BSR 19: Jesus Was Just a Man

Posted on by

Summary of reply: The Caesar of history doesn’t need supernatural tales, but Jesus is nothing without them. And that “You’re biased against the supernatural!” charge doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Jesus was just a man

Christian response #1: “If you trust what history tells us about Caesar (who was just a man), why wouldn’t you trust what history tells us about Jesus (who was described as God incarnate)?”

BSR: An account of Julius Caesar as a man isn’t surprising. We know of many men in history who did remarkable things. That he conquered Gaul or was on the winning side of a civil war or was the Roman Republic’s dictator for life are facts that every student of history will agree to. By contrast, claims about the supernatural are never universally agreed to.

The Roman historian Suetonius reported that Caesar, pausing before taking the monumental step of crossing the Rubicon river with his army, saw a divine messenger urging him to cross. Historians scrub supernatural claims like this from history. Give historians the gospels, and they’ll do the same.

How do we know about Julius Caesar? Unlike the gospels, it’s not just copies of ancient documents that refer to him. We have copies of books he wrote. There are inscriptions mentioning him. There are coins, busts, and statues with his likeness. There’s a calendar and even a month named after him! Remove the supernatural from the Caesar story, and you’re left with the remarkable Caesar of history, but remove it from the gospels, and you’re left with just the story of an not-particularly-interesting peasant from a distant culture. Jesus is nothing but his supernatural story.

If a claim is believed because it’s dogma rather than because evidence has convinced the historians, it’s not worth believing in.

Remove the supernatural from the Julius Caesar story, and you’re left with the remarkable Caesar of history, but remove it from the gospels, and you’re left with just the story of an uninteresting peasant. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Why trust the gospels when they say that Jesus existed but not when they say that he was a god?

BSR: Because reports of humans are common and typically trustworthy. Reports of gods are fiction, legend, or mythology, not history. If there is an exception in the case of Jesus, you need a mountain of evidence to support this remarkable claim. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Alexander the Great, and other historical figures from two millennia ago often have supernatural tales in their biographies, but historians accept none of them as history.

Even the part about Jesus existing isn’t certain. Some religions were started by a real person, and some weren’t. Either is possible in the case of Christianity.

This is a bias against the supernatural, though not an exclusion of that possibility. It’s a bias because the supernatural is unnecessary to explain anything about religion—not its origin, its affect on people, or its growth. Sure, I have a bias against the supernatural. Who doesn’t? List the supernatural claims of Hinduism, Scientology, or Mormonism, and the Christian will be as skeptical as I am. My bias for the plausible natural explanation is no different from the Christian’s . . . in every domain but Christianity.

Sure, I have a bias against the supernatural. Who doesn’t? List the supernatural claims of Hinduism, Scientology, or Mormonism, and the Christian will be as skeptical as I am. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 20: Christianity Is Anti-Science

For further reading:

Virtually every major technological advance
in the history of the human species—
back to the invention of stone tools
and the domestication of fire—
has been ethically ambiguous.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

.

Image from Vidar Nordli-Mathisen, CC license
.

Response to “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection” (2 of 5)

Posted on by

Let’s continue with our critique of Mike Licona’s “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection” (part 1 here).

Licona’s view is that the gospel story is literally true and Jesus really did die and rise again. The “myths” analyzed in this post series are explanations that Licona rejects. Let’s critique.

(Blue text is the myth, green is Licona’s rejection of the myth, and black is my response to Licona.)

Myth 3: The Fraud Theory

The disciples stole the body and lied about the later appearances of Jesus.

Licona says that no credible scholar holds this view.

I’ll grant that the body-snatchers hypothesis isn’t popular, but that’s only because skeptical scholars find another natural explanation far more likely: that the resurrection developed over time as a legend. Nevertheless, the disciples stealing the body is far more likely than a god creating the universe and everything in it and then 13.7 billion years later going to one galaxy out of billions to find one planet out of billions to visit one tribe for which this whole mess was created.

Christian apologists seem to imagine that they can drop the skeptic into the gospel story at any point and demand a satisfactory alternative ending. Until proven otherwise, none of the gospel is history, and none must be explained by a skeptic. Any part of the gospel story could be legend; in fact, it could all be legend.

For example, we could stay within the story and give “the disciples stole the body” as an alternative to the resurrection. However, with no interest or need to stay within the story, the skeptic can say that the resurrection is likely just a legendary addition.

And let’s pause and consider the credibility of the Christian scholars that Licona relies on. How many hold a job that requires a faith statement? Apologists who point to Christian “scholars” probably don’t give it a second thought, but this is actually fundamental to the credibility of many of these authorities. Licona is himself such an authority. He is an associate professor at Houston Baptist University. As such, he is bound by their faith statement. Licona has already lost jobs when he strayed from the obligation of a faith statement. Since he’s been punished for straying before, why should I believe that he’s following the facts now since this obligation means that he’s prohibited from following the facts objectively? To take just one claim from his faith statement as an example, he is committed to “man was directly created by God.” If he were to declare that humans didn’t evolve from lower animals, that could just be his faith statement talking. How could I believe that was his honest conclusion after following the facts when he knows that he loses his job if he says otherwise?

Licona says, “For the most part, scholars today acknowledge that Jesus’ disciples had experiences that convinced them that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had appeared personally to them.”

Oh? What about Muslim scholars? They have no problem with the supernatural, and they’re happy to accept Jesus as much more than an ordinary man. And yet I’m sure that these scholars universally reject the idea that Jesus resurrected from the dead, regardless of what his disciples might have said or not.

What about historians? There are plenty of stories of supernatural stories from history—Caesar Augustus being divinely conceived or Merlin the magician able to shapeshift—but these are never categorized as history. In other words, these stories exist, but they’re not true.

Licona seems left only with scholars who are Christians. That non-Christian historians disagree makes this a partisan issue, not the consensus view of historians.

Licona: The disciples were willing to die for this, which shows that they didn’t just report it; they believed it. Even if one nut would die for a lie, can you imagine them all doing so?

He undercuts his point by inferring that they all died as martyrs. The idea that all of the Twelve (except Judas and John) died as martyrs comes from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563. In fact, our best evidence is from Hippolytus of Rome, and he has only seven on his list of disciple martyrs. But even this was written 150 years after the events it claims to document and is therefore next to useless.

The “Who would die for a lie?” argument is popular, mostly because it rhymes, but it crumbles under investigation.

“The disciples were dying for what they knew was true or false. And liars make poor martyrs. So we can know that the disciples actually believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had appeared to them.”

“Liars make poor martyrs”? No one (except for apologists like Licona) are saying that anyone deliberately lied. It was a legend. It grew with time by happenstance. There was no individual pulling the levers to control the development of the gospel story. He just assumes the disciples were martyrs even though the evidence for any of them being so is scanty.

The characters in the gospel story are marionettes who do whatever the author makes them do. The burden of proof to show that this is history is on the Christian, and this burden hasn’t been met.

Finally, Licona marvels that Paul converted to Christianity. “Since [Paul] had been persecuting Christians and consenting to their execution, it’s inexplicable why he would convert to Christianity and lie about the appearances.”

What’s surprising about someone switching religions? And if there were a lie in Paul’s story, it could easily be about his being a persecutor. Perhaps even in the first century Christians liked to marvel at how sinful they had been in their pre-Christian lives. Paul would be motivated to show how far he’d come and could conceivably have enhanced the evil back story recorded in Acts 9.

Myth 4: Hallucinations

The disciples were grief stricken, so maybe they saw hallucinations about Jesus. Or maybe they turned to drink or drugs for solace and this distorted their perception.

Licona: While imagining a lost loved one does happen, only seven percent of grieving seniors experience visual hallucinations.

Sure, maybe the hallucination hypothesis is farfetched. But which would be likelier—that hallucinations of a risen teacher morphed over time into the gospel story? Or that some god created the universe and desperately wants a relationship with us but just can’t find the time to connect with us personally? Now, that would be hard to believe.

But it turns out that hallucinations are quite common. Scientific American reported on a study that found that eighty percent of elderly people experienced hallucinations of a dead partner. Bart Ehrman noted that another common hallucination is that of a revered religious figure. Did dead Jesus “appear” to several grieving disciples, and then this story evolved into Jesus physically appearing to many more? Paul admits that his own experience was just of a vision of Jesus, not a bodily appearance. The hallucination hypothesis isn’t so crazy, and it’s far more likely than the supernatural alternative.

Licona doesn’t even acknowledge the problem of fallible memories, which he imagines conveying the story accurately through the forty-plus years of oral history. There’s an enormous difference between a vivid memory and an accurate one. (I explore fallible memory here and here.)

Continue with part 3.

What’s the difference between a religion and a myth?
A myth is a religion that no one believes in anymore.
— James Kern Feibleman, paraphrased

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/23/16.)

Image from Steve Maw, CC license

.

BSR 18: Being a Good Person Is All that Really Matters

Posted on by

Summary of reply: Objective morality is make-believe, the dictionary already defines “good” (no need for God, thank you), and God sets no moral standard that anyone should be striving to follow.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Being a good person is all that really matters

Christian response #1: Don’t judge “good” by your own standard. Your good will differ from your neighbor’s. The objective standard of good comes from God.

BSR: We’ve all seen or heard countless individual moral dilemmas where we might argue with friends about which course of action was best. We also see moral issues within society like abortion or same-sex marriage that drag on contentiously for years. Where is this objective standard from God that will neatly direct us to the one correct moral answer?

The standard that people use is their own. A person’s moral standard begins with the moral programming they got from being born a human, and that is then shaped by their personality, upbringing, and society.

We already have a source to find out what “good” means—it’s the dictionary. Look up the word and there’s no mention of God. The standards we use are our own, grounded by ourselves. An objective, accessible moral standard would be nice, but there is no evidence of such a thing.

And even if we want to imagine objective morality, why imagine that the Christian god is behind it? Maybe it’s Allah or Zeus or the Aztec god of wind and learning, Quetzalcoatl. As Christopher Hitchens observed, this is slipping God through customs without declaring him.

Morals have a natural explanation. “But where did objective moral values come from but from God?” fails if there are no objective moral values to explain. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: No one’s thoughts and actions are entirely pure. If being a good person is all that really matters, then we all fail because we aren’t consistently good.

BSR: When did “good” become “perfect”? We know we’re not perfect. Even more so, we know that others aren’t perfect. The idea “he’s a good person” is never confused with “he’s morally perfect.” Here on earth, we try to live a life that’s at least more good than bad, more helpful than hurtful. We try to leave the earth better for our having lived. We see this codified into the legal system with the idea of character witnesses who argue that, though the defendant has made mistakes, there is a good side that mitigates the bad side.

Jesus’s parable of the sheep and the goats makes clear that works (not faith) get you into heaven and that perfection isn’t required: “The Son of Man will come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.”

You’ve ceded the right to have your moral judgments taken seriously if you accept the idea of infinite punishment for finite crimes in hell. Here again we see a difference between Christians’ one-size-fits-all imagination of the afterlife and proportional punishment here on earth. If a single horrible punishment for all crimes makes no sense in our legal system, why would it make sense coming from the omniscient and all-wise Judge of All?

Jesus agreed that perfection wasn’t needed to get into heaven (Matt. 25:31–46). And speaking of imperfection, the one-size-fits-all hell is an example. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: “Good” isn’t good enough when God is perfect.

BSR: Read the Old Testament, and you’ll see that God sets a terrible moral standard. He breaks pretty much every commandment that it’s possible for him to break. It’s not clear what moral rules he follows, if any.

Don’t tell me that God’s ways are higher than our ways or that God is good by definition or that God’s various rampages are in “difficult passages” that must be reinterpreted. The word “good” has a definition, and God doesn’t meet it. If you’re going to say that God is “good” when he does good things, you’re obliged to label him “bad” when he does things for which, if you did them, you’d be called bad.

Even if we did allow that God were morally perfect (remember that this is the same God who supports slavery, commands genocide, and kills everything in a flood), why does his moral perfection mean that we must be perfect? In this view, God creates us, so he’s well aware of how flawed we are. We’re imperfect by design—his design. No father would insist on a standard of behavior from his children that he knew they couldn’t meet.

God sets a terrible moral standard—just read the Old Testament. Supporting slavery, demanding genocide, drowning the world—he breaks just about every moral rule it’s possible to break. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 19: Jesus Was Just a Man

For further reading:

He’s your god; they’re your rules—
you burn in hell.
— seen on the internet

.

BSR 17: There Are No Objective Moral Truths

Posted on by

Summary of reply: Rejecting a claim on a flimsy technicality is cowardly, claims of objective morality fail, and adding “for fun” doesn’t help.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: There are no objective moral truths.

Christian response #1: “This kind of claim is clearly self-refuting. The challenge isn’t whether objective, moral truths exist, the challenge is simply identifying them and explaining where they come from.”

BSR: They’re trying to get a lot of mileage out of this tired and (in my opinion) cowardly charge that arguments are self-defeating. Specifically, the attack here is that “There are no objective moral truths” is itself an objective truth claim, which means that the statement defeats itself. But this charge fails.

What would work is dropping the “moral” part. Now, “There are no objective truths” is an objective truth claim and technically defeats itself. But let’s go back to the original challenge. “There are no objective moral truths” does not claim to be an objective moral truth, so the self-defeating charge fails.

My own position would be something like “I see no evidence for objective moral truths; if you have some, provide it.” Phrase it this way and, yet again, the self-defeating claim dissolves away.

And let’s highlight the second sentence in the response. It basically says, let’s not worry about whether objective moral truths exist; let’s assume they do and find out where they come from.

Uh, no, let’s not assume that. That objective moral truths exist is a bold claim that must be defended.

“That argument is invalid on a technicality, and I won’t respond” is a popular but cowardly retreat by which Christian apologists try to avoid difficult arguments. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Here’s an objective moral truth: “It’s always wrong to torture babies for fun.” You would fight anyone who didn’t see this truth limiting their behavior.

BSR: Yes, I would reject the claim that it’s okay to hurt someone for no good reason, but who says that’s objective morality? That moral claim about torture is both strongly felt and universally agreed to, but that doesn’t make it objectively true (that is, grounded outside humanity and true whether there are humans to appreciate its truth or not).

Notice the appeal to emotion. Here’s something that we all feel strongly about, and the argument wants to cheat by avoiding the difficult intellectual argument and claim success based on emotion. But it doesn’t work that way. Look up “morality” in the dictionary, and you’ll find no mention of objectivity.

Objective morality is unchanging morality. If slavery and genocide are wrong today, they should have always been wrong, but the Bible shows God supporting slavery and demanding genocide. If “slavery is morally wrong” is objectively true, then God was objectively wrong.

Or consider moral dilemmas today that divide society like same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, contraception, sex education, or capital punishment. Are there objectively correct moral stands for each of them? And are these objective moral truths reliably accessible by ordinary humans? If so, then why don’t we agree?

Consider society’s current moral dilemmas: SSM, abortion, capital punishment. Are there objectively correct moral stands on each? Are these objective moral truths reliably accessible by ordinary humans? If so, why isn’t it obvious? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: How do you find objective moral truths? Lying is bad, for example, but what if you’re protecting someone’s feelings? Solution: add “for fun” to the end of the moral statement.

BSR: Here’s the idea: take a moral statement like “Don’t steal” for which there seem to be exceptions. For example, what if you’re stealing because your family is starving? What if you’re stealing from a thief? The solution is to add “for fun” on the end. Now we have “Don’t steal for fun,” which shrinks the scope of the rule so that it is universally true.

But how does this help? Okay, I shouldn’t steal for fun. That seems to admit no exceptions, but I already knew that. And the moral questions remain: what if my family is hungry—is stealing okay then? Or take a persistent moral issue within society like abortion. I’ll agree with “Don’t have an abortion for fun,” but again, where is the new insight?

Sure, we can add “for fun” to any moral statement (“Don’t steal FOR FUN”), but how does this help? This teaches us nothing new, and it does nothing to resolve moral issues like abortion or same-sex marriage. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 18: Being a Good Person Is All that Really Matters

For further reading:

How can [God] be a source for any sort of morality
if [he’s] not held morally responsible?
— commenter Susan

.

Image from Alice Alinari, CC license
.

Response to “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection”

Posted on by

Easter has recently come and gone, so it’s opportune to critique “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection,” ten brief videos by Dr. Mike Licona covering what he claims are false beliefs about the Resurrection. Let’s take a look and see where the facts point us. (I’ve written about Licona before, and I analyze where he got on the wrong side of fundamentalist scholars here.)

Myth 1: Contradictions in the Gospels

“The gospels contradict themselves and so therefore we can’t believe them on the Resurrection of Jesus.”

Licona rejects this: “No credible historian believes that contradictions within an account discredit the account itself.” (I’ll use blue for the myth, green for Licona’s rejection of the myth, and black for my response to Licona.)

Contradictions don’t discredit a historical account? Surely you admit that contradictions within a source must discredit it somewhat and that a contradiction-free account is more credible than the equivalent story full of contradictions. (I have a long list of Bible contradictions beginning here.)

Licona gives the sinking of the Titanic as an example. Some witnesses say that the ship broke in two before sinking (which is correct) while others say that it sank intact, but historians didn’t conclude from this contradiction that the Titanic didn’t sink.

Since the witnesses were unanimous that it did sink, that a sinking ship is a well-understood event, and that the event is well documented, “the Titanic sank” sounds like a reasonable conclusion for historians. Disagreements over details didn’t change the fact that the genre of the Titanic account is history, but disagreements between the gospels make one wonder if historical or journalistic accuracy was even the goal.

While a ship sinking isn’t especially incredible, the story of a man rising from the dead must default to the “mythology” or “legend” categories. We’ll move it to the history category only after being convinced by very good evidence. The 100% natural Titanic story is a poor analogy to a supernatural tale.

Licona says that he won’t admit to any contradictions in the Bible and that any there could be explained away.

Harmonizing the facts to support something you know for certain happened is fine, but first you must show that it happened. Licona has it backwards—he wants to assume the accuracy of the Bible first and then select the facts of the world to support that presumption.

And, of course, if there are contradictions in an account, you must first ask yourself if that account is so unreliable that it should be discarded. Richard Carrier addresses this with his summary of Stephen Law’s Argument from Contamination:

Law’s argument is that in documents with a disturbingly high quantity of unbelievable claims, we have no reason to trust the mundane claims in those documents either, without some reliable external corroboration (the bogus material thus “contaminates” the rest with heightened suspicion). . . .

Law is not saying any history or biography that blends legendary with mundane claims warrants skepticism. He is saying any history or biography that is loaded with legendary claims, as in has an unusual amount of them central to the story, warrants sweeping skepticism. . . .

Law’s actual principle is obviously correct and obviously one real historians routinely employ.

I can accept that a single contradiction can’t justify the dismissal of a source, but contradictions must affect the reliably to some extent. Stephen Law’s Argument from Contamination is a nice encapsulation of how unbelievable claims, like the supernatural, must color our view of the remainder.

Licona argues that any contradictions are in peripheral details. The gospels agree on the important claims: that Jesus died, was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, was raised on the third day, and appeared to others.

We have several copies of the Gilgamesh epic, which must also disagree on some details. Are we entitled to consider as history the supernatural claims agreed to in all copies as Licona does for the claims common among the gospels?

Or suppose that a future historian is trying to make sense of our contradictory stories about Superman from radio shows, TV, movies, and other media. Suppose he selects just the common features—Superman came as a baby in a rocket from Krypton, he grew up in Smallville, he could lift cars, he disguised himself as Clark Kent, and so on. Must that amalgam be historical?

Licona gives no rule that allows him to capture Christianity but reject Gilgamesh, Superman, and other fanciful tales.

Myth 2: Pagan Parallels in Mystery Religions

“How can it be that you have so many accounts of dying and rising gods and heroes within pagan accounts—isn’t Christianity just another example of this?”

Licona says that there is almost unanimous consensus by scholars that virtually all of these accounts postdate the gospels. That means that it’s the pagans who are copying the Christians!

This is a red herring. If there are accounts that postdate the gospels, we should obviously discard them. But that leaves us with plenty of precedents for the Jesus resurrection: Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Baal. My favorite is Dionysus, the love child of one of Zeus’s many affairs. His jealous wife Hera had the infant Dionysus eaten by Titans, but Zeus brought him back to life through the mortal woman Semele.

Dead, and then born by a mortal. Brought back to life by the ruler of the gods. Sounds like there’s overlap with the gospel story.

Unlike Licona, second-century Christian Justin Martyr was happy to acknowledge commonalities between Jesus and Greek gods such as a virgin birth and resurrecting from the dead. He simply says that Satan placed the precedent back in time to trick us.

The Jesus story arose in a culture suffused with the idea of dying and rising gods, and Resurrection envy nicely explains the Resurrection.

Licona warns us that many popular internet examples are nonsense, such as the claim that Krishna was crucified and rose from the dead. “There are no accounts period of Krishna being crucified or rising from the dead three days later.”

I suppose he’s thinking of sources like The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves (1875) or Zeitgeist: the Movie (2007), which have been attacked for poor scholarship. But, like his complaints about the existence of dying-and-rising gods that postdated the gospels, historical examples that don’t fit can simply be ignored. His warning us away from examples that aren’t relevant doesn’t dismiss the ones that are.

As for Krishna, it’s true that there is no crucifixion or three-day delay, but those are insignificant details. What’s common is the important thing: that, like Jesus, Krishna arose from the dead and returned to his place in heaven!

Continue with part 2.

Forget Jesus—stars died so you could be here today.
— Lawrence Krauss

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/21/16.)

Image from Camilo Rueda López, CC license
.

BSR 16: Atheists Just Believe in One Less God than Christians

Posted on by

Summary of reply: Christian claims of better evidence for their supernatural beliefs are wishful thinking. Another argument tries (but fails) to lampoon the atheist challenge by comparing it to a murder investigation.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Atheists believe in just one less God than Christians.

Christian response #1: Don’t think that the gods of history are equally well evidenced. The case for the god of the Bible is far more reliable.

If we can set aside the contentious grammatical issue—whether it’s “one less” god or “one fewer”—we can get on to this more interesting problem. The Christian apologist claims that the evidence for his god is much better than that for the other gods. The number of Bible manuscripts is greater than those for other religions of the time, they’re older, and so on.

This claim of better documentation fails. One of the old religious books will have best documentation, but even if the Bible is the lucky one, it’s still full of supernatural tales supported by no evidence.

The Bible is full of story ideas taken from other religions—the Garden of Eden, the Flood, a supernatural birth, a dying-and-rising god, and so on all come from older religions nearby. An actual religion would look startlingly different than its neighbors, not like a cut-and-paste borrowing.

And if you like solid documentation, Mormonism is far better than Christianity. Its holy book was written more recently, we have records of changes made, and there’s little difficulty understanding the culture it came from.

In God’s holy book, he speaks the universe into existence, but in reality he can’t even wave hello. Christianity looks like just another manmade religion.

Christians should avoid the “We have better evidence” claim. If that argument is compelling, you should logically upgrade to an even better evidenced religion like Mormonism. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Imagine the defense attorney in a murder trial saying about the defendant, “We all dismiss everyone else in our community as a suspect. I just believe in one less suspect.”

This is a terrible analogy with God. We all agree that murders, killers, and evidence exist. But change the subject to the supernatural, and we can’t agree on anything, including whether the supernatural even exists. Theists can’t even agree among themselves how many gods there are or their names. The God argument can’t make a convincing case of the first and most important issue, that God exists.

If there’s a murder, there must be one or more murderers. Zero is not an option. But for the number of gods, zero is quite reasonable.

This Christian argument tries to change the subject. It wants to discuss, “Of the many gods, which one?” rather than, “Are there any gods at all?” It wants to ignore the elephant in the room—that the magical domain being discussed could easily be no more real than Harry Potter and Hogwarts.

If there was a murder, you can’t have zero murderers, but zero gods is possible. The magical domain Christians want to discuss may be no more real than Harry Potter and Hogwarts. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 17: There Are No Objective Moral Truths

For further reading:

“I don’t understand how you don’t believe in God.”
Well, you know how you don’t believe in Zeus? Like that.
— Ricky Gervais

.

Image from Caroline, CC license
.