Let’s create the most compelling miracle story possible. Here’s one.

I met Jesus yesterday. At first, I didn’t believe who he was, but he turned my lawn furniture from steel into gold. I just got back from a dealer who assayed the furniture, confirmed that it was solid gold, and bought it. Over 200 pounds of gold at $1389 per ounce works out to be close to $4.5 million.

Guess who’s a believer now!

Compare this story against the gospels

Would you buy this miracle story? I’m sure I’ve convinced no one, and yet, as miracle stories go, this one is pretty compelling. It certainly beats the gospel story. Compare the two:

• Taking the claim at face value, the time from event to the first writing was one day, and the original witness documented the event. There was no chance for legendary accretion. Compare this to forty years and more of oral tradition with the gospels.
• The time from original document to our oldest complete copy is zero days. Compare this to almost 300 years for the gospels. That’s a lot of time for copyist hanky-panky. (More on the time gap for New Testament manuscripts here and here.)
• The cultural gulf to cross to understand my miracle claim is nonexistent—it’s written in modern English with a Western viewpoint. Compare this to our Greek copies of the gospels from around 350 CE, through which we must deduce the Jewish/Aramaic facts of the Jesus story from around 30 CE.
• This story claims to be an eyewitness account. The argument for the gospels being eyewitness accounts is very tenuous.
• It refers to Jesus, a well-known and widely accepted deity. Compare this to Christianity, which had to introduce Jesus as a new deity into a Jewish context. Ask a religious Jew today, and they will tell you that, no, Jesus wasn’t the messiah they were waiting for.

Have I convinced anyone in my gold lawn furniture story yet? If not, why is the gospel story more acceptable when I’ve beaten it on every point? It’s almost like evidence is just a smokescreen, and Christians believe for non-evidentiary reasons.

The Christian response

Let’s consider some responses from skeptical Christians. They might point to important elements of the gospel story: what about the terrified disciples who became confident after seeing Jesus, the conversions of former enemies Paul and James, or the empty tomb?

Okay, so you want a longer story? It’s hard to imagine that simply adding details and complications can make a story more believable, but I can give you that. Let’s suppose that the story were gospel-sized and included people who initially disbelieved but became convinced.

You say Jesus doesn’t make appearances like this anymore? Okay, make it some other deity—someone known or unknown. You pick.

You say that these claims are so recent that they demand evidence—photos, a check from the gold dealer, samples of the gold lawn furniture? Okay, then change the story to make the evidence inaccessible. Maybe now we imagine it taking place 200 years ago. It’s hard to imagine how making the story less verifiable makes it more credible, but I’m flexible. It’s just words on (virtual) paper—whatever additional objection you have, reshape the story to resolve the problem.

And yet if you were presented with this carefully sculpted story, you’d still be unconvinced. Why? What besides tradition or presuppositions of the rightness of the Christian position makes that more believable?

Example #2

Let’s approach this from another angle. Imagine that we’ve uncovered a cache of Chinese documents from 2000 years ago, rather like a Chinese Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. These documents claim miracles similar to those found in the gospels. Here are the remarkable facts of this find.

• These documents appear to be originals, not copies. They seem to date from the period about which they are writing. (That beats the gospels, for which this gap is 300 years.)
• They claim to be writing immediately after the events, and the paleographic evidence supports this claim. (For the gospels, this gap is 40 to 70 years.)
• They claim to be eyewitness accounts. Not only do the gospels not claim to be eyewitness accounts, not only is there evidence against such an idea (Matthew and Luke wouldn’t copy most of Mark,  some of it verbatim, if they were eyewitnesses), but the evidence for the eyewitness tradition very weak.
• Four different accounts in our Chinese documents give plausible independent attestation. The four gospels are not independent (the three synoptic gospels rehash similar material).
• There are no internal contradictions between the four accounts, nothing is unclear, and the message is unambiguous. Contrast that with the gospels, which disagree with each other and the rest of the Bible on such fundamental issues as whether or not salvation comes exclusively from faith, how long Jesus remained on earth after the resurrection, whether the resurrected Jesus had a spirit body or not, whether hell exists or not, and others.

Christian response #2

Here again, the claims of our imaginary find trounce every equivalent Christian claim. But our Christian skeptic might have plausible responses.

• These Chinese authors were lying, and they actually weren’t eyewitnesses. Maybe they even had an agenda. This is just words on paper, after all. Who knows if they’re true, especially if they’re unbelievable?
• The authors were confused, mistaken, or sloppy in their reporting. We can’t guarantee that an author from prescientific China recorded the facts without bias. Perhaps they were constrained by their worldview and unconsciously shoehorned what they saw to fit what they thought they ought to see.
• We can’t prove that the claims are wrong, but so what? That’s not where the burden lies. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this story simply doesn’t have sufficiently compelling evidence.
• Gee, I dunno. It’s an impressive story, but that’s all it is. This is implausible, unrepeatable evidence that can’t overturn what modern science tells us about how the world works.

This Christian skeptic sounds just like me. These are the same objections that I’d raise. So why not show this kind of skepticism for the Christian account?

The honest Christian must avoid the fallacy of special pleading—having a tough standard of evidence for historical claims from the other guy but a lower one for his own. “But you can’t ask for videos or newspaper accounts of events 2000 years ago” is true but irrelevant. It amounts to “I can’t provide adequate evidence, so you can’t hold that against me.”

Ah, but we do. In fact, we must.

Some Christians will point to Christianity’s popularity as evidence, but surely they can’t be saying that the #1 religion must be true. When the number of Muslims exceeds that of Christians, which is expected to happen at shortly after 2050, will they become a Muslim? Popularity doesn’t prove accuracy.

We need a consistently high bar of evidence for supernatural claims, both for foreign claims as well as those close to our heart.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/23/15.)

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Jesus predicted the end of everything and said, “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34). Whoops—that didn’t happen. Jesus being wrong about this critical claim is a showstopper.

This is the conclusion of an analysis that began here.

Let’s turn to responses from Christian thinkers.

Maybe Jesus was limited by his human body?

Most Christians will tell you that Jesus had a human body but the mind of God. Can the Christian message be saved by arguing that Jesus was wrong about the end because he had a human mind?

No, this doesn’t salvage anything. Consider the options: Jesus could have a god mind (but then why would he make mistakes like this?), he could have a human mind (but then he would at best be a very good man, not divine), or his mind could be some combination (but where is the biblical support for Jesus’s mind being some fraction divine and perfect and the remainder human and imperfect?).

Perhaps they argue that Jesus was “truly God and truly man,” as defined in the Chalcedonian Creed. Apply that to his mind, and it’s 100% divine and 100% human. But now you’re back to explaining how a fully divine mind makes mistakes.

One Christian reaction

About “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened,” popular Christian apologist C. S. Lewis said, “It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.”

It gets worse. Just two verses later in Matthew we read, “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Lewis said about these two awkward statements, “The one exhibition of error and the one confession of ignorance grow side by side.”

Of course, Lewis didn’t let this little problem overcome his faith. Many Christians hold onto their faith with the help of rules like these:

Rule #1: Jesus is God.

Rule #2: If Jesus appears to not be God, see Rule #1.

Let the tap dancing begin: 5 responses

Lewis found some way to shield his faith from uncomfortable facts, but he did admit that Jesus’s prediction was, at least with the most obvious interpretation, wrong. And that’s a common view among scholars who have responded to it. But of course they have rationalizations to keep it at arm’s length.

We’ve considered the “Jesus had a human brain” response. Let’s continue the list. The first few explanations are from the NET Bible (the “Constable’s Notes” commentary on Matthew 24).

1. “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” refers to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

The problem here is that “all these things” includes the sun and moon fading away and the stars falling to earth. No, the destruction of a single city isn’t that.

2. “This generation will not pass away” means “the generation living during the end times will not pass away.”

Huh? This is basically a tautology. The generation that’s alive during the end times will exist during the end times? That’s not helpful.

3. “This generation” means the Jewish people.

The NET Bible itself rejects this one (see note for Matthew 24:34). It’s simply not a plausible interpretation of the Greek.

4. When the woman with the bleeding illness touched Jesus, he demanded, “Who touched me?” (discussed in part 1). How could the omniscient second person of the Trinity not know? One source explains this by arguing that Jesus “possesses the power of intentional self-limitation.”

Yeah, I’d stand in line for that superpower.

But let’s suppose Jesus knew that he was deliberately clouding his knowledge of humanity’s future. First, why would he do that? What would that accomplish? And second, why would he make a prediction about something that he knew he had limited his understanding of?

5. “Prophecies are, by their nature, conditional. A prophesied outcome may or may not transpire; it all depends on how the audience responds to the message of the prophet” (Pete Enns, italics in original).

There are certainly some prophecies that are not conditional. Matthew claimed that Jesus’s birth was miraculous and the fulfillment of a prophecy in Isaiah. No apologist who accepts the virgin birth claim would say that the prophecy in Isaiah was of the “it might happen, but maybe not” variety.

But he does have a point. One example: Jonah was sent to Nineveh to warn the inhabitants that their city would soon be destroyed because of their wickedness (Jonah 3). The king immediately accepted God’s judgement and commanded his people to fast, pray, and abandon their evil ways, and God relented.

Another example is Jeremiah 18:5–10 where God gives himself the right to declare that a nation will be destroyed but then change his mind if they repent and to declare a nation is to be supported but then change his mind if they do evil.

The first problem is that we’re faced with an all-knowing God changing his mind. How is this possible? But set that aside, and let’s return to Jesus’s failed prophecy. The claim here is that if God’s prophecy can fail because God changed his mind, the same is true for Jesus.

This author is largely echoing the argument in 2 Peter 3:3–9, which admits that the second coming is late but that God is doing humanity a favor by delaying judgment so that more can be brought into the fold.

Yet again, this doesn’t explain how an omniscient being like Jesus gets it wrong. If that’s what Jesus meant, he could’ve said that. Omniscient beings don’t change their minds based on new information, because there can be no new information for them.

Also, more delay means more people going to hell. Jesus said that few would find the narrow gate (Matthew 7:13–14). No, God does humanity no favors by making more people who will burn to hell.

Conclusion

Robert M. Price observed that when there is a mountain of Christian commentary about a verse, that’s usually evidence that it’s quite clear. The commentary isn’t there because the verse is confusing but because it’s embarrassing. We see that in the NET Bible’s commentary on Matt. 24:34, “This is one of the hardest verses in the gospels to interpret.”

(More on Christians’ seeking refuge by labelling verses “difficult” here.)

In the Christian explanations given above, they start with Rule #1: Jesus is God. And if you start with that assumption, the rationalizations above are worth considering.

But if you don’t start there and just follow the evidence, the problem is neatly dismissed by concluding that the gospels are just legendary stories. This is a natural explanation that is overwhelmingly more plausible than conjuring up the supernatural.

Continue with Silver-Bullet Argument #27.

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Prophecies are a big deal in the Bible. For example, Matthew claims that Jesus’s virgin birth fulfilled a prophecy made in the book of Isaiah. (It didn’t, because there was no such prophecy in Isaiah.)

Showing that the Bible has an error is a pretty good argument against Christianity, but we have bigger fish to worry about. Jesus, the omniscient second person of the Trinity, predicted the end of the world in the lifetime of his audience. Two thousand years later, we can safely say that that prophecy failed. Jesus being wrong is a silver-bullet argument against Christianity.

(This is a continuation of a list that begins here.)

What Jesus predicted

Jesus said, “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34).

What are “all these things”? A few verses earlier, he described some of them: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

So (1) we’re talking about something that is truly apocalyptic if the contents of the universe are being rearranged or destroyed, and (2) this will happen within the lives of those hearing him.

We’d know if that happened. It didn’t, and Jesus was wrong.

Most Christians reject this obvious conclusion, which frees them to invent countless end-times predictions of their own (illustrated here).

Jesus was an Apocalyptic prophet. That’s not simply to say that he predicted the end. He did, but Apocalypticism was an entire worldview popular within Judaism at the time of Jesus. For example, Bart Ehrman argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are from a Jewish (not Christian) community, are full of Apocalyptic ideas. The book of Daniel (written in the 160s BCE) is another example of this genre.

Jesus wasn’t an outlier, the lone eccentric in Jerusalem holding a sign saying, “The end is nigh!” He shared a worldview that was widespread in his time. Another clue that Jesus had an Apocalyptic viewpoint is that predicting an imminent end was a common trait of this literature.

The failed prediction elsewhere in the New Testament

Not only did Jesus think the end was nigh, Paul did, too. He wrote:

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep [that is, died]. . . . For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him (1 Corinthians 15:20–23).

The firstfruits were those few fruits that ripened first that were given as an offering to Yahweh. Jesus here is the firstfruits. The full harvest (in this analogy, those who follow Jesus) would follow soon afterwards. Here again we see the imminence of the prediction.

This idea is mirrored in the raising of the dead immediately after Jesus’s resurrection:

The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people (Matthew 27:52–3).

Jesus had risen, as had some of the pious dead from Jerusalem, so the end was apparently around the corner. (More on the story of the rising of the dead here.)

We have another clue that Paul thought the end would come soon. Here, Paul was responding to a question within one of his congregations. The assumption had apparently been that Jesus would return and scoop up all worthy followers. But time was dragging on, and church members were dying. What about them? Will those who’ve died also get the reward that is due those who were still? Paul responds:

For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. (1 Thessalonians 4:15).

In other words, Jesus will take his own, even if some have died. The possibility that Jesus won’t return for millennia, and no one of this early church will still be alive, is obviously not an option.

What else didn’t Jesus know?

Jesus didn’t know a lot of things. But give the guy a break—it’s not like he was perfect.

• In a crowd of people, a woman with a bleeding problem touched Jesus’s robe and was healed (Mark 5:25–34). After the incident, “Jesus realized that power had gone out from him” and demanded to know who had touched him. Oddly, Jesus’s power is treated as a limited quantity, like energy in a battery. Doesn’t the Trinity have an infinite supply? But for our purposes, the more interesting question is why he had to ask who touched him. How could he not have known?
• Jesus said that the end would come soon, but he didn’t know the exact time: “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matt. 24:36).*
• Jesus promised that prayers are answered and that his followers would be able to do magic greater than he. Alas, it doesn’t work that way.
• Jesus was amazed at the centurion’s faith (Luke 7:9) and amazed at the lack of faith in his hometown of Nazareth (Mark 6:5–6). Omniscient being aren’t supposed to be amazed.

Concluded with a look at how Christian apologists respond in part 2.

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*Jesus said: “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matt. 24:36). Paul said something similar: “For you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2).

But let us not forget the Harold Camping Maneuver (made famous in 2011 when Brother Camping’s predicted date for the Rapture came and went without incident). Camping points out that Paul continues: “But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness” (1 Thess. 5:4–5).

In other words, ordinary people will be surprised by the end, but the chosen will not.

Unfortunately, Harold Camping was completely surprised. So much for the Bible being correct about the supernatural. But perhaps Camping could take comfort knowing that he had much company in his failure.

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Who’s ready for more facepalming? It’s time for more stupid arguments Christians should avoid. For the first post in this series, go to Part 1.

Stupid Argument #32: Providing good evidence is hard!

Look—it’s not like we have photo, video, or audio recordings of the major events recorded in the gospels. You’ve got to make reasonable demands.

I agree that providing credible, high-quality evidence from the first century is hard, but so what? Are you saying that because it’s hard, I should drop my demand for good evidence?

Think of how that would sound if coming from another source. Suppose a Muslim argued that Mohammed’s Night Journey to heaven was historically true, but they didn’t have security cameras in Jerusalem then so we must accept Muslim tradition and holy books.

Or: doing a thorough search of Loch Ness is difficult, so we must accept the anecdotal evidence of Nessie’s existence.

Or: we can’t go back in time to see Xenu’s empire, so we must accept the Scientology mythology.

It doesn’t work that way. We demand evidence to back up the claims. If you make a remarkable claim, you must provide substantial evidence to back it up. The burden of proof is on the person claiming the supernatural, and if that burden isn’t met, we are obliged to reject the claim.

Stupid Argument #33: Hypothetical God Fallacy

“Just because something might seem pointless to us doesn’t mean God can’t have a morally justified reason for it. . . . The mere fact that I can’t figure out why God allows some of the things to happen that he does . . . is not warrant for the conclusion that he’s got no such reasons.”

(This quote is from a Christian argument that I analyze here.)

I don’t declare that God doesn’t exist or that, if he does, he couldn’t have good reasons for the nonsense in the world. But who starts by wondering about God’s actions rather than first demonstrating that God exists? Who, I mean, but someone with an agenda?

Starting with a presumption of God has it backwards. An honest seeker of the truth will follow the evidence, and that’s the power of the Problem of Evil, which this Christian apologist is trying to refute. The Problem of Evil looks at the problems in the world and considers the properties claimed for the Christian god—all-loving, omniscient, omnipotent. Does this look like a world with such a god?

The Christian response, “Ah, yes, but let’s imagine that God exists. Now how do things look??” is completely backwards. (More here.)

Stupid Argument #34: But I can’t reject Christianity now—I’ve invested so much!

If I rejected Christianity now, I’d be admitting that I’d backed the wrong horse for all these years. And what would that do to my reputation in my community?

This is the sunk-cost fallacy, which snares many financial investors. Suppose you invested in a stock that now is worth half what you paid for it. Consider two options. If an objective evaluation says that the stock should now rise substantially in value, you would be smart to hold the stock and maybe even invest more.

But what do you do if that optimistic evaluation is not justified? Instead of cutting their losses, some people buy more. They might rationalize that by buying more at this lower price, they’ve lowered their average purchase price. This is true but irrelevant; an investment should be considered on its own. If you wouldn’t invest if you didn’t own the stock, you shouldn’t double down when you do. Colloquially, we say that this is “throwing good money after bad.”

We see this in many other situations. Lyndon Johnson committed additional troops to the war in Vietnam after it was clear that it was unwinnable. The Concorde supersonic jet lost money, but the British and French governments continued to back it because they had already invested so much.

There are religious believers who don’t want to make an ego-less evaluation of the truth of their beliefs. They sacrifice intellectual integrity to soothe their sense of self-worth. For example, the Millerites sold everything to make themselves right with Jesus, who was to return to earth on October 22, 1844. After this prediction failed, many realized that they’d made a foolish mistake and walked away. But others in the group doubled down, ignoring this dramatic evidence that their beliefs were wrong and rationalized ways that they could still be right. Today’s Seventh-day Adventist Church is one outgrowth of the Great Disappointment of 1844.

A good illustration of how hard we’ll try to justify or recoup our sunk costs is the dollar auction. It’s a game in which both the auction winner and the second-place player must pay their final bids.

Two or more players are bidding to win a dollar. Let’s suppose that player #1 opens the bidding with 5¢. That sounds smart—if that bidder wins, their profit is 95¢. Now player #2 ups the bid to 10¢—that also seems to be a good move since a win at this stage will give a 90¢ profit. But here’s the problem: if player #1 lets it go at this point, he’s out 5¢, since as the second-place player, he’d be obliged to pay his final bid. So #1 bids 15¢.

And so it goes, with each one topping the other by 5¢, until player #2 bids $1. Game over? Not quite, since #1 would still have to pay his last bid of 95¢. Better to bid $1.05 and be down by only 5¢ than admit defeat and be down 95¢.

The game encourages irrational decisions, and the rational choice may be to avoid playing the game. This contains parallels with religion, where the smart decision for the doubting Christian may be to cut their losses and just get out.

To be continued.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/15/15.)

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