Soft Theism: Atheism’s Weaker Arguments

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We’re responding to a dialogue between an imaginary atheist and Miklos Jako, who advances a spiritual worldview he calls Soft Theism. It’s basically Christianity without the baggage (God’s Old Testament rampages, the Trinity, Creationism, and so on). Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits turn it into something plausible? Read part 1 here.

This is a fresh approach compared to the countless posts I’ve written responding to conservative Christians. I think it’s worth a look.

We continue with two more questions that wrap up what Jako calls atheism’s weaker arguments. They are: Who made God? and Why not multiple Gods?

(A note on format: The many ellipses in the green and blue dialogue indicate pauses, not omitted text, and are part of the original script.)

Who Made God?

Atheist: You can’t assert that everything must have a cause and then arbitrarily claim that God does not need a cause. You’re destroying your own argument before it even gets off the ground . . . That’s special pleading.

Soft Deist: Yeah, it IS special pleading . . . legitimate special pleading, because God, if He exists, is the special case, the logically necessary uncaused First Cause. Besides, you’re doing exactly the same thing . . . under Occam’s Razor, YOU are special pleading for the universe, as a major . . . uncaused effect.

Cross Examined Blog: “Logically necessary”? “First Cause”? We may want to avoid relying on 13th-century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas to answer our tough cosmological questions when he didn’t even know the earth went around the sun.

The universe might have come from a quantum mechanical event, and those don’t always need causes.

If common sense were enough to figure out science, Aristotle would’ve been able to do it 2300 years ago, but common sense is not sufficient. If you say that something doesn’t make sense to you, I believe you, but that’s no guide to resolving science’s open questions.

But, if you’re going to grant . . . self-causation, why not just grant it to the universe instead of postulating an extra entity?

Because . . . the universe is physical, and physical entities need a cause. Whereas a non-physical entity, like God . . . admittedly a hypothesis . . . would not need a cause.

But some physical entities don’t need causes. The positron and neutrino emitted from a decaying nucleus did not exist (as a positron and neutrino, that is) in the nucleus beforehand. We can express the probability that any such nucleus will decay in a certain amount of time, but we can’t point to a cause.

Maybe you’re making a category level error. If everything IN the universe needs a cause, that doesn’t necessarily mean the universe itself needs a cause.

(It sounds like he’s referring to the fallacy of composition. An example: a car causes less pollution than a bus, so cars must be less of a pollution problem than buses. Or: tires are made of rubber, and since cars use tires, they must also be made of rubber.)

Yeah, right, maybe not, who knows? But, it seems far more likely to me that some ultimate, non-physical power caused the Big Bang than . . . nothing caused it . . . that . . . it just happened.

Okay, I can accept that—a Creator seems more likely to you. But this is just the results of your musing. Why think you can resolve this question?

Let’s consider other open questions. The Millennium Prize problems are six open mathematical problems, each with a million-dollar prize. (There were originally seven, but one has been solved.) Why not tackle some of these? If you’re not a professional mathematician and must dismiss them as impossibly difficult, why think you have a chance figuring out the grandest question, as someone who isn’t a professional cosmologist?

Here’s a more humble stance: “Personally, I like the idea of a Creator. But Science doesn’t know, and Religion (having reliably answered zero questions) certainly doesn’t know, so ‘We don’t know’ is the best answer. I’ll have to content myself with that.” What do you think?

(More on “But who created God?” here and “Why is there something rather than nothing?” here.)

Why Not Multiple Gods?

We . . . observe . . . that complex things are designed usually by teams. Why not posit multiple gods?

Because then none of them would be the ultimate power. You can’t logically have more than one ultimate power.

Assuming the supernatural, which still needs evidence, you could have a pantheon of gods, each contributing their unique superpowers. Why isn’t that as good as one ultimate power? Using the Greek Olympians as an example, Zeus may have been the king of the gods, but was he the one ultimate power? He wasn’t for the sun (Apollo took care of that) or the ocean (Poseidon), or the underworld (Hades), and so on.

And if smart and powerful aliens in the universe somewhere could be the “ultimate power,” now we’re in the realm of science fiction. It’s possible one being is far above the rest, or one civilization, but maybe “ultimate power” is ambiguous. How would you decide whether civilization A’s destructive power counts for more than B’s transportation and colonization power and C’s refined wisdom and peace?

(Speculating about aliens may not be relevant to your thinking because you could ask where they came from.)

. . . Hah, you’re implying that belief in multiple gods is superstitious nonsense, but belief in one God . . . makes sense?

Hah, yeah, yeah. I think historically humans have progressed from polytheism to monotheism, as a more mature concept of God . . . I find that you atheists tend to have a very undeveloped, I’ll say . . . adolescent . . . concept of God. You think of God as this . . . anthropomorphic comic book character, instead of . . . an ineffable source of reality.

Huh? What does “mature” mean here, and how is monotheism more mature? And why is “mature” a good thing? We see plenty of evolution of religion (yet more evidence that religion is untethered to reality and adapts to society’s changing needs), but that’s what you’d expect from a manmade religion. Religion is a response to human needs, but that’s no evidence that it’s a reflection of an actual supernatural. And is the Christian Trinity monotheistic as claimed? I realize that Christians are desperate to say so (perhaps this is where you’re getting the maturity idea), but skeptical outsiders like Muslims say it’s not.

“Evolution” is a continual process of change, but “mature” suggests an end. Once something is mature, don’t you stop evolving? Judaism evolved into Christianity, which has continued to evolve. Was Islam a maturation of Christianity or just more evolution? Mormonism was another refinement of Christianity, and there were many more splinter groups substantial enough to be called religions rather than denominations of Christianity.

You’re doing it yourself with your own post-Christianity soft theism. I assume you’re trying to leave behind its weaknesses and make it more defensible. Is your spiritual worldview more mature than Christianity, and how do you know?

When you read the Bible, we find that Yahweh is indeed, as you say, an anthropomorphic comic book character. Atheists usually have a literal take on the Bible, but that doesn’t make it an adolescent one. Forcing Christians to back up the claims in their holy book isn’t adolescent; atheists are simply unwilling to give Christianity a pass. If Christians don’t like frank critiques of the Garden of Eden, the flood, God’s support of slavery, and other absurd Iron Age stories, they should rethink what’s in their holy book.

Up next: How atheists think: objective meaning and reification

Faith—because admitting
you believe in magic
is embarrassing.
— commenter Bob Jase

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Image from Vincent Lau (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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What Is Soft Theism?

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I came across an interesting comment at the blog recently. Miklos Jako sent a link to his video, “DEFENDING SOFT THEISM against ATHEISTS.” He’s arguing for what he calls Soft Theism, and he made his case through an imaginary discussion between him and an atheist.

Most of my posts explore a new idea or respond to an argument made by a conservative Christian. This video is something new, an interpretation of God without the baggage of any religion. Take Christianity and pare away the Bible, a couple of dozen ecumenical councils, church tradition, a long history of political meddling, and fear of science, and what’s left? Jako calls this Soft Theism. You know all those Nones who aren’t atheists? This is one of them.

The video is over an hour long, but Jako send me the script. I’ll print his conversation and include my reactions.

What am I going to say if I’m not responding to the typical narrow-minded fundamentalist? It turns out, quite a lot. I think you’ll find it interesting.

The first category of topics is what he calls “Weaker atheist arguments.”

We live on a speck of dust

Atheist: I think, it is a childish conceit, to think the world revolves around . . . us. Our planet . . . is just a speck of dust in a vast, VAST universe.

Soft Deist: I don’t think it’s childish. We’re the only planet we know of, that has intelligence on it. I think . . . objectively . . . that’s pretty damn special.

(Jako’s imaginary atheist speaks in green, and Jako’s soft theist response is in blue. My comments are in black.)

Cross Examined Blog: There are an estimated 70 billion trillion (7×1022) stars in the observable universe. Thirty years after discovering our first exoplanet, astronomers understand a bit about how common they are and estimate one planet per star, on average. That’s a lot of planets, about which we know little.

We also have a lot to learn about life. We don’t even understand life on the one planet where we know life exists. Biologists continue to be surprised at the extreme environments that life can adapt to. Let’s get excited about the earth’s specialness after we’ve shown that it’s special. (More here and here.)

God of the gaps

Alright . . . But, to say, God is the cause of something . . . explains nothing. That’s not science. It’s lazy thinking, “God of the gaps” thinking. Like Michael Shermer says . . . God is just a . . . word, a linguistic placeholder, until science discovers the . . . real reason for why things work.

OK, I agree, that invoking God . . . for the trillions of things that happen, is a lazy, and valueless way of thinking, but, invoking God for the ORIGIN and sustenance of . . . THE WHOLE DEAL . . . makes sense to me. I don’t posit God to explain lightning, but I do posit God to explain . . . the universe.

But if you do this without evidence, then you are guilty as charged. As you note, this would be God-of-the-gaps thinking where science explains more and more and the theist responds, “Ah, yes, but you haven’t shown God doesn’t exist in these gaps in between, where science still has unanswered questions!” True, science has unanswered questions, but it’s hardly an argument for God.

It’s a bit like Creationist thinking where they demand answers to this or that attack on evolution. What those Creationists ignore is (1) they should be talking to biologists (who likely have an answer) rather than laypersons, and (2) their theory can only displace evolution once it explains the facts better than evolution.

If you want to displace naturalistic explanations, (1) you should see if cosmologists share your concern that there’s a big gap at the top of the pyramid that only a deity could fill, and (2) your supernatural explanation can’t raise more questions than it resolves.

I could accuse YOU of being intellectually lazy, because you refuse to even consider anything outside the boundaries of science. I find it more reasonable to think some power created the universe than that the universe created itself.

I’m happy to consider arguments outside science, and when religion and theology can get its own house in order, let me know. Theists across religions can’t even agree on the most fundamental questions: how many gods are there? What are their names and properties? Worse, they don’t even have a reliable mechanism for resolving these questions! They can only fall back on the non-supernatural tools of arguing, charges of heresy, threats of hell, mutual excommunication, schisms, and the occasional war.

But why posit God? Why can’t I posit . . . ANYTHING to explain the universe—a purple cube, farting fairies, the flying spaghetti monster?

I argue that the Flying Spaghetti Monster (sauce be upon him) is a valid argument against Christianity here and here.

Well, because those things are defined by limiting characteristics. They don’t represent a reasonable concept of God, which is . . . an ULTIMATE power that transcends limitations like color, shape, and so on.

A “reasonable” concept of God? How is your concept of God reasonable and any other one unreasonable? Is there any evidence for a god with any properties, let alone ultimate power? Some religions posit a supernatural with no god having ultimate power. It sounds like you’re sketching out possible properties of the ultimate being, but this is just your own contribution to the discussion. If you know the properties God must have, show that everyone would come up with the same set.

This reminds me of the flimsy “God is love” argument made by some Christians. These Christians have made God a puppet, forcing him to mouth platitudes that sound good in the 21st century. God was a good old-fashioned fire ’n brimstone god in the Old Testament, where he supported slavery, demanded human sacrifice, and drowned the earth.

A super-smart alien could’ve created our universe without having “ultimate” (that is, infinite) power. But in that case, I imagine you’d want to go back to find out what created that guy, tracing things back to a god with infinite power (in particular, with omniscience and omnipotence). Perhaps you make a stronger case going forward, but I don’t see your justification yet. Let’s see how your argument plays out.

Next topics: Who made God? Why not multiple Gods?

Faith is humanity’s all-time, blue-ribbon, gold-medal,
undisputed, undefeated, heavyweight world-champion
worst method EVER of making decisions!
Nobody ever uses faith for anything
that can be tested or measured
or that really matters in real life.
— commenter RichardSRussell

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Image from Humaidi A R (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Why a Single Human Cell is Not a Baby

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abortion

 

See also: “A Defense of Abortion Rights: The Spectrum Argument”

[Mother Teresa] preached that poverty was a gift from God.
And she believed that women
should not be given control over the reproductive cycle.
Mother Teresa spent her whole life making sure that
the one cure for poverty we know is sound was not implemented.
— Christopher Hitchens

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(This is a repeat of a post that originally appeared 9/14/16.)
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When Christianity Actually Had a Sensible Idea but Discarded It

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Actually, the Catholics still have that sensible idea—it’s the Protestants that discarded it. The sensible idea is purgatory, the place where sins are accounted for. Purgatory is temporary, unlike hell, so the punishment can be in proportion to the sins.

Of course, very little of the made-up religion of Christianity is actually sensible. What I mean is: given that you must have hell, a purgatory with fair punishment for the bad done in life is a sensible alternative.

Encounter with purgatory

I was raised Presbyterian, and my first encounter with the idea of purgatory came from reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, written around 1600. At the end of Act 1, Hamlet is confronted by a ghost who identifies himself as the spirit of his dead father, visiting the earth briefly to convey a message. The ghost explains that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle and demands revenge.

This depiction of purgatory is odd in several ways: if the ghost had a human shape, why wasn’t he recognizable by Hamlet as his father? How can ghosts get temporary passes out of purgatory? How is the goal of revenge noble enough to get such a pass, especially when (spoiler alert) almost everyone, including Hamlet, dies at the end?

This illustrates how the idea of purgatory has changed through time. But how is this possible? Isn’t purgatory clearly defined in the Bible?

Nope, and that’s where we begin our journey.

Where did purgatory come from?

Jesus tells a parable in Luke 12 about readiness. He uses servants who don’t know when their master will return to parallel Jesus’s followers who don’t know when the Son of Man will arrive. In 12:47–8, Jesus distinguishes between servants who commit greater and lesser misdeeds, saying that they will receive greater and lesser punishments. This parable has been interpreted as referring to the afterlife and a rejection of one-size-fits-all punishment.

Another passage comes from Paul (1 Corinthians 3:12–15). It imagines people building the foundation of their lives out of materials that are precious (gold, silver, and jewels) or cheap (wood or straw). Fire will test these foundations, burning up the wood and straw but leaving the precious materials intact. This trial suggested to the early church fathers a purification process, which gave support to purgatory.

A final passage is 2 Maccabees 12:41–45. (The contents of the Bible varies by denomination, and the first two books of Maccabees are some of the handful of books in the Roman Catholic Bible that are not in the Protestant Bible.) This book was written in the second century BCE and documented the remarkably successful revolt of the Jews against the Seleucid Empire.

At the end of 2 Maccabees 12, the Jews fight a battle. Afterward, the living begin to bury their fallen, but they discover that each dead man was carrying “objects dedicated to the idols of Jamnia.” Clearly these men were hedging their bets, not putting their full support behind Yahweh. Their surviving comrades then prayed for these sins to be forgiven and sent money to Jerusalem for a sacrifice to make amends. This acknowledged both an afterlife and the expectation that prayers and sacrifices from the living will benefit the dead.

But there’s another side to that coin

As we’ve seen many times, including the last post, the context of any Bible passage is the entire Bible. With almost 800,000 words in its English version, the Bible says lots of things, many of which are contradictory. A clear statement in one book often crashes into another clear statement elsewhere.

One passage that argues against purgatory is Luke 23:42–3, in which Jesus is on the cross with two other criminals. The first criminal mocks Jesus, while the other defends him.

Then [the second criminal] said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

This makes no mention of a prolonged period in purgatory.

Here’s another that rejects purgatory as a way station on the path to heaven.

Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. (John 5:24)

In the parable of the sheep and the goats, the king separates the good people from the bad ones. Jesus concludes:

[The bad people] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. (Matthew 25:46)

Again, there are just two choices. Purgatory isn’t a third option.

Where do these ideas come from?

Years ago, I listened to a series of Sherlock Holmes radio plays. These didn’t come from the official Conan Doyle stories but were new adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Each would end with an acknowledgement such as, “This story was inspired by an incident in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’” The details of the mysterious incident that launched each story were never made clear.

That’s how it is with some of these points of Christian dogma like purgatory or the Trinity. The Bible gives no clear explanation of either; there’s little more foundation than “inspired by an incident.”

Why is this Catholic but not Protestant?

If you remember anything about the Reformation (also known as the Protestant Reformation), it’s probably Martin Luther’s publishing his Ninety-five Theses in 1517. One of Luther’s primary complaints was the Church’s sale of indulgences.

So how do indulgence work? The Roman Catholic Church imagines that the aftermath of a sin has a guilt component and a punishment component. If a Catholic is in a good relationship with God (up to date on confessions, for example), the guilt has been forgiven, but there’s still that punishment. If it’s not taken care of in life, it carries over into the afterlife. Living Catholics can reduce the burden of punishment on the dead through indulgences, which include prayers, good works, and financial donations.

Luther’s complaint was the sale of indulgences (though where a donation supporting the good work of the Church becomes a crass sale of a license to sin is not clear). Initially, Luther was merely cautious about indulgences but soon rejected them completely. He argued that the soul was insensate between bodily death and resurrection, and purgatory was an “unbiblical corruption.” This rejection caught on among other Protestant reformers, who argued “salvation by grace alone” rather than salvation by works.

This is what a manmade doctrine from God looks like

What does a doctrine cobbled together from a few cherry-picked Bible verses and wishful thinking look like? Here are some of the issues that theologians have debated about purgatory.

  • Is purgatory a physical place? The earliest notions were of a state of existence rather than a place, then it became a place about a thousand years ago. Lately the pendulum has swung back.
  • What’s the point of Jesus’s sacrificial death if people must be purified through torment in purgatory?
  • Is purification done with actual fire? How long is this process?
  • How much pain is caused? Augustine speculated that it is far greater pain than is possible on earth. Others imagine that those in purgatory are in peace because they are confident in their salvation.
  • Is punishment in purgatory correctly seen as vengeance by God?

Dante’s Inferno was just the most popular of a large number of medieval works in the afterlife-tourism genre that answered these questions with fiction. Trying to use theology instead, purgatory was addressed in three Church Councils. One conclusion that admits the flimsy foundation of purgatory was for the Church to avoid “difficult and subtle questions which tend not to edification.”

Society would be better off if the Church avoided entirely those questions it can’t answer, in particular every supernatural question.

See also:

The difference between education and indoctrination
is whether the person at the front of the room
welcomes questions from the audience.
Try it the next time your minister
is in the middle of a sermon.
— commenter RichardSRussell

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Image from osseous (license CC BY 2.0)
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“Never Quote a Bible Verse” Plus 7 Examples Where Christians Forgot This Advice

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It’s not like I go through life looking for arguments. I’m just a happy-go-lucky, tousle-headed scamp skipping through life and whistling a happy tune who unaccountably gets blindsided by nutty Christian arguments just begging for a good thrashing. It would be rude to ignore them.

In fact, I’m happy to agree with Christians when I can, and just to prove that, let me point out an article by Greg Koukl, “Never Read a Bible Verse.” His point is that you should never read just a Bible verse but rather read the entire paragraph or even the entire chapter to understand the context.

That’s good advice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s true that broadening your reading to the local context can clarify the meaning of the verse and is a fairer way to approach that verse. Unfortunately, this doesn’t assure us that the Bible doesn’t say something contradictory elsewhere—it’s a big book. Said another way, the actual context is the entire Bible. Don’t quote the Bible as an authority until you can assure me that the Bible never undercuts that message elsewhere.

The problem can be illustrated with a familiar source of simplistic Christian apologetics.

Chick tracts

Chick tracts are small comic pamphlets that use a story to illustrate conservative Christian principles (or attack evangelicals’ usual rogues of Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, evolution, and so on). A typical story will have a sinner scared straight by a glimpse of hell, for example. The printed tracts are cheap enough that street evangelists can hand them out to potential converts.

Let’s use Chick tracts as examples where a broader biblical context would give a very different interpretation of the point they’re making.

1. Bogus prophecy

“The Greatest Story Ever Told” is the condensed gospel story, and it can’t resist repeating several of the five claims of fulfilled prophecy in the first two chapters of Matthew. It first quotes Isaiah 7:14, “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” Yes, I realize that the author thought this was a prophecy of Jesus, but it’s not. Simply following the “never read a Bible verse” rule, we can find from the context that this claim was to be fulfilled just a few years after it was spoken, in Isaiah’s own time. (More here.)

The tract also says, “The Bible prophesied that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:1–2).” Wrong again, and you’d discover that if you’d read the context. Those verses talk about a ruler who will turn back the Assyrians, who began conquering Israel in 740 BCE. Micah 5:9 says, “Your hand will be lifted up in triumph over your enemies, and all your foes will be destroyed.” Whose story is this? Certainly not that of Jesus.

2. Belief in Jesus is mandatory

“Back from the Dead?” is the hilarious tale of someone who visits hell during a near-death experience. In it, Jesus is quoted from John 14:6, “No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” “It’s Not Your Fault” quotes John 3:18, which makes a similar point: “He that believes not is condemned already.”

This is one where the whole Bible is the context. Romans 5:19 says, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” That is, we didn’t opt in to get the sin of Adam, and we needn’t opt in to get the salvation of Jesus. No belief is necessary.

Christians seem endlessly eager to harmonize ill-fitting verses like these, but they’re still ill-fitting. An omniscient Creator would have made sure that his message got into the world clearly and unambiguously.

3. Works don’t get you into heaven

God turns revenge to love in “The Hit!” Someone says, “The only way anyone gets to heaven is through faith in Christ alone” with a reference to Acts 4:12. This is standard Chick: making a statement and then backing it up with just a Bible reference. I’ll agree that this verse does back it up (“Salvation is found in no one else”), but it’s just a context-free reference.

A character in “Back from the Dead?” says, “You can’t make it [to heaven] by good works” and cites Ephesians 2:8–9 and Titus 3:5. In “It’s the Law” we read, “[No,] good works will not take away our sins!”

But consider the entire Bible, and we find the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31–46), which makes plain that those who make it to the Kingdom do so through their good works. There is no mention of faith.

4. God hates slavery

“Kidnapped!” is about child slavery, and it tries to portray the Old Testament as anti-slavery by quoting Exodus 21:16, “He that stealeth a man, and selleth him . . . shall surely be put to death.” (Unsurprisingly, Chick prefers the King James Version.)

Nope. God has no problem with slavery. In fact, biblical slavery was pretty much identical to American slavery.

5. God hates fags

In “Birds and the Bees,” a little girl lectures us about homosexuality. Referring to the people of Sodom: “Today those same kind of people are back, but now they’re called Gays!” with a reference to Genesis 13:13.

Sorry, little girl, read the story. The “sin of Sodom” was rape. Yes, that’s a bad thing, but it’s bad whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual.

Little Girl then says, “But God still says being Gay is an abomination!” with a reference to Leviticus 18:22, but she needs to “never read a Bible verse.” Read more widely, and it’s clear that Leviticus 18–20 are full of ritual abominations. Don’t plant your field with two kinds of seed or wear clothing woven of two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19); don’t cut your hair (19:28); don’t use fortune tellers (19:31) (and kill them, by the way—that’s in 20:27); the death penalty is the punishment for cursing your father or mother (20:9); and don’t forget your kosher food laws (20:25).

Today, we ignore these ritual abominations. You can’t go back to retrieve one you’re fond of.

6. Only through Jesus can sins be forgiven

A gang killing gone wrong is the tale in “Gomez is Coming.” In the thrilling conclusion, we are told, “Only someone who was sinless could pay the price for our sins” (1 Peter 3:18).

Not really. In Matthew 16:19, Jesus tells his followers, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Binding means to forbid and loosing means to permit, both by an indisputable authority. The parallel verse in John 20:23 is, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” Apparently, forgiving sins isn’t that big a deal.

If Christians today say that the Great Commission doesn’t just apply to Jesus’s original disciples but applies to today’s Christians as well (it doesn’t), perhaps they’re bold enough to tell us that they can forgive sins, too.

7. The Ten Commandments

“It’s the Law” cites Exodus 20 and 34 in its references to the Ten Commandments. Whoops—here’s where being honest about the context bites them. Exodus 20 lists the original set of Ten Commandments. But remember that Moses smashed them in anger and went back up to get another set, which was put in the Ark of the Covenant. The second set is listed in Exodus 34, and it’s a very different set.

Let’s rephrase the advice we started with: never quote a Bible verse to pass along God’s position on a matter unless you’re certain that it is unambiguously what the entire Bible says on that subject.

See also: Christians’ Damning Retreat into “Difficult Verses”

Anyone who actually does everything the Bible commands
would be a criminal in every country on this planet.
— Aron Ra

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/24/16.)

Image from Kamil Porembiński (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Long Time Gap from Original New Testament Books to Oldest Copies

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Arguments for the reliability of the New Testament are built as a chain of claims—the reliability of oral history, the short duration between events and documentation, the large number of Greek copies, and so on. We’ll look at one of these links, the time from original authorship to our best copies, to see how well it stands up.

Where the data came from

Making a spreadsheet of the time gap for every chapter in every book in the Bible was a tedious task, though not a difficult one. The oldest manuscript with a complete New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus, written in about 350 CE. For 57 of the New Testament’s 260 chapters (22 percent) this was the oldest source, but the remainder have papyrus copies that are older. These papyri vary in size. For example, P46 contains more than eight epistles (letters), while P52 has just a few verses of John 18. (“P46” is papyrus number 46, and so on.)

That gave an oldest date for each chapter, and this list has the date of authorship for each book (from the 50s for Paul’s authentic epistles to 90 and beyond for John, Revelation, and some of the epistles). Subtract the two to get the time gap from authorship to oldest copy for each chapter.

Time gaps for gospel chapters

The chart above shows the gospel chapters in order for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The red bars indicate the first chapter in each book. The height of each bar is the time gap from the original to our best copy for that chapter.

Matthew and John each have 18 papyrus sources, Luke has 6, and Mark only 2. Though Mark is thought to be the oldest gospel, scholars have speculated that once churches had Matthew and Luke (which were basically second editions of Mark), Mark lost its value and wasn’t copied as much by the early church.

The time gaps for the chapters in John look pretty good compared to the others because it was the last gospel to be written and because papyrus P66, dated to 200 CE, is a complete copy. P52 (written as early as 125 CE though probably later) has bits of John 18, and P90 (late second century) has bits of John 19.

Two papyri dated to 200 CE cover most of Luke. Nevertheless, 22 of these 89 gospel chapters have no papyrus copies that improve on the Codex Sinaiticus (350 CE). This problem is particularly obvious in Matthew, where it must rely on Sinaiticus for 43 percent of its oldest chapters. The average chapter time gap for Matthew is 200 years, making it particularly unreliable. Mark is even worse, at 230 years.

The height of each bar is the length of the dark period during which no one knows for sure what happened to the content of these books. We have enough data to repair some errors, but we don’t know how many errors remain and how bad they are. How much confidence can we have in a copy written centuries later than the original?

You wouldn’t believe a supernatural story if it was claimed to have happened yesterday, but with the gospels we have supernatural stories about Jesus passed on as oral history for decades. They were then written, but we don’t have the originals but only copies from centuries later.

A note how the dates are chosen: if a chapter’s oldest copy holds just a fragment of one verse, that’s enough to assign that copy’s date as the oldest for that chapter. Since most of the earliest papyrus collections are made of pages that are each fragmentary, this is a generous concession in favor of the Bible.

Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians

(Remember that red columns are chapter 1.)

Acts and Romans both have a decent number of papyrus sources (8 and 7, respectively), but continuing down the list, it’s 4 sources, then 1, 1, and 3. Fortunately for these epistles, they are mostly in P46, which is dated to 200 CE.

Ephesians (the last six chapters on the right) looks unusually good, but that’s only because it’s a pseudo-Pauline epistle, one that falsely claims to have been written by Paul but was actually written about 30 years later than Paul’s actual epistles.

All the rest: Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1–3 John, Jude, and Revelation

The one-chapter books stand out here.

Hebrews (thirteen chapters, each 115 years tall, near the center) has 8 papyrus sources, including the excellent P46. Revelation has five sources, mostly poor. The remainder have three or fewer sources, and four books have zero sources and must be completely backstopped by Codex Sinaiticus.

Every link in the chain that builds to the conclusion, “And that’s why the New Testament is historically trustworthy!” must be reliable. When the average chapter-by-chapter time gap from original to oldest New Testament copy is 171 years, this link in the chain clearly isn’t.

See also:

If the Bible and my brain
are both the work of the same infinite god,
whose fault is it that the book and my brain
do not agree?
— Robert G. Ingersoll

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/22/16.)

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