Let’s wrap up our look at the popular Christian platitude “God is love.” In part 1, Christian apologist Peter Kreeft handwaved a clever yet ridiculous argument about how God being love made the Trinity mandatory.

Let’s continue with more of Kreeft’s groundless speculation of what God’s love is all about.

God is like a father

Imagine the progression in wisdom from a fool, to an ordinary human, to a sage, to God. Along this progression, positive qualities are amplified—patience, consideration, kindness, thoughtfulness—and negative qualities reduced—impatience, anger, jealousy, ego. “My way or the highway” is replaced by a yielding, selfless, whatever’s-best-for-you approach.

Peter Kreeft gave his insights about what the God end of the spectrum looks like as he spoke about God’s love (“God’s Existence” @1:05:45). He gave the example of a child who didn’t want to show his bad report card to his father. Why not, since the father loves him? Because he’s afraid that the father will get mad at how the child fell short of his potential.

Now dial up that relationship from father/child to God/us. When we adults show our report card to God, does he respond in a patient and considerate way, trying to work with our limitations to find what’s best for us? Apparently not. Kreeft says that God’s perception of our failings is far more acute than the father’s and God gets into a justifiable rage when we make a mistake. So, you see, God’s throwing us into hell forever for the smallest sin is not petty vindictiveness but Deep Love. (And the inmates of hell get to feel the warmth of God’s love for a long, long time.)

Kreeft is our Virgil as he guides us through the afterlife. You might think that injuring or offending God would be as likely as injuring Superman. You might think that God is far more sage-like than any human sage.

Nope. Kreeft tells us that “Love makes God more formidable, not less,” and “Infinite love is utterly intolerant in any imperfection in the beloved.” Gee—who’d’ve guessed? Heaven sounds like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where War is Peace and Love is Hate.

(Christians: when you puzzle over what atheists could possibly find troubling about your philosophy, this kind of groundless handwaving is part of the problem.)

See also: Why is God Hidden?

Does the Bible show us that God is loving?

“Love” is not the punch line of the Job story. Job was the pawn in a wager between Yahweh and Satan, and Job’s life was destroyed (but in the end God gave him another set of children to replace the ones that were killed, so it’s all good). Job complained about his undeserved bad fortune, and God made clear to Job that he (God) could do whatever the heck he wanted, and Job could just shut the hell up.

“God is love” isn’t the takeaway from the Old Testament. It isn’t interested in showcasing God’s love but rather his majesty and power in cases like drowning the Egyptian army or burning Sodom and Gomorrah. The lesson from the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac was not love but obedience. “ ‘Should you not fear me?’ declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’ ” (Jeremiah 5:22).

Christian children can be introduced to Old Testament stories with toys, but they omit the full story. The Noah’s Ark playset contains a handful of toy animals and people that survived, not the millions who drowned. The David action figure doesn’t come with a bag of 200 Philistine foreskins, Samson doesn’t come with the jawbone of an ass (with which he killed a thousand men), and Joshua doesn’t come with the corpses of any of the millions killed in the conquest of Palestine.

The New Testament isn’t much better, and it invented hell for most of us. Jesus makes this clear: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13–14).

Love isn’t the obvious theme in individual human lives around the world today, but as love-poor as the earth is, the empty space that composes almost all the universe contains none.

Former pastor Rob Bell wrote Love Wins, in which he argued for a kinder, gentler afterlife than the traditional Christian view. That was a little too much love for one traditionalist who spoke for many when he said, “Adjusting the gospel to placate human rebellion against God transforms the good news into a compromise with worldliness, something we should earnestly avoid.”

Let me close with a fragment from a modern hymn.

Scorned by the ones He came to save.
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied.

This portrait of God was so unpleasant that the hymn was finally removed from a hymnal.

There’s not a lot of love happening here. When listing God’s attributes, love isn’t on the short list.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
— Benjamin Franklin

Image credit: Bcow, flickr, CC

Gary Habermas claims that the resurrection is well evidenced because most scholars accept it. That claim crumbles for many reasons (more here), but let’s move on to consider his larger argument, the minimal facts approach to the resurrection as documented in The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Mike Licona (2004).

I like the idea. Habermas wants to minimize the number of facts necessary to build his foundation and use only claims granted by “virtually all scholars on the subject, even the skeptical ones.” He thinks four such “facts” are sufficient to show that the resurrection actually happened. (Going forward, I’ll use Habermas as a stand-in for the two authors.)

Let’s see if the argument holds up.

Fact 1: Jesus died by crucifixion. Habermas points to the gospels, which are first-century writings that all report a crucifixion. From outside the Bible, he gives Lucian, Mara Bar Serapion, and the Talmud, but these all appear to be second-century writings and don’t add a lot. An earlier non-Christian source is Josephus, but Josephus’s two references to Jesus appear to have been added or modified by later scribes (more here).

Habermas concludes, prematurely, “Clearly, Jesus’ death by crucifixion is a historical fact supported by considerable evidence.” The story does gradually became widespread, though this was long after the time of Jesus. That doesn’t make it “historical fact.”

Fact 2: The disciples believed that Jesus rose and appeared to them. The disciples went from cowards hiding from the authorities to bold proclaimers of the gospels, even to the point of martyrdom.

Yes, that’s what the story says, but let’s be skeptical about stories. We don’t take at face value the story about Merlin being a shape-shifting wizard. We don’t even unskeptically take the very un-supernatural claim that Arthur was king of England. Why then take elements of the supernatural Jesus story as history, even the natural ones?

In the second place, the “Who would die for a lie?” argument (that the disciples’ deaths is strong evidence) also fails. In brief, the historical evidence for apostles’ martyrdom is weak (more here).

Finally, the claim that the gospels document eyewitness history is also suspect when we don’t even know who wrote them (more here).

The gospel mentions emboldened disciples, but until we have good evidence otherwise, this is a story rather than history. Both “But they were eyewitnesses!” and “But they died for their faith!” are poorly evidenced claims.

The sources

Habermas gives Paul as one important source. It is rather incredible that Christianity was so strongly shaped by Paul, someone who wasn’t even a disciple of Jesus. Paul claimed to have known Peter, James, and John and claimed apostolic authority, but some random dude is just going to step in and declare that he’s got it all figured out, and he becomes part of the canon? Paul is authoritative just because he was influential, not because of any irrefutable sign from heaven.

Habermas argues that 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 is an early creed and so is very close to the events it claims to document. But a creed is simply a statement that is taken on faith, not evidence or an argument. His argument that these verses look distinct from the rest of Paul’s epistle could just as easily argue that they were added later. Note also that Paul’s Jesus story reads as mythology and is not grounded in history (more here).

Other authorities are church fathers Clement and Polycarp. Habermas argues that they were taught by the apostles, but his evidence comes from 150 years after the death of Jesus.

The innocence of a child

The credulity of Habermas is a little hard to believe. He says:

[The disciples] denied and abandoned [Jesus], then they hid in fear. Afterward, they willingly endangered themselves by publicly proclaiming the risen Christ (p. 56).

It’s just a story, and an untrustworthy one at that since we have a poor view of the original events (more here). Is this history? Show us.

Habermas again:

The apostles died for holding to their own testimony that they had personally seen the risen Jesus. Contemporary martyrs die for what they believe to be true. The disciples of Jesus died for what they knew to be either true or false (p. 59).

Habermas says that what we read is consistent with apostles seeing a risen Jesus, but of course that’s begging the question. Habermas assumes what he’s trying to prove. The honest interpretation is that we just have a story about Jesus and his apostles, and the stories of martyrdom developed decades later. Neither is history.

Naysayers

Here’s a common error that Habermas repeats several times.

If the news spread that several of the original disciples had recanted, we would expect that Christianity would have been dealt a severe blow (p. 60).

This is the Naysayer Hypothesis—the idea that a false story would have crumbled after the corrections of naysayers, those people who knew the truth. Here again, Habermas starts with the assumption that the Jesus story is correct and then wonders what would happen in various situations. This is backwards. Instead, start with the documents that we know exist and see where the evidence points.

I list 10 reasons why the Naysayer Hypothesis is flawed. To give just one, ask yourself why anyone who knew that Jesus was not divine would spend his life stamping out the brush fires of Christian belief throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.

And one final quibble: notice the word “recant” above. The only people I’ve heard who suggest that the disciples deliberately invented the story (and had something to recant) are apologists. I presume that the Paul and the gospel authors honestly believed, just like Christians today.

Since the original disciples were making the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, his resurrection was not the result of myth making. His life story was not embellished over time if the facts can be traced to the original witnesses (p. 60).

And again Habermas starts with an assumption, this time that the gospels come from the disciples’ eyewitness accounts. Habermas acts as if he can’t tell a story from history.

Continue with the remaining two “facts” here.

Our objective is to arrive at 
the most plausible explanation of the data.
— Habermas and Licona,
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 83

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 02/19/14.)

Image credit: British American

Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? These are some of life’s big questions. Christian answers involving God are often put forward as answers, but God is always the worst guess. Let’s conclude our list of reasons why (part 1 is here).

5. It ignores the trend.

Supernatural explanations are superseded by natural ones, not the other way around. Lightning used to be of heavenly origin, but now we have a natural explanation. Plague, famine, drought, accidents, death, and so on used to have supernatural explanations, but these have been replaced. Might we suddenly discover strong evidence that argues that some religious claims are true? Maybe, but that’s not the way to bet.

Just how poorly does the “God did it” explanation do against natural explanations? Might a natural explanation be so ridiculous that “God did it” becomes plausible? Probably, but since we have no prior examples of supernatural explanations being universally accepted (unlike a natural explanation like the germ theory of disease), this hypothetical explanation would have to be pretty ridiculous to be worse than anything from the supernatural category, which has never produced a single universally accepted explanation.

One Christian podcaster proposed this deliberately ridiculous explanation of Jesus: time-traveling insurance salesmen led by a clone of Elvis go back in time to manufacture the idea of Jesus to get the concept of “act of God” into insurance law. Have we finally found an explanation so ridiculous that the supernatural Jesus story is finally plausible by comparison?

No, and I explain why here.

6. It ignores the default position.

Hundreds or thousands of religions are practiced today, and many more were practiced in humanity’s long history. People invent things like ghosts, fairies, and superstitions. We understand how urban legends, conspiracy theories, and even traditions develop and take hold. And people make up religions by the thousands.

Ghosts don’t exist, urban legends are false, and so are made-up religions. Given any particular supernatural belief, the default position is that it is yet one more false belief by a mind that is susceptible to lots of false beliefs.

The Christian claims are a bold rejection of this default position. That doesn’t mean that Christianity is false, but it does mean that it has the burden of proof. (A discussion of Christian attempts to shirk their burden of proof is here.)

See also: Why Christianity Looks Invented

7. God catching uses evidence inconsistently.

We can imagine the Christian throwing out a net to catch fish, where the “fish” is the truth about supernatural claims, and the “net” is the evidence criteria. The trick is being consistent when evaluating the evidence.

When the Christian seeks evidence for God, the holes in the net are small. The evidence criteria become flexible, and any little clue is evidence—personal feelings, good luck and happy coincidences, the dismissal of inconvenient science by a Christian nonscientist, apologists’ assurances that the Bible (but not other ancient religious texts) is real history, and so on.

But when evaluating other religions’ supernatural claims, the holes are big and only the most compelling evidence counts. The Christian becomes skeptical and stringently applies the evidence criteria. They sound like an atheist and reject all but the most compelling evidence: this looks like just another manmade religion, those religious books are too old and unreliable, the supernatural claims are laughable, and so on.

This is a biased approach to the evidence. Sure, all of us are at least a little biased in how we sort through the evidence, tending to keep what confirms our beliefs and reject what challenges them, but we must do our best to evaluate evidence objectively. (More on what Christians’ loose criteria for evidence captures here and here.)

8. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Claiming that a god exists who created the entire universe is about as extraordinary a claim as possible. Such a claim needs extraordinary evidence. Not only must Christians make do with handwaving similar to other religions’ believers, they’re often reduced to protesting against this demand.

Most apologetic discussions devolve into, “Well, you can’t prove God doesn’t exist.” That’s correct, but that never was the goal. All we can try to do is follow the evidence. Sorry—it doesn’t lead to God.

One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.
— Robert Heinlein

Image credit: Bob Seidensticker

For the answer to any of life’s big questions—such as “Why are we here?” or “What is the meaning of life?”—God is always the worst guess. Super-smart aliens would be better. Fairies would be better. “I dunno, but there’s gotta be something better” would be better.

“God did it” is perhaps the most remarkable claim possible since it assumes, without compelling evidence, that a supernatural being created everything.

Let’s explore why God is the worst explanation for anything.

1. “God did it” is unfalsifiable. It explains too much.

“God did it” is the ready answer to explain any scientific puzzle—what caused abiogenesis (the first life, which allowed evolution to begin), what caused the Big Bang, and so on. Of course, science keeps answering those puzzles, meaning that “God did it” was both wrong and premature, but apologists never seem to learn that lesson.

I can never prove that “God did it” is not the explanation for anything. What about a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands of people, God’s hiddenness despite earnest prayers, or anything else within Christianity that confounds us? The Christian can always say that God might have his own reasons that we simply aren’t entitled to know or aren’t smart enough to understand.

(A god who made knowing about him a requirement to avoiding hell in the afterlife and yet remains hidden is not the omnibenevolent Christian god, but let’s ignore that for now.)

Handwaving away challenges to the God hypothesis is exactly what you’d do if there were no God.

The problem is that “God did it” can never be falsified, which makes it useless. By explaining everything, it explains nothing. More here and here.

2. “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable answer. Don’t stretch to fill the void—if you don’t know, just say so.

Christians will say that they have the answers to life’s big questions. They seem to imagine a time limit, with the teacher saying, “Time’s up! Pencils down. Pass forward your quizzes.” Yes, Christianity does have answers to life’s big questions; it’s just that those answers suck. They’re given without evidence.

Things are clearer when we pull back to take in all the world’s religions. The map of world religions makes clear that religion’s answers to these questions depend on where you live. If you live in Tibet or Thailand, Buddhism teaches that we’re here to learn to cease suffering. If you live in Malaysia or Morocco, Islam teaches that we’re here to submit to Allah. Christianity, Scientology, and all the rest—they each have their own supernatural answers to these big questions, and each answer must be taken on faith.

3. Popular apologetic arguments don’t point to God.

The most popular Christian apologetic arguments today—the Cosmological, Moral, Transcendental, Ontological, Design, and Fine Tuning arguments and so on—are all deist arguments. The Christian god is never the conclusion; all these arguments can do is allude to some sort of vague and undefined Creator. Yahweh fits the bill no better than the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

4. The Principle of Analogy tells us where to put supernatural claims.

We’re familiar with supernatural stories. Even the most secular society has in their history some approximation to Grimm’s Fairy Tales or the Greek pantheon of gods or magical folk such as fairies, leprechauns, and elves. We have a bin for these stories labeled “Mythology and Legend.” Zeus, Odin, and Merlin go in the bin, and so does Yahweh. More.

Concluded in part 2.

I’m afraid I don’t believe there is such a thing as blasphemy,
just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.
— Stephen Fry

Image credit: Bob Seidensticker

Christian apologist J. Warner Wallace has created a list of ten questions so tough that atheists are unable to respond. So far, the ferocious problems haven’t materialized. Perhaps the final questions will be more challenging.

8. Why Do Transcendent Moral Truths Exist?

“We have an intuitive sense of moral ‘oughtness’; we recognize that some things are right and some things are wrong, regardless of culture, time or location. We understand that it’s never morally ‘right’ to torture people for the mere ‘fun’ of it. . . . These moral vices and virtues are objective in the sense that they stand above (and apart from) all of us as humans; they are not simply creations of our liking. Instead, they are independent and transcendent.” Transcendent law requires a transcendent Law Giver.

I’ll use William Lane Craig’s definition of objective morality: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” I doubt Wallace would object.

Now, back to the question: Wallace asks why objective moral truths exist.

They don’t.

Take, for example, our response to an adult abusing a child. What could explain that moral revulsion? Wallace says that we tap into objective moral truths, but he doesn’t explain where they’re stored, how they got there, how we access them, or if we access them reliably. He confuses a universal response or a deeply held response (which it is in the case of child abuse) with an objective response (which it isn’t). A far more plausible explanation is the natural one: we humans are the same species, so we share the same moral programming.

Wallace also raises the is/ought problem: how do you get an ought (a moral prescription) from an is (a fact of nature)? You can say, “When someone is injured, you ought to help them,” but what grounds this demand?

His error is in imagining an objectively grounded ought. I’ve seen no evidence that such things exist, and Wallace provides none. An ordinary ought works just fine here. Our moral programming gives us this ought, and most other people will share the opinion.

Another way of seeing the problem: if morals don’t come from what is—that is, reality—then where do they come from? Where could they come from? Don’t point to the supernatural before showing compelling evidence that it exists.

Finally, note how morals change with time. We are horrified at the slavery and genocide in the Old Testament, for example, and congratulate ourselves to the extent that we’ve erased them from Western culture. Objective morals that change over time aren’t objective.

(I’ve responded more thoroughly to another of Wallace’s arguments for objective morality here.)

9. Why Do We Believe Human Life to be Precious?

We kill weeds and pests, and we eat livestock, but we’d never consider this for a fellow human. How do we justify this if we’re all just the results of evolution?

Are “it’s wrong to kill a human” or “it’s okay to kill a rat” objective moral statements? Nope. There is no difficulty if there is no objective moral truth to align with. We value our own species more than others because of our biological programming.

Wallace characterizes the naturalist position: “In the true scheme of things, we are no more important (nor any more precious) than the thousands of species that have come and gone before us. Biological life has no intrinsic value and the universe has no purpose.” I agree—life has no absolute value and the universe no absolute purpose. You think it’s otherwise? Show me some evidence.

Wallace also characterizes the naturalist position as saying that only the strong survive.

And here he’s wrong. This is the “nature, red in tooth and claw” caricature. It’s not the strongest that survive, as any high school student who’s studied evolution knows, but the fittest. The fittest for any particular evolutionary niche might be the best camouflaged or the best armored or the fastest. In the case of humans, cooperation and trust can make a stronger society which, in turn, helps protect the people in it. And we don’t see cooperation just in humans—think of any social animal such as wolves, monkeys, or bees.

10. Why Does Pain, Evil, and Injustice Exist in Our World?

“People are capable of inflicting great evil on one another and natural disasters occur across the globe all the time. More importantly, no matter what we do as humans, we seem to be unable to stop evil from occurring.”

Correct. That’s not strong evidence for an omniscient, loving god.

“Atheists often point to the presence of evil as an evidence against the existence of an all-loving and all-powerful God, but all of us have to account for evil in the context of our worldview. Both sides of the argument have to explain the existence and injustice of evil, consider what role it plays in the history of the universe, and come to grips with why justice is often elusive.”

Wrong. The atheist has no Problem of Evil to resolve. That’s your problem.

The Problem of Evil asks: how can a good god allow all the suffering that we see in the world? Wouldn’t he stop more of it—at least the gratuitous suffering? When you drop the god presupposition, this problem vanishes.

“Whatever worldview we adopt, it had better offer a cogent response to the young child who is dying of an incurable disease. Which worldview offers the most satisfying and reasonable explanation for the evil and injustice we see in our world?”

“Satisfying”?! Is that our goal? I thought we were trying to figure out which worldview is accurate! If Wallace wants to rank worldviews based on how happy a story they have to tell rather than how accurate they are, he can do that on his own. I have no interest in participating, but I doubt that Christianity is at the top of the list.

“Christian Theism offers an explanation that naturalism simply cannot offer.”

As does Scientology or Shinto or Pastafarianism. Do I care? I’ll focus on reality.

Summary

For each of his questions, Wallace has explained nothing. He has given us his theology, not evidence. His answers often distill down to nothing more than, “Science doesn’t have all the answers, therefore God.” To this gunfight he has brought a squirt gun.

Sure, science has unanswered questions. It always has. But it has a startling ability to find the answers. If we can look back and see how poorly “God did it” answered the question, “What causes drought and earthquakes?” centuries ago, why continue to apply this discredited answer to the latest series of questions? (More here.)

By being unfalsifiable, “God did it” could explain anything. In so doing, it explains nothing. (More here.)

I’d love to see an apologist show some courage in their claims. Is the riddle of abiogenesis or human consciousness or the origin of the universe so intractable that God is the only possible answer? Will you rest your faith on that claim? Will you say that God must be the answer and, if science does eventually resolve it naturally, you’ll abandon your faith?

Of course they won’t. Science’s unanswered questions aren’t the reason for their faith. But then if these unanswered questions aren’t supporting Christianity for them, why should they for the rest of us? When one of these questions is answered (and, given science’s track record, that’s a safe bet), Christian apologists will abandon it and retreat to whatever new question catches their fancy.

Science boldly pushes into new territory and gives us new insights. Religion follows and says, “Oh yeah, I knew that.” Religion is the dog that walks under the ox and thinks that he is pulling the wagon.

The fact that a believer
is happier than a skeptic
is no more to the point
than the fact than a drunken man
is happier than a sober one.
— George Bernard Shaw

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/22/13.)

Image credit: bluesbby, flickr, CC

It’s time once again to put on our neoprene waders and gas mask and step in, looking for the stupidest arguments by which Christians embarrass themselves.

The list begins here. We’re well past the original 25 and still going.

Stupid argument #42: Why do atheists worry about someone they don’t think exists?

One Christian source expressed it this way: “How can you hate someone you don’t believe in? Why the hostility? If God does not exist, shouldn’t atheists just relax and seek a good time before they become plant food? Why should it matter if people believe in God?”

We don’t care about gods; we care about their followers. Gods don’t cause problems within society, but people who think they’re following gods do.

This argument seems to presume that Christianity is all about doing good works, community, mutual support, and other worthy aspects that no one would object to. It presumes that nothing bad comes from believing false things. They imagine that Christianity has no more destructive impact on society than knitting, but Christianity in America does quite a bit more than just good works. Christians push for Creationism in public schools, demand prayers at government meetings, stand in the way of abortion and same-sex marriage, block the use of fetal stem cells used for research, and make other attacks on the separation of church and state. And that’s just their attacks on society—within their own communities, people can be ostracized for thinking the wrong things or terrified as children with talk of hell and demons.

A variant of this argument wonders why we don’t see a parallel to atheism (an organized movement against something) with, say, stamp collecting. Why aren’t there non-stamp-collecting organizations, blogs, and lectures?

That comparison is poor, so let’s fix it. Make stamp collecting in the U. S. an industry with revenue of $100 billion per year, all of which is tax deductible, but make that revenue secret. That is, require all nonprofits in the country to open their financial records to show that they are worthy of nonprofit status, except for stamp-collecting organizations (more here). Have the leadership of the stamp collecting industry meddle in public affairs, have them complain to their lawmakers when stamp collectors’ perks are attacked, amend Article VI of the Constitution to forbid any public stamp-collecting test of political candidates (but make it a de facto test anyway), add in some financial and sexual scandals, and the comparison becomes more accurate.

Perhaps now it’s clear why atheism exists as a movement.

This is related to Stupid Argument #24: You really believe in God. (You must believe in God because you talk about him so much.)

Stupid argument #43a: For the benefit of the Little People, don’t take away their God

This isn’t an argument that Christians make but I think it’s worth highlighting. The Little People Argument is made by atheists and agnostics against fellow atheists. They scold the cranky atheists for taking God away from ordinary people. These intellectual atheists don’t need God themselves, they assure us, but we mustn’t ruin things for the people who aren’t as smart or stable as we are.

They say that there’s more to a religious claim than just its truth. If believers get benefits from their belief, and their belief is grounded on the (false) claim that it’s true, why rock their boat?

Christianity’s reckless activity within society is why. Remember the problems listed in the argument above—Christians pushing for Creationism in schools, prayer in public meetings, and so on.

Of course, not all Christians are part of the problem. It’s likely a minority. In addition, politicians sometimes abduct Christian thinking for their own purposes, demanding that good Christians must vote for them to end the godless scourge of abortion, same-sex marriage, or whatever. Nevertheless, Christianity must take some blame for allowing this meddling in society.

One variant on the argument is to demand that you not undercut Christianity without something to replace it. Jerry Coyne, whose article was my inspiration for this argument, gives a counterexample: did the Civil Rights movement offer something to replace the idea that whites are superior to blacks? Nope. If you suffered from the realization that you weren’t superior to someone else, you had to get over it. Northern Europe is far ahead of us in pushing out Christianity, and they seem to have muddled through just fine.

Another example: when you’re cured of cancer or malaria, doctors don’t replace that disease with something else; they make you well and send you on your way.

Stupid argument #43b: Religion is useful

Yes, religion can be useful, but that doesn’t help us if we’re trying to find out if it’s true.

(My interest is responding to Christian claims that their supernatural beliefs are true; however, some Christians make no such claim. If a believer doesn’t state that their religion can back up its supernatural claims, then there’s nothing to respond to. I focus instead on those who insist that Christianity is true and want to tell me why.)

I don’t agree with C. S. Lewis on much, but he had a good point when he said, “If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.” If religion is useful, let’s acknowledge that and try to understand why. But that shouldn’t hamper efforts to get everyone to agree on what’s true.

Continued with part 14. Find the complete list in one place here.  

Don’t touch the fruit of the tree of historical knowledge
lest it open your eyes to the hooey that the Church professes.
— commenter Sophia Sadek

Image credit: Dan Ox, flickr, CC