Category Archives: Uncategorized

Lee Strobel’s Fragile Argument

Posted on by

Lee Strobel likes to introduce himself as a former atheist—quite an unpleasant atheist, in fact. As a tough-minded and award-winning journalist, he wanted to get to the bottom of the nonsense about Christianity when his wife became a Christian.
He was the legal editor at the Chicago Tribune where they had a sign reading, “If your mother says she loves you, get a second opinion.” Sounds like they take their fact finding seriously!
Journalists are great; it’s hypocrisy that I don’t care for. Strobel’s The Case for Christ starts off with this tough-minded search, and yet everyone interviewed in his book is a committed Christian. If this is journalism, where is the other side of the story? Looks like the conclusion was drawn before he started.
I have no problem with a Christian writing a Christian book; just don’t try to pass off this project as unbiased journalism.
Strobel wrote a summary of this search. I’d like to respond to his arguments.
He first picks up elements from the gospels—that Jesus was executed, that the tomb was empty, and that the opponents had to claim that the body was stolen—and uses them to argue for the truth of the overall story. That’s like saying that in The Godfather, the motivations of the movie studio executive made complete sense because he’d found a horse head in his bed.
The gospel story is a story. There really wasn’t a horse head, Indiana Jones didn’t really find the lost Ark of the Covenant, and Dorothy didn’t really land in Oz. Why imagine that there was a resurrection? Don’t show internal consistency between elements of the gospel story without first showing that it’s history.
Who Would Die for a Lie?
Strobel next says:

[The disciples] wouldn’t have been willing to die brutal martyrs’ deaths if they knew this was all a lie.

How do we know that this is accurate? Christianity Today reports that “The tradition of apostles’ martyrdom goes back at least to the beginning of the third century.” So we know this because it was written down 150 years after the events? Quite flimsy evidence.
And what does he mean by “if they knew this was all a lie”? In the first place, I don’t think that the gospel story was a deliberate invention, like a hoax, so this doesn’t attack a point I’d make. In the second place, Strobel apparently imagines that the disciples were charged with crimes that could be dismissed simply by saying, “Just kidding! Jesus wasn’t really raised from the dead.”
What crimes are we talking about? Sedition? Disturbing the peace? General rabble rousing? Denying Jesus doesn’t get you off from these. This “Why would they die for a lie?” argument collapses. (I’ve written more here.)
Straw Man Arguments Are Easier
He next “investigates” whether the reported post-resurrection appearances were hallucinations or visions. This is another argument I would never make just like I would never investigate whether the Cowardly Lion was a hallucination or vision.
This reminds me of the joke about the guy looking for something at night under a street light. Guy 2 comes over and asks what’s up.
“Lost my keys,” Guy 1 says.
So Guy 2 looks around to help. After a few minutes, he says, “I sure don’t see them. Where did you lose them, exactly?”
“Over there.” Guy 1 points to a dark part of a parking lot.
“Then why are we looking here??”
“The light’s better here.”
And that’s why Strobel brings up the hallucination argument and similar straw men. They aren’t serious arguments. Nobody raises them. But these he can knock over. The light’s better here.
Other Dying and Rising Gods
Strobel says:

Was the resurrection simply the recasting of ancient mythology, akin to the fanciful tales of Osiris or Mithras? If you want to see a historian laugh out loud, bring up that kind of pop-culture nonsense.

Unfortunately, all we have of Strobel’s juggernaut of an argument is this vague reference, so we’ll just have to do our best as we risk historians’ mocking laughter.
So the dying-and-rising aspect of the Jesus story couldn’t have come from the dying-and-rising aspect of gods that preceded Jesus like Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, and Baal? These were gods from nearby cultures, which would likely have been familiar to literate first-century Greeks, and these gods all died and rose again. No chance of resurrection envy influencing the gospel story?
The typical response is that these other gods’ stories are different from the Jesus story. Of course they’re different—otherwise, they’d be the same story. But they sure sound similar. For example, in a story originating centuries before Jesus, Dionysus was the product of one of Zeus’s many affairs. His jealous wife Hera had the infant Dionysus eaten by Titans, but Zeus brought him back to life through the mortal woman Semele.
Dead, and then born by a mortal. Brought back to life by the ruler of all gods. Is something of that present—nay, central—to the gospel story? You decide if there’s any chance of cross-pollination.
Second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr even used the similarities to his advantage. He said:

When we say [that Jesus] was produced without sexual union, and that He … was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.1

Not only did damning similarities exist, Justin argued, but they were deliberately planted in Greek myths by the devil:

For when [the Greeks] tell that [Dionysus] was begotten by [Semele], and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven … do I not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses?2

Justin not only acknowledged the similarities, he embraced them!
Strobel ends his essay:

After I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.

Yeah, whatever. Do some objective research and maybe you’ll reach a different conclusion.
I can imagine that Strobel used to be an atheist. But not that he was an atheist just like me.

And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant,
the words of the Bible were used
to beat plowshares into swords
— Alan Wilson Watts

1Justin Martyr, “Analogies to the History of Christ,” chapter 21 of First Apology.
2Justin Martyr, “The Devil, since he emulates the truth, has invented fables about Bacchus, Hercules, and Sculapius,” chapter 69 of Dialogue with Trypho.

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/12/11.)

Photo credit: Illuminating Distractions

Separating Fact From Fiction: How Does Christianity Fare?

Posted on by

when you throw your net into a sea of truth, what do you get? do you get Christianity?How do you separate fact from fiction? What procedure do you go through when confronted with a truth claim? This procedure should be practical rather than cumbersome, and it must be objective and fair rather than being biased toward a particular worldview. The goal should be finding the truth, not supporting a predefined conclusion.
I’ll go first. I only have two principles.

  • Accept the scientific and historical consensus, where there is one. In fields where there’s a high barrier to entry (becoming a physicist, for example), a layman is unqualified to evaluate evidence in that field and must rely on experts. That doesn’t mean that the experts are right, but the consensus is the best provisional approximation of the truth that we have at the moment.
  • Use the Principle of Analogy. This is the common-sense observation that we have much experience already with things that really exist (rocks, planets) and things that don’t (unicorns, legends). Let’s use this experience to find the best fit for any new claims. (I discussed the Principle of Analogy in detail here.)

Let’s take this procedure for a test drive with 15 categories of claims. (As we go through these, see what your procedure would make of them.)
Mythical animals such as unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns: fiction. Science tells us that these don’t exist and that there is no precedent for the magical powers attributed to some of these animals.
Animal surprises like the coelacanth, gorilla, Komodo dragon, and okapi: fact. Conclusive evidence for these animals was discovered only in the twentieth century.
Cryptozoological claims such as the Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, and Bigfoot: fiction. Science says that the arguments for these animals are insufficient. However, since these are (typically) claimed to have no special powers, there is a chance that evidence simply hasn’t been found. Science has been surprised before by new animals.
Curious life forms like the giraffe, blue whale, bacteria, volcanic vent life, and carnivorous plants: fact. Science tells us that they exist, even if we haven’t seen any personally.
Mythology like the Iliad, Gilgamesh, and Beowulf: fiction. Myths are sacred narratives that explain some aspect of reality (for example, the myth of Prometheus explains why we have fire and the Genesis creation myth explains where everything came from). History notes many examples of supernatural tales like these for which there is no evidence.
Legends like Merlin, Lady Godiva, and the Choking Doberman urban legend: fiction. Though they can include miracles, legends are otherwise plausible events that (unlike myths) are grounded in history. History tells us that there is insufficient evidence.
History like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar: fact. These generals won some remarkable battles. Though supernatural stories arose around these men (not surprising in a pre-scientific culture), history rejects the supernatural elements.
Fiction like The Wizard of Oz and Harry Potter: fiction (obviously). Most are clearly labeled as fiction, though the label is occasional lost or ignored—Orson Welles’ Halloween, 1938 War of the Worlds radiocast is a famous example.
Individual claims of supernatural events like miracles, ghosts, and demonic possession: fiction. Though these are widespread and customized to each culture, history and science reject these for lack of evidence.
Individual claims of extraterrestrials like seeing a UFO or an alien encounters: fiction. Like claims for cryptids, these don’t rely on the supernatural, but science has insufficient evidence to conclude that they exist, particularly when other explanations (hoaxes, misidentification, etc.) are available. “But no one has debunked case X!” may be true but is hardly proof of an alien claim.
Pseudoscience like ESP; telepathy; Ouija boards; Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and other predictors of the future; and speaking to the dead: fiction. Insufficient evidence.
Fringe medicine like homeopathy, crystals, and Kinoki foot pads: fiction. With the stakes so high, fringe medical claims are common, whether by charlatans or people who honestly think they’ve found a new cure. But when alternative medicine provides the evidence that it works, it’s simply called “medicine.”
Science like black holes, undersea volcanoes, planets around distant stars, quantum physics, and the Big Bang: fact. Science has a remarkable track record, though, as stated above, its claims are provisional.
Conspiracy theories like the moon hoax or 9/11 as an inside job: fiction. Some conspiracies are accurate history, but many, like these examples, do not have the evidence.
Books from the other guy’s religion like Hinduism, Buddhism, Scientology, Christian Science, and Mormonism: fiction. Historians discard the supernatural. That supernatural claims were made is often history, of course, but not that the claims are accurate.
That’s 15 categories, some of which are fact and some fiction. What are your criteria for separating fact from fiction, and what do they make of these examples?
The challenge for the Christian is to have an objective list with no “except for my religion” caveats. When Christians throw their net of truth into the water, a winnowing procedure that’s fine-meshed will pull up Christianity but also a lot of other religions. A procedure that’s coarser (like mine) will reject all religions.
What objective procedure can Christians have that will show Christianity as the only valid religion? I can imagine none.

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions …
are ever destroyed by their enemies
until they have been corrupted and weakened
by their friends.
— Walter Lippman

Photo credit: Hasin Hayder

What Would a Religious Constitution Look Like?

Posted on by

The US Constitution is not in the least religiousHappy birthday, Constitution! The U.S. Constitution went into effect March 4, 1789.
Paul Kurtz of the Center for Inquiry has said that 94 national constitutions are explicitly neutral on religion, with the U.S. Constitution being the very first. It’s frustrating that the secular nature of the Constitution is now being second guessed, when that trait is the friend not only of the atheist and non-Christian but also of the Christian.
Don’t Like History? Rewrite It!
History revisionists like David Barton (whose book The Jefferson Lies was recently recalled by its Christian publishing house for historical inaccuracies) imagine that America was founded on biblical principles.
The Constitution is full of biblical inspiration, he says:

You look at Article 3, Section 1 [sic], the treason clause. Direct quote out of the Bible. You look at Article 2, the quote on the president has to be a native born? That is Deuteronomy 17:15, verbatim. I mean, it drives the secularists nuts because the Bible’s all over it! … [We Christians] think it’s a secular document; we’ve bought into their lies. It’s not.

The Constitution not secular? There is no mention of deities, and the only mention of religion is to prohibit religious tests for public office in Article 6. But let’s investigate Barton’s claims.
First, the treason clause. In another video he makes clear what “direct quote” he’s talking about:

On the testimony of two or three witnesses a person shall be put to death, but no one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one witness (Deut. 17:6).

Compare that with the Constitution:

No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court (Art. 3, Sect. 3).

That’s the great wisdom that the founding fathers had to consult the Bible for—that you need at least two witnesses for an important crime? And that’s hardly a direct quote.
Consider what the Bible is talking about in this chapter: if anyone worships a god besides Jehovah, you are to stone them to death, with the witnesses the first to cast the stones. Death penalty for worshipping the wrong god? Uh, no—that’s about as unconstitutional as it comes.
In Barton’s second point, he compares

Be sure to appoint over you a king [Jehovah] your God chooses. He must be from among your fellow Israelites. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not an Israelite (Deut. 17:15).

with

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States … shall be eligible to the Office of President (Art. 2, Sect. 1, Clause 5).

That’s not a “verbatim” copy. That’s not even a rough approximation. The United States is to pick a king that God chooses?!
Not … even … close.
No, David, what “drives the secularists nuts” is your blatant lies. Do you assume your audience is too ignorant to know the truth or too stupid to care about it?
What Would a Religious Constitution Look Like?
There are lots more Barton claims, but he’s a waste of time. If the founding fathers had wanted America to be governed by Christian or biblical principles, they would have said so in the Constitution.
Compare it with the constitution of the Philippines, which implores the aid of “the Almighty God,” or Malaysia, which makes Islam the official religion, or Nigeria, which declares that it is a “nation under God,” or even the new constitution of Egypt, which makes Islam the official religion and Islamic Sharia the “principle source of legislation.”
The signers of the Constitution knew full well how to make religious constitutions since these same founding fathers helped to create constitutions in their states. Maryland granted religious protection for Christians only, New Jersey referred to “the inestimable privilege of worshipping Almighty God,” Pennsylvania required office holders to acknowledge that the Bible was divinely inspired, and Vermont required all men to declare “by the ever living God” that they will honorably carry out civic responsibilities such as voting.
That’s what the Constitution would’ve looked like if the founding fathers had wanted it to be religious. By contrast, the U.S. Constitution begins “We the People.” By not referring to God, it says volumes.

I think we need to have a government
that respects our religions.
I’m really tired of being lectured
about respecting every other religion on the planet.
I want them to respect our religions.
— Newt Gingrich, while campaigning for president in 2012

Photo credit: Wikimedia

The U.S. Constitution is 100 Percent Secular—or Is It?

Posted on by

Is the Constitution secular? Yep.In other blog posts, I’ve made the point that the secular U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from getting involved with religion, which makes the best environment for both atheists and Christians. However, on several occasions, I’ve gotten pushback that the Constitution isn’t secular. Let’s investigate this claim.
First consider a historic document that is easily seen to be religious, the Mayflower Compact (1620). It’s quite short, and the majority of the body is here:

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.

This is one of the documents that David Barton likes to use while bending history to take on his preconception of America as a Christian nation. There are also several federal Thanksgiving declarations that acknowledge the Christian god. For example, George Washington in 1789 created the first national Thanksgiving Day with this statement:

[Congress requests that the president] recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God.

The constitution of the Confederate States (1861) was adopted with few changes from the U.S. Constitution, one being the addition of “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in the preamble.
However, when we read the U.S. Constitution, this overtly Christian language isn’t there. Neither is the vaguely deist language present in the Declaration of Independence. It’s 100 percent secular. It’s not God making this constitution; it begins, in big letters, We the People. In fact, Article 6 says in part, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
But is it secular? Some Christians assert that it’s not. The first example is from Article 1:

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law.

In other words, it recognized Sunday as a holiday. The second example is the wrapup in Article 7:

done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven.

In other words, it replaces AD (Anno Domini—“in the year of our Lord”) with its English translation, as was customary for formal documents at the time.
That’s it?? Those are the powerful counterexamples? Compare this to the Mayflower Compact—a constitution with some balls that not only affirmed God’s existence but said that the entire project was for his glory.
That Sunday was a holiday simply acknowledged the custom of the people of the time. Spelling out AD and saying that this acknowledges Yahweh is like saying that the use of the names Thursday, Friday, and Saturday acknowledges the gods Thor, Frigg, and Saturn, respectively. Or that the use of the names May and June acknowledges the Roman goddesses Maia and Juno. “AD” is just another part of the same calendar.
The final irony is that “in the year of our Lord” isn’t even correct from a Christian standpoint. The few clues we have of Jesus’s birth in the gospels make clear that he wasn’t born in the year 1 but probably around 5 BCE.
So, yes, the Constitution does reflect the customs and calendar of the people of the time. But it’s still obviously and boldly secular. Isn’t that the best for everyone who is governed by it?

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

(In honor of the upcoming anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, this is a modified version of a post originally published 1/30/12.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia

Religion and Sports: Just Cultural Traits?

Posted on by

How similar are religion and sports?Lifelong fans of the Mariners baseball team would be Red Sox fans if they’d grown up in Boston instead of Seattle. Tarheels fans would be Trojans fans if they had gone to USC instead of UNC. People who eat Frosted Flakes for breakfast would likely prefer fermented soybeans (natto) if they grew up in Japan instead of the U.S.
And believers who think that the truth of Christianity is obvious might think that about Islam if they grew up in Morocco or Afghanistan instead of Mississippi or Alabama.
Begging the pardon of sports fans, there is no objective measure that makes their home team the only valid one, with all others being poor imitations of the real thing. The same is true for religion.
Why do people pick the religions that they pick? In fact, most don’t pick. They’re in effect assigned a religion by the randomness of their birth. They take on the religion of their parents or their community, like any other cultural trait such as customary food, dress, or etiquette.
Let’s not take this too far, however. Not everyone born in Mississippi is a Christian—atheist theologian Robert Price is an example. Not everyone raised as a Christian remains one—I’m an example.
So what we’re seeing is a strong correlation—people tend to take on the religion of their environment. What best explains this observation?
The atheist view is that all religions are fiction, but they’re sticky elements of culture. People tend to adopt these elements, but you’ll always have some outliers. In a culture where men wear neckties, a few will prefer bow ties. In a culture where one of the first questions after being introduced to someone new is, “And where do you go to church?” a few will be atheists.
The atheist says that religion is adopted because it’s a dominant cultural trait, not because it’s true.
The Christian view is much tougher to justify. Christians don’t want to discard this correlation because it helps explain why the other guy clings to his religion. Is the fact that there are a billion Muslims strong evidence that Islam is correct? Nope—their belief is just a cultural trait. With well over a dozen countries having 98 percent or greater Muslim populations, being Muslim is just what you do when you grow up in a monoculture.
Christians say that Islam, Shinto, Buddhism, Hinduism, and most other religions are cultural traits that are false. But they need to explain why Christianity is actually true even though it looks just like all those false cultural traits.
Seeing religion as nothing more profound or objectively accurate than a cultural trait is the best explanation of the evidence.

Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed.
Everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it
that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect
never desire more of it than they already have.
— René Descartes

Print Friendly and PDF
Photo credit

Don’t Believe Christianity Until You Believe in Aliens

Posted on by

If you like the Jesus resurrection story, you should like the alien story better!Do you think that Jesus rose from the dead? That he was virgin born? That he sits in heaven at the right hand of the creator of the universe?
That the gospel story is actual history is an immense claim, but Christians say they have the evidence. Let’s test that. If Christians accept this claim, then, to be consistent, they must also accept any claim with better evidence. Such a claim is that space aliens have visited the earth.
Let’s compare evidence for these two claims point by point.
1. Recentness of Event. You can interview people today who claim to have seen UFOs or encountered aliens. To understand the gospel claims, we must peer back across 2000 years of history.
2. Number of Sources. Thousands claim to have been abducted, and the number who claim only to have seen aliens or their technology must be far higher. There were only four gospels, and those aren’t even independent accounts.
3. Period of Oral History. The period of oral history is negligible for many alien claims. It may be just hours or days from a claimed event until a newspaper story. By contrast, the Gospels were written decades after the claimed events.
4. Reliability of Source. It may be easy to imagine alien claimants as insane, drunk, or uneducated, but one psychiatrist studied 800 claimed abductees and was struck with the ordinariness of the population. Another survey reported that this group is no more prone to mental disorder than the general population.
Question the sanity of those who claims to have seen aliens if you want, but we at least have something tangible—interviews with those people and people who know them, police records, and so on. With Peter and Paul or some other Christian patriarch we have 2000-year-old stories. Who’s to say if they’re accurate?
5. Natural vs. Supernatural. The supposed aliens came from a planet (we know about planets) on which there was intelligent life (we know about intelligent life), and they presumably got here in a spaceship (we know about technology and spaceships). This is 100 percent natural.
Science keeps finding strange new animals on earth living in extreme environments—worms that live miles underground, in glaciers, or in hot or cold places at the bottom of the ocean. Is it hard to imagine animals on other worlds? Their discovery would be surprising or even shocking, but we wouldn’t need to discard any scientific laws if aliens presented themselves.
By contrast, the Gospel story requires you to believe in supernatural beings and supernatural events. We have plenty of claims but no scientific consensus that even one is valid.
6. Cultural Gulf. The evidence for aliens is from our time, from our culture, and in our language. By contrast, the gospel story is from a culture long ago and far away, and the Greek gospels are already one culture removed from the actual events. Jesus and the apostles spoke Aramaic and came from a Jewish environment; the gospels were written in Greek by authors who lived in a Greek environment.
7. Contradictions. Any contradiction between alien claims can be chalked up to a different space ship or a different alien race. By contrast, the four gospel accounts are trying to document the same events.
8. Quality of Evidence. On the alien side, you talk directly to people who claim to be eyewitnesses. The argument that the gospel writers were eyewitnesses or close to them is a flimsy tradition.
Our oldest complete copies of the New Testament date from the fourth century. Yes, we do have fragments of New Testament books that date earlier, but these are incomplete and are still copies from one to two centuries after the original authorship.
9. Criterion of Embarrassment. Christians ask, “But who would make up the gospel story? Who would endure the persecution?” First, I never claimed that anyone made up the story, simply that the supernatural elements in the gospel story are easily explained by supposing that it evolved as it was passed along. Second, that defense crumbles when we consider that alien claimants tell their story today in the face of much potential ridicule. Is a story in the face of persecution strong support for the truth of the story? Okay—then consider it strong evidence for alien claims.
If the Gospel stories are believable, shouldn’t alien stories be far more believable? Seen the other way around, Christians who read this and think up many objections to the alien argument need to apply those same objections against the gospel story to see if it holds up.
I think they’ll find that the net that pulls in Christianity will pull in a lot of bycatch as well.

Reality is that which,
when you stop believing in it,
doesn’t go away.
— Philip K. Dick

Photo credit