Yet More on the Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science

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Bible scienceI recently analyzed claims made by Christian apologists arguing that the Bible correctly anticipated modern scientific discoveries. It becomes plain that these were simply science-y sounding verses cherry picked to satisfy a Christian agenda when you see that none taught us anything new about nature. Any insights came exclusively from science.

Augustine (354–430) rejected the quest for science in the Bible. He said, “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said, ‘I am sending you the Holy Spirit, that he may teach you about the course of the sun and the moon.’ He wished to make people Christians not astronomers.”

But many Christians ignore Augustine, and the flurry of claims continues. The previous posts analyzed Bible verses that seemed to accurately reveal science. Let’s move on to another category, science claims within the Bible that don’t line up with what modern science tells us. Do they reveal startling insights into science, or are they simply the superstitions of primitive pre-scientific people?

We do find startling things in the Bible, but they’re not very scientific. Let’s start with claims about cosmology and the structure of the earth.

1. The earth is immoveable

The world is firmly established, it will not be moved (Psalm 93:1; see also Ps. 96:10, 1 Chronicles 16:30).

Real science tells us that the earth is anything but fixed; it orbits the sun, the entire solar system orbits the galactic center, and the Milky Way galaxy itself moves through space.

2. The earth rests on a foundation

For the foundations of the earth are Jehovah’s; upon them he has set the world (1 Samuel 2:8; see also Ps. 102:25, Ps. 104:5, Zechariah 12:1).

We’re also told what this foundation is made of.

He shakes the earth from its place and makes its pillars tremble (Job 9:6; see also Job 26:11).

Apologists might say that “pillars” simply refers to mountains or bedrock, but a more plausible conclusion is that the literal interpretation was the intended one and that the Hebrew cosmology imagined a flat earth surrounded by or suspended on an ocean, as was popular in ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India.

3. The sky is solid

The cosmology in Genesis makes clear that the earth rests between water underneath and more water in a dome above. We see this in the Noah story when “the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened” (Genesis 7:11). For details, see my post on Noah and Hebrew cosmology here.

That dome must be solid to hold up the water. We also see this elsewhere in the Old Testament:

Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies (Ps. 148:4).

When He made firm the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed (Proverbs 8:28).

What is this dome made of? Job suggests that it’s made of metal:

Can you, with him, beat out the skies, strong as a mirror of cast bronze? (Job 37:18)

“Beat out” (“spread out” in some translations) is the verb used for hammering out metal.

We get one more clue from the equivalent Sumerian cosmology. (The Babylonian captivity from 597–539 BCE could be where the Hebrews picked it up, or it might have come through trade.) The dome might’ve been made of what the Sumerians called the “metal of heaven,” the metal we call tin.

4. The earth is flat

We’ve seen a flat disk of earth before.

[God] sits above the circle of the earth (Isaiah 40:22).

Our previous analysis showed that this is no reference to a spherical earth (they had another word for “ball” or “sphere”) but simply a flat disk. We also find other clues:

And there was evening, and there was morning, the third day (Gen. 1:13).

The six-day creation story assumes a flat earth because a time reference would’ve been necessary on a spherical earth. To see this, suppose God began creating the plants in the morning on Day Three based on the time in Mesopotamia. This means that God began this project in the evening of Day Two in much of the rest of the world (western North America, for example). Only with a time standard (“according to Mesopotamian Standard Time”) would this be unambiguous.

We also find a flat earth in the New Testament.

The devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor (Matthew 4:8).

A high spot to see all the world is possible on a flat earth but not on a spherical planet. And consider that a mountaintop from which you could see everywhere on the earth could itself be seen from everywhere on earth. So go outside and look around. It’s there—the claim that it’s on the horizon somewhere is as reliable as the Bible itself. (Thanks to commenter RichardSRussell for this observation.)

5. The earth is at the center of not just the solar system but the universe

Here’s another verse we’ve seen before that makes clear that the sun moves around the earth.

The sun rises and the sun sets; and hastening to its place it rises there again (Ecclesiastes 1:5; see also Ps. 19:6).

Two more examples are when God played games with the sun, stopping its motion for hours so Joshua could continue killing Amorites (Joshua 10:13) and then moving it backwards to give a sign to King Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:8–11). It’s no big deal for God to move things across the sky, but it gets complicated in a heliocentric solar system when “stopping the sun” actually means stopping the earth’s rotation.

Could God have used magic to stop the earth’s rotation so that its inhabitants didn’t notice the deceleration and subsequent acceleration (and report it in the biblical accounts)? Could he have maintained the earth’s protective magnetic field that would’ve been lost if the molten iron core stopped rotating? Sure, but why imagine that instead of the heliocentric solar system known to science since the early sixteenth century?

6. Confused creation order

God created the earth and land plants in the first three days, but the sun wasn’t made until the fourth. Photosynthesizing plants obviously couldn’t survive without the sun.

Compare the order of creation in Genesis with the order we’ve learned through science. In Genesis, it’s first earth, then land plants, sun and moon, fish, birds, land animals, and finally humans. Science instead tells us that the evidence points to the sun being first, then the earth, then the moon. Single-celled organisms were the only life for several billion years. Then photosynthesizing organisms, then land plants, fish, land animals, and finally birds. But Genesis is right that humans came last—yay.

(This is off our topic of science errors in the Bible, but the two creation stories—the six-day creation story and the Garden of Eden story—have many incompatibilities).

Concluded in part 2.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God
who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect
has intended us to forgo their use.
— Galileo Galilei

Photo credit: Andy Murray, flickr, CC

The Inadequate Deist Argument

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I read or listen to many arguments from Christian apologists, and they usually have a curious flaw. I’m surprised when they take little notice of this.

Consider the following popular arguments and see if you can find the common feature.

Popular Christian apologetics

  • Cosmological Argument: “Someone had to get everything started, therefore God”
  • Moral Argument: “Objective morals exist, and who but God could create them?”
  • Transcendental Argument: “What grounds logic? God does.”
  • Ontological Argument: “If ‘God’ is the greatest possible being that we can imagine, and a being existing is greater than being imaginary, then this greatest being must exist.”
  • Design Argument: “Just look around you and you’ll see the marvelously complex design of a Designer.”
  • Fine Tuning Argument: “The constants that define the universe are fine-tuned for life, therefore God.”
  • Argument from Incredulity: “It’s all just so … so incredibly complex! Therefore, God.”

What’s the common feature? It’s that these are all deist arguments. If I accepted any one of them, I’d only be agreeing that some deity (or deities) created the universe. But which one? These arguments are as good for Islam or Shintoism as Christianity and Judaism.

(This reminds me of the famous Sidney Harris cartoon with the punch line “I think you should be more explicit here in step 2.” Christians likewise need to make sure their arguments are comprehensive.)

And yet the apologists often seem unaware of the problem. They finish their deist argument with a “Ta-dah!” and a sweep of the hand and think that they’ve made the sale, but they’ve got a long way to go to convince me that their particular deity is the real one and it’s actually all those other ones that are mere human inventions.

Maybe they count on ambiguity to help. They conclude that God created everything and—whaddya know?—their god is named “God.” I’ve written before about this odd confusion of names. It’s like a cat named “Cat.”

One exception is John Warwick Montgomery, an apologist from an earlier generation. He takes the opposite approach and first uses the New Testament to argue the resurrection of Jesus. From there, he tries to build the rest of the Christian worldview. This approach is no more convincing, but at least it avoids this problem with deist arguments.

The general problem with deist arguments

Remember Sherlock Holmes’ famous dictum? “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The problem with this rule for us mortals is that either we’ve eliminated something in error or there’s another possibility we didn’t consider. While the dictum is true in principle, it’s very impractical to follow in practice.

The problem with the deist argument is similar because it also uses the process of elimination. Since there’s no direct evidence of God, deist arguments attempt to eliminate the natural answer(s) and leave the supernatural as the only viable possibility. But how do you know that all the scientific possibilities are on the table? A last-man-standing approach is risky because science is always provisional. It continues to surprise us. Christian philosophers often appeal to common sense, but this only leads us astray in fields like quantum physics or cosmology where common sense is frequently upset.

Christian apologists need to put forward positive evidence of their own.

How can we access the supernatural?

If we explain the world in a Christian way, God is active in our natural world, and we can see his hand in Nature. This runs into a problem for Christians that is at least as big as the Problem of Evil: the Problem of Divine Hiddenness. If God enters into our world and is eager for a relationship, why the mystery? Why make things so difficult? Why is our world exactly like a world without a god?

If we imagine the opposite, that God isn’t particularly eager for a relationship or isn’t motivated to provide compelling evidence that he exists, then we’re back in the deist camp. We have a deity who exists, but we’re on our own to show that he exists anywhere but in our minds. If the deity hasn’t provided a conduit between the Natural and the Supernatural, why imagine that natural techniques (prayer, meditation, or logic, say) could prove the existence of the supernatural? If God is just sitting there and not helping us out, how can we show that he exists?

Christians sometimes retreat by arguing that science is incapable of detecting the supernatural. That would be relevant if supernatural beings never interacted with our reality. But if those beings interact (that is, change) our world, then this is in principle detectable by science.

Also consider that the boundary of “natural” expands with time. Seeing through opaque objects was supernatural before X-rays, for example. And even if science can’t detect supernatural beings, what makes those Christians imagine that they can?

A couple of analogies come to mind. Imagine using integers (1, 2, 3, …) with addition and subtraction and trying to creating anything but more integers. You couldn’t reach 7.65, the square root of 2, or pi, for example. Or, imagine a two-dimensional Flatlander trying to prove the existence of three-dimensional space. Sure, he can hypothesize “a dimension at right angles to all of my dimensions,” but that’s hardly a proof that it exists.

It seems to me that our pointing to evidence of the supernatural with a deist argument is like creating all real numbers using addition and subtraction on integers, or a Flatlander proving the existence of 3-space. Sure, we can imagine something more, but that’s no proof and not even particularly compelling evidence.

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. 
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; 
But will they come when you do call for them?   
— William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, act III, scene i

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/28/13.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

God’s Kryptonite

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We’re told that God is all powerful, and stories of other deities are false. Though this is the Christian interpretation today, that wasn’t the case in the early days of the Old Testament, and the Bible itself makes that clear. Let’s look at two examples where God was not all powerful.

Christianity god defeatedStory 1: Cage match of the gods

In the tale of yet another Old Testament battle, Israel, Judah, and Edom are allied against Moab. The year is around 846 BCE. Trekking through the desert, the allied army runs out of water, but the prophet Elisha promises both water and total victory over Moab. The next morning, pools of water cover the ground, plenty for both men and animals.

The Moabite soldiers massed on their border see the unexpected water, but it looks red because of the morning sun. Thinking that this is the bloody aftermath of infighting within the alliance, the Moabites advance to plunder the camp. Hidden Israelites rise up and turn them back, and then they advance into Moab and destroy all the cities and towns except one stronghold.

The king of Moab has one final ploy. He takes his son, the future king, and sacrifices him on the city wall to the Moabite god Chemosh. The result:

There was an outburst of divine anger against Israel, so they broke off the attack and returned to their homeland (2 Kings 3:27, NET).

Wait a minute—I thought that just a few verses earlier, Elisha promised that “[Jehovah will] hand Moab over to you. You will defeat every fortified city and every important city” (2 Kings 3:18–19). That’s an odd way of saying, “You will get your butt kicked.”

But more important, in a mano-a-mano between Jehovah and Chemosh, Chemosh wins? Could Jehovah have won but he didn’t get that extra energy boost that Chemosh got with his sacrifice, so Jehovah couldn’t give a hundred percent?

Ever resourceful, apologists have various rationalizations. One is that the Moabites were energized by the public sacrifice and fought with renewed vigor, and another is that Israel’s allies were fed up with the campaign and attacked Israel. Or, perhaps “his son” means the King of Edom’s son, and the Edomites become furious with Israel.

Though what defeated Israel is variously translated as “fury,” “great anger,” “great wrath,” or “great indignation,” the NET Bible says that the Hebrew word in question is almost exclusively used to mean “an outburst of divine anger.”

Letting the Bible speak for itself, the king of Moab sacrificed his son to Chemosh and then, as a consequence, there was divine anger against Israel. The only two divinities in play here are Jehovah and Chemosh, and though Jehovah is sometimes capricious, it’s hard to imagine why he would defeat Israel when he had just promised to give them victory.

In this cage match, Jehovah lost.

Story 2: Tent pegs can be fatal

In one of the more oddly savage passages in the Bible, Israel defeats an army led by Sisera, leaving Sisera as the sole survivor. He finds refuge in the tent of Jael, a non-Israelite woman, and he falls into an exhausted sleep. But she’s not the ally that he imagines, and she uses a hammer to drive a tent peg through his head into the ground (Judges 4:17–22).

Sisera had harassed Israel for twenty years with 900 chariots “fitted with iron” (Judges 4:3). But as powerful as this chariot force was, Israel (and God) were able to defeat it.

Earlier in Judges, another conflict ends very differently. The book begins with the tribes of Judah and Simeon joining forces to mop up remaining Canaanite strongholds including Jerusalem, Hebron, and others.

One interesting city was Debir, which sounds like the Alexandria of Canaan. Also called Kiriath Sepher (City of Scribes), it was inhabited by giant Anakites, descendants of the Nephilim, to whom ordinary men were as grasshoppers (see Numbers 13:31–33). The defeat of this city is given no comment except that the Judean leader gave his daughter to the commander who captured the city.

But the campaign wasn’t universally successful.

[Jehovah] was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron (Judges 1:19).

Was Jehovah not supporting them? The verse makes clear that he was. And if he was there, what’s the problem with the iron chariots?

(If God was confounded by them, he’d cry like a little girl if confronted with a battalion of the bad boys in the photo above.)

If you want support from the toughest god, maybe Chemosh is your guy. He certainly convinced the Moabites. Or, if Chemosh is just fiction, perhaps Jehovah is the same.

God gives every indication of being simply a literary character who has evolved over time. Of course he has setbacks—it wasn’t like he was all-powerful (at least, not at this point in the story).

We know that reason is the Devil’s harlot, 
and can do nothing but slander and harm all that God says and does…
Therefore keep to revelation and do not try to understand.
— Martin Luther

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/26/13.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

New Commenting System: Welcome to World Table

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Today the Cross Examined blog gets a new commenting system, World Table. Older posts still have their old Disqus comments, and new comments can be entered with either system. Going forward, however, posts will only allow comments with World Table.

Why?

The New Idea is the ratings system, which is designed to create more civil conversations—take a look at the comment box below, and you’ll notice the slogan, “Credibility Matters.”

A top-level comment (a comment on the post) shows four “virtues” of the post, and you’re invited, though not required, to rate each one. Was the post respectful? Helpful? Honest? Likable? You’ll see “Bob’s post is …” to remind you what you’re rating.

A comment on a comment shows a different label, “BuddyChrist’s comment is …” so it’s clear that now you’re rating his comment.

You can write a reply or just give a rating, or you can do both.

Civil conversation

We’ve had discussions through comments lately of what to do with commenters who are more trouble than they’re worth, but with World Table, the problem resolves itself.

As an example, take my profile below. I’ve made a couple of comments at another Patheos blog that uses World Table. My score (scores run from 0 to 100) started at 50, and now it’s up to 62. The faint “(16)” means that I’ve gotten 16 virtue ratings (4 ratings that set all 4 virtues). But suppose readers felt that I was not respectful, helpful, honest, and/or likeable. In that case, my score might’ve fallen below 50. At some point, it could fall below the threshold at a particular blog (say, 40), and I would no longer be allowed to comment or rate. Someone might have a decent score but have bad ratings on one comment. When the ratings are bad enough, that comment will be hidden.

WorldTableID

Banning as such will be unnecessary. Ratings are crowdsourced, and obnoxious or useless commenters will soon find themselves unable to comment, and they will know why. Ratings by commenters with high scores count more than ratings from low-score commenters.

You have a single World Table score that follows you around to other sites that use it. That score becomes part of one’s introduction, and a new commenter with an 85 score might deserve a closer look than someone with a 55.

Commenting with World Table

You must sign in the first time, but your profile at Disqus (or other social media) can be used.

I found the various features very discoverable, so jump in and have a go. Write a sample comment below to see what happens.

Patheos is rolling out World Table among the blogs gradually. It’s an alpha version, which means that there will be both bug fixes and new features in the future. More information from World Table is available here, and a brief introductory video will be helpful to those people now saying, “We’ve got to learn another commenting system again?”

Issues

  • The Internet Explorer browser is not supported, though Microsoft’s new browser (Microsoft Edge) is.
  • Comments are not editable (yet).
  • If you sign up through Disqus, the email address isn’t passed along to World Table, so you won’t get email notifications as with Disqus. This should soon be fixed, but you can add other accounts like Facebook to your profile here to get an email address attached to your account.
  • If you have questions, ask them below, and if you find bugs, have complaints, or get new ideas, send feedback to World Table.

The aim of an argument or discussion
should not be victory, but progress.
— Joseph Joubert, French essayist

Image credit: pixabay, CC0

Response to My Position on Abortion

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I argue that personhood during pregnancy is a spectrum—a newborn is a person, but the single cell at the other end of the spectrum is not.*

My claim about personhood seems to be a simple and obvious point, but there are many who insist (1) that there is no meaningful difference and that the spectrum doesn’t exist and (2) their interpretation should be imposed on the rest of the country by law.

I got a rebuttal to my post by fellow Patheos blogger Tara Edelschick at the Homeschool Chronicles blog, and I’d like to go through Tara’s points. She begins with, “I’m an evangelical, homeschooling, anti-choice woman” and then adds, “I’m also a feminist who is against the death penalty, voted for Ralph Nader every time that was an option, and supported Obama in each of the last two elections.”

Looks like Tara doesn’t fit into the typical evangelical box—in fact, her post was titled “The Constraining Abortion Box.” Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Religious opinions have changed

She begins by responding to lists of American religious leaders in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade who supported it.

The fact that most evangelicals felt differently about abortion in the past is not relevant to whether or not it’s immoral.  After all, fifty years ago plenty of evangelicals also supported anti-miscegenation laws.

Those evangelicals used your Bible and Christian tradition to argue in favor of the pro-choice position. Let’s not dismiss them as fools or charge them with playing games. This makes it clear that the Christian position easily supports the pro-choice position.

When does life begin?

She responds to my saying that, as a father who has helped raise two children from babies to adults, I’m an expert on “babies” and reject that idea that a single invisible cell is one. She said:

Is he really claiming to be an expert on when life begins because he is a father?

Perhaps we’re talking past each other. First, I said that I’m an expert just on what a “baby” is, and something you need a microscope to see isn’t a baby. In other words, if you want to see both ends of the spectrum as a baby, that’s fine, but don’t impose that conclusion on the rest of us.

Second, when life begins was never the subject, but I doubt that we have much disagreement here. The new life with its unique DNA obviously begins at conception, though you could argue that, since fertilization isn’t abiogenesis, it isn’t a beginning but a continuation of life.

Freedom to choose

She said, “I want to hear the voice of God. I understand that many fellow citizens have no such desire. I respect that….” And I’m happy to reciprocate and respect that she wants to hear the voice of God. The United States Constitution establishes many important freedoms, and she has the right to that. Back to the topic, she can choose whether an abortion is right or wrong for her, and she can encourage her opinion on others. Where I object is when she wants to impose her conclusion that abortion is wrong on all of us. (I conclude that she wants Roe overturned because in her subsequent post she says, “In general, women should not be able to choose to end their pregnancies.”)

Back to the subject of what “baby” means, she says, “Even a clear scientific definition of what constitutes a baby will not bring us to consensus.” It may well be that nothing will bring us to consensus, but as for what “baby” means, the relevant Merriam-Webster definition is pretty straightforward: “an extremely young child; especially: infant.”

Given this definition, you can see why I object to the spectrum-collapsing approach of calling the single cell a baby.

Back to the spectrum argument

In my post, I listed a number of familiar before-and-after situations and culminated with “[and] a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.” Her response:

Yup. That’s true. And I don’t know a single person who disagrees.

She should read the comments at my blog to find a slice of Christianity that does indeed disagree. Accepting the significant differences between the two ends of the spectrum is impossible to most of my Christian commenters.

Acknowledging that there is a spectrum of meaning between zygote and college graduate does not mean, as Bob suggests, that one would need to be pro-choice.

Let me back up and note that the goal of my spectrum argument is modest. I simply want to attack the argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is wrong to kill a human life; therefore (3) abortion is wrong. We need to think of a word (“person,” for example) that can be applied to the newborn but can’t be applied to the single cell.

It sounds like Tara and I are on the same page, which is a point of agreement worth celebrating, and yet she still thinks that killing that single cell is wrong. Fair enough—that she consider my argument is all I can ask. What I have a problem with is her wanting to impose her conclusions on the rest of us by law.

So we agree on the spectrum—what’s next?

She moves on to the question of where pro-choicers would draw the line.

Is [the line] at birth? Why? Why not a day before birth? Or three months before birth? What about after birth but before the umbilical cord is cut? Why not a couple weeks after birth? What’s the difference? And who are you to decide?

I sense that Tara sees these questions as some sort of show stopper, but how does society decide any tough moral issue? For example: what should the prison term be for robbery? For attempted robbery where nothing was stolen? For robbery with a gun? For robbery with an injury? For robbery with a death? Is the death penalty a possibility? Are extenuating circumstances relevant and, if so, how are they factored in? And on and on.

These questions are also about people’s lives. Six months or six years makes a big difference in the life of the person sentenced.

We have law-making bodies at various levels through the country, and one hopes that the relevant laws are decided with expert input and measured deliberation. Law making does its imperfect best to answer questions like these about robbery and thousands more.

Indeed, Tara’s questions have already been answered many times. In each state, a combination of state law and federal law defines when an abortion is legal and the various exceptions that might apply.

Who’s to decide?

The most insightful comment I’ve gotten on my many posts in support of abortion was this one from Chuck Wolber:

Have no illusions, if abortion really were murder, it would come as an instinctive reaction from women. It would come with such force that men would be confused by the average woman’s revulsion towards abortion.

Here’s a parallel observation from the other side of the gender aisle:

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament (Florynce Kennedy).

In the same way that society trusts parents to raise their children properly, stepping in only when it’s clear that something has gone wrong, I want to trust the instincts of the pregnant woman. These instincts come from the front lines of the issue, from the person who understands both the importance of the potential person inside her as well as any reasons why a new life many not be a good idea.

I do not believe that just because
you’re opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life.
In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking …
if all you want is a child born but not a child fed,
not a child educated, not a child housed.
And why would I think that you don’t?
Because you don’t want any tax money to go there.
That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.
We need a much broader conversation
on what the morality of pro-life is.
— Sister Joan Chittister

* If you object to the word “person,” give me a substitute. It must replace “person” in the opening sentence, and so must be something that the newborn is while the single cell is not. With all the words we come up with for small distinctions in the first few years of life—infant, baby, newborn, child, toddler, kid, and so on—surely we can find a word to describe the transition during the nine months of gestation.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/24/13.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Christianity Is a Hospital, and Sinners Are Ill (Or Not)

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If Christianity is the correct moral and spiritual path, why doesn’t it look like it?

Some Christians are good and some not so much, just like in any large population, but if morality is a central part of religion and Christianity is the one true religion, shouldn’t this be obvious somehow? Why can you not tell a person following the truth path from one following a false religion by their actions? Why are prisons full of Christians?

Christians have a response. When you look in a church, you see that it’s full of sinners. Well, what did you expect? Christianity says that we’re all fallen people. Jesus said, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” The church is a hospital, with the sinners as the patients.

Let’s take this metaphor for a drive and see the many ways it fails.

1. A hospital stay is temporary. When you’re sick, you go to the hospital if you must, but your stay should be as brief as possible. The hospital is the option of last recourse. Financial pressure encourages the patient to leave quickly.

By contrast, church isn’t to be avoided, it’s celebrated. It’s a lifestyle and a worldview. Once you’re in, there are often penalties for leaving such as loss of friendships and even family. Church isn’t free, and you are encouraged to contribute as much as possible.

2. Hospitals improve society. If we can expand the metaphor to include modern medicine and health-focused social policy, this expansive view of “hospitals” has found many ways to keep you out of a hospital bed: a healthy lifestyle with proper diet and exercise, vaccines, improved environmental conditions, laws to safeguard working conditions and food, and preventative medicine like periodic checkups.

By contrast, churches have no interest in seeing you leave. They sometimes encourage their members to fiddle with social policy, standing in the way of same-sex marriage and abortion, for example. Church leadership often dabbles in politics. Christians can push for Creationism to be taught in schools. Evidence drives medicine, but dogma drives religious meddling.

3. A hospital can cure you. Modern medicine isn’t perfect, but it often cures an illness. While medical treatment and research is expensive, we have a lot to show for it.

By contrast, churches have no concept of a cure for a spiritual ailment. To follow the metaphor, churches provide palliative care only. Christianity says that we’re born spiritually sick, there is no cure in this lifetime, and God himself made us so. As Christopher Hitchens noted, “We are created sick and commanded to be well.”

Religion takes in over $100 billion in the U.S. every year. Tell me that church is a country club and I’ll buy it, not so much that it’s a hospital.

4. Hospitals treat actual illness. Hospitals treat illnesses like pneumonia, hepatitis, and AIDS.

By contrast, churches invent a new problem of sin plus a god to get offended by it, as if there weren’t enough real problems in the world. This is theology, not science.

Here’s an idea: if God is offended by sin, let’s assume that he’s a big boy and can take care of it. He can tell us himself how we should conduct our lives, not through a religion that looks no different from all the other manmade religions. That God needs human agents here on earth and never speaks for himself is more evidence.

5. Hospitals follow science. Hospitals use medicine, and medicine follows evidence.

Churches use dogma and faith, not evidence.

6. Hospitals work. Antibiotics and other medicine as well as other treatments work. Some are 100% reliable, while others are less so, and doctors can reliably predict how a course of treatment will go.

Churches use prayer whose only effectiveness is as a placebo. Christians often say that prayer works, but it certainly doesn’t in the sense that medicine, electricity, or cars work. Prayer may reliably work only in that it provides meditative benefits, but that is certainly not the intention behind the claim “prayer works.”

They also claim that miracles happen. I issue a challenge to provide that evidence here.

7. Hospitals use professionals. Doctors and nurses are trained. Evidence is used to improve their training.

Jesus is the Great Physician (as in a spiritual healer) in name only. He never shows up. It’s said that he does his work by magic, but there’s no evidence of this. People marvel at his work, just like people marveled at the diaphanous fabric made by the tailors weaving the Emperor’s new clothes. Any example of an actual healing through the church—someone who kicked an addiction or got out of homelessness or got control of their anger—has people behind it.

In this “hospital,” the patients treat each other. Some are lay members and some are clergy, but they’re all ordinary people, with the Big Man conspicuously absent.

The treatments (that is, the right path of spiritual living) are sometimes incompatible between Christian denominations. Extend that out to all religious people, and the incompatibilities underscore the partisan nature of religion’s answers (more here).

8. Bad things happen if you need to go to the hospital but don’t. Centuries ago, doctors might’ve caused more illness than they cured, but we’re long past that. Faith healing or wishful thinking are no help when there is a medical cure.

By contrast, people outside the church look about the same as those who are members. In fact, those who had been in but quit the church say they’re happier. (Of course, Christians will say that the opposite is also true—those who had been outside the church and are now inside are happier. There are plenty of miserable Christians, but let’s accept that point. That simply makes this a worldview issue. Atheism and Christianity are worldviews, and those in each one prefer it to the other. But is this the best that the One True Religion can claim? It’s just another worldview? Shouldn’t it be obviously better somehow?)

But there is one parallel that works. Hospital-acquired infections cause or contribute to 100,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. Similarly, churches can give you new spiritual infections such as new biases or hatreds.

Acknowledgement: This post was inspired by an excellent commentary by Deacon Duncan at Alethian Worldview.

You say you’re supposed to be nice
to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists
and this, that, and the other thing.
Nonsense! I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.
— Pat Robertson

Image credit: Wikimedia