Anti-Choicers’ Misfire on the Fertility Clinic Hypothetical: a Response (2 of 2)

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Ice!

The fertility clinic problem is this: if a fertility clinic were on fire and you could save either a five-year-old child or a canister with a thousand human embryos, which would you save?

In part 1, I looked at the anti-choice responses by Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and Greg Koukl. They largely accepted the point of the argument, that we’d all save the child over the embryos, but then rambled on down many tangents, oblivious to the fact that the case was closed. “An embryo is a child” is the foundational moral claim for many in the anti-choice community, and by admitting that one child is more important than many embryos, they showed that claim to be false.

Let’s wrap up our look at the points made in these anti-choice arguments.

Unfair! It’s an emotional argument.

One objection was to reject this as an emotional argument. Koukl complained, “The dilemma simply forces us to make a choice in a no-win situation. It doesn’t draw out buried intuitions that show our real values; it draws out our emotions in a forced choice.”

Koukl calls this a “dilemma” and a “no-win situation,” but there’s no dilemma here. The choice is obvious.

He’s also wrong about emotional arguments being unfair. This is basically the Portman Effect, named after Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who turned against his party in 2013 to support same-sex marriage. What caused the turnaround was his son coming out as gay. You’d think that people would be good at hypotheticals like, “Gee—what if my son were gay? Would I still oppose same-sex marriage?” But for some reason, having it happen for real puts things in a new focus.

And so it is with abortion. It’s one thing to stroke one’s chin thoughtfully and harrumph that an embryo is a child, but it’s another to be told, “Child or embryos—choose now!”

(And don’t get me started about men weighing in on a matter that can never affect them personally.)

It’s absurd hearing a Christian complain about the unfairness of emotional arguments in support of abortion when anti-choice advocates torment women needing an abortion with posters showing an aborted fetus, the height of emotional manipulation.

More hypotheticals

Shapiro complains that a dangerous fire needing a quick choice has no parallel with the question of whether to have an abortion. “No such hard choice exists in 99.99 percent of abortion cases.” That’s true, but that’s the nature of hypotheticals like this. They’re designed to flush out one’s real attitudes, which are often a surprise to the opinion holders themselves.

Anyway, the complaint is misguided since the hypothetical has done its work by exposing “embryo = child” as false.

Each author is eager to provide his own hypotheticals to replace the original series of tweets from Tomlinson. Shapiro’s contribution: Imagine now that those thousand embryos are required to save humanity. “Do you save the five-year-old and doom the human species to extinction, or do you save the embryos? . . . .  Does that mean the five-year-old is no longer a human being?”

And another: “You can save the box of embryos or you can save the life of a woman who will die of cancer tomorrow. Which one do you save? If you choose the embryos, is the cancer-ridden woman therefore of no moral value?”

Where did “no moral value” enter the discussion? Ditto for the five-year-old no longer being a human being. The point is that Shapiro has agreed that the child is more significant than an embryo, which destroys the capstone of his moral high ground. This admission has exposed an enormous hole in the anti-choice argument. Even if the boys never personally argued “embryo = child,” they must know that it’s central to the anti-choice position. I’m amazed that they don’t confront this directly. Maybe because they can’t.

 

See also: The Limits of Open Mindedness in Debates on Same-Sex Marriage and Abortion

 

Cluelessness

I can’t leave without highlighting some unrepentant, world class cluelessness. Walsh pounds the virtual table, proclaiming that silly hypotheticals are the tools of a coward. He says, “You don’t seem willing to put all of your fantasy scenarios aside and just deal with what abortion is 99% of the time: the willful choice by a healthy woman to kill a healthy unborn child because the child is inconvenient.”

Inconvenient? Is that your final answer? Have you ever used this argument with a real woman seeking an abortion? Have you told her that her pregnancy is merely an inconvenience? Share with us how she replied.

Consider this example. Suppose a 15-year-old girl got pregnant in large part because the sex ed in her public school focused on abstinence, so she didn’t really know how to prevent pregnancy, and because no contraception was available. She had dreamed of college and a career as a teacher or maybe a doctor, but that’s all in jeopardy now because to take the fetus to term means a life as a mother. And don’t say that there’s always adoption since less than one percent of never-married women relinquish their newborns for adoption.

Convenience isn’t the issue when the girl’s entire life is in the balance. What an idiot.

Spectrum argument

Much of these anti-choice rebuttals were shadow boxing against nonexistent arguments, outraged that the fertility clinic hypothetical didn’t do a better job making arguments it never intended to make.

Let me summarize how this fits into an effective pro-choice argument. Personhood is a spectrum, and the newborn is a person while the single cell isn’t. During the development process, the fetus increasingly becomes a person.

The anti-choice response had been to say that the embryo is 100% a person. In response, you can point at the enormous gulf separating the single cell from the newborn, far more than what separates a newborn from an adult, but evidence and reason can’t move a person away from an argument that they didn’t use evidence and reason to reach. I know—I’ve tried.

But the conclusion of the fertility clinic hypothetical changes that. With it, they admit that the embryo isn’t a person.

The spectrum argument doesn’t conclude that abortion should always (or ever) be moral. You could still conclude that the single cell, though not a person, still must be protected, but you’ve got to make that argument. No longer can they fall back on, “Well, you wouldn’t kill a newborn, would you? The single cell is the moral equivalent.”

The increasing personhood of the fetus during gestation is the foundation of any argument for abortion, and this hypothetical clears the way.

Ever notice that in fantasy roleplaying games
the admittedly fictional gods answer prayers
much better than the so-called real gods?
— Bob Jase

Image credit: Wilhelm Joys Andersen, flickr, CC

 

Anti-Choicers’ Misfire on the Fertility Clinic Hypothetical: a Response

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Who knew that anti-choice advocates could go off the rails so inventively in response to a brief hypothetical argument posed in a series of tweets?

A few weeks ago, Patrick Tomlinson tweeted a scenario that I first wrote about over five years ago and that he says he’s been using for over ten years. In short, if a fertility clinic were on fire and you could save either a five-year-old child or a canister with a thousand human embryos, which would you save? Read the original in this Friendly Atheist post.

“An embryo is a child” is the foundational moral claim for many in the anti-choice* community, and the fertility clinic thought experiment nicely shows that, no it isn’t, even to them. Someone once observed, there’s nothing like a life-or-death predicament to help you get your priorities straight. You can pontificate at leisure about how things ought to be, but when you have seconds to decide between a child who would suffer unimaginable agony and a can of cells that not only won’t but can’t, you quickly realize what’s important.

Rebuttal

In what is the most impressive “Yes, but” tap dancing that I’ve seen in a long time, anti-choice advocates have a lot to say in response. I’ll look at three high-profile responses, by Matt Walsh (blogger), Ben Shapiro (editor of The Daily Wire, a conservative website), and Greg Koukl (Christian radio host).

Walsh and Shapiro admit up front that they would save the child, while Koukl won’t.

The next item on the agenda is the obligatory changing of the subject. Each author raises all manner of tangential topics, some interesting but some seemingly deliberate misdirections.

Before I give examples, let’s take a step back to remember the point of this exercise. Many anti-choicers tell us that an embryo is equivalent to a child. That is, they declare that the definition of “child” goes from, say, eight years old and goes all the way down to –9 months. It’s a child at eight years old, as a newborn, as a fetus, as a frozen embryo (which is a blastocyst with roughly 100 cells), and even as a single cell.

That’s the claim, but by saving the hypothetical child they’ve admitted that this claim is false. No, a child is much more valuable than a single cell. End of argument. There’s nothing more to say.

That’s where the “Yes, but” arguments come in. They want to change the subject. They want to have the last word. But the argument is over. It had the sole goal of undercutting their moral argument, and it succeeded. QED.

 

See also: Five Intuitive Pro-Choice Arguments

 

Change the subject

But for completeness and to illustrate the games they play, I want to list some of their arguments.

  • Walsh: “Yes, I would save the kid. No, that does not prove that the embryos have no value.” No one said it did.
  • Walsh: Leaving the embryos behind isn’t the same as killing them intentionally, and it doesn’t show that abortion is moral. The hypothetical argument doesn’t claim to prove that abortion is moral, just that “embryo = child” is false.
  • Shapiro: “Let’s say that it was your five-year-old in the room, and next door were 1,000 actual full-grown human adults. Your instinct would probably be to save your five-year-old. Mine would be. Does that make me right, or the 1,000 humans no longer human?” If “human” means “has Homo sapiens DNA,” then of course they’re human, but that’s off topic. You’ve already agreed that embryos aren’t children—that’s the point.
  • Shapiro: “We can agree with Tomlinson that one ought to save the five-year-old rather than the box of embryos and still not admit that embryonic life is meaningless.” Huh? Who said it was meaningless?
  • Koukl: “Moral dilemmas, by design, make us choose. But the choice doesn’t rebut the argument for the intrinsic value of embryonic human beings.” No, it rebuts the claim that embryos are children.
  • Koukl: “The fact that Sophie, in the film Sophie’s Choice, made the choice to save her son didn’t mean she thought her daughter wasn’t a valuable human being.” This is yet another change of subject. The subject is: embryos aren’t children.

Notice the word games in several of these. Keeping things simple doesn’t seem to be the goal, so we take “child” from the original challenge and add “human” and “human being” to the mix. Throw in Homo sapiens and “person,” and we’ve got a nice selection of terms that may or may not be synonyms. For some apologists, there’s nothing they like better than spending hours fileting the definition of a word to keep the debate away from an embarrassing area.

Concluded in part 2.

The mystery is how people can follow a religion
whose central theme from beginning to end is:
“Deity angry. Something gotta die.”
— commenter Lark 62

* Normally, I refer to the two camps as pro-life and pro-choice, but the obnoxious response by one author used “pro-abortion.” In fact, I am pro-abortion in the same way that I’m pro-amputation: no one enjoys a medical procedure, but sometimes they’re necessary. Nevertheless, that article encouraged me to use “anti-choice” as the reciprocal term for their side of the argument.

Image credit: Bailiwick Studios, flickr, CC

 

Movie Review: “Heaven Is for Real”

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At age four, Colton Burpo visits heaven during an emergency operation. This isn’t a near-death experience, since he never died on the operating table. Nevertheless, he freaks out his parents as he tells them what he saw in heaven. This 2014 movie came from a book that claims to be a retelling of true events.

The movie opens with father Todd Burpo. He installs garage doors, and we see him installing a door at a carpet warehouse, taking carpet in trade (though he has bills to pay), and giving the carpet to the church. He’s the wrestling coach, he puts flowers at a grave, he’s a volunteer fireman, and he’s a pastor. Quite a guy.

In addition to his bills, God burdens him with some medical difficulties of his own, and then he has the close call with his son.

A pastor whose own son personally visited heaven? Sounds heavenly, but it causes division in the church. Sure, they’re good Christians who believe in heaven, but as a place that you could visit? You mean, like actually believe in heaven? They don’t want people laughing at their church.

It’s like the story of Peter getting out of prison in Acts 12. An angel frees him, and he returns to a house where supporters had been praying for his release. The servant runs to tell the supporters, but they think she’s crazy. They won’t believe that Peter was freed though that was precisely what they’d just been praying for.

Do modern Christians actually believe what they’re supposed to believe?

(Spoiler, of sorts.) The story culminates with a packed church. The press is there, curious to hear more about this nutty story. There are the church elders, who have given Todd an ultimatum—get the church back on a sensible track or else. His wife and two kids are there, and this experience has been challenging for all of them. There’s even the psychology professor who Todd had visited to get more information about claims of heavenly visits. As an atheist, she stands in for the skeptics in the audience.

Todd’s job and reputation are on the line.

He begins by suggesting to the congregation that if they actually did believe in heaven, they’d all lead different lives. But what is heaven? It’s simply the best of life on earth—“on earth as it is in heaven,” as the Lord’s Prayer says.

This is the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” approach to heaven. Do you believe in sunsets, puppy dogs, and children? Well, there you go—that’s heaven. Bypassing the supernatural makes this easy to accept, but I don’t think everyone will be satisfied.

Pastor Todd brings the church community together, keeps his job, and soon discovers that his wife is pregnant again. After a few years, his money problems are taken care of, too. The book, written with the help of Sarah Palin’s ghost writer, was a bestseller in 2010, and the movie pushed it back to the top of the bestseller lists.

The journey of this story parallels that of the gospel story. We’re seeing a movie, which came from a book, which was the result of an editorial process on a draft written by an outside author, which came after years of oral history within a Christian household.

As a sweet Christian story, this movie works fine. It’s not my cup of tea, but then I’m not the intended audience. But, as usual, the claim of serious evidence to support the towering claim that the universe has a supernatural creator falls flat. The boy’s testable claims of things he could only have learned in heaven are that (1) he saw his parents in separate rooms in the hospital as he had his out-of-body experience, (2) he could identify his father’s grandfather by a photo, and (3) he knew that his mother had had a miscarriage. That’s it. Like the stories of modern-day appearances of Mary, limbs growing back, and dead being resurrected, I await serious evidence. (I’ve written about fallible memory here and tales growing over time here.)

The story is bookended by Akiane Kramarik (a real person, now 19) who paints about her impressions of heaven after God spoke to her when she was three. Colton confirms that, yes, her painting is a correct rendering of Jesus. Apparently we’re to connect the dots. God isn’t so hidden after all. He’s planting visions of heaven in the minds of children.

A tip for God: next time, give a camera crew a visit to heaven. The evidence would be more believable.

Not only is there financial motivation for the family to push this story, accurate or not, but the publisher and every other company in the distribution chain is so motivated. Where’s the vetting? Where’s the skepticism? These may be silly questions when there’s money to be made, but someone has to at least ask.

There has been some pushback. The boy behind another visitation book, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven (the ironically named Alex Malarkey), admitted that the story was invented, and the publisher, Tyndale House, has since stopped selling the book. Shortly afterwards, LifeWay, one of the largest Christian bookstores, announced that it would drop the entire genre of “heaven visitation resources.”

I wonder how hard it was to do the right thing.

At age 4, the inability to distinguish 
between fantasy and reality is charming. 
Among American adults, widespread identification 
with the mind of a preschooler is scary.

Only in America could a book like this 
be classified as non-fiction.
— Susan Jacoby, commenting on the book

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/16/14.)

Photo credit: Deadline

25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid (Part 14 and counting)

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stupid christian arguments

Hey—don’t blame me. I’d stop listing stupid arguments if Christians would stop making them.

The discussion of these arguments begins here (go to the appendix at that post for a list of all these arguments to date).

Stupid argument #44: Time’s up! Now answer all the fundamental questions of science.

To illustrate this stupid argument, here are comments by popular apologist J. Warner Wallace (audio interview @ 20:30). When an atheist, he says, he wondered if he was justified in believing “that everything in the universe could be accounted for with nothing more than just space, time, matter, and the laws of physics and chemistry—because that’s all I would have to work with if atheism was true.” I guess he was an inquisitive guy, because he had a lot on his mind:

Does that explain the universe the way we see it? Can it explain the beginning of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, can it explain the origin of life or the appearance of design in biology, can it explain consciousness or free agency or objective transcendent moral truths? Everyone has to explain evil, whether you’re a theist or a nontheist. These are the things that everyone has a burden to explain.

Let’s first clear away the smoke to see what is actually being argued here. The universe began with the Big Bang, though I imagine his question is what caused that. Fine tuning of constants in the universe is curious, though not much of an argument for God (discussed here and here). The origin of life (abiogenesis) is indeed a puzzle, though too much is made of the appearance of design, which is neatly explained by evolution. Science does have questions about consciousness, though there’s no evidence of objective morality (see here and here). And the Problem of Evil asks why a good god allows bad things to happen. Atheists don’t propose a god, so this is precisely a problem for Christians.

So what’s left? The cause of the Big Bang and abiogenesis are important research areas, with consciousness and perhaps free will as additional challenges. After dismissing the tangential issues, we’re left with the observation that science has questions to answer. That’s true. And obvious. Why then the long list of questions? Because it sounds stupid to come right out and say, “There will always be questions within science, but ‘God did it’ can explain them all; therefore, God.”

Wallace demands, “These are the things that everyone has a burden to explain,” but his sense of urgency is groundless. Yes, there are unanswered questions, but so what?

[Then I examined] the universe from the perspective of my philosophical naturalism to see if my atheism had any explanatory power.

Sure it does, just not in the field of science. While the Christian claim “God did it” has no evidence backing it and is unfalsifiable (and therefore useless as an explanation), the hypothesis “there is no god” does follow the evidence and neatly untangles the tough problems that tie Christians in knots (more here).

[I already accepted] several extra-natural explanations as an atheist, because if nature is just space, time, matter, and physics, well there’s lots of things that those things won’t account for, and so I’ve got to step out of my naturalism just to explain those things and so what am I doing here?

Time’s up—I need the answers now! No, I’m sorry, “Science is working on it” will not be accepted as an answer. You must completely explain all remaining scientific questions right now.

Or at least that’s how apologists like Wallace imagine things. For some reason, we shouldn’t look for further progress from the discipline that has given us our modern technology-intensive world. No, we should rely on the discipline that weaves contradictory stories about the supernatural, that has no use for evidence, and that has never taught us anything accurate about reality.

See also: Christianity’s Bogus Claims to Answer Life’s Big Questions

Stupid argument #45: Well, aren’t you arrogant! Who are you to judge God?

Here’s a comment from this blog that illustrates the popular Christian idea that we mortals are in no position to judge God’s actions.

I am completely clueless as to what you think could possibly give you the right to Judge God. Unlike you, God knows all things and He brought the universe into existence for a reason. You don’t have to like it that God created people knowing they would end up in hell, or suffer on earth, or be blessed for a while, or whatever it might be. But what right do they have to look into the infinite heavens, raise their fist, and bring a righteous charge against the infinite God of the universe?

The first problem, of course, is the Hypothetical God Fallacy (Stupid Argument #33). You don’t just assume the incredible Christian claims and proceed from there, but that is the assumption behind the claim, “Who are you to judge God?”

If we don’t assume God, which is the only reasonable option for an outsider to Christianity, then we’re not judging God but judging claims about God. No believer can ask anything more from us than that we evaluate their supernatural claims. What’s the alternative? To simply accept Christians’ claims about God? No, the buck stops here, and we’re the ones to judge.

The problem is that the Christian claims suck. The Christian is usually eager to judge God but only when the conclusion would be “God is good.” When a negative conclusion is possible, they tell us that no one can judge God.

And with the biblical God, a negative conclusion is inevitable. A god who is all-loving but commands genocide and sanctions slavery? A god who is eager for a relationship but won’t provide evidence of his existence? A god who is just and fair but demands belief in the unbelievable to get into paradise? Nope—that’s not a good God (more).

Christians seem to want to treat God like a celestial baby. With a human baby, people excuse its messes since it doesn’t know better, but then that’s how they treat God as well. When someone wants to judge God’s actions by adult standards—nothing difficult, just basic morality—these Christians step in and say that that’s not fair. God can’t do wrong, by definition. If he does something that would be wrong if you did it, we’re just supposed to call that “right” since it’s God who did it.

Like the baby who needs a diaper, God can’t even defend himself. What does it say that Christians treat God like a baby? And that they demand that we avoid judging his actions?

Continued in part 15.

Of the two great, evil, criminal gangs to emerge out of Italy,
why is the Mafia the one that gets most of the bad press?
— RichardSRussell

Image credit: Mark, flickr, CC

Guest Post: Why We Atheists Ridicule Theists

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This is a guest post by a long-time commenter at this blog, Richard S. Russell. Richard is a retired research analyst (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction) and long-time activist in the realms of atheism, science fiction, and liberal politics. He has more opinions than any ten people should legally be allowed to have but makes up for it by giving them away as fast as possible. He blogs irregularly at richardsrussell.blogspot.com.

Guest Post

For years, CNN.com published essays on what they called their Belief Blog — something to do with religion and occasionally atheism. And I’d often join other atheists in the comment section as we pointed out the many, many flaws, fallacies, and outright lies in the cases the religionists are trying to make. I in particular often favored humor in my observations, but I’m hardly alone in that regard. And this has led any number of religionists to whine that we have no respect for them or their faith, and that we’re just mean to poke fun at them.

I don’t deny that I derive a certain glee in doing so, but I submit that it’s a perfectly normal, utterly human reaction, in defense of which I offer up one of Jesus’s favorite tactics …

= = = = = =  T H E   P A R A B L E  = = = = = =

You’re sitting around your favorite table at the corner tavern with the usual gang, when your friend Norm comes in, all excited.

“Norm, where ya been, buddy?”

“Guys, you’re not gonna believe this, but I swear it’s true, every word of it. I was just leaving the house and heading for my car when I heard voices coming from my back yard. That was strange, so I went around back to see what it was. And you’ll never believe what I saw.”

“So don’t keep us in suspenders, what was it?”

“It was a leprechaun. And he was talking to the Easter Bunny. Not exactly talking, they seemed to be arguing, but they were using some language I couldn’t understand. Loud, though, that’s why I heard them all the way around the front of the house.”

Some sniggering, but Bob down at the end of the table rises to the bait. “Easter Bunny, huh? How do you know it was the Easter Bunny and not just a regular rabbit?”

Norm shoots the questioner a reproachful look. “Because he was 6 feet tall and wearing a polka-dot vest. And talking! OK? And while I was just standing there goggling, the leprechaun reaches behind his ear and pulls out a big gold coin and just throws it at the bunny, like he’s really mad or something.”

“Oh, do go on!”

“Well, I kind of slid into the shadows, hoping they wouldn’t see me, and just then the flying saucer shows up.”

“Flying saucer, eh? We’ll probably get lots of coverage of that on the news tonight, then?”

“No, probably not, because it was only about the size of my hand when it appeared. I didn’t even see it coming, it just settled down on the lawn out of the sky. And then it suddenly just grew, right before my eyes. Got about as big as my garage. And then …”

“Yeah, then a little green man came out, right?”

“Will you please shut up and let me tell it? I was there, and you weren’t! Yes, he was little and had those big almond-shaped eyes you always see in the movies, but he wasn’t green, more grayish. And only 3 fingers on each hand. And he didn’t say anything but he kept waving his arm at the other 2, trying to get them on board the saucer.”

“And did they go?”

“The leprechaun did. Right away. Just scooted in past the space alien. But the bunny didn’t look like he wanted to, and you could tell that the little green man, I mean gray man, was getting irritated, because he waved harder and stamped his foot. Finally the Easter Bunny hopped on up the ramp and got on. Had to duck a bit to get through the doorway.”

“Norm, if you think …”

“Will you wait a minute? Then the opening in the side of the ship just closed up, the saucer shrank back down to about hand size again and took off straight up, faster than I’ve ever seen anything move. It was out of sight in about 10 seconds. So that’s what happened and why I’m late.”

And everybody else just looks at each other and then busts out laughing. Norm is miffed. “I’m telling you, that’s exactly what happened!”

“Norm, my friend, we are just simple everyday working guys. Our drug of choice is beer. What on Earth have you been smoking?”

“Nothing! Nothing at all! Haven’t had a drop to drink, either. I’m stone-cold sober.”

“Been doing a little experimental cooking with mushrooms, then, have you?”

“No! I’m telling you that’s exactly what happened. God’s honest truth. Would I lie to you?”

A round of nods and a chorus of “Oh, yeah!”s, and Norm gets really pissed and stomps off.

= = = = = =  T H E   E N D  = = = = = =

OK, be honest, now. You would’ve made sport of Norm, too, wouldn’t you? What an incredible crock! He’s practically begging for scorn and ridicule.

And if, in the coming days and months, Norm stuck to his guns and continued to insist that his account was true, despite lack of any evidence whatsoever, you’d eventually fear that your buddy had suffered some kind of psychotic break and start urging him to seek professional help.

But at least Norm had the advantage of claiming first-hand, personal, eyewitness experience. And, no matter how far-fetched his tale, it didn’t contain any outright impossibilities. How much crazier do you have to be to solemnly subscribe to the even more incredible BS from the Bible, all of which (supposedly) happened 2,000 years ago and is attested to only by 4 pseudonymous authors, otherwise unknown to history, who didn’t even live thru the events they wrote about?

And you religionists wonder why we jeer, scoff, roll our eyes, and poke fun at you. Put yourselves in our position, and imagine the self-restraint we have to use to hold it down to only that. The only reason we take you at all seriously is because you wield political power and have historically shown that you’re perfectly willing to barbecue people like us for pointing out your idiocies, so you’re not merely pathetically funny, you’re irrationally dangerous.

People who don’t want you to laugh at their beliefs
shouldn’t believe such funny things.
— Anonymous

Response to Lee Strobel’s “Five E’s of Evidence”

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Case for Christ, 5 Es of Evidence

Lee Strobel has a story. No, it’s not the Greatest Story Ever Told (though he gets to that). The story is his conversion from unpleasant atheist to humble Christian servant, using his tough legal mind and journalistic experience to verify the facts of the Jesus story. (This story has been turned into a movie, The Case for Christ, which I critique here.)

He offers five reasons to accept the gospel story, each starting with the letter E. Let’s examine them and see if we can apply the eight lessons we developed from wading through Gary Habermas’s “minimal facts” argument for the resurrection.

E #1: Jesus was Executed. We can be sure that Jesus was dead. The Romans were very good at killing people. Don’t imagine that Jesus survived and then revived in the tomb. In addition, non-Christian historians like Tacitus and Josephus confirm the death. [I’ll show Strobel’s argument in italics.]

I’m always startled when Christians wallow in the agony Jesus went through. Strobel takes us on a gory journey through the details of the beating, how crucifixion worked, and so on. That apparently makes his sacrifice more impressive (though I’m unimpressed).

Strobel’s Executed claim violates our Lesson 1: it’s just a story. Yes, the story says that Jesus was executed, but so what? That’s not history. I’ll grant that someone dying is a fairly easy claim to accept. There’s nothing supernatural there, but we must emphasize the difference between a story and history. Is the gospel more than a story? That must be shown.

As for the historians, they give us little more than “there are people called Christians” (more on Josephus here).

E #2: There were Early accounts of the Jesus tale. Not only do we have four gospels, but 1 Corinthians 15 gives a creed stating that Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected on the third day. This creed has been dated by scholars to just a few years after the death of Jesus.

A creed is a statement of belief; it isn’t history. (I’ve written more about the 1 Corinthians passage here.)

As for the accounts being early, if you read the story of a three-days-dead man resurrecting from the tomb in yesterday’s newspaper, you wouldn’t believe it. Why believe it in a 2000-year-old document? Does making it harder to verify somehow make the claim more plausible?

The Early Accounts claim violates Lesson 8: just because the consensus of New Testament scholars says so doesn’t make it true. To those who demand that Christian scholars get a seat at the table, I wonder if they’d like to have Muslim scholars at the table. They have no supernatural bias, and they even accept much of the story of Jesus. Oddly, they universally reject the resurrection part. Are they biased by their religion? Perhaps, but if Muslim scholars are biased, what does that say about Christian scholars? Let’s not forget their bias.

Don’t imagine legend crept in to the gospel story. Historian A.N. Sherwin-White argues that “the passage of two generations of time was not enough for legend to wipe out a solid core of historical truth.”

I’ve written in detail about Sherwin-White’s work here. In short, Sherwin-White wasn’t making an immutable rule about the growth of legend. Note also that his claim is that the truth isn’t erased, not that there’s a reliable way of retrieving it.

E #3: The tomb was found Empty. “Nobody in the first century was claiming it was anything but empty.” The authorities said that disciples stole the body, but the disciples had no motive to, and that story simply confirms that the tomb was empty! The skeptics had to invent a story to explain away this embarrassing fact.

Apologists are drawn to weak skeptical arguments like sharks to chum. “Disciples stole the body” or “Jesus wasn’t dead and revived in the tomb” are fun to knock over, but this process is just misdirection. Apologists hope we won’t notice how weak the primary argument is.

Disciples are said to have stolen the body? Lesson 1: it’s just a story. Strobel says that skeptics invented the story, but of course that story comes from Matthew, not from skeptics.

75% of critical scholars accept the empty tomb as historical.

Lesson 8: the consensus of New Testament scholars doesn’t count for much, especially when this “75%” isn’t a valid poll.

Remember that the gospel accounts of the empty tomb come decades after the supposed event. Why would anyone expect there to still be naysayers (people who knew the truth who could rebut a false tale) to challenge the gospel story? Though the Naysayer Hypothesis is popular, it crumbles with a little investigation.

E #4: We have Eyewitness evidence. In 1 Cor. 15, Paul mentions individuals who saw the risen Jesus by name and makes clear that there were 500 more. And the icing on the cake is when Paul challenges the reader to look them up to verify the claim! “No way would he have said that if it wasn’t true.”

500 eyewitnesses? That’s no evidence. And you know who agrees with me? The author of each of the gospels! None of the gospels repeat this claim. Perhaps the authors hadn’t heard of this rumor or knew it to be false; either way, Paul’s claim looks pretty weak.

“You’ll back me up on this, right guys? Guys . . . ?” Sorry, Paul, but you’re alone on this one.

(I write more about the claim of 500 eyewitnesses here.)

“I’ve seen people sent to the death chamber on a fraction of this kind of evidence.”

And now Strobel really jumps the shark. He’s seen people convicted by a single sentence written by a stranger? I doubt it. The Sixth Amendment demands that the accused be able to cross-examine a witness. Not only is Paul long dead, but we know very little about him. Strobel compounds this problem because he probably takes the conservative line by insisting that the thirteen Pauline epistles were indeed all written by Paul, though most scholars only acknowledge seven. In other words, Strobel doesn’t even accept the scholarly consensus about this “witness.”

E #5: The Emergence of the early church. The Christian church emerged in the very city where Jesus had just been crucified. “Now, how do you sell [a false story] to people if they are there and they know better?”

No, the people weren’t there! The New Testament wasn’t written in Jerusalem just days after the events it claims to document; the many books of the New Testament were written in cities all around the Mediterranean decades later. Skeptics couldn’t read it and then step out their doors to do man-on-the-street interviews to verify the facts.

Weeks after the resurrection, Peter stood up publicly and proclaimed the gospel story. People didn’t say that it was nonsense. “History shows that on that day 3000 people” proclaimed the truth and joined the church.

No, it was a story. The “people” are just characters on a page that can be made to do whatever suited the author’s purpose. The claim of history must be shown.

The 8 lessons

Some of the other lessons are relevant to dismantling Strobel’s simple argument.

  • 2. The natural trumps the supernatural. The God hypothesis might be right, but we need big evidence.
  • 4. “Given the story to this point . . .” Strobel often wants to assume part of the story as history as he evaluates what comes next.
  • 7. Evaluate similar claims with a similar bar of evidence. If you’re unimpressed with a particular claim from another religion, don’t expect us to be any more convinced by an analogous claim from Christianity.

Strobel said that he had rejected Christianity because he refused to be held accountable for his worthless life and because he was too proud to bend his knee to Jesus. The bigger issue is that he had no good reason to accept it.

[Heaven is like] when you hear someone
talk about Hawaii like they’ve been there 
but they only read about it in a brochure. 
— Kodie (commenter)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/11/14.)