The Bible is a book whose storyline spans over a thousand years, so perhaps it’s not surprising that it also has reboots.
(A reboot is a new release of a story in comic, film, television series, or other form that discards continuity with previous versions to start afresh, unburdened by plot decisions in any previous release.)
The Bible, take one (the Adam story)
In the six-days-of-creation story in Genesis 1, God created mankind in his own image.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28).
He then promises them all the fruit and vegetables from the earth.
(This one is debatable since it doesn’t mention an “everlasting covenant,” but I include it becausesome Christian sources do.)
The Bible, take two (Noah)
Adam and Eve leave the Garden, their son Cain kills his brother Abel, and then there’s a long genealogy ending in Noah. God is annoyed with how humanity turned out, so he hits the Reset button, and everyone drowns. But there’s a happy conclusion—Noah, his family, and his ark full of animals survive the storm.
Everyone in the world (by now, just eight people) is once again safe on land. God as Elohim blesses Noah’s family with authority over all living things. He lays down a few rules, and in return he promises, “I establish my covenant with you: never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood” (Genesis 9:11). The rain-bow (think: the kind of bow that shoots arrows) will appear in the clouds and remind everyone (God included) of this “everlasting covenant” (Gen. 9:16).
So there you have it, God’s covenant with humanity.
But there’s more, as the story trundles along. Noah’s descendants populate the earth, there’s that whole Tower of Babel thing, and then we’re introduced to Abraham. For some reason, Abraham (né Abram) isn’t already in Israel but lives in Ur, an ancient city on the coast of the Persian Gulf, now in southern Iraq. God (now Yahweh) guides him to Canaan.
God must be forgetful because he keeps making the same promise to Abraham. The promise is you will have many descendants (D), you get land (L), and this covenant is perpetual (P).
In Genesis 12, Yahweh says, “I will make you into a great nation (D)… To your offspring (P) I will give this land (L)” (that is, Canaan).
Other stories intervene, and then in Genesis 13, God does it again: “All the land (L) that you see [Canaan] I will give to you and your offspring forever (P). I will make your offspring (D) like the dust of the earth.”
In Genesis 15, guess what God does. He gives Canaan to Abraham. Actually, he gives a lot more than that, listing ten tribes (L) whose land will be the property of Abraham’s descendants. He gives as boundaries the Euphrates River to the east and Egypt to the west.
In Genesis 17, God was feeling generous, so he gave Canaan to Abraham. “I will make you very fruitful (D)…. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant (P) between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan (L), where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you.” This is the first time we see Abraham’s contribution to the covenant: he and his male descendants must now be circumcised. (If you’re familiar with the documentary hypothesis, this came from the P source. The previous three were from the J source.)
Elohim from the E source is feeling generous, too, so in Genesis 22, he rewards Abraham for (almost) sacrificing Isaac with another gift of Canaan. “I will surely bless you and make your descendants (P) as numerous (D) as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies (L).”
God (in his several forms) has stuttered out many bequests of Canaan and promises of many descendants. It was a bit clumsy and contradictory, but we kind of get the message.
The End.
Just kidding—there’s more. This is concluded in part 2.
Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teachings, and most of these teachings have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas, and most of these dogmas have been false. — epitaph of George P. Spencer
The influence of C. S. Lewis on modern Christians in the West is hard to overestimate. Few stories of apologists coming to faith don’t include a mention of Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
Lewis was a student of Norse, Greek, and Irish mythology since his youth. He knew mythology and, he felt, he knew reality by contrast. Here’s his critique of the overall feel of Christianity as he compares it to the two possibilities, myth and reality.
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies—these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.
It is wholly believable because it is absurd.
third-century church father Tertullian, commenting on the resurrection (disputed)
Simple as a test for religion
If Christianity “offers us a universe” we don’t expect, doesn’t that mean that this new godly universe isn’t what we observe? (h/t commenter Raging Bee)
Lewis says that simplicity isn’t what we should expect in Christianity: “It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple.”
While it’s true that natural things are often messy and complicated, a supernatural God could resolve, clearly and unambiguously, the big issues Christians fight over in a single page.
Christianity has much to be confused about. Look at the long list of Christian heresies about the nature of Jesus, the role of Mary, and so on. These have been resolved by mandate and tradition, not by objective evidence. Look at modern debates over morality (same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, and so on). Look at the second coming, the Trinity, justification for God’s abominable actions in the Old Testament, and other murky issues. Look at the 45,000 denominations of Christianity that exist today. Let me know when Christianity gets its act together. Until then I won’t believe that the Bible looks like the product of an omniscient mind.
No, complex is just what made-up religions look like. Religions, especially the old ones, are usually quite complicated. Simple is a reasonable thing to ask for.
And shouldn’t Lewis, as an expert in mythology, admit to the Ancient Near East mythology that the Old Testament authors drew upon for their stories, like the Garden of Eden or the Flood?
Let’s return to the more interesting point. Lewis said, “[Christianity] has just that queer twist about it that real things have.” It’s an instinctive reaction, so let’s label this argument Lewis’s Appeal to the Gut. Christianity just feels like reality rather than myth.
Lewis says that myth feels one way, and reality feels another way. All right, Clive—formalize and quantify this “queer twist.” Move beyond your gut feeling and give us an algorithm for reliably telling myth and reality apart in a document. Does it have to do with passive vs. active voice? Is it dynamic vs. passive action? Male vs. female characters? A direct storyline vs. one with tangents? Word choice or subject matter or archaic language or sentence length? Turn this feeling into something that can be tested.
Challenge 1. Let’s take this powerful tool on the road. Test your algorithm on biographies, hagiographies (biographies written to flatter), legend, mythology, and so on. See if it accurately separates Myth and Reality.
Challenge 2. Try it out on religious writings. Does it put the Bible (and only the Bible) into the Reality bin?
Challenge 3. Now use your algorithm to invent a supernatural story that has the traits of Reality. This is a supernatural story that you know is false (because you made it up), and yet you are compelled by your genre argument to declare it true (because that’s how you know Christianity is true). You’re obliged to believe this story as strongly as Christianity by your own argument.
But if you reject this invented story as clearly fiction, you’ll need to reject your test as well. In this case, “if the genre feels right, then the story is believable” wouldn’t work after all.
Early church father Tertullian (died ca. 240) supposedly said about the resurrection, “it is wholly believable because it is absurd.” The New Testament says, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).
That’s right—it is both foolish and absurd, but that’s not something to celebrate.
That’s not how the adults do it
Instead of the feel test, let’s follow the lead of the experts. We already have a scholarly discipline devoted to deciding what happened in the past. It’s called History. It uses principles shaped over centuries that do a good job of synthesizing what actually happened from what is invariably insufficient or contradictory evidence. Spoiler: history is no friend of the supernatural. The consensus view of historians scrubs the supernatural from the record.
The resurrection, the Trinity, heaven and hell—there’s plenty of nonsense within Christian dogma that has just that queer twist about it that legend has. Invert Lewis’s argument, and it finally makes sense.
For more rebuttals to nonsense from C. S. Lewis, see these articles:
When we remove all the unevidenced beliefs [from supernatural thinking] we are left with naturalism. And when we remove all the unevidenced beliefs from naturalism, we are left with naturalism. — commenter Greg G.
Who says Christian apologetics can’t be the heart of a great movie? I do, and you might agree with me after you read this review of the third iteration of the God’s Not Dead franchise from 2018.
This is another film from the Christian studio Pure Flix. For the previous two films, see my reviews of GND1 and GND2.
We see story continuity in #3 of this franchise, just as we saw in #2. This time, it’s Pastor Dave’s chance in the spotlight, and Josh (the hero from GND1) is his youth pastor. Dozens of fans were holding their breath since the thrilling ending of GND2 two years earlier where Pastor Dave was hauled off in handcuffs for disobeying a court order to disclose his sermons.
TL;DR
The previous films each had a student rejected by anti-Christian parents, a ridiculous plot, and a list of legal cases at the end where someone was mean to a Christian. These films were persecution porn, allowing Christians to wallow in how hateful everyone is to them and how tough it is being a Christian in America these days, but that’s okay because Jesus promised us persecution, and he’ll be standing alongside us during our tribulation (invisibly and not actually doing anything, but there nonetheless), and blah, blah, blah.
But the franchise has grown up. They’ve fired Chicken Little as the screenwriter, and the transparently unrealistic plot is gone. It’s still an overtly Christian film about people working through doubts and struggles, with God (in his own inept and nonexistent way) guiding each person to a stronger faith, but that’s a big improvement.
This was a gamble. Will box office receipts show that Christians like a realistic story rather than persecution fantasy? Turns out, not really. GND1 (2014) had worldwide receipts totaling an impressive $64 million. GND2 (2016) took in $24 million. And GND3, a lackluster $7 million.
Plot
First, here’s the background to Pastor Dave in handcuffs. This situation was inspired by a real case in Houston. Conservative groups had filed suit against a new city ordinance supporting the rights of trans people. The city, as a small part of the discovery process for its defense, subpoenaed five local pastors to find out what they’d been saying. The mayor later retracted the request, not because it was inappropriate or illegal, but because the conservative groups played the victim and were changing the conversation to an attack on their religious freedoms.
Back to the film: Dave is now out of legal trouble, and the only point of that tiny episode was to identify him and his church as controversial. That puts him in a delicate position with the university, on whose land his church sits.
Pastor Jude (from Ghana), seen in the previous two films, becomes Dave’s assistant pastor. The two of them leave the church one night and hear breaking glass. They see someone run away. Jude goes in to investigate, not realizing that a brick through a window broke a gas valve. He turns on the light and triggers an explosion. Dave drags him out, but he dies while the church burns in the background.
Only later does Dave understand Jude’s last words, spoken in his native language. It’s the line that encapsulates Jude’s worldview, “God is good all the time, and all the time God is good.” Striving for this simple faith will be Dave’s journey.
The primary subplot involves Keaton. We see her earlier that day, and she’s struggling with her faith. She’s talking, but God isn’t responding. Her boyfriend Adam has happily moved beyond Christianity, and the faith thing has become a problem in their relationship. She wants some distance from Adam to figure things out, and we see her going to the youth group in Dave’s church.
To Adam, the church is breaking up his relationship, and we discover that he was the brick thrower.
The university board sees Dave as a lightning rod, and that’s not good for enrollment. It’s a public university, and they own the land the church is on, so they use eminent domain to seize the church property. Tom is the university president and a friend of Dave’s, and he needs to get Dave to agree. The university will pay for the land, and insurance will pay for the loss of the church building, so they hope Dave will accept the proposal.
But Dave won’t go quietly. He drives from the university in Arkansas to Chicago to visit his brother Pearce, a social justice lawyer. Though they’ve been estranged, Pearce drops everything and returns with Dave to help save the church. It turns out that their father had been the pastor of St. James church before Dave, and Christianity has caused friction in the family for years.
So, we have Pearce the atheist helping Dave keep his church. This would’ve been a great chance to emphasize Pearce fighting for what’s right regardless of his religious beliefs, how separation of church and state helps everyone, how the ACLU fights predominantly for Christians’ rights, and so on, but I guess that isn’t what a Christian audience wants to hear.
Adam realizes that his vandalism caused not only the destruction of the church but Jude’s death, and he’s consumed with guilt. He confesses to Keaton and asks if God could forgive him. (Omigod! Do you think Adam’s stony heart is turning toward God? That would make Jude’s death totally worth it!)
Dave discovers a demolition crew at the church one Sunday morning. (Their primary tool is a bulldozer, probably not what you’d use to destroy a three-story brick building, but whatever.) Dave stalls them with an impromptu church service while Pearce quickly gets an injunction. Whew! They have three more weeks.
Since the beginning of the film, Dave has been delivering groceries to a soup kitchen run by Meg. They gradually become an item, and she takes on the Jude role. Dave becomes increasingly frustrated with the difficulties God (apparently) is throwing in his path, which contrasts with Meg’s simple, strong faith.
To change the public conversation in his favor, Dave gets himself interviewed on local TV and asks people to appeal to the university to change their decision. This works, but it becomes personal when Tom the president gets a brick through a window in his home.
Dave gets an anonymous text saying that it was Adam who threw the brick through the church window. Though we all know that Adam’s act was simply vandalism, and he had no intention of destroying the church or killing Jude, Dave assaults Adam in public. Adam walks away in handcuffs, but Dave has blown his PR advantage, and the university knows it.
Angry Dave lashes out at Pearce, driving him away. Dave is pretty unsympathetic at this point. He returns to that one rock we can all get support from, Jesus as told in the gospels. [Pass the barf bag.]
Keaton is also stressed, feeling Jesus absent from her life. She tells Josh (the youth pastor) about her failing faith, and Josh replies with the film’s only apologetic-ish argument. He says that John the Baptist had been around Jesus, and yet his faith was tested. When in prison, John asked his disciples to visit Jesus to see if he was the One.
Whoops—that was a bad story to use. When John baptized Jesus, he heard God himself say that Jesus was his son. If John still had reasonable doubts with that evidence, how can any Christian today, so far removed from the supposed events, believe any Christian claim? But a Christian film can likely have faith in modern Christians’ ignorance of what the Bible actually says.
It’s still an overtly Christian film about people working through doubts and struggles, with God (in his own inept and nonexistent way) guiding each person to a stronger faith, but that’s a big improvement.
Dave walks through the burned-out church and God finally speaks clearly: be a light in the darkness (which is the film’s subtitle). He visits Adam in jail, and Adam says that he sent the anonymous text. They hug it out after Dave gives him Jude’s Bible.
Things culminate in a nasty public confrontation at the church, with sign-carrying students separated into groups shouting for and against the church. Pastor Dave and president Tom are both there, and Dave speaks to the crowd. He says that the church isn’t worth the friction that the debate has created in the community. He drops his lawsuit and says that Tom has promised that the new student union to be built on the site will have a place for the youth group to meet (which is hardly a concession, since a church youth group would be just one of dozens of student groups that would legally be entitled to meet there).
This public protest is bizarrely set at night, but the story logic becomes clear when Meg hands out candles, and everyone becomes a light in the darkness.
Keaton is waiting for Adam when he’s released from jail. (Dave had been pushing for leniency, but that wouldn’t have been his call to make. Involuntary manslaughter is usually a felony with a prison sentence of 5–10 years. Ah, well—that’s Christianity Land in Hollywood.)
The film wraps up with Dave breaking ground on the new St. Jude’s church. Pearce phones congratulations to Dave, and we see on his desk his old Bible, which has a handwritten note from his parents. And Keaton feels that she hears Jesus again, so she (what else would you do at the end of a GND movie?) texts “God’s not dead” to her friends. To hit us over the head with the point, at the end of the film one of the Newsboys (the Christian group featured in each film) encouraged everyone to share that message on social media.
I stayed through the credits, looking without success for the entry “God (played by himself).” That surprised me, since he played such a large role in the film.
But then I remembered that he made absolutely no appearance in the film, just like in real life.
God’s not dead, but he’s very, very good at playing possum. — commenter Richard Wade
God loves us deeply and really wants to have a relationship with each of us. So why doesn’t he?
This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):
25. Because God is hidden
God knows that if we don’t understand and get on board with his plan, we will go to hell. He doesn’t want that. So what does God do to give us the basic information we need to know that he simply exists?
Nothing.
Christians might find God in the basic facts of nature—happy things like sunsets and puppies—but they ignore unpleasant things like tornadoes and cholera. Puppies and tornadoes point to the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or Satan) as much as they do the Christian God.
Or the Christians might quote Bible passages (“Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities … have been clearly seen … so that people are without excuse” from Romans 1:20), ignoring that the Bible is not binding on non-Christians.
God is a billion times smarter than me, and he can’t convince me he even exists? A slug can convince me that it exists by just lying there. This existence thing apparently just flummoxes God.
A popular Christian response is to say that God’s making himself known would violate our free will. As C. S. Lewis said in Screwtape Letters, “[God] cannot ravish. He can only woo.”
Nonsense. This is one of the weakest Christian apologetic responses in a vast arsenal of substandard responses. Our request is a reasonable one, and we shouldn’t apologize for it. God should have made his existence (and properties) known to all. That he doesn’t is just one more reason to think we’re not living in God World.
What got me started on this long blog post series was a Christian commenter at an apologetics blog a few years ago. He asked what evidence I’d need to be convinced that God exists. He said he needed to know what a convincing argument would look like so he could work on providing one.
I said that our positions were similar with respect to non-Christian religions. I don’t think that Scientology or Islam or Hinduism are correct, and neither does he. I played up the symmetry of our positions by saying that I’d probably need the same kind of argument that he would need to convert to a foreign supernatural worldview. An argument for Hinduism (say) with a high enough standard of evidence to convince him would get my attention as well. Give me that same quality of evidence for Christianity—as a minimum, I’d need that.
So the answer to his question is: tell me what you’d need. I’d probably need something like that.
He wasn’t satisfied (no, I couldn’t figure out why), so I made more good faith attempts to comply with his request before I realized that he wasn’t making his request with the goal of being satisfied. He was asking questions to avoid having to answer questions, attacking so he wouldn’t have to defend. He was sealioning, interrogating with the goal of asking questions to drive the antagonist away. And it worked—I haven’t bothered to comment at that blog since.
But that got me thinking. A big reason I’m an atheist is because of all the clues that we live in a non-God world. You want to know what I need to know that God exists? Show me that I live in a world where God doesn’t have the traits that he has.
Show me that we don’t live in a world where God is omniscient but also needs (or tolerates) praise and worship (reason #3).
Show me that we don’t live in a world where Christians feel so insecure in their faith that they want to strongarm the government to support them (reason #7).
Show me that we don’t live in a world where all-powerful God is so fragile that he gets praise but can’t handle blame (reason #9).
Show me that we don’t live in a world where perfect God’s perfect message is so confusing that Christians need thick books with rationalizations for Bible difficulties (reason #15).
In short, show me that I don’t live in the world that I live in.
A slug can convince me that it exists by just lying there. This existence thing apparently just flummoxes God.
The apologist might respond that this approach makes atheists unconvinceable. That might be true, though it wouldn’t be because of atheists’ closed-mindedness. It’s because there is so little intellectual reason to favor the Christian view of the world. (For another reason why skeptics are obliged to hold their skepticism, consider the Earth vs. Gaia comparison.)
And now, over 10,000 words later in this post series, I have 25 positive, pro-atheistic reasons that I can offer a Christian apologist to explain why I don’t think that God exists. Seen another way, these are the obstacles that prevent me from seeing this as God World. These are the traits of our world that the apologist must remove.
The Christian commenter who prompted me to collect these arguments won’t be satisfied with this list, because I’m sure he’s made his position unfalsifiable. However, my job is not to satisfy him, it’s to honestly follow reason and the evidence. I believe I’ve done just that.
We have reached the promised 25 reasons we don’t live in a world with a God! Share your own reasons in the comments.
It must be obvious to even the most casual observers that I get the answers to life’s difficult questions from the screaming voices in my head. — David Letterman
Christianity has changed over time. If God’s message is timeless and unchanging, Christianity must not be it.
This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):
23. Because Christianity evolves
Parchment manuscripts were expensive, and outdated manuscript pages were sometimes scraped or washed to remove the ink and then reused. This is called a palimpsest. In some cases, the pen marks from the previous (older) document can still be read.
We find a metaphorical palimpsest with the Bible, with current Christian ideas shadowed by earlier, different ideas. Taken by themselves, some passages make little sense. For example, what does it mean that the water for Noah’s flood came from “the springs of the great deep” and the “floodgates of the heavens”? We can put the pieces together when we realize that the ancient mythology of Genesis was built on still-older cosmology from the Sumerians and other Mesopotamian civilizations.
Of course, realizing that Yahweh worship was built on the religion of the guys down the street pretty much rules out any historical foundation, but the point here is how the biblical story has changed. For example, God evolves through the Bible. In his youth, he wasn’t distant and omni-everything, he was rather like Zeus. He walked through the Garden of Eden and spoke with Adam and Eve like an ordinary man. He visited Abraham. He spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11). He also wasn’t omniscient, and he needed scouts to check out the rumors about Sodom and Gomorrah that he heard. He regretted creating man before the flood.
By the time of the New Testament, things are remembered differently. “No one has seen God at any time” (John 1:18). It tells us that God knows everything (1 John 3:20) and doesn’t change (James 1:17).
For an omniscient, unchanging god, he sure has changed a lot.
The most recent change to God is his retreat in the face of science. God used to cause lightning and drought, but not anymore—science provided a better explanation that could be tested. God used to cause cancer and plagues, but science explains them better, too. How about miraculous cures? Sorry—labeling a surprising remission as a medical miracle is wishful thinking. Only science has evidence that it can improve health outcomes or even eliminate disease.
And what is “Christianity”? That, too, is a moving target. Christianity is like bacteria in a petri dish, and new denominations are now splitting off at a rate of two per day.
Consider Christianity in the early days and the long way it’s come. There have been 21 church councils, and the conclusions of each council were declared infallible (because magic?). Then there are the schisms within the Christian church. The Protestant Reformation may come to mind as the most interesting, at least from the standpoint of Christians in the United States, but there have been dozens of schisms.
Nothing objective grounds the evolution of various doctrines and the declaring of some as orthodox and some as heresy. Imagine someone living centuries ago, doing their best to conform to Christianity as it was preached in their church. Christianity might have changed enough that some denominations today would consider their worship heretical. So then was that person a heretic or not?
Even the canon (the set of books considered authoritative scripture) has been a moving target. It took until the Council of Rome (382) to get the canon more or less defined, but that list was amended within the Roman Catholic church by the Council of Trent (1545). Different Christian denominations still have different canons today, so therefore no infallible hand guided its selection. Here again, there is nothing objective to ground it. The canon was a popularity contest, and theologians would argue for whatever set of books was in vogue in their part of the world.
If we lived in God world, it would look like it. God’s a smart guy, and his message would be simple and unambiguous.
Realizing that Yahweh worship was built on the religion of the guys down the street pretty much rules out any historical foundation.
And a bonus reason:
24. Because of Shermer’s Law
Michael Shermer observed, “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
Suppose someone absorbed a false belief during childhood—a superstition, a bias, or even a worldview. As they got older, they discarded some of these beliefs that weren’t supported by good evidence, but they held on to some, particularly those beliefs integral to their self-image. And here’s the interesting part: because they’re much smarter as adults, they can put together a plausible defense for those false beliefs, even if they actually hold them for no better reason than that they were indoctrinated in them as a child. The appeal of Christian apologetics is that these are smart-sounding arguments that satisfy the need to have plausible defenses for their beliefs, not that they’re true.
This isn’t like defending a belief that you know is false—such as, just for fun, creating the most compelling argument that the Earth is flat. Shermer’s Law applies to people defending a false belief for reasons that they believe. There is no self-deception going on. The unpleasant alternative is to admit to themselves that they’ve believed a false belief for years or even a lifetime, but the subconscious protects one’s self-esteem and prevents this.
If God existed, belief would be defended with evidence.
Christians can see science and technology deliver nine times but still doubt it the tenth time, and they can see religion fail nine times but still expect it to succeed the tenth time.
Faith statements list the beliefs that are mandatory at a Christian university or ministry. For example, Liberty University requires its faculty to be Christian, and it has a faith (doctrinal) statement. That’s not true for Harvard University. Or Stanford University. Or MIT or Oxford or Cambridge or the Sorbonne or any other college or university with a worldwide reputation.
This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):
21. Because faith statements exist
Faith statements (doctrinal statements) are contracts that Christian scholars must commit to at many Christian universities and ministries. These statements might, for example, declare that God exists as a Trinity, life didn’t evolve but was designed by God, or they might state that Jesus had a virgin birth.
The problem is that these statements are not a commitment to follow the evidence but a commitment to a predetermined conclusion regardless of the evidence. Suppose a professor has signed a doctrinal statement that includes the virgin birth and then writes an article arguing that the virgin birth was historical. What good is that article when we knew beforehand that they were obliged to reach that conclusion and that their job was at risk if they published the wrong conclusion? The professor has no reputation for honest scholarship, and readers must critique the argument themselves, which is beyond most readers’ ability.
A university that constrains its professors with a doctrinal statement has created a straightjacketed environment. Even if scholars honestly followed the evidence where it led, readers could only think that they were parroting their doctrinal statement.
More importantly for our purposes, that university has created scholarship with training wheels by prohibiting all that pesky contrary evidence. Their arguments can’t take the critique that historical arguments must face in the real world, so they have created their own parallel kindergarten with a low bar of evidence.
If we lived in God World, no one would need to discard rigorous standards for scholarship because the evidence for God would meet those standards. Said another way, the mandatory low standards for Christian “scholarship” and its inability to compete with other disciplines makes clear that we don’t live in God World.
The problem is that these statements are not a commitment to follow the evidence but a commitment to a predetermined conclusion regardless of the evidence.
A bonus reason:
22. Because prayer doesn’t work
The Bible makes clear that, when it comes to prayer, God is pretty much a vending machine. In Matthew, Jesus says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” In Mark, Jesus says, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” In John, Jesus says, “He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do.”
But that’s not the way it works in the real world. Christians often lower expectations of what prayer can deliver so that it doesn’t disappoint. Here’s one Christian example:
Instead of understanding prayer to be conversation with God as with a friend, we generally see prayer referred to as something reminding us of Santa Claus or a vending machine. And that sets us up for disappointment or disillusionment…. Let’s enjoy conversation with God as with a friend—without prayer jargon, vague language, or a list of requests for God to break natural law.
One response is to say that God answers prayer with Yes, No, and Not Yet, but of course that is not what the Bible says.
Experienced Christians sometimes say that a person’s faith “matures.” One sign of this maturity is an acceptance of how reality shows prayer works over how Jesus claimed it works. Atheist blogger Neil Carter observed, “The mature Christian eventually learns to wait and see where the arrow lands, then they draw a target around that spot, calling God faithful and his word true.”
The 2006 Templeton prayer study is probably the most famous and comprehensive scientific study of prayer. It showed no benefit.
The “researchers” who should best know if prayer works are televangelists. If prayer actually worked, they would simply ask for prayers for their ministries, but of course they don’t. It’s always prayers plus donations.
Not only does prayer not work, but Christians themselves admit this when they make it their avenue of last resort. When a Christian actually takes Jesus at his word and discards natural answers to rely only on prayer for something important, society doesn’t rally around that person to celebrate their marvelous, powerful faith. Instead, they react with varying degrees of shock. Parents have prayed for their sick children instead of taking them to the hospital, people have sold their worldly goods to make themselves right with God before the end of the world, and one person closed their eyes to pray while driving. These situations did not turn out well.
If God existed, prayer would work as he promised. It doesn’t.
When atheists accuse religious people of just praying instead of “doing something” I often chastise them for not getting it that prayer is often just what people do after they’ve done all that they personally could and wish there was something more. — Camels with Hammers blog
