Was Jesus Born to a Virgin? William Lane Craig Answers This and More.

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It’s the Christmas season! World-famous philosopher William Lane Craig (WLC) was asked by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “Professor, Was Jesus Really Born to a Virgin?” The conversation ranges over this and additional topics that all need a response.

Was Jesus born to a virgin?

“I must confess that for all my admiration for Jesus, I’m skeptical about some of the narrative we’ve inherited. Are you actually confident that Jesus was born to a virgin?” (I’ll use italics for the interviewer’s questions.)

WLC responded:

For a God who could create the entire universe, making a woman pregnant wasn’t that big a deal! Given the existence of a Creator and Designer of the universe (for which we have good evidence), an occasional miracle is child’s play.

Apparently, WLC’s strategy is to dig his hole deeper. No, you have terrible evidence for God as the supernatural creator of the universe. Look around and see that people are Christians because they were raised that way, not because they are compelled by the evidence to accept Christianity’s claims. I agree that God making the entire universe is a bigger unanswered question than his making a virgin birth, but how has this advanced your argument?

Historically speaking, the story of Jesus’ virginal conception is independently attested by Matthew and Luke and is utterly unlike anything in pagan mythology or Judaism. So what’s the problem?

“What’s the problem”?? I gotta give him swagger points for that. Yes, the virgin birth is written in two accounts, but these are contradictory*. As for Jesus’s conception vs. those of other important figures, mythology and legend are full of supernatural births (some virgin births and some just god/human couplings). Palestine was at the crossroads of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian civilizations and more, and these societies had many supernatural births. For example, Dionysus (Greek culture), Caesar Augustus (Roman), and Amenhotep III (Egyptian) were all said to have had supernatural births. (More on Christianity as a copycat religion here.)

The typical Christian response is that those stories are quite different from that of Mary and Jesus. Perhaps they are, but so what? Jesus was said to have been divinely conceived, just like many other gods before him—that’s the commonality. Was it likelier (1) that Jesus’s supernatural birth was the only one that was the real deal or (2) that it, like all those that came before, was just mythology, legend, or other human invention?

An essential part of the Jesus birth story that WLC doesn’t mention is that the virgin birth is claimed to have fulfilled a prophecy from Isaiah 7 (which writes about a Judean king from the eight century BCE). It didn’t.

Early Christians picking up the supernatural birth and adding it to their story, like a bower bird adding a pretty rock to its nest, isn’t hard to imagine. We can see the recent evolution of Christianity in Mary’s position within the Catholic church. Catholic theologians concluded, without scriptural evidence, that she must have been born free of original sin (the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, 1854) and then that she must have been assumed into heaven without dying (the doctrine of the Assumption, 1950). If Christianity can still pick up new doctrines now, it could do so in its earliest days.

How about that, kids? A poor peasant girl from the outskirts of nowhere grows up to be the mother of God. Work hard and eat your vegetables, and maybe you, too, can be the source of a Christian doctrine!

Was Jesus a miracle worker? Or just a great moral teacher?

“Why can’t we accept that Jesus was an extraordinary moral teacher, without buying into miracles?”

WLC replies:

You can, but you do so at the expense of going against the evidence. That Jesus carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms is so widely attested in every stratum of the sources that the consensus among historical Jesus scholars is that Jesus was, indeed, a faith-healer and exorcist.

Let’s just say that Jesus as an “extraordinary moral teacher” is debatable and move on to that consensus. I always respect the scientific consensus, unlike WLC, who doesn’t care much for Biology’s consensus about evolution. However, the “consensus of historical Jesus scholars” doesn’t mean the collected opinion of free agents because most Jesus scholars are constrained by doctrinal statements. This means that they aren’t free to follow the evidence but must come to a predetermined conclusion. This makes their consensus meaningless.

As for Jesus as a “faith-healer and exorcist,” we know today that evil spirits don’t cause disease, and yet the gospels have Jesus performing many exorcisms as cures. Consider which of these two options seem likelier: (1) evil spirits caused disease 2000 years ago in the time of Jesus but they’ve stopped, or (2) evil spirits never were a cause, and the gospels simply reflect the pre-scientific thinking of their time (more).

And why does Paul, the earliest source of Jesus information, say nothing about Jesus performing healings? In fact, Paul mentions no Jesus miracles of any sort. More.

One unsurprising possibility is that the Jesus in Paul’s mind was quite different from the Jesus documented in the gospels decades later. A religious message that changes over time is easy to imagine from a naturalistic standpoint, though that is hard to imagine coming from a supposedly historically accurate document.

More questions will be answered (and critiqued) in part 2.

There was an old bugger called God,
who got a young virgin in pod.
This disgraceful behavior
begot Christ our Saviour,
who was nailed to a cross, poor old sod.
— Dylan Thomas

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*Here are two contradictions in the Luke and Matthew birth narratives.

Luke makes clear that Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth, but Matthew suggests that they lived in Bethlehem. There is no mention in Matthew of them traveling to Bethlehem, suggesting they already live there; the wise men find them in a house rather than a stable or inn, suggesting a permanent home; and Joseph had initially planned on returning from Egypt to Judea (where Bethlehem is) but was convinced to go to Galilee instead (where Nazareth is), suggesting that Nazareth hadn’t originally been their home.

Also, each gospel gives a historical reference that allows the birth to be dated (the death of Herod and the governorship of Quirinius), but these are different dates.

 

Image from Camylla Battani, CC license
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You Don’t Like the Scientific Consensus? Ignore it Away.

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Imagine this problem: you’re a layperson, and you dislike the scientific consensus on some issue. I’ve argued that laypeople have no grounds by which to reject a scientific consensus. How could they when they’re outsiders to that discipline? But if you’re part of a vocal minority on the political Right, you just declare the consensus stupid and substitute your own.

Those who give themselves veto power over science sometimes argue that smart people (and who wouldn’t put themselves in that category?) are perfectly able to come to their own conclusions. Or they might poke around the internet to find conclusions they like better and point to those arguments, unconcerned that these are fringe opinions, already evaluated and rejected by the relevant scientists.

Let’s take an example. Dennis Chamberland is not a climate scientist, but he’s good and mad at the current consensus within that discipline that climate change is happening and that it’s primarily caused by human activity (“The Tyranny of Consensus”). That’s not going to stop him from finding more pleasing conclusions on the internet and adopting those.

The dark cause behind all this

He begins by rooting out the underlying cause.

[Infecting science with politics] was accomplished for a reason, of course: specifically so that billions of dollars in global taxes may be levied at the point of a gun against the specter of anthropogenic climate change.

What’s next—black helicopters? The United Nations as world government? Reptoid shape-shifters controlling Congress? The Antichrist? And why would any government be eager to dump billions into a boondoggle?

There seem to be lots of dog-whistle terms in this article to wake up the faithful. If I were in this community, I’d probably understand what he’s trying to say. I suppose that for those people, this vague claim works, but let’s move on to the more interesting point, Chamberland’s attack on the use of the scientific consensus.

Government’s conflict of interest?

Science struggles to do the right thing, but we’re told that government isn’t helping.

The task is made even more difficult by an across-the-board failure of ethics within the profession [of science], created by the billions of research dollars poured into anthropogenic climate change [by government].

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Government money with an agenda bothers you, when on the opposing side is the energy industry? I’ll see your billions of dollars and raise you the many trillions of dollars of market capitalization of those companies.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the publicly traded energy companies Exxon Mobile, Petro China, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, and British Petroleum. They have a market capitalization of close to $1.5 trillion. Then there’s the world’s largest company, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco, which is valued at $2 trillion. Don’t forget the enormous state-owned oil companies in Mexico, Venezuela, Kuwait, Malaysia, Algeria, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, and other countries.

The fossil fuel industry is enormous and powerful, and they like the status quo just as it is, thank you very much. They’re not particularly motivated to study climate change, so if we are to understand this issue, government-funded science is the obvious route.

The “follow the money” strategy has now turned on and bitten the author. But that’s okay, as he hurries on to concern about the Dark Forces:

[The government is] entirely biased against any approach, study or theory except the one championed and paid for, solely reflecting the government’s predetermined, ethically conflicted, politically and economically motivated, self-serving theories.

Again, I’m missing the big conspiracy (and more importantly, what would drive it), so let’s set that aside. Was research on GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) burdened by some demand for a government-imposed conclusion? Smallpox vaccine? Internet? Cancer research? Or if they’re too goal-driven, consider work on the Large Hadron Collider to find the Higgs boson or the Cassini spacecraft’s visit to Saturn. Science often just follows the evidence.

Evil consensus

This has been somewhat tangential to the main point, the attacks on the scientific consensus when it is unwanted. Nevertheless this has illustrated the kinds of games that can be played to defend an anti-consensus position.

As an example of the misuse of consensus, Chamberland gives the book A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, published in German in 1931 as a criticism of Relativity. His conclusion:

This consensus-based, adolescent pile-on of Einstein historically backfired in a rather spectacular way, as all consensus schemes are wont to do.

Let’s consider this example. Suppose that

  • There were just 101 physicists in the world, Einstein and 100 others who wrote this book.
  • Einstein proposed Theory X.
  • The other 100 all thoroughly understood Theory X and Einstein’s reasoning.
  • The other 100 all rejected it.

Given that the relevance of a consensus is its value for outsiders like us rather than the practitioners, what do we conclude? Of course, we conclude that Theory X is not ready for prime time. What else could we conclude? Maybe the theory will mature to sway the other physicists, but we go with the consensus. When the consensus changes, so must our opinion.

Chamberland might handwave, “But Einstein was right with Relativity!” I agree, but how do we know? Because, and only because, it’s now the consensus! When it’s Einstein vs. the Hundred, it’s not like there’s an arbiter who can settle the argument. Consensus as our arbiter is imperfect, but it’s the best we have.

Let’s return to A Hundred Authors Against Einstein. It was a useful example to explore the issue, but in fact it doesn’t even make Chamberland’s point because it wasn’t the clean thought experiment I’ve just outlined. By the publication date of this book, Relativity was already well accepted within the scientific community, and the consensus was on Einstein’s side. More important, there was only a single physicist in the list! This wasn’t even an attempt at a scientific consensus.

This is like the Disco Institute’s inept attack on evolution, “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” In it, roughly a thousand scientists, doctors, and engineers skeptical of evolution have added their names, but how many are active biologists whose critique of evolution would be relevant? As with the Relativity attack, few have credentials relevant to the issue at hand.

How does Chamberland expect we laypeople to respond to the scientific consensus? Maybe he likes the Kim Davis approach where every elected official makes their own conscience the ultimate arbiter for any action. “Sure, I’ll follow the law,” she says, “as long as it satisfies my morality.” A Kim Davis world would have county clerks deciding who can get married, Jehovah’s Witness doctors avoiding blood transfusions, Christian Science business owners refusing to provide health insurance, Muslim police officers arresting women dressing immodestly, pharmacists filling only those prescriptions that seem moral, and racist judges deciding cases based on white supremacist principles (for which they find support in the Bible).

Chamberland analogously imagines each of us deciding things on first principles. “Sure, I’ll accept germ theory” (or quantum theory or evolution), Chamberland says, “once I see that it feels right.” Nothing is settled for us, and a 6000-year-old earth is no less an option than one 4.5 billion years old. Creationism, phlogiston, ether, bodily humors, astrology, alchemy, flat earth—they are all in play if there is no consensus. In fact, this is playing out right now as an Ohio bill would require that religious answers (rather than, y’know, accurate answers) on public school tests be acceptable.

In his next tirade, I recommend that Chamberland acknowledge the elephant in the room, that he accepts scientific theories based on whether he likes the conclusion or not.

Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact
as the roundness of the Earth.
— NewScientist, 2008.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/9/15.)

Image from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC license

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Can God Be Benevolent if He Sends Your Children to Hell? (3 of 3)

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What do you think about a god who would send children to hell? Let’s finish our critique of an article by William Lane Craig (WLC) in which he defends God’s honor (part 1).

On to the philosophical question

Remember that WLC said that the first question, the psychological one, was a red herring. Having stumbled through that response, he moves on to the question he says is significant, the philosophical one. Since philosophy is his discipline, you’d expect an intellectual tsunami. You’d be disappointed.

As for the philosophical question, “How can you think that is a fair and reasonable thing for anyone or anything to do?”, I’ve already alluded to the answer, and I’d refer you to my debate with Prof. Ray Bradley on this topic.

He’s spent 90 percent of his article discussing what he says is a red herring, but for the question that he admits deserves an answer, you must sit through a 75-minute debate. Maybe it’d just be easier to take his word for it.

Fortunately, I’ve already responded to his argument from that 1994 debate. If WLC won’t summarize it, I will.

WLC admitted in the debate that “God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell” sounds bad. He tried to turn the tables and argued that the atheist must show two things.

  1. If God is all powerful, then God could create a world in which everyone freely lives their life in such a way that they merit getting into heaven.
  2. If God is all loving, then he would want such a world.

He insisted that, “Both of these assumptions have to be necessarily true, in order to prove that God and hell are logically inconsistent with each other. So as long as there’s even a possibility that one of these assumptions is false, it’s possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell.”

Step back and admire that message: it’s possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell. Said another way, God does look like an immoral tyrant, but you can’t prove it. Yeah, that sounds like a compelling message.

Let’s return to his two points and play the game as he defined it. Christian doctrine seems to accept point 2—an all-loving God would want a world in which everyone merited heaven. In fact, WLC himself said in this article, “God’s heart breaks for the lost far more than mine does!”

So we’ll focus on point 1: could an all-powerful God create a world in which everyone freely lives such that they merit heaven? Surprisingly, God has apparently already created such a world: that world is heaven itself.

Consider two properties that heaven must have. First, people in heaven must have free will, given how vital Christians say it is. For example, Christian apologists say that God won’t step on people’s free will, and that’s why there’s so much evil in the world. They also inform us that God is a gentleman who won’t force people to love him—that would make them zombies. (For more on the bizarre uses apologists make of God’s love, go here.)

Given that Christians insist that our love of God be freely given, we can assume that free will is also mandatory in heaven. But heaven must be a lot better than just a continuation of life on earth. The secret ingredient that makes heaven work must be wisdom. Free will is a clumsy tool in the hands of imperfect humans on earth, but add perfect wisdom, and all the sinful uses of free will (robbery, rape, murder, and so on) vanish. The perfectly wise inhabitants of heaven would have the free will to commit a sin, but they’d have the wisdom to know that that would be foolish.

Conclusion: God could’ve made heaven on earth by giving us the wisdom to use free will properly. That meets the two criteria WLC set out. Therefore, “God is all loving” is indeed in conflict with “Some people go to hell.” Therefore (returning to the subject of this post series), God is indeed not benevolent when he sends your children to hell.

WLC attempts a final defense of hell

This is his conclusion.

There are no good defeaters of this doctrine [of hell], given such facts as (i) the universal reality of human evil and our profound need of forgiveness and moral cleansing, (ii) God’s holiness and justice, (iii) God’s will for universal human salvation and efforts to draw everyone freely to a saving knowledge of Himself, and (iii) human freedom.

No good defeaters? I think we’ve just seen one. But let’s look at his points.

  1. The universal reality of human evil and our profound need of forgiveness and moral cleansing. Our “need for forgiveness” and a fallen world is a Christian invention. That’s not an objective fact of our world.
  2. God’s holiness and justice. God is just pretend, and God is a Bronze Age dictator. Show us that he exists and that biblical morality rises above being merely an anthropological curiosity.
  3. God’s will for universal human salvation and efforts to draw everyone freely to a saving knowledge of Himself. Salvation is a solution to a problem (hell) that Christianity invented. I don’t need either, thanks. As for universal human salvation, remember that Yahweh was initially just the god of the Chosen People, not a source of universal salvation.
  4. Human freedom. Yes, humans like freedom. No, God is no champion of free will.

God’s one-size-fits-all hell, completely at odds with modern Western ideas of proportionate justice, is ridiculously immoral. Justifying it is a desperate attempt to justify one’s belief in the unbelievable.

More posts on hell:

A magician asked me a trick question.
I still don’t know how he did it.
— commenter Greg G.

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Image from Marco Verch, CC license
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Four Blood Moons: Revisiting John Hagee’s Embarrassing Failure (2 of 2)

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In part 1, I summarized John Hagee’s “Four Blood Moons” hysteria, which culminated with its final lunar eclipse four years ago.

So what was supposed to happen?

We need to learn from Reverend Hagee precisely what was supposed to happen and when. Hagee told us, “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”

Okay, but that’s rather vague. Hagee said (in a video that is, embarrassingly, still in the Hagee Ministries channel), “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon.’”

Surely the creator of the universe can do better? “Something is about to change,” according to the book’s subtitle.

Okay, forget it. Hagee won’t be specific because he can’t. Perhaps the purpose of the book wasn’t to enlighten the flock but (dare I say it?) to make money. It turns out that Pastor Hagee wasn’t the first to think up the four blood moons idea, though you wouldn’t know it from his movie, where he claims to have come up with this connection. Hagee loves money like sharks love chum.

Others piled on and predicted financial disaster after the end of the Shemitah year (didn’t happen—the Dow was up on the next trading day). Unsurprisingly, those financial prophets didn’t conclude that their game is groundless. One pundit concluded that God simply didn’t want to make himself predictable. It’s clear that no lesson has been learned, and the next breathless, invented crisis among gullible Christians is in our near future.

One element of this hysteria is a “the sky is falling” attitude. Prophecy-hungry Christian charlatans point to the worrisome news of the moment—Iran’s nuclear ambitions, ISIS, problems in Israel, Ebola, police shootings, droughts and forest fires, same-sex marriage, and more—and imagine that these are the signs of the End.

No, that’s not bad. You want bad? How about the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) that killed between three and eleven million people in Europe? That was bad. Or how about 1942–43 when it looked like the Axis powers might succeed and carve up the world? Or the 1918 flu pandemic that killed up to 100 million people? Or the Black Death in Europe (1346–53), which killed 20% of the world’s population?

Remember when you were a kid in history class, and you asked why you had to learn all that stuff? This is why. It’s so you can immunize yourself from people like Hagee who hope you are ignorant of events like those—events so world-shakingly calamitous that they plausibly could have signaled an end of the world.

Sorry, Christian apocalypticists, same-sex marriage doesn’t compare.

Consequences

I believe a quote from the Good Book is relevant here.

The prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die (Deuteronomy 18:20).

Wow—that’s tough love. I wonder if pastor David Berzins, who was eager to stone gays to death, might have been happy to carry out that punishment since Hagee obviously wasn’t speaking for God since his prophecy didn’t come true.

Hagee had to walk a fine line. He had to be specific enough to mesmerize his flock into buying his books and mailing in checks but not so specific that he could be easily called on a prophecy when it didn’t come to pass. That was the error that Harold Camping made. He spent $100 million to advertise a very specific date for the Rapture, May 21, 2011. Things became uncomfortable when May 21 came and went just like any other day.

After several years of planning, you could imagine a crescendo at Hagee’s web site on the eve of the fourth “blood moon.” Nope—out of a bunch of ads, a single one read, “The final blood moon is coming . . . are you ready?”

Ready for what? Hagee pretty much ignored the blood moons non-event and moved on to the next apocalyptic message so we can get good and scared all over again. John Hagee has become Pastor Freddie Krueger of the (Nightmare on) Elm Street Church. And like the groundless claims in John Oliver’s much-missed megachurch, Hagee’s far-reaching but empty claims are, incredibly, all legal.

If there were justice where you could pull a stunt like this once but then you’d lose all credibility after a failure, I wouldn’t mind. The problem is, there are no consequences. When Hagee and others tap dance away from their false claims, no one will stone them. Their flock will continue to do what they’re told. Like a stage magician, Hagee will focus his flock’s attention on some new book or outreach. While I wonder how Hagee can live with himself, the whole thing looks like a smart financial move in hindsight.

What’s it like on the inside?

Patheos atheist blogger Captain Cassidy wrote about what it was like growing up as a Pentecostal teenager during the “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988” scare. On why this kind of thing is effective, she said that being on the inside flatters one’s ego. You know that you’ve got it figured out and the naysayers will get theirs soon enough, and then who’ll be laughing? Chillingly, she observed, “Fear lies at the heart of Christianity, not love.”

To remind us of how common end-of-the-world prophecies have been in history, I’ll wrap up with this much-mended “The End is nigh!” sign envisioned by Kyle Hepworth. The End has been predicted more often than you may know.

Christians who know that there’ve been
other Rapture scares in the past
look at new Rapture scares
like other folks look at lottery tickets:
sure, they’ve always failed to win in the past,
but this time might be the big payoff.
The problem is that their payoff
happens for the worst reasons
and at the expense of those who disagree with them.
— Captain Cassidy

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/26/15.)
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Can God Be Benevolent if He Sends Your Children to Hell? (2 of 3)

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Are Christians okay with a god who could send their children to hell? Let’s continue our critique of an article by William Lane Craig (WLC) in which he defends the Christian position (part 1).

The doctrine of hell

WLC had divided the question into a psychological question (“How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?”) and a philosophical question (“How can you think that is a fair and reasonable thing for anyone or anything to do?”).

His point about the psychological question is that if this is just someone’s personal opinion, “it would have no implications at all for the truth of the doctrine of hell.”

Hell? So much for Good News. But what is the doctrine of hell? Is it C.S. Lewis’s “gates barred from the inside” or fire ’n brimstone® or something else? He must make sure his answer is in harmony both with every afterlife passage in the Bible and with the doctrine of hell in every other Christian denomination. Don’t give us your interpretation; rather, show that the Bible defines a single unambiguous doctrine about hell.

Objective vs. subjective morality

WLC moves on to emphasize the critic’s relative (rather than objective) position on moral issues.

Suppose I were one of those persons who would not or could not bring himself to do X. That implies nothing about the rightness/wrongness of doing X or the truth/falsity that someone does X. It’s just about me and my personal psychology.

Uh . . . did you just deny the existence of reliably accessible objective morality? Well done, Dr. Craig. You’ve convinced me. I guess even if objective morality exists, that doesn’t matter because we humans can’t reliably access it. One wonders, though, why you keep pretending like such a thing does exist.

Children and the age of accountability

WLC next wants to make a special case for young children.

Neither God nor I would send small children to hell, for they are not morally accountable.

Show me, and again don’t just cherry pick verses to support your position. Make sure that no Bible verse contradicts your claim.

The age of accountability (the idea that children below a certain age are too young to be held accountable for their sin) comes from tradition, not the Bible. But the Bible makes clear that everyone has a sin nature and falls short.

Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Psalm 51:5).

The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies (Ps. 58:3).

So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God (Romans 14:12).

There is no one righteous, not even one (Rom. 3:10).

These verses argue that children don’t deserve an exemption.

(An insightful video by Underlings argues that God’s plan is either that (1) dead babies go to hell or (2) they don’t. But knowing that most adults do go to hell, option (2) means that murdering babies is morally proper because it saves them from hell. With either option, God loses.)

The Bible and thoughtcrime

Back to WLC:

Neither God nor I would send anyone to hell “simply because of thoughts in their heads.” Where in the world did you get that idea?

Uh, from the Bible? The tenth Commandment demands “no coveting.” Jesus added a few of his own thoughtcrimes in the Sermon on the Mount: “I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.” And, “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Coveting, anger, and lust are thoughts in your head, they’re evidently all sins, and you know the penalty for sin.

God’s provision to get us out of the mess we’re in

And now it’s time for WLC to hurry to God’s defense because, Lord knows, he can’t defend himself.

People go to hell because they willingly reject God’s forgiveness and resist His every effort to save them.

How can I willingly reject what I’ve never been given good evidence for? Christianity’s sin/salvation story is nonsense. “God made you sinful, but that’s okay because if you believe in the unbelievable, he’ll not burn you forever” isn’t coherent, loving, or fair.

It’s misleading to talk about God’s “sending” people to hell. He desires and strives for the salvation of every person, but some freely resist His grace and so separate themselves from Him irrevocably. It’s not His doing.

Did he make the rules? Then it’s his doing. If I’m imperfect, blame my Maker. And even if humans are sinful, God could just forgive, since that’s how we do it and he’s done it before.

As for “freely [resisting] His grace,” I’ve never seen evidence of God’s grace, but apparently you think I deserve hell nonetheless.

God’s offer of salvation: take it or regret it

WLC moves on to discuss salvation.

What do you mean by “don’t believe that Jesus Christ died for their sins”? If they don’t believe because they are ignorant of the Gospel message, then they will not be judged on that basis. But if you mean that they knowingly and willfully reject Jesus Christ as their Savior, then, yes, God will judge them on that basis.

Or, option three, they understand the gospel message but have no good reason to believe that it’s anything but legend and myth. They might understand the message of countless other religions, but they probably don’t believe that they’re anything more than legend and myth, either.

I can reject a serving of potatoes at the dinner table, but that assumes I believe those potatoes exist. I don’t reject unicorns or leprechauns, I just don’t have enough evidence to believe in them, or a thousand other mythical creatures, or gods.

The problem is not that they simply lack a certain belief but rather that they repudiate God’s provision for their sin.

You mean the sin that God made unavoidable? Yeah, my bad. Sorry about that.

Anyway, Paul made clear that we’re all good. In Romans 5:18–19, he said that humanity didn’t need to opt in to inherit Adam’s sin, but it also didn’t need to opt in to get Jesus’s salvation. So I guess I’ll see you in heaven, Dr. Craig.

Conclusion for the psychological question

So to sum up the psychological question, “How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?” I guess I would answer that I know He would condemn them only if they deserved it. I trust in His justice.

Why trust God’s justice? It doesn’t match what we think of justice in the West. God ordered genocide on the Canaanites (here, here). He set up the rules for slavery. He flooded the world. Much of humanity today live in substandard conditions, which he could easily correct but won’t. These would be crimes against humanity if done by a person. WLC apparently wants to redefine justice so that whatever God does is just. No, God doesn’t get a pass, and Christians don’t get to redefine “justice” to make it easier for God to meet.

He goes on to liken non-Christians who ignore God’s offer of salvation to a drowning man who refuses a life preserver. The obvious flaw in this feeble analogy is that we all know that life preservers exist. A ticket to heavenly paradise, on the other hand, sounds like make-believe.

In part 3, WLC responds to the philosophical question, the one he said deserved attention.

Democracy doesn’t guarantee
an educated and logical populace,
but it does depend on one.
— Daniel Miessler (Daniel’s Unsupervised Learning)

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Image from Steve Shreve, CC license
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Can God Be Benevolent if He Sends Your Children to Hell?

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Why does God do the crazy stuff that he does—demand genocide, support slavery, flood the world? He’s the one with the perfect morals, and yet his actions and rules don’t even meet the moral standards we have set for ourselves today. In particular, how can he be “benevolent” if he sends children to hell?

Is it reasonable to criticize God?

Since we’re asking why God would send children to hell, let’s critique “Asking Why God Would Do X Is Crazy.”

Sometimes you’ve just got to admire the audacity of some Christian authors. The article begins by assuming God and then browbeating any reader who would question God.

What [God’s critic] sees the world to be like, he finds inconsistent with how he believes God should have done things, and he believes that since God has failed at doing things the way he would have done them, that therefore He does not exist.

What does not exist is the Christian God as an all-good being. You need only read the Bible to see that the tyrant described there isn’t all-good. (Or you can redefine “good,” which seems to be a popular fallback.)

One aspect of the article’s argument is pointing out that the critic is a mere human. How can humans judge God? But of course they don’t judge God; they judge claims about God. Sure, we’re imperfect, but we’re all we’ve got. We evaluate claims to the best of our ability. Christianity can ask nothing more of us.

Moving on, the article jumps the shark with its God assumption, all backed with no evidence:

The audacity to think that God’s ordering of reality based on His omnipotence is faulty compared to the way we would order reality given our limited knowledge.

At the heart of the question is the implicit belief that the person asking knows more than God.

[The critic thinks] that he himself has the more rational view of how, if he were God, would have dealt with the world.

Are the atheists good and chastised?

No, the error is not critiquing God claims but assuming God into existence. Starting by assuming God is the Hypothetical God Fallacy. As for the challenge about the critic having the more rational view, no it’s not arrogant to think that the modern-day critic is more rational than the 10th-century BCE tribesmen who began documenting the mythology that became our Bible.

The author concludes with roughly the response that God gave when Job questioned God’s cruel actions.

God’s purposes are God’s business. If He had intended for us to know something, the answer would be available. Things He did not intend for us to know, we may merely speculate about.

So STFU, stop complaining, and accept that God exists and has good reasons whether you understand or not.

Contestant #2

Let’s move on to another response, this one from William Lane Craig (WLC). Will he bring a higher caliber argument?

His article is, “Worshiping a God Who Might Damn Your Children,” in which WLC responds to a question from Dale:

How can you worship a God who might send your children to Hell?

Would you send your child to an eternity of suffering, simply because of thoughts in their heads? If your children lead wonderful lives, but don’t believe that Jesus Christ died for their sins, would you send them to hell? What if they just can’t wrap their heads around the concept? . . . How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?

WLC begins with a point of order.

There are actually two different questions here which are being run together, the first a psychological question (“How can you love and worship a God who you believe would do that to your children?”) and the second a philosophical question (“How can you think that is a fair and reasonable thing for anyone or anything to do?”).

Okay, let’s go with that. WLC then dismisses the “psychological question” as a red herring.

It is [just] a request for an autobiographical report about one’s subjective condition. As such, its answer will be person-relative and have nothing to do with objective truth.

Objective truth? Does such a thing exist for morality? You’ve certainly never given a reasonable defense of objective morality that I’ve ever seen (more here, here). Don’t base your argument on objective morality without first showing it exists.

A Word to the Wise: Whenever people pose questions beginning “Would you . . .” or “If you were . . .,” then you know immediately that it is a question designed merely to put you in an awkward position, not to get at truth.

A word to the wise: whenever you read an apologetic article, make sure the Christian actually answers the question. Don’t be swayed with bluster and confidence so that you overlook them running from the question.

The kind of question he’s trying to avoid here is one that taps into our shared moral values. For example, “If you think that X is bad, what does it mean when God does it?” is a valid question. If humans are created in God’s image, we share a moral sense, and indeed the Bible confirms that. That God’s morality is so incompatible with ours argues that God’s moral actions are, not divine, but simply a reflection of the primitive culture from which he came.

No, this isn’t a rhetorical trick to put Christians in an awkward position. That the question might make them uncomfortable isn’t the issue. They want to get the challenge dismissed on a technicality so they don’t have to answer it. Don’t let them.

The critique of WLC’s response continues in part 2.

If your choice of religion is subjective
so are your morals.
— commenter Otto

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Image from Andrae Ricketts, CC license
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