When Christians Themselves Don’t Know Why They Believe

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Why do Christians believe? Not because Christianity is true but pretty much for the same reason every other theist believes—because they were raised that way.

I’d like to use a puzzle to illustrate the thought process of the believer—or indeed any of us who feel backed into a corner, needing to defend a position. Seeing this flawed thinking in a more familiar, non-Christian context (and realizing that we all do this to varying degrees) may help us better understand how Christians believe.

Lateral thinking puzzle

Imagine two strings hanging from the ceiling in an ordinary room—an office, say, or a living room. Your challenge is to tie the strings together, but if you hold one, your arms aren’t long enough for you to reach the other. Using items typically in such a room (pencils, tacks, light bulbs, etc.), how many different ways can you find to connect them?

This puzzle dates to 1931 when psychologist Norman Maier first did the experiment. His subjects fairly reliably came up with solutions in three categories. (Pause here if you want to think up your own answer to the puzzle. How many categories can you find?)

Here are the categories.

  1. Make one string closer. There isn’t a second person to hand you string 1 while you hold string 2, but an easy alternative is to pull string 1 as close to string 2 as possible and hold it in place by tying it to a chair. Then grab string 1 and return to pick up string 2, and tie them together. There are lots of variations (replace the chair with a table, hold the string in place with a heavy weight, tack it to a wall, and so on), but these are unimportant. They all fit into this one category.
  2. Lengthen the string. Tie string 1 to something long like an extension cord. Grab the other string and then reach for the extension cord to pull in the first string.
  3. Lengthen your arm. Hold one string with one hand and use a broom or yardstick to reach the second string.

Did you get those? How about the fourth option? (Pause for a few minutes, if you want, to see if you can find it.)

In Maier’s 1931 experiment, only forty percent of the subjects found the fourth solution within ten minutes. Here’s that solution: tie a weight like a stapler or coffee mug to one string and make it swing like a pendulum. Hold the other string and wait for the pendulum to swing toward you, and then grab it.

Punch line

Now we’ll connect this puzzle to the problem of how the human mind justifies itself. The climax of the experiment was when the psychologist gave a clue for the fourth solution. To the sixty percent who didn’t come up with it themselves, he hinted at it by walking past one of the strings and knocking it “accidentally” so that it swung. That prodded an additional forty percent of the subjects to come up with the solution.

The interesting part was the final step when he asked the subjects with the new insight why they came up with the solution. The answer, of course, was “You brushed the string, and it moved like a pendulum. That helped me realize that I could make one string swing to me while I held the other.” But only one person answered with that. The rest gave answers ranging from “It just came to me” to some elaborate explanation or other. One supposed insight involved the mental image of monkeys swinging from trees.

Connection to Christianity

Why do Christians believe? Mostly because they were raised that way. Christian apologist Jim Wallace agrees and has said that, in his experience, this is a popular (but insufficient) Christian explanation for belief.

Nevertheless, Christians will often rationalize an intellectual foundation. They might point to the apparent design in nature or wonder where morality would come from in a world without God. This parallels the result of Maier’s connect-the-strings experiment. Those subjects wouldn’t state the actual reason for their belief and gave rationalizations when asked.

Or, perhaps those Christians couldn’t admit the actual reason because they honestly thought their belief was well grounded in evidence. Here, the intellectual part of the brain is simply rationalizing what the emotional part told it to rationalize—“I reject that argument; go make up a reason why” or “we’re doing it this way; go justify that.”

Malcolm Gladwell in Blink analyzes Maier’s subjects this way:

Were these people lying? Were they ashamed to admit that they could solve the problem only after getting a hint? Not at all. It’s just that Maier’s hint was so subtle that it was picked up only on an unconscious level. It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all Maier’s subjects could do was make up what seemed to them the most plausible one.

Beyond simply being a fascinating look into the human mind, I see two lessons from Maier’s experiment. First, Christians’ explanations for their beliefs are unreliable, even if delivered earnestly. This experiment shows how Christians may think they’re believing for rational reasons when in fact they believe for emotional reasons (or, at least, non-intellectual reasons). To see that, find out when a Christian adopted their rationalizations. They likely learned those arguments after becoming a Christian.

Second, we all have (more or less) the same brain, and atheists aren’t immune from bad thinking. A little humility helps.

See also: Your Religion Is a Reflection of Your Culture—You’d Be Muslim if You Were Born in Pakistan

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.
Tell him you disagree and he turns away.
Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources.
Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.
— Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger

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Image from nahid hatamiz, CC license
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Christianity and Anti-Nuclear: Both Selective Users of Science

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The documentary film Pandora’s Promise (2013, 86 minutes, $4) explores nuclear power as it interviews prominent environmentalists who switched from being against it to being in favor. I’d like to highlight some of the features of the transition these environmentalists went through. There are surprising parallels with the transition people make when leaving Christianity, and there are parallels between a dogmatic anti-nuclear attitude and a dogmatic religious attitude.

The charges against nuclear power

Dr. Hellen Caldicott (a medical doctor) is used in the film as the representative of anti-nuclear environmentalism. She has been called “the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner.” She has received many prizes, 21 honorary doctorates, and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize by Linus Pauling and has been called by the Smithsonian Institution “one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.”

Caldicott uses nuclear accidents to make her case and claims that 985,000 people died as a result of the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl (Ukraine). She says that the aftermath from the 2011 Fukushima (Japan) power plant accident will be even worse. Seven million will die prematurely in the next two decades, and tens of millions more will suffer from “debilitating radiation-induced chronic illnesses.”

And the rebuttals

The World Health Organization disagrees. About Fukushima, it concluded in 2013, “The increases in the incidence of human disease attributable to the additional radiation exposure from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP accident are likely to remain below detectable levels.” No deaths due to radiation have been attributed to the accident.

Caldicott’s source for the nearly one million deaths due to Chernobyl has been widely discredited. A consortium of United Nations organizations and others gave this summary of the mortality due to the Chernobyl disaster:

According to [the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation] (2000), [Acute Radiation Syndrome] was diagnosed in 134 emergency workers. . . . Among these workers, 28 persons died in 1986 due to ARS. . . . Nineteen more have died in 1987–2004 of various causes; however their deaths are not necessarily—and in some cases are certainly not—directly attributable to radiation exposure.

There were no radiation deaths in the general population, though there have been close to 7000 cases of thyroid cancer among children. These would have been “almost entirely” prevented had the Soviet Union followed simple measures afterwards.

The report estimates an increase in cancer mortality due to radiation exposure of “a few per cent” in the 100,000 fatal cancers that would be expected in this population. In other words, Caldicott is about as wrong as it is possible to be.

This is not to dismiss the problem—the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents were indeed disasters—but it doesn’t help to see them incorrectly. The Fukushima earthquake and tsunami caused 16,000 deaths, while the power plant accident caused none.

Not seeing the problem correctly causes its own problems. The World Health Organization concluded twenty years after Chernobyl that “its psychological impacts did more health damage than radiation exposure did,” and childhood obesity in the Fukushima area is now the worst in Japan because children are not allowed to play outside, in most cases without any valid reason.

Environmentalists—aren’t they the ones who should be following the science?

One critic compared environmentalists with climate change deniers.

Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don’t suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.

I find this topic revealing because anti-nuclear attitudes are typically held by liberals. Instead of using science and technology to find solutions to the problems of nuclear power, some liberals simply want it to go away. But these problems have solutions. For example, the Integral Fast Reactor was an experimental fourth-generation reactor program begun in the U.S. in 1984. It was cancelled ten years later by Democratic pressure, after it had proven that it was failsafe (it survived a loss of electrical power and loss of all coolant) and shown that it could reduce the waste leaving the facility to less than one percent that of conventional reactors.

The mothballing of the reactor cost more than letting the project conclude. Democrats can be as mindlessly ideological and anti-science as Republicans.

While the U.S. civilian nuclear power industry has caused no deaths, the U.S. health burden from fossil fuel power generation is 30,000 to 52,000 premature deaths per year. Worldwide, the total is millions per year.

Breaking free

Some of the interviewees spoke of their change of mind. Mark Lynas said, “I was under no doubt that my whole career and my whole reputation as an environmental activist, communicator was at risk if I talked publicly about having changed my mind about nuclear power.”

Richard Rhodes said, “I came to realize [journalists] basically avoided looking at the whole picture. They only looked at the questions that seemed to prove to them that nuclear power was dangerous, as I had, too.”

I was most shocked at how little some of these environmentalists knew about nuclear power. They had their standard line—nuclear power of any type was bad—and they stuck with it. One career environmentalist admitted that he hadn’t known about natural background radiation from the ground, from space, and even from bananas. Natural potassium, of which bananas are a good source, is 0.012% potassium-40 (a radioactive isotope), and humans are more radioactive because of potassium than because of carbon-14.

Comparison with Christianity

Dr. Hellen Caldicott, the strident anti-nuclear activist, has a lot in common with Christian leaders. (Obviously, her opinion of religion isn’t the issue. I’m simply paralleling her actions with those of Christian leaders.)

  • Dogmatic. Caldicott is a charismatic speaker, and she has a ready audience eager to hear her message. She’s “the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner” for a reason. She says that nuclear power is wicked just like a televangelist might say that same-sex marriage in America is wicked. She says that nuclear power of any type is bad, just like a preacher might say abortion of any type is bad.
  • Confident and unchanging. Caldicott is well aware of this controversy and the fact that her figures are orders of magnitude greater than the most widely accepted data. Her position is grossly out of touch with reality and could even be called hysterical. But she uses this notoriety to her advantage, and I imagine her façade is as confident as ever.
  • Reputation. This is her livelihood and her identity, and she’s not likely to change. Like Harold Camping or John Hagee in the Christian domain, she can’t admit a big mistake. Some career environmentalists do change, though, as the film documents, and the soul-searching crisis that individual environmentalists go through parallels that of ex-Christians like Dan Barker, Bart Ehrman, or Matt Dillahunty. Leaving one’s identity in either domain means reinventing or even re-finding oneself, and former allies may ridicule or shun.
  • Embrace of science. Caldicott is like William Lane Craig and other apologists in that neither feels bound by science. They use science as it suits them and ignore it when it doesn’t. Caldicott is outraged that climate change deniers dismiss environmental dangers by ignoring or selecting their science, but then she does it herself. In the same way, William Lane Craig quotes cosmologists to defend the Big Bang (because he likes a beginning to the universe), but he ignores quantum physics when it says that quantum events needn’t have causes (he’s desperate to find a cause for the universe).

It’s tempting to pick and choose (or invent) your science when you’re on the losing side of the evidence. Christian apologists do it, and seeing it within the anti-nuclear movement, a completely different domain, can illustrate that it’s not just dogmatic Christians who are guilty of it. This bias is a human problem. Seeing nuclear power incorrectly prevents seeing it as an important way to address climate change, and seeing the supernatural incorrectly diverts us from solving society’s problems. No, God isn’t going to ride into town to save the day.

I’m starting to worry that reason is an acquired taste.
— Sam Harris

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/10/15.)

Image from Idaho National Laboratory, CC license

 

In Gods We Trust: The Polytheistic Pedigree of the U.S. System of Law and Government (Guest Post, 2 of 2)

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This guest post is from frequent commenter Lex Lata.

In part one of this piece, we surveyed the pre-Christian origins and medieval development of the English legal tradition from which the U.S. system of law and government spun off. In part two, we now turn to that U.S. system—in particular, the federal Constitution—and the paucity of evidence for a Mosaic or biblical foundation.

The U.S. Constitutional Experiment

To be clear, it is not my contention that Christian sentiments were absent from the political discourse of the American Revolution and Founding, broadly speaking. Patriots and Loyalists alike were overwhelmingly religious (of varying denominations and levels of orthodoxy), and often employed explicitly biblical ideas and rhetoric in their prolific and varied argumentation. For instance, even the highly heterodox deist Thomas Paine drew from the Old Testament in his viral pamphlet advocating independence, Common Sense. In a similar but less scriptural vein, the Declaration of Independence reflected an Enlightenment-flavored version of Christianized Ciceronian natural law, justifying rebellion against a king whose actions had become “destructive” of certain “unalienable Rights” vested in human beings by their “Creator” (also referred to in the Declaration as “Nature’s God,” “Supreme Judge of the world,” and “divine Providence”). At the state level, most of the new governments imposed religious tests for public office, required taxpayer support for certain churches, and had other indicia of religious “establishment.” Moreover, the conventional wisdom among the Founders was that religious belief served as one source of the personal virtue and moral judgment necessary for responsible citizens of a democratic republic.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1788, was a deliberately and controversially secular charter for a federal government. Its authority came not from God or the Bible, but rather from “the People of the United States.” It contained nothing like the explicitly Christian invocations typical of the old colonial charters, nor even the brief expressions of accommodating, ecumenical theism found in the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. In contrast to most of the new state constitutions, Article VI prohibited the application of any sort of religious test for federal office—a striking repudiation of the standard practice in English government.

The U.S. Constitution’s Unbiblical DNA

More to the point for our purposes, though, the record left by the most prominent constitutional practitioners of the time contains no material evidence that the Bible furnished meaningful guidance about the painstaking, uncertain, and contentious enterprise of crafting a new federal republican government based on the theory of popular sovereignty.[1] James Madison’s copious notes from the Constitutional Convention did not credit the Bible as the source of any useful structure or process, for instance. Nor did Hebrew governance warrant discussion in the hundreds of pages on “ancient republics” explored in John Adams’ ponderous study of constitutional theory and practice, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.

A similarly conspicuous silence marks The Federalist Papers, the series of public essays on the nascent Constitution penned under the shared pseudonym “Publius” by Framers Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. These writings mention numerous examples from European history, including Greco-Roman antiquity (a common area of study in curricula back then), while citing the Bible exactly zero times. We see bupkis about the Ten Commandments specifically, and about Mosaic or biblical law generally.

Word searches on relevant ancient peoples and places in The Federalist Papers produce the following word frequency results:

  • Rome or Roman—26
  • Greece or Greek—21
  • Athens or Athenian—18
  • Achaean—17
  • Sparta—12
  • Carthage—7
  • Lacedaemonian—6
  • Lycia—4
  • Israel—0
  • Judea—0
  • Jerusalem—0
  • Jew or Jewish—0
  • Hebrew or Hebraic—0

As these numbers would appear to confirm, writings on political theory and practice authored by classical thinkers such as Cicero and Polybius “molded the legal expectations of the Framers of the American Constitution, and guided their legal judgment in the actual structuring of the checks and balances of that national charter.”[2] Although the U.S. Constitution arose in a Christian culture in which certain natural rights were widely believed to be God-given, its drafters looked more to Athens and Rome than to Mt. Sinai for pragmatic, actionable insights about democracy, republicanism, federalism, and separation of powers.

Conclusion

The historical record dispels the notion that our legal and political infrastructure rose atop a predominantly biblical foundation. Even the modern English vocabulary of law and government has its intellectual and etymological beginnings among the heathens. Woden-worshipping Anglo-Saxons gave us “right” (riht), “freedom” (freodom), and “laws” (laga). Greek believers in Athena and Apollo coined what would become “democracy” (δημοκρατία) and “politics” (πολιτικά), as well as “monarchy” (μοναρχία) and “tyrant” (τύραννος). And of course the ancient Roman contributions are legion (pun wholeheartedly intended). Libertas, res publica, fœderatio, constitutio, leges, legislatio, exsecutio, iudicialis, senatus, votum, veto, magister, ius naturale, etc. Like our calendar, with its days recalling Germanic gods, months bearing names from the Greco-Roman pantheon, and system of years based on the estimated delivery of Yahweh’s and Mary’s son, the U.S. legal and political system is a mutt, the syncretic product of centuries of intercultural and interreligious confluence.

The likelihood that America is a Christian nation
is directly proportional to the number of occurrences
of the words “Jesus,” “Christ,” “God,” “Bible,” and “Christianity”
in the US Constitution.
— Richard S. Russell

About the author: Lex Lata is a professional bureaucrat and amateur historian, with a bachelor’s degree in English and history and a law degree in . . . um, law. His hobbies include book learnin’ and strategy gamin’. Lex resides with Lady, Lad, and Little Lata in a weird old house in Minnesota

Some elements of this post have appeared in previous comments, rants, and sticky-notes left by the author here and there over the years. Dude likes the sound of his own voice.

 

[1] For further discussion, see Steven K. Green, The Fount of Everything Just and Right?  The Ten Commandments as a Source of American Law, 14 Journal of Law and Religion 525 (1999-2000).

[2] David J. Bederman, The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution, 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

 

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In Gods We Trust: The Polytheistic Pedigree of the U.S. System of Law and Government (Guest Post)

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This guest post is from commenter Lex Lata. As his name suggests, he is trained in the law. This makes him well suited to deal with an issue that I’ve neglected to some extent, responding to the popular Christian claim that the U.S. is a Christian nation. In the sense that it contains lots of Christians, sure. But in the sense that it was built on a biblical foundation, not so much.

Any number of Christian apologists and nationalists contend—inaccurately—that the Bible is the historical foundation of the U.S. system of law and government. Ex-judge Roy “Not Without the Permission of Her Mother“ Moore recently restated his position that “the Ten Commandments [are] the law upon which our nation is founded.” A few years ago, current Trump courtier Michele Bachmann ended her stint representing/embarrassing my state of Minnesota in Congress with a rambling declaration that “in the United States the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses is the very foundation of the law that has given the happiness and the rise of the greatest prosperity that any nation has known before.” And pseudo-historian David Barton continues to credit the Bible as the direct source for the key concepts and structures in the federal Constitution; he goes so far as to claim the Bible is “quoted” and “cited” in the Constitution, placing into question his grasp of not only 18th century U.S. political history, but also the meanings of words like “quote” and “cite.” Less extreme formulations of these views include “Judeo-Christian principles” being the basis of our legal system, or the Ten Commandments being the “moral foundation” of our law.

As a matter of history, arguments of this sort tend to be unduly reductive at best, and deceptive at worst. To be sure, Judeo-Christian learning, theology, ethics, and notions of justice have been consequential in several key respects over the course of time, but the taproots of the legal tradition inherited and renovated by the Founding Generation reach back to the raucous timber mead-halls of northern Germanic tribes and the bustling stoae and fora of ancient Greece and Rome.

Genesis of the Anglo-American Legal Heritage

Legal scholars and historians of the early Middle Ages discern the nativity of English law in the kingdoms founded by pagan Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians (Anglo-Saxons, for short) who invaded or migrated to Great Britain from what is now Denmark and northern Germany and the Netherlands in the fifth to seventh centuries CE.[1] These sea-faring settlers did not find a wholly lawless island, of course. The indigenous Celtic Britons of antiquity relied on an unwritten system of rules memorized and applied by priest-judges known as druids (no half-elves, as far as we know), and the Romans who governed the province of Britannia from roughly 43 to 410 CE brought the civil law of the empire with them. No less a figure than Papinian, a giant of Roman jurisprudence, reportedly adjudicated cases in the forum of York while in the service of Emperor Severus, ca. 200–210. There is no extant evidence, however, that these Celtic and Roman legal cultures directly influenced the land’s increasingly dominant and numerous Germanic occupants, who appear to have imported their own legal customs with them. (As noted below, elements of Roman civil law made their way into English law somewhat later, via different channels.)

Like the Celts and other “barbarians,” the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons possessed little in the way of a written tradition, and regulated rights and liabilities with their own oral catalog of penalties for breaching specified norms. The oldest known recorded versions of many of those rules appear in the law code transcribed during the reign of King Æthelberht I of Kent (ca. 560–616). This code consisted of a tariff of monetary damages linked to particular harms and often the aggrieved party’s social rank. “If a man lie with the king’s maiden [i.e., maidservant], let him pay a bot [compensation] of fifty shillings. . . . If a man lie with an eorl’s [nobleman’s] birele [cupbearer], let him make bot with twelve shillings. . . . If a man lie with a ceorl’s [freeman’s] birele, let him make bot with six shillings. . . .”

There were likewise penalties for killing, theft, and assorted amputations, disfigurements, and other injuries listed with colorful particularity. Crude and gritty as this system might seem to us, it illuminates some of the priorities (or perhaps pastimes) of a warrior society that, at least in principle if not always in practice, had evolved beyond the purely talionic justice of retributive self-help and violent blood-feuds in favor of a more organized, pro-social system of compensatory justice—Teutonic tort reform, in a manner of speaking.

While these rules (and others) developed in large part among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, we see in this collection the early and unmistakable fingerprints of Christianity, a religion to which Æthelberht was the first Anglo-Saxon royal convert (ca. 600). For one thing, the code begins with protections for the property of the Church. For another, and perhaps more significantly from a historical perspective, these laws were put to parchment by the Gregorian missionaries who brought with them the Roman practices and tools of literacy and codification. (The derivation of modern “clerk” from Old English “cleric” reflects the clergy’s quasi-monopoly on writing skills in early medieval England.) The codes assembled during the reigns of Æthelberht and later Anglo-Saxon kings such as Alfred the Great (ca. 847–899), were the products of Christian hands transcribing rules of largely Teutonic provenance, typically in Old English rendered in the Latin alphabet of Virgil and Livy.

Evolution of the Law in Christian England

In the space of this post, the maturation and formalization of English justice over the next several centuries can be described in only the most general and possibly unsatisfactory terms. Temporal authorities, from the crown to shire reeves and other local magistrates, adopted, adapted, and invoked various substantive laws and procedural rules, frequently aided by churchmen serving as scribes, advisors, and specialists involved in the administration of oaths and trials by ordeal in particular. Not long after the Norman conquest of 1066, separate networks of secular/royal and ecclesiastical courts emerged. The former applied what became known as the common law to adjudicate most property, contract, debt, injury, and violent criminal matters, whereas the latter relied on canon law (itself essentially the lovechild of Roman civil law and Christian precepts) in exercising jurisdiction over complaints of clerical misconduct, justiciable sins such as adultery and heresy, disputes involving Church property, defamation, and matrimonial and probate cases.[2] Theologians debated and refined ideas about the relationship between divine, natural, and manmade law—drawing not only on scripture, but also on ideas traceable to admired classical heathens such as Cicero and Aristotle. And durable principles, methodologies, maxims, and terms of art originating in ancient Roman law surfaced in English commentaries and jurisprudence, as well as the formal legal education offered at Church-affiliated universities.[3]

Without a doubt, Christian institutions, clergy, and ideas had a role shaping the course of English law in certain practical and philosophical respects. But characterizing that law as originally or fundamentally “biblical” would be misleading. The substance of the English legal tradition was “formed in the main from a stock of Teutonic customs, with some additions of matter, and considerable additions or modification of form received directly, or indirectly, from the Roman system; and both the Germanic and Romanic elements have been constituted and reinforced at different times and from different sources.”[4] Christianity was a tributary, rather than the wellspring, of the legal system and doctrines that England passed to its ornery colonies in North America.

In part two of this piece, we’ll discuss the scant evidence of biblical contributions to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

King Æthelberht [with] the advice of wise persons,
introduced judicial decrees, after the Roman model;
which, being written in English,
are still kept and observed by them.
—Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation
(ca. 791 CE)

[1] Much of the information summarized in this section can be found in Sir John Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (5th ed., Oxford University Press, 2019); Daniel R. Coquillette, The Anglo-American Legal Heritage (2nd ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2004); Tom Lambert, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press, 2017); and Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (2nd ed., Liberty Fund, 2010).

[2] See Charles Sherman, A Brief History of Roman Canon Law in Medieval England, 68 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 233 (1920).

[3] See Edward D. Re, The Roman Contribution to the Common Law, 29 Fordham Law Review 447 (1961); and Charles Sherman, The Romanization of English Law, 23 Yale Law Journal 318 (1914).

[4] A.H.F. Lefroy, The Anglo-Saxon Period of English Law, 26 Yale Law Journal 291, 291-292 (1917).

 

Image from Rochester Cathedral

Jesus Thought Demons Cause Disease (Doctors Disagree)

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Jesus cured disease with exorcisms. But if demons really are a cause of disease, why isn’t exorcism a part of medical practice today?

The Bible records Jesus performing seven distinct exorcisms (sometimes repeated between the gospels). The most famous may be the Gerasene demoniac, a man possessed by many demons. Jesus cured him by expelling the demons into pigs, which then drowned.

Where does disease come from?

Some of the sick people in these exorcism stories had what we would probably diagnose as mental illness, but some illnesses were physical. For example, Jesus healed a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute (Matthew 12:22–32).

The medical picture gets more complicated. Though Jesus spoke to dispel demons in some cases, not all exorcisms were performed this way. For example, the demon possessed child (Mark 7:24–30) was cured remotely without Jesus addressing the demon, and a woman “crippled by a spirit for eighteen years” was cured after a touch (Luke 13:10–13).

What about physical illness? Though Jesus touched people to cure physical illness in some cases (for example, the blind men in Matt. 9:27–30 and the leper in Luke 5:12–16), not all such cures were performed this way. He healed the Centurion’s servant remotely (Matt. 8:5–13), he healed the man with the withered hand in person but without touching (Matt. 12:9–14), he rebuked a fever (Luke 4:38–9), and the bleeding woman was cured after she touched Jesus (Matt. 9:19–20).

To make the picture more complicated still, one final category of illness is that caused by sin. Jesus cured the invalid at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1–16) and cautioned him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” Sin and illness are also connected in the story of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof (Mark 2:1–12) and when Jesus’s disciples asked about a blind man, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:1–7).

This sin/disease connection comes from the Old Testament. In the book of Job, Job’s friends assured him that his difficult situation must’ve been caused by his own sin, since God wouldn’t inflict this without cause. Moses lectured Israel that they’d better follow all of God’s commands. Of the many curses they would receive if they didn’t, “The LORD will plague you with diseases” (Deuteronomy 28:15–22). And Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden was supposedly the original sin, the cause of all illness today.

A significant fraction of Jesus’s healings are of illnesses caused by demons or sin, but where are these illnesses today? Are doctors today ill-prepared if they treat demon- or sin-caused illnesses as if they had organic causes?

I see three explanations.

1. Demons/sin caused disease in the time of Jesus but not today

The Christian might argue that the Bible is accurate and that some diseases were caused by demons and others by sin. However, it doesn’t work that way today, and now all illness has an organic cause.

This, of course, is stated without evidence. The Bible doesn’t say this. The naturalistic explanation, as usual, is sufficient: we have categories labeled Pseudoscience and Mythology for stories like these.

2. Demons/sin caused disease 2000 years ago, and that’s still true today

This is what faith healers like Benny Hinn would tell us. I’d be more convinced by his claims if he weren’t taking money from desperate people who have exhausted conventional medicine or if he were magically curing people in hospitals or if he convinced skeptics like James Randi. (A hilarious video game fight between Benny Hinn and the demons is here.)

Christian apologist Greg Koukl has an interesting angle. He said that demon-possessed people today aren’t morally responsible for their crimes (podcast @12:45). You know—the devil made them do it. One wonders what Koukl is doing to get this important correction made to the law. I’ll be particularly interested in seeing how he determines which people are demon possessed.

3. Demons/sin never caused disease, and the gospels are simply the product of a prescientific time

Different New Testament authors handled exorcisms and cures differently. The gospel of John had plenty of miracles but no exorcisms. Paul has no mention of healings; in fact, Paul mentions no Jesus miracles of any sort. Different authors had different agendas, which explains why some made a big deal of healings and some seem not to have known about them.

The Bible Odyssey blog fits Jesus alongside other exorcists of his time, between “the charismatic magicians and the charismatics of a slightly later period, making him the first of the charismatic exorcists.” As with Jesus’s supernatural birth and resurrection from death, Jesus’s exorcisms aren’t unique. Jesus looks like just another figure from mythology.

The Bible says that demons and sin cause disease, but modern medicine has found no category of disease for which faith healings or exorcisms provide cures. The naturalistic explanation works best. There’s no reason to believe that the stories of Jesus’s healing miracles are accurate and every reason to conclude that they’re simply legend.

Science is not going to change
its commitment to the truth.
We can only hope religion changes
its commitment to nonsense.
― Victor J. Stenger

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Image from Chris Hobcroft, CC license
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How Does the Kalam Cosmological Argument Fail? Let Me Count the Ways (part 2 of 2).

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Let’s conclude our examination of William Lane Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument (part 1 here). His version of the argument has two premises and a conclusion:

1 Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2 The universe began to exist.

Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Premise 1 sounds like common sense until you realize that William Lane Craig (I’ll call him WLC) imagines a loophole for his god. Reinterpret premise 1 with this agenda, and you see he is talking about:

  • a supernatural creation (he provides no examples of a supernatural anything),
  • out of nothing (he provides no examples of creation out of nothing),
  • before time (which didn’t yet exist before the universe came to be)
  • with “begins to exist” as a special-pleading caveat to carve out a God-shaped exception
  • to the “everything has a cause” rule, which is false.

Seen this way, premise 1 loses all common-sense appeal and the Kalam argument fails, but let’s flog this dead horse and continue.

Second premise: The universe began to exist

WLC defends the second premise this way:

Let’s consider the second law of thermodynamics. It tells us the universe is slowly running out of usable energy… and that’s the point.

If the universe had been here forever, it would have run out of usable energy by now. The second law points us to a universe that has a definite beginning.

 6. The second law of thermodynamics is no ally to the apologist.

Unlike his frequent metaphysical handwavings, WLC makes a plausible argument here. If the universe is like a clock that’s running down, it can’t have been running forever.

But does WLC really want to argue that things always run down, so therefore everything must have a beginning? If so, then this must apply to God as well. (Yes, of course I know that WLC will say that God is an exception. But then I will demand evidence that such a god exists.)

It turns out that a clock is a poor analogy to the universe. The zero-energy universe theory says that if you convert everything to energy, matter and light are positive energy but gravity is negative energy. Add it all together, and the sum is zero—the universe has zero net matter and energy. Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist who WLC often cites, explains it this way: “The gravitational energy, which is always negative, exactly compensates the positive energy of matter, so the energy of a closed universe is always zero” (source: video @24:00). Though it seems like cheating, it takes no matter or energy to create a universe.

WLC might say that the zero-energy universe theory might be overturned with new evidence. True, but then his argument has become “The second law of thermodynamics might argue for a beginning,” which isn’t much of an argument.

7. The universe began . . . in its present form.

We don’t know what preceded or caused the Big Bang. The universe might’ve come from nothing, or it might be a rearrangement of material from another universe. (This point and point 6 may not coexist as objections.)

8. Response to Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin.

WLC frequently cites the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (BGV) to argue for a beginning to the universe and, if you want to posit a multiverse, a beginning for that, too.

He’s such a fan that he has the following quote by Vilenkin on several pages at his web site:

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. (Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One [2007], p.176)

That’s powerful evidence for WLC, but if he’s such a fan, I wonder why he ignores this from Vilenkin on the very next page:

Theologians have often welcomed any evidence for the beginning of the universe, regarding it as evidence for the existence of God. . . . So what do we make of a proof that the beginning is unavoidable? Is it a proof of the existence of God? This view would be far too simplistic. Anyone who attempts to understand the origin of the universe should be prepared to address its logical paradoxes. In this regard, the theorem that I proved with my colleagues does not give much of an advantage to the theologian over the scientist.

Oops—it looks like WLC wants to pick and choose his evidence and hope that we don’t notice. (We’ll soon see that the cosmologists he cites aren’t the allies he imagines.)

Cosmologist Vic Stenger saw limitations to BGV:

I asked Vilenkin personally if his theorem required a beginning. His e-mail reply: “No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning. You can evade the theorem by postulating that the universe was contracting prior to some time.” This is exactly what a number of existing models for the uncreated origin of our universe do.

In Sean Carroll’s debate with WLC (my summary here), he made clear that BGV starts with assumptions. Discard those assumptions, and the rules are different and eternality is possible. Carroll said:

BGV . . . is certainly interesting and important, because it helps us understand where classical General Relativity breaks down, but it doesn’t help us decide what to do when it breaks down. Surely there’s no need to throw up our hands and declare that this puzzle can’t be resolved within a materialist framework. (Quoted in Vic Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning, p. 130.)

In the debate, Carroll mentioned that there are over a dozen plausible models for the universe, including eternal ones.

WLC says he’s BFFs with B, G, and V, but then these guys go off and say things that WLC can’t possibly agree with. He should rethink who his allies are.

  • Vilenkin says that the universe can have no cause.
  • Vilenkin argues for the multiverse, which defeats WLC’s fine-tuning argument.
  • Alan Guth says, “It looks to me that probably the universe had a beginning, but I would not want to place a large bet on the issue.”
  • WLC likes to channel The Sound of Music and declare, “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.” But Guth says, “Conceivably, everything can be created from nothing. And ‘everything’ might include a lot more than what we can see. In the context of inflationary cosmology, it is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch.”
  • And if WLC’s interpretation is compelling, I await the conversion to Christianity of his allies Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin.

Though I’m open to disconfirming evidence, it seems that WLC simply cherry-picks his evidence to cobble together a science-y argument, then stamps it with his two doctorates. He has no interest in honestly following the evidence.

He also enjoys mocking the pathetic plebes from his ivory tower. Take this defense of Kalam’s first premise:

I think the first premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause is virtually undeniable for any sincere seeker after truth. . . . It’s silly then when popularizers say things like, “Nothingness is unstable to quantum fluctuations” or “the universe tunneled into being out of nothing.” (Source: video @22:55)

WLC has no argument here, just derision. He’s not a quantum physicist, and yet he cheerfully trash-talks those who are. Note also that WLC dismisses the “popularizers,” who include the very cosmologists he cites as allies.

9. The Big Bang isn’t a beginning

Yes, the Big Bang happened, but no, that wasn’t a beginning. This is a subtle point, but it’s worth making: the Big Bang takes us back 13.8 billion years in time, but that’s not the same thing as a beginning. The Big Bang is the point before which cosmologists can’t see.

WLC might ask, “But if God didn’t create the universe, then how did it come to be?” Science is the discipline that answers questions, not religion, and science may need to say that it doesn’t know. WLC offers an argument without evidence and imagines that this forces an answer.

WLC has an answer that he’s bursting to offer, but insisting that God did it is no answer at all because it comes without evidence. Science saying that the origin of the universe is one of its unanswered questions isn’t embarrassing when there’s insufficient evidence to make a conclusion.

It’s like the world created by Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Show us that toves and borogoves exist, and then we can figure out what their properties are. WLC needs to show us first that God exists. Only then can we puzzle over his properties (outside of time, omniscient, supernatural, whatever). Until then, he’s just imagining a Jabberwocky universe without evidence.

10. God has an odd relationship with time

To bypass other problems, Christian apologists tell us that God has existed forever and that he is outside of time. But what does this even mean? The physics of their argument, God as a Time Lord like Doctor Who, is metaphysical bullshit. The ball’s in their court to support their fanciful claims.

I’ll close with an apt summary by blogger Uncredible HallQ:

This is just an example of Craig’s annoying tendency to make unsupported claims and then demand his critics disprove them, and it’s an absurd way to argue. If Craig is going that way, why not just announce God exists, demand atheists prove otherwise, and be done with it?

 

People are so unsophisticated in their thinking.
I am just appalled, honestly,
when I read the stuff that’s out there on the internet,
how inept and sophomoric people are.
— William Lane Craig

 

It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge
— Christopher Hitchens

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/28/15.)

Image from NASA, CC license

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