Games Creationists Play: 7 Tricks to Watch Out For

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Creationism Intelligent DesignStephen Meyer isn’t a biologist, but he plays one at the Discovery Institute. He wants to help GOP candidates through the minefield of science denial by answering the tough question, “What Should Politicians Say When Asked About Evolution?” This article provides an opportunity to illustrate a number of popular tricks Creationists play.
Trick #1: Politicians need special rules.  
What triggered Meyer’s article was the response of GOP candidate-to-be Scott Walker to the question, “Do you believe in evolution?” Walker’s response: “That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or another. So I’m going to leave that up to you.”
According to Meyer, this showed Walker to be “unprepared, evasive, and scientifically uninformed.” Meyer next critiques another candidate’s response:

Mike Huckabee, for his part, tried to laugh it off, saying: “If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it,” which only made him look evasive and flippant.

No, it mostly made him look ignorant. He is the descendant of a primate because humans are, in fact, primates. Jeez—get an education.
As someone who isn’t a biologist (like Meyer) but who respects science (unlike Meyer), let me offer some advice to conservative candidates. I like that Walker didn’t pretend to be something he wasn’t. He’s a politician, not a biologist.
Consider his constituency. The fraction of Republicans who accept the science, that humans have evolved over time, is only 43%. Incredibly, that’s 11% less than four years earlier (Pew Forum). Evolution denial is becoming an identifying trait of Republicans, and accepting evolution has become a problem for Republican candidates.
Walker could’ve been tougher. He could’ve said that, given that he’s not a scientist, he has no option but to accept the scientific consensus on biology, which is evolution. He could’ve insisted that Republican citizens get their science from scientists rather than religious or political leaders. This could’ve been an opportunity to show how a leader handles a tough situation. But given his reality-averse audience, I suppose his sidestep is about as good as it gets.
Trick #2: “The term ‘evolution’ can mean several different things.” The concept of evolution that is clear in biology class or on the cover of a biology journal suddenly becomes quite slippery and confusing in the hands of Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents. For example, the Creationist ministry of Kent Hovind’s son lectures us that there are six kinds of evolution, including the Big Bang, abiogenesis (the origin of life), and the creation of elements through fusion. (No, I don’t see why the word “evolution” is mandatory for those ideas, either.)
Meyer proposes three definitions that are, in order of increasing controversy, change over time, common descent (which Creationist icon Michael Behe accepts), and what most people would call plain old evolution—the theory that life on earth came to be from random mutation and natural selection without anything supernatural. He does nothing to show that his imagined controversy exists.
My guess is that they like many “evolutions” to show their reasonableness in accepting at least some science-y ideas.
Trick #3: Evolution is controversial—in fact, increasingly so.
To make this claim, Creationists may quote a scientist. Maybe they’ll even quote a biologist. Oddly, they never quote any statistics to show that evolution is losing its respectability.
This idea has been around for decades. The Creationist book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis was published thirty years ago. Maybe Creationists think that if they keep repeating this claim, no one will notice that evolution is still here, with biologists as confident in it as ever.
If anyone doubts that evolution is indeed the consensus, I’ve compiled a long list of quotes from reputable organizations in the appendix at this post.
Trick #4: Declare that a debate about some aspect of evolution is actually a challenge to evolution itself.
Meyer says,

Increasingly, even leading evolutionary theorists question the creative power of its central mechanism of natural selection/random mutation.

A Creationist is the last person I’ll listen to for the scientific consensus within biology. When evolution is overturned, have the biologists tell me. Creationists will say that the truth isn’t decided by a vote. They’re right, but it’s not like we can just compare our scientific theories against the truth. What’s decided by vote is society’s best guess at the truth through scientific consensus. It’s not necessarily right, but that consensus is the best we have.
What Meyer could be saying (it’s unclear to me because he gives no backup for this statement) is that biologists argue about various mechanisms within evolution. I’ll accept that. What this doesn’t translate to is a rejection of evolution.
Trick #5: Look at the polls! The majority of Americans reject evolution. Meyer points to polls that show Americans rejecting evolution.

A huge majority of Americans (and many scientists) reject the third and distinctly controversial meaning of evolution—the idea that the cause of the change over time is an unguided and undirected mechanism.

You say that Americans reject evolution? So what? Unless the subject is the scientific illiteracy of the American public, who cares about the opinions of people who don’t understand the issue?
The vague “many scientists” who reject evolution presumably is a reference to the Disco Institute’s “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism,” a list of close to a thousand scientists who are “skeptical” of evolution. Yet again, who cares? We don’t consult scientists, we consult biologists. But if you want to play that game, the National Center for Science Education has an even longer list of scientists who accept evolution, limited just to those named Steve (in honor of the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould).
Trick #6: But much of a conservative politician’s constituency reject evolution! Meyer says,

Many conservative candidates are themselves either genuinely skeptical about some aspects of Darwinian evolution … or they are aware that much of their base rejects it. 

When non-scientist politicians won’t accept the scientific consensus, they can’t claim to have a competent opinion. They might also have a hard time accepting quantum physics (which is more counterintuitive than evolution), but they shouldn’t make any policy decisions built on that ignorance.
If this is difficult politically, then the choice is to mirror the flawed thinking of the constituents or take the tough stand for the truth. That conservative politicians often cave doesn’t speak well of how they’d handle the tough issues of public office.
Trick #7: Position the teaching of Creationism/ID as openness and academic freedom.
Meyer poisons the well by labeling the teaching of just evolution in the science classroom as “dogmatic.” He claims that this is an insult to “scientific literacy, academic freedom, and critical thinking.”
This reminds me of Rick Perry on the campaign trail in 2001: “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.” That’s a clever spin, but that’s not the way schools work. You dump out the possibilities on a table and say “Figure it out” in the lab, not the classroom. The history of science is often taught, but students are never given flat vs. spherical earth or geocentric vs. heliocentric solar system and encouraged to choose. Perry seems to imagine that biology tests would be ungraded, and students would simply summarize their preferences for what they want to be the case.
Meyer’s article finally devolves into a suggested script for science-denying politicians. It includes agreeing where possible (to some debilitated version of evolution), saying “I’m skeptical” rather than “evolution is wrong,” mentioning “many scientists” while avoiding “the scientific consensus,” handwaving about the importance of understanding the weaknesses in scientific theories, and conflating abiogenesis with evolution.
In short, if the facts aren’t on your side, obfuscate the issue.
Related articles:

The world is suffering more today from the good people
who want to mind other men’s business
than it is from the bad people
who are willing to let everybody
look after their own individual affairs.
— Clarence Darrow, 1908

Image credit: Jakob Lawitzki, flickr, CC

2015 Predictions: How Did the Christian Psychics Do?

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I remember the tabloid magazines from years ago at the grocery store checkout stand in January. They splashed famous psychics’ predictions across the cover of every new year’s first edition. What Hollywood or royal celebrities would get embarrassed, arrested, or divorced? What gaffes would various world leaders commit? What natural disasters or wars would happen?
What was surprising was how they could keep doing this, year after year, when the issue just one week earlier had the end-of-year scorecard showing how badly the prior year’s predictions had done.
Kidding! There was no scorecard, not at the end of the previous year or ever. Why acknowledge the elephant in the room?
The tabloid fan might admit that if you really want to get precise about it, sure, the occasional prediction wasn’t completely accurate. If the prediction was that a celebrity would lose a child due to a drug overdose, but what actually happened was that their ex got divorced, that was close enough, right? Blur your eyes and score generously, and those psychics were still worth reading.
This has been called the Jeane Dixon effect after a prolific psychic. From her oeuvre, you can find loads of preposterously wrong predictions as well as the occasional correct one. Knowing what sells, the media celebrated the hits and forgot the misses. (One author called this kind of selection bias the Jeane Dixon defect.)
And isn’t it fun to believe? It’s like a kid waiting for Santa. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll get that pony you asked for.
Maybe, just maybe, the psychic will be right, the predicted natural disaster will happen, and you can say you knew it all along.
And maybe, just maybe, your prayer for a miracle will be answered.
Christian predictions
We see the same naïve belief in some Christians today. The fraction of Americans who say that we’re living in the end times as described by the Bible is 41 percent. Of American Evangelicals, it’s 77 percent.
When you or I hear a tragic news story—the November ISIS attack in Paris, for example—we likely see this in the context of bad stuff that happens across the world from time to time. For apocalyptic Christians convinced that Armageddon is around the corner, however, any tragedy neatly confirms their conclusion.
John Hagee’s recent hysterical blather about the four blood moons scratched that “All aboard!” itch that these apocalyptic Christians seem to have. They’re playing the poker game of eternity, they’re all in, and they’re eager to show their cards. About the four blood moons, Hagee said, “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon,’ ” and “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”
(You didn’t notice the world ending in October? No four horsemen? Nothing to suggest the End? Me neither. The only blood is Hagee’s bloody nose when he got smacked with reality.)
As with psychics’ failed predictions in tabloid magazines, Christian prophets have no final reckoning. The Jeane Dixon defect is in play, and failed predictions are either ignored or reinterpreted to be close enough.
One difference, though, is that the Bible demands the death penalty for false prophets.

A prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded … is to be put to death. (Deuteronomy 18:20–22)

It’s almost like Christians aren’t consistent and are selectively reading the Bible.
Comparison: psychics vs. prophets
The National Enquirer psychics predicted big things for 2015: an assassination attempt on Pope Francis, a Hollywood job offer for Barack Obama, significant volcanic activity in the Pacific Northwest, and a deathbed confession that that whole moon-landing thing really was a hoax. As of this writing, half an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve, none of those predictions was correct.
No 2015 prediction about ISIS or the Paris attacks or Charlie Hebdo? Nothing about the Obergefell decision or Christian bakers or Kim Davis? Nothing about Donald Trump and the comedy that American politics has become? I’m omitting many big stories of 2015, but then there’s a lot of that going around.
We can laugh at how badly the psychics got things wrong, but then the Christian prophets, perpetually crying wolf about the latest disaster, were just as laughably wrong. My prediction for the new year: more empty and irresponsible predictions from both psychics and Christian prophets.

Risky predictions have been successfully made
thousands of times in science,
not once in religion.
— Vic Stenger

Hey, GOP Candidates! Want to Reject Science Without Looking Like a Troglodyte?

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Scientific consensusI’ve written before about the scientific consensus, arguing that we laymen are in no position to reject the scientific consensus and dismantling popular conservative arguments that encourage us to do exactly that.

The Discovery Institute, that fearless citadel in the battle against evolution, throws chum on the waters of thoughtful discourse with its article, “To Have a View on the Darwin Debate, Do You Need a PhD in Evolutionary Science?”

Let me abstract this post by answering that question: you’re welcome to have a view, but if that view rejects the overwhelming consensus in favor of evolution then yes, you need a PhD. And to correct the title, there is no “debate” over evolution—at least not within biology, the only place where such a debate would be relevant.

The article begins with a tweeted exchange between Kevin Williamson (correspondent for the National Review) and David Klinghoffer (senior fellow at the Discovery Institute).

Kevin Williamson: Evolution, like similarly specialized fields, is not really subject to casual opinion.

David Klinghoffer: And that is why our politician, or anyone, if he’s more than a casual thinker, gives it the needed study

Kevin Williamson: ‘The needed study’ = graduate-level work in evolutionary science.

The author of the unattributed article disagrees.

Just as you don’t need a graduate degree in meteorology to understand why tornados will never turn rubble into houses and cars, you don’t need “graduate-level work in evolutionary science” to understand that unintelligent forces alone cannot cause civilizations to arise on barren planets, and for the very same reasons.

I agree that any process analogous to a tornado won’t drive an organism to change, adapt, and improve as happens on earth. But that’s not evolution. A tornado is just random, while evolution has random elements plus selection to pick the organisms that best fit their environments. (Why is this elementary error so common within Creationism/Intelligent Design proponents? Do they have no interest in understanding what they’re rejecting?)

The author moves from not-a-biologist David Klinghoffer as an authority to not-a-biologist Jay Homnick. Homnick is a commentator, humorist, and deputy editor of The American Spectator. His homey logic neatly punctures the evolution balloon:

Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident … you have essentially lost your mind.

That’s some tough love, folks. A not-a-biologist has used the Argument from Incredulity to cut the Gordian Knot to give us the painful truth. “That’s just crazy talk! It don’t make sense to me, so it can’t be true!”

Homnick apparently thinks that the process of evolution is nothing but accident. It’s not. (That demand for graduate-level education in biology for those who would draw conclusions about evolution is sounding better all the time.)

Back to the article:

Jay Homnick is not a scientist, but unlike Kevin Williamson, he understands that you don’t need a scientific background to realize something is terribly wrong with the scientific “consensus” on evolution.

Do you hear what you’re saying? You’re justifying someone deliberately rejecting the consensus and drawing his own conclusion about biology—someone who doesn’t understand biology!

You may need a PhD before people will listen to you as an authority, but you emphatically don’t need one to draw the correct conclusion for yourself.

But if you aren’t qualified to do the first, how are you qualified to do the second? You admit you’re not an authority, but then you grant yourself the ability to “draw the correct conclusion”? The author seems to be saying that to convince others you’ll need credentials, but your own opinion isn’t that important, so what the heck? Discard those experts and pick your own conclusion.

I bet the author wants a Kim Davis world where government employees use their own religious beliefs as the final guide to their official actions, and candidates for public office reject any unpleasant scientific consensus and substitute their own conclusion.

Often it seems it doesn’t matter how much evidence you present to these people, or how clearly you present it. They’ll just keep saying, “All our elite scientists reject ID, who am I to question elite scientists?”

No, the question is: “Who am I to question those people who understand the evidence, since I don’t?” Sometimes a little humility is appropriate.

Meanwhile, as the evidence piles up, those same scientists keep repeating, “Intelligent design is not science, intelligent design is not science.”

Aha—so you are in favor of following the consensus after all! If the evidence is piling up to create a sea change within evolution, then let’s just give it a few more years and then follow that consensus. That the author doesn’t express it this way shows how little he thinks of this new “evidence.”

Maybe someday in the future, after a poll shows that most of our elite scientists have finally accepted the obvious, folks like Kevin Williamson will say, “Wow, imagine that … believing that the survival of the fittest was enough to generate human brains and human consciousness. I guess that was a pretty stupid idea after all.”

Wow, imagine that … the ideas at the frontier of science don’t always conform to common sense.

People say they love truth,
but in reality they want to believe
that which they love is true.
— Robert J. Ringer

Image credit: Wikimedia

Dating the Gospels: Harder than You Might Think (2 of 2)

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In part 1, we looked at the conservative Christian argument for an early dating of the gospels (using a blog post from Jim Wallace to represent that position). These Christians are eager to minimize the time from events to the chronicling of those events in the gospels. With a little sleight of hand, they can reduce this time gap for the gospel of Mark to about twenty years.

Now let’s turn to the scholarly consensus. Bart Ehrman says, “Scholars debate [whether Mark was written before or after the Jewish War with Rome], but the majority (outside of fundamentalists and very very conservative evangelicals) think the answer is ‘afterward.’” We will explore some of the ideas that support that conclusion.

Dating the gospelsMaybe the gospel authors did know about the Temple

The gospels show Jesus alluding to the Jewish-Roman War and the destruction of the Temple.

Jesus said [referring to the Temple], “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another which will not be torn down” (Mark 13:1–2).

When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near…. There will be great distress upon the land and wrath to this people; and they will fall by the edge of the sword, and will be led captive into all the nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. (Luke 21:20–24)

The Parable of the Great Banquet (Matthew 22:1–14) and the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen (Mark 12:1–12) tell of a king and a landowner, respectively, who play the role of God. After being treated unfairly, the king/landowner destroys those who wronged him.

Each of these examples sound like they were written from a time when the extent of the destruction was known because it had already happened.

Do you really want to leave a prophecy unfulfilled?

The early daters cling to the idea of an accurate Jesus prophecy, but this falls apart when we analyze it. Consider two options. Option one: Jesus foretold the destruction of the Temple, and the author of Mark knew that this had already happened. This is the scholarly consensus.

With option two, Jesus foretold the destruction of the Temple, but the author of Mark didn’t know this had happened. Wallace picks this option because he can’t imagine that the author wouldn’t have turned down the chance to brag about it, but it’s not smart to add an unfulfilled prophecy that could look embarrassing in the future.

And why expect that the gospel authors would underscore the obvious? If the Temple had been destroyed just a few years earlier, why bother adding, “and, as you know, this indeed happened”? Good writers don’t explain the punch line.

Clues to late dating in the gospels

The gospels themselves argue that the gospels were late. Luke begins, “Many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” The phrase “from the beginning” suggests a good amount of time has passed. And what about the reference to “many” prior accounts? Even with the hypothetical lost gospel of Q, the first century didn’t have many gospels (as far as we know). This sounds more like the second century, when “many” would accurately describe the number of gospels.

At the end of Matthew, we read, “So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day” (Matt. 28:15). This phrase also suggests a good amount of time, not shortly.

Other clues

  • Bart Ehrman calls Paul “extraordinarily well-traveled and well-connected” and yet says that the lack of any hint of the gospels in his epistles suggests that they came after his time. Wallace imagines that there were several gospels to choose from, but Paul wouldn’t have bothered to guide his flock through the question of which were accurate.
  • Mark writes about an Israel that didn’t yet exist in the time of Jesus. He writes about a handwashing ritual in Mark 7:1–4 that was accurate around 70 CE but wasn’t true in the time of Jesus (see Randel Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels? p. 10). Mark also refers to synagogues being common and the title “Rabbi,” each of which was only true decades after Jesus (see the Bible Geek podcast for 9/17/13 @19:00).
  • The author of Luke is often praised as a historian. He’s said to be accurate because the facts in Luke match those in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews (93 CE), but one easy explanation is to suppose that the author of Luke copied Josephus. After all, the author had no problem copying nearly 80% of Mark.
  • Acts has clues that point to a late date. In it, Paul says, “After my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock” (Acts 20:28–9). This could refer to heretical teachings such as those from Marcion (mid-second century).

How close to a date can we get?

Randel Helms in Who Wrote the Gospels? (p. 7–8) makes a compelling argument for a date for Mark.

Mark includes obvious apocalyptic* elements, and the “Little Apocalypse” in Mark 13 refers to the “abomination of desolation” from Daniel. Daniel pretends to be written in the sixth century BCE and prophecies the end of the world in 164 BCE, but, like other apocalyptic books, things are best explained if we imagine it written a few years before this point.

Mark puts into the mouth of Jesus a prediction of the war that will be the “birth pains” of the new godly age. This war is one that the author of Mark has just experienced, and he predicts the imminent end this way:

[Jesus said:] But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven…. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.… You too, when you see these things happening, recognize that He is near, right at the door. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. (Mark 13:24–30)

If the book of Daniel is the template, Mark would have used its end times dating method. During the last week of years (that is, seven-year period), the “abomination of desolation” happens halfway through, and then three and a half years later comes the end of this age. The destruction of the Temple in 70 would be the abomination of desolation, so the end predicted by Mark—the one with the stars falling to earth—should happen in roughly 74. That places the authorship of Mark between those two dates.

The takeaway here is that there are a handful of indefinite clues for dating the gospels. You’re on solid ground if you say that they could have been written as early as the mid-first century or as late as around 150 when Justin Martyr quotes from the four gospels (though there’s even debate here about whether those quotes had to have come from the gospels). To reduce this range from a century to a decade, all you can manage is an educated guess.

Even giving the apologists their earliest date for the authorship of Mark, that still leaves two decades of oral history, plenty of time for legend to grow.

When he [asked] what separates Hitler from Mother Teresa,
 I really wanted to say a mustache.
— Rachal Davidson

*Apocalypticism sees two time periods, the evil one that we’re living in now, and the good one that God will violently usher in any day now. This belief had been an element within Judaism for a couple of centuries by the time of Mark.

Photo credit: liz west, flickr, CC

Dating the Gospels: Harder than You Might Think

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Dating the gospelsChristian apologists are eager to date the gospels as early as possible to minimize the period of oral history. Less time for oral history means less time for legends to develop, and this points to a more reliable gospel message.

I must confess that the conservative calculations sound reasonable in parts. This thinking places at least some of the gospels well before the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. I’ll use a post from Jim Wallace’s Cold Case Christianity blog to represent this argument.

  1. First note that the destruction of the Temple isn’t mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, but Matthew 24:1–3 has Jesus predicting it. Matthew likes to write about fulfilled prophecies (Jesus was born of a virgin, as foretold in Isaiah, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as foretold in Micah, and so on). If Matthew was written after the destruction of the temple, how could Matthew resist bragging about yet another fulfilled prophecy?
  2. The destruction of the Temple was just one event during the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE). Josephus claims that 1.1 million people were killed during the destruction of Jerusalem. This war is also not mentioned.
  3. Before that are the deaths of Peter (65 CE), Paul (67), and James (62 or 69), also not mentioned. The last half of Acts is a diary of Paul’s activities, ending with his house arrest in Rome. If Paul had already been martyred, wouldn’t that story be both powerful and relevant? Acts must precede these deaths, and Wallace dates it at 57–60 CE.
  4. Evidence for an early authorship of Luke is this verse from Paul’s epistle of 1 Timothy: “The Scripture says … ‘The laborer is worthy of his wages’” (1 Tim. 5:18), which quotes Luke 10:7. Wallace gives 53–57 for the authorship of 1 Timothy. Scholars agree that Luke preceded Acts, and Wallace gives 50–53 for Luke.
  5. But Luke wasn’t the first gospel—that was Mark. Luke plagiarizes heavily from Mark, and Wallace gives 45–50 for Mark.

With Mark written in 50 or before, we’re less than twenty years from the traditional death of Jesus in around 30.

Another look at this argument

Let’s take another look to see how well it stands up.

  1. Matthew likes fulfilled prophecy from the Scriptures—that is, the Old Testament. He has no examples of fulfilled prophecy from Jesus. Maybe that just doesn’t do it for him. And is prophecy really the right word for what was likely inevitable? The Jews had had a difficult relationship with ruling empires and had even revolted against and broken away from the Seleucid empire less than two centuries earlier. Anticipating violent conflict with Rome didn’t require supernatural insight.
  2. Suppose Luke were written after the war with Rome and the destruction of the Temple. Why would it be surprising if it didn’t mentioned them? The gospel of John also didn’t mention them, and even most conservative scholars agree that John was written after 70 CE.
  3. The date of Paul’s death comes from tradition from the second century. The deaths of Peter and James are also poorly evidenced.
  4. While Wallace gives 57–60 as the date for 1 Timothy, Wikipedia gives an earliest date of the mid-60s. It could also have been written as late as the mid-second century because it seems to be responding to second-century heresies. If it does copy Luke, it would be surprising to see it elevate Luke to the status of Scripture just a few years after its composition, as Wallace claims.
  5. Even if we accept twenty years from the time of Jesus until Mark rather than forty, as other scholars say, doesn’t help much. If it were written the next day, its claims of the supernatural would still be highly suspect. Early dating doesn’t help much.

And note the juggling that Wallace must do. He wants to argue that legend couldn’t creep in over a few decades, so we can be confident that the gospels are an accurate biography of Jesus. But he must argue that legend did happen when given a few additional decades to justify why he can dismiss the Gospels of Thomas, of Judas, of the Ebionites, and others, many of them written in the late first or second centuries. (More on the development of myth through oral history here.)

Another challenge is that by reducing the time from events to originals, he’s increased the time from originals to our best manuscript copies. This centuries-long Dark Ages means lots of time for the story to change.

Continue with a look at the scholarly consensus for the dating of the gospels in part 2.

There is no apologetics in science, as there is in theology,
where unquestioned presumptions are made and then explanations sought
to make the data conform to those presumptions.
— Vic Stenger

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Christians: Can ANYTHING Change Your Mind?

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unfalsifiable hypothesis

In a recent post, I called Christianity “The Ultimate Unfalsifiable Hypothesis.” I am bothered by the worldview held by many Christians in which good things are evidence that God exists, and bad things are also evidence that God exists. This impervious-to-reality God belief can’t lose, but it isn’t realistic. It’s merely insulation from reality.

Christians who want to willfully reject evidence can certainly do so, but they have no grounds to pretend to be following the evidence where it leads. Let’s consider some examples.

Evidence Against Prayer

Imagine a prayer experiment that showed no effectiveness. But we needn’t imagine this; such a test has been conducted. The 2006 STEP experiment, often known as the Templeton Study because of the foundation that funded it, was “by far the most comprehensive and rigorous investigation of third-party prayer to date” (source). It found no value to prayer.

Have any Christians turned away from faith because of this study? I doubt it. They’ll say that you can’t test God or that God isn’t like a genie who answers to your command. They’ll say that using science to study religion is like using a hammer to carve a turkey—it’s simply not the right tool.

But if a prayer study had shown a benefit, you can be sure that Christians would be all over that, citing it as important evidence that everyone must consider.

Mother Teresa’s story is an excellent personal example of the results of prayer. As a young woman, she had an ecstatic vision of Jesus charging her to care for the poor. Surely she would’ve said that this was evidence for the existence of God and Jesus. But then mustn’t we also take seriously the absence of evidence and consider what that means? Her life was colored far more by the agony of ignored prayers than the ecstasy of visions. Late in life she wrote, “the silence and the emptiness is so great” and “I have no Faith … [the thoughts in my heart] make me suffer untold agony.”

Accepting positive evidence for prayer and ignoring any negative evidence is no honest search for the truth.

Pat Robertson publicly prayed that the 2003 hurricane Isabel wouldn’t hit the Virginia Beach area where his Christian Broadcasting Network is based. He demanded:

In the name of Jesus, we reach out our hand in faith and we command that storm to cease its forward motion to the north and to turn and to go out into the sea.

Here’s a photo of Isabel making landfall just south of Robertson’s 700 Club headquarters. It was that season’s costliest and deadliest. Oops.

How did Robertson explain the failure to the faithful? My guess is that it wasn’t too hard to dismiss unwelcome evidence to a flock that doesn’t care much about evidence. Where else can you fail this badly and come out looking good?

Evidence Against Divine Inspiration

A Mormon example of selective consideration of evidence is Joseph Smith’s translation of an Egyptian papyrus he called the “Book of Abraham,” which has become part of Mormon canon. Modern evaluation has shown Smith’s “translation” to be nonsense, but did that sink Mormonism? Of course not—it’s not based on evidence!

When presented with plausible natural explanations for sensations of God’s presence, some people prefer to cling to the imaginary. One epileptic patient wouldn’t take meds because it would destroy her link to God. She said, “If God chooses to speak through a disease to me, that’s fine.”

Evidence Against Prediction

A religious leader’s specific prediction is a great way to put religion into the domain of science. You’d think that if the prediction doesn’t come to pass, the followers would realize that the entire thing was a sham.

But no—when the prediction doesn’t happen, a little song and dance can restore the leader’s credibility with at least some of his followers. The Millerites’ Great Disappointment of 1844 is an example. Determined post-Disappointment believers morphed into several groups, including one that became the Seventh Day Adventist church (which itself has made a number of failed end-of-the-world predictions).

More recent participants in the Guess the End of the World contest, which has been ongoing for 2000 years, include Hal Lindsey, who predicted the end in 1988. More recently, Harold Camping was wrong about his highly publicized prediction of the Rapture on May 21, 2011 and the end of the world five months later.

Even after the complete failure of his “prediction,” he rationalized that it was all God’s will, but what about his followers? How many concluded that Camping was totally wrong, that they were fools for being duped, and that they should’ve seen through his charade from the beginning?

The biggest failed prediction is the one that the end of the world was at hand that’s been in the gospel accounts all the time:

This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened (Matthew 24:34).

I’ve already deflated three of the most popular predictions (the virgin birth, Isaiah 53, and Psalm 22).

The Ultimate Falsifying Evidence?

Imagine that historians discovered an ossuary (bone box) from roughly 30 CE that said, “Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, born in Bethlehem and crucified in Jerusalem” and, after much study and debate, the relevant scholars reached a consensus that it was as convincing as any Jesus evidence. Given this compelling evidence of an un-risen Jesus, would all Christians discard their belief? William Lane Craig has made clear that he would not, and I’m sure that many or most would side with him. Rationalizations abound, such as the Justin Martyr gambit: argue that the devil planted false evidence to deceive us.

Remember Poe’s Law: without some obvious wink that you’re joking, you can’t create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing. A Christianity where Jesus actually died? Not a problem!

Christianity has weathered Galileo, evolution, and the 14-billion-year-old universe. It shrugs off the Problem of Evil and the Bible’s sanction of slavery and genocide. What negative evidence could sink Christianity? Probably not even clear evidence that Jesus was just a myth. A religion operating on faith after the generation of the founders is like an arch that stays up after the scaffolding is removed.

Christianity is the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail who said, after Arthur chopped his arm off, “ ’Tis but a scratch.” It’s the Teflon religion.

Before you say something is out of this world,
make sure it isn’t of this world.
— Michael Shermer

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/7/13.)

Image credit: Joe Loong, flickr, CC