Response to “Nine Not-so-Good Reasons To Be an Atheist”

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Here’s something new—apologetics from a Muslim source. Pakistan Today recently ran the article, “Nine not-so-good reasons to be an atheist.” Since Islam is the official religion and 96+ percent of the population is Muslim, I assume that this article is defending Islam. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few British spellings, this is just what an American Christian apologist would argue. Since the focus of this blog is Christianity in the West, I will respond to these arguments as if they came from a Christian apologist.

Here are nine “not-so-good reasons to be an atheist” that, in the words of the author, “leave a lot to be desired.” See if you agree with me that the problem has been overstated.

“1. There’s so much suffering in the world.”

This comes in many forms: There’s no justice in the world. Faith is rewarded to the same degree as unbelief. The resources are so unjustly distributed among people. If an omniscient, omnipotent and an all-good God doesn’t choose to prevent evil, He’s not all-good; if He is unable to prevent evil, He’s not omnipotent. All these arguments feature anthropomorphism—casting the deity in the image of man.

In the Bible, God is very much cast in the image of man. God walked in the Garden of Eden like an ordinary man. God regretted making Man. God lied. God got a good thrashing by Chemosh, the god of Moab. Abraham changed God’s mind on Sodom. Moses talked with God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”

The Bible evolved over time. In the early years, the Bible’s religion was polytheistic. Yahweh was similar to the Greek and Roman gods, only gradually becoming omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

But anthropomorphism isn’t as interesting as some of the arguments alluded to. The Problem of Evil is indeed a problem for Christianity. An omniscient god could achieve any purpose he wanted without causing any pain. And a god who desired a relationship with humanity wouldn’t be hidden—excuses for his hiddenness are what you’d see if the god were manmade.

Good and evil are themes of mankind, not of God. Good and bad (like hot and cold, beneficial and harmful) are relative terms. . . . An Absolute God cannot be judged according to something else.

What absolute god? You give me a proposition such as “Yahweh is a good god,” and I must evaluate it. I judge claims for Yahweh, just like the Christian or Muslim would judge the claims for a god foreign to their worldview. And when I judge claims that Yahweh is good, he fails that test by his own holy book (more on genocide, evil, human sacrifice, and slavery).

“2. Belief in God is an accident of birth.”

You would probably believe in Allah if you were born in Pakistan, probably in Jesus if born into a Christian family, in Krishna or Vishnu if born to a Hindu Brahmin. In much the same way as the Greeks believed in Zeus, or so the argument goes.

Yes, that correlation does indeed exist. I’ve written about this very argument: “Your Religion Is a Reflection of Your Culture—You’d Be Muslim if You Were Born in Pakistan.”

Here’s the author’s concern:

The fallacy at play here is called the genetic fallacy: trying to invalidate a position by showing how a person came to hold it. The accident of birth theory—whether true or false—in no way invalidates all belief in God.

The genetic fallacy is about the origin of something (think genesis). Here’s an example: “Hitler was a bad man and he was a vegetarian. Therefore, vegetarianism is bad.” There is no plausible cause-and-effect link.

But the argument here doesn’t fail by that reason. “You would probably believe in Allah if you were born in Pakistan” is indeed a true statement. More than 96 percent of Pakistanis are Muslim, and a baby born there today will likely grow up to be a Muslim adult.

We can shoehorn correlations like this into an absolute statement like “People tend to reflect the religion of their environment so therefore all religious belief is false and a mere cultural artifact,” but that’s not my claim. I say instead that people tend to reflect the religion of their environment, and this gives weight to the naturalistic hypothesis that religious belief is a cultural artifact. There’s no fallacy here.

“3. I am throwing in my lot with science.”

While science is wonderful in many respects, it’s a mistake to think that it addresses all aspects of humanity. . . . [For example,] there’s no matter-only explanation of consciousness yet. Probably there never will be.

Let’s assume that this is correct, and science will never fully explain consciousness (which I doubt, but forget that). So what? You think that supernaturalism will? Supernaturalism has never explained anything that we can verify as true. Countless supernatural “explanations” have been overturned by scientific ones based on evidence, and the opposite hasn’t happened once.

“4. How can one believe in flying gods and the like?”

Starting with the question of whether to believe (or not believe) in God means that one has already skipped a vital question; namely: what does one mean by the word ‘God’?

Good point—that is an important question. There are 45,000 answers within Christianity. Even Islam, which isn’t as fragmented, has more than just the well-known Sunni and Shia denominations. Like Christianity, there are also nondenominational Muslims who don’t fit into the handful of large denominations.

But that was an aside. The author has a different concern:

It pays immensely if this is addressed and the childish concepts of gods are ruled out.

So childish is your concern? Seriously? Are there god concepts that are not childish?

Yes, there is much metaphysical or philosophical dust thrown up about God, but that doesn’t mean it’s not at root childish. I remember hearing world-famous theologian William Lane Craig arguing that the noncanonical gospels didn’t deserve to be canonical because they were nutty. He asked, Did you know that the Gospel of Peter has a walking, talking cross?

But Craig is living in a glass house. Has he ever read his own stuff?? It’s insane—floating ax heads, talking donkeys and snakes, three gods who are instead just one god, and an “all-good” god who condones slavery, demands human sacrifice, and drowns everyone.

Try seeing Christianity as an outsider. Only because you’re accustomed to your own view do you not see that it looks childish from the outside (in its own way) as all the others do.

Concluded in part 2.

He’s your god; they’re your rules—
you burn in hell.
— seen on the internet

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Image via Lex Kravetski, CC license

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When Christianity Was in Charge, This Is What We Got

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In 2014, I visited Hereford Cathedral in England and saw their mappa mundi (chart of the world). About 100 standalone mappae mundi remain, and this is the largest. It was made from a single calf skin, it’s a little over five feet tall, and it was made around 1300.

This is not the kind of map we’re used to. There is little attempt at accurate geography. This map wouldn’t serve an explorer or navigator, and its creators didn’t pretend that it would.

Using the theme of a world map, medieval cartographers embellished maps like this one to make them into something of an encyclopedia. Science was in its infancy, however, and the information was often bizarre.

Jabberwocky creatures?

Do you remember the “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass? It begins:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

Humpty Dumpty explains what a tove is: “‘Toves’ are something like badgers, they’re something like lizards, and they’re something like corkscrews. . . . Also they make their nests under sun-dials, also they live on cheese.”

Assuming our interest is the real world rather than Wonderland, the zoology we’re taught by the Mappa Mundi might as well have come from Humpty Dumpty. The drawing above shows monstrous people from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), and the Hereford Mappa Mundi includes some of these and more.

  • Sciapods had one large foot that they used to shield themselves from the sun.
  • The Blemmyes were warlike and had no head. Instead, their face was in their chest.
  • The dog-headed men were the Cynocephali.
  • Troglodites are “very swift; they live in caves, eat snakes and catch wild animals by jumping on them.”

The map also shows a number of mythical creatures, including a griffin and a salamander with wings. My favorite is the bonnacon, shown looking back over its shoulder at its own explosion of scalding diarrhea, which covers three acres. Even actual animals are misunderstood. The map reports, “The Lynx sees through walls and urinates a black stone.”

As with all mappae mundi, this one puts Jerusalem in the center. It locates places of important biblical events such as the Tower of Babel, the Garden of Eden, the route of the Exodus, and Sodom and Gomorrah.

Mythology and history are mixed without distinction. We see Jason’s Golden Fleece and the Labyrinth where Theseus killed the Minotaur, but we also see the camp of Alexander the Great.

Christianity was in charge for a millennium, and all I got was this lousy map

Christianity has been given a chance at understanding reality, and this is what it gave us. When Christianity was in charge, the world was populated by mystical creatures, we had little besides superstition to explain the caprices of nature, and natural disasters were signs of God’s anger.

Christianity’s goal isn’t to create the internet, GPS, airplanes, or antibiotics. It isn’t to improve life with warm clothes or safe water. It isn’t to eliminate diseases like smallpox or polio. It’s to convince people to believe in a story that has no evidence.

Admittedly, it’s not like Europeans had a lot of options. Christianity was the opium of the masses—better than nothing and not exceeded by much of anything in the Europe of 1300. True, eyeglasses had recently been invented and a remarkable century of cathedral building had passed, but science didn’t yet offer much of an alternative way of seeing reality.

Today, we have had a couple of centuries to give modern science a test drive, and we know that it delivers. Nevertheless, we still see Mappa Mundi thinking today. There are still religious leaders who long for the good old days of 1300.

The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God.
— William Lane Craig

“Q. What is the chief end of man?”
“A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
— the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (written in 1647 but in use today)

According to the Bible, our purpose—the reason we are here—is for God’s glory. In other words, our purpose is to praise God, worship him, to proclaim his greatness, and to accomplish his will. This is what glorifies him.
— Matt Slick, CARM

There is no calling greater than praising God. This is true not only for us, but surprisingly also for God himself, he being the greatest, to glory in anything else would be idolatry. Therefore, if the greatest thing God can do is give himself glory, and no created thing can be greater than God, the greatest thing we can do (our purpose, you might say) is to glory him.
— John Piper, Desiring God

And Christians say that it’s the atheists who lead pointless lives!

Christianity is like an arch

But if Christianity is just what you do if there’s no science, why is it still here? It doesn’t win when compared against science. It doesn’t even win when compared against other religions—Christianity has one view of the supernatural, and other religions have other views. Christianity offers nothing but claims without evidence (more here and here).

The metaphor of an arch illustrates this. To assemble an arch, first you build an arch-shaped scaffold. Next, lay the stones of the arch. Finally, remove the scaffold. Once the stones of the arch are in place, they support themselves and don’t need the scaffold.

That’s how religion works. Superstition in a world before science was the scaffold that supported the arch of religion. Science has now dismantled the scaffold of superstition, but it’s too late because the arch of religion has already calcified in place.

It’s the twenty-first century, and yet the guiding principles for Christians’ lives come from the fourteenth, back when the sun orbited the earth, disease had supernatural causes, and the world was populated by Sciapods, Blemmyes, and bonnacons.

So geographers, in Afric maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps
And o’er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
— Jonathan Swift (1733)

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/3/14.)

Photo credit: St. John’s College

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25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid (Part 7)

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Let’s wrap up our exploration of stupid arguments Christians would do well to avoid (Part 1 here).

Stupid Argument #23: Atheism is an empty philosophy.

“There is no basis in atheism for morality. A consistent atheist would admit that the holocaust was not evil based on atheism. All that he can say is that stuff happens” (from commenter Al).

No basis in atheism for morality? There’s also none in chemistry, but so what? Atheism doesn’t propose to define or explain morality; it is simply the lack of god belief (or some close variant). That’s it. If you’re looking for a formalized approach to secular morality, consider the Humanist Manifesto or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Seriously, Christians, avoid this one. It invites a critique of your own worldview which, unlike atheism, does claim to provide moral guidelines. And they suck. With a God that commands genocide and condones slavery, your morality lives in a glass house.

Stupid Argument #24: You really believe in God.

You must just hate God. Or you’re an atheist because you are too proud to bend the knee. Or because you had a bad father. Or you don’t want to give up your hedonistic lifestyle. Or you had a bad experience with a religious person.

“You really believe in God, you just hate him” was the laughable punch line in the move God’s Not Dead. The mean professor, when a child, pleaded with God to not take away his mother, but she died anyway. (My review here.) Someone who believes in God is not an atheist. And not me.

Some Christians seem determined to begin with “all men are without excuse” from Romans 1:20. If there is no excuse, then atheists’ arguments must somehow be invalid, and they must actually be believers who willfully reject the truth.

I’ve responded to the weak “atheists must’ve had a bad father figure” argument here. The same kind of Freudian analysis by which some Christians imagine that atheists had a poor father figure (and so reject their supernatural father) just as easily argues that Christians who grew up with strong fathers invent a supernatural father to avoid the fear of being alone.

Here’s another angle on this idea that atheists are actually believers. From a pastor (quoted by Friendly Atheist):

How many atheists do you know that want to fuss and fight with you about trolls, and about Smurfs, and about fairies? None of them. They all want to fight about God. Why? Because you don’t fight stuff that’s non-existent. You fight stuff, that, in your conscience, you know is existing.

We push back against Christians because Christianity (at least conservative U.S. Christianity) is the bull in society’s china shop. Christianity supports hateful social policy and attacks the separation of church and state that protects both Christians and atheists.

Stupid Argument #25a: Rationalization.

“Life is . . . like a ray that starts with a point called birth and extends on into eternity. . . . That gives you a very different perspective on suffering, on evil, on anything bad that might happen to you in your life. . . . Any period of suffering . . . becomes smaller and smaller relative to eternity [as you proceed along the ray of life—it becomes] a quick, brief instant.” (from Christian podcaster J. Warner Wallace)

Any injustice you might experience in the world? Just shake it off because we should compare it relative to the all-you-can-eat buffet and bottomless coffee that is heaven. (And you thought Christians didn’t view moral arguments from a relativistic standpoint!)

The Bible puts it this way: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). This is analogous to punching someone and then giving them a million dollars in compensation. Yes, you’ve given compensation, but that doesn’t justify the injury! In the same way, “God compensates for the injustice in your life” doesn’t get God off the hook, since he still caused that suffering.

Rationalization has its place. If you have conflicting claims X and Y and you are certain that X is true, it makes sense to assume that Y fits in somehow. The problem is when X (for example, “God exists”) is assumed true with insufficient evidence.

C.S. Lewis’s rationalization for the Problem of Evil was, “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” He can’t imagine a bungling god and he can’t imagine no god, so somehow evil must be there for a good reason. Here again we have the Hypothetical God Fallacy where God is presupposed so that we can imagine that omniscient God must have good reasons for things we just don’t understand.

The Bible itself has these rationalizations. Remember when Jesus predicted the imminent end? Rationalization becomes damage control when it doesn’t happen on schedule.

In the last days scoffers . . . will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?” . . .

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:3–8).

So Jesus was wrong by 2000 years and counting? Well, yeah . . . but . . . but that must’ve been part of the Plan® all along. Yeah—that’s what it was! All along, God wanted to bring as many believers as possible to the Kingdom, so he’s just delaying the inevitable. So rationalize a catastrophe by assuming God’s plan is right on course.

Or take the embarrassing conquest of first Israel and then Judah. What happened to Yahweh’s protection? Was he weaker than the gods of the other countries? Well, you have to understand that Yahweh was just using the Assyrians and Babylonians to teach God’s people a lesson (Ezekiel 36:19, for example). Yep, he was in charge all along. No other option is conceivable.

(Ideas on avoiding rationalization here.)

Stupid Argument #25b: God as the unfalsifiable hypothesis.

“Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter” (Christian apologist William Lane Craig).

If prayer works, that’s because of God, and if it doesn’t work, that’s also because of God.

If good things happen, God is blessing you, and if bad things happen, God is testing you.

If God does something good, praise the Lord, and if God does something bad, you just misunderstand (because it was actually good).

Heads, God wins; tails, God still wins. For some people, nothing will falsify God belief. (I’ve written more here and here.)

Conclusion

Christians, get out of the echo chamber. These arguments sound good only before they’re tried out in the real world. Arming yourself with these arguments is like walking the Hollywood set of a Western town—everything is pretend.

But the good news is that now that we’ve gotten these bad arguments out in the open, no Christians reading this will use these useless and embarrassing arguments, right? Surely, that’s the last we’ll see of them.

Christian apologists might say that these 25 arguments (and the ones I’m sure to be blogging about in the future) are ridiculous. Who would use them? I’m afraid that I’ve seen these arguments and more. If you’re saying that these arguments are ridiculous, yes, that’s the point. Spread the word.

But wait! There’s more!

The chains men bear they forged themselves.
Strike off their chains and they will weep for their lost security.
— John Passmore

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/20/14.)

Image via Casey Hugelfink, CC license

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Guest Post: Bible Quiz

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This Bible quiz (with a theme) is the second guest post from long-time commenter avalon. I learned more than I expected—see if you do, too.

Bible illiteracy is a major problem in America. Whether you’re a Christian who believes in the Bible or a skeptic who doubts the Bible, knowledge about what’s in the Bible should be a prerequisite for any discussion or debate. The following quiz is an attempt to spark your interest in learning more about the Bible. This quiz focuses on the word “spirit.”

Questions

1) What are the four types of baptism referred to in the New Testament?

2) In Hebrew, Greek, and Latin the word for spirit can have two other meanings (besides literally “spirit”). What are they?

3) Why didn’t Abram cut up the birds when preparing for the meeting with God? This is from Genesis 15:9–10: “So the Lord said to him, ‘Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.’ Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half.” (Hint: remember the theme.)

4) What descended on Jesus when he was baptized?

5) What was the first sign that the apostles were being visited by the Holy Spirit when they gathered at a house for Pentecost?

Continue for the answers:

 

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Why the Atheist Worldview Beats the Christian Worldview

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Christian apologists, perhaps knowing that they won’t do well in the arena of argument and evidence, try instead to beat the atheist worldview by arguing that it’s more pleasing or happier. In several recent posts, I’ve responded to the claim that Christian hope is a strong plus for Christianity. It’s not. It incorrectly imagines that consoling is enough, it encourages Christians to not see reality clearly, it encourages complacency and magical thinking, it provokes anxiety when promises and reality don’t mesh, it makes God a jerk, and it infantilizes Christians.

Let’s now look at the big picture of each worldview. Compare Christianity and atheism, and atheism wins.

Positives of Christianity (and the negatives)

Let’s start with Christianity’s positive traits. The church can create community for its members, and it can catalyze their good works and charitable giving. As such, it is an important social institution. While this natural part of the church is a positive, however, the supernatural side doesn’t hold up as well. Let’s look at some examples. For one, heaven is a nice idea, but it comes as a package deal with hell.

And you’re told that God is eager for a relationship, but he won’t even meet you halfway when his very existence isn’t obvious.

Laying your problems at the feet of Jesus might be comforting, but they’re usually still there when you go back to check. Why are prayers answered at a rate no better than chance?

One of Christianity’s strongest selling points, we’re told, is that salvation doesn’t require works but is a gift. All you need is faith. But with so many interpretations of correct belief within Christianity, how do you know the Jesus you have faith in is the right one? You may be headed for hell if you guess wrong.

What is God’s goal when he allows bad things to happen to people—tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands or childhood cancers, for example? As an omnipotent being, he could achieve any goal without causing suffering.

Christians might deal with issues like these by compartmentalizing, by not asking questions, or by denying their doubt. But not being able to honestly raise your concerns, let alone resolve them, creates mental stress, not a healthy relationship.

Facing reality (and the positives of atheism)

When challenged with some of these concerns, a common Christian response is to argue that the atheist worldview is bleak and empty (as if “that worldview is depressing” is any argument against it being correct). But let’s consider that worldview—a world without God. This would be a world where praying for something doesn’t increase its likelihood; where faith is necessary to mask the fact that God’s existence is not apparent; where no loving deity walks beside you in adversity; where natural disasters kill people indiscriminately; where far too many children live short and painful lives because of malnutrition, abuse, injury, or birth defects; and where there is only wishful thinking behind the ideas of heaven and hell.

Look around, because that’s the world you’re living in. But this isn’t anarchy, it’s a world where people live and love and grow, and where every day ordinary people do heroic and noble things for the benefit of strangers. Where warm spring days and rosy sunsets aren’t made by God but are explained by science, and where earthquakes happen for no good reason and people strive to leave the world a better place than they found it. God isn’t necessary to explain any of this. Said another way, there is no functional difference between a world with a hidden god and one with no god.

It’s not that the atheist worldview finds no value in life. In fact, the opposite is true: the Christian worldview is the one that devalues life. Of what value is tomorrow to the Christian when they imagine they’ll have a trillion tomorrows? What value are a few short years here on earth when they have eternity in heaven?

There are consequences. If the atheist is right, the Christian will have missed seeing their life for what it truly is—not a test to see if you correctly dance to the tune of Bronze Age traditions; not a shell of a life, with real life waiting for you in the hereafter; not drudgery to be endured or penance paid while you bide your time for your reward; but rather the one chance you have at reality. We can argue whether heaven exists, but one thing we do know is our one life here on earth: a too-short life, no matter how long you live, that you can spend wisely or foolishly. Where you can walk in a meadow full of flowers, and laugh and learn, and do good things and feel good for having done them. Where you can play with children, and teach someone, and love.

I won’t be able to visit new places after I die; I won’t be able to learn another language, or comfort a friend, or apologize, or forgive, or simply stop and smell the roses. If it’s important to me, I’d better do it in the one life I know I have. Life is sweeter when that’s all you’ve got. Sure, there’s a downside to having a finite number of days on this earth. It’s a downside, but that’s why it’s an upside.

Atheism is far from being a depressing worldview—just ask any ex-Christian atheist. They’ll tell you how empowered and free they feel now that they can honestly ask questions and follow evidence where it leads.

They seek only the truth, but the truth is enough.

You can only live once,
but if you do it right, once is enough.
— Mae West

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Image via Sivesh Kumar, CC license
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How Legends Develop in Our Own Time

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Health foods were popular in the Victorian period—foods such as Kellogg’s corn flakes, Grape-Nuts cereal, and graham crackers all came from food fads of this time—but the most interesting story might be that of Horace Fletcher, “The Great Masticator.” He advocated a low-protein diet, said that more efficient digestion could halve the amount of food a person needed, and claimed that capacity for work would increase and need for sleep decrease with his methods.

Chewing was the key. He famously warned, “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate” and advised, “Chew all solid food until it is liquid and practically swallows itself.” Success could be measured when bowel movements (“digestive ash,” as he called it) were negligible and had “no more odor than a hot biscuit.”

At age 54, he easily performed the exercises given to the Yale varsity crew though he “had for several months past taken practically no exercise other than that involved in daily walks about town.” At 58, he beat Yale athletes on tests of strength and endurance. He said that “perfect alimentary education” would deliver to society “no slums, no degeneracy, no criminals, no policemen, [and] no criminal courts.”

Should we all become Fletcherites?

Some of these are just handwaving promises (calories halved or no criminals, for example). But some are tests with places, dates, and quotes from named professors, such as the claims of physical strength and endurance. What do we make of this?

I’m skeptical. Maybe Fletcher embellished his claims. Maybe other authors reporting on the benefits of Fletcherism were caught up in the excitement and passed on stories without fact checking. Fletcherism might have been popular, but we must distinguish popularity from the truth of health claims (astrology is popular, but that doesn’t mean that the planets influence our lives).

The biggest issue is that we’ve had a century of scientific progress since Fletcher, and no science predicts that his simple regime could deliver what he claimed. Society today gives plenty of encouragement for new eating regimes, valid or bogus, and yet nothing has come of Fletcher’s philosophy.

Fletcherism vs. Christianity

This is an over-the-top story about a guy a century ago that we can see through, but we’re to believe the far more fantastic Jesus story?

For starters, Fletcher makes bold claims, but they’re all natural claims. They can be tested. By contrast, the Jesus story is nothing without its supernatural parts. The “like what?” test applies here. You say Jesus is supernatural? Like what? There is no accepted precedent for the remarkable supernatural claims made about Jesus.

We have originals of Fletcher’s story, written in our own language and coming from our own Western culture. There are no copyist errors and no puzzling idioms to decipher. Contrast that with the difficulty of reading the Bible. Native speakers from millennia past didn’t provide us with Ancient Greek-English or Ancient Hebrew-English dictionaries, so modern scholars must create their own imperfect ones. Not all words are easy to interpret. For example, the Hebrew reem was a puzzle, as in this sentence: “Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the reem.” It’s now translated as “wild ox,” but the King James Version translated it nine times as “unicorn.” Scholarly theological papers are written analyzing single Bible verses or phrases.

Fletcher’s story can be explained by some combination of wishful thinking, error, deliberate lie, and legendary growth. Why wouldn’t that very unsurprising explanation apply to the gospel story as well? We don’t have the originals of the New Testament books, and an average of 200 years separates the individual chapters of Matthew from the originals, to take one example (more on this time gap here).

I’ve made a similar comparison between the claims of Mormonism and Christianity (guess which one wins), and I argue that the Jesus story is a legend here.

The Argument from History

A popular Christian argument from history goes like this: you say the historical record for Jesus is poor? We show the gospel story is true in the same way that you show that the story of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar is true, through the historical record. You want to discard the gospel story? Then be consistent and discard the story of every great figure in ancient history.

In the first place, the evidence for Alexander and Julius Caesar is far better than that for Jesus (more here and here). And second, historians scrub out supernatural claims for historical accounts. Remove the supernatural from the stories of Alexander and Caesar (yes, there was plenty), and you have the accounts of those great men from history. But remove the supernatural from the Jesus story, and you’re left with nothing—just an ordinary, uninteresting man.

Let’s zoom out from this critique of Jesus vs. Alexander to bring in a more contemporary giant of history, Horace Fletcher. Point by point, the Fletcher story beats the Jesus story on its own criteria—shorter cultural gap, shorter period of oral history, more reliable copies, and so on. Until Christian apologists embrace the great truths of The Great Masticator, I will conclude that they are applying their standards inconsistently.

More modern legends

Let me pile on with more modern legends. With each one, ask yourself: if this can happen today, with our modern understanding of science, geography, anthropology, and what’s plausible, how reliable a foundation can Christianity have been built on?

  • According to a story begun in the early 1980s, astronaut Neil Armstrong heard the Muslim call to prayer on the moon and converted to Islam. Who would give such a ridiculous story credence? Enough people, apparently, that it was worth Armstrong denying the story in 2005.
  • Did you hear the one about how Pope Francis would sneak out of the Vatican disguised as a priest and minister to the homeless? This was popular early in his papacy, but it is false. How can a false story about the whereabouts of one of the world’s most famous people get going? And if that’s possible, what might you expect 2000 years ago after forty years of oral history in a prescientific melting pot of different religious beliefs?
  • Atheist Hector Avalos, in a 2004 debate with William Lane Craig, said that as a Pentecostal preacher, he had people raised from the dead in his own church.
  • The story of John Frum and cargo cults is a fascinating modern example of legend developing among pre-scientific people.
  • Is Barak Obama a Muslim? A 2015 CNN poll showed that 29 percent of Americans think so (and more than half of Republicans, depending on the poll).
  • How many people thought that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11? It took more than two years for the fraction of Americans who thought that he was behind it to drop below fifty percent (source).
  • The Gilligan’s Island sitcom began airing on television in 1964, and the U.S. Coast Guard received telegrams urging them to rescue the stranded people. (And this was a show with a laugh track.)
  • Did you know that North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was the world’s best golfer, despite only playing the game once? He shot eleven holes in one in a single 18-round game. He was also a fashion trendsetter, he had a supernatural birth, and he didn’t poop.
  • Remember the violence in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina? The Associated Press reported, “Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy today” (“today” being September 1, 2005). The reports were wildly exaggerated. There was looting, though most of it seemed to have been people looking for food and water. There were hundreds of dead, but these were caused by the hurricane, not from violence. There were several shooting deaths, but these were from police.
  • You can’t buy an electric fan in South Korea with a simple on/off switch. They all come with timers. This is because of the widespread fear of “fan death,” the idea that being in a closed room with a fan running is potentially deadly.
  • The idea that blood types determine personality had been popular in Japan, and the idea that children born in the year of the dragon are more successful is popular in China. Science supports neither idea.

Christian apologists might demand, “How could the story about Jesus get traction if it weren’t true??” But this is similar to, “How could the modern legend about <pick your favorite> get traction if it weren’t true?” The same answer would be reasonable for both.

God is a comedian
playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
— Voltaire

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