Response To an Angry Christian

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Several years ago, Mark Shea, a Patheos blogger who writes the “Catholic and Enjoying It!” blog, wrote an article titled “Padding the Case for the New Atheism.” His contempt for what he sees as the atheist position is barely contained at times. Let’s find out what aggravates Mark so much.
He begins by saying that the New Atheists don’t actually say anything new. Indeed 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas only had two objections, and Mark assures us that “every reasonable atheistic argument is a restatement of one or both of these basic points.”
With that buildup, who’s not eager to find this succinct distillation of atheist thought?
Christian apologetics argumentsAtheisms two arguments
1. The Problem of Evil. If God existed, there would be no evil; but there is; therefore, God doesn’t exist. (This isn’t the way that I’d phrase it—I’d say that the existence of evil is strong evidence that an omnipotent and good god doesn’t exist.)
2. Nature Suffices. Natural explanations are sufficient. “God did it” is unnecessary and the God hypothesis is redundant; therefore, we have no need to imagine God.
Mark thinks this is all atheists have to offer. He lampoons atheists pointing out harm done in the name of religion and argues instead “that 20th-century atheists shed oceans of blood dwarfing anything ever achieved by theists.”
Men with moustaches might have committed more barbarity in the 20th century than men without. Does that tell us something about moustaches? Hitler was a vegetarian—do his crimes then tell us something about vegetarians? Indeed, men have shed far more blood on all sides of 20th-century conflicts than women. But they didn’t do it in the name of men, Hitler didn’t order the Holocaust in the name of vegetarianism, and Stalin didn’t commit his crimes in the name of moustaches.
Similarly, savage 20th-century atheists (I presume he means Stalin and Mao) didn’t do their thing in the name of atheism. Rather, they were dictators who saw the church as a competitor and suppressed it. The church and innocent people were both on the wrong side of these dictatorships. More here.
Atheists and morality
He next imagines that atheists get tripped up with morality.

Trying to derive a moral universe — any moral universe at all — of Should from a purely materialistic universe of Is turns out to be impossible.

In Mark’s mind, perhaps. Not in mine.
This is David Hume’s is-ought problem. For example, “It is the case that X, therefore, you ought to do Y.” What could replace X and Y to make a sensible sentence?
That’s a provocative question until you ask yourself: if morals don’t come from what is—that is, reality—where do they come from? Imagining a supernatural source for morals demands evidence.
Hume says that you can’t derive an absolute or objective ought from an is, and I agree. This causes no problem because I don’t see any evidence for absolute oughts. It is the case that my moral programming tells me to help people; therefore, I ought to help people. Problem solved.
Mark isn’t done and says that the naturalistic view of atheists demands that the biochemical thought process going on inside Adolph Hitler’s head has no greater or lesser oughtness than that in Martin Luther King’s head.
I agree—from an absolute or objective standpoint. But not from mine. And not from that of most people in society. Most of us are happy to weigh various moral stands against our own views and judge them satisfactory or wanting.
My moral instincts are very similar to Mark’s and very similar to those of most other people, which is hardly surprising because we’re all the same species. That’s why we can create a society.
Today’s bull-in-a-china-shop atheists, Mark tells us,

retain a serene confidence that the privileged bits of the moral and rational order looted from the Christian civilization they are laboring to destroy will just go coasting on of their own accord.

Isn’t it quaint how Mark imagines that morality and rationality are gifts from his religion? I wonder how he explains non-Christian civilizations that stumble along pretty well. Or how the first civilizations in what is now India, Egypt, and Iraq did fine despite their preceding Christianity by 3000 years. When you consider the morality of Christian civilization, I’m not sure that gives you much to crow about.
And he imagines that Christianity gave us morality and rationality?
Nature suffices
It’s on to argument two, which says that natural arguments are sufficient and “God did it” is redundant and unnecessary.

Put briefly, you propose a huge metaphysical hypothesis that Absolutely Everything popped into existence 13 billion years ago with the help of Nobody, but loaves and fishes cannot pop into existence 2,000 years ago with the help of Jesus of Nazareth, despite the eyewitnesses who inexplicably chose to die in torments proclaiming He did.

Wow—so many mistakes and so little time. First, cosmology doesn’t claim to know what caused the Big Bang. Science says, “I don’t know” without shame. There is no “Time’s up!” after which Yahweh will be declared the default Creator of the Big Bang.
Second, most atheists don’t declare that the miracles of Jesus absolutely didn’t happen, just that that’s where the evidence points. (Given that the myriad miracle claims throughout history have produced no scientifically acceptable evidence of the supernatural and that we have many examples of legends or myths, it’s a pretty good bet that the loaves-’n-fishes story is yet another.)
Third, we have no reason to think that the gospels were eyewitness accounts. We don’t even know who wrote them.
Finally, the “Who would die for a lie?” argument is weak (more here).
He next mentions the fine-tuning argument. I’ve responded to that argument here, here, and here.
The Muse of Sarcasm seems irresistible to Mark (I hear there’s a 12-step program for that), and he lampoons his version of the positions of various atheists. In one rant, he touches on Richard Dawkins’ statement,

any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself.

Mark is unimpressed and tells us that Thomas Aquinas

addressed your brand new unrebuttable objection nearly 900 years ago in his Summa Theologiae (Part I, Question 3, Article 7).

Yes, Aquinas addressed it. No, he didn’t do a particularly convincing job. I’ve written more here, but my short response is: if God is simple, prove it by making one. You don’t have the materials, you say? Okay, then give us the recipe. You can’t even do this? Okay, then don’t claim that you know what makes God well enough to tell us that he’s simple.
Mark wraps up this section with some snarky advice for atheists.

Most of all, overlook the fact that the question you are supposed to be attending to is “whether God exists,” not “whether God is complex.” Ignore the fact that all a theist has to do is show that creation is contingent and therefore necessarily depends on what is not contingent for existence. Do not remind yourself that the theist is not obliged to say he or she understands that non-contingent Being, merely that such a being exists. If all this fails and your reader still thinks St. Thomas is getting the better of you, call your reader a creationist in the same tone of voice you’d use to say, “You left your used Kleenex on my coffee table.”

Why imagine that the universe is contingent? A popular view within quantum physics is the Copenhagen interpretation, which states that some quantum events have no cause. For example, the alpha particle that comes out of a decaying nucleus has no cause. The probability of this event can be precisely predicted, but that’s it. Given that the universe itself was a quantum particle at the beginning of the Big Bang, maybe universes are also stochastic rather than caused.
(Snarkiness can work, but it backfires when your argument is flimsy.)
There’s more, but let’s pause here before our next dose of Mark’s bitter medicine. Feel free to read Mark’s original paper if you question whether I’m treating his argument fairly.
This critique is concluded in part 2.

Forget Jesus. 
The stars died so that you could be here today.
— Lawrence Krauss

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/18/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Bible: a Pro-Slavery Free-For-All!

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Our little friend William Lane Craig is up to his old shenanigans. God apparently can’t defend himself against charges that he condones slavery, so Christian apologist Craig steps into the breach to do it for him.

We need to help [skeptics] come to grips with the fact that they have not studied the Hebrew text carefully and in many cases simply have a misunderstanding of the text. So-called “slavery” in the Old Testament is a prime example.

Why, I do believe I’m being condescended to! But Craig isn’t alone in his view. This idea that biblical slavery was very different from American slavery—indeed, that it was a good thing—is a common spin within many Christian blogs.

The slavery referred to in the Bible was a fundamentally different practice [than that practiced in the West]. Some translations try to indicate this by using the word “bondservant.” … Biblical “slavery” was not race-based (Stand to Reason blog).
The New Testament Servitude of the Ancient Near East had little in common with the New World Slavery of our American ancestors (Cold-Case Christianity blog).

Apologists’ spin approach #1: biblical slavery wasn’t so bad
Let’s compare these two approaches to slavery. They’re a lot more similar than the apologists will admit.
During U.S. history, we had two kinds of servitude. There was indentured servitude, where Europeans would come to America to work for fellow Europeans in return for payment of their transportation. This servitude would typically last for five years or so.
And, of course, we had slavery. Slaves were almost always not Europeans. They were slaves for life, as were their children.
The Old Testament outlines the very same categories of servitude. Fellows Jews could be slaves, but only for a limited time:

[God said:] If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free (Exodus 21:2).

That’s pretty much indentured servitude, and that’s the “biblical slavery” that many Christians like to point to. They often ignore the other kind:

[God said:] Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. … You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life (Leviticus 25:44–6).

Slavery in the Old Testament was regulated, just like commerce. And, like commerce, slavery was kosher from God’s standpoint.
Granted, slavery was common in this part of the world. During New Testament times, as many as a third of the population of Italy were slaves. We can see the Bible as just a product of its times, but wouldn’t a book inspired by the omniscient and holy creator of the universe be better than that? And why were the Greek Stoics the first to condemn slavery rather than God’s chosen people?
Apologists’ spin approach #2: biblical slavery was a good thing!
Now, back to Craig. Determined to force-fit slavery into a godly world, he says:

I think that [the point of the book Is God a Moral Monster? is] that our understanding of [slavery] is shaped by the experience of the American South prior to the Civil War and that what is described in the Old Testament is actually a sort of anti-poverty program designed to help the poor in the absence of a strong national government.

That’s an interesting spin. But is this so called “anti-poverty program” a moral institution? It must be, since God defines the rules for slavery and so obviously approves of it. But Craig has dug himself into a hole—either indentured servitude is moral for society today, or morality changes over time and we discard the idea of objective morality. Neither can be a pleasing option for Craig.
The problem is worse with slavery for life. Surely we can agree that this biblical institution is wrong today. Either it was wrong in Old Testament times, and God made a mistake in giving rules for it, or it was right then and morality changes with time. Here again Craig finds himself in a difficult spot.
How can Christians satisfy themselves that the Ten Commandments have “Don’t covet” but not “Don’t enslave anyone”? The Bible is obviously the work of Man, not that of God. The Bible is simply a reflection of their society.
Christians who justify slavery in the Bible are determined to shoehorn an ancient religion into modern society, but the result is as out of place as a Neanderthal in a tuxedo. My advice: they should stop embarrassing themselves.
More: Yes, Biblical Slavery Was the Same as American Slavery

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

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/30/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Guest Post: Still Waiting for Jesus

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This is a guest post by Anthony Coleman, a former Christian (but still a theist). His book The Evangelical Experience: Understanding One of America’s Largest Religious Movements from the Inside was recently published. In this post, he explains how understanding the apocalyptic claims of Jesus toppled his faith.
Guest PostI remember hearing in church growing up that “the early Christians expected Jesus to come back soon.” From my experience, this is actually a fairly uncontroversial thing to say, even in a conservative church. You may have even heard it from your own pastor. As a former Evangelical, I wonder why this doesn’t cause believers more concern. Maybe it’s the phrasing. It was only the “early Christians” who “expected” something that didn’t happen. Those words don’t sound any alarms. But to put it in starker terms, it seems that the Bible is wrong about the return of Christ. A pastor making this claim has a controversy on his hands.
Although I tried to get out of it for several years, I eventually came to this conclusion for myself – the biblical authors were simply wrong about the return of Jesus.
In 1 Thessalonians, Paul expects to be alive for the event:

We who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds. (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17)

In 1 Corinthians, Paul encourages believers to refrain from seeking marriage, due to the immanency of the “world’s present form” passing away:

I think that in view of the present distress it is good for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife … This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing…. For the present form of this world is passing away. (1 Corinthians 7:26–27, 29–31)

We also have more brief expressions of this belief from various other biblical writers:

The end of all things is at hand … (1 Peter 4:7)
Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and late rains. You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. (James 5:7–8)
Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. (1 John 2:18)
He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! (Revelation 22:20)

And not only do we have these fairly straightforward statements about the expectation of an early return, we also have records of justifications and re-interpretations from the Church when Jesus didn’t come back so quickly.

Scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.”…But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. (2 Peter 3:3–4, 8–10)
When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” So the saying spread abroad among the brothers that this disciple was not to die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die, but “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?” (John 21:21–23)

Critics wonder where this return is. John has died, Jesus hasn’t come, and the church needs to re-interpret. A day is like a thousand years.
I suppose with some extremely creative exegesis, you could wiggle out of these verses. “Soon,” “the final hour,” “the end of all things,” and “at hand” could, perhaps, find alternate translations. Some might argue that these verses are somehow referring to the fall of Jerusalem or other events. Preterism (the belief that all biblical prophecy, including verses predicting Jesus’ “return,” have already occurred) or partial-Preterism are options presented on the theological table. For me, I couldn’t get around it. Looking at the Scriptures, even as a professing Evangelical Christian, I was forced to conclude that something the early church was expecting to happen, didn’t happen. They (and, because they wrote their thoughts into Scripture, the Bible) were simply wrong about the immediate return of Christ.
Some Christians may be able to deal with an errant church and even an errant Bible. But, even more controversially, could these expectations have come from Jesus himself?
With Jesus on record as saying that “the Kingdom of God is at hand,” “you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes,” “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things take place,” and “some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” as well as regularly warning his listeners about an impending final judgment (for instance in Matthew 25), I can’t help but think that they did.
The apocalyptic eschatology of the early church, and, in my opinion, of Jesus himself, was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. It’s why I left the faith. In my book, The Evangelical Experience, I conclude with the following:
“Ultimately I left Evangelicalism because I could no longer believe its core tenets. The issue that pushed me over the edge was the apocalyptic eschatology of Jesus. The ‘Historical Jesus’ scholar Dale Allison explains the term in his Constructing Jesus:

“My claim … is that Jesus held what we may call, for lack of a better expression, an ‘apocalyptic eschatology.’ The words are a convenient shorthand for a cluster of themes well attested in post-exilic Jewish literature, themes that were prominent in a then-popular account of the world that ran, in brief, as follows. Although God created a good world, evil spirits have filled it with wickedness, so that it is in disarray and full of injustice. A day is coming, however, when God will repair the broken creation and restore scattered Israel. Before that time, the struggle between good and evil will come to a climax, and a period of great tribulation and unmatched woe will descend upon the world. After that period, God will, perhaps through one or more messianic figures, reward the just and requite the unjust, both living and dead, and then establish divine rule forever.1

“The worldview explained by Allison is familiar to Christians, because it is all over the New Testament. What is unfamiliar is the idea that Jesus thought this tribulation and ultimate Divine Deliverance was coming soon. As Allison, again, puts so well:

“His dream, however, has remained a dream. It is not just that, as Matt. 24:36 = Mark 13:32 says, the Son had no knowledge of precisely when the end would come. It is rather that the Son expected and encouraged others to expect that all would wrap up soon, and yet run-of-the-mill history remains with us: Satan still goes to and fro upon the earth.2

“Once the idea of Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet was presented to me the whole thing just made sense. The early Christians clearly expected Jesus to return immediately. The synoptic Gospels, on my reading, present Jesus as expecting a final judgment in the near future. It makes sense of his teaching, the warnings of judgment. ‘The Kingdom of God is at hand.’
The Evangelical Experience“When the paradigm was in place, I couldn’t not see it. The evidence, for me, leads to a Jesus who is most fairly labeled as an Apocalyptic Prophet and who called Israel to repentance before an expected immanent final judgment. He was wrong. The world didn’t end and the Divine Rule was not established. My Evangelical faith survived a lot of biblical criticism, but it couldn’t survive that.”
About the author: Anthony Coleman holds a B.A. in Biblical and Theological Studies and an M.A. in Theological Studies from separate Evangelical institutions. He can be contacted at theevangelicalexperience@gmail.com.
1 Dale Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), 32.
2 Dale Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 96. Also see p. 92–95 of the same work for a list of Gospel material indicating that Jesus held an apocalyptic eschatology.

William Lane Craig Misrepresents Christianity and Insults Islam (2 of 2)

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William Lane Craig delivered a one-two punch in a lecture comparing Islam and Christianity. In part 1, I critiqued his defense of Christianity against the Muslim critique. Surprisingly, this theology scholar doesn’t understand the fundamental concept of the Trinity enough to explain it without committing heresy.
Trinity WLC William Lane Craig IslamAttacking Islam’s concept of God
With reduced expectations, we move on to WLC’s second point. He says,

What I am going to tell you now is something that you will never hear in the media or from our public officials for they dare not say such things.

Oh Dr. Craig, what big balls you’ve got! How fortunate for us to have WLC give us the hard truth. (I just wish he’d turn some of that tough skepticism on his own worldview.)
Here’s the truth that WLC isn’t shy about stating: “Islam has a morally deficient concept of God.” This isn’t just a preference for Yahweh over Allah; instead, “The Muslim concept of God is rationally objectionable.”
1. God is loving
Here is his argument. Step 1: “God, as the perfect being, must be all-loving.” But why that attribute for a perfect being? What about others such as being kind, genteel, polite, sophisticated, retiring, snarky, or witty? What are the objectively correct attributes of a perfect being, and how does he know? WLC is playing Victor Frankenstein, picking and choosing the attributes for his perfect god.
But let’s ignore that—does WLC’s favorite god meet his own criteria? The Bible itself makes clear that he doesn’t. Yahweh supports slavery and human sacrifice, has crazy attitudes toward marriage, and demands genocide (more here, here, here, and here). He even created evil. God clearly has a not-so-loving side.
WLC doesn’t care about consistency and sifts out verses that support his preconception:

The love of the Heavenly Father is impartial, universal, and unconditional.

Yeah—tell that to the Canaanites. Or the enslaved. Or women. Or Jesus when he said, “Don’t cast pearls before swine.”
2. But Allah isn’t so loving
WLC contrasts the Christian god with the Muslim god in step 2: “According to the Qur’an, God does not love sinners.” He then lists many verses where Allah is said not to love unbelievers, evildoers, the impious and sinners, the proud, and so on. I can accept this point, but Craig seems to imagine that his god is immune to this pettiness. He should read his own Bible:

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9–10)

God created hell, and sending people to Hell isn’t what you do to people you love. Nevertheless, Jesus makes clear that God made most of his favorite creation so that he could send them to Hell:

Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13–14)

3. Allah loves only those who deserve it
Step 3: “According to the Qur’an, God’s love [is] reserved only for those who earn it.”
Given the choice between getting into heaven by works or by faith, I’ll pick the former. Christianity’s demand to believe the unbelievable to gain entrance into heaven fails from the beginning.
Even if we accept that faith is the preferred route to heaven, WLC should read his Bible. The parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 makes clear that works get you into heaven. And there’s more:

For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done (Matthew 16:27).
[God] will repay each person according to what they have done (Romans 2:6).
The dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works (Revelation 20:12).

Craig’s own Bible makes the case for works, just like the Qur’an.
4. Therefore, Yahweh beats Allah
WLC’s conclusion: “Now don’t you think that this is a morally inadequate conception of God?”
Can he be encouraging us to judge god claims to see if they make sense? I’m all for that, but it’s surprising to hear from WLC. It almost sounds like he skeptically judges supernatural claims but then plays the “Who do you think you are to judge God??” card when it’s his god being judged.
To highlight the emptiness of the Muslim concept of God, WLC gives us this thought experiment:

What would you think of a parent who said to his children, “If you measure up to my standards and do as I tell you, then I will love you”?

Consider the Christian version: “If you don’t measure up to my standards, I’ll fry you forever.” There seems to be a lot of conditional loving going on.
WLC wraps up:

Therefore, it seems to me that the Islamic conception of God is simply morally defective. Therefore I cannot rationally accept it.

Sure, the Muslim god is morally defective, but so is the Christian god. WLC makes no attempt at an unbiased evaluation. He has no interest in fairly critiquing both sides of the issue and is simply deciding that Allah doesn’t match up to his mental model of his god.
And what does “I cannot rationally accept it” mean? If there’s a creator of the universe, it may be that he has the properties outlined in the Qur’an. The Gnostics, for example, thought that the creator of this world was imperfect (which certainly explains a lot). Since we’re going on no hard evidence in each of these cases, who’s to say that it’s not the Muslim or Gnostic creator rather than the Christian one?
Moral imperfections in the Qur’an
WLC sets up his own jihad against Islam by citing its barbarism. But for each Muslim example, the barbaric history of Christianity has plenty of counterbalancing examples.

  • “[In 627,] Muhammad rounded up hundreds of Jewish families in Medina. Seven hundred Jewish men were put to the sword. Muhammad had their wives and children sold into slavery.” (That isn’t much compared to the Canaanite genocide that was ordered by God in Deuteronomy 7:1–5)
  • Mohammed ordered the non-Muslims killed unless they converted. (That sounds like the persecutions of the Cathars, Anabaptists, and Huguenots in Europe. They also could have gotten forgiveness by converting.)
  • “Islam is a total way of life. Everything is to be submitted to God. … The Western idea of separation of church and state is meaningless in Islam.” (Like Kim Davis performing only those government duties that satisfied her interpretation of Christianity? Like science denial by school boards? Like the many examples of state-supported Christianity? The U.S. has plenty of examples, but can WLC be saying that he wants to fight against this kind of Christian extremism? I’d love to see him on our side, but somehow I think that this is just another example of one standard for his religion and another for the other guy’s.)

William Lane Craig has butchered the Trinity, the organizing principle of his religion. He’s painted a cotton-candy picture of the Christian god based only on wishful thinking. But his critique of the Muslim god is on target. If he applied the same skepticism to his own religion, it would dissolve just as readily.

Some in the Republican Party
want official approval to oppress and marginalize
nonconformists, dissenters and freethinkers—
in other words, the very kind of people
who founded the United States.
— Tom Ehrich

Image credit: John Christian Fjellestad, flickr, CC

William Lane Craig Misrepresents Christianity and Insults Islam

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Trinity WLC William Lane Craig IslamWorld famous apologist William Lane Craig picks up a machete and hacks a path through difficult theology in a recent lecture (“The Concept of God in Islam and Christianity”). He doesn’t waste time building bridges with our Muslim neighbors but instead highlights their threadbare theology while he commits collateral damage to Christianity.
Defense of the Trinity (but with defenders like that, who needs enemies?)
WLC begins by stating that Muslims have misinterpreted basic Christian teaching. Early Christians called Mary the “mother of God,” and Mohammed misinterpreted the Trinity as a king-consort-son arrangement. The Christian Trinity isn’t like this, and WLC says, “It is no wonder that [Mohammed] was revolted by such a ridiculous doctrine.”
I’m not sure that he was revolted, but let’s look instead at this being a “ridiculous doctrine.” I don’t see what’s ridiculous about it (except for the evidence-less supernatural part, which is admittedly pretty ridiculous). You could find lots of king-consort-son triads in other religions—Zeus, Leto, and their son Apollo from the Greek pantheon, for example. If any collection of gods could rule the cosmos, I don’t see why it couldn’t be a family Trinity.
And WLC should be careful with that “ridiculous doctrine” crack since he makes clear that he doesn’t even understand his own ridiculous doctrine. Here’s his approach to the Trinity.

[The Trinity] is the doctrine that God is tri-personal. It is not the self-contradictory assertion that three gods are somehow one God. Or that three persons are somehow one person. That is just illogical nonsense.

That is indeed illogical nonsense. Unfortunately, it’s also Christian dogma. The fourth-century Athanasian Creed says in part, “The Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods; but one God.”
WLC could argue that the definition of the Trinity is not stated in the Bible. For evidence, he could point out that the early Church needed centuries to reach agreement on it (if it were obvious, it would’ve been dogma from the start). Unfortunately, this only undercuts his position further.
Craig continues:

Rather, [the Trinity] is the claim that the one entity we call God comprises three persons. That is no more illogical than saying that one geometrical figure which we call a triangle is comprised of three angles. Three angles in one figure. Three persons in one being.

Yes, a triangle is composed of three angles, but no, that is not a parallel to the Trinity. In fact, that commits the heresy called Partialism, the declaration that God is composed of three parts that make a whole. Other popular analogies that are also heretical for the same reason compare God to an egg (shell + white + yolk = egg) or to time (past + present + future = time).
WLC is in good company, and C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity makes the same mistake: “In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.” Six squares are parts of a cube, just like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are parts of God? Be careful—a heresy like that can send a guy to Hell.
Modalism is another anti-Trinitarian heresy that modern Christians often fall into as they struggle to find an analogy by which to understand the fundamental concept of the Trinity. With this heresy, God can be analogized with water, which can be a solid, liquid, or gas. It declares that God can take on different modes, like an actor putting on different masks at different points in a play. (More on the Trinity here and here.)
WLC doubles down on his claim that Muslims (or anyone) pushing back against the Trinity is wrong.

Although this doctrine may seem strange to Muslims, once it is properly stated there is nothing illogical about it. It is a logically consistent doctrine, and therefore rationally unobjectionable.

Nothing illogical about it? You can’t even explain it without preaching heresy! The most honest explanation that I’ve heard is that it’s simply a mystery, and we fallible humans on this side of heaven won’t ever be able to understand it. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains it this way, for example. That doesn’t make the Trinity any more realistic, but at least Christians who say this acknowledge the difficulty.
God and love
WLC moves on to argue why the Christian concept of God is better than the Muslim version. The Trinitarian nature of the Christian god isn’t an embarrassment to Christians determined to argue that their god is monotheistic, WLC tells us; it’s actually an advantage.
Here’s his argument. First, “God is by definition the greatest conceivable being.” This is the beginning of the Ontological argument, where apologists imagine that they can think into existence anything they want, but let’s avoid digging into the problems with that argument and move on.
Point 2: “A perfect being must be a loving being, for love is a moral perfection.” Who says that love is a moral perfection? Is there a list of these perfections?
I agree that love is pretty great, but that’s because evolution has programmed me to think that love is pretty great. I feel this way for no more profound reason than that. Why imagine that the feelings we have for each other translate unchanged to God? Christians eager to excuse God’s genocidal demands suppose that we simply can’t understand his thinking. But then if we can’t understand his thinking, don’t pretend that we understand how he loves us or anything else or what “love” means at his level.
Anyway, “loving” is not on the short list of attributes that an objective observer would give the god of the Old Testament. Richard Dawkins’ famous quote at the end of this post summarizes some of these. The Bible makes clear that God is a lot more than just a cuddly teddy bear.

“Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. “Should you not tremble in my presence?” (Jeremiah 5:22)

(More about God’s unpleasant characteristics here, here, and here.)
Point 3 in WLC’s argument: Love requires a target of that love, and for the current of love to flow before the creation of humanity, God couldn’t have been a single person. (And maybe because self-love puts hair on your palms?) Sorry, Muslims, your mono-monotheism isn’t as good as Christianity’s tri-monotheism.
Here’s how WLC puts it:

If God is perfectly loving by his very nature then he must be giving himself in love to another. But who is that other? It can’t be any created person since creation is a result of God’s free will, not a result of his nature. It belongs to God’s very essence to love, but it does not belong to his essence to create. God is necessarily loving, but he is not necessarily creating.

Wow—where did all these rules come from? It’s nice to imagine that God is loving, just like us, but how does WLC conclude that this is a binding attribute? And how can God not be necessarily creating since creating the universe must’ve been better than not doing so, and God always does the better thing?
And what kind of love are the three persons of the Trinity sharing? Is this romantic/erotic love? Parent/child love? And how do we know?
What would this love-in even look like? WLC apparently imagines that for the trillions of years God existed before the universe did, the three persons of the Trinity were just loving and loving each other. And then they’d start all over again. Was it nothing but compliments all day long?

“Y’know, those new trousers really work on you”
“Say, have you lost weight? You look great!”
“Oh, no—let me do that for you!”
“Can I get you a beer? You look like you could use one.”

WLC would probably say that we just don’t know and that it’s ridiculous to speculate. I like that—let’s just say we don’t know instead of this philosophical masturbation based on nothing.
Conclude with part 2. 

The God of the Old Testament
is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
— Richard Dawkins

Image credit: Luz Adriana Villa, flickr, CC

Biblical Polytheism

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The first of the Ten Commandments says, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). (There are two very different sets of Ten Commandments in Exodus, but let’s ignore that for now.)
Have you ever thought much about the wording of this commandment? Why doesn’t it say that Jehovah is the only god? It’s because this section of the Bible was written in roughly the 10th century BCE, the early days of the Israelite religion, when it was still polytheistic. (More on the Documentary Hypothesis which explains these sections here.) The next commandment notes, “I, Jehovah, your God, am a jealous God”—jealous because there were indeed other viable options, and Jehovah insisted on a commitment.
Jewish biblical polytheismJewish Henotheism
Let’s use the proper term for this, henotheism. Polytheists acknowledge many gods and worship many gods, while henotheists acknowledge many gods but worship only one. In this view, different gods ruled different territories just as kings did, and tribes owed allegiance to whichever god protected them.
I’ve gotten a lot of insight into Old Testament henotheism from Thom Stark’s The Human Faces of God. Some of what follows comes from chapter 4 of that book.
The Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 is considered to be some of the oldest material in the Bible—dating to the mid-13th century BCE. We have several somewhat-inconsistent copies, the oldest being from the Dead Sea Scrolls:

When Elyon divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he established the borders of the nations according to the number of the sons of the gods. Yahweh’s portion was his people, [Israel] his allotted inheritance. (Deut. 32:8–9)

Here we see Elyon, the head of the divine pantheon, dividing humankind among his children, giving each his inheritance. The idea of a divine pantheon with a chief deity, his consort, and their children (the council of the gods) was widespread through the Ancient Near East. Elyon (short for El Elyon) is the chief god, not just in Jewish writings but also in Canaanite literature. The passage concludes with Yahweh receiving Israel as his inheritance.
We learn more about terms like “sons of the gods” by widening our focus to consider Ugaritic (Canaanite) texts. Ugarit was a Canaanite city destroyed along with much of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze Age Collapse in roughly 1200 BCE, a period of widespread chaos in that part of the world from which Israelite civilization seems to have grown.
The Ugaritic texts state that El and his consort Asherah had 70 sons, which may be the origin of the 70 nations (or 72) that came from Noah’s descendants listed in Genesis 10.
The Old Testament is full of clues pointing to multiple gods. Genesis is a good place to start.

Then [Elohim] said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

We also see plural gods when Jehovah warns them that man mustn’t eat the tree of life (Gen. 3:22) and that they must confuse mankind’s languages lest their projects, like the Tower of Babel, succeed (Gen. 11:7).
A common Christian spin is either to say that the “us” is the Trinity or that it is a heavenly assembly of angels. But can we imagine that the original audience for Genesis would understand the Trinity? And why imagine an angelic assembly when the polytheistic interpretation of Genesis simply growing out of preceding Canaanite culture is available and plausible?
Psalms is another old book that has fossilized the earliest forms of Judaism. We see the assembly of the gods mentioned several times.

[Elohim] stands in the assembly of El; in the midst of the gods he renders judgment (Psalm 82:1).
For who in the skies can compare to [Jehovah]? Who is like [Jehovah] among the [sons of God], a God who is honored [in the great assembly of the holy ones], and more awesome than all who surround him? (Ps. 89:6–7)

And many more verses celebrate Jehovah while acknowledging the existence of others.

For [Jehovah] is the great God, and the great King above all gods (Ps. 95:3).
All the gods bow down before [Jehovah] (Ps. 97:7).
I know [Jehovah] is great, and our Lord is superior to all gods. (Ps. 135:5)

In a recent post, we’ve seen where the Bible documents how Yahweh lost a fight with the Moabite god Chemosh (2 Kings 3:27).
Migration to Monotheism
We find one indication of the move from henotheism to monotheism in later versions of the Song of Moses. The phrase “sons of the gods” becomes “angels” in the Septuagint (from the 3rd century BCE) and “sons of Israel” in the Masoretic text (7th through 10th centuries CE).
Let’s consider books composed later than Genesis or Psalms.
Deuteronomy was written after the conquest of Israel and before the conquest of Judah, in the 7th century BCE. The philosophy has now moved from henotheism to monolatry. Like henotheism, many gods are accepted and only one is worshipped, but now worship of other gods is forbidden.

Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you (Deut. 6:14)
But you must not turn away from all the comandments I am giving you today, to either the right or left, nor pursue other gods and worship them (Deut. 28:14–15).

Second Isaiah (the second part of Isaiah) was written later, near the end of the Babylonian exile. Here we find the transition to monotheism is complete.

Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me (Isa. 43:10)

The very idea of an idol is ridiculed in Isaiah 44:9–20. Can a man cook his meal over a fire made from half of the tree he used to carve his idol and imagine that an idol from so unrefined an origin is really a god?
What explains this migration to monotheism? A major factor was the Babylonian exile. How could Yahweh, clearly defined as the most powerful of the assembly of gods, have been defeated by the puny Babylonian god Marduk?
Maybe Yahweh let it happen to teach Israel and Judah a lesson. Yeah, that’s what happened! Babylon didn’t defeat Yahweh’s people; they were merely a pawn in his grand plan all along.

A decent provision for the poor 
is the true test of civilization. 
— Samuel Johnson

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/13/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia