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More Pointless Parables

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Jesus ParablesI’ve posted before about some modern-day Christian parables. Here are two more.

Ah, for the good old days when biblical parables made a compelling point! These are pretty weak. If you come across more, let me know.

“Money Troubles”

I heard this one on the radio.

A man goes into his pastor’s office. “I’ve got money problems,” he says. “I try to give what God commands of me, but I’m having a hard time making ends meet. At the end of the month, there are still bills to pay.”

The pastor says, “What if you did what God commands of you and then, at the end of the month, you bring any bills that aren’t covered to me and I’ll pay them. Would you do that?”

“You’d do that? You’d pay the extra bills?”

“That’s not the question,” said the pastor. “If I agreed to pay the extra bills, would you do that?”

“Sure!”

The pastor said, “Isn’t it odd that you’d trust a frail human like me when you wouldn’t trust God, the all-powerful creator of the universe to help you with your problems …” and blah, blah, blah about how fabulous God is and all the stuff that he’s done for us.

If you’re already drinking the Kool-Aid, this one might hit home, but it does nothing as an argument for Christianity. And the pastor is making a very testable claim—almost a science experiment. He’s all but quoting Jesus:

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass in the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you? You men of little faith! (Luke 12:27–8)

My advice: test this pastor’s claim. I wouldn’t hold my breath for verifiable results.

“Celestial Mechanics in the Bible”

I first heard the next story decades ago.

In the early days of the space program, NASA scientists were checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets to make sure that they could safely put up satellites. They checked thousands of years in the future and the past, but the computers ground to a halt. The problem was a missing day in elapsed time. They rechecked their data and the software, but the problem wouldn’t go away.

Puzzling over the problem, one scientist said, “You know, I remember a story from Sunday school. Something about God making the sun stand still so that Joshua could win a battle. Could that be it?”

The scientists were skeptical, but they found a Bible. With a little searching they found Joshua 10:12–13. “The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.” With a little calculation, they found that this accounted for 23 hours and 20 minutes. They were much closer but were still stuck. They had to resolve that last 40 minutes.

The other scientists looked expectantly at the one with the Sunday school story. “Well, I remember another story,” he said. All eyes were on him. “Something about the sun going backwards.”

There were a few chuckles, but they got out the Bible again and found 2 Kings 20:8–11, where King Hezekiah asked God for a sign, that the sun move backwards ten degrees. Ten degrees out of 360 degrees in a circle—that is, 1/36 of a day. In other words, exactly 40 minutes!

The scientists plugged in this information, and, sure enough, the calculations ran smoothly.

Ooh—let me guess the moral! Modern science needs to get its guidance from the Bible. (Did I get that right?)

Well, Mr. Smarty Pants Scientist—looks like the Goliath of Science has been defeated by the David of Christian Truth!

Despite its longevity and popularity—this story originated in a 1936 book by Harry Rimmer and was popularized by a 1974 book by Harold Hill—it’s bogus. NASA even had to issue a press release denying the popular story.

There are lots of red flags. Even if God had stopped the sun 3000 years ago, there is no way to deduce that from information available to astronomers today, so the entire premise is flawed. And let’s not even speculate at what “stopping the sun” (that is, stopping the rotation of the earth) would’ve done. Concluding 23 hours and 20 minutes from “about a full day” is wishful thinking, and the ten degrees is more properly translated as “ten steps”—an angle based on local instrumentation that we can’t reproduce.

I know what you’re thinking: why waste time on this ridiculous tale? It’s because there are people who believe it.

As usual, imagining that the Bible’s miracle stories really happened takes us to nowhere that can be scientifically justified.

Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you,
to correct for subjective error.
― Linus Pauling

Photo credit: Wikipedia

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/30/12.)

Sean Carroll Slaps Down Fine Tuning Argument

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Christianity Fine TuningThis is the conclusion of a summary of the recent debate between philosopher William Lane Craig and cosmologist Sean Carroll. In part 1, I summarized Carroll’s response to the Kalam cosmological argument. Here, it’s a response to the other half of Craig’s argument, the fine tuning argument.

Carroll began with a compliment of sorts.

This is the best argument that the theists have when it comes to cosmology. That’s because it plays by the rules. You have phenomena, you have parameters of particle physics and cosmology, and then you have two different models, theism and naturalism, and you want to compare which model is the best fit for the data. I applaud that general approach. Given that, it is still a terrible argument. It is not at all convincing.

1. What fine-tuning problem?

Carroll raises five points. First, he’s not convinced that there is a fine-tuning problem. Yes, changes in the parameters that define our reality would change conditions, but it does not follow that life could not exist. “I will start granting that [life couldn’t exist with different conditions] once someone tells me the conditions under which life can exist.” We don’t even fully understand life on this planet, nor do we understand it on the other planets in the universe that hold life (if any), nor do we understand it within the other possible universes (if any).

For example, is life just information processing? That raises lots of possibilities for life. “They sound very science fiction-y,” Carroll admits, “but then again, you’re the one who’s changing the parameters of the universe.”

2. Don’t limit God

God can do anything, and he isn’t limited by the parameters of the universe. If life were impossible naturally, God could make it happen anyway. Carroll says about theism, “No matter what the atoms were doing, God could still create life.” That means that apparent fine tuning points to naturalism, since it must do everything naturally and has no fallback. If you insist that the parameters must be just so, then you’re arguing for naturalism.

Physicist Vic Stenger made the point this way in The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning:

Certainly an all-powerful creator could have made a universe delicately balanced to produce life. But he also could have made life exist in any kind of universe whatsoever, with no delicate balancing act necessary. So if the universe is, in fact, fine-tuned to support life, it is more—not less—likely to have had a natural origin. (p. 115)

3. Illusory fine tuning

Some apparent fine tuning vanishes on closer inspection. The expansion rate of the early universe is often cited as one example of fine tuning. In fact, Stephen Hawking in his A Brief History of Time says that it was tuned to 10–17, to the delight of apologists. What they avoid quoting is Hawking just a few pages later:

The rate of expansion of the universe [in the inflationary model] would automatically become very close to the critical rate determined by the energy density of the universe. This could then explain why the rate of expansion is still so close to the critical rate, without having to assume that the initial rate of expansion of the universe was very carefully chosen.

Carroll makes the same point when he says that the apparent fine tuning vanishes when you look to general relativity. The probability of the universe expanding as it did wasn’t 10–17; it was 1.

4. Multiverse

Apologist Richard Swinburne isn’t on board with the multiverse. He says, “To postulate a trillion trillion other universes, rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality.”

He doesn’t acknowledge that we have no supernatural precedents by which to evaluate the probability of his god proposal. He doesn’t seem to know that the number of other universes isn’t the point—there are an infinite number of integers, for example, but bringing integers into a discussion isn’t infinitely complicating. He doesn’t admit that the multiverse is a prediction of well-established science.

Carroll disagrees that the multiverse is extravagant: “It’s a prediction of a simple physical model.” The multiverse hypothesis can make testable predictions. He showed a graph of the density of dark matter in the universe as an example. “You do not see graphs like this in the theological papers trying to give God credit for explaining the fine tuning because theism is not well defined.”

5. Theism isn’t the default

Even if you reject naturalism as an explanation, you can’t fall back on theism. To be taken seriously, apologists must come up with a model of a universe that one would expect with theism and then compare it to the data to see if it fits. So, what would you expect a theistic universe to look like, specifically?

Theism would predict a just-right tuning of parameters, while we find that the entropy of the early universe (to take one example) was far, far lower than it needed to be for life. Theism would predict far less matter than the 100 billion galaxies (each with 100 billion stars) in our universe. Theism would predict that life would be important to the universe; naturalism says that it’s insignificant. Theism demands that we look at the Hubble Deep Field image of thousands of ancient and incredibly distant galaxies and conclude, “This is all here because of us!”

Over and over, the data shows a universe that matches the predictions of naturalism and not theism.

Which worldview predicts best?

He went on to contrast the predictive success of theism vs. naturalism.

  • Theism predicts that God’s existence would be obvious (in fact, the evidence is poor, and faith is not only required but celebrated)
  • Theism predicts that religious belief should be universal; there should be just a single, correct religion (in fact, we have thousands of denominations within just Christianity, plus many thousand more other religions)
  • Theism predicts that religious doctrines would be permanent (in fact, they evolve and adapt to social conditions)
  • Theism predicts that moral teachings would be transcendent and progressive (in fact, Western society rejected slavery and embraced civil rights in spite of Christianity, not because of it)
  • Theism predicts that sacred texts would provide practical advice like how to stay healthy
  • Theism predicts that life is designed (in fact, evolution explains life’s Rube Goldberg features)
  • Theism predicts a mind independent of the body (in fact, “mind” changes as the brain grows or is damaged, or even if one is tired or hungry)
  • Theism predicts a fundamentally just world without gratuitous evil (in fact, the Problem of Evil is often cited as Christianity’s toughest challenge)

Carroll is quick to agree that, yes, the theist can whip up reasons to explain away any of these problems. It’s not hard because theism is not well defined and can be reshaped as necessary, like clay. Ad hoc justifications are easy to come up with, but no, that’s not a good thing.

Contrast that with science—when new data causes problems for a theory, science looks for a new theory. And that is a good thing.

The reason why science and religion
are actually incompatible is that, in the real world,
they reach incompatible conclusions.
— Sean Carroll

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Carefree Christian Dinghy Hits Immoveable Rock of Reality: Thoughts on the Craig vs. Carroll Debate

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Craig Carroll cosmology apologetics debateDuring the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial, talk show host Dick Cavett mused about bumping into Simpson at a cocktail party. In such a situation, he anticipated that he would say, “Well, there are so many people here who haven’t murdered anyone, I think I’ll go talk to them.”

And that’s my reaction to hearing philosopher William Lane Craig blather on about his opinions on cosmology (read: how he’s picked facts to support his conclusion). When I’m curious about the origin of the universe, I think I’ll go talk to the cosmologists.

William Lane Craig, cosmologist. Or not.

In the first place, Craig isn’t an expert on the topic. For this 2/21/14 debate, the topic was, “The existence of God in light of contemporary cosmology.” In the second place, experts are readily at hand—for example, his opponent, Sean Carroll, who earned a doctorate in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard and is currently a professor at CalTech.

Craig has made clear where his truth comes from. He states in Reasonable Faith (2008):

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa. (p. 48)

See what I mean about his picking his facts to support his conclusion? Perhaps that also explains his unwarranted confidence in getting into the ring with someone who is actually an expert on the topic.

There’s not much to say about Craig’s 20-minute opening to those familiar with his arguments. He used two of his favorites, the Kalam cosmological argument and the fine tuning argument. One surprise was that his arguments were more remote than usual. The average Christian may have difficulty with terms like entropy, singularity, and arrow of time. Here, Craig also used, without definition, the terms cosmogonic, de Sitter space, “unitarity of quantum theory,” and Boltzmann brains.

However, I was pleased that he avoided my usual complaint, which is his using “just think about it” to introduce some bit of pop philosophy. Yes, common sense is tempting, but it’s not the final arbiter at the frontier of science. Maybe he knew that this kind of argument would be laughed down by an expert. If so, let’s remember that next time he uses such an argument when Sean Carroll isn’t around.

Sean Carroll’s response

Carroll began by making clear that this debate is not an ongoing one within the cosmology community. You’ll hear theories of origins debated at cosmology conferences, but there is no discussion of God as a plausible explanation.

He responded to Craig’s Kalam argument by attacked point 2 (the universe began to exist). He noted that Craig gave no evidence to back up the claim and, indeed, there isn’t any.

The bigger problem is that the point isn’t even false since Craig doesn’t use the right vocabulary for discussing cosmology. Carroll said, “Aristotelian analysis of causation was cutting edge stuff 2500 years ago; today we know better.” Referring back to his opening point, he noted that you don’t find the words “transcendent cause” in a cosmology textbook; what you find are differential equations! There simply is no need for metaphysical baggage on top of the known physics.

Borde Guth Vilenkin

The idea of a beginning to the universe suits Craig. He’s concerned about the naturalist who says that, even if the Big Bang were the beginning of our universe, it could have come from an eternal multiverse. To anticipate this, Craig invariably brings up the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (BGV), which says that the multiverse did have a beginning.

Carroll responded by ticking off variant universes. A universe with a beginning but no cause? There’s a model for that. A universe that is eternal without a beginning? There’s a model for that, too—indeed, there are at least 17 plausible models.

BGV demands a beginning to the universe, but it starts with assumptions. Discard those assumptions, and the rules are different and eternality is possible. What BGV says is simply that our ability to describe the universe classically, that is, without quantum mechanics, gives out. Craig is simply wrong when he insists that BGV proves a beginning to everything.

Potpourri

It was a pleasure to see a competent physicist dismantle Craig’s cosmological dabblings. Craig cited the Second Law of Thermodynamics to support a finite universe, and Carroll responded that he’d written an entire book on the subject. About the puzzle of why the universe began with low entropy, Carroll said, “To imagine that cosmologists cannot answer that question without somehow invoking God is a classic God-of-the-gaps move. I know that Dr. Craig says that that’s not what he’s doing, but then he does it.”

About Craig’s criticism of Carroll’s own cosmological model, Carroll responded, “[Dr. Craig] says that my model is not working very well because it violates unitarity, the conservation of information, and that is straightforwardly false.” He then pointed out how Craig took a Hawking quote “completely out of context.”

I appreciated Carroll’s polite but direct approach. (I’ve written more about Carroll’s insights here and here.)

Cosmology vs. Theism

Carroll pointed out that a major problem is the very definition of theism. One theist may give a thorough definition, but then dozens (or thousands) more will give competing definitions. More to the point, theism is not a serious cosmological model. Cosmology is a mature science, and models are expected to address real issues. For example: What is the predicted spatial curvature of this universe? What is the amplitude of density perturbations? What causes the matter/antimatter asymmetry? What is the dark matter? And so on.

Theism doesn’t even try. It has nothing to offer.

Some things happen for “reasons” and some don’t,
and you don’t get to demand
that this or that thing must have a reason.
Some things just are.
Claims to the contrary are merely assertions,
and we are as free to ignore them
as you are to assert them.
— Sean Carroll

Photo credit: brett jordan

500 Eyewitnesses to the Risen Christ? 9 Reasons Why It’s Not Likely.

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1 Corinthians Paul epistle 500 eyewitnessesThe apostle Paul throws down the gauntlet in 1 Cor. 15:6, and many apologists see it as powerful evidence in favor of the resurrection story. Paul in effect dares his readers to go check out his claim if they want. Who would make a claim like this, making himself vulnerable to readers catching him in a lie (or at least an embarrassing error), if he didn’t know it were true?

[Jesus] appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have [died]. (1 Cor. 15:6).

Paul’s number has a default credibility like Joe McCarthy’s numbers of Soviet spies did. Who would say a number if it weren’t correct, right?

But this confident defense of the resurrection wilts under scrutiny.

Let’s think this through. Imagine that we’re in that church in Corinth and we have just received Paul’s letter.

1. What does “appeared” mean? Jesus “appeared” to Paul as a vision (Acts 9:3–9), but Paul uses the same verb to refer the appearance of Jesus to Peter, James, and the 500 as well as to Paul. Could Paul think that the appearance to everyone was as a vision?

2. Who are these 500 eyewitnesses? Names and addresses, please? To find out, someone would need to send a letter back to Paul, at that moment 200 miles across the Aegean Sea in Ephesus. If a church member had the money, time, and guts to write this letter, why would Paul have deigned to reply?

Even if Paul had witnessed Jesus in front of the 500 (he hadn’t), it’s possible he wouldn’t have known a single person in that crowd. And even if Paul thought the number were accurate, “500 eyewitnesses” might be all he had heard, and he wouldn’t have been able to back it up with any evidence.

3. How many will still be around? Paul wrote this epistle in about 55CE about a supposed event that occurred over 20 years earlier. Of the 500 eyewitnesses, how many are still alive and still in Jerusalem, ready to be questioned?

4. Who could make this trip? Jerusalem is 800 miles away, and getting there would involve a long, dangerous, and expensive trip.

5. How many candidates for this trip? Paul had only started the church in Corinth a couple of years earlier. There would probably have been less than 100 members.* Would even one have the means and motivation to make the big trip to Jerusalem?

6. Who would challenge Paul? If the founder of the church says something, who’s likely to question it? There might well have been people who were unimpressed by Paul’s message, but these would never have joined the church. Others within the church might have become disappointed and left. Even if these people had wanted to embarrass Paul, they wouldn’t have been in the church community to learn of the claim.

7. What did the eyewitnesses actually see? Let’s imagine that we have the money and daring to make the trip, we have a plan for whom to interview in Jerusalem, and we’re rebellious enough to spit in the face of our church’s founder to see if he’s a liar.

After many adventures, we reach Jerusalem. What will the eyewitnesses say? At best they’ll say that, over 20 years ago, they saw a man. Big deal—that’s uninteresting unless they saw him dead before. Had they been close enough to the movement to be certain that they recognized Jesus? Human memory is notoriously inaccurate. There’s a big difference between the certainty one has in a memory and its accuracy—these don’t always go together.

8. So what? Suppose all these unlikely things happen: we make the long trip, we search for eyewitnesses, and we conclude that Paul’s story is nonsense. If we successfully make the long trip back, what difference will this make? Even if we had the guts to tell everyone that Paul’s story was wrong, so what? Who would believe us over the church’s founder? We’d be labeled as bad apples, we’d be expelled from the church, the church would proceed as before, and Paul’s letter would still be copied through the centuries for us to read today!

9. Why is this even compelling evidence? No gospel uses this anecdote as evidence. For whatever reason—that they’d never heard it or that they had and felt that it was uninteresting—the gospels argue that this is unconvincing evidence. Why should we think otherwise?

In my post on the Shroud of Turin, I noted that our very first historical record of the Shroud is a letter stating that the shroud was a fake. That’s done nothing to steer people away from a belief they want to hold. As with the Naysayer Hypothesis, apologists imagine that this argument is far stronger than it is.

Who would imagine that a supernatural claim written two thousand years ago would be compelling when we wouldn’t find it compelling if written two minutes ago?

Let’s consider two possible conclusions about this verse.

1. The resurrection happened supernaturally as the gospels describe it. (Let’s pretend that the gospels all tell the same story.)

2. Tales circulated orally in the years after the crucifixion among Jesus’s followers, with the number of eyewitnesses to the risen Christ growing with time.

Why imagine a supernatural story when a natural story explains the facts?

If you can’t be a good example, 
then you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.
— Catherine Aird

Photo credit: University of Michigan

* Prof. Philip Harland’s “Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean” podcast #1.5 (“Paul and the followers of Jesus at Corinth, part 2”) argues that each Greek house church would’ve only had dozens of members.

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 12/21/11.)

Women at the Tomb Are Weak Evidence for the Resurrection

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Resurrection Easter WomenLet’s consider an incident from that first Easter. All four gospels say that women were the first to discover the empty tomb. (Of course, who was actually at the tomb varies by the gospels, as do many other important details about the resurrection, which makes the gospels unreliable as history. But let’s ignore that for now.)

Many apologists point to the women as an important fact arguing that the gospels are reliable. Greg Koukl says:

Women, disrespected in the ancient world, are the first to witness the risen Christ. Why include these unflattering details if the Gospels are works of fiction?

I don’t know who argues that the gospels are fiction. I don’t think they’re history, but I certainly don’t think that they were deliberately invented. But let’s set that aside as well.

William Lane Craig says:

The discovery of the tomb by women is highly probable. Given the low status of women in Jewish society and their lack of qualification to serve as legal witnesses, the most plausible explanation … why women and not the male disciples were made discoverers of the empty tomb is that the women were in fact the ones who made this discovery.

That is, having women make this momentous discovery is embarrassing.

This is an application of the Criterion of Embarrassment, which argues that you’re likelier to delete something embarrassing than add it to your story. And if a story element is embarrassing, that points to its being historical fact.

The trick to using this criterion is knowing what’s embarrassing. Things that look embarrassing to us may not have been so to the author. For example, all four gospels show Peter denying Jesus three times. That’s pretty embarrassing … or is it?

Not if that story was written by someone who didn’t like Peter. Paul’s lenient approach in converting gentiles conflicted with the more traditional approach of Peter and James. Supporters of Paul might have strengthened their case by circulating a story to undercut Peter, and this story became part of the canon.

So our question becomes: is it embarrassing to have women discover the empty tomb? These apologists certainly think so, and historical records agree on women’s unreliability. Josephus, a first-century historian, stated, “Let not the testimony of women be admitted because of the levity and boldness of their sex,” and the Mishnah (a Jewish legal text written in 220 CE) concurs.

However, this flimsy argument is much more popular than it deserves to be.

Give the original authors credit for being good storytellers. As plot twists go, having women make the discovery instead of men isn’t particularly shocking. I find it hard to imagine an early Christian evangelizing an unbeliever and having the unbeliever say, “Whoa—hold on. You say women found the body? That’s a whole new ball game! I wasn’t on board before, but your story is sounding a lot more compelling now.”

But if you find it a powerful argument for the truth of the story, then you can imagine why that element might have become attached to the story.

The gospel story wasn’t made up. The point that women were unreliable witnesses is relevant only in rebutting the charge that the story was deliberately invented, a claim I don’t make. I’ve never heard this hypothesis except by apologists. Instead, what best fits the facts for me is that the story documented in the gospels is the result of forty or more years of oral history. Each gospel is a snapshot of the tradition of a different church community in widely different places (perhaps Alexandria, Damascus, or Rome?) and over decades of time.

Believers might demand, “Well, how do you explain the empty tomb?” But of course, that assumes the accuracy of the gospel story to that point. It’s like saying, “How do you explain Jack’s cutting down the beanstalk any other way than that there really was a giant climbing down after him?”

Who cares about women’s “unreliability”? Women discover the empty tomb, they tell men, the men verify the story, and then the men spread the word. If you don’t like women as witnesses, you’ve got the men.

That women were less reliable as witnesses in court doesn’t matter because there is no court in the story! The women were trustworthy where it mattered—in conveying the story to people who knew and trusted them.

Tending to the dead was women’s work in this culture. Instead of women discovering that Jesus had risen, imagine that the Bible had this incident:

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, Simon Peter and James entered the kitchen to prepare bread for the community. In the darkness of the kitchen, a voice called out to them saying, “Why do you tend to minor matters when there is the LORD’s work to be done?” And they took hold of His feet and worshiped Him.

What’s wrong with this story? It’s that preparing bread is women’s work in this culture. It makes no sense to have men come across Jesus in the kitchen. And the same is true for men dealing with the dead. According to the Women in the Bible web site:

It was the women’s task to prepare a dead body for burial. … Tombs were visited and watched for three days by family members. On the third day after death, the body was examined. … On these occasions, the body would be treated by the women of the family with oils and perfumes. The women’s visit to the tombs of Jesus and Lazarus are connected with this ritual.

The Bible also gives clues to women’s role in mourning in Jer. 9:17–20 and 2 Sam. 14:2.

Mark focuses on reversals, and the other gospels followed Mark’s lead. Richard Carrier gives a detailed discussion of this topic and argues that a philosophy of “the last shall be first” led Mark to add this touch.

Given Mark’s narrative agenda, regardless of the actual facts, the tomb has to be empty, in order to confound the expectations of the reader, just as a foreign Simon must carry the cross instead of Peter, a Gentile must acknowledge Christ’s divinity instead of the Jews, a Sanhedrist must bury the body, and women must be the first to hear the Good News.

Seeing the gospel story as no more supernatural than any other myth from the past best explains the facts.

Religion—it’s like Wikipedia. 
Anyone can write something in.
— Bill Maher

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 4/8/12.)

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