Dr. Craig replies

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William Lane Craig, a Bible scholar with two relevant doctorates, tells me that I have “a very naive understanding of the case for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus” and that I use “sophomoric refutations.” Grab some popcorn, watch the debate unfold, and see which case you think is stronger.

My original article was The Bible defeats its own Resurrection story (12/2/21), and Dr. Craig’s reply was Eyewitnesses and the Resurrection (video, 3/26/22). The conversation between Dr. Craig and his cohost Kevin Harris was polite but direct, and I’ll try to reply in kind.

The article that ruffled feathers

My point was first that Christian apologists often claim that the gospel story was told by authors who were eyewitnesses. Firsthand, eyewitness testimony would be more credible. I agree that an eyewitness source would be more credible, but the Bible makes clear that they weren’t eyewitnesses.

That’s the second point. Let’s be precise: an eyewitness to the Resurrection must (1) see Jesus alive, then (2) see him dead, then (3) see him alive again. Anyone who didn’t observe each of these might have a story to tell, but they wouldn’t be an eyewitness. Our oldest gospels say that the disciples fled before the crucifixion and death, which means they didn’t witness point (2), which means they weren’t eyewitnesses.

True, the women followers saw Jesus dead. The problem remains that the eyewitnesses weren’t the authors, and the authors weren’t eyewitnesses.

Also true, the later two gospels (Luke and John) did have the disciples witness the death. But what kind of solution is this? Now you have contradictory gospels.

Eyewitness testimony

Craig pushed back:

I don’t know of any prominent exponent of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection who would base it upon the Gospel writers being eyewitnesses to these events.

That’s not my point. I only said that “many apologists insist that the resurrection was documented by eyewitnesses.” I’m not saying that it must be, just that eyewitness status is commonly claimed for the gospel authors. Craig himself agrees: “The dominant view is that the passion narratives are early and based on eyewitness testimony.”

Craig then said:

Bob’s statement “Only eyewitness authors could be credible” is outrageously naive and patently false.

Not my claim. I’m simply paraphrasing those apologists who insist that the gospel authors must have been eyewitnesses.

NOT eyewitness testimony: writing about the distant past

Craig defends the idea that non-eyewitnesses can write good history:

Just to give one example, Arrian and Plutarch are ancient historians who wrote The Life of Alexander the Great, and they did so hundreds of years after Alexander’s death. And yet classical scholars regard these biographies of the life of Alexander as largely credible historically accurate accounts of the life of Alexander the Great.

If you’re wondering what “largely credible” is a fig leaf for, here are a couple of examples. Arrian wrote, “Alexander was also partly urged by a desire of emulating Perseus and Heracles, from both of whom he traced his descent” (Heracles and Perseus were both gods).

Plutarch said something similar, “As for Alexander’s family, it is firmly established that he was descended from Heracles through Caranus on his father’s side and from Aeacus through Neoptolemus on his mother’s” (Aeacus was also a god).

Alexander tracing his lineage back to gods on both sides of his family may have been said at the time, but the consensus of modern historians is that this isn’t historical fact. They routinely scrub the supernatural from history. Is this really the comparison Craig wants to make? Should historians give the supernatural elements in the gospel story the same harsh treatment?

The Bible makes clear that they weren’t eyewitnesses.

Dr. Craig, are you sure you want to go there?

This is an odd argument for Craig to make. He has a complicated relationship with the growth of legends. He wants to ignore the possibility of legendary contamination in the books of the New Testament (written as much as seventy years after the crucifixion). On the other hand, he doesn’t want to be forced to accept the couple of dozen noncanonical gospels written in the second century and later. He’s drawn a convenient line at roughly the year 100 CE, arguing that New Testament writings written before that date are trustworthy, and those written afterwards are not.

But now he’s arguing that the more than 400 years separating Alexander’s death from the biographies by Arrian and Plutarch are not a big deal. Is he abandoning his previous stance to now accept the noncanonical gospels?

In what seems like an Easter miracle, perhaps we’re on the same page. If Craig is saying that a 400-year gap might be acceptable if you first purge the supernatural elements, then I agree.

See also: Oral Tradition and the Game of Telephone: A. N. Sherwin-White’s Famous Quote

Continue as we puzzle over the role of women at the tomb and wonder why the disciples were surprised by the Resurrection here.

We can see the cognitive dissonance
when they try to make their excuses.
They think we don’t notice,
but it’s like the letter “l” in “salmon.”
You may not be saying it,
but when you spell it all out
we can see it right there.
— commenter MR

Fertility clinic on fire

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

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

But it’s against their religion to admit that they’re wrong. Let’s wrap up our look at the points made in these anti-choice arguments.

Less than one percent of never-married women relinquish their newborns for adoption.

Unfair! It’s an emotional argument.

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

No, drawing out buried intuitions is exactly what it does.

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

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

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

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

More hypotheticals

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cluelessness

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

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

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

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

And look at the wording in his complaint: he referred to an “unborn child.” Nothing has changed as he gropes for the familiar argument, that a zygote, embryo, or fetus is a child. But that trusty old friend is gone, because he admitted that children are different from zygotes. (Clue #1: we have different words for them.)

Spectrum argument

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

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

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

And see how the fertility clinic hypothetical changes that. With it, they admit that the embryo isn’t a person.

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

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

You are in an air-conditioned facility
with a canister of frozen embryos
and a five-year old child crying about being cold.
You have one sweater.
Do you put it on the canister or the child?
The building then bursts into flames
and you must evacuate immediately.
Do you take the child,
the embryo canister,
or just your sweater?
— commenter Greg G.

Anti-choicers misfire on the fertility clinic hypothetical

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

A few years ago, Patrick Tomlinson tweeted this scenario: if a fertility clinic were on fire and you could save either a five-year-old child or a canister with a thousand human embryos, which would you save? Read the original tweets in this post from Hemant Mehta.

“An embryo is a child” is the foundational moral claim for many in the anti-choice* community, and the fertility clinic thought experiment nicely shows that it isn’t, not even to them. Someone once observed that there’s nothing like a life-or-death predicament to help you get your priorities straight. You can pontificate at leisure about how things ought to be, but when you have seconds to decide between a child who would suffer unimaginable agony and a can of cells that not only won’t but can’t, you quickly realize what’s important.

Rebuttal

Tomlinson begins his argument with this:

Whenever abortion comes up, I have a question I’ve been asking for ten years now of the “Life begins at Conception” crowd. In ten years, no one has EVER answered it honestly.

In what was some impressive “Yes, but” tap dancing, the anti-choice advocates I picked had a lot to say, but none of them answered the question honestly, either. I’ll look at three high-profile responses, by Matt Walsh (blogger), Ben Shapiro (editor of The Daily Wire, a conservative website), and Greg Koukl (Christian radio host).

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

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

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

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

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

See also: Five Intuitive Pro-Choice Arguments

Change the subject

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

  • Walsh: “Yes, I would save the kid. No, that does not prove that the embryos have no value.” No one said it did. The point is that the child and the embryos have different values, and you’ve made plain that you agree.
  • Walsh: Leaving the embryos behind isn’t the same as killing them intentionally, and it doesn’t show that abortion is moral. The hypothetical argument doesn’t claim to prove that abortion is moral, just that “embryo = child” is false.

When you have seconds to decide between a child who would suffer unimaginable agony and a can of cells that not only won’t but can’t, you quickly realize what’s important.

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

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

Concluded in part 2.

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

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

Language and morality—does either have objective grounding?

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Christianity would be clearer with subtitles. We’ve seen how interestingly messy English can be (part 1), but thing really get weird when we let Christians explain their religion. Christianity is quick to redefine words if the traditional definitions are inconvenient.

  • Does faith mean a belief well-grounded with evidence (and which would change, if necessary, based on new evidence)? Or does it mean belief not based on evidence? Christians use both definitions.
  • The pro-life movement has redefined person to include a microscopic human zygote. (To sidestep this ploy, ask the pro-life person what the newborn baby is that the single cell nine months prior was not. This can help acknowledge the vast gulf of development that turns that single celled zygote into a trillion-cell baby.)
  • The word truth is often capitalized when referring to the fundamental tenets of Christianity. Commenter RichardSRussell clarifies the matter, “They’ve doused the word in piety sauce by capitalizing it, so you won’t mistake it for the meaning you’ll find in the dictionary.”
  • Some words are redefined as their opposite. For example, “Jesus died on the cross.” But if Jesus is alive and well now and was only pretend-dead for a day and a half, then he didn’t die.
  • “I know that God exists.” Really? In a demonstrable way, like “water dissolves sugar” or “the sun is a star”?
  • “Prayer works.” Really? Like “my computer works” or “the light switch works”?
  • Michael Newdow attacked the phrase “under God” in the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” as the national motto. Christian defenders of the status quo replied that these phrases had withered to become mere expressions of “ceremonial deism.” That’s right: the atheist thought that the word God had power, while the Christians didn’t.

I wonder how Christianity would look if we called them on their word games and returned to words’ actual definitions. Prayer would kinda work. A Christian would feel very strongly that God exists. Jesus had a painful day for our sins. Faith would be belief based on feelings or customs, not anything verifiable.

What kind of morality says today that birth control is legal and “Whites only” signs aren’t but said the reverse, in parts of the same country, seventy years before? Obviously not an objective morality.

Language and morality

Let’s highlight the similarities between language and morality.

1. Dictionaries. Languages can have dictionaries, and those dictionaries are usually descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, they simply document how words are used rather than say how they ought to be used. Dictionaries are rarely consulted, because native speakers absorbed the definitions informally since birth.

Moral rules can be documented, but these are also rarely consulted because natives pick them up from the environment as they do with the rules of language.

2. Guides. Usage and style guides are the prescriptive sources, which tell you what you should do. These tell you when to use whom rather than who (grammar), when to use continuously rather than continually (definitions of confusing words), or the rules that are mandatory at a workplace (style).

In the moral domain, Emily Post’s Etiquette is a venerable example of the rules that constrain polite people. A broader example is Confucius, who prescribed proper behavior with his teachings.

3. Crowd sourcing. Change in language doesn’t come from some authority but from the ground up, from the users themselves.

Similarly, morality comes from us. Fundamental moral tenets are taken for granted (about slavery or child work laws), and we debate ones that are in contention (abortion, capital punishment).

4. Change over time and place. Words and their definitions change with time. They’re also an attribute of society, and the language spoken in one country might be different than that in its neighbor. In the U.S. the predominant language is Modern English, but other societies do fine with other languages.

Morals also change by time and place. In the Old Testament, we find God ordering genocide, demanding human sacrifice, and defining the rules for slavery (both temporary indentured servitude and slavery for life). Modern Westerners reject these unconditionally. Morals also vary by society, and we find different rules for capital punishment, abortion, and eating meat across the globe. There is no objective set of morals just like there is no universal language.

Differences between language and morality

But this language/morality analogue isn’t perfect. Morality isn’t arbitrary in the way language is. In English, we could get along just fine if we replaced the word head with the word some other language uses—Kopf or tête or holova. And while etiquette rules are largely arbitrary (Does a gentleman need to remove his hat indoors? How do you introduce two people of unequal social rank?), some moral beliefs are part of our programming. Evolution has made our inclinations toward compassion and trust (but also jealousy and lust) more or less innate in all of us.

There was no pre-Babel common language that we all share, but we do share human morality.

What about objective morality?

Christians will say that some things are “really wrong,” but how is really wrong different from regular wrong? It’s different in degree, not kind. The wrongness due to a breach of etiquette is different in degree from that of a murder, not different in kind.

“Really” wrong is usually intended to mean objectively wrong. William Lane Craig defines objective morality as “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” But look up morality in a dictionary and you’ll find nothing about an objective grounding. Those who handwave about an objective morality admit that morality doesn’t mean that, because if it did, they wouldn’t have to add the qualifier objective!

To view this charitably, they’re making a distinction between morality from society and morality from evolution—that is, morality as changeable vs. morality as hardwired. But they fail to provide evidence that any part of morality is grounded outside the human mind or comes from God.

What kind of morality says today that birth control is legal and “Whites only” signs aren’t but said the reverse, in parts of the same country, seventy years before? Obviously not an objective morality.

Changes in morality are like changes in language. Language is not immutable, it’s not objectively correct, and it doesn’t come from God. The same is true for morality.

Some women approached Dr. Johnson
after he had published his famous dictionary
to thank him for not putting in any vulgar words.
He said, “And I congratulate you ladies
for looking them up.”

“On accident” or “by accident”? Word choice and objective morality.

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Which sounds better: “I took your book by accident” or “I took your book on accident”?

We may want an objectively correct final arbiter that can define words and settle questions of usage with authority. This authority would always be correct and would be above human messiness, but this ultimate arbiter doesn’t exist. New words come into popular usage and definitions of old words change through a crowd-sourced negotiation.

It’s like morality. There is no final moral arbiter—not a Being, and not a book. The buck stops with us.

Oddities of English

To explore this parallel between words we define and morality we define, let’s first poke around some of the oddities of English.

What does peruse mean? Does it mean to look over in a cursory manner? Or does it mean the opposite: to study carefully? Yes, it does—both definitions are valid (go look it up; I’ll wait). If you get cranky seeing new definitions given to old words, note that “look over in a cursory manner” is the new definition.

Speaking of words that have two opposite meanings, there are lots of these contranyms. The Devil’s Dictionary (first published in 1906) defines infidel, “In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.” Here are a few more words that have two contradicting definitions:

  • Dust: dust a cake with powdered sugar vs. dust the furniture
  • Off: turn a light off vs. the bomb went off
  • Screen: screen from view vs. screen a movie

Is the change in words and language usage hopelessly messy and confusing? I think the opposite is true.

Word stories

So then what does peruse mean?! It means what we say it means, acknowledging that “we” don’t speak with a single voice. We can consult a dictionary, but in the case of peruse, it’ll just verify that these two opposite definitions are both valid, leaving to us the choice of one definition over the other or to find a synonym without this ambiguity.

Let’s peek under the couch cushions of English to find more interesting word stories.

  • Does decimate mean to destroy a tenth? Or to destroy almost all?
  • Do you get as annoyed as I do when “beg the question” is used to mean “encourage or invite the question”? It actually means “assume the issue we’re talking about”—in other words, to use circular logic. I hear it used in the first way almost exclusively … but of course that means that the public has spoken and I’ve lost, and this upstart new definition is the primary definition in the dictionary.
  • Regionalisms are words that vary based on location. For example, what do you call a soft drink? In the U.S., soda, pop, and coke dominate in different parts of the country. Is mayonnaise two syllables or three? Is it y’all or you guys? Is it puh-JAH-muz or puh-JAM-uz? Maps illustrate this tug of war.
  • Esquivalence is an invented word added to the 2001 New Oxford American Dictionary as a copyright trap. Here’s its invented definition: “Deliberate shirking of one’s official duties.” We could ask if esquivalence is a real word, but what more is a word than its spelling and definition? That’s enough to communicate, and it’s even in a dictionary.
  • Speaking of invented words, have you heard of this word origin? The story goes that in the late 1700s in Dublin, one man bet another that he could have a completely new word on everyone’s lips within 24 hours. That night, the man who’d made the boast enlisted street urchins to paint the word all over Dublin—on curbs, walls, sidewalks, and more. The word that everyone was talking about within 24 hours? Quiz.
  • William Shakespeare invented many words and was the first to put many more on paper. Some credit him with almost 2000 novel words, including accommodation, critic, fitful, lapse, obscene, and pious.
  • The new St. Paul’s cathedral, rebuilt after the 1666 Great Fire of London, was called by the king, “amusing, awful, and artificial.” That sounds odd until you realize that those words meant amazing, awe-inspiring, and artistic. Definitions drift.

Is the change in words and language usage hopelessly messy and confusing? I think the opposite is true. It’s crowd sourced, which means that the people who create the change are the consumers of that change.

On accident vs. by accident

Let’s return to on accident and by accident. The logic of on accident is that it parallels its opposite, on purpose. It’s also more popular among young people, which suggests that it will eventually win out. On the other hand, it is rarely used outside the U.S. (Of course, you can sidestep the confusion and just use accidentally.)

Where does meaning come from?

Imagine someone creates an upstart word and starts using it. The purpose of words is to communicate, and that happens when we share definitions. If they use their new word so that others can infer the meaning (or they take pains to define it), it might catch on like a meme.

In an extreme, someone can make up whatever words or definitions they please, as Humpty Dumpty did in Through the Looking Glass, but they’ll communicate better if they use well-known words and definitions.

This is how language works. It sounds haphazard, and yet we communicate easily. No natural language has an absolute source.

Concluded with a look at how Christianity plays with words and the logic of objective morality.

“When I use a word,”
Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean—
neither more nor less.”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Stupid arguments Christians should avoid: You can’t judge God

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Well, aren’t you arrogant! Who are you to judge God?

Welcome to stupid arguments Christians should avoid #45! Here’s a comment from this blog that illustrates the popular Christian idea that we mortals are in no position to judge God’s actions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a day passes over this earth,
but men and women of no note do great deeds,
speak great words,
and suffer noble sorrows.
— Charles Reed