Atheist whiners like me are quick to point out the problems that religion causes within society—crimes become righteous acts when done in the name of God, believers attack the boundary between church and state, a believer who thinks that beliefs can be justified through faith rather than evidence opens their mind to parasitic mental baggage, and so on.

But let’s be fair. Christians will point out that their religion created universities and hospitals. Setting aside the negatives about religion, surely these institutions are a substantial addition to the Christian side of the ledger.

Now consider the pro-social motivations within Christianity versus those within the secular community. British author Malcolm Muggeridge said:

I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.

Original universities

We’ll look at universities in this post and hospitals next time.

Let’s consider the challenge that we have Christianity to thank for creating universities and nurturing them as they developed into the centers of education and research that they are today.

The oldest continuously operating university is the University of Bologna, Italy (1088), followed by universities at Oxford, England (1096), Salamanca, Spain (1134), and Cambridge, England (1209). Though there were institutions of higher learning in other old civilizations such as Greece, Byzantium, China, India, and the Muslim world, Wikipedia’s list excludes them because they are sufficiently different to make comparisons difficult, and evidence suggests that the seed that eventually grew into the modern university was the medieval European version, not similar institutions from other cultures.

Universities at Oxford and Paris began with the disciplines of theology, law, medicine, and the liberal arts. To see their unabashedly Christian environment, though, consider an example from several centuries later.

Cambridge in the time of Newton

The story of Isaac Newton illustrates how dissimilar medieval universities were from modern universities. Both Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth century required its fellows to be ordained Anglican priests. Newton was a Christian, but he didn’t accept the Trinity. This made him a heretic, which was no minor matter at that time. Only an exemption granted by the king in 1675 allowed Newton to accept the Lucasian chair at Cambridge without taking holy orders. Demanding that physics professors also be priests highlights the difference with universities today.

Don’t imagine that Christianity was a burden for Newton, however. Though he revolutionized science and has been called history’s greatest physicist (or even scientist), Newton devoted more time on theology than science and wrote more than two million words about religion. His Christian beliefs are proudly cited by many apologists.

What then was the result of all that theological work from such a great mind? Nothing. He might’ve spent that time playing solitaire for what it taught him about reality and the good it did for Humanity.

Christians also point to other important Christian scientists from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and into the Industrial Revolution, but they can’t show that these scientists’ religious beliefs drove their discoveries in any way. As far as science goes, they were just conforming to their environment (like drinking wine, wearing clothes, or anything else that Europeans at the time did).

Early American universities

Harvard (1636) was the first university in the United States. It was founded by Christians to train clergy. Most of the first universities in this country were founded the same way.

106 of the first 108 colleges were started on the Christian faith. By the close of 1860 there were 246 colleges in America. Seventeen of these were state institutions; almost every other one was founded by Christian denominations or by individuals who avowed a religious purpose.

The universities that Christians point to with pride are today guided with a very different principle than this declaration by Rev. Jonathan Dickinson, the first president of Princeton: “Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.” Christian universities with a Christian purpose are no gift to humanity, and today’s prestigious universities have turned their back on their original focus of creating clergy.

Modern universities

Changed though modern universities are, we can get a glimpse at the environment in medieval universities by looking at modern Christian colleges. Just like Cambridge in Newton’s day, Biola University demands that each undergraduate student “be a believer in the Christian faith (the applicant’s statement of faith will be articulated in the personal essay section of the application).” The PhD application for one discipline at Liberty University asks for church membership, an essay documenting the applicant’s “personal salvation experience,” and agreement with the school’s doctrinal statement. These universities aren’t interested in honest inquiry if they must create a safe space that protects their pre-determined conclusions.

Here is rule #2 from Harvard College’s original student rulebook:

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).

That is the house that Christianity built. It wasn’t Christianity but secular thinking that created the modern university that we’re proud of.

Continue with a discussion of Christianity’s role in creating hospitals here.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/22/16.)

Image from Pantelas, CC license

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Do Christians have a proprietary avenue to truth? We’re critiquing a Christian presentation of advice on finding Christian truth in three points. We’ve covered the first two points (study scripture and seek wise counsel) in part 1.

3. “Seek the consensus of historic Christianity”

I’m guessing this is a polite way of rejecting Roman Catholicism, the denomination that eclipses in size all the Protestant denominations put together. I imagine that the presenter, Alan Shlemon from Stand to Reason ministry, would say that Catholicism relies on tradition too much, while his flavor of Christianity discards those manmade accretions and gets back to basics: nothing but the Bible.

But this doesn’t help since the Bible itself was manmade. It was written by men, and the canon (list of official books) was selected by men. And we’re back to the problem from point #1 in the previous post, that the Bible is ambiguous. You can make it into a sock puppet to make it say almost anything you want.

Shlemon said:

What has the Church taught for 2,000 years? If the idea or the claim that I am considering right now is contradicted by 2,000 years of church history, or it is a completely new idea, then it causes me to become suspicious.

“Church history”? Here again is the problem of manmade ideas. If the Roman Catholic Church’s traditions must be rejected because they were made by fallible men, why stop there? Apocalypticism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, mystery religions, and more influenced Christianity in its first couple of centuries, and there’s no reason to imagine that the crazy quilt that came out of that religious Petri dish was divinely guided. Paul documented the confusion: “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ’ ” (1 Corinthians 1:12). In other words, Christianity is what it is today because of fallible men, in more areas than just Catholicism’s tradition.

Shlemon is on thin ice when he wants to go back 2000 years. To take one example of doctrine that wasn’t in the Bible but had to be decided by committee, the doctrine of the Trinity was in a form that we would recognize only after the Council of Constantinople in 381. That was just the second general church council, and there were 21 of them.

When Shlemon says, “Gimme some of that old-time religion,” what he’s really saying is that he doesn’t like this newfangled acceptance of same-sex marriage, abortion, and Christianity losing its hold on the morals of Western society (more).

I wonder what he thinks about other newfangled ideas like making slavery illegal, which, in the United States, happened in 1865. His response might be to argue that American slavery wasn’t the same as biblical slavery. (Wrong. They were pretty much identical, and the Bible gave Southern pastors the stronger argument on the slavery issue.)

We’d know that Christianity was correct if it (alone among all religions and philosophies) was dragging society into a more moral world. It isn’t, and Christianity looks like all the other religions, a conservative institution uninterested in change and trying to hold on to the status quo.

Where would Shlemon have us go? Should modern Christians try to recreate Christianity as practiced in Paul’s churches in the 50s? Paul’s idea of Jesus was very different from the gospels’. Or maybe the version practiced in the first church to use Mark’s gospel in the 70s. Or John’s significantly different gospel in the 90s. Or maybe after the Trinity was added more than two centuries later.

That’s a lot of effort just to justify wagging your finger at the Gays.

We have been divided on a whole bunch of things for hundreds if not thousands of years in some cases. But when it comes to the question of marriage and sex, all of the church, Protestant, Catholic, and even the Orthodox traditions, have been unanimous for 2,000 years.

Unanimous? Then what are these churches I see in the Pride parades? How is it that many Christians are okay with abortion? Bronze Age morality—genocide, slavery, ownership of women, rules against homosexuality, and more—has no place within modern society, and millions of Christians understand this. The 10 constitutional amendments in the Bill of Rights are much more valuable to American society today than the 10 Commandments.

The three rules in this lecture—study scripture, seek wise counsel, and seek the consensus of historic Christianity—claim to be able to reliably and honestly sift “biblical from bogus,” but they are only useful to solidify your current Christian position, whatever it is. Christians boast about their grasp of objective truth, but take them for a test drive, and these rules are relative just like everyone else’s.

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Image from Lopez Robin, CC license
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Christian apologists are eager to report that they alone have Truth with a capital T. What’s their secret? Let’s take a look at one list of rules that, we’re told, will reliably lead someone through the maze of religious claims to the truth.

The problem is real. Paul said, “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10). That didn’t happen, and there are now 45,000 Christian denominations. The Bible is the perfect word from a perfect divinity, and yet it’s somehow so ambiguous that Christians can’t figure out fundamental issues of doctrine (more).

Our source is an article in Christian Post that summarized a recent lecture by Alan Shlemon from Stand to Reason. Let’s see if this apologist shows us how to separate, as promised, “biblical from bogus.”

1. “Study scripture”

The first rule is that when you’re puzzled by an idea or claim, “we need to test it against Scripture.”

And there’s the problem, presupposing the Bible is correct up front. Why test an idea against the standard of the Bible? Since the Bible is full of contradictions and God has terrible morals, it should be the other way around. Presupposing the correctness of the Bible is a fundamental flaw at the argument’s foundation, but it isn’t even acknowledged.

Studying scripture gets into other dubious but popular rules of thumb like “let easy verses interpret difficult ones.” The idea here is that when you find some Bible verses that fit nicely into your Christian thinking but others that seem in opposition, don’t consider the obvious naturalistic possibility that the Bible was put together over centuries by different people with different agendas whose writings aren’t consistent. No, you should instead let the easy verses interpret difficult verses. And by this, they of course mean that you use the verses you like to reinterpret the unpleasant verses.

And there are more biased rules.

Let me respond with my own rule, that Christians must take four steps before they deliver their rationalization for why God looks like a Bronze Age barbarian. These hold Christians’ feet to the fire so they accept the consequences of their claims. I discuss them in detail here, but very briefly, Christians must:

1. Acknowledge that God sure looks like a moral monster, even if you want to argue that, in fact, he isn’t.
2. You say God might have his reasons for acting this way? Share them with us. Make a list of plausible reasons God might have for allowing a tsunami to kill 200,000 people or for letting a child die of leukemia.
3. Show that this God plausibly exists. “You can’t prove no God” is no argument.
4. A Greatest Possible Being could achieve goals without suffering. Justify why God didn’t take this route.

2. “Seek wise counsel”

Admitting that you don’t have all the answers and listening to others sounds like good advice, but the advice really is to seek wise counsel from people within your church or denomination. This isn’t a search for the truth, it’s a search for rationalizations that will keep you a Christian, preferably in the denomination of the person giving the advice. How do you know their denomination is the correct one? Not by following the evidence but by listening to faith.

Christian faith is fragile. The Christian vessel must be insulated as much as possible from outside influences. Christians acknowledge this when they fret about sending their children to secular universities, but they never stop to think what this means. If the claims of Christianity were easy to verify, who would have doubts? Why is Christian doubt even a thing? And isn’t it odd that Christians must reject, ignore, or reinterpret the doubts that their God-given brain tells them?

The religion from a real omnipotent and omniscient god would be unambiguous. It’d be simple. Christianity isn’t.

Rule 1 is “study scripture,” pretending that the Bible has a single interpretation. Rule 2 is “seek wise counsel,” but this can only be a quest to tamp down annoying doubts and maintain the status quo.

We’ll conclude with a final rule in part 2.

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Image from commenter epeeist, used with permission
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