A Response to David Gelernter’s Attack on Evolution (3 of 4)

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We’re considering a popular article in which David Gelernter (who’s not a biologist) attacks evolution. This critique begins with part 1.

Evidence for evolution

Gelernter makes the “okay, microevolution happens, but not macroevolution” argument in a clumsy way. Macroevolution is usually defined by biology textbooks to mean speciation—that is, not just change within a species but enough change to make a new species (or more).

That doesn’t sound like what he’s talking about here.

But mutations to these early-acting “strategic” genes, which create the big body-plan changes required by macro-evolution, seem to be invariably fatal. They kill off the organism long before it can reproduce. . . .

Evidently there are a total of no examples in the literature of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole and are not fatal.

What he’s apparently talking about is phylum-level changes, which is at a much higher level than speciation.

In the first place, I get my biology from biologists, so have them tell me that phylum-level changes are impossible.

Second, apparently you’re startled that there are no examples in the literature of phylum-level changes. Do you think new phyla have appeared in your lifetime? Do you expect someone to have documented the change? Or are you saying that we should have examples of the complete sequence of mutations, horizontal gene transfers, or whatever that created one or more new phyla? Whatever deal breaker you imagine for evolution is not clear. It sounds like your complaint is that we haven’t seen a thing we have no reason to expect to have seen—is that surprising?

He then quotes a researcher: “We think we’ve hit all the genes required to specify the body plan of [the fruit fly]. . . . [None is] promising as raw materials for macroevolution.” But this is from a presentation in 1982, which is 37 years ago! Biology is a fast-moving field. If you’re going to ignore the scientific consensus and avoid any sources but those that support your minority opinion, at least use recent findings.

He quotes another biologist who referred to a “great Darwinian paradox.” This paper is from 1983, so again we need to see what today’s biologists would make of the issue. And the paper isn’t even dismissive of evolution. (For those who want more, I’ll let you follow up with the rather involved biological argument in the source.)

Is Intelligent Design a viable alternative to evolution?

Gelernter says that Intelligent Design (ID) is the obvious response to the Cambrian explosion.

The theory suggests that an intelligent cause intervened to create this extraordinary outburst. By “intelligent” Meyer understands “conscious”; the theory suggests nothing more about the designer.

The subtext in that last phrase is that there is nothing in ID to suggest religion. But it’s hard to imagine what suggesting an intelligent Creator is if not religion. Sure, you can imagine super-smart aliens (rather than deities) behind life on earth, but the Christian will immediately wonder what created them, not satisfied until we’ve reached the Christian god.

Gelernter imagines skeptics wondering where the evidence for ID is:

To Meyer and other proponents, that is like asking—after you have come across a tree that is split vertically down the center and half burnt up—“but where is the evidence of a lightning strike?” The exceptional intricacy of living things, and their elaborate mechanisms for fitting precisely into their natural surroundings, seemed to cry out for an intelligent designer.

And we’re back to the childish “Golly, it sure looks designed!” Uh, yeah, and the earth sure looks flat.

Pushback

My favorite examples of evolution in almost real time is the bacteria that evolved to eat nylon and PET plastic. Remember that nylon didn’t exist before 1935 and PET plastic before about 1941.

My favorite example of the principles of evolution tested and proven to succeed is the discovery of Tiktaalik, a plausible transition between fish and land animals. Knowing the date that such an animal would’ve lived, paleontologists found exposed sedimentary rock of the right age. They searched, and there it was.

My favorite rebuttal to all ID arguments is: evolution is the consensus of the scientists who understand the evidence. Laymen (that is, scientific outsiders) are stuck with the scientific consensus as the best explanation. Of course, that consensus could be wrong, but it’s our best bet.

And my favorite summary of the power of evolution to explain life is from Richard Dawkins:

The ratio of the huge amount that [evolution] explains (everything about life: its complexity, diversity and illusion of crafted design) divided by the little that it needs to postulate (non-random survival of randomly varying genes through geological time) is gigantic. Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few.

The arguments from ID proponents aren’t arguments for their own theory (as they would be if coming from scientists actually trying to follow the evidence). All they can do is try to crap on evolution. I find none of these arguments convincing, and wouldn’t follow them if I did. I get my biology from biologists.

Worse, “Intelligent Designer did it!” raises far more puzzling questions than it answers. Who is this Designer (or Designers)? A god we know about or a new one or something else? You can’t just say that a Designer did it and then think you’ve resolved anything. You’ve now got a new, bigger problem: justifying your remarkable claim. Get to work.

The silver bullet argument that takes down Intelligent Design is the fact that there is zero evidence for such a designer. The religious or spiritual people of the world have come up with countless supernatural beings, but none of them are universally agreed to. The contradicting supernatural claims among religious people themselves show that religious claims can’t be justified.

Continued in part 4.

This whole [young-earth vs. old-earth Creationism] debate
is nothing more than a battle of wits
between two unarmed sides.
— Hemant Mehta (The Friendly Atheist)

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A Response to David Gelernter’s Attack on Evolution (2 of 4)

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David Gelernter is a well-known professor, but he’s not a biologist. Nevertheless, he has written an attack on evolution that has been praised by a number of conservative and Christian sites.

Though Gelernter isn’t ready to say that Intelligent Design (ID) is the replacement, he is sympathetic. (ID has many problems that he ignores, some of which are addressed in part 1.)

Let’s move on to the two primary arguments he uses against evolution.

Cambrian explosion

Gelernter is impressed by the Cambrian explosion, the period during which the 30-some animal phyla evolved.

In the famous “Cambrian explosion” of around half a billion years ago, a striking variety of new organisms—including the first-ever animals—pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years. This great outburst followed many hundreds of millions of years of slow growth and scanty fossils, mainly of single-celled organisms, dating back to the origins of life roughly three and half billion years ago.

Because this is his key argument against evolution, I’d like to respond in depth. Even though science continues to learn new things about this period, there is plenty to push back against the idea that the Cambrian explosion defeats evolution.

  • The duration of the explosion he gives (70 million years) is 13 percent of the time since it started. Is that too short for thirty phyla to develop? (Even if the duration is 20 million years, more typical of the duration given by biologists, the same question applies.) Surprise is only possible if we have a mismatch between how long it took and how long it should’ve taken—so how long should it have taken? And perhaps the explosion wasn’t as surprising as once thought. “The presence of Precambrian animals somewhat dampens the ‘bang’ of the explosion; not only was the appearance of animals gradual, but their evolutionary radiation (‘diversification’) may also not have been as rapid as once thought. Indeed, statistical analysis shows that the Cambrian explosion was no faster than any of the other radiations in animals’ history” (emphasis added). (An evolutionary radiation is a burst of diversity through speciation.)
  • If creativity is his point about the Cambrian explosion, note that only nine of these phyla have diversified widely. These nine have each produced thousands to a million species. The remaining ones, not so much. For example, two phyla have about a hundred species each. Two other phyla have about twenty.
  • The fossil record is an imperfect record, and the duration of the explosion is just a guess. Did other phyla develop beforehand but die out before they could leave a record? “The sparseness of the fossil record means that organisms usually exist long before they are found in the fossil record” (source).
  • Did these phyla develop earlier than thought but without hard body parts that fossilize well? “Since most animal species are soft-bodied, they decay before they can become fossilized. As a result, although 30-plus phyla of living animals are known, two-thirds have never been found as fossils” (source).
  • One hypothesis that explains the sudden beginning of the period of body plan creativity is that the ocean finally became transparent at that point, which meant that vision was now possible. This set off an arms race between predator and prey, with size, speed, armor, teeth, and more as competitive factors. Additional non-supernatural explanations are also possible.
  • In the big picture, the Cambrian Explosion isn’t that big a deal. Sure, it’s important to us, because it’s the period of animal diversification, and we’re animals. But animals are just one of six biological kingdoms. And above kingdoms are three domains. This diagram may kindle a little humility.

Source: Wikipedia

  • One example that shows there’s a lot more to evolution than the Cambrian explosion is the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event, which produced many more animal genera than did the Cambrian explosion. (The Ordovician Period followed the Cambrian Period.) The Cambrian explosion was noteworthy, but so were other periods of biological flourishing.
  • Impressive though the Cambrian explosion may be, let’s not overestimate what it produced. The Cambrian period started 541 million years ago (Mya). Land plants didn’t appear until 470Mya. The first land tetrapods (vertebrates with four limbs) appeared 370Mya. Even the jawless fish of the Cambrian Period wouldn’t look much like what we think of as “fish.”

The ultimate evaluation of the Cambrian explosion comes from the people who actually understand the evidence, the biologists. And they still accept evolution. Non-biologist Gelernter’s puzzlement over the Cambrian explosion counts for nothing.

Synthesis of novel proteins

He next argues that evolution couldn’t make useful new proteins.

Your task is to invent a new gene by mutation. . . . You have two possible starting points for this attempt. You could mutate an existing gene, or mutate gibberish. You have a choice because DNA actually consists of valid genes separated by long sequences of nonsense. Most biologists think that the nonsense sequences are the main source of new genes. If you tinker with a valid gene, you will almost certainly make it worse—to the point where its protein misfires and endangers (or kills) its organism—long before you start making it better.

(“Long sequences of nonsense”? I thought ID proponents weren’t allowed to consider the idea of junk DNA.)

He likes the idea of nonsense sequences, by luck, switching on and creating useful new proteins because he has a ready response. The fraction of useful proteins out of all possible proteins is miniscule, so he can cross his arms here, confident that this route won’t yield the answer.

About a string of DNA nonsense being interpreted as a working gene to create a small (150-amino-acid-long) protein, he says:

Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million—you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.

Guaranteed? You’re saying that evolution has no mechanism to create novel proteins, and you can prove it? Then write your paper destroying evolution, and collect your Nobel. That you’re wasting your time trying to convince ordinary readers rather than scientists betrays your agenda.

And if the repurposing-gibberish route won’t work, we could (dare I say it?) consider the other route, the mutation of a working gene. Suppose that a gene is copied with one base pair wrong. This is technically an error in DNA replication, but this new gene might make a better protein.

Alternatively, the gene might be duplicated (gene duplication is a well-understood error in DNA replication). With two of the genes, one can make the old protein, leaving the other to possibly mutate and give a shot to a new protein. And if the new protein is worse? Then natural selection won’t select for it.

Looks like he needs to reconsider his guarantee that new protein synthesis never works.

Next up: Gelernter weighs evolution against Intelligent Design in part 3.

I like to ask them how God did it.
If they can explain the how,
then in all likelihood the who will no longer be necessary.
This is the entire history of science in a nutshell.
— commenter ThaneOfDrones

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A Response to David Gelernter’s Attack on Evolution

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Let’s subtitle this story, “Guy who made his career in not-biology is convinced by other not-biologists that Biology’s core theory is wrong.”

David Gelernter is a Yale computer science professor. You may know him as one of the technologists who was injured (in 1993) by a bomb mailed by the Unabomber. My first career was in computer science, so I want to like what he writes.

This time, however, he’s writing to tell us that evolution is a failure (Giving Up Darwin, 5/1/19). His article has been trumpeted by a number of Christian sites that use an Argument from Authority to encourage the rest of us to follow this smart guy’s lead.

Unlike many of the evangelicals who imagine they’re dancing on evolution’s grave, Gelernter takes a sympathetic stance. It’s like he’s a reluctant doctor who must tell the family that the patient is dead. He’s not pleased about it and in fact calls evolution “a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory.”

The alert reader will wonder, however, at the first words of his article: “Darwinian evolution.” If you’re like me, ominous music begins. It gets louder with the article’s repeated attention to what Charles Darwin knew or thought. And we truly know that all is not what it seems when the author mentions his guides in this world of evolution denial, three senior fellows at the Discovery Institute (none of them biologists), in particular Stephen Meyer.

We’ll return to this, but let’s overview his arguments against evolution.

Evolution and design

Gelernter says,

Darwin’s mission was exactly to explain the flagrant appearance of design in nature.

Yes and no. Richard Dawkins said, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” (The Blind Watchmaker, 1986). But if we’re taking this naïve view of life, let’s not imagine it’s all sunsets and puppy dogs. If we insist on finding design, we can see not just good design but also poor design (the recurrent laryngeal nerve, chronic pain, atavisms, and vestigial structures) and evil design (parasites, babirusa tusks that can penetrate their heads, and the Tomentella fungus that zombifies ants).

DNA is often cited as the biggest clue pointing to design, but DNA singlehandedly disproves the Design Hypothesis (that the world looks designed and therefore must have been designed). No competent designer would include junk in their work, but DNA has plenty.

  • Every cell in your body contains DNA with 20,000 nonworking genes (pseudogenes).
  • Viruses replicate by inserting their DNA into cells, and millions of years of this imperfect process has left nonworking viral junk comprising eight percent of human DNA.
  • Atavisms are archaic genes that are accidentally switched on, like human tails or dolphin hind limbs. Vestigial structures (such as eyes in cave fish or pelvises in whales) are flashbacks to body features from species in the distant past.
  • Onions have much more DNA than humans do, as do lots of other plants and animals and even protozoa. Do they need it all, or is much of it junk?

I expand on DNA as a rebuttal to the Design Hypothesis here and here.

It’s also a mixed bag when we move beyond DNA. Our environment has warm spring days but also tsunamis; laughing babies but also earthquakes; satisfaction with a job well done but also disease, famine, cancer, drought, and more. This imaginary “Designer” is closer to a six-year-old burning ants with a magnifying glass than an omni-benevolent deity.

Could it be . . . Intelligent Design??

Gelernter quotes Intelligent Design advocate Stephen Meyer:

Our uniform experience of cause and effect shows that intelligent design is the only known cause of the origin of large amounts of functionally specified digital information.

And I’ve just shown that DNA, your “specified digital information,” is unlike anything that any designer we know would create. The Design Hypothesis fails.

While we’re talking about “our uniform experience,” our uniform experience of designers is that they have physical brains. Keep that in mind if you hope to eventually point to a god as the Designer.

Gelernter moves on to what explains life’s apparent design:

[Intelligent Design is] the first and most obvious and intuitive [argument] that comes to mind.

Sure it is, just like the earth being flat was the first and most obvious and intuitive explanation. But, as with flat earth theory, we’ve moved on to a better understanding of why life is the way it is.

Unlike evolution, Intelligent Design (ID) isn’t falsifiable, so it’s not a scientific theory. Any point where it’s unnecessarily complicated or confusing or unexpected, the ID proponent can always say that the Designer is smarter than you and must’ve had good reasons.

ID is Creationism—“God did it”—with one small change. Now it’s “Someone whose name we don’t know did it,” with an implied “wink wink—I think you know who that is!” The decision of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial agreed: “ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.”

Read Gelernter’s arguments, Cambrian explosion + protein synthesis, in part 2.

(h/t commenter Scooter for pointing out the article.)

The “Intelligent Designer”
is the fundamentalist Christians’ god
with the serial number filed off.
— commenter Michael Neville

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Proposal For a Christian Rumspringa

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Suppose young Christians were given license to question their worldview when they became old enough to evaluate the evidence. These teens wouldn’t be pushed into a Christian life but would be allowed to question their faith and learn about other ways of living. Maybe other sects of Christianity. Maybe Wicca or Buddhism. Maybe atheism.

Older and wiser after a few years of considering new ideas, these Christians would be welcomed as members of the church or, if they’d prefer, allowed to leave.

Rumspringa in the Amish community

We have a Christian precedent for this. Rumspringa (German for “running around”) is a phase that many Amish and Mennonite communities allow their youth to go through. It varies between groups, but it typically begins at age 16 and ends with marriage. It had traditionally been a time to find a spouse, but it now often includes exploring the wider world (as shown in the 2004 reality TV show Amish in the City).

Because Amish are Anabaptists, these teens aren’t yet baptized into the church. Offenses that would be unacceptable among members—dressing “English,” driving something besides horse-drawn vehicles, using alcohol, or even drugs or sex—are often overlooked. Almost 90% of youth eventually choose to become members of the church.

Rumspringa in the Christian community

What would a Christian Rumspringa look like? Church communities would encourage their youth to use their brains and evaluate the truth claims of Christianity. The Bible even supports this.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind (Luke 10:27).

By testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:2).

This could be a position of strength for the church community. They’d make clear that they didn’t need to indoctrinate or strong-arm people into becoming members. Their claims could withstand public scrutiny, and churches that did things the old way—using indoctrination rather than education and labeling uncomfortable questions off limits—would feel the pressure to become more open.

I grant that this wouldn’t be easy on churches. “Because I said so” or “Don’t ask that question!” are easy appeals to authority, but that often backfires when youths become independent and unwilling to accept such weak answers. Fundamentalist congregations’ backwards attitudes toward homosexuality or science are sometimes cited as a reason young people turn away. One Barna study reports:

Three of the reasons that kids vote with their feet is that churches seem unfriendly to science, that churches are overprotective, and that churches are not friendly to young folks who doubt.

Church communities lament that many children go into college as Christians but come out as doubters or atheists—70%, according to one study. But why this is? What does it say that a mind sharpened and expanded by college is less willing to accept your religion? Maybe a faith built on indoctrination and custom rather than reason and evidence isn’t strong and isn’t worth much, and encouraging thought would actually be good for churches.

This reminds me of a chat I had with a Christian girl about 17 years old who was part of a group of sign-carrying Christians haranguing people in public. Long story short, her spiritual leader publicly scolded her for talking with me, hardly the independent attitude a wholesome upbringing should encourage in a young adult.

I’m sure that no conservative Christian church leader would consider encouraging their youth to explore other worldviews and follow the evidence where it led. They fear what honest inquiry would do. And what does that say about the truth of their claims?

Related post: “Imagine a Christianity Without Indoctrination”

Jesus is like the date who says, “I’ll call you.”
— commenter Kodie

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/17/15.)

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A Call for Civil Disobedience: Remove “God”

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Some atheist friends and I had a ritual that we followed when we met for dinner. We defaced our money.

On the back of U.S. paper money (technically, Federal Reserve notes) are the words “In God We Trust.” But I don’t trust in a god that I don’t believe exists; why should I be forced to promote a concept I don’t accept to conduct commerce? Does the American government have no obligation to its citizens who are atheists, agnostics, or religious non-Christians who feel excluded by this?

Consider the second beast from Revelation 13:16–18 that forced all people “to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.” Would the Christians eager for the imposition of “In God We Trust” as a national motto be just as happy if the money were printed with the Beast’s 666? Or what if it instead professed trust in Shiva or Allah or Xenu?

Civil disobedience

Our dinner ritual is to practice a little civil disobedience and change the slogan. Some cross out the entire motto, some cross out just “God,” and some change “God” to “FSM” (Flying Spaghetti Monster). You could replace it with E Pluribus Unum or the beginning of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Let’s take a closeup of the middle anarchist. I’m pretty sure that’s a blue “RELIGION: Together we can find a cure” t-shirt. Oh—and a defaced $20 Federal Reserve Note.

Give it a try at your next gathering of freethinkers or advocates for the separation of church and state.

But is it illegal?

What’s illegal is a national motto that spits on the First Amendment. Even if we ignore the unconstitutionality, it should’ve been a crime to replace the motto E Pluribus Unum—“Out of many, one,” which is the story of an America built by immigrants working together—with a colorless motto that could just as easily fit fifty countries.

Title 18 of the U.S. Code has several relevant sections about changes to currency.

  • Section 333 says that mutilating or defacing a Federal Reserve note is illegal, but only if done “with intent to render such [note] unfit to be reissued.”
  • Section 471 says you can’t alter money with intent to defraud.
  • Section 472 says you can’t possess or pass on money with intent to defraud.
  • Section 475 says you can’t put advertisements on money. (This got the Where’s George? bank note tracking project into trouble.)

It’s clear that this project is legal, but if you like, imagine a cloud of doubt to make it more exciting.

Add some spice. Cross out “God” in front of who you’re paying, or replace the slogan with “Atheist Money.” Get your Christian friends to join in—government meddling in religion can’t be good for them, either.

And ask yourself how weak the Christian argument is if its proponents must try to steal the prestige of the U.S. government to bolster it.

668—the neighbor of the beast.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/12/15.)

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Gospels vs. the Perfect Miracle Claim

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Let’s create the most compelling miracle story possible. Here’s one.

I met Jesus yesterday. At first, I didn’t believe who he was, but he turned my lawn furniture from steel into gold. I just got back from a dealer who assayed the furniture, confirmed that it was solid gold, and bought it. Over 200 pounds of gold at $1389 per ounce works out to be close to $4.5 million.

Guess who’s a believer now!

Compare this story against the gospels

Would you buy this miracle story? I’m sure I’ve convinced no one, and yet, as miracle stories go, this one is pretty compelling. It certainly beats the gospel story. Compare the two:

  • Taking the claim at face value, the time from event to the first writing was one day, and the original witness documented the event. There was no chance for legendary accretion. Compare this to forty years and more of oral tradition with the gospels.
  • The time from original document to our oldest complete copy is zero days. Compare this to almost 300 years for the gospels. That’s a lot of time for copyist hanky-panky. (More on the time gap for New Testament manuscripts here and here.)
  • The cultural gulf to cross to understand my miracle claim is nonexistent—it’s written in modern English with a Western viewpoint. Compare this to our Greek copies of the gospels from around 350 CE, through which we must deduce the Jewish/Aramaic facts of the Jesus story from around 30 CE.
  • This story claims to be an eyewitness account. The argument for the gospels being eyewitness accounts is very tenuous.
  • It refers to Jesus, a well-known and widely accepted deity. Compare this to Christianity, which had to introduce Jesus as a new deity into a Jewish context. Ask a religious Jew today, and they will tell you that, no, Jesus wasn’t the messiah they were waiting for.

Have I convinced anyone in my gold lawn furniture story yet? If not, why is the gospel story more acceptable when I’ve beaten it on every point? It’s almost like evidence is just a smokescreen, and Christians believe for non-evidentiary reasons.

The Christian response

Let’s consider some responses from skeptical Christians. They might point to important elements of the gospel story: what about the terrified disciples who became confident after seeing Jesus, the conversions of former enemies Paul and James, or the empty tomb?

Okay, so you want a longer story? It’s hard to imagine that simply adding details and complications can make a story more believable, but I can give you that. Let’s suppose that the story were gospel-sized and included people who initially disbelieved but became convinced.

You say Jesus doesn’t make appearances like this anymore? Okay, make it some other deity—someone known or unknown. You pick.

You say that these claims are so recent that they demand evidence—photos, a check from the gold dealer, samples of the gold lawn furniture? Okay, then change the story to make the evidence inaccessible. Maybe now we imagine it taking place 200 years ago. It’s hard to imagine how making the story less verifiable makes it more credible, but I’m flexible. It’s just words on (virtual) paper—whatever additional objection you have, reshape the story to resolve the problem.

And yet if you were presented with this carefully sculpted story, you’d still be unconvinced. Why? What besides tradition or presuppositions of the rightness of the Christian position makes that more believable?

Example #2

Let’s approach this from another angle. Imagine that we’ve uncovered a cache of Chinese documents from 2000 years ago, rather like a Chinese Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. These documents claim miracles similar to those found in the gospels. Here are the remarkable facts of this find.

Christian response #2

Here again, the claims of our imaginary find trounce every equivalent Christian claim. But our Christian skeptic might have plausible responses.

  • These Chinese authors were lying, and they actually weren’t eyewitnesses. Maybe they even had an agenda. This is just words on paper, after all. Who knows if they’re true, especially if they’re unbelievable?
  • The authors were confused, mistaken, or sloppy in their reporting. We can’t guarantee that an author from prescientific China recorded the facts without bias. Perhaps they were constrained by their worldview and unconsciously shoehorned what they saw to fit what they thought they ought to see.
  • We can’t prove that the claims are wrong, but so what? That’s not where the burden lies. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this story simply doesn’t have sufficiently compelling evidence.
  • Gee, I dunno. It’s an impressive story, but that’s all it is. This is implausible, unrepeatable evidence that can’t overturn what modern science tells us about how the world works.

This Christian skeptic sounds just like me. These are the same objections that I’d raise. So why not show this kind of skepticism for the Christian account?

The honest Christian must avoid the fallacy of special pleading—having a tough standard of evidence for historical claims from the other guy but a lower one for his own. “But you can’t ask for videos or newspaper accounts of events 2000 years ago” is true but irrelevant. It amounts to “I can’t provide adequate evidence, so you can’t hold that against me.”

Ah, but we do. In fact, we must.

Some Christians will point to Christianity’s popularity as evidence, but surely they can’t be saying that the #1 religion must be true. When the number of Muslims exceeds that of Christians, which is expected to happen at shortly after 2050, will they become a Muslim? Popularity doesn’t prove accuracy.

We need a consistently high bar of evidence for supernatural claims, both for foreign claims as well as those close to our heart.

If Christ has not been raised,
our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
— 1 Corinthians 15:14

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/23/15.)

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