of milk) delivers the same results?

Let’s return to that quote—government may fail, but God never fails—to see if that word is used consistently. What would “government fail” mean? Presumably it means that incompetence might get in the way of a prompt response, shortsightedness years ago might have postponed necessary infrastructure maintenance, and so on. You expect the government to do something, but then it’s not there for you.

Isn’t that exactly what God does? The Bible promises that prayer works, but where is God when disaster strikes? Didn’t he fail you in being indistinguishable from nothing? Remember that this isn’t a human-caused disaster such as murder. Nothing could be more an act of God than a hurricane.

Is even the word fail a problem word that you must redefine? What does it say about your fragile worldview that you must redefine so many words to maintain your beliefs?

Inspiration for the Bible?

Reynolds concludes with this optimistic line: “Thank God prayer works.” And, sure, prayer “works” if you redefine away definitions that get in your way. “Answered prayer” no longer means what you’d think it means. Whatever happens is now “answered prayer.”

It’s like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where 2 + 2 = 5, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. God knows all that you do, which parallels “Big Brother is watching you.” Christianity has also embraced thoughtcrime, where every private thought is known to God and lustful thoughts are adultery (see Matthew 5:21–28).

By giving itself permission to redefine troublesome words, Christianity has added doublethink to the list of Nineteen Eighty-Four parallels.

Continue on to see an apologist wrestle with the troublesome word “miracle.”

I’ve responded to John Mark Reynolds several other times:

Believers:
Think of the one thing you would do
to improve the world if you were God.
Now realize that he hasn’t done it.
— seen on the internet

Why accept evidence that didn’t convince Jesus’s contemporaries?

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The gospel story is from long ago and far away, and yet Christians insist it’s history. Even if we could accept the gospel story as true, why should we accept any element of the story that wasn’t convincing at the time?

The gospel story didn’t convince Paul

Paul was a dedicated Pharisee (the Pharisees were an influential Jewish group during the time of Jesus), and he emphasized in his letters how enthusiastically he persecuted Christians. Though he didn’t make his motivations clear, we can assume that he was offended by this upstart Christian movement within Judaism. That suggests that he understood Christianity’s claims but wasn’t convinced

He certainly had the opportunity. Paul heard Stephen’s long speech just before he was killed and was unmoved by Stephen’s reference to Jesus. Paul had the opportunity to discuss Christianity with the Christians he arrested.

Only after the death of Jesus, on a trip to Damascus to arrest more Christians, did Paul become a Christian. If Paul was unconvinced by the arguments of Christians of the time, at least one of whom had been a disciple, why should they convince us when we are far more separated from Jesus by language, culture, and time? If Paul was only satisfied by a personal vision from Jesus, why should we be satisfied with less?

See also: How Reliable is Apostle Paul When He Knew Very Little About Jesus?

The gospel story also didn’t convince John the Baptist

The skepticism of John the Baptist is even more remarkable. John knew exactly who Jesus was when he baptized him. He heard God’s voice from heaven proclaiming Jesus as God’s son and saw “the Spirit of God descending like a dove” (Matthew 3:16–17). He reported afterwards, “I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One” (John 1:34; see also 1:29).

John knew this even before he was born. Mary (when pregnant with Jesus) visited her relative Elizabeth (when pregnant with John). We read, “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb” (Luke 1:41), and she was filled with the Holy Spirit.

But John apparently forgot all that. During Jesus’s ministry, John was in prison, and he sent some of his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” Jesus said that he was, and he pointed to his healing miracles to support his claim (Matt. 11:1–5).

John needs to ask if Jesus is the One despite having heard the voice of God and seen the Holy Spirit descend to Jesus?! If John was entitled to question given that banquet of evidence, what are we to do with the watery gruel that we’re given?

If Paul was only satisfied by a personal vision from Jesus, why should we be satisfied with less?

Jesus explains the end game to the disciples and they … forget?

The end of the gospel story is pretty remarkable: Jesus will die by crucifixion and then rise from the dead. That is probably not the way the disciples expected it to end. But that’s okay, because Jesus explained it all to them.

From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. (Matthew 16:21)

When they came together in Galilee, he said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised to life.” (Matt. 17:22-23)

“We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!” (Matt. 20:18-19)

Crucified, three days, raised back to life—the key points are all there. And that’s just Matthew. The other two synoptic gospels explain this three times, and John has a few instances as well.

Since this was public knowledge, at least among the disciples, why the sad faces after the crucifixion? Why did the women go to the tomb with spices? The disciples should’ve been camped out in front of the tomb with picnic baskets and blankets to witness the most remarkable miracle since the creation of the world.

And if the disciples can get it this wrong, no one can fault modern Christians for being very skeptical given that they have the faintest whisper of evidence compared to what the disciples had.

In Mark, it’s like Jesus was
the 1000th customer of John the Baptist
and won the grand prize.
— commenter Greg G.

Magic bones

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The book of 2 Kings has a brief story about Israelites burying a man (2 Kings 13:20–21). When they saw bandits approaching, they threw the body into the tomb of the prophet Elisha and fled. The body touched the bones of Elisha, and the man came to life.

This two-verse story fills me with questions! Consider how it impacts the Christian worldview.

  • Were Elisha’s bones permanently curative, or was the cure haphazard like a slot machine, or did this happen only once? Why is there no mention of other people using this marvelous discovery? Surely word would have spread, and others would have taken advantage of this cure.
  • How many ancient sages’ or prophets’ bones had this property? Do we have any today that can do this, or does the magic fade with time? Besides bones, what other body parts were magical? And what could they do besides restoring life? You’d think that something that can restore life would be able to perform lesser cures like fix a broken bone or cure a cold. Could they cure baldness? If so, that would be surprising since Elisha was famously bald.
  • Surely some holy relics in churches today have magical properties. If they can’t restore life, maybe they can perform lesser miracles. Which relics are real, and which are fake? Why aren’t these used to reliably cure people today (especially today, since we know that we are saddled with the trials of life, unlike Jesus, who thought that the End was just around the corner). And if relics can’t reliably do anything, why revere them?
  • If the communion wafer and wine, once blessed, become the body and blood of Jesus (in the Roman Catholic church, anyway), what magic can we expect from that? As an aside, if consuming the eucharist and wine have an effect in the supernatural world, why consume it every time it’s offered? Shouldn’t once be enough?
  • The dead man was restored to life by touching Elisha’s bones, but isn’t it odd that Elisha himself stayed dead?

We can wonder why this miracle story was put in. But now that it’s in, the Bible must justify it.

Imagine a biologist dropped onto an isolated island who wanted to catalog the strange new plants and animals. That’s who I feel like—I want a taxonomy of this magical world we apparently live in. Perhaps the bigger question is, why isn’t everyone else similarly intrigued? Why don’t they ask the questions above?

It seems that Christians see these Bible miracles as a hierarchy. There are the big ones: the parting of the Red Sea, the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus, the raising of Lazarus, and others are central to the Christian belief. It’s hard to be a Christian and not know these stories.

But other miracles are not as well known: in addition to Elisha’s magic bones, Jesus reattaches a man’s ear (Luke 22:49–51), cloth that had touched Paul magically heals the sick (Acts 1:11–12), Balaam’s donkey speaks (Numbers 22:28), Elisha makes a lost ax head float on water (2 Kings 6:1–7), and Jesus predicts that a coin will be found inside a fish (Matthew 17:27).

This dichotomy is a problem. You can’t embrace the fundamental set of miracles and think deeply about why they’re in the Bible and what they mean to the ordinary Christian but then ignore the not-so-fundamental set and what it says about the world we’re living in. Christians can’t dismiss these peripheral stories with a careless, “Well, I guess I’ll have to ask God when I see him in heaven!” If the Bible is history, these miracle stories define our world as much as the famous ones.

Could Elisha’s bones really restore a corpse to life? Maybe. Or maybe we take the easy route and say that the Bible is just what it looks like—a collection of myths and legends.

I’m really excited
to be going to the World Series!
I just wish God didn’t hate
<insert the team we just beat>
so bad.
— seen on the internet