Yeah, but Christianity Built Hospitals!

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Christians have a long history of putting themselves at risk to help others during plagues. For example, the Plague of Cyprian (251–66) is estimated to have killed two-thirds of the population of Alexandria, Egypt. And yet,

During the Plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying.

Many Christians will point to medieval hospitals to argue that they were pioneers in giving us the medical system that we know today. Let’s consider that claim.

(Part 1 considered the similar claim that Christianity is responsible for modern universities.)

Health care in the Bible

We can look to the Bible to see where Christian contributions to medical science come from.

We find Old Testament apotropaic medicine (medicine to ward off evil) in Numbers 21:5–9. When God grew tired of the Israelites whining about harsh conditions during the Exodus, he sent poisonous snakes to bite them. As a remedy, God told Moses to make a bronze snake (the Nehushtan). This didn’t get rid of the snakes or the snake bites, but it did mean that anyone who looked at it after being bitten would magically live. So praise the Lord, I guess.

This is a “hair of the dog” type of treatment, akin to modern homeopathic “medicine.” Just as bronze snake statues are useless as medicine today, Jesus and his ideas of disease as a manifestation of demon possession was also useless. To those who point to Jesus’s few individual healings as evidence that Jesus cared about public health, I ask why Jesus didn’t eliminate any diseases or at least give us the tools to do so.

The Father of Western Medicine was Hippocrates, not Jesus.

Medieval hospitals

Without science, a hospital can do nothing but provide food and comfort. Palliative care is certainly something, and let’s celebrate whatever comfort was provided by church-supported hospitals, but these medieval European institutions were little more than almshouses or places to die—think hospitals without the science.

Christian medicine did not advance past that of Galen, the Greek physician of 2nd century who wrote medical texts and whose theories dominated Western Christian medicine for over 1300 years. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance) did the physician Andreas Vesalius surpass Galen in the area of human anatomy.

Let’s also be cautious about how much credit Christianity gets rather than simply Christians. People planning a hospital in Europe 500 years ago would’ve been Christians, not because only Christians were motivated to build hospitals but because in Europe then, pretty much everyone was Christian.

Hospitals of that time in other regions of the world would’ve been built by people who reflected those societies—Arabs, Chinese, and so on, and India, Greece, and Rome were trying to systematize health care long before Christians.

Christianity’s poor attitude toward learning

Christianity had an uneasy relationship with any ideas that didn’t directly support the Church. The 1559 Index Librorum Prohibitorum listed books by 550 authors that were prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, though prior lists had prohibited books almost since the beginning of Christianity. The list is a Who’s Who of Western thought and included works by Sartre, Voltaire, Hugo, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Milton, Locke, and Pascal. The List was abolished only in 1966.

Dr. Peter Harrison said, “From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeen century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice.” For example, Augustine compared physical lust to “vain desire and curiosity . . . of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.” Martin Luther said, “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.”

This aversion to knowledge is ironic because when the Church was motivated, it could accomplish great things. My favorite example is the thirteenth-century explosion of innovative cathedrals that still stand today.

A modern look at Christianity’s medieval hospitals

We can get a picture of medieval Christian hospitals by looking at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity hospitals. They have minor comforts, and at best they are comfortable places to die. They’re not meant for treating disease and often lack even pain medication. This isn’t for lack of funds—some estimates claim that the charity took in $100 million per year, though we can only guess because the finances are secret.

One critique noted the mission’s “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.” Christopher Hitchens said, “[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.” Mother Teresa’s own philosophy confirms this: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

This is the opposite of the approach of modern hospitals.

Hospitals and medicine today

Let’s return to the Malcolm Muggeridge quote with which I started this post series: “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.”

Maybe the humanists were more focused on curing the problem than simply addressing the symptoms and having a good old pray. And let’s not be too hard on the Fabian Society. They founded the London School of Economics in 1895—not a medical institution but a worthwhile contribution to society nonetheless.

I’d like to give credit where it’s due. If the medieval Church catalyzed human compassion into hospitals that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, that’s great, but let’s not take that too far. The Church was largely in charge at that time. If the Church deserves praise for its hospitals, does it also deserve some condemnation for the social conditions that forced people into those hospitals? Did Christianity retard medical science with its anti-science attitude? We forget how long a road it was to reach our modern medical understanding. The book Bad Medicine argues that “until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.” Christianity might have set modern medical science back centuries.

How many diseases has faith cured? How many have faith healers like Benny Hinn cured?

Compare that to how many reasoning and evidence have cured. Smallpox killed 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. Today, zero. Thank you, science.

And aren’t Christian hospitals an admission of defeat? Hospitals should be redundant, even counterproductive, to Christians armed with prayer. The Bible makes bold claims about prayer curing the sick. For example, “The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick” (James 5:15). What does it say that a Catholic hospital cures illness using science like any other hospital?

Catholic hospital systems are today busy gobbling up independent hospitals in the United States. This appears to have nothing to do with providing improved health but rather to be an opportunity to impose Catholic moral attitudes in areas such as abortion and euthanasia. And note that “Catholic” hospitals are publicly funded, just like all the rest.

For religious hospitals, 46 percent of all revenues came from Medicaid or Medicare, 51 percent was patient revenue from other third-party payers, such as commercial insurers, and only 3 percent was classified as non-patient revenues.

Of those non-patient revenues, the majority came from county appropriations (31 percent) and income from investments (30 percent). Only 5 percent derived from unrestricted contributions, such as charitable donations from church members. So, at best, charitable contributions made up a tiny faction of religious hospitals’ operating revenues. (Source: “No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religiously-Sponsored Hospitals in the United States”)

The few billion dollars that religion spends on good works in the United States is insignificant compared to the nearly trillion dollars that we as a society spend on health care through Medicare and Medicaid.

I’ll conclude with an observation about Mother Teresa’s charity, a modern throwback to medieval Christian hospitals. Speaking about her stance against condoms, which replaced science with Catholic prudery and removed a barrier against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, one source said, “More people died as a result of dangerous Church beliefs than Mother Teresa could ever have hoped to save.”

Related posts:

Do you know what they call alternative medicine
that’s been proven to work?
Medicine.
— Tim Minchin, “Storm”

 

There was a time when religion ruled the world.
It is known as The Dark Ages.
— Ruth Hurmence Green

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/6/16.)

Image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

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Yeah, but Christianity Built Universities!

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Atheist whiners like me are quick to point out the problems that religion causes within society—crimes become righteous acts when done in the name of God, believers attack the boundary between church and state, a believer who thinks that beliefs can be justified through faith rather than evidence opens their mind to parasitic mental baggage, and so on.

But let’s be fair. Christians will point out that their religion created universities and hospitals. Setting aside the negatives about religion, surely these institutions are a substantial addition to the Christian side of the ledger.

Now consider the pro-social motivations within Christianity versus those within the secular community. British author Malcolm Muggeridge said:

I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.

Original universities

We’ll look at universities in this post and hospitals next time.

Let’s consider the challenge that we have Christianity to thank for creating universities and nurturing them as they developed into the centers of education and research that they are today.

The oldest continuously operating university is the University of Bologna, Italy (1088), followed by universities at Oxford, England (1096), Salamanca, Spain (1134), and Cambridge, England (1209). Though there were institutions of higher learning in other old civilizations such as Greece, Byzantium, China, India, and the Muslim world, Wikipedia’s list excludes them because they are sufficiently different to make comparisons difficult, and evidence suggests that the seed that eventually grew into the modern university was the medieval European version, not similar institutions from other cultures.

Universities at Oxford and Paris began with the disciplines of theology, law, medicine, and the liberal arts. To see their unabashedly Christian environment, though, consider an example from several centuries later.

Cambridge in the time of Newton

The story of Isaac Newton illustrates how dissimilar medieval universities were from modern universities. Both Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth century required its fellows to be ordained Anglican priests. Newton was a Christian, but he didn’t accept the Trinity. This made him a heretic, which was no minor matter at that time. Only an exemption granted by the king in 1675 allowed Newton to accept the Lucasian chair at Cambridge without taking holy orders. Demanding that physics professors also be priests highlights the difference with universities today.

Don’t imagine that Christianity was a burden for Newton, however. Though he revolutionized science and has been called history’s greatest physicist (or even scientist), Newton devoted more time on theology than science and wrote more than two million words about religion. His Christian beliefs are proudly cited by many apologists.

What then was the result of all that theological work from such a great mind? Nothing. He might’ve spent that time playing solitaire for what it taught him about reality and the good it did for Humanity.

Christians also point to other important Christian scientists from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and into the Industrial Revolution, but they can’t show that these scientists’ religious beliefs drove their discoveries in any way. As far as science goes, they were just conforming to their environment (like drinking wine, wearing clothes, or anything else that Europeans at the time did).

Early American universities

Harvard (1636) was the first university in the United States. It was founded by Christians to train clergy. Most of the first universities in this country were founded the same way.

106 of the first 108 colleges were started on the Christian faith. By the close of 1860 there were 246 colleges in America. Seventeen of these were state institutions; almost every other one was founded by Christian denominations or by individuals who avowed a religious purpose.

The universities that Christians point to with pride are today guided with a very different principle than this declaration by Rev. Jonathan Dickinson, the first president of Princeton: “Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.” Christian universities with a Christian purpose are no gift to humanity, and today’s prestigious universities have turned their back on their original focus of creating clergy.

Modern universities

Changed though modern universities are, we can get a glimpse at the environment in medieval universities by looking at modern Christian colleges. Just like Cambridge in Newton’s day, Biola University demands that each undergraduate student “be a believer in the Christian faith (the applicant’s statement of faith will be articulated in the personal essay section of the application).” The PhD application for one discipline at Liberty University asks for church membership, an essay documenting the applicant’s “personal salvation experience,” and agreement with the school’s doctrinal statement. These universities aren’t interested in honest inquiry if they must create a safe space that protects their pre-determined conclusions.

Here is rule #2 from Harvard College’s original student rulebook:

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).

That is the house that Christianity built. It wasn’t Christianity but secular thinking that created the modern university that we’re proud of.

Continue with a discussion of Christianity’s role in creating hospitals here.

But since the devil’s bride, Reason, that pretty whore,
comes in and thinks she’s wise,
and what she says, what she thinks, is from the Holy Spirit,
who can help us, then?
Not judges, not doctors, no king or emperor,
because [reason] is the Devil’s greatest whore.
— Martin Luther

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/22/16.)

Image from Pantelas, CC license

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BSR 10: You Can’t Trust the Bible Because it Was Written by Humans

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The Bible must be held to a different standard than an ordinary book, the gospels being eyewitness accounts is wishful thinking, and the Bible’s successful prophecies are imaginary.

(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: You can’t trust the Bible because it was written by humans.

Christian response #1: Why then trust any book written by a human or even any statement from a human, including yours? The question should be, is it true?

We’re at the tenth reply in this series, and this is the fourth attempt to dodge a challenge by disqualifying it. Oh well, let’s play along. This version should be unobjectionable: “The Bible’s claims are extraordinary, far more so than those of an ordinary history book. How can these claims be supported when the Bible was only written by humans?”

Sure, a nonfiction book isn’t perfect, but science has a secret weapon: crowdsourcing. The argument and the evidence are presented, and then other scientists are encouraged to find errors. That’s also how it works in other legitimate scholarly disciplines like history. Science has no concept of faith, but the Bible does—big difference.

Christian apologists point to the accurate history in the Bible, such as the names of places, people, or tribes. But then archaeologists used clues in the Iliad to find Troy. Does that mean that the Iliad’s supernatural tales are true? Accurate place names are merely a requirement to get to the starting line; you don’t get bonus points for them.

The elephant in the room is that the Bible was supposedly inspired by God. With this claim, the expectations are much, much higher. If God took the trouble to inspire it, you’d think he would take the trouble to protect it. The Bible should be the world’s most reliable book, but it’s not even close.

The Bible holds God’s message, but you wouldn’t know it given its contradictions and errors. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: The gospels claim to be reliable eyewitness accounts. Test this claim, and you’ll find that it holds up.

Reliable eyewitness accounts? Nope. We don’t even know who wrote the gospels, because they don’t tell us. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are just names assigned by tradition. No New Testament gospel has the equivalent of “I Thomas, an Israelite, write you this account,” which is how one of the noncanonical gospels begins.

This response claims that the gospels are reliable eyewitness accounts. The author is eager to have us take that next little step and conclude that the gospels are accurate, so therefore the Bible’s supernatural tales are true. But it’s not a little step. I could write a pile of nonsense and end it with, “I saw this myself!” That doesn’t turn nonsense into fact. Even if the gospels did claim to be eyewitness accounts—even if they were eyewitness accounts—we’d have a long way to go before story becomes history.

Christianity is old, but don’t think venerable and respected; think clouded by time. We have much more data with which to criticize a supernatural claim in yesterday’s news than 2000-year-old miracle claims for which evidence has vanished. Christians will tell us that they don’t have a chemist’s analysis of the wine Jesus made from water or security cam video of Jesus’s tomb, but that’s their problem, not ours. For claims as remarkable as Christianity’s, we need far more evidence than old stories.

The gospels aren’t reliable eyewitness accounts, and they don’t claim to be. Their names are just tradition, and the authors are unknown. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: The Bible records dozens of prophecies plus their accurate fulfillment.

The Bible’s most well-known “prophecies” fail.

  • Isaiah 7: Matthew says that Jesus’s virgin birth “took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet,” a reference to the Immanuel story in Isaiah 7. But all you have to do is read the three verses about Immanuel to see that his biography is no match with that of Jesus.
  • Isaiah 52–3: The story of the Suffering Servant matches Jesus only if you carefully select the verses to consider. Ask modern Jews: it’s their holy book, and they’ll tell you that the Suffering Servant actually represents Israel, not any man.
  • Psalm 22: This also matches Jesus only by careful picking and choosing.
  • Daniel: This book claims to have been written in the 600s BCE. But it’s much more likely to have been written in about 167 BCE because its “predictions” are accurate up to this point and nonsensical after.
Read a summary of successful Bible prophecies, and they sound impressive. But read a skeptical critique to get the other side of the story. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 11: It’s Narrow-Minded to Think Jesus Is the Only Way to God 

For further reading:

Every cake
is a miraculous fulfillment
of a prophecy called a recipe.
— commenter RichardSRussell

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Image from Paweł Czerwiński, CC license
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BSR 9: Truth Can’t Be Known With Any Certainty

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While this isn’t an argument I’d make, we can still learn a few things from it. This time, the Christian responses are that this challenge can be dismissed as self-defeating and that we can’t expect certainty.

(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: “You can’t be certain about Christianity because truth cannot be known with any certainty.”

Christian response #1: But this is self-defeating! If truth can’t be known with certainty, you can’t be certain of the truth of your challenge.

If you’re keeping track at home, this is the third time the apologist has tried to get a challenge thrown out on a technicality. Take a charitable view, drop the claim to certainty, and you get something like, “We fallible humans can’t be certain of our analysis, so how confident can anyone be when a fallible mind concludes that the monumental claims of Christianity are true?”

This is a real problem. Christians today seeking the word of God are, in effect, looking through a telescope the wrong way. To get back to the words of Jesus, you go from the English translation to the original Greek in our oldest manuscripts. But from there, you still have about 200 years separating those copies from the originals. What changes were made during that Dark Age?

And even if you had the New Testament originals, they’re still separated from Jesus by roughly 25 years (for Paul’s epistles) to 60+ years (for the gospel of John and more). That period is filled with oral history, which changed the message in ways about which we can only make educated guesses. This turns Jesus’s message into a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and no box top.

Christianity is ordinary, fallible people all the way down.

Roughly 200 years separate our best Greek copies of the New Testament books from the originals. This turns Jesus’s message into a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and no box top. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: If you insist on certainty on every issue, you’ll be paralyzed with doubt.

I don’t insist on certainty. I go with the preponderance of evidence. But whether the standard is 100 percent confidence or just 51 percent, Christianity fails. Christianity makes perhaps the most outlandish claim possible, that a god created everything. It’s hard to top that one. Add in the 3 = 1 of the Trinity, or Jesus’s unfulfilled “ask and you shall receive” guarantee for prayer, or a petulant god who must satisfy his rage with a human sacrifice, and it just gets worse. This claim might have been reasonable in the Iron Age, but not today.

This touches on a related challenge, from my site’s Bizarro version, Frank Turek’s Cross Examined. The article asks atheists, “If you knew God existed, would you worship Him? Would you try to live the life that God wants you to live?”

Short answer: no. Far from the all-good god imagined by Christianity, the god of the Old Testament supported slavery and polygamy, demanded genocide and child sacrifice, and had the limited imagination of the inhabitants of Palestine 2500 years ago.

Back to the article. We’re told that a no answer means, “Your problem is not with regards to the strength of the evidence for Christianity or lack thereof, your problem is either emotional or moral. In other words, you simply don’t want Christianity to be true.”

Or maybe there’s just insufficient evidence for a God who wouldn’t be worth worshipping even if he did exist. I think I’ll go with that one.

God created everything? Outlandish. Add in the 3 = 1 of the Trinity, the false “ask and you shall receive” claim for prayer, and a petulant god who must satisfy his rage with a human sacrifice, and it just gets worse. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 10: You Can’t Trust the Bible Because it Was Written by Humans

For further reading:  

The God of the Old Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

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Image from Van Williams, CC license
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William Lane Craig Needs to Insult Islam Some More

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William Lane Craig delivered a one-two punch in a lecture comparing Islam and Christianity. In part 1, I responded to his defense of Christianity against Islam. Surprisingly, this theology scholar doesn’t understand the fundamental concept of the Trinity enough to explain it without committing heresy.

Attacking Islam’s concept of God

With reduced expectations, we move on to WLC’s second point. He says,

What I am going to tell you now is something that you will never hear in the media or from our public officials for they dare not say such things.

Oh Dr. Craig, what big balls you have! How fortunate for us to have WLC give us the hard truth. (I just wish he’d turn some of that tough skepticism onto his own worldview.)

Here’s the truth that WLC isn’t shy about stating: “Islam has a morally deficient concept of God.” This isn’t just a preference for Yahweh over Allah; instead, “The Muslim concept of God is rationally objectionable.”

1. God is loving

Here is his argument. Step 1: “God, as the perfect being, must be all-loving.” But why that attribute for a perfect being? What about others such as being kind, humble, polite, witty, sophisticated, sassy, or snarky? What are the objectively correct attributes of a perfect being, and how does he know? WLC is playing Victor Frankenstein, picking and choosing the attributes for his perfect god.

But let’s ignore that—does WLC’s favorite god meet his own criteria? The Bible itself makes clear that he doesn’t. Yahweh supports slavery and human sacrifice, has crazy attitudes toward marriage, and demands genocide (more here, here, here, and here). He even created evil. God clearly has a not-so-loving side.

WLC doesn’t care about consistency and sifts out Bible verses that support his preconception:

The love of the Heavenly Father is impartial, universal, and unconditional.

Yeah—tell that to the Canaanites. Or the enslaved. Or women. Or Jesus when he said, “Don’t cast pearls before swine.”

2. But Allah isn’t so loving

WLC contrasts the Christian god with the Muslim god in step 2: “According to the Qur’an, God does not love sinners.” He then lists many verses where Allah is said not to love unbelievers, evildoers, the impious and sinners, the proud, and so on. I can accept this point, but Craig seems to imagine that his god is immune to this pettiness. He should read his own Bible:

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9–10)

God created hell, and sending people to Hell isn’t what you do to people you love. Nevertheless, Jesus makes clear that God made most of his favorite creation so that he could send them to Hell:

Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13–14)

 3. Allah loves only those who deserve it

Step 3: “According to the Qur’an, God’s love [is] reserved only for those who earn it.”

Given the choice between getting into heaven by works or by faith, I’ll pick the former. Christianity’s demand to believe the unbelievable to gain entrance into heaven fails from the start.

WLC should read his Bible. The parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 makes clear that works get you into heaven. And there’s more:

For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done (Matthew 16:27).

[God] will repay each person according to what they have done (Romans 2:6).

The dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works (Revelation 20:12).

Craig’s own Bible makes the case for works, just like the Qur’an.

4. Therefore, Yahweh beats Allah

WLC’s conclusion: “Now don’t you think that this is a morally inadequate conception of God?”

Can he be encouraging us to judge god claims to see if they make sense? I’m all for that, but it’s surprising to hear from WLC. He skeptically judges supernatural claims but then plays the “Who do you think you are to judge God??” card when it’s his god being judged.

To highlight the emptiness of the Muslim concept of God, WLC gives us this thought experiment:

What would you think of a parent who said to his children, “If you measure up to my standards and do as I tell you, then I will love you”?

Tell us, Dr. Craig, what would you would think of a Bible that said this:

[Jesus said:] If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love (John 15:10).

The flip side of that is the Christian hell for people who don’t measure up to God’s standards. WLC is living in a glass house, and he should be more cautious whom he throws stones at.

WLC wraps up:

Therefore, it seems to me that the Islamic conception of God is simply morally defective. Therefore I cannot rationally accept it.

Sure, the Muslim god is morally defective, but so is the Christian god. WLC makes no attempt at an unbiased evaluation. He has no interest in fairly critiquing both sides of the issue.

And what does “I cannot rationally accept it” mean? If there’s a creator of the universe, it may be that he has the properties outlined in the Qur’an. The Gnostics, for example, thought that the creator of this world was imperfect (which would explain a lot). Since we’re going on no hard evidence in each of these cases, who’s to say that it’s not the Muslim or Gnostic creator rather than the Christian one?

Moral imperfections in the Qur’an

WLC sets up his own jihad against Islam by citing its barbarism. But for each Muslim example, Christianity’s own barbaric history has plenty of counterbalancing examples.

  • “[In 627,] Muhammad rounded up hundreds of Jewish families in Medina. Seven hundred Jewish men were put to the sword. Muhammad had their wives and children sold into slavery.” (That isn’t much compared to the Canaanite genocide that was ordered by God in Deuteronomy 7:1–5.)
  • Mohammed ordered the non-Muslims killed unless they converted. (That sounds like the persecutions of the Cathars, Anabaptists, and Huguenots in Europe. They also could have gotten forgiveness by converting.)
  • “Islam is a total way of life. Everything is to be submitted to God. . . . The Western idea of separation of church and state is meaningless in Islam.” (Like Kim Davis performing only those government duties that satisfied her interpretation of Christianity? Like science denial by school boards? Like the many examples of state-supported Christianity? The U.S. has plenty of examples, but can WLC be saying that he wants to fight against this kind of Christian extremism? I’d love to see him on our side, but somehow I think that this is just another example of one standard for his religion and another for the other guy’s.)

William Lane Craig has butchered the Trinity, the organizing principle of his religion. He’s painted a cotton-candy picture of the Christian god based on wishful thinking. But his critique of the Muslim god is on target. If he applied the same skepticism to his own religion, it would dissolve just as readily.

(h/t commenter bryce1012)

Some in the Republican Party
want official approval to oppress and marginalize
nonconformists, dissenters and freethinkers—
in other words, the very kind of people
who founded the United States.
— Tom Ehrich

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/11/16.)

Image from John Christian Fjellestad, CC license

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William Lane Craig Insults Islam and Misrepresents His Own Religion

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World famous apologist William Lane Craig picks up a machete and hacks a path through difficult theology in “The Concept of God in Islam and Christianity.” He doesn’t waste time building bridges with our Muslim neighbors but instead highlights their threadbare theology while he commits collateral damage to Christianity.

Defense of the Trinity (but with defenders like that . . .)

WLC begins by stating that Muslims have misinterpreted basic Christian teaching. Early Christians called Mary the “mother of God,” and Mohammed misinterpreted the Trinity as a king-consort-son arrangement. The Christian Trinity isn’t like this, and WLC says, “It is no wonder that [Mohammed] was revolted by such a ridiculous doctrine.”

I’m not sure that he was revolted, but let’s look instead at this being a “ridiculous doctrine.” I don’t see what’s ridiculous about it (except for the evidence-less supernatural part, which admittedly makes it quite ridiculous). You could find lots of king-consort-son triads in other religions—Zeus, Leto, and their son Apollo from the Greek pantheon or Osiris, Isis, and Horus in Egyptian religion, for example. If any collection of gods could rule the cosmos, I don’t see why it couldn’t be a family Trinity.

And WLC should be careful with that “ridiculous doctrine” crack since he makes clear that he doesn’t even understand his own ridiculous doctrine. Here’s his approach to the Trinity.

[The Trinity] is the doctrine that God is tri-personal. It is not the self-contradictory assertion that three gods are somehow one God. Or that three persons are somehow one person. That is just illogical nonsense.

That is indeed illogical nonsense. Unfortunately, it’s also Christian dogma. The fourth-century Athanasian Creed says in part, “The Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods; but one God.” You can try to get around it by saying that the three part is three persons and the one part is one god, but this is just wordplay.

WLC could argue that the definition of the Trinity is not stated in the Bible. For evidence, he could point out that the early Church needed centuries to reach agreement on it, and if it were obvious, it would’ve been dogma from the start. Illuminating the shaky foundation of this doctrine only undercuts his position further.

Craig continues:

[The Trinity] is the claim that the one entity we call God comprises three persons. That is no more illogical than saying that one geometrical figure which we call a triangle is comprised of three angles. Three angles in one figure. Three persons in one being.

Yes, a triangle is composed of three angles, but no, that is not a parallel to the Trinity. In fact, that commits the heresy called Partialism, the declaration that God is composed of three parts that make a whole. Other popular analogies that are also heretical for the same reason compare God to an egg (shell + white + yolk = egg) or to time (past + present + future = time) or to music (three notes make a chord).

WLC is in good company, and C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity makes the same mistake: “In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.” Six squares are parts of a cube, just like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are parts of God? Be careful—a heresy like that can send a guy to Hell. (More on the Trinity here and here.)

WLC doubles down on his claim that Muslims (or anyone) pushing back against the Trinity is wrong.

Although this doctrine may seem strange to Muslims, once it is properly stated there is nothing illogical about it. It is a logically consistent doctrine, and therefore rationally unobjectionable.

Nothing illogical about it? You can’t even explain it without committing heresy! The most honest explanation that I’ve heard is that it’s simply a mystery, and we fallible humans on this side of heaven won’t ever be able to understand it. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains it as a mystery, for example. That doesn’t make the Trinity any more realistic, but at least Christians who say this acknowledge the difficulty.

God and love

WLC moves on to argue why the Christian concept of God is better than the Muslim version. The Trinitarian nature of the Christian god isn’t an embarrassment to Christians determined to argue that their god is monotheistic, WLC tells us; it’s actually an advantage.

Here’s his argument. First, “God is by definition the greatest conceivable being.” (This is the beginning of the Ontological argument, where apologists imagine that they can think into existence anything they want, but let’s avoid digging into the problems with that argument and move on.)

Point 2: “A perfect being must be a loving being, for love is a moral perfection.” Who says that love is a moral perfection? Where is the list of these perfections?

I agree that love is pretty great, but that’s because evolution has programmed me to think that love is pretty great. I feel this way for no more transcendent or objective reason than that. Why imagine that the feelings we have for each other translate unchanged to God? Christians eager to excuse God’s genocidal demands suppose that we simply can’t understand his thinking. But then if we can’t understand his thinking, don’t pretend to understand how he loves us or what “love” means at his level.

Anyway, “loving” is not on the short list of attributes that an objective observer would give the god of the Old Testament. Richard Dawkins’ famous quote at the end of this post summarizes some of these. The Bible makes clear that God is a lot more than just a cuddly teddy bear.

“Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. “Should you not tremble in my presence?” (Jeremiah 5:22)

(More about God’s unpleasant characteristics here, here, and here.)

Point 3 in WLC’s argument: Love requires a target of that love, and for the current of love to flow before the creation of humanity, God couldn’t have been a single person. (And maybe because self-love puts hair on your palms?) Sorry, Muslims, your mono-monotheism isn’t as good as Christianity’s tri-monotheism. Or something.

Here’s how WLC puts it:

If God is perfectly loving by his very nature then he must be giving himself in love to another. But who is that other? It can’t be any created person since creation is a result of God’s free will, not a result of his nature. It belongs to God’s very essence to love, but it does not belong to his essence to create. God is necessarily loving, but he is not necessarily creating.

Wow—where did all these rules come from? It’s nice to imagine that God is loving, just like us, but how does WLC conclude that this is a binding attribute? And how can God not be necessarily creating since creating the universe must’ve been better than not doing so, and God always does the better thing?

And what kind of love are the three persons of the Trinity sharing? Is this parent/child love? Romantic/erotic love? How is this different from a polygamous same-sex marriage, and how do you know?

What would this love-in even look like? WLC apparently imagines that for the trillions of years God existed before the universe did, the three persons of the Trinity were just loving and loving each other. And then they’d start all over again. Was it nothing but compliments all day long?

“Y’know, those new trousers really work on you”

“Say, have you lost weight? You look great!”

“Oh, no—let me do that for you!”

“Can I get you a beer? You look like you could use one.”

But wait a minute—if this were before our universe was created, it was before time existed. How does love work without time? How can you create the universe, or anything, without time?

WLC would probably say that we just don’t know and that it’s ridiculous to speculate. I like that—let’s just say we don’t know instead of this philosophical masturbation based on nothing.

Concluded in part 2, William Lane Craig Needs to Insult Islam Some More.

The God of the Old Testament
is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
— Richard Dawkins

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/8/16.)

Image from Samuel M. Livingston, CC license
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