The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity

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problem of divine hiddenness Christianity atheismWhy is evidence for God so sparse? If God wants a relationship with us and knows that hell awaits those who don’t know him, why doesn’t he make his existence obvious? I’ve always found this Problem of Divine Hiddenness to be the most powerful argument against Christianity.
Does God’s revealing himself intrude on our free will?
The Wintery Knight blog cites Prof. Michael Murray, who argues that God’s hands are tied. He just can’t reveal too much:

God places a higher value on people having the free will to respond to him, and if he shows too much of himself he takes away their free choice to respond to him, because once he is too overt about his existence, people will just feel obligated to [believe] in him in order to avoid being punished.

But that’s not how belief works. There might be benefits to belief, but you believe if and only if you have convincing evidence. When you’re convinced, then you believe. This, by the way, is the failure of Pascal’s Wager (“I’ll believe in God, just in case, so that if he exists I’ll go to the good place when I die”).
Murray claims that God wants us to desire to know him and then reach out to connect rather than act out of fear of what will happen if we get on his bad side (which sounds like a tricky juggling act).

If it is too obvious to us that God exists and that he really will judge us, then people will respond to him and behave morally out of self-preservation.

On this topic, Christian apologist Greg Koukl is an unlikely ally in our fight for reason. He rejects this argument from free will by noting that in the Bible, God did appear to people, precisely what apologists like Murray say God refuses to do. God appeared as smoke and fire to the Israelites during the Exodus. Jesus did miracles, he healed people, he multiplied food, he controlled nature, and he raised the dead.
And consider the apostles—did witnessing the miracles of Jesus make their belief and love counterfeit? Did Paul’s Damascus road experience disqualify him from being a proper believer? (If not, then how about some of that evidence for us today?)
Because of Jesus, was the free will of everyone in Palestine violated, with many turned into mindless robots who said nothing but, “I … love … Jesus”? No, the Bible makes clear that belief in God doesn’t coerce one to follow God. John 6:66 says, “Many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” Or consider the authorities who acknowledged that Jesus raised Lazarus—they still plotted to kill him. All the angels believe in God, and yet a third of them rebelled.
The Bible itself makes clear that being convinced of God’s existence and being compelled to worship him are two very different things. And the problem of God’s hiddenness remains.
Introducing today’s contestants
That was a long introduction to the third and final question raised by skeptics and posed to Koukl on the Unbelievable podcast (audio here; go to 45:50). Previous questions were about prayer and the Atonement.
The free will argument above was just a tangent to the main question, raised by skeptic Matt. Here is his version of the Problem of Divine Hiddenness: nonresistant unbelief exists. This is unbelief by honest seekers who are eager to know God but reject God’s existence for lack of evidence. Assuming that God desires to have a relationship with us, merely knowing that the other person exists is the mandatory first step in a relationship. God’s existence should be obvious to these seekers and yet it isn’t. This is easily explained by concluding that God doesn’t exist.
Why should God bother?
Koukl pushed back by observing that, in his Bible examples, not everyone believed. People had miracles done in front of them, and yet they still didn’t believe—so much for the compelling power of evidence.
First, let’s clarify what “believed” means. I don’t think there are any Bible stories where someone in the audience said, “Hold on—I saw that trick in Vegas. He put it up his sleeve!” Everyone seemed to believe that miracles had been done, so Koukl must mean that not everyone became a Christian. Let’s then be careful to distinguish these two very different kinds of “believe”: “I accept that God exists” vs. “I worship God.”
Second, he’s probably right that not everyone would believe if God made his existence plain, but that’s a helluva lot more evidence than we have now. Maybe not everybody, but surely millions or even billions more would be convinced and believe if God made his existence clear. Matt’s argument about nonresistant unbelief would be gone.
Apologists are burdened with a Bible that is no more convincing than other ancient religious writing. If God made himself apparent so that Christianity were the only religion backed by a real god, you can be sure that Christians’ pious handwaving about faith would go out the window, and they would gleefully point to the only obvious deity—theirs—that proved that they had been right all along.
Let’s make clear what compelling evidence for God would look like. This wouldn’t simply be the clouds parting one day just as you wondered if God existed. It wouldn’t be unexpectedly coming across a photo of a beloved relative who had died. I’m talking about something really compelling—something like everyone in the world having the same dream the same night in which God simply and clearly summarizes his plan. Could that be dismissed as alien technology or mind-control drugs rather than God? Perhaps, but this evidence would be vastly more compelling than the feeble arguments apologists are saddled with today.
Finally, Koukl is complaining that this wouldn’t be a perfect plan, but what does he propose that’s better? The skeptic’s demand for evidence is quite reasonable.
Continue to part 2, where we see what Koukl thinks is a reasonable request for evidence.

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Criticizing the Logic of the Atonement (2 of 2)

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The Christian atonement is the reconciliation of humans to God through the death of Jesus. Let’s conclude our analysis of a discussion between Christian apologist Greg Koukl and skeptic Frances (part 1 here).
Some get heaven … and some don’t
Frances gave as an example twin children who each did the same bad thing. It would be unfair to punish one but not the other. Even if the punishment were appropriate, that doesn’t excuse the dissimilar treatment.
Koukl responded that grace is offered to everyone, “and some turn it down.”
Nope—it’s not an option for me. God’s “grace” has a belief component, and one can’t just believe in something. Belief happens when one has sufficient evidence. I don’t have sufficient evidence of the Christian god, so I can’t believe. (Try believing in leprechauns or fairies if you think that determination will compensate for a lack of evidence.)
Do we all start the race from the same starting line?
Frances asked about people who have never heard the Christian message. Is it fair to send them to hell?
Koukl said that if they haven’t heard the gospel message, they are still guilty before God, and God is justified in punishing them. Paul says that evidence for God is obvious: “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). Koukl concludes, “If they reject the Father, how is the Father any further obligated to tell them more about himself—for example, the Son—when they’ve already rejected the most general of revelations?”
The Bible can be a dangerous book, and he who lives by Bible quotes sometimes dies by Bible quotes. Just four chapters later in the same book, Paul also says, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). That is, there is symmetry between Adam getting all of us into our fallen state and Jesus getting us out (again, all of us). In neither situation do we opt in; we’re included whether we like it or not. That means no faith requirement for getting the saving grace of Jesus, which defeats Koukl’s statement that grace is offered to everyone, but “some turn it down.” Nope, we’re saved whether we like it or not.
But back to this point: Koukl takes one verse from Romans and concludes that no one has an excuse, and God’s demands are therefore correct. As he made clear in part 1, Koukl wants to evaluate Christian claims from a Christian worldview—and, unsurprisingly, things make some sense given that viewpoint. But without the unearned presupposition that the Bible is correct, the Christian claim that non-Christians have plenty of evidence for God doesn’t work.
Attack on the atheist position on justice
Koukl got the last word, and with it he waxed unlearnèd. For good measure, he attacked the atheist position on justice and morality: “I don’t see outside of God how there can be any sense of justice at all.”
Then you’ve omitted your most powerful argument, Greg. Show us how the existence of justice here on earth demands God. I see just the opposite. Justice here—at least our imperfect attempt at it—shows that God isn’t necessary at all. The dictionary says nothing about a need for God in its definition of “justice.”
Next, Koukl wonders how atheism can ground the idea of objective morality, which is the only kind of morality we’ve been talking about.
Nope. If Koukl wants objective morality (“moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not,” according to William Lane Craig), he’ll have to show that it exists and that it’s reliably accessible by humans. I’ve seen this tired trick a dozen times—referring to objective morality with appeals to common sense (or nothing, in this case) without doing the hard work of showing that it actually exists. Try again.
And finally, Koukl pontificates that you don’t get morality from mere molecules in motion.
Look up “emergent properties,” Greg. A single molecule of water doesn’t have the properties of fluidity or wetness or pH. Those properties emerge once you have trillions of molecules. Similarly, a single brain cell doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast as a whole human brain with 1011 cells; it doesn’t think at all! Only when you have a critical mass of these things do the emergent properties emerge.
Am I just missing Koukl’s deeper analysis of these topics? Or is he so insulated from or unconcerned about the wider discussion that he has no interest in responding to outside critiques?
Final thoughts
Koukl is like a visitor from Planet Christianity who is telling us how things work there. That’s nice, but we’re here. There is a default idea of justice, and it’s embodied in our justice system. It doesn’t much matter how things work on Greg’s planet, but here, penalties must be fair and you must serve your own punishment. Incredibly, Koukl surely knows and supports this idea of justice. In his own mind, he must know that the Christian claims of substitutionary atonement contradict Western justice. The word “justice” by itself means the Western kind, not the Christian kind.
It’s hard to imagine how Koukl thinks that the outline of his worldview does anything to justify his incompatible version of justice, and I wonder why he even bothers with the justification. It would be simpler to say, “The Christian worldview is correct” and leave it there. That argument would stand on no poorer a foundation.
More on Greg Koukl’s answers to skeptics’ questions:

See also:

Some say that ignorance is bliss,
but it’s only bliss for the ignorant.
— Ricky Gervais

Image credit: U.S. Army, flickr, CC

Contradictions to the Trinity in the Bible

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Broken eggLet’s remember the key traits of the Trinity. According to the Athanasian Creed,

The Father unlimited; the Son unlimited; and the Holy Ghost unlimited.…
So likewise the Father is Almighty; the Son Almighty; and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not three Almighties; but one Almighty. So the Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. …
And in this Trinity none is before, or after another; none is greater, or less than another.…

About Jesus, it says:

Perfect God; and perfect Man …
Who although he is God and Man; yet he is not two, but one Christ.

Okay, okay, I get it. Three persons, all equal. None greater than another. Jesus is unlimited, almighty, and perfect.
But look to the Bible for confirmation and you’ll find that unlike the clear definition of monotheism in the Koran, the doctrine of the Trinity is not clear. It took almost four centuries to congeal.
Consider some Bible verses that challenge the Trinitarian concept as defined in the creed above. First, verses that portray Jesus as an ordinary person who didn’t know everything, who wasn’t completely on board with the program, who got impatient, and who spoke to God as you or I would.

When Jesus heard this, he was amazed (Matt. 8:10)
[Jesus] turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” (Mark 5:30)
[Jesus prayed,] “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matt. 26:39)
Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)
Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. (Luke 5:16)
You are looking for a way to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. (John 8:40)
[Jesus said,] “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” (John 20:17)
Faithless and perverse generation! How much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you? (Matthew 17:17)

Verses that state that only God has certain traits or abilities.

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. (Matt. 24:36)
[Jesus said,] “The most important [commandment is:] The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Mark 12:29)
God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:15–16)

Verses that portray Jesus as inferior to God.

“Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good.” (Matt. 19:17)
[Jesus said,] “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28)
The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. (1 Cor. 11:3)
The Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28)
You have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. (Col. 3:1, see also 1 Peter 3:22)
There is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5)

Ever-nimble Christian apologists have had two thousand years to handwave responses to these. Perhaps they’ll argue that we’re seeing the limited human side of Jesus here, not the God side. Or that other verses can be brought in to bolster the Christian position. Nevertheless, there is no evidence for the Trinity coming from the Bible. It was invented by theologians centuries later.
The simplest explanation is that the Bible is a collection of books from authors (many unknown) who had similar but not identical religious beliefs, which has been modified in unknown ways over the centuries, and which has no more accuracy in its depiction of the supernatural than the Iliad.
See also: 

It ain’t supposed to make sense; it’s faith. 
Faith is something that you believe 
that nobody in his right mind would believe.
— Archie Bunker

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/14/13.)
Photo credit: Samuel Livingston, flickr, CC
 

Movie Review: Ray Comfort’s “The Atheist Delusion”

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Well, that’s 62 minutes I’ll never get back.
I watched Ray Comfort’s new movie, The Atheist Delusion: Why Millions Deny the Obvious, which releases today. The style is trademark Ray Comfort as he interviews a dozen or so atheists, mostly 20-somethings. We follow them as Ray works through his arguments, and at the end they’re all left with either a lot to think about or a commitment to follow Jesus. Throw in some nice graphics, take a few tangents, overlay some stirring music, and he’s done. Any subject who saw through Ray’s thin arguments and made him look foolish was cut from the movie to give the impression that this approach is devastating to the brittle worldview of any atheist.
The production quality was good, but one consequence of the high-quality audio was worrisome. You almost never see Ray himself, just the subject of the moment. Often Ray would speak a seamless paragraph while we see the video cut between two or three subjects listening patiently. I see how that makes things visually more interesting, but it brings to mind old charges that in previous movies Ray had mixed and matched video segments to line up pleasing answers in response to questions, distorting what the subjects had actually said. When a subject says, “Yes,” what are they answering? Maybe it’s “Have you changed your mind?” or maybe it’s “Are you still an atheist?” (The Friendly Atheist pressed him on this question here in an interview about the movie.)
“Atheism destroyed with one scientific question …”
That got your attention, right? It’s the tag line for the movie’s trailer. Ray may be a science-denying apologist who refuses to be corrected on his childish understanding of evolution, but surely he’s not going to make a claim like that without something pretty compelling.
Or not. He gives people a book and asks, “Do you believe that book could’ve come about by accident?” That’s the scientific question. He then talks about how marvelous human DNA is and concludes that if the book had a maker, then DNA must have, too. It’s the Argument from Incredulity: “Golly, I can’t imagine a natural explanation for this, so it must be supernatural!”
Let’s revisit the “by accident” part. DNA didn’t come about by accident, it came about through mutation (random) and natural selection (not random). How many times has this guy been corrected on this? I’m convinced that this is just willful ignorance on his part. Telling the accurate story doesn’t suit his agenda, so he lies.
In fact, the sloppiness in DNA nicely defeats Ray’s Design Argument (more here).
“Could DNA make itself?”
Here’s another of Ray’s probing strawman questions. He lives in a simple world: DNA either made itself or God did it. But DNA didn’t make itself; chemistry did. DNA was simply the result of unguided processes. Again, I have to wonder if this wording was clumsy or calculated.
He talked about how nicely fit we are to our environment, which brought to mind Douglas Adams’ puddle that marveled at how well its hole had been fit to itself.
“You’re an atheist, so you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything.”
Wow. Where do you begin with this black hole of bullshit?

  • An atheist has no god belief. That’s it. Atheists can have any views on cosmology they want.
  • Cosmologists don’t say this.
  • “Scientific impossibility”? Show me. Pop philosophy is not an asset at the frontier of science.
  • What’s the problem with something coming from nothing? Isn’t that how you say God did it?
  • You’re still stuck on “created.” You imagine a cause, but there might not have been one. The Copenhagen model of physics argues that some events don’t have causes.

In an odd attack, he claims that Richard Dawkins says that nothing created everything. Analyzing the hamster wheel that drives Ray’s brain is tricky business, but here’s my theory. Richard Dawkins says it and he’s the pope of the atheists, so therefore all atheists must believe that nothing created everything. Conclusion: “You’re an atheist, so you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything.”
I could begin by saying that I’m not bound by what Dawkins says, but Dawkins didn’t even say this. Ray’s evidence for his charge is a video of Dawkins speaking about physicist Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe From Nothing. Dawkins says, “Of course it’s counterintuitive that you can get something from nothing” … but how did we get from Comfort’s charge of “nothing created everything” to Dawkins’ defense of something possibly coming from nothing? Only in the hamster wheel are these equivalent.
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
In interviews years ago, I heard Ray explain his idiotic understanding of evolution. Say you have two lizards, and because of mutations, they give birth to a healthy monkey (cuz that’s what evolution says happens, right?). The monkey matures and looks for a mate, but since monkeys from lizards is quite rare, it can’t find a monkey of the opposite gender, so it dies without making more monkeys. Cue sad trombone sound.
In the movie, Ray goes down a similar line of “reasoning” to ask whether the chicken or the egg came first. He wonders where the rooster came from to fertilize the egg to continue the line. Then he asks whether it was the heart or the blood that evolved first. If the heart, what was it doing without blood? If the blood, how did it move with no heart? Ray’s questions are useful because they sometimes get a “Gee—I’ve never thought of that” from a layperson, not because they’re effective against a biologist, which would actually count for something.


See also: Fat Chance: Why Pigs Will Fly Before Ray Comfort Writes an Honest Critique of Atheists

The last third of the movie moves from “intellectual” arguments to the usual evangelism. You’re avoiding your conscience, you have selfish motives for denying what you know to be true, morals come from God, you just want to keep sinning, imagine if you died today, and more.
Several reviewers said they needed tissues. I needed a barf bag.
Then there’s Ray’s old standby, the Ten Commandments Challenge®, in which he convicts people based on their failure to satisfy the Ten Commandments. Ray, did you forget that they don’t think the Bible is binding since they’re atheists?
(How the Ten Commandments don’t say what Ray thinks they do here.)
Ray’s project was, “Atheism destroyed with one scientific question,” but that was just clickbait. I don’t remember a single correct scientific statement from Ray in the entire movie. The entire thing collapses into a pretentious pile of elementary and emotional arguments, which, unfortunately, may be effective on people who haven’t thought much about these issues.

As for the contents of his skull,
they could have changed place with the contents of a pie
and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Image credit: Living Waters

25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid (Part 12)

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The trough of stupid arguments sloppeth over once again, so let’s put on our hazmat suits and dive in. You can begin the list here. We’re now well past 25 arguments and still going.
christianity atheism arguments
Stupid Argument #39: Were you there?
This may be Creationist Ken Ham’s favorite line to infect students’ minds. In Job, God says, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” Ken Ham paraphrases this into a challenge to the scientist that summarizes what science knows—about evolution, about the Big Bang, or about anything that happened in the past. Ham’s challenge is, “Where you there?” The implied evidence-free conclusion is, “Because if you weren’t, God was!”
Ham proudly wrote about nine-year-old Emma B. who took Ham’s advice and attacked a museum curator’s statement about the age of a moon rock with “Were you there?”
Biologist PZ Myers nicely deflated Ham’s anti-science bias with a gentle reply to Emma B. Myers noted that Ham’s “Were you there?” is designed simply to shut down discussion and is a question to which you already know the answer. He recommended instead, “How do you know that?” which is a question from which you can actually learn something.
“Were you there?” is a variation of the more general question, “Did you experience this with your own senses?” To Science, this question lost significance centuries ago. The days when Isaac Newton used taste as a method to understand new chemicals are long gone. Modern science relies on instruments to reliably provide information about nature—from simple instruments like compasses, voltmeters, Geiger counters, and pH meters to complex ones like the Mars rovers, Hubble space telescope, LIGO gravity wave observatory, and Large Hadron Collider.
Not only is Ham’s question irrelevant, not only does it attempt to shut down discourse rather than expand it, it can be confronted directly. If Ham wants to play games, he needs to expect the same:
Ken Ham: “You say there was no six-day creation? Well, Smart Guy, were you there?”
Atheist: “Why yes, as a matter of fact I was there.”
Ham: “No you weren’t!”
Atheist: “Oh? How do you know? Were you there?”
To rebut this ridiculous claim, Ham would have to use (shudder!) common sense, a tool that he doesn’t want introduced into the conversation because it is devastating to someone who wants to imagine a 6000-year-old earth, men rising from the dead, and a god who desperately wants a relationship with us but is apparently too shy to make plain his existence.
And if direct observation is so important to Ham, I wonder how he validates the Creation story—was he there?
(This ties in with Stupid Argument #6: Creationism.)
Stupid Argument #40: Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones.
This argument is an attempt to wriggle away from Bible verses that are unpleasant or that contradict each other. “Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones” is advice from Josh McDowell’s New Evidence that Demands a Verdict (page 48). McDowell makes clear that difficult isn’t the issue at all—it’s contradictions that are the problem. They’re not difficult to understand, only to reconcile. For example, the epistle of James says that salvation is by works but Romans says that it’s by grace. The trick, McDowell tells us, is to find the interpretation that you like in the constellation of competing verses, bring that one forward, and either ignore the others or reinterpret them to be somehow subordinate or supportive of your preferred interpretation. That’s not quite how he puts it, but that’s what he means.
The quest for the “clearer” passage has become a quest for the most pleasing one.
The mere existence of what McDowell euphemistically calls “difficult” passages is an unacknowledged problem. How could verses conflict in a book inspired by a perfect god? If conflicting verses exist, doesn’t that make the Bible look like nothing more than a manmade book? How could God give humanity a book that was at all unclear or ambiguous? What does it say that 45,000 Christian denominations have sprung up over varying interpretations of a single holy book?
And no, “I’ll just have to ask that of God when I see him in heaven” won’t do because the Bible has no purpose except to be clear and convincing to people here on earth. (This argument is discussed in more detail here.)


See also: Five Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass

 
Stupid Argument #41: Appealing to polls to resolve scientific issues.
Polls of the population can be interesting and informative—percent of prison population that are atheists vs. Christian, fraction of Republicans vs. Democrats who are Christian, gender mix of Christians or atheists, the biggest issues troubling voters, the most/least religious parts of the country or world, how many Americans think the end times have arrived (41 percent, by the way), and so on.
The problem arises when polls are used to drive government policy. Public opinion should make no contribution to the scientific facts used to guide policy. Of course, elected officials must answer to their constituents, but the opinions of non-scientist constituents still count for nothing on any question of science. Politicians make policy, and scientists give us science’s best approximation to the truths of nature. “We should do nothing because acknowledging climate change is scary” is a policy option, but “Climate change is a hoax that can be ignored” isn’t.
Creationism in public schools is another area where science steps on toes. Americans are embarrassingly clueless (or willfully so) about evolution. 42 percent accept strict Creationism (God created humanity in the last 10,000 years), and an additional 31 percent accept guided evolution (evolution was tweaked by God). (Acceptance of evolution rises with education, which highlights the nonscientific agenda behind Creationism, but that’s an aside.)
Answers in Genesis said about this wide public acceptance of Creationism, “Although the vast majority of Americans desire both creation and evolution taught in school, the evolutionary naturalism worldview dominates, revealing a major disparity between the population and the ruling élite.” No, the disparity is between a population that to a large extent accepts the agenda of conservative and religious leaders on one hand and science on the other. Nonscientists don’t get to invent science.
The Discovery Institute tried to give a veneer of scholarship to the debate with its “Teach the controversy” campaign. If we’re talking about science, why can’t we present claims of both sides and let the students decide?
I wonder if they’ve thought this through. How would such a science class be graded? Would pastors be brought in to grade the tests of students who don’t like evolution? Would an answer, “I feel that the answer is …” automatically be correct? And how many “controversies” do we teach—does only the biblical idea of Creation get to come in, or are we throwing the door open to humanity’s hundreds of origin myths?
Texas governor Rick Perry put it this way, “In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools, because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”
Oh? And which one is right? How do you know? If you already know, why don’t we just teach that one instead of wasting class time teaching both?
“Teaching the controversy” isn’t what we do in science. We teach science in science class, not discarded theories like astrology, alchemy, or Creationism. And, of course, within science, there is no controversy! This is a manufactured issue, and polls of citizens do not make science.
Continued with part 13. Find the complete list in one place here. 

“Who is the right god?” is like asking,
“What is the last decimal digit of pi?”
There are ten possible answers and none of them are right.
— commenter Greg G.

Photo credit: Garry Knight, flickr, CC

What Does “God” Mean? The Answer Undercuts the Concept of the Trinity.

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Why can’t Christianity think of a better name for its god than “God”? A god named “God” is like a cat named “Cat.”The fourth name of God
While we’re talking about names, if Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the persons, what do you call the union of these into one god? Shell, white, and yolk form an egg. Ice, water, and steam are three states of H2O. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit form whom?
You need a fourth name. Do you call it “God”? That won’t do because the Bible tells us that “God” is the one who created everything, and that’s supposed to be the Father. The Father can’t be both the first person of the Trinity and the overall god at the same time.
Calling this union the Trinity would emphasize the separateness of the three and risk the heresy of Partialism. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are supposed to form a single, unified who. Another problem with “the Trinity” is that’s an odd name for a monotheistic god. It’s a label, not a name. Call the three persons “a council of three” if you want, but that doesn’t make clear the unity like a proper name would.
That the Old Testament uses one name for God (okay, it uses several names—Yahweh/Jehovah, Elohim—but that’s a different issue) makes clear that God the Father was no Trinity. Without this distinction, it’s clear that there is no Trinity in the Old Testament.
Let’s see this another way. Consider this passage from Isaiah 45:5–6:

I will gird you, though you have not known Me; that men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that there is no one besides Me. I am Jehovah, and there is no other.

There are two interpretations of this passage, neither of which supports the Christian interpretation.

  • If Jehovah is a synonym for “the Father,” this means that he reigns alone (since “there is no other”), and we must discard the Trinity.
  • If Jehovah is a synonym for “the Trinity,” then it makes nonsense of the singular pronouns (Me and I) in these verses and confuses passages such as “Then Jehovah spoke to Moses” (Ex. 40:1) or “After Jehovah had spoken these things to Job” (Job 42:7).

The problem, of course, is demanding a Christian interpretation of a Jewish text. There’s nothing confusing here from a Jewish viewpoint, and that was the intended audience. There is no Trinity, and the only god that exists is Jehovah.
Well, at least the only god at this time in the evolution of Judaism. It’s a little more complicated because Old Testament Jews didn’t begin as monotheists. The Old Testament documents their evolution from a kind of polytheism (that’s an aside that I explore more here).
Admittedly, one handy feature of the Trinity is that it gives Christians a way to reinterpret some embarrassing passages from the Old Testament.

Let us make mankind in our image (Gen. 1:26).
The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil (Gen. 3:22).
Let us go down [to Babel] and confuse their language so they will not understand each other (Gen. 11:7).

These are no problem if “us” refers to, not a council of gods as a careful reading of the Old Testament reveals, but the three persons of the Trinity. But if understanding God as a trinity were important, he would’ve made this clear from the beginning. Judaism’s evolution from polytheism explains this nicely. The conflation of “God” to mean both “the Father” and “the Trinity” reveals the Trinity as a clumsy later addition.
See also “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” as Reasonable as the Trinity

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used 
against unintelligible propositions.
— Thomas Jefferson

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/12/13.)