Miracles Conference, Coming Soon

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For anyone in the greater Seattle area, the NW Miracles Conference will be held on Saturday, March 30, 2019 in Sequim, WA (a couple of hours northwest of Seattle and Tacoma). The speakers include:

  • Michael Shermer. Dr. Shermer is the founder and editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine and author of Scientific American’s Skeptic column. He will debate local Christian Luuk van de Weghe on the topic, “Are the Miracles of Jesus Unbelievable?” (I debated his father Rob a couple of years ago on “Is it Reasonable to Believe in God?” Discussion and video of that debate here.)
  • Justin Brierley. Justin is the host of the UK-based Unbelievable? radio show and podcast and the Unbelievable? conference. Justin does what apparently is impossible in the U.S. by putting Christians and non-Christians together weekly and having a civil and informative conversation. I highly recommend the podcast. Justin also organized the 2012 Atheist Prayer Experiment, in which I participated. (My posts on that experiment: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.) Justin will be the conference moderator.
  • Sean George and Bradley Bowen. Dr. Sean George is an Australian doctor whose heart stopped for an hour but was eventually revived with no brain damage, and Seattle-area atheist Bradley Bowen is a frequent blogger on the Secular Outpost blog at Patheos. Bradley will put on his philosopher’s hat and debate another philosopher, Hans Vodder, about Dr. George’s miracle claim.

Find the entire schedule here.

I’ll be there. Look for me if you attend!

What I found [in reading the Bible]
was that most of the Bible was neither horrible nor inspiring.
It was simply dull and irrelevant:
long genealogies written by men obsessed with racial purity;
archaic stories about ancient squabbles over real estate and women;
arcane rituals aimed at pleasing a volatile deity;
folk medicine practices involving mandrakes and dove’s blood;
superstition that equated cleanliness with spiritual purity
and misfortune with divine disfavor;
and outdated insider politics.
— Valerie Tarico

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Image from Eric Welch, CC license
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How Do You Decide What to Believe?

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For a clear and succinct discussion of what evidence is enough to support a claim, one good source is the observations of German philosopher Gotthold Lessing (1729–81). Lessing was a Christian, but he argued that history is insufficient support for religious truths.

He distinguished between the strength of the evidence and the consequences of belief.

We all believe that an Alexander lived who in a short time conquered almost all Asia. But who, on the basis of this belief, would risk anything of great permanent worth, the loss of which would be irreparable? Who, in consequence of this belief, would forswear forever all knowledge that conflicted with this belief? Certainly not I.

(Source: “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” Gotthold Lessing, 1777)

There are thousands of similar instances of the imperfect history record. Consider our difficulty in knowing the details surrounding the Battle of Hastings (1066), a pivotal event to the English-speaking world. We have the Bayeux tapestry, but it presents a compelling case for the legitimacy of William the Conqueror’s possession of England from the winner’s standpoint. Arguments for the legitimacy of the defeated English monarchy were less likely to have been preserved.

Consider Marco Polo. Did he actually spend years in China as a confidante to Kublai Khan or did he just pick up fascinating tales on his travels and weave them into a story?

Did Plato make up Socrates as a literary device to illustrate his points? Was William Tell real? Was Ned Ludd? Robin Hood? King Arthur? Homer?

We want to understand history as correctly as possible, but none of these issues carry much weight. Any new evidence that changes the historical consensus might be newsworthy but would test the worldview of very few people.

The Christian challenge

A popular historical challenge by Christian apologists is to compare the record of Alexander the Great to that of Jesus. Jesus has a better historical argument on every point—there was less time from events to documentation, our copies of the gospels are better and more numerous than any documentation of Alexander, and Jesus is more recent. You accept our account of Alexander from history, my atheist friend? Then you should also accept the far better account of Jesus.

But this argument backfires. If we’re to adopt the best-evidenced claims, what about claims that are far better than those of Christianity? For example, Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian holy man who could raise the dead and be in two places at once, performed his miracles publicly until his death in 2011. Mormonism makes a far better historical case than Christianity (more). Thousands of people who claim to have not only seen UFOs but been abducted can be interviewed today (more).

If the reliability of the claims were actually important, Christians would sooner believe in Sai Baba, Mormonism, and UFO abductions. That they don’t shows that this is simply an argument of convenience, not one on which they built their worldview. And, of course, if this argument doesn’t support their beliefs, why should it convince an outsider?

We must also consider the magnitude of the claims. While details of the Alexander story are debatable, the basics are hard to reject. Twenty new cities named “Alexandria” appeared in times and places consistent with his supposed travels and conquests, and we have coins and statues with his name. Alexander was a military commander, and we know they exist. Historians scrub out any supernatural accretions to the Alexander story. By contrast, the Jesus story is nothing without its supernatural claims. Remove the supernatural from the Jesus story, and you have just the story of a man (more here).

Lessing’s ditch

Lessing makes the point with a metaphor that has become famous.

If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated by means of historical truths. That is: accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason. . . . That, then, is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap.

Lessing says that no history—whether the consensus view of historians or not—is sufficient to support the “necessary truths of reason,” which include religious truths.

If the consequences from a mistaken belief are minimal, then what the hell: Homer existed, and Marco Polo really was an important figure in Kublai Khan’s court. I might cross that ditch of historical evidence.

But if there are consequences—if it’s an issue on which I risk something valuable—that’s a ditch I won’t cross without good reason, and “Gee, it’d be nice to be on the other side” isn’t a good reason.

Continue: How Christian Apologists Teleport Across Lessing’s “Ugly, Broad Ditch”

Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said.
“One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the [White] Queen.
“When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many
as six impossible things before breakfast.”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 02/14/15.)

Image from Mike Tungate, CC license

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The Modal Ontological Argument? It Needs a Good Thrashing. (2 of 2)

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We’re halfway through our analysis of the modal ontological argument, an apologetic argument that’s not accurate and useful so much as weighty. Those of us who are outsiders to philosophy have probably found it to be ponderous and counterintuitive. I certainly did.

In part 1, we saw that premise 1 seemed reasonable and premise 3 seemed crazy, and I promised to swap that critique and show that 3 was reasonable and 1 was crazy.

Here’s the argument again:

Premise 1. It is possible that an MGB exists.

Premise 2. If it is possible that an MGB exists, then an MGB exists in some possible world.

Premise 3. If an MGB exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

Premise 4. If an MGB exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

Premise 5. If an MGB exists in the actual world, then an MGB exists.

Conclusion 1. Therefore, an MGB exists.

Conclusion 2. Therefore (since MGB is just another name for God), God exists.

Raising the stakes

Before we complete our attack on the argument, let me show the stakes we’re playing for. Douglas Groothuis in Christian Apologetics (2011) responded to Richard Dawkins’ rejection of the ontological argument in The God Delusion. Critiquing Dawkins, he said:

Without prior knowledge of the history of this fascinating specimen of reasoning, we could conclude from Dawkins’s treatment that the ontological argument was more of a joke than a serious work of philosophy. As a naive empiricist, he simply finds absurd the idea that an argument could prove God’s existence without appeal to empirical evidence. But Dawkins’s glib rejection never engages the richness or subtlety of the argument, a piece of reasoning that has intrigued some of the best minds in philosophy since the argument’s inception by Anselm in the eleventh century.

Richness and subtlety? That’s like complaining that we’re missing the richness and subtlety of the Emperor’s new clothes. Sorry, I’m still stuck on whether the argument is correct or not. Groothuis seems to be promising that it’s a powerful and compelling argument. Let’s see.

Equivocation on the definition of “possible”

In part 1, we saw that premise 3 works, and our problem remains: the conclusion “Therefore God exists” still looks like magic.

Our first challenge was correctly seeing the consequences of an MGB as a necessary being. Now, let’s focus on the word possible. Few people would begrudge premise 1, “It is possible that an MGB exists.” I’ve seen no good evidence, but, sure, maybe an MGB does exist.

But this is the colloquial meaning of possible. We’re saying, “I have no idea—maybe an MGB exists in one possible world or a thousand worlds or none.” This is usage 1: possible as a statement of ignorance. But there’s another usage.

(The modal ontological argument makes use of S5 modal logic, in which necessary and possibly are carefully defined, but there’s no need for our analysis to get bogged down with that. I bring this up only to note that Plantinga used a different definition openly. Unfortunately, it’s easy for other apologists to use these two meanings of possible to take advantage of the reader’s confusion.)

The other usage is possible as a declaration of existence, and we see that in premise 2: If it is possible that an MGB exists, then an MGB exists in some possible world. That is, an MGB exists in one or more possible worlds. Zero possible worlds is not an option.

Now we can see the deceptiveness of premise 1 (again, that deceptiveness wasn’t deliberate for Plantinga, but I doubt that’s true for some apologists). Premise 1 says, It is possible that an MGB exists. In other words (using the appropriate definition of possible), an MGB exists in one or more possible worlds. By accepting premise 1, you’re accepting that an MGB exists somewhere. Not really what you intended, was it?

Let’s rework those first three premises with this new knowledge.

Premise 1′. An MGB exists in one or more possible worlds.

Premise 2.

Premise 3′. Given that an MGB exists in some possible world (premise 1) and that an MGB either exists in all worlds or none (by definition), then an MGB must exist in all possible worlds.

When the implications are laid out, the assumptions become clear, the magic vanishes, and the argument says nothing of interest. When you assume an MGB in your first premise and define it to be either everywhere or nowhere (and nothing in between), it’s hardly surprising that you can conclude that one exists.

This is a circular argument. It logically fails.

Revisit the conclusion

Let’s take a closer look at the second half of the argument.

Premise 4. If an MGB exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

Premise 5. If an MGB exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.

Conclusion 1. Therefore, an MGB exists.

Conclusion 2. Therefore (since MGB is just another name for God), God exists.

This works except for Conclusion 2. An MGB has a very simple definition, while God (that is, Yahweh) doesn’t. Christians can’t agree on all of God’s properties, and those properties evolved through the Old Testament. The first problem is God’s squishy and ambiguous definition not fitting the simple definition of an MGB.

Let’s focus on one aspect. If God is a Maximally Great Being, then he must be, among other things, wholly good. But read the Bible, and you’ll see that God isn’t wholly good. He supports slavery and demands human sacrifice and genocide. The easy comeback is “Sure, but God could have his reasons,” which simply presupposes God to defend his existence, which is another logical error.

There’s another part of the definition of a Maximally Great Being that doesn’t work, the clash between the conflicting requirements of an MGB’s omni properties. For example, the MGB is omniscient and so knows the future. But he’s also omnipotent, so he can change the future. Which one wins?

And since God has even more superpowers than an MGB, it becomes even weirder with him. Before God created the universe, reality was either perfect or not. It couldn’t have been imperfect, because God wouldn’t have tolerated that. But if it was already perfect, why create the universe? Or how can God be all-just (and give everyone what they deserve) while also being merciful (giving some of us less than we deserve)?

(More on omni conflicts here and a proof that God doesn’t exist because of the suffering in the world here.)

Turn the argument on itself

As with the regular ontological argument (my response to that here), the modal ontological argument can be turned on itself. The argument works because (1) its definition of possible existence is “exists in at least one possible world” and (2) an MGB is necessary, which makes its existence all or nothing—it’s everywhere or it’s nowhere. If you start with premise 1 being “It is possible that an MGB exists,” the wheels of the argument turn to move from an MGB in at least one possible world, to all possible worlds, to the actual world.

But change one cog in the machine, and you get a different prize when you turn the crank. Change every exists to doesn’t exist. It’s still valid, but its cleverness has been turned on itself. Now the conclusion becomes, “Therefore, God doesn’t exist.”

You want to go with this as your argument? Is that your final answer?

This is a caltrop argument, an argument that doesn’t make an offensive point. Its value instead is in slowing down a pursuer. It’s a puzzle. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists eight categories of ontological argument, so there are lots more if the retreating Christian apologist needs to throw out another tar baby.

What kind of god are you defending if you must go to this argument instead of pointing to convincing evidence? What kind of god are you defending if he can’t defend himself?

In fact, Plantinga agrees that the argument doesn’t do much:

Our verdict on these reformulated versions of St. Anselm’s argument must be as follows. They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion. But since it is rational to accept their central premise, they do show that it is rational to accept that conclusion.

I’m not sure what he’s saying in that last sentence. My guess is he’s saying that the modal ontological argument reached a conclusion through a flawed logical path, but that’s okay because he knows that conclusion is correct because of other reasoning.

Regardless, we’ve shown that, though the argument concludes, “Therefore, God exists,” that’s not a takeaway for any of us.

Let’s end by returning to Douglas Groothuis, whose challenge mocked us as we began our critique of the argument: “Dawkins’s glib rejection never engages the richness or subtlety of the [ontological] argument, a piece of reasoning that has intrigued some of the best minds in philosophy since the argument’s inception by Anselm in the eleventh century.”

A flawed argument deserves ridicule in proportional to the earnestness with which it is put forward as a serious, useful apologetic argument.

Acknowledgements. Several sources in particular helped me peek behind the curtain to see how the trick was done.

  • “Plantinga’s Modal Ontological Argument, Part 1” is an excellent video by Roderic Taylor.
  • Richard Carrier’s articles are thorough and insightful but always accessible. He analyzes the ontological arguments here, as part of his series taking down Plantinga’s famous list of “Two dozen or so” arguments.
  • Frequent commenters Greg G. and JustAnotherAtheist2 provided useful insights. A particular h/t is due Grimlock, who prodded me to write this post.
You can make an argument so simple
that there are obviously no errors.
 Or you can make it so complicated
that there are no obvious errors.
— Hoare’s dictum

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Image from Žygimantas Dukauskas, CC license
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The Modal Ontological Argument? It Needs a Good Thrashing.

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This Christian apologetic argument is the one that I most often see put forward as the one that will put cocky atheists in their place. And for you Christians, once you’ve gotten past the beginner arguments like the Design, Cosmological, and Moral arguments and then master intermediate ones like the Fine-Tuning, Transcendental, and Ontological arguments, it’s time for advanced arguments like the Modal Ontological argument. Or at least that’s how it’s presented.

The best thing I found about this argument was that it was complicated—not that it was correct or informative but that it was so effective a smokescreen that I needed hours of research before I felt that I really understood it. And it’s only five lines long.

While it concludes, “therefore, God exists,” it doesn’t actually tell us that. Not only am I telling you this, but Alvin Plantinga, the author of one popular version, will tell you this as well. And you’ll see it, too, by the end of these two posts.

I’ll try to cover every point thoroughly with simple language, so this may be a little slow for some readers.

The modal ontological argument

First, some definitions.

Definition 1: a Maximally Excellent Being is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good.

Definition 2: a Maximally Great Being (MGB) is a Maximally Excellent Being that is necessary (that is, it exists in every possible world).

It’s a little more formal to use MGB rather than “God” for our analysis, but the Christian apologist obviously thinks that they’re synonymous for this discussion. Note also that the MGB is simply the typical list of godlike properties with necessity thrown in. That will be important later.

Here’s the William Lane Craig version of the argument:

Premise 1. It is possible that an MGB exists.

Premise 2. If it is possible that an MGB exists, then an MGB exists in some possible world.

Premise 3. If an MGB exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

Premise 4. If an MGB exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

Premise 5. If an MGB exists in the actual world, then an MGB exists.

Conclusion 1. Therefore, an MGB exists.

Conclusion 2. Therefore (since MGB is just another name for God), God exists.

The argument is valid (the formal logic is correct), and premise 1 seems easy to grant, even for atheists. Sure, it’s possible that a maximally great being exists.

However, Premise 3 is crazy—we’re going to go from “Sure, maybe an MGB exists” to “an MGB definitely exists in every possible world.” This is the logical equivalent of the “then a miracle occurs” step in Sidney Harris’s famous cartoon.

You’ll soon see that that initial reaction is backwards—Premise 3 actually works, and 1 is the tricky one.

The prisoner and the surprise sentence

Quick intermission: Did you hear the story of the guy sentenced to execution?

The judge, in a whimsical mood, wondered why sentencing someone to death must always be so gloomy. Can’t we have a little fun with it? “Executions are always at sunrise,” he said to the prisoner. “Your sentence will be one day next week, but you won’t know which day. It’ll be a surprise.”

As the prisoner sat dejected in his cell, he soon realized that the judge’s odd requirement gave him a loophole. After all, if they hadn’t come for him by Thursday morning, then he would know that it would be Friday. And Friday’s out because it would violate the judge’s demand that it must be a surprise.

Looking at the remaining days, he couldn’t be executed Thursday using similar reasoning. And so on, through the days of the week.

The guards woke him from a contented sleep just before sunrise on Wednesday morning to be executed. He was completely surprised.

The Christian’s confidence in the modal ontological argument is like the prisoner’s confidence in his analysis. The Christian probably doesn’t completely understand the argument, but it’s put forward by famous Christians like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, so must be solid.

Our Christian apologist is in for a surprise.

Take 2: one small change to the argument 

The ontological argument starts with the claim that God is possible and then concludes that he exists. But what kind of black magic is this?! That doesn’t make sense.

Things are clearer if we take the argument exactly as defined above and make one change: replace “Maximally Great Being” with “griffin” (a griffin is a lion/eagle chimera).

Premise 1. It is possible that a griffin exists.

Premise 2. If it is possible that a griffin exists, then a griffin exists in some possible world.

Premise 3. If a griffin exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

Premise 4. If a griffin exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

Premise 5. If a griffin exists in the actual world, then a griffin exists.

Conclusion 1. Therefore, a griffin exists.

A griffin doesn’t exist in our world, but (premise 1) it’s possible that it exists. That is, it’s possible that physics and evolution in a different world would be such that a griffin was an outcome. But the argument fails on premise 3. No, even if griffins exist in some possible worlds, that doesn’t transport them to any other non-griffin world.

Then how could the argument work for an MGB?

Premise 3 makes no sense for griffins or indeed for any ordinary thing . . . but it does for an MGB. To understand this, let’s focus on where the action is, just the first three premises.

Premise 1. It is possible that an MGB exists.

Premise 2. If it is possible that an MGB exists, then an MGB exists in some possible world.

Premise 3. If an MGB exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

The reason that premise 3 works is a word that you may not have taken notice of in the definition of MGB, the word necessary.

Let’s step back. Things are either necessary or contingent. For example, lions and griffins are contingent. Their existence depends on how the world is. In our world, lions exist and griffins don’t, but another possible world could’ve had it the other way around.

Mathematical truths, by contrast, aren’t contingent, they’re necessary. The statements 1 + 1 = 2 and 1 + 1 = 7 aren’t dependent on the way the world is. One is true and one is false, and those truth values are unchanging across all possible worlds.

An MGB is necessary by definition (scroll back up and see). Like mathematical truths, “an MGB exists” is either true or false, but that truth value is unchanged in all possible worlds.

If an MGB is possible (premise 1), then it must exist in one or more possible worlds (premise 2). But if it exists anywhere, it must exist everywhere, since it is necessary (from the definition of MGB). Said another way, an MGB is all or nothing—because it’s necessary, “an MGB exists” is consistently either true or false everywhere. It can’t be true in some fraction of the possible worlds and false in the rest, just like “1 + 1 = 7” can’t be true in some fraction of the possible worlds and false in the rest. Since we’ve shown that if an MGB exists in some possible world, then it must exist in every possible world (and that’s premise 3).

We’ve seen that premise 3 actually makes sense. Next up: we’ll see how premise 1 doesn’t make sense, how the entire argument is circular (and so fails), plus a few other problems.

Concluded in part 2.

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The Argument from Mathematics Doesn’t Add Up to God (2 of 2)

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A Christian apologist with a new argument is like a kid with a new toy. William Lane Craig is excited to show us the Argument from Mathematics (part 1 of the discussion here). He marvels at what he calls “the uncanny effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the world around us. Unsurprisingly, he’s quick to push forward his favorite deity as the explanation.

Limits on math

So how effective is math? It’s fundamental in physics, but it doesn’t do much for other fields like literature. Or art. Or history, geology, sociology, politics, human relations, or lots of other fields. Impressive attempts have been made to find mathematics to model human behavior—catastrophe theory, for example—with little success. Compared to the scope of human endeavors, math is actually quite limited.

Consider where math does its impressive work, the intersection of Math and the Physical World.

There’s a lot of the physical world that benefits little from math (on the left of this diagram), and there’s a lot of math that has little direct applicability to the real world (on the right). In addition, math in the real world isn’t always tidy and simple.

  • The orbits of planets aren’t simple circles but rather ellipses.
  • Fundamental particles are composed of three quarks, not one or two.
  • The n-body problem has no simple solution.
  • Chaos theory shows that some systems are deterministic but not predictable.
  • NP-complete problems like the traveling salesman problem are computationally difficult.
  • Important numbers like pi or e are transcendental (nonrepeating and nonterminating).
  • Quantum mechanical events are describable only with statistics and may have no individual cause.
  • There is no simple rule for enumerating primes.

Math gives neat, simple answers where it does, and it doesn’t where it doesn’t. Our awe at math’s effectiveness may be due to confirmation bias, in which we count the hits and ignore the misses. We marvel at the places where math provides a neat solution and ignore those where it doesn’t.

Another bump in the road to math’s “uncanny effectiveness” are Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which argue that finding a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible.

And consider whether God or reality calls the shots. Take just one primitive truth in our reality, 2 + 2 = 4. Could God have made it anything different? If so, we await the evidence. If not, what role is left for God if reality defines the fundamentals from which the rest of math follows? God is sidelined without much to do.

Craig’s antagonist in this discussion, Dr. Daniel Came, raised many of the points I’ve mentioned here. About math’s applicability, he said,

If you think of the number of possible questions that human beings can ask, the number that are actually tractable with science and mathematics is a vanishingly small percentage.

Craig’s weak explanation

Craig claims that “God did it” is an inference to the best explanation. He wants the teacher to declare that time is up because he has an answer. Problem is, it’s not much of an answer.

He doesn’t care that the consequences of his explanation are either untestable (such as the existence of an afterlife) or have been tested and failed (such as answered prayer).

He doesn’t care that his claim isn’t even falsifiable.

He doesn’t care that “God did it” raises more questions than it answers—questions about who or what God is, his motivations, how and why he created the universe, and so on. “God did it” is no explanation at all.

He doesn’t care that whenever science has found an explanation, it’s always natural. Science has accepted zero supernatural explanations.

He doesn’t care that, when you look around at God’s project with its natural disasters, parasites, childhood illnesses, and so on, it looks more like an experiment of the kid who burned ants with a magnifying glass, inexplicably given omnipotence, than the design of an all-loving deity.

He doesn’t provide evidence that his god even exists.

No, Craig says, his answer has great explanatory power, “unless you’re closed to theism.” (Did you see that clever role reversal coming? If there’s a problem with embracing Craig’s position, it must be that the atheist is simply closed-minded!)

We see cracks begin to form, however, when he admits that his isn’t an empirical explanation but rather a metaphysical one. But then what good is it—I mean, besides advancing Craig’s pet theory?

Craig retreats

Craig says that simple math would always apply to the physical world in any universe. That sounds plausible to me, but Craig is overconfident as usual as he tosses out claims about which he couldn’t possibly have definite knowledge. And if Craig admits that God isn’t needed for simple math, how can you exclude the rest when complex math is built on simple math? As an example of “simple math,” Craig includes the Bridges of Königsberg problem, which was the beginning of graph theory.

Craig demands an explanation because that’s where he imagines his advantage lies. He’s got an explanation, pathetic though it is, which is more than the other side has.

The problem, of course, is that “we don’t have an answer” is a perfectly reasonable response from the side of reason and science. The last ten thousand puzzles that science resolved started from that position of honest ignorance. Every Christian explanation of “God did it!” for these puzzles was wrong, and yet here Craig pops up again like a Weeble with the same childish and simple-minded proposition. “Well, how about now? Is God an explanation now?”

Christianity assures its flock that it’s doing important work as it pretends to answer science’s unresolved questions with the same mindless, one-size-fits-all answer, but this is just god-of-the-gaps reasoning. (In my list of 25 stupid arguments Christians should avoid, this is #20a: Science can’t explain everything; therefore, God.)

As his antagonist chipped away at Craig’s ice floe, Craig’s argument essentially dribbled from “math’s effectiveness is uncanny” down to “math’s effectiveness is kind of uncanny.” All he could do was whine that what was left was still extraordinary and needs an explanation. Sure, let’s work on an explanation, but in the meantime, don’t imagine that you have one.

William Lane Craig and Barbie—separated at birth?

Craig reminds me of Teen Talk Barbie, a doll from 1992 that could say a number of phrases, including one that has been paraphrased as “Math is hard!” Craig seems to confuse difficult math (and there’s plenty of that) with math that depends on God, and his argument seems to devolve into little more than Barbie’s observation.

Yes, math is hard, but both Barbie and Craig have yet to show that mathematical explanations of the real world would fail in a godless universe. They seem to even be unaware of the problem.

Related posts:

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians
and all those who make empty prophecies.
The danger already exists that mathematicians
have made a covenant with the devil
to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
— Augustine

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/9/15.)

Image from stuartpilbrow, CC license

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Christian Historical Claims Are Surprisingly Fragile: a Case Study (2 of 2)

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early church manuscripts

Polycarp, an important second-century Christian bishop, was martyred in about 155. A letter, The Martyrdom of Polycarp, documented the appeal by the Roman proconsul to get Polycarp to avoid a death sentence by making an obligatory prayer to Caesar. Polycarp rejected the idea, saying, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

The lecture that prompted me to write about Polycarp was “Church History” from the Credo House ministry. In response to Polycarp’s famous line, one lecturer said, “I just read that and get chills. That needs to be a t-shirt.” The other replied, “That’s one of the most beautiful statements in all of church history. It really is.”

I’m not sure why. If Jesus helped Polycarp through life’s trials no more overtly than he helps people today, I don’t see what’s worth dying for. The Jesus who urged believers to pray in a closet instead of in public wouldn’t be pleased at a public show of devotion through martyrdom. The Bible doesn’t encourage it, and martyrdom for being a Christian (in the West, anyway) doesn’t happen. (I explore a modern version of this foolish sacrifice here.)

But that’s a tangent. Our goal here is to answer the question, Did Polycarp really say this? We’ve covered three glaring red flags already (in part 1)—the story contains miracles, Polycarp’s death reads like a deliberate imitation of Jesus’s death, and many decades may have intervened between the death and the documentation of the event. Let’s continue.

Problem 4

We have a series of copyists, though fortunately these are known. Unlike many manuscripts, the letter documents the earliest series of copies: someone wrote the original (in Greek), and then Irenaeus got a copy, which was copied by Gaius, which was then copied by Socrates, which was then copied by Pionius. Pionius noted that the copy he had to work with “had almost faded away through the lapse of time,” which raises the possibility that he used guesswork to fill in gaps.

Problem 5

But at least that initial series of copyists was documented. Our final problem is the unknown period between Pionius (assuming the accuracy of the letter’s appendix) and the oldest copies that we have today. We have seven Greek manuscript copies of the letter, but these date to the tenth century and later. That isn’t a reliable foundation on which to build our translation.

There’s also a Latin version from the tenth century and an Old Church Slavonic version from the fifteenth century. These are no improvement—not only are they late, but there’s a translation in there.

Finally, we have Church History by Eusebius (also known as Ecclesiastical History), written in Greek in about 320. He copied much of The Martyrdom of Polycarp into his book, including the “he has done me no wrong” quote.

The problem is similar here: there are seven Greek manuscript copies from the tenth century or later, six Latin copies from the eighth century and later, and two Syriac copies. The earliest Syriac copy is the oldest of all existing copies, with a (surprisingly precise) copy date of 462.

Which do we point to for our most reliable copy? We have a tenth-century Greek copy of the letter, and we have a fifth-century copy of a translation of Eusebius’s copy of the letter. Neither inspires confidence. One source characterizes the problem this way: “The letter as presented in extant Greek manuscripts, the oldest of which dates from the 10th century, is somewhat different from the account given by Eusebius, so that probably the work has undergone interpolation [change].”

The two options for the dates of Polycarp’s death are more evidence of problems with these two manuscript traditions. Each tradition gives a clear but contradictory date. The copies of The Martyrdom of Polycarp say 155 or 156, while those of Church History say 166 or 167.

(A similar analysis with a tenuous chain of evidence is the claim that the gospels are eyewitness accounts. I’ve responded to that with a blog post and video summary.)

Have we chosen a particularly poor example? Candida Moss argues in The Myth of Persecution that the martyrdom of Polycarp is one of the best martyrdom accounts, and yet it’s still unreliable.

Lessons

Admittedly, what Polycarp said, if anything, isn’t very important by itself. What is important is this as an example of the feeble foundation that supports many other claims that, collectively, are important.

Let’s review the problems that came up with this quote.

  1. Miracles. The story contains miracles. Sure, I’ll listen to miracle claims, but the hill to climb to show historicity has suddenly become huge.
  2. Fan fiction? It looks to be a deliberate parallel to the Jesus death story. That might make literary or theological sense, but it brings historicity into question.
  3. Time gap from event to autograph. The date of original authorship is unclear. Clues in the text suggest many decades between the event and the original letter.
  4. Time gap from autograph to our best copy. The letter documents three or four steps in the copying process, the last of which implies that creative license might’ve been taken to fill in the blanks in a tattered manuscript.
  5. And more time from autograph to our best copy. Next is the unknown period from that point to our best copies (a tenth-century original language Greek copy or a fifth-century translated copy, neither of which inspire confidence).

When confronted with a claim about early church history, be skeptical. Ask: How do you know? Any declaration about something that happened in the early church comes down to manuscripts. Are they plausible history? How long is the chain from original to our best copies (in years and number of copies)? Did anyone in the chain of copies have an agenda to “improve” the text? And so on.

Very few typical Christians will have answers. That shouldn’t be an invitation to dump a bunch of questions and insults on them and smugly walk away, however. These are complicated issues, and maybe you can each learn from the other.

The whole story of human history is:
the blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.
— Ralph Nader

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Image from Wikimedia, public domain
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