A popular article among some conservatives is “Secularism’s Ongoing Debt to Christianity” by John Steinrucken in the conservative online magazine American Thinker.
I didn’t think much of it.
Steinrucken says that he’s an atheist, but he has an odd accommodationist point of view. I don’t see him making many new atheist friends, and his view of Christianity as a false but useful fiction to keep the Proletariat in line can’t endear him to Christians either. Still, dozens of sites reference his article, many of them Christian.
First, let’s understand his thesis.

Religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. … Western civilization’s survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

As an atheist, he doesn’t believe that there is anything behind Christian faith. And though the somewhat-Christian West is at the top of the pyramid at the moment, other societies have advanced quite well without Christianity—consider the Islamic Golden Age, China’s many dynasties, India, the Aztecs and Olmecs in Central America, the Incas and Aymara in the Andes, Mali and Egypt in Africa, Greece and Babylon in the Eastern Mediterranean, Angkor and Sukhothai in Southeast Asia. He has a long way to go to show that Christianity does something that other religions don’t.
Next, it’s Christianity as a “moral compass.”

Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion?

I say to any Christian who would be a rampaging maniac without religion: please remain a Christian! Since prisons aren’t overflowing with atheists, they may avoid crime simply because it’s the right thing to do. This reminds me of Penn Jilette’s observation

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.

If you wondered if Steinrucken is really an atheist, he really looks like a clumsy Poe when he says:

Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?

Wow—how many ways would this be wrong in American society? No, the law that Moses brought down from the mountain would be worse than useless. The Ten Commandments demand allegiance to God; the First Amendment allows religion but says that government must stay out of it. The Ten Commandments say nothing against slavery, genocide, and rape; today, we have a very different view of what’s right and wrong. The Ten Commandments presuppose a theocracy; the Constitution outlines a representative democracy.
You want a moral code that’s concise but doesn’t suck? Here are some suggestions from commenter Playonwords:

“Be excellent to each other” – Bill and Ted
“Do as you would be done by” and all the other versions of the Golden Rule
Primum nil nocere (first, do no harm)

Steinrucken next blunders into the question of morality and says that the secularist

can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion.

Wrong again. Atheists point to a shared moral instinct. We’re all the same species, so we have pretty much the same moral programming. If Steinrucken is pointing to objective morality, I want evidence of such a thing. I’ve seen none.
For some reason, he has a chip on his shoulder about “secularists.” He pauses to paint a bizarre picture of how they fill their God-shaped hole. If it’s not nutty New Age nonsense,

they surrender themselves to secular ideologies or do-good causes, especially those in which they can mass with others in solidarity, shouting in unison mindless, ritualistic simplicities and waving placards of hackneyed and inane slogans.

My local atheist group organizes an event at the local blood center every eight weeks. At Christmas, we wrap presents at book stores, with donations going to a children’s hospital. We answer phones for the local public radio station pledge drive. We get together for social events and lectures. We don’t shout mindless simplicities or wave signs with inane slogans—should we?
Next, we’re told that

secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion.

Do you substitute something for malaria or cancer? Or do you simply make victims healthy? But if you want to see it that way, the substitute for religion is reality.

We secularists should recognize that we owe much to the religionists, that we are not threatened by them, that we should grant to them their world.

They already have their world—read the First Amendment. I strongly support the demand that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
As for our not being threatened, guess again. Some Christians are eager to see prayer in public schools. To see Creationism taught in science class. To see prayers in government buildings from City Hall to Congress. To see “In God We Trust” continue as our official motto and placed on the walls of government chambers. To have the phrase “under God” remain in the Pledge. To see a de facto Christian requirement for public office.

Why should we be exercised over a Christmas Crèche in front of the county court house?

Because it spits on our governing document, that’s why. (Unlike what you may have heard, there actually are stupid questions.) Do we care about the First Amendment or not? If so, respect it and protect it.

And what harm will come to a child who hears prayer in the schoolroom?

You tell me. Should we deliver morning prayers by cycling through the religions represented in America, giving turns to Muslims, Mormons, Satanists, Wiccans, Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, and so on? No conceivable harm to the schoolchildren, right?
Or—crazy idea—maybe we should leave the religious indoctrination at home and just focus on education at school.
Steinrucken doesn’t think much of “elitists,” which pop up occasionally as scoundrels in his essay. They stand on the shoulders of the Christian masses to practice “their conceits and dilettantes.” But it would be wise of them to

publicly hold in high esteem the institutions of Christianity and Judaism, and to respect those who do believe and to encourage and to give leeway to those who, in truth, will be foremost in the trenches defending us against those who would have us all bow down to a different and unaccommodating faith.

So fight fire with fire? When the Muslim believers attack, we must respond with Christian believers for some reason.
No, you don’t fight fire with fire; you fight it with water. A civilization that is immune to the siren call of Christianity won’t care much for Islam either.
But from Steinrucken’s standpoint, what’s the problem? If Christianity is the special sauce that makes a civilization run, what’s the problem with replacing it with Islam? Wouldn’t it provide the same thing? He’s asserted that Christianity is the best but provided no evidence.
This flabby apology for American Christianity never gets off the ground. It’s not that Christianity is the foundation on which is built American democracy; it’s the other way around. The Constitution is what we should defend and hold in high esteem. It’s the Constitution that gives religion its freedom.

A religious war 
is like children fighting over 
who has the strongest imaginary friend.
— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/11/13.)
Image credit: tangi bertin (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Let’s put on our asbestos suits again and finish with Mark Shea’s attack on atheism,“Padding the Case for the New Atheism.” Part 1 of my response is here.
Mark claims that reasonable arguments for atheism boil down to the Problem of Evil and “Natural Explanations are Sufficient.” About these, he concludes,

[These] are all she wrote as far as good atheist arguments. … [They are] the only two really reasonable objections to God’s existence there ever have been or ever will be.

And why is this? Mark won’t tell us. I guess it’s obvious or something. As for additional arguments, he dismisses them out of hand as “fallacies.” But he deigns to gives his critique of three more, so let’s make the most of this opportunity to sit at the feet of the master.
Argument from Intellectual Maturity
In Aquinas-esque form, he gives the argument as follows:

It seems that God does not exist, because children, fools, and other simpletons believe He does. Therefore, God is a delusion concocted by mental and emotional juveniles.

I’ve never made this argument, nor have I heard anyone who has.
Next, he concludes that in God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens “reveals his own atheist convictions to be entirely faith-based.” I remember some evidence and arguments in Hitchens’ book, and I have no idea what Mark is referring to.
Argumentum Contra Suckers
Mark gives the next fallacious atheist argument.

It seems that God does not exist, for shepherd children, peasants, polyester-clad tourists from Jersey, and other people I regard as suckers say they see miracles. But any God worthy of the name would submit to my demand for experimental proof, not manifest Himself to such tacky people. God does not submit to my demands, therefore God does not exist.

Or, we could just drop the snarkiness and address head-on the Problem of Divine Hiddenness: if God exists and wants us to know him, why is he so hidden? Why the need for faith? Why not just come out and show us?
Yes, Mark’s lampoon of this argument is fallacious, but, unless Mark’s goal is simply to write a humor piece, this problem actually exists and deserves serious discussion. We see this problem in Mother Teresa’s agony from unanswered prayer and the plaintive beginning of Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest.

Mark isn’t interested in acknowledging that this is a real problem for honest Christians. Instead, he brings up the miracles of Jesus. First, he notes that Jesus said,

An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah (Matthew 12:39).

And then he notes the contradiction. Jesus says that he does healing miracles

so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins (Matt. 9:6).

God won’t give a sign … and then Jesus gives a sign. In the same book. Mark wonders what we conclude from this. How about that the Bible is contradictory? Or that this suggests different authors or copyists modified a consistent original? Or that competing stories from the decades of oral tradition were too precious to harmonize away, so they were all included when Matthew was finally written?
Wrong—Mark tells us that this is too obvious a problem to have been an accident, and we must presuppose that it all makes sense and give it a deeper reading.
Mark picks another atheist to bash when he finds a columnist who was unimpressed by the 2006 story of a nun who claimed that her Parkinson’s disease was healed after the heavenly intervention of Pope John Paul II. The columnist dismissed the claims out of hand, and perhaps with good reason. A diagnosis of Parkinson’s can only be confirmed by an autopsy, and it’s possible that her illness was something else. She was reported to have had a relapse. Perhaps the columnist’s certainty was misplaced, but it was certainly a good bet.
You don’t like this miracle? Mark lists others: the stigmata of Pio of Pietrelcina, the miracle healings of Lourdes, the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. I’m sure he’s got plenty more, and that’s the problem. You poke holes in one claim, and he’ll just throw another one at you.
Let me propose another approach: Mark, you take the burden of proof. Don’t complain about skepticism; skepticism is appropriate in response to a miracle claim. Show us a miracle that has passed scientific scrutiny—something that, if true, would overturn some substantial part of our scientific understanding of nature. Until we have that independent confirmation, I won’t accept any as true. Nor is it my job to do the investigation.
Did you ever wonder why the miracles accepted by the church are not accepted by science? What does this tell us?
One problem with Christians citing miracles is that they have nothing on the line. If you poke holes in one claim, they’ll just bring up another from Mary Poppins’ bottomless carpet bag of miracles. What I’d like to see is some commitment. I’d like a Christian to say, “This miracle claim is for real. No natural explanation explains it or could explain it. I’m so certain that I rest my faith on it. Show me scientific consensus that I’m wrong, and I drop my faith.”
We never see this. Maybe claims of evidence are only for atheists’ benefit.
Argument from Chronological Snobbery

It seems God does not exist, because if he did exist he would meet my demand for proof by giving a biblical author knowledge — such as the soil composition of Mars or the design of a microchip — impossibly ahead of the Bronze Age. He has not done this, therefore God does not exist.

Wow—is this guy blind to the arguments that are actually leveled against Christianity? Or maybe it’s a genre mistake, and I’m misunderstanding a humor article.
Yes, it would be compelling evidence if the Bible contained scientific knowledge unknown to people of the Ancient Near East. It doesn’t. Heck, it would be impressive if it contained the recipe for soap. But no, that this isn’t the case doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist.
He talks about Catholics’ belief in progressive revelation. This is simply vaccine against a plain reading of the Bible, which documents the evolution of the unchanging Creator of the universe.
He asks whether atheists would like to have seen the rejected theories of bodily humors, leeches, or luminiferous aether in the Bible. No, atheists would like to see something scientific found in the Bible before it was discovered by science. Anything.
What we see instead are the superstitions and pre-scientific musings of an early Iron Age people—a global flood (Genesis 6–8), a geocentric universe (Ecclesiastes 1:5), a belief that what animals see while mating affects their young (Gen. 30:37–9), and so on. Sure, that doesn’t prove that God didn’t want to hide his majesty behind superstitions of the time, but it makes the Bible look like just another ancient book of mythology.
Mark concludes:

There are two sorts of questioners, roughly speaking: those who ask to find things out and those who ask to keep from finding things out.

Atheists are apparently in the latter camp, but Mark is in neither. He’s got it figured out.
Mark has given us two reasonable (but wrong) arguments for atheism and assured us that the rest are all fallacious.
Really? Atheism has nothing else to offer to the conversation? Not that polytheism in the Old Testament shows early Judaism to be just another Canaanite religion? Not that God’s own prohibitions against other religions show it to be cut from the same cloth and just as fictitious? Not that many Christians have insulated their religion from critique, turning it from an evidenced-based viewpoint to just a belief? Not that God’s support of slavery shows the Bible to be nothing more than the history of a not-particularly-enlightened tribe? Not that the Bible shows Yahweh to be vulnerable?
In this post, I find Mark’s arguments unconvincing and his style obnoxious. He has scolded me in the past for being offensive myself. I’d reach more Christians with a more likeable approach, he says.
He’s right, and that’s bitter medicine that’s actually on target. I think he might want to take a dose himself.

Happiness is the only good. 
The time to be happy is now. 
The place to be happy is here. 
The way to be happy is to make others so.
— Robert Green Ingersoll

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/20/13.)
Image credit: Kendra Rowland, flickr, CC

Several years ago, Mark Shea, a Patheos blogger who writes the “Catholic and Enjoying It!” blog, wrote an article titled “Padding the Case for the New Atheism.” His contempt for what he sees as the atheist position is barely contained at times. Let’s find out what aggravates Mark so much.
He begins by saying that the New Atheists don’t actually say anything new. Indeed 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas only had two objections, and Mark assures us that “every reasonable atheistic argument is a restatement of one or both of these basic points.”
With that buildup, who’s not eager to find this succinct distillation of atheist thought?
Atheisms two arguments
1. The Problem of Evil. If God existed, there would be no evil; but there is; therefore, God doesn’t exist. (This isn’t the way that I’d phrase it—I’d say that the existence of evil is strong evidence that an omnipotent and good god doesn’t exist.)
2. Nature Suffices. Natural explanations are sufficient. “God did it” is unnecessary and the God hypothesis is redundant; therefore, we have no need to imagine God.
Mark thinks this is all atheists have to offer. He lampoons atheists pointing out harm done in the name of religion and argues instead “that 20th-century atheists shed oceans of blood dwarfing anything ever achieved by theists.”
Men with moustaches might have committed more barbarity in the 20th century than men without. Does that tell us something about moustaches? Hitler was a vegetarian—do his crimes then tell us something about vegetarians? Indeed, men have shed far more blood on all sides of 20th-century conflicts than women. But they didn’t do it in the name of men, Hitler didn’t order the Holocaust in the name of vegetarianism, and Stalin didn’t commit his crimes in the name of moustaches.
Similarly, savage 20th-century atheists (I presume he means Stalin and Mao) didn’t do their thing in the name of atheism. Rather, they were dictators who saw the church as a competitor and suppressed it. The church and innocent people were both on the wrong side of these dictatorships. More here.
Atheists and morality
He next imagines that atheists get tripped up with morality.

Trying to derive a moral universe — any moral universe at all — of Should from a purely materialistic universe of Is turns out to be impossible.

In Mark’s mind, perhaps. Not in mine.
This is David Hume’s is-ought problem. For example, “It is the case that X, therefore, you ought to do Y.” What could replace X and Y to make a sensible sentence?
That’s a provocative question until you ask yourself: if morals don’t come from what is—that is, reality—where do they come from? Imagining a supernatural source for morals demands evidence.
Hume says that you can’t derive an absolute or objective ought from an is, and I agree. This causes no problem because I don’t see any evidence for absolute oughts. It is the case that my moral programming tells me to help people; therefore, I ought to help people. Problem solved.
Mark isn’t done and says that the naturalistic view of atheists demands that the biochemical thought process going on inside Adolph Hitler’s head has no greater or lesser oughtness than that in Martin Luther King’s head.
I agree—from an absolute or objective standpoint. But not from mine. And not from that of most people in society. Most of us are happy to weigh various moral stands against our own views and judge them satisfactory or wanting.
My moral instincts are very similar to Mark’s and very similar to those of most other people, which is hardly surprising because we’re all the same species. That’s why we can create a society.
Today’s bull-in-a-china-shop atheists, Mark tells us,

retain a serene confidence that the privileged bits of the moral and rational order looted from the Christian civilization they are laboring to destroy will just go coasting on of their own accord.

Isn’t it quaint how Mark imagines that morality and rationality are gifts from his religion? I wonder how he explains non-Christian civilizations that stumble along pretty well. Or how the first civilizations in what is now India, Egypt, and Iraq did fine despite their preceding Christianity by 3000 years. When you consider the morality of Christian civilization, I’m not sure that gives you much to crow about.
And he imagines that Christianity gave us morality and rationality?
Nature suffices
It’s on to argument two, which says that natural arguments are sufficient and “God did it” is redundant and unnecessary.

Put briefly, you propose a huge metaphysical hypothesis that Absolutely Everything popped into existence 13 billion years ago with the help of Nobody, but loaves and fishes cannot pop into existence 2,000 years ago with the help of Jesus of Nazareth, despite the eyewitnesses who inexplicably chose to die in torments proclaiming He did.

Wow—so many mistakes and so little time. First, cosmology doesn’t claim to know what caused the Big Bang. Science says, “I don’t know” without shame. There is no “Time’s up!” after which Yahweh will be declared the default Creator of the Big Bang.
Second, most atheists don’t declare that the miracles of Jesus absolutely didn’t happen, just that that’s where the evidence points. (Given that the myriad miracle claims throughout history have produced no scientifically acceptable evidence of the supernatural and that we have many examples of legends or myths, it’s a pretty good bet that the loaves-’n-fishes story is yet another.)
Third, we have no reason to think that the gospels were eyewitness accounts. We don’t even know who wrote them.
Finally, the “Who would die for a lie?” argument is weak (more here).
He next mentions the fine-tuning argument. I’ve responded to that argument here, here, and here.
The Muse of Sarcasm seems irresistible to Mark (I hear there’s a 12-step program for that), and he lampoons his version of the positions of various atheists. In one rant, he touches on Richard Dawkins’ statement,

any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself.

Mark is unimpressed and tells us that Thomas Aquinas

addressed your brand new unrebuttable objection nearly 900 years ago in his Summa Theologiae (Part I, Question 3, Article 7).

Yes, Aquinas addressed it. No, he didn’t do a particularly convincing job. I’ve written more here, but my short response is: if God is simple, prove it by making one. You don’t have the materials, you say? Okay, then give us the recipe. You can’t even do this? Okay, then don’t claim that you know what makes God well enough to tell us that he’s simple.
Mark wraps up this section with some snarky advice for atheists.

Most of all, overlook the fact that the question you are supposed to be attending to is “whether God exists,” not “whether God is complex.” Ignore the fact that all a theist has to do is show that creation is contingent and therefore necessarily depends on what is not contingent for existence. Do not remind yourself that the theist is not obliged to say he or she understands that non-contingent Being, merely that such a being exists. If all this fails and your reader still thinks St. Thomas is getting the better of you, call your reader a creationist in the same tone of voice you’d use to say, “You left your used Kleenex on my coffee table.”

Why imagine that the universe is contingent? A popular view within quantum physics is the Copenhagen interpretation, which states that some quantum events have no cause. For example, the alpha particle that comes out of a decaying nucleus has no cause. The probability of this event can be precisely predicted, but that’s it. Given that the universe itself was a quantum particle at the beginning of the Big Bang, maybe universes are also stochastic rather than caused.
(Snarkiness can work, but it backfires when your argument is flimsy.)
There’s more, but let’s pause here before our next dose of Mark’s bitter medicine. Feel free to read Mark’s original paper if you question whether I’m treating his argument fairly.
This critique is concluded in part 2.

Forget Jesus. 
The stars died so that you could be here today.
— Lawrence Krauss

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/18/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Our little friend William Lane Craig is up to his old shenanigans. God apparently can’t defend himself against charges that he condones slavery, so Christian apologist Craig steps into the breach to do it for him.

We need to help [skeptics] come to grips with the fact that they have not studied the Hebrew text carefully and in many cases simply have a misunderstanding of the text. So-called “slavery” in the Old Testament is a prime example.

Why, I do believe I’m being condescended to! But Craig isn’t alone in his view. This idea that biblical slavery was very different from American slavery—indeed, that it was a good thing—is a common spin within many Christian blogs.

The slavery referred to in the Bible was a fundamentally different practice [than that practiced in the West]. Some translations try to indicate this by using the word “bondservant.” … Biblical “slavery” was not race-based (Stand to Reason blog).
The New Testament Servitude of the Ancient Near East had little in common with the New World Slavery of our American ancestors (Cold-Case Christianity blog).

Apologists’ spin approach #1: biblical slavery wasn’t so bad
Let’s compare these two approaches to slavery. They’re a lot more similar than the apologists will admit.
During U.S. history, we had two kinds of servitude. There was indentured servitude, where Europeans would come to America to work for fellow Europeans in return for payment of their transportation. This servitude would typically last for five years or so.
And, of course, we had slavery. Slaves were almost always not Europeans. They were slaves for life, as were their children.
The Old Testament outlines the very same categories of servitude. Fellows Jews could be slaves, but only for a limited time:

[God said:] If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free (Exodus 21:2).

That’s pretty much indentured servitude, and that’s the “biblical slavery” that many Christians like to point to. They often ignore the other kind:

[God said:] Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. … You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life (Leviticus 25:44–6).

Slavery in the Old Testament was regulated, just like commerce. And, like commerce, slavery was kosher from God’s standpoint.
Granted, slavery was common in this part of the world. During New Testament times, as many as a third of the population of Italy were slaves. We can see the Bible as just a product of its times, but wouldn’t a book inspired by the omniscient and holy creator of the universe be better than that? And why were the Greek Stoics the first to condemn slavery rather than God’s chosen people?
Apologists’ spin approach #2: biblical slavery was a good thing!
Now, back to Craig. Determined to force-fit slavery into a godly world, he says:

I think that [the point of the book Is God a Moral Monster? is] that our understanding of [slavery] is shaped by the experience of the American South prior to the Civil War and that what is described in the Old Testament is actually a sort of anti-poverty program designed to help the poor in the absence of a strong national government.

That’s an interesting spin. But is this so called “anti-poverty program” a moral institution? It must be, since God defines the rules for slavery and so obviously approves of it. But Craig has dug himself into a hole—either indentured servitude is moral for society today, or morality changes over time and we discard the idea of objective morality. Neither can be a pleasing option for Craig.
The problem is worse with slavery for life. Surely we can agree that this biblical institution is wrong today. Either it was wrong in Old Testament times, and God made a mistake in giving rules for it, or it was right then and morality changes with time. Here again Craig finds himself in a difficult spot.
How can Christians satisfy themselves that the Ten Commandments have “Don’t covet” but not “Don’t enslave anyone”? The Bible is obviously the work of Man, not that of God. The Bible is simply a reflection of their society.
Christians who justify slavery in the Bible are determined to shoehorn an ancient religion into modern society, but the result is as out of place as a Neanderthal in a tuxedo. My advice: they should stop embarrassing themselves.
More: Yes, Biblical Slavery Was the Same as American Slavery

None are more hopelessly enslaved 
than those who falsely believe they are free. 
— Johann Wolfgang van Goethe

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/30/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

The first of the Ten Commandments says, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). (There are two very different sets of Ten Commandments in Exodus, but let’s ignore that for now.)
Have you ever thought much about the wording of this commandment? Why doesn’t it say that Jehovah is the only god? It’s because this section of the Bible was written in roughly the 10th century BCE, the early days of the Israelite religion, when it was still polytheistic. (More on the Documentary Hypothesis which explains these sections here.) The next commandment notes, “I, Jehovah, your God, am a jealous God”—jealous because there were indeed other viable options, and Jehovah insisted on a commitment.
Jewish Henotheism
Let’s use the proper term for this, henotheism. Polytheists acknowledge many gods and worship many gods, while henotheists acknowledge many gods but worship only one. In this view, different gods ruled different territories just as kings did, and tribes owed allegiance to whichever god protected them.
I’ve gotten a lot of insight into Old Testament henotheism from Thom Stark’s The Human Faces of God. Some of what follows comes from chapter 4 of that book.
The Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 is considered to be some of the oldest material in the Bible—dating to the mid-13th century BCE. We have several somewhat-inconsistent copies, the oldest being from the Dead Sea Scrolls:

When Elyon divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he established the borders of the nations according to the number of the sons of the gods. Yahweh’s portion was his people, [Israel] his allotted inheritance. (Deut. 32:8–9)

Here we see Elyon, the head of the divine pantheon, dividing humankind among his children, giving each his inheritance. The idea of a divine pantheon with a chief deity, his consort, and their children (the council of the gods) was widespread through the Ancient Near East. Elyon (short for El Elyon) is the chief god, not just in Jewish writings but also in Canaanite literature. The passage concludes with Yahweh receiving Israel as his inheritance.
We learn more about terms like “sons of the gods” by widening our focus to consider Ugaritic (Canaanite) texts. Ugarit was a Canaanite city destroyed along with much of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze Age Collapse in roughly 1200 BCE, a period of widespread chaos in that part of the world from which Israelite civilization seems to have grown.
The Ugaritic texts state that El and his consort Asherah had 70 sons, which may be the origin of the 70 nations (or 72) that came from Noah’s descendants listed in Genesis 10.
The Old Testament is full of clues pointing to multiple gods. Genesis is a good place to start.

Then [Elohim] said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

We also see plural gods when Jehovah warns them that man mustn’t eat the tree of life (Gen. 3:22) and that they must confuse mankind’s languages lest their projects, like the Tower of Babel, succeed (Gen. 11:7).
A common Christian spin is either to say that the “us” is the Trinity or that it is a heavenly assembly of angels. But can we imagine that the original audience for Genesis would understand the Trinity? And why imagine an angelic assembly when the polytheistic interpretation of Genesis simply growing out of preceding Canaanite culture is available and plausible?
Psalms is another old book that has fossilized the earliest forms of Judaism. We see the assembly of the gods mentioned several times.

[Elohim] stands in the assembly of El; in the midst of the gods he renders judgment (Psalm 82:1).
For who in the skies can compare to [Jehovah]? Who is like [Jehovah] among the [sons of God], a God who is honored [in the great assembly of the holy ones], and more awesome than all who surround him? (Ps. 89:6–7)

And many more verses celebrate Jehovah while acknowledging the existence of others.

For [Jehovah] is the great God, and the great King above all gods (Ps. 95:3).
All the gods bow down before [Jehovah] (Ps. 97:7).
I know [Jehovah] is great, and our Lord is superior to all gods. (Ps. 135:5)

In a recent post, we’ve seen where the Bible documents how Yahweh lost a fight with the Moabite god Chemosh (2 Kings 3:27).
Migration to Monotheism
We find one indication of the move from henotheism to monotheism in later versions of the Song of Moses. The phrase “sons of the gods” becomes “angels” in the Septuagint (from the 3rd century BCE) and “sons of Israel” in the Masoretic text (7th through 10th centuries CE).
Let’s consider books composed later than Genesis or Psalms.
Deuteronomy was written after the conquest of Israel and before the conquest of Judah, in the 7th century BCE. The philosophy has now moved from henotheism to monolatry. Like henotheism, many gods are accepted and only one is worshipped, but now worship of other gods is forbidden.

Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you (Deut. 6:14)
But you must not turn away from all the comandments I am giving you today, to either the right or left, nor pursue other gods and worship them (Deut. 28:14–15).

Second Isaiah (the second part of Isaiah) was written later, near the end of the Babylonian exile. Here we find the transition to monotheism is complete.

Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me (Isa. 43:10)

The very idea of an idol is ridiculed in Isaiah 44:9–20. Can a man cook his meal over a fire made from half of the tree he used to carve his idol and imagine that an idol from so unrefined an origin is really a god?
What explains this migration to monotheism? A major factor was the Babylonian exile. How could Yahweh, clearly defined as the most powerful of the assembly of gods, have been defeated by the puny Babylonian god Marduk?
Maybe Yahweh let it happen to teach Israel and Judah a lesson. Yeah, that’s what happened! Babylon didn’t defeat Yahweh’s people; they were merely a pawn in his grand plan all along.

A decent provision for the poor 
is the true test of civilization. 
— Samuel Johnson

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/13/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

I remember the tabloid magazines from years ago at the grocery store checkout stand in January. They splashed famous psychics’ predictions across the cover of every new year’s first edition. What Hollywood or royal celebrities would get embarrassed, arrested, or divorced? What gaffes would various world leaders commit? What natural disasters or wars would happen?
What was surprising was how they could keep doing this, year after year, when the issue just one week earlier had the end-of-year scorecard showing how badly the prior year’s predictions had done.
Kidding! There was no scorecard, not at the end of the previous year or ever. Why acknowledge the elephant in the room?
The tabloid fan might admit that if you really want to get precise about it, sure, the occasional prediction wasn’t completely accurate. If the prediction was that a celebrity would lose a child due to a drug overdose, but what actually happened was that their ex got divorced, that was close enough, right? Blur your eyes and score generously, and those psychics were still worth reading.
This has been called the Jeane Dixon effect after a prolific psychic. From her oeuvre, you can find loads of preposterously wrong predictions as well as the occasional correct one. Knowing what sells, the media celebrated the hits and forgot the misses. (One author called this kind of selection bias the Jeane Dixon defect.)
And isn’t it fun to believe? It’s like a kid waiting for Santa. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll get that pony you asked for.
Maybe, just maybe, the psychic will be right, the predicted natural disaster will happen, and you can say you knew it all along.
And maybe, just maybe, your prayer for a miracle will be answered.
Christian predictions
We see the same naïve belief in some Christians today. The fraction of Americans who say that we’re living in the end times as described by the Bible is 41 percent. Of American Evangelicals, it’s 77 percent.
When you or I hear a tragic news story—the November ISIS attack in Paris, for example—we likely see this in the context of bad stuff that happens across the world from time to time. For apocalyptic Christians convinced that Armageddon is around the corner, however, any tragedy neatly confirms their conclusion.
John Hagee’s recent hysterical blather about the four blood moons scratched that “All aboard!” itch that these apocalyptic Christians seem to have. They’re playing the poker game of eternity, they’re all in, and they’re eager to show their cards. About the four blood moons, Hagee said, “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon,’ ” and “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”
(You didn’t notice the world ending in October? No four horsemen? Nothing to suggest the End? Me neither. The only blood is Hagee’s bloody nose when he got smacked with reality.)
As with psychics’ failed predictions in tabloid magazines, Christian prophets have no final reckoning. The Jeane Dixon defect is in play, and failed predictions are either ignored or reinterpreted to be close enough.
One difference, though, is that the Bible demands the death penalty for false prophets.

A prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded … is to be put to death. (Deuteronomy 18:20–22)

It’s almost like Christians aren’t consistent and are selectively reading the Bible.
Comparison: psychics vs. prophets
The National Enquirer psychics predicted big things for 2015: an assassination attempt on Pope Francis, a Hollywood job offer for Barack Obama, significant volcanic activity in the Pacific Northwest, and a deathbed confession that that whole moon-landing thing really was a hoax. As of this writing, half an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve, none of those predictions was correct.
No 2015 prediction about ISIS or the Paris attacks or Charlie Hebdo? Nothing about the Obergefell decision or Christian bakers or Kim Davis? Nothing about Donald Trump and the comedy that American politics has become? I’m omitting many big stories of 2015, but then there’s a lot of that going around.
We can laugh at how badly the psychics got things wrong, but then the Christian prophets, perpetually crying wolf about the latest disaster, were just as laughably wrong. My prediction for the new year: more empty and irresponsible predictions from both psychics and Christian prophets.

Risky predictions have been successfully made
thousands of times in science,
not once in religion.
— Vic Stenger