How likely was the empty tomb, Part 3? Empty tomb or empty promise?

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This is the final column in response to a recent the article, “12 reasons to accept the empty tomb as a historical fact.” Before you read my reasons nine through twelve, I recommend that you check out Part 1 and Part 2. And, if you can find points that I’ve missed, share them in the comments.

9. The leaders of the day didn’t produce a body

If Christianity were a nuisance, why not shut it down by presenting the body? The Jewish and Roman leaders could’ve undercut Christianity’s central claim. That they didn’t produce a body suggests that they didn’t have one. An empty tomb would explain this.

Critiquing the gospel story by assuming the story is like taking the Goldilocks story up to where she was woken by the bears and demanding to know what she should’ve done besides run away.

The resurrection didn’t happen two days after the crucifixion of Jesus; it happened two decades later in Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15. Or two decades after that in Mark. The Jewish and Roman leaders in the story are in a story. If Christianity was troublesome in Paul’s or Mark’s time, the time to reveal the body was long passed.

If Jesus were a real person who was a real rabble-rouser (the “King of the Jews” title would’ve been a very clear poke in the eye to Rome) and really was executed by the Romans, then why produce the body? The leader was dead; case closed.

The book of Acts agrees. It has no “was he/wasn’t he resurrected?” arguments. There was no seditious behavior at that first Pentecost, fifty days after Easter (see Acts 2). Again, what would producing the body be a response to?

And why imagine the body of Jesus would have changed things? Remember the example of the Millerites—religion is largely above the facts. It took years for Christianity to evolve its interpretation of Jesus’s death. In the days after the first Easter, it would’ve made no sense for the Romans to say, “Y’know how the bodily resurrection of Jesus will be a big deal within Christianity years from now? Well, guess whose body we just found!”

Christianity with the corpse of Jesus could’ve seen Jesus as a martyr—it’s a much more powerful sacrifice if Jesus stayed dead. Or maybe Jesus would’ve risen as a spirit to rule in heaven, discarding his useless body. Or the early Christians could’ve just dismissed any body as a Roman deception.

10. The empty tomb hypothesis is widely accepted

A strong majority of scholars accept the empty tomb hypothesis. “[Gary] Habermas notes that over one-hundred contemporary scholars accept at least some of the arguments for the empty tomb.”

Do Muslim scholars accept the empty tomb? Nope. They are comfortable with the supernatural, they revere Jesus, they accept him as a prophet, but they reject the resurrection. Are they biased? Probably, but by the same logic, so is your “strong majority [of scholars].”

11. The story is simple

“The story of Jesus’s burial is simple without any form of theological development. Its simplicity argues for the empty tomb’s authenticity. Signs of legendary development are simply not found in the empty tomb hypothesis.”

Suppose our oldest tale of Merlin the magician has him buried without ceremony. Or maybe it says “And then Merlin died,” and that’s it. Would that make believable the tales of his magic? And if not, why imagine that this process would make believable the far more fanciful tales of Jesus?

You claim that complexity suggests legendary accretion. I’ll buy that, but why bring this up since Christianity is extremely complicated! Books on systematic theology are 1500 pages and more. The Bible has close to a million words, and the church needed more than twenty worldwide councils to fill in its gaps.

12. The resurrection and empty tomb were too early to be legend

“The resurrection story and the empty tomb are part of the pre-Markan passion story which is extremely early which precludes any time for legendary development. Legendary claims do not apply to the empty tomb hypothesis. This suggests that the tomb was not something that came later in the Christian story but was rather found at ground zero.”

You want legendary development? Before Mark was Paul, and here’s what Paul says about the divinity of Jesus:

[Jesus], who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 1:3–4).

That’s right—Jesus became divine at his resurrection.

Let’s move forward in time to the first gospel, Mark. Here, Jesus becomes divine at his baptism:

Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:10–11).

Then it gets earlier: Matthew and Luke are the two gospels with nativity stories. Angels announce the supernatural birth.

And in John,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning (John 1:1–2).

The later the New Testament book, the earlier and grander is the stature of Jesus. That’s legendary development!

But back to our Christian argument. Its focus is the historicity of the empty tomb. Did just that element stay simple?

Hardly. The gospels aren’t consistent on whose tomb it was and where it was. Matthew alone has the bit about Pilate ordering guards to keep the tomb secure and the guards being told to lie that the disciples took the body. The synoptic gospels say the death and burial were on the day after the Passover, while John says the day before. The events at the tomb on Easter morning vary: the number of angels, how the stone was moved from the entrance, who applied spices, which women went to the tomb, which male disciples went to the tomb, if Jesus was there and who he spoke to, what the women did afterwards, whether Jesus met with the disciples afterwards in Galilee or Jerusalem, and so on. Sounds like a textbook example of legend to me.

Conclusion

The author of this Christian article realizes that the empty tomb is just a part of a historical critique of the resurrection claim. But given the naïve scholarship in this one, I don’t hold out much hope for the rest of the series.

As human beings, we’re desperate to do
the minimum amount of research
that allows us to keep on believing
what already makes us feel good about ourselves.
— Dave Holmes, Esquire

How likely was the Empty Tomb, Part 2? Maybe Jesus just stepped out for a sandwich

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How likely is the empty tomb story in the Christian gospels? I’m continuing my critique of a recent article, “12 reasons to accept the empty tomb as a historical fact” with reasons five through eight (part 1 here). This batch of reasons don’t seem to be any better than the first, but they will give us a mental workout. See what you think.

5. Women found the tomb

Women were the first to see the empty tomb. This strengthens the case for an empty tomb since the testimony of women was not trusted as much as that of men. They wouldn’t have included this embarrassing detail if it weren’t true.

Oh, please. If women were first, why didn’t Paul say so in his 1 Corinthians 15 “creed” that you referenced so admiringly in point 3 above?! In it, he ticked off, in order, the people who saw the risen Jesus but never mentions women as the first to find the empty tomb. If you want to cite that creed as reliable history in point 3, you must be consistent here. Each gospel mentions women as the first to come upon the empty tomb. Matthew and John add that the women saw Jesus, and this is a glaring contradiction with Paul.

But back to the point: are women embarrassing to the gospel story, making it more reliable? Nope. Tending to the dead was women’s work in this culture. If someone in the story was to find the tomb empty, it had to be women. Yes, women were considered less reliable in a courtroom, but that’s irrelevant because there is no courtroom in the story. Women were trusted members of Jesus’s inner circle, and they found the empty tomb. If you want men, they saw it themselves after the women told them.

6. The Jewish authorities invented the story that the disciples stole the body

The Jewish authorities explained the empty tomb by invented the story that the disciples stole the body (Matt. 28:11–15). They knew they had something to hide.

Again, we must keep separate the story from 30 CE and the story being written down by the author of Matthew in 80 or 90 CE. How would the author of Matthew know of this secret meeting—with security cam footage? A hidden microphone? Of course not—to this author in 90 CE, these people were just characters in a story, not bound to history, and he can make them do anything necessary to advance the theological point. Nothing in Jerusalem in 90 CE prevented the author of Matthew from writing whatever he wanted about the chief priests sixty years earlier.

7. Early creeds in the New Testament argue for the resurrection

Look at the early creeds in Acts (13:29-31, 13:36-37). They make clear that Jesus was buried, raised, and appeared without experiencing decay. Other verses in Acts indicate that the body of Jesus was no longer found in the tomb.

Creeds are not evidence; they’re just statements of belief. My creed could be that fairies and leprechauns exist, but that doesn’t make it true.

Is it smart to move these passages into the Creed category? I assume you’re trying to argue that they’re older than the authorship of Acts (about 90 CE) to make them more reliable, but by doing so you’ve moved them out of the History category. I agree that they were only tenuously in History to start with, but now that they’re creeds, they’re useless.

You’re building a foundation out of marshmallows. To support the most remarkable claim ever, you need overwhelming evidence.

8. The gospel story is built on many sources

“Historian Paul Meier indicates that two or three sources render a historical fact ‘unimpeachable.’The empty tomb is verified in four sources Mark, M (Matthew), John, and L (Luke), with 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 and Acts 13’s sermon summary adding two more. Historically, the more sources one holds, the greater probability that the event in question occurred. In this case, at least 6 sources suggest that the tomb was empty, doubling what historians would call ‘unimpeachable.’ ”

This can only mean two or three independent sources—that is, sources that didn’t know about the others. That’s quite rare, and you certainly don’t have it in the New Testament. Matthew and Luke not only knew of Mark, they copied large portions of it, sometimes verbatim.

Paul’s 1 Corinthians passage is chronologically the first in this list, but it shouldn’t be here at all since it doesn’t mention an empty tomb. It also contradicts Matthew and John, which state that Jesus appeared to women first. The burden of proof is yours to show that any independent source hadn’t read any of the others’ descriptions of the empty tomb.

What about claims beyond the empty tomb? You could admit that Matthew does overlap with Mark quite a bit but that it also brings new material to the party. And that’s true for Luke, John, and Acts.

I’ll agree, but what does this get you? The fundamental supernatural claims are all in 1 Cor. 15:3–7, and we’re back to a single source with the others not being independent sources.

Keep in mind that an axiom of history is to reject the supernatural. That supernatural stories were told is a fact of history. But the consensus of ordinary, not-bound-by-a-doctrinal-statement historians is that every supernatural claim is false.

Let’s turn to the referenced historian, Paul Meier. As stated, he said, “Many facts from antiquity rest on just one ancient source, while two or three sources in agreement generally render the fact unimpeachable.” That’s good advice for ordinary facts that we agree have precedents—someone died, someone traveled somewhere by boat/horse/airplane, someone and their army conquered a country, and so on. The claimed fact may be wrong, but at least we’ve seen this kind of thing before. Supernatural claims are unprecedented and need much greater historical evidence.

Meier agrees:

[The claims in these verses have not] led to universal acceptance of the resurrection as a datum of history. Why not? Because the more unlikely the episode, the stronger the evidence demanded for it. So if something supernatural were claimed, the evidence required to support it would have to be of an unimpeachable, absolute, and, indeed, direct eyewitness nature. Quite obviously, however, such categorical evidence disappeared with the death of the last eyewitnesses nineteen centuries ago.

Let’s imagine we had three independent sources documenting Merlin (from the King Arthur story) as a magician. Christians will respond that stories of Merlin were written centuries after he supposedly lived. All right—let’s suppose that our three sources were no more than 40 years after the life of Merlin (that’s the same timespan from the crucifixion to the first gospel). Would that convince Christians that Merlin could do magic?

Of course not. They’d suddenly become as skeptical as an atheist, saying that 40 years is far too long, that our surviving copies of the stories weren’t reliable, and that supernatural stories need a lot more than that to be convincing.

One example is Joseph Smith. In 1823, an angel told him where to find the golden plates whose writings became the basis of the Mormon church. We don’t have independent sources for that story, but we do have the testimony of the Three Witnesses, who say that they heard God’s voice and were shown the golden plates by an angel. A later group, the Eight Witnesses, testified that they touched the plates.

Or another: beginning in 1849, the Fox sisters claimed to be able to communicate with spirits through “rappings” and were important players in the religion of Spiritualism. Surely hundreds or even thousands of people who witnessed their public performances were convinced that they had seen evidence of the supernatural.

No conventional Christian would believe Smith’s tale or that the Fox sisters’ act was genuine, and yet they have two or more independent sources. Why then think that the far older books of the New Testament should be any more convincing?

For another historian who’s claimed to support the Bible, see: Oral Tradition and the Game of Telephone: A. N. Sherwin-White’s Famous Quote

For more on how historians deal with supernatural claims, see: Historians Reject the Bible Story

Concluded in part 3.

You toss a coin 100 times
and pray for heads before every toss.
If it lands on heads 50 times,
this doesn’t mean prayer works 50% of the time,
it means prayer doesn’t work.
— Geronimo Jones

Read my other critiques of this article on my column. Here’s Part 1, and here’s Part 3.

How likely was the empty tomb? A critique of “12 reasons to accept the empty tomb as a historical fact.”

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What do you do if you don’t have any good arguments? Just pile on poor ones and call it a “cumulative case.” Today we’ll critique “12 reasons to accept the empty tomb as a historical fact” by Brian Chilton. I liken this cumulative case to 12 sieves. Let’s see if they hold water.

1. Christianity’s enemies could’ve checked to see if the tomb still had the body

Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, the very place 1. where the gospel message was first preached. The last place you’d 2. invent a story would be where the event supposedly occurred. A doubter could have easily 3. checked the tomb. [The Christian argument will be in italics.]

There’s a lot of confusion in this one.

1. Historians have no data to back up a claim of what was preached where. Rather, they can offer a date at which time a particular book was written and where. And the first gospel, Mark, was almost certainly not written in Jerusalem (most likely Rome).

2. I don’t say that the gospel story was deliberately invented. I say it was legend that developed through decades of oral history.

3. The idea that opponents would’ve just presented the body of Jesus to shut down the early Christian movement confuses two things. The apostles of Jesus and the leaders in Jerusalem just after the crucifixion in 30 CE is one thing. The story in the gospel of Mark (the first gospel), written in 70 CE, is the other. When we read Mark, we’re (at best) reading about events that happened forty years earlier. The leaders, the dead body, the tomb—these were all elements in a story that wasn’t at all constrained by reality. It didn’t suit the story for anyone to discover Jesus’s body on Easter Sunday, so that didn’t happen.

(The dates and time spans I use come from the consensus of relevant scholars. They’re just best guesses using mediocre evidence.)

2. Hallucination hypothesis

“If Jesus’s disciples had only hallucinated, Jesus’s body would have still been in the tomb. Because Jesus’s body was never retrieved and Christianity continued, then one must assume that the tomb of Jesus was empty. Hallucinations cannot account for an empty tomb.”

Who says the disciples hallucinated Jesus? Not me.

3. The resurrection is a very early claim

The message that Jesus had resurrected was 1. written soon after the event. The 2. creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 dates to just a couple of years after Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. 3. Residents of Jerusalem could have easily checked to see if the tomb was empty.

This passage in 1 Corinthians gives the basics of the resurrection, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, [was buried, and] was raised on the third day,” and lists the post-resurrection appearances. The author is claiming here that this passage didn’t appear twenty years after the crucifixion (when Paul wrote that book) but within a few months or years because it was an independent creed that Paul later copied into this epistle.

1. So what if the creed were early? Suppose a similar supernatural claim were written about someone else’s religion yesterday. Would “But look—it’s just a day old!” make it believable?

2. Yes, it does sound a bit like a creed. But a creed isn’t evidence. It isn’t intended to be evidence. It’s nothing more than a list of beliefs; it gives no reasons why anyone should believe them.

3. Again, the players in the story written in 70 CE could do or not do anything they wanted, unconcerned about what happened forty years earlier.

And why think that a simple factual correction—“No, you’re mistaken; I have it on good authority that the tomb wasn’t empty”—would cause a religious community to abandon their beliefs? When does that ever happen? A religious community’s faith isn’t built on facts.

Consider a few examples. Prior to the Great Disappointment of 1844, the Millerite community got rid of their possessions to make themselves right with God because their leader had calculated that the end would come on October 22 of that year. When October 23 dawned like any other day, do you think they all had a good laugh at their naivete and then returned to their prior lives? Some did leave the group, but many reinterpreted the facts to create a reality in which they weren’t wrong.

Or imagine the early Mormons spreading the word about Joseph Smith using magic stones to translate mysterious writing on golden plates. Do you think their faith would’ve been shaken if they’d learned that Smith had been tried in court for using the same seer-stone trick to scam neighbors with promises of treasure?

We’ve seen enough examples of how religions work to know that it’s not built exclusively on evidence.

See also: 13 reasons to reject the Christian naysayer hypothesis

4. The tomb and burial weren’t secret

Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin (a tribunal of elders) and was well known in first-century Israel. Everyone would have known where his tomb was located and therefore where Jesus’s body had been placed.

According to the story, we know certain facts about Joseph of Arimathea, but we only get this from the gospels. The burden is on you to show that this is reliable history. There are plenty of legends about him after the time of the gospels, none of which are reliable. Historians aren’t even certain where Arimathea was.

And was the tomb known to everyone? Only Matthew says that it was Joseph’s tomb. The other gospels suggest that it was just a convenient tomb. John and Matthew say that it was new, which is more reason to doubt that it was a well-known landmark. Mark and Luke suggest that the women who attended the crucifixion knew where the body was laid only because they stayed to watch. In other words, the rest of the crowd wouldn’t have known.

See also Responding to the minimal facts argument for the resurrection

Continue to part 2.

You know the photo that came with your new wallet? God is like that.

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New wallets sometimes come with sample photos in the clear plastic sleeves. Suppose I kept the photo of the female model and told everyone that she was my girlfriend. Her photo is in my wallet, after all, and I’d be happy to show it to you.

You might remember this bit from the movie Napoleon Dynamite.

Napoleon: My old girlfriend from Oklahoma was gonna fly out here for the dance but she couldn’t cuz she’s doing some modeling right now.

Pedro: Is she hot?

Napoleon: See for yourself.

At this point, Napoleon brings out a stock model photo from his wallet, and Pedro is impressed.

The Christian is like Napoleon when he brags about God’s properties, accomplishments, and (of course) skills. “Oh, he’s great—he supports me when times are tough” or “He found me a new job and cured me of cancer” or “He upholds the very laws of physics.” All this is stated without evidence.

Anytime you get a little too close to exposing the claim, the goalpost is moved.

Maybe you prayed without success, but you’re told that God’s answer must’ve been “not yet.”

Maybe natural disasters that kill thousands don’t sound like what an all-good god would allow, but you’re told that it’s actually mankind’s fault.

Maybe you wonder: If the Trinity is so important, why aren’t the specifics made clear in the Bible? Or, why is the Bible ambiguous such that there are 45,000 Christian denominations, each hoping that they have the correct answers? Or, why does a good god do so many bad things in the Bible? Or, why doesn’t God make his existence obvious to everyone? Or, why does the Christian story seem to be from the same mold as all the other religions? You’re told that you can’t judge God or that God works in mysterious ways or that you haven’t proven that God doesn’t exist.

God is the ultimate hot girlfriend from Oklahoma who just can’t find the time to come for a visit. She’s busy modeling, you see.

See also: Weak Analogies? Is That the Best You Can Do to Prove God?

An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself,
without going in partnership with State Legislatures.
Certainly he ought not so to act
that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at.
No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule,
by the threat of fine and imprisonment.
It strikes me that God might write a book
that would not necessarily excite the laughter of his children.
— Robert G. Ingersoll


(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-5-29.)

Has evolution taken its last breath?

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After much overconfident bluster about why evolution has breathed its last, Christian apologist and podcaster Greg Koukl offers these three reasons supporting what he believes is the “death of evolution.”

1. Abiogenesis. “First you have the insurmountable problem of getting living stuff from dead stuff. . . . This is not just a problem. This is an insurmountable problem.”

Insurmountable? Write your paper detailing the proof and collect your Nobel Prize. (True, there is no Nobel Prize in Biology, yet, but I’m sure that will change once Koukl documents his breakthrough).

What will you do if a consensus view for abiogenesis does develop over the next decade or so? Let me guess: you’ll not apologize, you’ll sweep under the rug the fact that you backed the wrong horse, you’ll hope that no one remembers, and you’ll stumble forward grasping for some new as-yet-unanswered question within science, learning absolutely nothing from the experience.

2. Cambrian Explosion. Koukl focuses on the basics, which is that he doesn’t like evolution and thinks that the Cambrian Explosion is fatal to it. He’s not so good on details like when it happened (he’s off by about a factor of six; in fact, it began roughly 541 million years ago and lasted for 20–25 million years).

The big deal about the Cambrian Explosion is that most of the 30-some animal phyla (the top-level category, which defines the basic body plans) appear for the first time in the fossil record in this relatively brief period.

How damaging is the Cambrian Explosion to evolution?

Here are some reasons why this rapid emergence of phyla isn’t a nail in evolution’s coffin.

  • The phyla had to appear at some point. Some estimates say that animals began to exist 650 million years ago. Is it hard to imagine that the outline of this new kingdom would be mostly completed in about 4% of the total time (25 million years out of 650 million), with the individual species added and deleted gradually after that point? If 25 million years is too short, how long should it be and why?
  • While we’re most excited about animals, being animals ourselves, we must not miss the big picture by singling out the Cambrian Explosion to the exclusion of the rest of evolutionary history. This period had an impressive bit of evolution, but there is a lot of other diversity besides just animal. Consider animals’ place on the tree of life (and cultivate some humility):

Source: Wikipedia (with changes)

  • To take one additional example of evolutionary change within animals, the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event was another relatively brief period of change, and it created many more genera (“genuses”) than did the Cambrian.
  • The starting gun for the Cambrian Explosion may have been when the ocean finally became relatively transparent and vision became useful for the first time (all animals were aquatic during the Cambrian Period). This triggered an arms race—better sight meant that animals had to protect themselves with armor or speed, or they could arm themselves with teeth or strength. This struggle for survival may explain the suddenness of the development of phyla.
  • Maybe it wasn’t that the evolution of new phyla happened only during that time; perhaps instead the conditions had changed to allow fossilization to happen. That is, the suddenness might apply to fossilization, not the development of phyla.
  • Biologists (remember them—the ones who actually understand this stuff?) haven’t responded to the Cambrian Explosion by rejecting evolution.
  • Just because phyla today are very different doesn’t mean that they were just as different after the Cambrian Explosion. It may be more accurate to think of the ancestors of today’s phyla becoming distinct at that time. Wikipedia noted: “ As [our classification system of phylum, class, order, and so on] is based on living organisms, it accommodates extinct organisms poorly, if at all.” The innovation during the Cambrian Explosion might not have been so great after all. From today’s standpoint, we see the fruits of evolution from the beginning of life on earth.

Creationism can only replace evolution when the evidence shows that it can better explain the facts. All the facts.

Epigenetics and other new developments

3. Genes don’t explain everything. Mutation of DNA is a key part of evolution, but DNA only codes for protein. That’s only part of the picture, Koukl tells us—how do you get the body? That requires epigenetics. That’s not in the genes. “Now, they’re working on it, trying to figure it out, but if it’s not in the genes, if the genes aren’t doing the work, then natural selection doesn’t do its work on genetic mutations, then that is neo-Darwinism, and it’s dead.”

I’m not sure what Koukl is getting at. Embryology is fairly well understood, and we can see a single cell develop according to the body plan defined in its DNA. Magic isn’t necessary. And, yes, epigenetics is a new and exciting aspect of genetics. There is much to be learned. But a naturalistic explanation remains the best explanation. If evolution is changing, well, that’s just what science does as it adapts to new facts.

Creationists’ goal

Taking a step back, I see several problems. One is the unstated idea that if evolution can be defeated, Creationism will step in to take its place as the explanation of why life is the way it is. Nope—Creationism can only replace evolution when the evidence shows that it can better explain the facts. All the facts.

Scientific theories stand on their own merits, not on the failure of other theories. Or, if I could use a schoolyard analogy that might be more in Creationists’ wheelhouse: tattling on someone who’s misbehaving in class doesn’t improve your grade.

That Koukl is talking to the public and not to scientists reveals both his agenda and his impotence. He’s got PR, not evidence.

The other problem is that this entire tantrum seems to be semantic. His agenda seems to be finding a loophole so that you can’t call it “the neo-Darwinian Project” anymore (ignoring the fact that no one worth listening to calls it that).

In Koukl’s wildest dreams, biology would develop in radical new ways so that evolution taught twenty years ago, say, will be seen as inadequate or incomplete in important ways. But how does that help? Once Koukl’s smokescreen clears, the naturalistic discipline that explains how life developed on earth (whatever you want to call it) is still there, with no role for God to play.

I’ve written about two related issues, the Rube Goldberg appearance of life (rather than appearance of design) and the question of information in DNA.

Science’s unexplained “Big Bangs”

Koukl next brings up atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, who says that evolution won’t allow for consciousness.

This is yet another question that might get answered, as tends to happen with scientific puzzles. Koukl’s argument is nothing more than: Science has unanswered questions; therefore, God. Again, he forgets that a weakness in science (I see no weakness here, but let’s pretend there is) does nothing to support the God argument. Such an argument must stand on its own.

He concludes by ticking off the unanswered questions—abiogenesis, the Cambrian Explosion, and the evolution of consciousness—and concludes, “Incidentally, these are no problem whatsoever for our point of view.”

Yeah—“God did it” explains everything. Of course, you’ve given us no good evidence for the God side of the question, but never mind. The real problem is that “God did it” is unfalsifiable. You could apply it to anything, and I couldn’t prove you wrong. Therefore, it’s useless. By explaining everything, it explains nothing. Scientific theories must be falsifiable.

Koukl’s argument reminds me of Michael Denton’s 1986 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. His 30th-anniversary edition was titled Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. Creationists keep predicting that evolution is dead, and it keeps not being dead. Perhaps there’s a lesson here that Creationists aren’t learning.

What we have in Koukl is a popular Christian apologist (who has a religious agenda) who talks with a popular Christian science-y person (who has the same religious agenda) about their rejection of the scientific consensus. They reassure each other that they’ve indeed backed the right horse, and they shore up their argument with smug confidence.

Popularizing consensus science is one thing (this is what I do sometimes), but rejecting it is another (this is what Koukl does, often). I put Creationists in with the anti-vaxxers.

The difference between a cult and a religion: 
in a cult there is a person at the top who knows it’s a scam, 
and in a religion that person is dead.
— seen on the internet

Christians’ secret weapon against evolution

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Christian apologists have a secret weapon against evolution: confidence. This isn’t the confidence you’re familiar with, based on evidence, the consensus of experts, and all that. No, this is the empty, groundless kind. Still, it’s confidence just the same, and it can sound pretty compelling.

I started my path to atheism with the evolution/Creationism debate, so I like to check in occasionally. I recently critiqued the recent young-earth Creationist movie Is Genesis History? here.

Status update on evolution

Let’s move on to a podcast by Christian apologist Greg Koukl, “Why Neo-Darwinism Is Dead.” He was all abuzz from a recent meeting with Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, an anti-evolution think tank, and Koukl quickly made clear his conclusion:

The Darwinian model of biological evolution is dead. It is dead. (@9:05)

Why should I care? Should I reject the consensus view of science from someone who is no expert in the field he’s rejecting?

Koukl doubles down on his claim:

The academic crowd on the inside at the highest levels know the facts and know that it’s dead. When I say “the Darwinian project,” I mean very precisely what has come to be known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis, okay, and that is simply that evolution is driven forward by genetic mutation being acted on by natural selection. (9:15)

Let me first get a quibble out of the way. What the hell is “the Darwinian project”? Who says that? You could call it the “modern synthesis,” but that term comes from a 1942 book, and it refers to the integration of Darwin’s ideas with other pioneers’ work from earlier in the twentieth century—in other words, ancient history.

I assume that the attraction of the word “Darwinism” is that it has that scary “-ism” suffix like other wicked terms such as “Marxism” or “Maoism.” Tell you what, Greg—let’s follow the lead of the people who actually understand the science and call it “evolution.” How does that sound?

But back to the point of the quote: Koukl tells us that the biologists who really understand evolution see not just unanswered questions, not just gaps—no, they know that the theory is completely dead.

Call me skeptical, but I’ll wait to hear about that from someone who’s not a Christian apologist who gives every indication of having an anti-evolution agenda. Y’know, like a biologist. Even better: the consensus view of the entire field of biology. Last time I checked, evolution was still firmly in place (see the appendix at this post). If Koukl knows that the biggest names within biology are on his side, I wonder why he doesn’t list them. It’s almost like that list doesn’t exist.

Liars gonna lie

Koukl is way ahead of us. He says we can’t trust the biologists to honestly follow the evidence.

They’re not letting go of their presuppositions. They’re not letting go of their metaphysical religion. (10:40)

Hmm—methinks the lady doth protest too much. Perhaps you should look in a mirror, Greg. I share your concern about people who let their religion constrain what they can think, but are you sure it’s the biologists who have the problem?

Koukl tells us that Stephen Meyer said:

In the academic circles and among the professionals in the know and who work closely with the facts, they see the serious, debilitating problems of the Darwinian model of origins. (11:20)

Stephen Meyer, you say? Is that the Stephen Meyer who rejects evolution but whose doctorate is in history and philosophy of science, not biology? The one who works for an organization whose mission statement begins, “The mission of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is to advance the understanding that human beings and nature are the result of intelligent design rather than a blind and undirected process”? Yeah, I’m sure he’s a reliable, unbiased source.

I always question “research” that comes from a person or an organization bound by a doctrinal (faith) statement. (I criticize doctrinal statements here and here.) My approach is that the research should come first and then the conclusion, not the other way around, but maybe that’s just me.

Evolution in schools

He moves on to rant that criticism of “Darwinism” isn’t allowed in textbooks.

I wonder what kind of criticism he’s thinking of. Perhaps an analogous debate in physics might be the various approaches to unify the four fundamental forces. If string theory is discussed, for example, I’d expect that the textbook would make clear that it is just one of several approaches.

But there is no equivalent within biology. Evolution is the consensus. There is no other side of the issue.

In the rejection of criticism of evolution in textbooks, Koukl sees a clue. “When someone tries to silence opposition” or when they use the power of the system (courts, legislature, the school system, media), you know they have a weak case.

I know what he’s talking about. Knowing they had no scientific case, conservative legislatures and school districts have tried to slip Creationism into public school classrooms in myriad ways—is that what you’re referring to, Greg? The science is squarely on the side of your opposition.

If there were a battle within the scientific community, then Greg would have a point, and we could let the facts decide the issue. But he’s already lost that battle, so he wants to fight in the court of public opinion.

When organizations like the National Center for Science Education respond in kind, pointing out the tricks used to slip Creationism in where it doesn’t belong, he cries foul and cites it as a clue that they’re trying to “silence the opposition.”

As a final flounce, he tells us that the not-Christian position warns that the Creationist arguments mustn’t be read (16:50). By contrast, he’s happy to have Christians read the other side. “Our case can take it.”

The overwhelming consensus of biologists disagrees.

To be concluded in part 2 with Koukl’s explanation of evolution’s failings.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real.
Religion is believing that other peoples’ hallucinations are real.
— seen on the internet


(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-5-22.)

Image from Dmitri K (license CC BY 2.0)