The trough of stupid arguments sloppeth over once again, so let’s put on our hazmat suits and dive in. You can begin the list here. We’re well past our original goal of 25 arguments and still going.

“Were you there?” may be Creationist Ken Ham’s favorite line with which to infect students’ minds. In the Old Testament book of Job, God says, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” Ken Ham paraphrases this into a challenge to anyone who summarizes what science knows—about evolution, about the Big Bang, or about anything that happened in the past. Ham’s challenge is, “Were you there?” In other words, shut up about events at which you weren’t present. The implied evidence-free corollary is, “Because if you weren’t there, God was!”

(Which demands the response: then why does God get pretty much every detail wrong? Biology, cosmology, archaeology, morality—on all of these, God looks less like the omniscient Creator of All and more like an Iron Age desert nomad. [h/t FB commenter Luci Walker])

Ham proudly wrote about nine-year-old Emma B. who took Ham’s advice and attacked a museum curator’s statement about the age of a moon rock with “Were you there?”

Biologist PZ Myers nicely deflated Ham’s anti-science bias with a gentle reply to Emma B. Myers pointed out that Ham’s “Were you there?” is intended to shut down discussion and is a question to which you already know the answer. Myers recommended instead, “How do you know that?” which is a question from which you can actually learn something.

“Were you there?” is a variation of the more general question, “Did you experience this with your own senses?” To Science, this question lost significance centuries ago. The days when Isaac Newton used taste as a method to understand new chemicals are long gone. Modern science uses instruments to reliably provide information about nature—from simple instruments like compasses, voltmeters, Geiger counters, and pH meters to complex ones like the Mars rovers, Hubble space telescope, LIGO gravity wave observatory, and Large Hadron Collider.

Not only is Ham’s question irrelevant, not only does it attempt to shut down discourse rather than expand it, it can be confronted directly.

Atheist: “This rock is 3.56 billion years old.”

Ken Ham: “How do you know? Were you there?”

Atheist: “I wasn’t, but the rock was, and that’s what it tells us when we use radiometric dating” (h/t commenter Jim Baerg).

And if Ham wants to play games, here’s an exchange he might enjoy:

Ken Ham: “You say there was no six-day creation? Well, Smart Guy, were you there?”

Atheist: “Why yes, as a matter of fact I was there.”

Ham: “No you weren’t!”

Atheist: “Oh? How do you know? Were you there?”

To rebut this ridiculous claim, Ham would have to use (shudder!) common sense, a tool that he doesn’t want introduced into the conversation because it is devastating to someone who wants to imagine a 6000-year-old earth, men rising from the dead, and a god who desperately wants a relationship with us but is apparently too shy to make plain his existence.

And if direct observation is so important to Ham, I wonder how he validates the Creation story—was he there?

(This ties in with Stupid Argument #6: Creationism.)

Continue: Stupid Christian Argument #40: Interpret Difficult Passages in Light of Clear Ones

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/27/16.)

Image from Mark Timberlake (free-use license)
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Let’s conclude our look at the perplexing idea that Jesus would want you to die for him or at least be willing to (part 1). This idea comes from “Dying for Jesus” by David Mills.

There’s an important symmetry. (Or is there?)

I’m groping for the logic here. Maybe . . . Jesus was willing to die for you, so you should be willing to reciprocate? That might work if you and Jesus were in the same infantry unit. You’d risk your life to protect your buddies, and you’d expect them to do the same. But how does that make sense when Jesus is invulnerable? If you’re in the same platoon as Superman, what you’d never think is, “He’d risk his life for me, so I’ll do the same for him.”

If I sacrificed my life for Jesus, I’d be dead. When Jesus “sacrificed” for me, he wasn’t really dead, since he popped back to life in a day and a half. (More on how Jesus’s crucifixion doesn’t make sense here.)

Where is this die-for-each-other symmetry in the Bible? The closest I can find is Paul encouraging Christians to “[offer] your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), but this is a basically a call to dedicate one’s life to God. That’s quite different from dying.

You’ve probably heard the mindless Christian aphorism, “God never gives you more than you can handle.” The idea is that if you ever reach your limit of anguish, God will ensure that conditions don’t get worse, but there’s no evidence for this. It’s wishful thinking. Christians die painful, tragic deaths just like anyone else. Ask the people who commit suicide if they’ve been given more than they can handle.

Who does this make Jesus look like?

Dying for Jesus makes so little sense that I wonder if they’re imagining themselves in the role of Isaac, making this just a perverse loyalty test. An angel will zoom down at the last minute, right? But this turns Jesus into Jim Jones. Close to a thousand followers in Jones’ crazy jungle cult were occasionally forced awake in the middle of the night and ordered to drink what they were told was poison. After 45 minutes, they were told that it wasn’t, that it had been a loyalty test, and they were sent back to bed. This training disciplined them to accept suicide when the time eventually came. How can this be any parallel to the religion of a loving god? Is Christian judgment this distorted?

This is persecution porn. Christians in the U.S. are so persecuted, amirite brother? One of the comments to Mills’ article quoted early church father Tertullian: “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” For Tertullian, martyrdom was a thing. It’s not for Christians in America today, but if they want to imagine how tough it is for Christians today, they can do so without much consequence. We live in a society with airbags that coddles Christians, allowing them their fantasy. Christians can be like the person who thinks that sitcoms are real or that food comes from the back of the grocery store.

Been asked to die for Jesus lately?

Christians today aren’t asked to die for Jesus, but no thanks are due Jesus. Church-state separation is why Christians of the wrong denomination (or indeed anyone with any worldview) aren’t tortured to death in the West today.

Remember Edmund Campion from part 1. He returned to England as a Catholic priest in 1580 and conducted services in secret, which was very illegal in Elizabethan times. He was captured, convicted of sedition, and executed slowly. With church-state separation in England, Campion the martyr would’ve been Campion the footnote of history.

The lesson of Campion’s story isn’t “What marvelous devotion to the Lord!” or “That’s why you should be Catholic and not Anglican.” No, the lesson is that free speech shouldn’t be a capital crime. Anyone moved by Campion’s story should ensure it doesn’t happen again by working to keep church and state separate. In the U.S., that protection comes from the First Amendment to the Constitution. If you want to declare yourself for Jesus in the presence of men (see Matthew 10:32–3), you’re welcome to. Thanks, First Amendment.

Let’s be clear on the hero in this story. It’s not Jesus. Jesus didn’t swoop in to save Campion. The hero is secular government. In a secular society, non-believers as well as believers of all kinds are allowed to think and believe as they choose.

Note also that this gives no evidence for the correctness of the claims of Christianity. There’s not even a claim that Campion received any special revelation or confirmation to provide some sort of comfort that he’d backed the right horse. The opposite is true, because this was a missed opportunity for Jesus. He not only failed to tell English society the correct resolution of the Campion matter, he didn’t bother to step in to resolve the other Christian conflicts—the Thirty Years War, the Crusades in the Middle East, the Albigensian Crusade in France, the Inquisition, and so on.

Wrapup

Mills gives this summary.

We have one way of knowing (as much as we can) if we would go all the way to death in serving Jesus. . . .

[Campion] practiced being faithful, in little things and big things. He grew both in his love for his Lord and his ability to say no to the world. When the persecutors threatened to kill him, he loved Jesus too much and was too well-trained to give in.

It’s true that Christians killed other Christians by the millions in the not-so-distant past, but that’s where Mills’ thinking is stuck. Don’t celebrate Edmund Campion dealing with an inhuman situation brought about by religion. Rather, celebrate modern secular democracies that make that situation inconceivable.

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Image from jimmy brown (license CC BY 2.0)
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Would you die for Jesus? That’s the question asked to Christians in a recent article from the online ministry The Stream.

But hold on . . . does Jesus want Christians to die for him? What sense does it make for ordinary mortals like us to die for an immortal god? Who could possibly benefit? How could such a sacrifice possibly inform a god who already knows everything?

Let’s try to make sense of “Dying for Jesus” by David Mills.

Two contemporary lives that ended very differently

Mills illustrates serious devotion to Jesus through the lives of two accomplished men of Elizabethan England. The first was Tobias Matthew, who become the Archbishop of York in the Church of England and died in 1628 at the age of 81.

The second was Edmund Campion. Though he was a few years older than Matthew, the two were contemporaries at Oxford. Campion followed a different path. At age 24, he became an Anglican deacon, but he held Catholic views and soon had to retreat from public view, leaving England for Ireland and then the Continent. He became a Jesuit and, at age 40, returned to England to preach. At the time, preaching Catholicism was treason, and he held services in secret. He was soon captured and put in the Tower of London. When he acknowledged Elizabeth as the queen, showing that he had no goal of replacing her with a Catholic monarch, he was offered freedom and the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. He refused because he couldn’t renounce his Catholicism. He was tried, convicted of sedition, and executed painfully.

Mills’ point is that this is what true devotion to Jesus looks like.

God’s perfect plan

The article includes a bit of atheist wit. Under a painting of Christians being fed to lions in a coliseum is the line, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

(Which reminds me of another clever meme I saw at The Stream, to which I responded in this post: Prayer: Because Jesus Already Knows What You Want, He Just Wants to Hear You Beg.)

On the question of Christian martyrdom, Mills asks if your faith is strong enough that you’d die for Jesus. Would you have the mental strength of Edmund Campion?

And there’s the problem: where did this concept of dying for Jesus (rather than the other way around) come from?

In three gospels, Jesus told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him. That might mean living a life that sets a good example, sharing the Good News when the opportunity presents itself, and so on. But where does martyrdom fit in? Both testaments of the Bible make clear that God protects the righteous.

The LORD will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life (Psalm 121:7).

No harm overtakes the righteous, but the wicked have their fill of trouble (Proverbs 12:21).

We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them (1 John 5:18).

(Yes, there are also verses that promise persecution. One example is 1 Peter 4:12: “Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you.” The Bible, as usual, can be used to argue both sides. To any Christian who offers that argument, I say: you’re right; you win—the Bible is contradictory.)

Not only will no harm come to these people, but much good is promised in this life, not just in the hereafter.

[God said:] Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it (Malachi 3:10).

[Jesus said:] No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (Mark 10:29–30).

Where in the Bible is the demand to die for Jesus? Endure difficulties for the truth, sure, but die?

It’s all about Jesus’s honor

Mills’ point is that Christians have taken that first step already by committing to Jesus, but they must practice daily. Take out the Jesus part, and it sounds good to me. Mills said:

Do we walk the second mile, turn the other cheek, forgive those who hurt us, stand up for others who need our help, stand with Jesus when the world demands we give Him up?

[You try to avoid] complaining to yourself about your spouse or children when they annoy you. And cheerfully doing the little things for them you wish they’d do themselves.

Be a decent person—I get it. Things go off the rails, however, with his conclusion:

And most important, standing up for Jesus when you need to. That’s the best training and the best test. Will you really face the lions if you can’t face the conceited atheist at the office?

Being a good person is important, but defending Jesus’s honor is more important? Let me suggest instead that we focus on what we know exists (you and your interactions with family, friends, and others) as our first priority and let the mythology prove its worth before we worry too much about it.

If Jesus’s honor is being defamed, why can’t he deal with that himself? He could do a much better job. And where’s the evidence? Why isn’t Jesus’s good name as widely accepted as that the sky on a clear day is blue?

Take another example: suppose a gunman said to you, “I say your father is a rotten scoundrel. Contradict me, and I’ll kill you!” What would you do? What would your father want you to do? No father worth the title would consider his own honor to be more important than your life. I respond to another Christian apologist and explore the question of a gunman asking, “Are you a Christian?” here.

And why are we worrying about something so petty as someone’s honor anyway? That’s the last thing an actual god would want your help with.

Think about this idea of dying for Jesus. Suppose you were a king. Would you accept a barricade of three-year-old children or puppies sacrificing their lives for, not your life, but your honor? What heroes need ordinary people to defend their honor or would want to test the allegiance of their followers?

(More on the illogic of all-wise gods needing worship here and on how the Great Commission doesn’t apply to you here.)

Conclusion in part 2.

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Image from engine ekyurt (free-use license)
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Summary of reply: A perfect creator should be able to accurately convey his perfect message to the people he created. And yet, somehow, he can’t. It’s not looking good for God.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here. I’m hoping to wrap up the final three this week.)

Challenge to the Christian: If Christianity were true, there wouldn’t be so many denominations.

Christian response #1: Sure, Christians disagree, but so do atheists. Christians agree that God exists, and atheists agree that he doesn’t, but there are disagreements within both camps on lots of issues.

BSR: It’s true that some atheists are Democrats and some Republicans, some reject the supernatural entirely and some don’t, some reject vaccines and GMOs and some accept the scientific consensus on these. Atheism is a simple, narrow claim: “There are no gods” or “I have no god belief” or something similar, and that’s it. Christianity is vastly larger and contains the Bible and all its claims, angels, the Trinity, the history of doctrinal changes, 2000 years of church tradition, the decisions of 2000 years of church councils, rules of conduct, and so on.

When you compare the two, of course Christianity looks like the aftermath of the Tower of Babel, so where’s the problem? The problem is that Christianity claims to have come from an omniscient, perfect author. Surely this perfect author was able to convey his Most Important Message clearly so that his Most Cherished Creation could understand it.

The Bible makes clear that this was the idea. Jesus said, “I pray [that all believers] may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” Paul said, “I appeal . . . that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”

A perfect author could surely convey his Most Important Message so that his Most Cherished Creation could clearly understand it. Why then 45,000 denominations? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Sure, Christians disagree, but so do scientists. “Cosmologists disagree, therefore the universe doesn’t exist” is just as wrong as “Christians disagree, therefore God doesn’t exist.”

BSR: We should expect an omniscient god to be able to communicate his message clearly to everyone, but no one expects scientists to instantly answer every new question. There is disagreement at the frontier of science, but consensus typically emerges after a few decades. For example, quantum tunneling was first noticed in 1927, it was understood in more general cases by mid-century, and it has long since become a commonplace part of the physics that underlies today’s electronics. But in Christianity, many issues are never resolved but instead cause a permanent split in the church. Even when a theological issue is agreed to within Christianity, most outsiders reject it.

Even for scientific questions that take decades to resolve—plate tectonics, quasicrystals, string theory, or cold fusion, say—more evidence tends to resolve the conflict. Christianity, by contrast, has little use for evidence. Scientists tend to converge, and Christians tend to diverge. Christianity is forming new denominations at a rate of two per day.

Ask yourself why there is a map of world religions but no map of world science. Then ask whether that map of world religions looks like God’s Perfect Plan or human culture and superstition.

Ask yourself why there is a map of world religions but no map of world science. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Sure, Christians disagree. People disagree. People disagree on pretty much everything—there’s the problem.

BSR: So God made people and God has a perfect message for all people, but God couldn’t make his people so that they could understand this single, universal message? Or is omnipotent God unable to create that universal, understandable message?

This is no proof against a god of some sort, but it’s sure not looking good for God.

The “perfect” God can’t create people who can understand his message (or a message understandable by his people). Either way, it’s not looking good for God. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 27: There Are No Good Reasons to Believe in Miracles

For further reading:

• Why Map of World Religions but not World Science?

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Image from AJC1, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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A few years ago, I contributed a chapter to Not Seeing God (2017), edited by fellow Patheos Nonreligious blogger Jonathan M.S. Pearce (at A Tippling Philosopher). Pearce’s Onus Books has a new book out, The Unnecessary Science by Gunther Laird. The following is an excerpt from that book, which is a response to the work of some of the most popular Catholic apologists in professional philosophy working today. Here, he critiques an argument for the historical veracity of the Bible based on philosophical grounds made by one such philosopher, Edward Feser. This approach (as well as the humorous but still academically rigorous writing style) can be found throughout the rest of The Unnecessary Science.

The philosopher Edward Feser, in most of his published books and articles (such as The Last Superstition, Five Proofs for the Existence of God, and Scholastic Metaphysics, among many others) has done more than any contemporary writer to popularize and defend the Catholic religion. I have endeavored to contest his efforts directly in the new book I have recently published, The Unnecessary Science: A Critical Analysis of Natural Law Theory. In this entry for Cross Examined, I will summarize one of the arguments (out of many) I make in Chapter 2: Even if we assume the existence of a single God, and even if we assume that God is capable of miraculous intervention in the material world throughout history, we would still be unable to prove with certainty that Christianity was true through the “miracle” of the Resurrection; indeed, no apparent miracle could prove any religion true with such a high degree of philosophical certainty.

By “philosophical certainty” I refer to deductive arguments versus inductive ones. Deductive arguments are necessarily true due to the logical relationships between their premises (if the conclusion of a deductive argument follows necessarily from its premises, it is called a valid argument, and if those premises are also true, it is a sound argument). Inductive arguments are probabilistic—they rely on empirical evidence, so their conclusions can be very likely true, but not absolutely certain as is the case for deductive arguments. Feser thinks he has made a sound deductive argument for an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God (one who would never lie to His creations). That syllogism, sketched out in his book The Last Superstition and given in a more formal manner in Five Proofs for the Existence of God, is based on the Aristotelian metaphysical argument for change, the premises of which, though admittedly empirical, cannot be contested. For the moment, I would be happy to concede this point to Feser, and argue against him on his own terms. This is one of the appeals of my book: I make an effort to engage with my opponents on their strongest grounds, accepting many of their assumptions and premises at first in order to display how their conclusions do not follow even given those assumptions, and only then attacking those assumptions directly. I do not expect every Catholic or Christian to agree with me on every point they make, but I expect that they will be unable to claim I have been unfair.

So, how does Feser go from the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent (and also entirely honest) single God, to believing that the Christian religion specifically gets it right about that God? Miracles. To quote from his The Last Superstition,

Given that God exists and that He sustains the world and the causal laws governing it in being, we know that there is a power capable of producing a miracle, that is, a suspension of those causal laws…. [Therefore, if] a monotheistic religion’s claim to be founded on a divine revelation is going to be at all credible, that claim is going to have to rest on a very dramatic miracle.… The Resurrection surely counts as such a miracle, for there are no plausible natural [as opposed to divine] means by which a dead man could come back to life. What does Islam have to match this? Muhammad’s “miracle”…is the Qu’ran itself. This is…rather anticlimactic, especially given that the contents of the Qu’ran can easily be accounted for in terms of borrowings from Jewish and Christian sources. Jewish miracle claims are going to be the ones familiar from the Old Testament…but Christians accept those too, so even if their historicity were verified, they could not make the case for Judaism over Christianity specifically. Moreover, the direct eyewitness evidence for these miracle stories is more controversial than the evidence surrounding the Resurrection. All things considered, then, the one purportedly revealed monotheistic religion which can appeal to a single decisive miracle in its favor is Christianity.[1]

This, therefore, is Feser’s argument for the truth of Christianity above all others: We know, through deductive reasoning and therefore with one-hundred-percent deductive certainty, that a single God exists, and that God is capable of performing miracles. We have a great deal of eyewitness historical evidence for a certain miracle (the Resurrection). Thus, we can conclude the Resurrection really did occur, and since the only being capable of performing a miracle is the one God, God must have been responsible for it. And since God is omnibenevolent and could not lie, the miracle of the Resurrection proves that Christianity has His imprimatur, which makes Christianity true, and the world is logically (not just probablistically) obligated to accept it.

I can highlight the problems in Feser’s argument with an analogy—one which I hope most readers here might get a chuckle out of.

Let us imagine that one day, mysteriously, the body of Elvis Presley disappears from his grave in Graceland, Tennessee. The media flocks to the area, the King’s fans are in an uproar, the FBI is dispatched to figure out what happened to it, and the nation descends into general chaos. Just before the nuclear bombs start flying, Elvis suddenly reappears! Dressed in his finest sparkly threads, his black hair waxed and mussed into a perfect pompadour, his skin as healthy and radiant as it was when he first came on stage, he casually strolls into a local Denny’s at 5 AM in the morning and orders a milkshake. It’s not a busy night, and there are only thirteen people there, including the staff. But none of them can deny it—the King has returned! They crowd around him, begging for his wisdom, and he tells them that he was resurrected by God to return peace, love, and rock-and-roll to this benighted world. He must return to heaven very soon, he says, but once he does, they must start a new religion called “Elvisism.” He’s a bit vague about its tenets, but it mostly revolves around listening to his songs at least once a week. With those words of wisdom dispensed, he stands up and casually saunters away as if nothing had happened, and when his audience desperately runs outside to follow him, they find out he’s gone! There’s no proof he was ever even there…except for a recording the cashier had made on her smartphone, which is irrefutable evidence of what he did and said. She uploads it on YouTube, gaining over one billion views in less than six hours, and soon everyone in the world is convinced of the inescapable truth of the new religion. The nuclear strikes are called off, all the world’s great religions are swiftly abandoned, and Planet Earth is soon united in peace and harmony under the soothing tunes of the greatest musician who ever lived, now proven to be divine as well.

If such an event were to take place—if the corpse of Elvis were to disappear, and someone who looked just like him appeared soon after—would Dr. Feser abandon Catholicism and embrace the hip-grinding ways of his new savior? I rather suspect not. Like any good skeptic, Dr. Feser would point out that a multitude of explanations besides divine activity could explain these shenanigans. Some mischief-makers stealing Elvis’s corpse and hiring a look-alike to fool the dupes at Denny’s, for instance.

But wait! Don’t we know for sure it would be an act of God? After all—to once again review Feser’s reasoning—we know that change exists, which means that a single unchangeable Being exists, which also must be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Since that Being can control the laws of physics (this is a slight simplification—Feser believes in “laws of natures,” emphasis on the plural, rather than physical laws, but that’s too complex to get into here). He could have brought Elvis’s corpse back to life, thus allowing the King to get his shake at Denny’s. That means, as Feser might say, “His miraculous resurrection puts a divine seal of approval on what He said,” which of course would mean that Elvisism would be true.[2]

Given that line of reasoning, would Feser relent and join the Church of Elvis? I still suspect not. Feser would probably say, “Well, simply because the existence of Pure Act makes miracles possible, it doesn’t follow that any strange happening or bizarre event is necessarily a miracle. Perhaps they’re elaborate hoaxes which will be revealed given enough time and investigation. Or perhaps there are scientific explanations, like will-o-the-wisps being proven to be marsh gas, that we haven’t discovered yet. But simply believing in Pure Act doesn’t mean I have to believe every trick someone might pull over me.”

Reasonable enough, but couldn’t you say the same for Christianity? After all, there are “natural” explanations for the miracles attributed to Christ, simply due to the nature of historical (or exegetical, in the case of the Bible specifically) inquiry. There is no way to prove with deductive certainty that some historical event happened—it is always possible that the historian has incorrectly interpreted the evidence, or even that the evidence itself is not reliable. It is true that the existence of God (if we concede this to Feser, again, I contest this in chapter 6 of my full book) makes Christ’s miracles possibly true, but that does not make the evidence “overwhelming.” Otherwise, any random person could claim to be a dead celebrity, or have risen from the dead, and point to “overwhelming” evidence on their side.[3]

Feser might try and refute this by saying that given their different historical contexts, it is far more likely Christ’s Resurrection would be divine than Elvis’s. After all, Christ was known for many miracles in addition to coming back to life, and in any case it would have been harder to pull off such a hoax back in the days of Roman Judea, since any grave robber would not have had the aid of machinery to break in or any technology which could help hide his presence. But two problems remain with this solution. First, even if it is unlikely that anyone could break into the tomb and steal Christ’s body in ancient times, it is not impossible. Perhaps someone bribed some guards or soldiers near the tomb to assist them with the scheme, for instance, and the subsequent reappearance of Christ was, if not a mass hallucination, a look-alike that fooled the audience. It may be unlikely that anyone could disguise themselves as Christ, but given the number of people who can pass for Elvis today, it is hardly impossible that there was at least one person in ancient Judea who resembled Jesus enough to trick a grieving, emotionally-distraught audience. The same applies to Christ’s other miracles—perhaps they were tricks or made-up. Of course, this is assuming the testimony of the Gospels is entirely accurate—very many scholars have looked at the Biblical account and found more than a few reasons to be skeptical.[4] But either way, it is far from certain that the Resurrection happened exactly the way Scripture tells it, which means that it is far from certain Catholicism (or any other branch of Christianity) is true. In other words, one might—might—be able to make a strong inductive case for Catholicism or Christianity generally based on the available historical evidence, but it is impossible to make a deductive case that what evidence we have (the testimony of the Gospels, archaeological traces, etc.) proves that a miracle truly occurred and that a certain religion is true.

This is just one example of what you can expect to find in chapter 2 of The Unnecessary Science—I expand on these points, and many others, in the text itself! If you find this compelling—or perhaps even amusing—whether you agree with it or not, I hope you’ll consider giving the book itself a look.

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[1] Edward Feser, The Last Superstition (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008), 155, 160.

[2] The Last Superstition, 156.

[3] For more problems with the Resurrection, see the paragraph on Ockham and miracles at Arensb, “The Last Superstition: Hedonism Killed Aquinas,” Epsilon Clue, November 21, 2016, last accessed on August 14, 2020,

https://epsilonclue.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/the-last-superstition-hedonism-killed-aquinas

[4] My editor has done an excellent job rounding up a selection of these theories on his personal blog. See Jonathan Pearce, “Easter Round-Up: Everything You Need To Know About The Resurrection (Skeptically Speaking),” A Tippling Philosopher, April 20, 2019, last accessed August 14, 2020, https://onlysky.media/jpearce/2019/04/20/easter-round-up-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-resurrection-skeptically-speaking

My oldest granddaughter is now four years old, and I remember playing with her in her first year. I found myself treating her like I did my dog. Neither understood English very well, but they could understand tone. She grabs her toy? “What a smart girl!” She rolls over? “What a clever girl!” She bites Piglet’s nose? “What a talented girl!” She burped, she pooped, she has a wet diaper? “What a good girl!”

This is surprisingly analogous to how many Christians treat God. You get what you wanted in prayer? “Thank you, God!” You didn’t get what you wanted in prayer? “Thank you, God!” God is too emotionally fragile to handle constructive feedback. Christians aren’t supposed to say, “God, the next time you think it’d be instructive to give a five-year-old leukemia, get back on your meds and think again.” God is (supposedly) omni-everything and so could achieve any goal without the human cost. God’s actions are assumed to be good at the outset, and any negative reaction is your fault for not seeing the hidden good.

God is either giving you great stuff or teaching you important lessons, and no matter what happens, God gets the credit. God is praised, regardless—whether you got the perfect parking space when you were late or God dealt some tough love by not giving you that promotion, he can’t lose. When bad things happen, God is never blamed. That’s man’s fault. Even natural disasters are recast as part of God’s marvelous, inscrutable plan. And when bad things happen to someone, they endured the ordeal only with God’s support.

Empty and groundless platitudes like “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” or “God must’ve needed another angel” or “Everything happens for a reason” litter the internet. Doubt is discouraged, and faith (in the sense of belief despite poor evidence) is put forward as a great virtue.

God is always perfect and infallible, especially when you conclude that before you start. There is even the scholarly discipline of theodicy to add somber scholarly support to this claim. Christians give all the other supernatural beliefs (unicorns, Xenu, Zeus) the critique of a skeptical adult, but their god can only handle baby food. And just like a baby, he’s never called to account, never has to clean up his messes, never has to explain himself or follow adult rules. God doesn’t even need good evidence that he exists.

Related: God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/7/16.)

Image from Christian Haugen, CC license

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