Christians need to more carefully check the arguments they use. Sometimes these arguments blow up in their faces.

One example is William Lane Craig’s use of A.N. Sherwin-White’s rule of thumb about the growth of legend (discussed in detail here). Craig proclaims that legendary growth is slow when he wants to argue that the gospels are reliable history, but then he’s happy to point to legendary growth when he wants to reject the dozens of noncanonical gospels!

Gospel contradictions and airplane crashes

Apologists walk a similar knife edge with the problem of contradictions between the gospels.

The skeptic will demand, How many women went to the tomb? Was the tomb already open when they got there? How many angels were there? What was the women’s emotional reaction at the tomb? Did the women tell the disciples? The gospels disagree on the answers. (I document a long list of contradictions here.)

That the most important part of the Bible is full of contradictions about the easy part—the basic facts of the story—raises questions about reliability of the supernatural parts.

Neil Mammen responds to this challenge with “Gospel contradictions? Why they don’t exist. A Little Experiment to Teach Skeptics about NT Accuracy.” He uses a 2005 incident at Chicago’s Midway airport in which an airplane skidded off the runway in heavy snow to highlight the fallibility of journalists’ reporting.

He looks at five media sources written within days of the event. Each is a one- to three-sentence summary. Here are the inconsistencies he found across the sources.

#1. According to the first source, the plane went through a “boundary fence,” hit two cars, and killed a child in one of the cars.

#2. Now only one car is mentioned, there’s no fence, and it’s a “6-year old boy.”

#3. The two cars and one death are mentioned, but the fence has become a “security wall.”

#4. Now it’s a “safety barrier,” and the car(s) and death are not mentioned.

#5. No cars, no fence, and no deaths.

He wonders what to make of this, since the accounts vary so widely. Which is it—one car or two? A dead boy or a dead child or none? Some truths, some lies, and some errors? Or all lies? Or all errors? Is it a legend? A total fabrication?

He parallels this with complaints about Bible contradictions. You have multiple sources in the airplane story, which is a good thing, because each source can bring new insights. The same is true for the gospel accounts.

The airplane story and the resurrection story each have inconsistencies surrounding their own common core. In Chicago, did the plane hit one car or two? In the Bible, did one, two, three, or more women come to the tomb? And so on. Let’s be consistent, he says—if you want to reject the resurrection story for inconsistent accounts, do the same for this airplane story.

He also emphasizes that this doesn’t point to the gospel story being “a fabrication.”

Just a few quibbles

• First, notice the brevity of the accounts—that’s because they’re photo captions! They work as an abstract of the story, but no one would argue that they’re complete or that they attempt to be. Read the accompanying stories and then let’s talk about serious inconsistencies.
• Caption 4 is just one sentence long. It doesn’t mention the car, thought the accompanying photo might have told that part of the story. For example, here is one such photo. Also, the title accompanying this summary is, “Plane slides off Chicago runway, boy killed,” which adds yet more information. Taking these into account, the inconsistencies go away.
• Caption 5 (here) has been truncated. Add the next sentence, and the boundary fence, car, and death are back in.
• The only arguments I ever hear about the gospel story being fabricated (that is, deliberately invented, like a hoax) come from the Christian apologists. It’s a fun straw man to knock over, I suppose, but it’s a waste of time since that’s not the argument.

And now, let me agree

Using photo captions makes this experiment useless as a comparison, but the larger point is correct. Yes, journalists can be wrong, and articles can be incomplete. Let’s start with this point of agreement to see where that takes us in an analysis of the gospel stories.

Modern journalists are trained to focus on the facts. For some media, fact checkers double check to verify that the story is correct. Journalists can be penalized for errors in their stories. Now instead of modern journalists, imagine the followers of a religious leader in pre-scientific Palestine. Their Truth may not have been bound by any sense of journalistic accuracy.

Now add over forty years of oral history before the gospels are written.

Now make that forty years happen in a foreign culture, a Greek culture already familiar with miracles such as turning water into wine, virgin births, and dying-and-rising gods.

Now separate our oldest copies from the gospel originals by centuries. That’s a long time for rival traditions to fight it out and for copyists to add or delete as their own beliefs demanded. (I’ve discussed this long journey here, here, here, and here.)

Now how much confidence can we have in the account?

The Christian may respond that the Holy Spirit didn’t much care about preserving accuracy. It pleased him to trust fallible human processes to document the Greatest Story Ever Told. He was content to let the gospels look no different from other supernatural musings that we justifiably dismiss to the bins of Mythology or Legend.

Neil Mammen might ask us to look to the overlap of the gospel stories to find the truth, but with this approach, we’ve lost Jesus’s last words, the location where the disciples were to meet the risen Jesus, Paul’s 500 eyewitnesses, and even the explanation for how the story spread (in Mark, the women keep silent), but no matter.

Does this approach work elsewhere—when there are competing stories, do we assume the overlapping part must be true? We usually don’t do this for UFO abduction stories. Or the stories from people who saw the 1917 Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, Portugal, an accepted Catholic miracle. Or claims from alchemy. Or the accounts by the eleven Mormons who claimed to have seen the golden plates. Competing tales that are supernatural or at least extraordinary can be and usually are all wrong.

Mammen’s article argues that professional reporters can’t be trusted to get the details right on a mundane story that happened the previous day. But then it expects us to believe the gospel accounts (already suspect because they are full of the supernatural) that were written down decades later? His “little experiment to teach skeptics about NT accuracy” seems to have blown up in his face.

Christians, consider your arguments lest they backfire.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/10/14.)

Image via Alexis Breaux, CC license

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In 2014, I visited the famous Mappa Mundi, an oddly un-maplike map, at Hereford Cathedral in England (more here). A few blocks away is All Saints Church. The current church building was completed around 1330, about the time the Mappa Mundi was completed. After a recent restoration, the church was reopened in 1997.

As churches go, this one is smaller than those that usually capture the tourists. It is certainly smaller than the magnificent Hereford cathedral, for example. What is unusual about this church—and it’s a working church, with four masses each week—is that part of it is now a café.

From the church’s web site:

We have played host to a variety of events, from Shakespeare to flamenco, homegrown jazz to the finest touring classical musical groups.

Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money” (or “God and mammon,” as the King James Version memorably translates it), but this church seems to have found a workable balance. It has found new roles as a meeting place and community center.

Christianity is always changing. At 45,000 denominations and growing (more here), it evolves faster than Ken Ham imagines animals evolved after the Flood. How must it adapt as conditions in the West change?

Harold Camping’s Family Radio is an example of a failure to adapt. You may remember Camping as the idiot who predicted the Rapture on May 21, 2011. It’s almost like he didn’t believe his own billboards, because he didn’t sell his assets even though he was telling everyone else that there would be no use for them after that date. If he had sold, there could now be a $100 million Christian foundation doing good works in the world—not a bad consolation to ease the humiliation of Camping’s being so hilariously wrong. But he held on into a world that he was convinced wouldn’t exist. The organization’s assets lost tens of millions of dollars of value, a pathetic reminder of one foolish man’s hubris and overconfidence in ancient stories.

Another option is what I’ve called Secular Christianity or Christianity 2.0, a “religion” where believers and nonbelievers would all be welcome because belief in the supernatural wouldn’t be a requirement. The focus would instead be on community, inspiration, and service. It might be a gentler landing than church buildings simply becoming quaint museums (or bookstores, markets, art galleries, breweries, event sites, condos, and more).

All Saints Church is reaching out to make peace with the secular. Maybe it’s an early adopter of what religion will become.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/5/14.)

Image by Bob Seidensticker
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In 2014, I visited Hereford Cathedral in England and saw their mappa mundi (chart of the world). About 100 standalone mappae mundi remain, and this is the largest. It was made from a single calf skin, it’s a little over five feet tall, and it was made around 1300.

This is not the kind of map we’re used to. There is little attempt at accurate geography. This map wouldn’t serve an explorer or navigator, and its creators didn’t pretend that it would.

Using the theme of a world map, medieval cartographers embellished maps like this one to make them into something of an encyclopedia. Science was in its infancy, however, and the information was often bizarre.

Jabberwocky creatures?

Do you remember the “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass? It begins:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

Humpty Dumpty explains what a tove is: “‘Toves’ are something like badgers, they’re something like lizards, and they’re something like corkscrews. . . . Also they make their nests under sun-dials, also they live on cheese.”

Assuming our interest is the real world rather than Wonderland, the zoology we’re taught by the Mappa Mundi might as well have come from Humpty Dumpty. The drawing above shows monstrous people from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), and the Hereford Mappa Mundi includes some of these and more.

• Sciapods had one large foot that they used to shield themselves from the sun.
• The Blemmyes were warlike and had no head. Instead, their face was in their chest.
• The dog-headed men were the Cynocephali.
• Troglodites are “very swift; they live in caves, eat snakes and catch wild animals by jumping on them.”

The map also shows a number of mythical creatures, including a griffin and a salamander with wings. My favorite is the bonnacon, shown looking back over its shoulder at its own explosion of scalding diarrhea, which covers three acres. Even actual animals are misunderstood. The map reports, “The Lynx sees through walls and urinates a black stone.”

As with all mappae mundi, this one puts Jerusalem in the center. It locates places of important biblical events such as the Tower of Babel, the Garden of Eden, the route of the Exodus, and Sodom and Gomorrah.

Mythology and history are mixed without distinction. We see Jason’s Golden Fleece and the Labyrinth where Theseus killed the Minotaur, but we also see the camp of Alexander the Great.

Christianity was in charge for a millennium, and all I got was this lousy map

Christianity has been given a chance at understanding reality, and this is what it gave us. When Christianity was in charge, the world was populated by mystical creatures, we had little besides superstition to explain the caprices of nature, and natural disasters were signs of God’s anger.

Christianity’s goal isn’t to create the internet, GPS, airplanes, or antibiotics. It isn’t to improve life with warm clothes or safe water. It isn’t to eliminate diseases like smallpox or polio. It’s to convince people to believe in a story that has no evidence.

Admittedly, it’s not like Europeans had a lot of options. Christianity was the opium of the masses—better than nothing and not exceeded by much of anything in the Europe of 1300. True, eyeglasses had recently been invented and a remarkable century of cathedral building had passed, but science didn’t yet offer much of an alternative way of seeing reality.

Today, we have had a couple of centuries to give modern science a test drive, and we know that it delivers. Nevertheless, we still see Mappa Mundi thinking today. There are still religious leaders who long for the good old days of 1300.

The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God.
— William Lane Craig

“Q. What is the chief end of man?”
“A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
— the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (written in 1647 but in use today)

According to the Bible, our purpose—the reason we are here—is for God’s glory. In other words, our purpose is to praise God, worship him, to proclaim his greatness, and to accomplish his will. This is what glorifies him.
— Matt Slick, CARM

There is no calling greater than praising God. This is true not only for us, but surprisingly also for God himself, he being the greatest, to glory in anything else would be idolatry. Therefore, if the greatest thing God can do is give himself glory, and no created thing can be greater than God, the greatest thing we can do (our purpose, you might say) is to glory him.
— John Piper, Desiring God

And Christians say that it’s the atheists who lead pointless lives!

Christianity is like an arch

But if Christianity is just what you do if there’s no science, why is it still here? It doesn’t win when compared against science. It doesn’t even win when compared against other religions—Christianity has one view of the supernatural, and other religions have other views. Christianity offers nothing but claims without evidence (more here and here).

The metaphor of an arch illustrates this. To assemble an arch, first you build an arch-shaped scaffold. Next, lay the stones of the arch. Finally, remove the scaffold. Once the stones of the arch are in place, they support themselves and don’t need the scaffold.

That’s how religion works. Superstition in a world before science was the scaffold that supported the arch of religion. Science has now dismantled the scaffold of superstition, but it’s too late because the arch of religion has already calcified in place.

It’s the twenty-first century, and yet the guiding principles for Christians’ lives come from the fourteenth, back when the sun orbited the earth, disease had supernatural causes, and the world was populated by Sciapods, Blemmyes, and bonnacons.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/3/14.)

Photo credit: St. John’s College

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