This blog (and those of other atheist authors) had been hosted by OnlySky, but OnlySky has closed shop. The Cross Examined blog has been for me a journey of more than a decade, with over a million words in 1700 posts.

The links to articles outside this blog should work, though some will have gone bad—for these, try Internet Archive. Links within the blog, from one post to another, won’t work. However, you should be able to salvage the title of an article and can search on that.

Thanks for your interest in the skeptical side of Christian apologetics. My parting gift is a short nonfiction book, 2-Minute Christianity: 50 Big Ideas Every Christian Should Understand. You can buy it online, or read it for free at the 2-Minute Christianity blog.

It should be an engaging read for those who are new to the debate about Christianity, and it will have surprises for those who are experienced with Christian apologetics as well. Please spread the word.

–Bob Seidensticker 7/10/24

It’s fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts
of fact, history, and pizza.
― Penn Jillette

Well, aren’t you arrogant! Who are you to judge God?

Welcome to stupid arguments Christians should avoid #45! Here’s a comment from this blog that illustrates the popular Christian idea that we mortals are in no position to judge God’s actions.

I am completely clueless as to what you think could possibly give you the right to Judge God. Unlike you, God knows all things and He brought the universe into existence for a reason. You don’t have to like it that God created people knowing they would end up in hell, or suffer on earth, or be blessed for a while, or whatever it might be. But what right do they have to look into the infinite heavens, raise their fist, and bring a righteous charge against the infinite God of the universe?

The first problem, of course, is the Hypothetical God Fallacy (Stupid Argument #33). You don’t just assume the incredible Christian claims and proceed from there, but that is the assumption behind the claim, “Who are you to judge God?”

If we don’t assume God, which is the only reasonable option for an outsider to Christianity, then we’re not judging God but judging claims about God. No believer can ask anything more from us than that we evaluate their supernatural claims. What’s the alternative? To simply accept Christians’ claims about God? No, the buck stops here, and we’re the ones to judge.

The problem is that the Christian claims suck. The Christian is usually eager to judge God but only when the conclusion would be “God is good.” When a negative conclusion is possible, they tell us that no one can judge God.

And with the biblical God, a fair conclusion is a negative one. A god who is all-loving but commands genocide and sanctions slavery? A god who is eager for a relationship but won’t provide evidence of his existence? A god who is just and fair but demands belief in the unbelievable to get into paradise? Nope—that’s not a good God (more).

Christians seem to want to treat God like a celestial baby. With a human baby, people excuse its messes since it doesn’t know better, and that’s how they treat God as well. When someone wants to judge God’s actions by adult standards—nothing difficult, just basic morality—these Christians step in and say that that’s not fair. God can’t do wrong, by definition. If he does something that would be wrong if you did it, we’re just supposed to call that “right” since God always gets a pass.

Like the baby who needs a diaper, God can’t even defend himself. What does it say that Christians treat God like a baby? And that they demand that we avoid judging his actions?

Not a day passes over this earth,
but men and women of no note do great deeds,
speak great words,
and suffer noble sorrows.
— Charles Reed

This is one of my shirts. It makes a fun and provocative statement that often gets a smile, but it also raises an important question. When the Christians think they’re talking to God, how do they know? If there is a supernatural world populated with both good and bad beings, maybe one of Satan’s little helpers is answering your prayer instead of God, Jesus, or a saint.

Now consider the bigger question: who’s in charge? Is this a good world governed by an all-good god (the Christian view), or is a bad god in charge?

Think about the Problem of Evil, why a supposedly good god allows so much evil—tsunamis, childhood diseases and birth defects, millions of people living in abysmal conditions, and so on. Is this really the best that he can do? But drop the assumption that the guy in charge must be good, and things make more sense. You now have the Problem of Good—why the evil god in charge wouldn’t make things much worse. This question has potential answers: maybe having things bad but not too bad allows hope to flourish and then be dashed. Or maybe the guy in charge is just a well-meaning but imperfect craftsman—a celestial Homer Simpson or an extraterrestrial middle schooler who got a C+ on the simulation that we call our universe.

So is God good? (I’ll use “God” as our name for the being in charge of our world.) Let’s imagine a dialogue with a Christian.

Of course God is good! The Bible says so.

Yes, it does. Here are some examples.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)

For everything God created is good. (1 Timothy 4:4)

But the Bible is a sock puppet that can be made to say almost anything. God not only created good, but he created evil:

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, Jehovah, do all these things. (Isaiah 45:7)

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come? (Lamentations 3:38)

When disaster comes to a city, has not Jehovah caused it? (Amos 3:6)

The Bible isn’t much help to the Christian when it documents what God does when he’s off his meds. God demands human sacrifice and genocide. God supports slavery and polygamy. God drowned the world. These would universally be condemned as evil by anyone who didn’t have an agenda to defend God.

The Bible is also full of errors and contradictions, just the kinds of clues to suggest that an inept or even evil guy was behind it.

God is good by definition

If God did it, that’s “good.” He’s the Creator of Everything! How could it be any other way?

In the first place, this isn’t how the dictionary defines “good.” There’s no mention of God in the definition of the word. (That’s right—the dictionary takes precedence over the Bible.)

But see where this takes Christians if the guy in charge is good by definition. There’s no amount of carnage he can do for these Christians to change their evaluation. Natural disasters, disease, individual calamities—it’s all good. If you can’t understand, then you’ll just have to content yourself with God working in mysterious ways. The Christian has completely disconnected themselves from reality by making their worldview indifferent to evidence.

This “God” could just as easily be objectively bad. Tricking us into believing that this very imperfect world is actually the best of all possible worlds is just the kind of monkey business that the Lord of Lies would do, isn’t it?

Imagine Satan in charge. He might do something abominable like convince Christians that the death of an innocent child is an acceptable part of his greater plan, if you can believe such a thing. Indeed, grieving Christian parents are told exactly that!

Christians have ceded their right to evaluate God’s goodness. Good or bad, this guy has convinced Christians that we must label every act of his “good.” Christians don’t say that he’s good because he performs actions that anyone can see are good; they say he’s good by default.

But God has his own morality.

What’s wrong with God following the same morality that he demands of humans? We were created in his image, after all. But if he has his own moral rules, what are they and how do you know? What rules can we be confident God will follow, or are you determined to clean up after him no matter what rules he breaks?

This is a beautiful world!

Just look around you—God’s hand is all over it.

A well-known poem says, “All things bright and beautiful . . . The Lord God made them all.” Puppies and sunsets and snow-covered mountains are beautiful. But tsunamis and guinea worm and cancer are not. Don’t forget that God made them, too.

I respond to the Design Argument, which says that life on earth is so complicated that it must be designed, here.

God has his own reasons

God could easily have his own reasons for things that appear strange to us. For example, the tragedy of the crucifixion led to the gift of salvation. Just because Noah’s flood seems wrong to you doesn’t mean that it wasn’t right from God’s standpoint.

This is the Hypothetical God Fallacy. It assumes God, offering no defense of the outlandish God hypothesis. Maybe God had his ineffable reasons for inspiring the holy books for Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and more—who are you to object that this makes no sense?

God’s children, made in his own image (moral and otherwise) would be able to weigh God’s perfect moral actions and find that they are always correct. They should feel intuitively right in an aha! sort of way, and they should show themselves to be logically right in an intellectual way. No one would say, “God has his own morality” except as a desperate attempt to avoid critique of God’s actions.

This argument is nothing more than, “Yeah, but you haven’t proven me wrong!” That’s true, but that was never the goal. All we can do is follow the evidence, and it doesn’t point to the supernatural. We have to evaluate the God claim with the evidence we have, and Christianity can offer very little.

It’s not God’s fault!

Don’t blame God for poor conditions here on Earth, blame Satan.

Here again, the Bible isn’t the Christian’s friend. Satan is said to have killed Job’s servants and his ten children, but that was with God’s approval. And that’s it.

Now consider God’s killings, also documented in the Bible. The Dwindling in Unbelief blog estimates five million people dead in 157 incidents plus another twenty million for the global flood.

Like God, “Satan” is a character who has changed over time. In the book of Job, he was simply God’s prosecuting attorney, making sure that Job was obedient for good reasons rather than selfish ones. The idea of Satan as God’s sworn enemy (as in Revelation 12:9, “that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray”) developed centuries later.

How can you know??

Well, aren’t you the cocky know-it-all? God is unjudgeable. God said, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).

Here again, this is the Hypothetical God Fallacy. You don’t start with the assumption of God.

An open-minded skeptic will consider religious claims on their evidence. We must evaluate the evidence as best we can; there is no other option. If God exists, what could please him more than that we use the brain he gave us to evaluate claims, not simply accept unevidenced nonsense because it’s convenient or pleasing?

As an aside, there were other versions of Christianity where the good guy wasn’t in control here on earth such as Marcionism and Gnosticism. This is also true for Apocalypticism, a strain of Judaism that influenced Christianity. These approaches neatly sidestep the Problem of Evil since adherents didn’t have to apologize for the crazy actions of the guy in charge.

What God does is sometimes evil by any reasonable standard. It’s not hard to see how this might have developed. Imagine a skeptic pressuring a Christian about slavery or genocide in the Bible, with the Christian responding, “Well, uh . . . whatever God does must be good. Yeah, that’s it—God’s actions are always good by definition!” But, as we’ve seen, this unevidenced Band-Aid has consequences.

See also: “And God is Not Good, Either”

Gullibility and credulity
are considered undesirable qualities
in every department of human life—
except religion.
— Christopher Hitchens

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-7-12.)

Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Christian answers to big questions such as these often involve God, but God is always the worst guess. Let’s conclude our list of reasons why (part 1: 8 reasons why “God” is always the worst answer).

5. It ignores the trend

Supernatural explanations are superseded by natural ones, never the other way around. Lightning used to be of heavenly origin, but now we have a natural explanation. Plague, famine, drought, accidents, death, and so on used to have supernatural explanations, but these have been replaced. Might we suddenly discover strong evidence that argues that some religious claims are true? Maybe, but that’s not the way to bet.

Just how poorly does the “God did it” explanation do against natural explanations? Might a natural explanation be so ridiculous that “God did it” becomes plausible? Perhaps, but since we have no prior examples of supernatural explanations being universally accepted (unlike a natural explanation like the germ theory of disease), this hypothetical explanation would have to be pretty ridiculous to be worse than anything from the supernatural category, which has never produced a single universally accepted explanation.

One Christian proposed this deliberately ridiculous explanation of Jesus: time-traveling insurance salesmen led by a clone of Elvis go back in time to manufacture the idea of Jesus to get the concept of “act of God” into insurance law. Have we finally found an explanation so ridiculous that the supernatural Jesus story is finally plausible by comparison? Nope.

6. It ignores the default position

Hundreds or thousands of religions are practiced today, and many more were practiced in humanity’s long history. People invent things like ghosts, fairies, and superstitions. We understand how urban legends, conspiracy theories, and even traditions develop and take hold. And people make up religions by the thousands.

Ghosts don’t exist, urban legends are false, and so are made-up religions. Given any particular supernatural belief, the default position is that it is yet one more false belief by a mind that is susceptible to lots of false beliefs.

The Christian claims are a bold rejection of this default position. That doesn’t mean that Christianity is false, but it does mean that it has the burden of proof. (I’ve also explored Christian attempts to shirk their burden of proof.)

See also: Why Christianity Looks Invented

7. God catching uses evidence inconsistently

We can imagine the Christian metaphorically throwing out a net to catch fish, where the fish are truths about supernatural claims, and the net is the evidence criteria. The trick is being consistent when evaluating the evidence.

When the Christian seeks evidence for God, the holes in the net are small. The evidence criteria become flexible, and any little clue is evidence—personal feelings, good luck and happy coincidences, the dismissal of inconvenient science by a Christian nonscientist, apologists’ assurances that the Bible (but not other ancient religious texts) is real history, and so on.

But when evaluating other religions’ supernatural claims, the holes are big and only the most compelling evidence could count. The Christian becomes skeptical and stringently applies the evidence criteria. Suddenly they sound like an atheist and reject all but the most compelling evidence: this looks like just another manmade religion, those religious books are too old and unreliable, the supernatural claims are laughable, and so on.

This is a biased approach to the evidence. Sure, all of us are at least a little biased in how we sort through the evidence, tending to keep what confirms our beliefs and reject what challenges them, but we must do our best to evaluate evidence objectively. (More: what Christians’ loose criteria for evidence capture and how Christian arguments ought to convince them of the truth of Mormonism instead.)

8. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Claiming that a god exists who created the entire universe is about as extraordinary a claim as possible. Such a claim needs extraordinary evidence. Not only must Christians make do with handwaving similar to other religions’ believers, Christians often are reduced to protesting against this demand for extraordinary evidence.

Many apologetic discussions devolve into, “Well, you can’t prove God doesn’t exist.” That’s correct, but that never was the goal. All we can try to do is follow the evidence. And it doesn’t lead to God.

One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.
— Robert Heinlein

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-7-10.)

Image credit: Bob Seidensticker

God is always the worst guess for the answer to any of life’s big questions such as “Why are we here?” or “What is the meaning of life?” Super-smart aliens would be better. Fairies would be better. “I dunno, but there’s gotta be something better” would be better.

“God did it” is perhaps the most remarkable claim possible since it assumes, without compelling evidence, that a supernatural being created everything.

Let’s explore why God is the worst explanation for anything.

1. “God did it” is unfalsifiable. It explains too much.

“God did it” is the ready answer apologists can use to explain any scientific puzzle—what caused abiogenesis (the first life, which allowed evolution to begin), what caused the Big Bang, what explains consciousness, and so on. Of course, science keeps answering those puzzles, meaning that those applications of “God did it” were both wrong and premature, but apologists never seem to learn that lesson.

I can never prove that “God did it” is not the explanation for anything. What about a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands of people, God’s hiddenness despite earnest prayers, or anything else within Christianity that confounds us? The Christian can always say that God might have his own reasons that we simply aren’t entitled to know or aren’t smart enough to understand.

(A god who made knowing about him a requirement to avoiding hell in the afterlife and yet remains hidden is not the omnibenevolent Christian god, but let’s ignore that for now.)

Handwaving away challenges to the God hypothesis is exactly what you’d do if there were no God.

The problem is that “God did it” can never be falsified, which makes it useless. By explaining anything, it explains nothing. More here and here.

2. “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable answer.

Don’t stretch to fill the void—if you don’t know, just say so.

Christians will say that they have the answers to life’s big questions. They seem to imagine a time limit, with the teacher saying, “Time’s up! Pencils down. Pass forward your quizzes.” Yes, Christianity does have answers to life’s big questions; it’s just that those answers suck. They’re given without evidence, so there’s no reason to believe them.

Things are clearer when we pull back to take in all the world’s religions. The map of world religions makes clear that religion’s answers to these questions depend on where you live. If you live in Tibet or Thailand, Buddhism teaches that we’re here to learn to cease suffering. If you live in Malaysia or Morocco, Islam teaches that we’re here to submit to Allah. Christianity, Scientology, and all the rest—they each have their own supernatural answers to these big questions, and each answer must be taken on faith. The only thing that religions  all agree on is that the supernatural exists, and each one makes up its own stories to populate its version.

3. Popular apologetic arguments don’t point to God.

The most popular Christian apologetic arguments today—the Cosmological, Moral, Transcendental, Ontological, Design, and Fine Tuning arguments and so on—are all deist arguments. The Christian god is never the conclusion; all these arguments can do is allude to some sort of vague and undefined Creator. Yahweh fits the bill no better than the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

4. The Principle of Analogy tells us where to put supernatural claims.

We’re familiar with supernatural stories. Even the most secular society has in their history some approximation to Grimm’s Fairy Tales or the Greek pantheon of gods or magical folk such as fairies, leprechauns, and elves. We have a bin for these stories labeled “Mythology and Legend.” Zeus, Odin, and Merlin go in the bin, and so does Yahweh. More.

To be concluded in part 2.

I’m afraid I don’t believe there is such a thing as blasphemy,
just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.
— Stephen Fry

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-7-8.)

Image credit: author

New wallets sometimes come with sample photos in the clear plastic sleeves. Suppose I kept the photo of the female model and told everyone that she was my girlfriend. Her photo is in my wallet, after all, and I’d be happy to show it to you.

You might remember this bit from the movie Napoleon Dynamite.

Napoleon: My old girlfriend from Oklahoma was gonna fly out here for the dance but she couldn’t cuz she’s doing some modeling right now.

Pedro: Is she hot?

Napoleon: See for yourself.

At this point, Napoleon brings out a stock model photo from his wallet, and Pedro is impressed.

The Christian is like Napoleon when he brags about God’s properties, accomplishments, and (of course) skills. “Oh, he’s great—he supports me when times are tough” or “He found me a new job and cured me of cancer” or “He upholds the very laws of physics.” All this is stated without evidence.

Anytime you get a little too close to exposing the claim, the goalpost is moved.

Maybe you prayed without success, but you’re told that God’s answer must’ve been “not yet.”

Maybe natural disasters that kill thousands don’t sound like what an all-good god would allow, but you’re told that it’s actually mankind’s fault.

Maybe you wonder: If the Trinity is so important, why aren’t the specifics made clear in the Bible? Or, why is the Bible ambiguous such that there are 45,000 Christian denominations, each hoping that they have the correct answers? Or, why does a good god do so many bad things in the Bible? Or, why doesn’t God make his existence obvious to everyone? Or, why does the Christian story seem to be from the same mold as all the other religions? You’re told that you can’t judge God or that God works in mysterious ways or that you haven’t proven that God doesn’t exist.

God is the ultimate hot girlfriend from Oklahoma who just can’t find the time to come for a visit. She’s busy modeling, you see.

See also: Weak Analogies? Is That the Best You Can Do to Prove God?

An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself,
without going in partnership with State Legislatures.
Certainly he ought not so to act
that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at.
No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule,
by the threat of fine and imprisonment.
It strikes me that God might write a book
that would not necessarily excite the laughter of his children.
— Robert G. Ingersoll

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-5-29.)