We’ve recently seen how poorly God fares when measured against his own Ten Commandments. Let’s move on to a classic argument about God’s relationship with morality.

Euthyphro dilemma

Is something good because God says so, or does God say so because it’s good? The first option makes morals arbitrary. They’re just whatever God says, and he could’ve made them something else. They’re not based on anything, including external facts.

If God couldn’t have made them anything else, then they’re constrained, and that’s the second option. But this is no better: morals are external, and God’s role in morality is reduced to messenger boy. God is bound by this external morality.

Here’s an analogy. If I’m a clerk in a store and need the price of something, I look it up. I consult an external, correct source. But if I’m the boss, I could just make the price whatever I want it to be: “For you, let’s say $5.95.” So which one is God? Is he the boss (morals are arbitrary and changeable) or the clerk (morals are external and fixed)?

It’s “heads you win; tails I lose” for the Christian. Either option is unpalatable—morality is either arbitrary or God is not sovereign over an external morality.

Christian response

World famous apologist William Lane Craig (WLC) responds:

The Euthyphro Dilemma has been refuted again and again as a false dilemma. We are not under any obligation to choose between saying something is good because God wills it or that God wills something because it is good. Those two are not contradictories. Those are not A or not-A. Therefore you can have a third alternative which is that God wills something because he is good. God is the good and his will is an expression of his essential nature.

How does this help? This simply changes the dilemma to: Is something good because God’s nature says so, or does God’s nature say so because it’s good? Is “God’s nature” changeable (morality could be something else) or fixed? If it’s fixed, what does God’s character conform to? And we’re back to the original problem, with arbitrary vs. external!

And what does it mean to say that God is good? We run into Euthyphro yet again: Is WLC proposing that this is true by definition (“good” is arbitrary—it is whatever God says it is) or that we can know that God is good by evaluating his actions against a standard (“good” is defined by an external standard)?

Make it a proper dilemma

If WLC wants a proper dichotomy, let’s give him one. Let A be the statement “Morality is within the control of God” (or “God’s nature” if you prefer). The two possibilities are now A and not-A. No other option is possible.

Consider the consequences:

• Option A is true, so morality is within the control of God/God’s nature. Morality can be anything that God says it is since it’s not bound by or evaluated against anything external, and morality becomes changeable. Murder would be a good thing, for example, if only God had said that. (And why couldn’t he? He’s not bound by anything.)
• Option not-A is true, so morality is not within the control of God/God’s nature. This makes morality external to God. God might accurately report morality to us (through the Bible or one’s conscience, say), but morality’s source is something besides God.

(The Transcendental Argument for God runs into Euthyphro in a similar way. Is God bound by an external logic? Then logic is what it is, and God is stuck with it. Or is logic just what God says it is? Then logic is arbitrary. More)

Sauce for the gander: how does this work for the atheist?

To be fair, we should consider what the Euthyphro problem would be for the atheist. How does the atheist explain morality? Let’s simplify and consider just the Golden Rule: why is the Golden Rule a fairly universal moral belief among humans? It’s because evolution gave us that as part of our programming. We’re social animals, and working and playing well with others had survival benefit.

Euthyphro’s question to the atheist would be: Is something good because our genetic programming says so, or does our genetic programming say so because it’s good? But there’s no dilemma here—the answer is the former. Our genetic programming (our conscience, in this case) tells us what is good and bad. (That is, seen from the human standpoint, our conscience tells us what is good and bad. Seen from an evolutionary standpoint, our conscience tells us what is useful to believe.)

God can’t just say, “Okay, that takes care of lying. The next item on my list is murder . . . hmm . . . oh, what the heck—let’s call that one bad.” We certainly don’t do it that way—we feel that murder is bad, and we get that by consulting our consciences.

Does God have such a fixed source of morality that he consults? Then Christians are caught on one horn of the dilemma. Or does the buck have to stop somewhere, and God is it? Then Christians are caught on the other horn. The naturalistic explanation seems a lot more reasonable.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/1/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Do we live in a world with a god? It doesn’t look like it (read part 1 of this series here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world.

19. Because the “best” Christian arguments are deist arguments

A Christian appeal for the existence of God typically brings up arguments such as the ones below.

• The Moral argument: How can there be objective moral truth without God?
• The Cosmological argument: The universe had a beginning, which requires a cause, and that cause was God.
• The Fine-Tuning argument: The constants in the universe are fine-tuned for life; that must’ve been done by God.

There are lots more arguments like these—the Ontological Argument, the Design Argument, the Transcendental Argument, and even the Argument from Mathematics. These are all deist arguments, which means that the god behind them might have been nothing more than a clockmaker who created and wound up the universe and then walked away. And if the creator god actually does interact with our world, nothing in these arguments points to the Christian god any more than to Marduk, Allah, Brahma, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If we lived in God World, the go-to arguments would unambiguously identify this god, not be one-size-fits-all arguments that point to no god in particular—not Yahweh any more than the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

And just so no one is confused, the arguments in the list above fail.

• The Moral argument needs to first establish that objective truth exists. More here, here, and here.
• The Cosmological argument as Craig defines it fails in many ways. More here and here.
• The Fine-Tuning argument also fails. A universe made by God wouldn’t need fine tuning since God can make life anywhere (he’s God, remember). And the multiverse. More here, here, and here.

20. Because the Bible story keeps rebooting

God has a perfect plan, and he’s stickin’ to it. He created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but those pesky kids messed things up. The resulting society became irredeemable, so God drowned them all. All, that is, except the brave little troupe that was Noah’s family. (I’m imagining Gilligan’s Island except with a cruise ship full of manure.)

Society had been set right, God put his bow in the heavens (that is, the rainbow) and promised never to fly off the handle again, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Or not. The story next lurches forward with Abraham, and God makes a perpetual covenant with Abraham—five times, in fact. And once again we think we’re done.

Nope. Abraham begat Isaac, who begat Jacob, who begat the twelve patriarchs of the (soon to be) twelve tribes of Israel. Then slavery in Egypt, then Moses frees his people, then the Exodus through the desert, and then entry into the Promised land. God ties a bow on the story with the perpetual Mosaic Covenant that is still in force today. The End.

Wrong again. No, it turns out that it was Jesus who was the key to the whole thing. Who saw that coming? What a twist! The entire New Testament (plus a couple dozen church councils) are required to figure out what this new religion actually is and to rationalize some sort of harmony with the Old Testament, which is (oddly) still in force.

But don’t think that that’s the last reboot. Islam was a reboot. Mormonism was a reboot. And there you go—that incompatible mess is God’s perfect plan(s). (More detail on these reboots here.)

If a perfect god actually existed, he would get his story straight from the beginning, and it wouldn’t look like what it is—a collection of loosely connected ancient mythology and legend.

Continued in part 11.

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Image via Alejandro Forero Cuervo, CC license

Not that we need the confirmation, but the Bible makes clear that lying is bad. The ninth Commandment says so. Yahweh detests lying lips (Proverbs 12:22), and lying makes his top-seven list of things that he hates (Prov. 6:16–19).

And, not surprisingly, God doesn’t lie himself.

God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind (Numbers 23:19).

It is impossible for God to lie (Hebrews 6:18).

But that’s just what a liar would say, isn’t it? Let’s see what the Good Book admits about God lying.

What about justified lies?

The classic example of a justified lie is lying to Nazis about the Jews hiding in the attic. The Bible shows this kind of lie when Rahab lied about hidden Israelite spies (Joshua 2:4–5) or when the Israelite midwives lied to protect the male babies from Pharaoh (Exodus 1:19). Humans must lie in such situations because they aren’t omnipotent. Rahab couldn’t teleport the spies to safety, and the midwives couldn’t protect the babies like Superman.

God has no such excuse.

God lies in Garden of Eden story

We can’t even get out of the Creation story without seeing God lie. God says to Adam, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:17). Adam doesn’t, and he lives to be 930 years old.

The rationalization that “die” only meant that Adam and Eve had been immortal before eating the fruit won’t work. Remember that God had to exile them from the Garden so they wouldn’t eat from the Tree of Life. (More on the immediacy of death from the fruit here.)

God lies to Ahab

Israel and Judah allied to fight the country of Aram across the Jordan River in 1 Kings 22. King Ahab of Israel consulted his 400 prophets and was assured of success. Prophet Micaiah was the sole holdout, but his prophecy turned out to be correct—the battle was lost and Ahab was killed. How then had the 400 other prophets gotten it completely wrong? Micaiah tells us that Yahweh wanted Ahab to die and authorized a spirit to cause the prophets to lie to lure him into the battle.

New Testament lying

Remember how God hardened Pharaoh’s heart to prevent him from doing the right thing (Exodus 9:12)? We see the same thing in the New Testament. 2 Thessalonians predicts that “the lawless one” will deceive during the end times. To people caught by the lie, “God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness” (2 Thess. 2:11–12).

We see something similar when Paul describes God’s frustration at the people who don’t get it. “God [gives] them over in the sinful desires of their hearts” (Romans 1:24).

The Jewish opponents of Jesus saw his miracles. They didn’t believe, not because the evidence was poor or because they didn’t understand or because they were stubborn. No, they didn’t believe because God deliberately hardened their hearts (John 12:37–40). John says, “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts.”

But why harden the hearts of bad people? Were they going to do bad things on their own accord or not?

Jesus lying

Jesus was wrong when he predicted an imminent end: “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matthew 24:34). The end of the world obviously didn’t happen in the first century.

Christian apologists try to argue that it wasn’t exactly the end of the world but something else that was predicted. But Jesus makes clear what “all these things” that would soon come to pass. He’s predicting a galactic apocalypse: “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.” There’s no chance we would’ve missed that one.

This may not be a deliberate lie like we saw from God but rather a false statement, but the result is the same when it comes from an omniscient being.

God is untrustworthy

In a recent post, I noted that God bragged that he had deliberately given his people bad laws:

So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord (Ezekiel 20:25–6).

Since God has lied to us in the past, what’s to stop him from doing it again? Which of God’s current laws is also a deliberately bad law? That’s the problem when you lie—now we can’t trust you about anything.

He hardened hearts to steer people away from the right path. He demanded that Abraham sacrifice Isaac and then revealed that it was a ruse. Sure, an all-powerful god can do whatever that he wants, but this god has shown himself to be untrustworthy.

Am I an atheist because God hardened my heart? If so, why do I deserve hell when it was God’s doing? And for the Christians celebrating that they’re going to heaven, how can they trust God about that whole salvation thing? Maybe God lied about that, too.

Christian apologists will try to spin the story to salvage some credibility for God, but what can this guy do and be declared immoral? If he’s simply moral by definition, then the claim is meaningless.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/11/14.)

Wikimedia / Image public domain

Dave Gardner is a long time reader of this blog. He is a retired public school math teacher, and he and I were in a writing group that helped polish my two novels, Cross Examined and A Modern Christmas Carol.

For the moment, let’s assume that God exists, the iconic Judeo-Christian God. He is an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, and omnipotent supernatural being who can do anything. Think about that for a moment: God can do anything. With the snap of his fingers (or whatever ritual he used) God created the heavens and the earth and everything in, on, above, and below it. He knows the past, present, and future of the universe, the galaxy, the planet, and every living thing. But this causes a problem.

If that’s the case, if God can do anything—anything!—then there’s nothing remarkable about anything he does. He didn’t have to practice 10,000 hours to achieve mastery of his talents. He didn’t have to sacrifice anything to achieve his level of mastery. God. Can. Simply. Do. Anything.

It reminds me of a short story I read many years ago. A baseball team has been dwelling in the standings basement for years and the manager is desperate to find a player who can help produce a winning season, and he finds him. This player has the amazing ability to hit a home run every time he comes to bat! Every time. The manager is ecstatic, the player’s teammates are elated, the fans go wild. Every game is SRO. Game after game he hits home runs and the team soars to the top of the standings.

Then something happens. The fans begin to tire of the sameness, the predictability of his at bats and the endless winning. They begin to lose interest. Hitting home runs is what the player does and it’s no longer remarkable. As a matter of fact, he’s become tedious and boring.

It’s much the same thing with God and all his omnis: if he can do anything, then his works inspire no awe, no wonder, no amazement. He simply hits home run after home run, and nothing he does is remarkable.

So, what is remarkable? That science can give us theories and explanations on the evolution of the universe, galaxies, planets, and life itself, all without reference to a supernatural being, and it does so clearly and scientifically. That takes enormous effort, brilliance, and resources, and it’s not at all inevitable.

And that, indeed, is remarkable!

The Burned-Over District was the name given to the western part of New York state. From this region in the early- to mid-1800s came much of the energy for the Second Great Awakening. From here came Mormonism; the Millerites and their descendants, the Adventists; the Fox sisters, key to the Spiritualism movement; the Shakers; and the Oneida utopian community. It was named the Burned-Over District to suggest that it had had so many revivals and religious movements that no fuel remained for any more.

One additional product of this region was the Cardiff Giant, which has a surprising religious connection.

A giant man discovered

In 1869, workmen digging a well in Cardiff, NY, near Syracuse, uncovered what appeared to be a petrified man. It was a giant over ten feet tall. William Newell the landowner charged visitors 25 cents to see the marvel. Two days later, with huge crowds, he doubled the fee. Some religious groups saw the man as archeological proof of the Genesis story of the giant Nephilim—“there were giants in the earth in those days,” as the King James Bible put it (Genesis 6:4).

With interest in the giant still strong, Newell sold the giant to a Syracuse group for the equivalent of half a million dollars today.

The story comes apart

Archeologists soon declared the giant a fake, and George Hull, cousin of the landowner, admitted he was behind the hoax. The giant had been carved from gypsum, stained to simulate age, and then shipped to Cardiff so that Newell could bury it and then, a year later, order the well dug so that workmen could stumble across the find.

Incredibly, even after this admission, the stone giant continued to be a moneymaker, and showman P.T. Barnum offered a fortune to buy it. When the Syracuse syndicate refused to sell, Barnum made a copy, displayed it in his New York City museum, and claimed that his was the real fake, while the Syracuse giant was a fake fake. In response to the idea of people paying to see a fake fake, one of the new owners of the Syracuse giant observed, “I guess there’s a sucker born every minute” (falsely attributed to Barnum).

Barnum’s observation was also penetrating: “The American people love to be humbugged.”

Another humbug

L. Frank Baum was 13 years old and living in a suburb of Syracuse as the Cardiff giant hoax unfolded. He learned of Barnum’s observation and, decades later, merged it into his The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. At the end of that book, Dorothy and her friends discover that the wizard is a humbug but that the citizens of Oz had participated in the deception. Evan Schwartz in Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story said:

In telling the story of the real fake and the fake fake, Frank Baum would never forget this powerful lesson: Americans not only don’t mind being fooled, or humbugged, but they desperately want to be taken for a ride—and the greater the number of people who are strung along by a great humbug, the more others want to be in on it, too.

The real story

While cashing in on Americans’ gullibility (or delight at being duped) might have been a motivation, George Hull’s real drive was to prove how easy religious Americans were to fool. Hull was an atheist, and the idea for the hoax came from an argument with a preacher who took the Genesis giant story as history. (Clearly, frustration at Christianity’s hold on Americans dates to long before blogging.)

As with the Cardiff giant, American Christians easily accept remarkable and unsubstantiated religious claims. In a couple of recent posts (here and here), I’ve explored the surprisingly frank admission of how, for Christian apologist William Lane Craig, reason takes a back seat to faith. How can his flock keep following him when he admits that reason isn’t what supports the edifice?

Perhaps Americans’ gullible acceptance of the Cardiff giant hoax gives some insight.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/23/14.)

Image public domain

Here’s another excerpt from my book, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey.

A bit of background: Jim is a wealthy, housebound, and somewhat obnoxious atheist, and Paul is the young acolyte of Rev. Samuel Hargrove, a famous pastor. Paul is doing his best to evangelize Jim, though Paul’s faith is now wavering. It’s 1906 in Los Angeles, and they’re in Jim’s house.

Paul came into the kitchen. “You said that Reverend Hargrove and you had worked together, and I mentioned this to Reverend Hargrove.”

“What did he say?”

“That you and he debated a lot. He said that that’s where his passion for apologetics came from.”

“We did debate a lot. Sam liked to win. I took that as a challenge and learned more about apologetics to present the atheist counterpoint. Perhaps I played the role of the freethinker a little too energetically—I like to win as well.”

“But you were a believer then.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t argue from the opponent’s side. You must know his position. Until you do, you don’t completely understand your own.” Jim dried his hands on a towel. “I met a woman in Boston once. The conversation turned to travel, and I asked her where she liked to go. She said, ‘Why should I travel? I’m already there!’ Extraordinary—and yet that’s the way many Christians think. ‘Why should I critique my position or evaluate someone else’s? I’m already there!’ ”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about my own position. It’s hard to admit this, but I’ve been having some doubts.” Paul looked at the floor as he smacked his fist against his thigh. “Just a little.” He looked hard at Jim. “As an atheist, I guess that must please you.”

“Not really.” Jim set the kettle on the stove to boil and walked past Paul to the living room. “I care about the truth.” Jim sat and motioned Paul into his chair. “If you think you have it, I want you to argue as convincingly as you know how. On the other hand, if you find my opinions convincing, you’re welcome to them—they’re free. And if neither of us changes but we can live in a civil manner with each other, then that works as well. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ ”

Jim walked to a bookshelf and pulled off his Bible. He returned to the sofa, set the Bible on the center table, and slowly flipped through the pages so Paul could see. “This was my approach to truth.” There didn’t seem to be a single page without a handwritten mark. Some notes were small and dense while others were scrawled in large block letters. Some notes were in pencil while others were in various and seemingly arbitrary colors of ink. Some pages had margins full of comments with more on scraps of paper.

“Wait—what did that page say?” Paul pointed at a page.

Jim leafed back, page by page.

“There!” Paul said. In the outside margin of the page, with a dark pen and in capital letters, was written the word “Nonsense.”

“Oh, that,” Jim said. “That’s the book of Job.”

What was next—shopping lists? Drinking songs? Bawdy limericks? “Why would you deface a book of Scripture? And why Job? It’s the book where we see God’s consistent love during hardship.”

“Indeed? Then let me suggest you read that book more closely. God says that he ruined Job without reason—took away his health and money and killed his family. Why? Because he could. That’s not a very helpful book if you’re trying to find God’s love.”

“That’s not what I remember from the book.”

“Sermons rarely tell the complete story of Job. Read it and decide for yourself.”

Paul resolved to do exactly that, but there was a more immediate problem. “I must say, you seem to have treated your Bible rather harshly.”

“I critique what I read, and whether something is wicked or noble, I write what I think.”

“But you can’t treat the Bible that way. It’s a holy book.”

“Who cares? If it’s the truth, then surely it isn’t so fragile that it can be damaged by a nasty comment in the margin. The truth can take whatever punishment I give it. If it can’t, then it’s not worth my regret—or yours.”

“It just seems disrespectful.”

“I treat the claims of Christianity as if they can be tested against logic and reason. I can’t give a philosophy any more respect than that.”

The kettle whistled, and Jim went to the kitchen. He returned with the tea tray and set it on the center table.

“Tell me about your change—how you became a freethinker,” Paul said.

Jim eased back into the sofa. “I left the church in about 1885.”

“Why did you leave?”

“There was a falling out in the church. I wound up on the losing end, and Sam was part of the group that forced me out.”

“That must have been devastating.”

“I felt betrayed, but that’s another story. A few years later, Vive died—it’s been over twenty years now. I was still a Christian then, but struggling. How could God have taken Vive from me? Every Christian who endures the death of a loved one asks the same questions, of course, but it was especially tough since I didn’t have the church community for comfort. I felt very alone.

“Then I began noticing natural disasters that God apparently felt were necessary to impose on his favorite creation. One year, a blizzard in the Midwest killed hundreds of people, many of them children. It was called the Schoolhouse Blizzard. There was one Nebraska school—when the stove ran out of wood, the teacher led her students to another building less than a hundred yards away. The blowing snow made visibility so poor that they didn’t make it, and all the children froze to death.” Jim swallowed hard and faltered.

Jim ticked off other disasters that had made an impression, making clear that this wasn’t a period of unusual tragedy, just unusual awareness on his part. “These disasters prodded me. What explained natural evil? I called out to God and got no answer—as if there was no one on the other end of the telephone—and that was when I made those notes in my Bible. I felt abandoned, in agony.”

Paul often felt privileged when parishioners confided their difficulties in him, but he had rarely heard so personal a story.

“Then I began to take seriously the objections from the atheist side,” Jim said. “I knew them well, but I had always assumed that they were wrong. I had never given them a chance. But when I did, I noticed something surprising. The difficult questions in Christianity fell away when approached from the atheist viewpoint. Why do natural disasters happen? Because they just do—there is no conscious cause, no particular message behind them. Why does God answer my prayers but let millions of people die every year from malnutrition or disease? Because there is no God, just an unfeeling and indifferent Nature in which people are hurt sometimes. Why does God answer some of my prayers but not others, even the unselfish ones? Because there is no God to answer prayers, and I just imagined answers. Why is there support for slavery and barbarism in the Bible? Because it was written by ordinary men thousands of years ago and is a reflection of their primitive attitudes, nothing more.”

Jim set the cups on their saucers and swirled the tea in the pot. “It was a revelation—all the convoluted and flimsy rationalization that had been necessary before just vanished. My God hypothesis was a poor explanation of reality, and when I no longer insisted that it was correct and simply followed reality where it led me, things made vastly more sense.”

Continued in part 2.