On to part 4 of our critique of Mike Licona’s “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection” (part 1 here).

(Blue text is the myth, green is Licona’s rejection of the myth, and black is my response to Licona.)

Myth 7: It Was Merely Legend.

We don’t know what really happened. All we have is legends that developed long after the events. In the gospels we read these legends, not history.

Finally! Lucky number seven is the correct answer! Yes, all evidence points to the resurrection in the Jesus story as legend. C. S. Lewis’s famous “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?” argument is quite popular in Christian circles, and he misses Legend as the obvious fourth possibility (more here). I respond to twelve reasons given by apologists who argue against the legend hypothesis here.

Unfortunately, Licona handwaves a weak rebuttal and becomes an example of Winston Churchill’s dictum, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” Licona says, “We have reports that go back to the original apostles.” Paul said that Jesus died, was buried, rose, and appeared to others (1 Corinthians 15). “We know Paul was teaching what the Jerusalem apostles were teaching.”

Reports that go back to the original apostles? Is he seriously going to point to the story itself to justify the validity of the story? The claim that the gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John isn’t history but is itself a legend. And sometimes centuries separate our best copies from the originals (more). That doesn’t make them useless, but that’s insufficient evidence on which to base a supernatural claim.

Licona says that the disciples confirmed Paul’s approach, which is probably a reference to Galatians 2:2–6, in which Paul reports that the Jerusalem crowd had no corrections to make to his teaching. However, Paul’s conclusion shows a fair amount of friction between the two camps: “As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me.”

And how reliable is Paul anyway? The post-resurrection appearances in his famous 1 Corinthians 15 passage don’t match the gospel accounts (more here and here). Perhaps the reason Paul didn’t have more respect for those who lived with Jesus—unlike his own Jesus experience, which was only through a vision—was because he thought they’d all seen him as a vision. He uses the same verb for his personal interaction with Jesus as those of the apostles.

Paul says that the Jerusalem faction supported him . . . but then he’d be motivated to claim their support, wouldn’t he? Just because a claim is in one of Paul’s epistles, that doesn’t make it history.

“This goes back to the eyewitnesses themselves. You can accuse them of lying or hallucinating or whatever you would accuse them of, but a legend? Can’t happen because it was the original apostles of Jesus who were making the initial proclamation that Jesus had been raised and had appeared to them.”

Licona has done nothing to move any component of the New Testament from the story/legend column into the history column. The gospels don’t even claim to be written by apostles; that’s yet another part of the legend.

Myth 8: Science proves that resurrections cannot occur.

“Science does prove that the dead do not return to life by natural causes. . . . But does that prove that Jesus could not have been raised from the dead?” No, because Jesus rising from the dead wasn’t due to natural causes; rather, God raised Jesus. “If God exists and wanted to raise Jesus, well then . . . that makes things different.”

If God exists? This is the Hypothetical God Fallacy—assuming God and then proceeding from there. But showing God’s existence is exactly what we’re trying to do here. It’s a deceptive tangent to begin a sentence with “If God exists. . . .” That line of reasoning might be useful only if I claimed to be proving that God doesn’t exist, which I don’t.

“If God exists” is just pointless speculation like “If I were a billionaire.” Until I am, anything that proceeds from this is just a daydream.

There is no evidence here and no argument. Licona might as well say, “If God exists, well, then I’m right!” That’s true, but it does nothing to advance the argument.

Licona illustrates his point by imagining people trying and failing to walk across the water in a swimming pool. And now Licona shows how to do it: he walks along the side of the pool, holding a small boy by the wrists over the water as the boy walks on the water. You’ll say that this worked only because Licona was an external force. That’s right, and God was the external force that raised Jesus from the dead.

Yes, we understand that God is the not-natural, external force that you say came in to cause the resurrection. Any reason to accept your claim? Do you have evidence? You don’t seem to want to use science here, but what other tool do we use to evaluate a claim about reality like this?

“So science only proves that dead critters stay dead apart from an act of God. It doesn’t prove that God couldn’t raise Jesus from the dead.”

True and irrelevant. Proving that God couldn’t raise a dead man isn’t the goal. We start with the assumption that this is just a story, and you shoulder the burden of proof. I’m waiting.

Concluded in part 5.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/28/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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Easter has recently come and gone, so it’s opportune to critique “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection,” ten brief videos by Dr. Mike Licona covering what he claims are false beliefs about the Resurrection. Let’s take a look and see where the facts point us. (I’ve written about Licona before, and I analyze where he got on the wrong side of fundamentalist scholars here.)

Myth 1: Contradictions in the Gospels

“The gospels contradict themselves and so therefore we can’t believe them on the Resurrection of Jesus.”

Licona rejects this: “No credible historian believes that contradictions within an account discredit the account itself.” (I’ll use blue for the myth, green for Licona’s rejection of the myth, and black for my response to Licona.)

Contradictions don’t discredit a historical account? Surely you admit that contradictions within a source must discredit it somewhat and that a contradiction-free account is more credible than the equivalent story full of contradictions. (I have a long list of Bible contradictions beginning here.)

Licona gives the sinking of the Titanic as an example. Some witnesses say that the ship broke in two before sinking (which is correct) while others say that it sank intact, but historians didn’t conclude from this contradiction that the Titanic didn’t sink.

Since the witnesses were unanimous that it did sink, that a sinking ship is a well-understood event, and that the event is well documented, “the Titanic sank” sounds like a reasonable conclusion for historians. Disagreements over details didn’t change the fact that the genre of the Titanic account is history, but disagreements between the gospels make one wonder if historical or journalistic accuracy was even the goal.

While a ship sinking isn’t especially incredible, the story of a man rising from the dead must default to the “mythology” or “legend” categories. We’ll move it to the history category only after being convinced by very good evidence. The 100% natural Titanic story is a poor analogy to a supernatural tale.

Licona says that he won’t admit to any contradictions in the Bible and that any there could be explained away.

Harmonizing the facts to support something you know for certain happened is fine, but first you must show that it happened. Licona has it backwards—he wants to assume the accuracy of the Bible first and then select the facts of the world to support that presumption.

And, of course, if there are contradictions in an account, you must first ask yourself if that account is so unreliable that it should be discarded. Richard Carrier addresses this with his summary of Stephen Law’s Argument from Contamination:

Law’s argument is that in documents with a disturbingly high quantity of unbelievable claims, we have no reason to trust the mundane claims in those documents either, without some reliable external corroboration (the bogus material thus “contaminates” the rest with heightened suspicion). . . .

Law is not saying any history or biography that blends legendary with mundane claims warrants skepticism. He is saying any history or biography that is loaded with legendary claims, as in has an unusual amount of them central to the story, warrants sweeping skepticism. . . .

Law’s actual principle is obviously correct and obviously one real historians routinely employ.

I can accept that a single contradiction can’t justify the dismissal of a source, but contradictions must affect the reliably to some extent. Stephen Law’s Argument from Contamination is a nice encapsulation of how unbelievable claims, like the supernatural, must color our view of the remainder.

Licona argues that any contradictions are in peripheral details. The gospels agree on the important claims: that Jesus died, was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, was raised on the third day, and appeared to others.

We have several copies of the Gilgamesh epic, which must also disagree on some details. Are we entitled to consider as history the supernatural claims agreed to in all copies as Licona does for the claims common among the gospels?

Or suppose that a future historian is trying to make sense of our contradictory stories about Superman from radio shows, TV, movies, and other media. Suppose he selects just the common features—Superman came as a baby in a rocket from Krypton, he grew up in Smallville, he could lift cars, he disguised himself as Clark Kent, and so on. Must that amalgam be historical?

Licona gives no rule that allows him to capture Christianity but reject Gilgamesh, Superman, and other fanciful tales.

Myth 2: Pagan Parallels in Mystery Religions

“How can it be that you have so many accounts of dying and rising gods and heroes within pagan accounts—isn’t Christianity just another example of this?”

Licona says that there is almost unanimous consensus by scholars that virtually all of these accounts postdate the gospels. That means that it’s the pagans who are copying the Christians!

This is a red herring. If there are accounts that postdate the gospels, we should obviously discard them. But that leaves us with plenty of precedents for the Jesus resurrection: Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Baal. My favorite is Dionysus, the love child of one of Zeus’s many affairs. His jealous wife Hera had the infant Dionysus eaten by Titans, but Zeus brought him back to life through the mortal woman Semele.

Dead, and then born by a mortal. Brought back to life by the ruler of the gods. Sounds like there’s overlap with the gospel story.

Unlike Licona, second-century Christian Justin Martyr was happy to acknowledge commonalities between Jesus and Greek gods such as a virgin birth and resurrecting from the dead. He simply says that Satan placed the precedent back in time to trick us.

The Jesus story arose in a culture suffused with the idea of dying and rising gods, and Resurrection envy nicely explains the Resurrection.

Licona warns us that many popular internet examples are nonsense, such as the claim that Krishna was crucified and rose from the dead. “There are no accounts period of Krishna being crucified or rising from the dead three days later.”

I suppose he’s thinking of sources like The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves (1875) or Zeitgeist: the Movie (2007), which have been attacked for poor scholarship. But, like his complaints about the existence of dying-and-rising gods that postdated the gospels, historical examples that don’t fit can simply be ignored. His warning us away from examples that aren’t relevant doesn’t dismiss the ones that are.

As for Krishna, it’s true that there is no crucifixion or three-day delay, but those are insignificant details. What’s common is the important thing: that, like Jesus, Krishna arose from the dead and returned to his place in heaven!

Continue with part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/21/16.)

Image from Camilo Rueda López, CC license
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Isn’t it weird that faith healers aren’t curing COVID-19? Isn’t it weirder that their flock isn’t calling them on it?

From Oral Roberts’ sweaty tent revivals in the 1950s to Benny Hinn’s slick five-hour productions today, faith healers have been busy. Kenneth Copeland, Pat Robertson, Peter Popoff, and other big names are faith healers or started that way. A healing revival has lots of practiced emotional manipulation, but there is clear biblical support for healings of this sort. Jesus did public healings, and we see a first-century promise to the sick in James 5:14–16:

Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

If faith healing worked, and healing revivals were the place to see them, what would that look like? How could we tell that it was for real? Here’s a list of some of the things we should expect to see (contrasted with what we actually see).

Use of money

Donations given by sick people to the ministry that provided real faith healing would either be refused or used for conventional good works (food, clothes, and housing for the needy, for example). Instead, God would provide money, equipment, or whatever was necessary to run the ministry. After all, God “will repay each person according to what they have done” (Romans 2:6), and Jesus said, “Give, and it will be given to you” (Luke 6:38).

What we see instead: the big faith-healing ministries take in roughly $100 million per year, and sick people in the audience, who probably have better things like medical expenses to spend their money on, are encouraged to give money repeatedly. Desperate people giving money they shouldn’t part with to rich people who make big claims with paltry evidence? Though it may be done for the best of reasons, that certainly looks from the outside like a scam, a modern-day version of the patent medicine salesman.

Relationship to evidence

If faith healing worked, the focus would be on evidence and science. Scientists and doctors would be given easy access to evidence supporting claims of miraculous healings and would be encouraged to evaluate the claims and publish the results. They’d be encouraged to examine people before and after healings by prayer.

You would see statistics showing the efficacy of faith healing, just like with a conventional medical treatment. The ministry would show that it could reliably access the supernatural by winning a public, transparent test like the James Randi Education Foundation’s Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. (The JREF Challenge retired in 2015 after fifty years with no winners.) If faith healing worked, you’d see people going there first instead of conventional medicine.

What we see instead: instead of evidence and science, we see anecdotes, emotion, and faith. The focus is on quantity rather than quality, and if you debunk the claims of one anecdote, they point you to others. No one won the JREF million-dollar prize, and no big-name psychic or faith healer ever tried. The 2006 STEP experiment, often known as the Templeton Study because of the foundation that funded it, showed no value in third-party healing prayer.

Relationship to faith

It may be faith healing, but it’s claimed to actually work. Faith may be the key to unlock the miracle, but the results should be testable. It should work as reliably as a car or light switch works—otherwise, “faith healing works” is a meaningless claim. If a sick person stays sick despite treatment, the medicine (the faith healing procedure) would be faulty.

What we see instead: We see sick people who don’t recover blamed for their lack of faith, adding guilt to their burden and making faith healing unfalsifiable. We see sick people told that using conventional medicine admits a lack of faith. We see people pushed because of the limitations of conventional medicine to a desperate, “Well, I can’t take it with me” attitude toward their life savings, preyed upon by faith healers eager to provide snake oil in return for all they can take.

I remember one televangelist who used the line, “The bigger the need, the bigger the seed”—that is, the bigger your problem (and a life-threatening disease is a pretty big problem), the more money you must send to God to the televangelist. It’s hard to imagine more reprehensible advice to give to a vulnerable person.

Lourdes, France became a destination for the sick shortly after a claimed visitation by Mary in 1858. Today it receives six million visitors per year, though the Catholic Church recognizes a total of just 67 miraculous cures. How many more people are killed or injured just traveling to Lourdes than are imagined to be healed?

Kinds of cures

A real faith healer would be able to cure anything, including healings that anyone could see, such as limbs restored, burns healed, and chromosomal diseases like Huntington’s or Down syndrome cured.

What we see instead: we see only claims for invisible “cures” like cancer or some other internal illness that we can’t check on the spot. We must take the results on faith.

Military uses

The battlefield would be the perfect place for faith healing. Imagine a wizard who could conjure injured soldiers back to health or even raise them from the dead. Such a military would be invincible.

What we see instead: chaplains in the military can be helpful with matters of conscience (“Is it wrong to kill people?”) or as a therapist in an extremely stressful environment. But they have no medical mojo to offer medics and doctors.

Public healings

Real faith healings wouldn’t need to be elaborate public events. Real faith healers would take their show on the road. They wouldn’t be in churches but rather in hospitals or on street corners. The goal wouldn’t be showmanship but simply healing people. There would be no interest in a big audience, and a private hospital room would be as good a venue as a stadium.

What we see instead: we see a performance. We see emotional manipulation. We see tricks like those performed by a stage magician—think of Peter Popoff’s use of wireless messages to magically “know” someone’s name or ailment. We see frauds like putting someone who normally needs only a cane into a wheelchair. The patient is then wheeled onstage so the faith healer can do his thing and then marvel when the patient gets up and walks.

With the public spectacle, we have the solitary person put on the spot and all the emotional issues that brings: the placebo effect that can simulate a cure, adrenaline that masks pain, peer pressure to encourage you to play the role you’re expected to play, and so on.

Negative results? Just blame them on demons.

Intermediaries

Faith healing wouldn’t need a special personality or great training. There would be no need for intermediaries like Benny Hinn. Jesus himself makes clear that it’s as simple as, “Ask and you will receive” (John 16:24).

What we see instead: faith healers are apparently anointed by God. They may or may not have great learning, but they have the gift. Communicating with God is so tenuous that only a very few can do it. Nevertheless, even their performance isn’t very reliable, so don’t expect a guarantee.

Here again, the presence of an intermediary with his hand out makes faith healing look like just another scam.

Conclusion

Televangelists always conclude their infomercials with two requests: to pray for them and to send lots of money. But why ask for money? If prayer works and God responds to it, then the prayer is far more potent than my twenty dollars. Televangelists asking for money means that they know what I know: that money has value but prayer is just a placebo. Prayer does nothing whether I’m at home praying for their ministry or they’re on television praying for my health.

Am I too hard on faith healing? Televangelists handwave about the comfort provided by a god that’s not there or a heaven that doesn’t exist, but this may provide hope for the hopeless.

I’m in no position to criticize what someone in a tough position must do to get through life, but we’re not talking about a sugar pill. We’re talking about taking poor people’s money in return for witchcraft or encouraging them to shun conventional medicine. In the West in the twenty-first century, when we know something about disease, neither is acceptable.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/22/16.)

Image credit: Jay Trinidad

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Christian apologist Greg Koukl recently wrote an article with a provocative title: “This One Thing Could Destroy Christianity Completely…” (4/1/2020). Who doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking about?

I’ll get to the argument in a moment. First let’s recall another argument that has an interesting similarity, C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.” In brief, Lewis takes the gospel story and demands to know what could explain Jesus’s claims of divinity. Jesus could be a liar (he’s wrong and he knows it), or he could be a lunatic (he’s wrong but doesn’t know it). Lewis rejects those two and so, by process of elimination, Jesus must be right, so he’s the Lord! (I respond here and here.)

Someone hearing Lewis’s argument for the first time who’s even just a bit skeptical will probably think of a fourth possibility, that Jesus in the gospels is legend. This very reasonable, natural option screams out as the best explanation, and yet apologists will carefully run through the standard three options, concluding with Lord with what I can only imagine are crossed arms and a smile, and ignoring the elephantine Legend in the room. Do they never think of it? Do they know this option but hope their audience is too unsophisticated to raise it? We’ll be left with a similar puzzle at the end of Koukl’s example.

Let’s return to Koukl’s article. This Achilles’ heel of Christianity is spelled out in the verse from Paul that says that if Jesus was not raised, “we [Christians] are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

So if we overturn the idea of the Resurrection as a real historical event, Christianity falls. Koukl says,

If Jesus rose from the dead, then everything critical to Christianity is true. If Jesus stayed dead, everything uniquely important about Christianity is false. It’s all or nothing.

Let’s accept that challenge and attack the Resurrection. Helpfully, Koukl gives three “facts” that argue for the Resurrection as a historical event. Let’s see how factual they actually are.

0. What evidence would prove a resurrection?

Koukl wants to establish the ground rules first. To prove a resurrection, he says, you’d need to show that (1) someone was dead and then (2) later alive. With that, you could claim a resurrection.

But read the gospels carefully, and you don’t find that! Matthew and Mark make clear that no men witnessed the death, so they don’t satisfy the first requirement. It’s true that women disciples saw Jesus dead, but conservative scholars like Koukl emphasize that women at that time were unreliable witnesses. (They do this to defend their argument that women finding the empty tomb was surprising and therefore historically accurate. I respond to that here.)

Apologists can clumsily salvage their argument by pointing out that Luke and John don’t have this problem. With these gospels, the male disciples stay to witness the death. But by pointing this out, they’ve created a new problem, that the Bible is contradictory and therefore unreliable.

The three facts that establish the Resurrection as historical

Here are the three claimed facts: Jesus was dead and buried, the tomb was empty, and the disciples were transformed. To emphasize how unremarkable these claims are, Koukl says:

Each piece of evidence is about something completely earthly. Nothing supernatural, only natural—a corpse, an empty tomb, and apparent personal encounters of some sort changing doubters into believers.

That’s true, these are all natural claims. But he will try to use three natural claims to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead, an incredible supernatural event. Something doesn’t seem right about that.

The general worldview-changing document

Let’s take a step back and abstract Koukl’s argument. The gospel account is compelling enough that he thinks nonbelievers should use it to conclude that the supernatural exists. But that’s a lot to expect of mere words on paper, that it would force on the reader a complete worldview change.

To show that he’s being fair and not privileging the gospel story, I want Koukl to give another example of words on paper that would convince open-minded people to change their worldview. Call it Story X. If Koukl thinks that the gospel story should convince us, he must first show us that Story X is so compelling that it convinces him. That’s right—Koukl needs to show us that it’s possible for an all-natural set of words on paper to convince a thoughtful person by first being sufficiently convinced himself to radically change his own worldview away from Christianity.

This challenge is impossible for him to meet because he begins with the assumption that the gospels are unique. He won’t grant that any other document has the worldview-changing power of the gospels, but with this he reveals his bias: you should believe his document (and only his document) just because. Sorry, that’s not an honest discussion.

With that his entire project fails, but let’s continue and examine the three supposed facts.

1. Jesus was dead and buried

As I noted above, half the gospels don’t meet the resurrection-witness requirement Koukl himself defined: first seeing Jesus dead and then seeing him alive. According to Matthew, at Jesus’s arrest, “all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matthew 26:56b).

But Koukl ignores this. To argue the first part of the miracle, that Jesus was dead, he steps through the torture, crucifixion, and burial. He wraps up:

So, based on the record, is it reasonable to conclude Jesus survived that ordeal?

Based on what record? The record that says that Jesus didn’t survive that ordeal??

Yes, based on the record of the gospels, Jesus died. And based on the record of “Goldilocks,” the little girl ran away when woken by the three bears. That doesn’t mean it actually happened.

There’s another problem. In his description of the burial, Koukl mentioned the application of spices by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and the wrapping of the body with strips of linen. This comes from John. But both points conflict with claims that the famous fourteenth-century Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus in that (1) the image on that shroud doesn’t show the enormous quantity of spices, and (2) the Shroud is a single large rectangle rather than strips (which was the Jewish custom  according to John 19:40b). This argument contradicts Koukl’s belief that the Shroud is authentic (podcast @22:00).

Conclude with a response to the final two arguments, the tomb was empty and the disciples were transformed: Part 2.

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Image from darkday, CC license
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Christians have a long history of putting themselves at risk to help others during plagues. For example, the Plague of Cyprian (251–66) is estimated to have killed two-thirds of the population of Alexandria, Egypt. And yet,

During the Plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying.

Many Christians will point to medieval hospitals to argue that they were pioneers in giving us the medical system that we know today. Let’s consider that claim.

(Part 1 considered the similar claim that Christianity is responsible for modern universities.)

Health care in the Bible

We can look to the Bible to see where Christian contributions to medical science come from.

We find Old Testament apotropaic medicine (medicine to ward off evil) in Numbers 21:5–9. When God grew tired of the Israelites whining about harsh conditions during the Exodus, he sent poisonous snakes to bite them. As a remedy, God told Moses to make a bronze snake (the Nehushtan). This didn’t get rid of the snakes or the snake bites, but it did mean that anyone who looked at it after being bitten would magically live. So praise the Lord, I guess.

This is a “hair of the dog” type of treatment, akin to modern homeopathic “medicine.” Just as bronze snake statues are useless as medicine today, Jesus and his ideas of disease as a manifestation of demon possession was also useless. To those who point to Jesus’s few individual healings as evidence that Jesus cared about public health, I ask why Jesus didn’t eliminate any diseases or at least give us the tools to do so.

The Father of Western Medicine was Hippocrates, not Jesus.

Medieval hospitals

Without science, a hospital can do nothing but provide food and comfort. Palliative care is certainly something, and let’s celebrate whatever comfort was provided by church-supported hospitals, but these medieval European institutions were little more than almshouses or places to die—think hospitals without the science.

Christian medicine did not advance past that of Galen, the Greek physician of 2nd century who wrote medical texts and whose theories dominated Western Christian medicine for over 1300 years. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance) did the physician Andreas Vesalius surpass Galen in the area of human anatomy.

Let’s also be cautious about how much credit Christianity gets rather than simply Christians. People planning a hospital in Europe 500 years ago would’ve been Christians, not because only Christians were motivated to build hospitals but because in Europe then, pretty much everyone was Christian.

Hospitals of that time in other regions of the world would’ve been built by people who reflected those societies—Arabs, Chinese, and so on, and India, Greece, and Rome were trying to systematize health care long before Christians.

Christianity’s poor attitude toward learning

Christianity had an uneasy relationship with any ideas that didn’t directly support the Church. The 1559 Index Librorum Prohibitorum listed books by 550 authors that were prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, though prior lists had prohibited books almost since the beginning of Christianity. The list is a Who’s Who of Western thought and included works by Sartre, Voltaire, Hugo, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Milton, Locke, and Pascal. The List was abolished only in 1966.

Dr. Peter Harrison said, “From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeen century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice.” For example, Augustine compared physical lust to “vain desire and curiosity . . . of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.” Martin Luther said, “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.”

This aversion to knowledge is ironic because when the Church was motivated, it could accomplish great things. My favorite example is the thirteenth-century explosion of innovative cathedrals that still stand today.

A modern look at Christianity’s medieval hospitals

We can get a picture of medieval Christian hospitals by looking at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity hospitals. They have minor comforts, and at best they are comfortable places to die. They’re not meant for treating disease and often lack even pain medication. This isn’t for lack of funds—some estimates claim that the charity took in $100 million per year, though we can only guess because the finances are secret.

One critique noted the mission’s “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.” Christopher Hitchens said, “[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.” Mother Teresa’s own philosophy confirms this: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

This is the opposite of the approach of modern hospitals.

Hospitals and medicine today

Let’s return to the Malcolm Muggeridge quote with which I started this post series: “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.”

Maybe the humanists were more focused on curing the problem than simply addressing the symptoms and having a good old pray. And let’s not be too hard on the Fabian Society. They founded the London School of Economics in 1895—not a medical institution but a worthwhile contribution to society nonetheless.

I’d like to give credit where it’s due. If the medieval Church catalyzed human compassion into hospitals that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, that’s great, but let’s not take that too far. The Church was largely in charge at that time. If the Church deserves praise for its hospitals, does it also deserve some condemnation for the social conditions that forced people into those hospitals? Did Christianity retard medical science with its anti-science attitude? We forget how long a road it was to reach our modern medical understanding. The book Bad Medicine argues that “until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.” Christianity might have set modern medical science back centuries.

How many diseases has faith cured? How many have faith healers like Benny Hinn cured?

Compare that to how many reasoning and evidence have cured. Smallpox killed 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. Today, zero. Thank you, science.

And aren’t Christian hospitals an admission of defeat? Hospitals should be redundant, even counterproductive, to Christians armed with prayer. The Bible makes bold claims about prayer curing the sick. For example, “The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick” (James 5:15). What does it say that a Catholic hospital cures illness using science like any other hospital?

Catholic hospital systems are today busy gobbling up independent hospitals in the United States. This appears to have nothing to do with providing improved health but rather to be an opportunity to impose Catholic moral attitudes in areas such as abortion and euthanasia. And note that “Catholic” hospitals are publicly funded, just like all the rest.

For religious hospitals, 46 percent of all revenues came from Medicaid or Medicare, 51 percent was patient revenue from other third-party payers, such as commercial insurers, and only 3 percent was classified as non-patient revenues.

Of those non-patient revenues, the majority came from county appropriations (31 percent) and income from investments (30 percent). Only 5 percent derived from unrestricted contributions, such as charitable donations from church members. So, at best, charitable contributions made up a tiny faction of religious hospitals’ operating revenues. (Source: “No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religiously-Sponsored Hospitals in the United States”)

The few billion dollars that religion spends on good works in the United States is insignificant compared to the nearly trillion dollars that we as a society spend on health care through Medicare and Medicaid.

I’ll conclude with an observation about Mother Teresa’s charity, a modern throwback to medieval Christian hospitals. Speaking about her stance against condoms, which replaced science with Catholic prudery and removed a barrier against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, one source said, “More people died as a result of dangerous Church beliefs than Mother Teresa could ever have hoped to save.”

Related posts:

• Christianity a Hospital, with Sinners the Patients? 8 Reasons This Fails.
• The Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science
• Why Does the Bible Have No Recipe for Soap?

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/6/16.)

Image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

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Atheist whiners like me are quick to point out the problems that religion causes within society—crimes become righteous acts when done in the name of God, believers attack the boundary between church and state, a believer who thinks that beliefs can be justified through faith rather than evidence opens their mind to parasitic mental baggage, and so on.

But let’s be fair. Christians will point out that their religion created universities and hospitals. Setting aside the negatives about religion, surely these institutions are a substantial addition to the Christian side of the ledger.

Now consider the pro-social motivations within Christianity versus those within the secular community. British author Malcolm Muggeridge said:

I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.

Original universities

We’ll look at universities in this post and hospitals next time.

Let’s consider the challenge that we have Christianity to thank for creating universities and nurturing them as they developed into the centers of education and research that they are today.

The oldest continuously operating university is the University of Bologna, Italy (1088), followed by universities at Oxford, England (1096), Salamanca, Spain (1134), and Cambridge, England (1209). Though there were institutions of higher learning in other old civilizations such as Greece, Byzantium, China, India, and the Muslim world, Wikipedia’s list excludes them because they are sufficiently different to make comparisons difficult, and evidence suggests that the seed that eventually grew into the modern university was the medieval European version, not similar institutions from other cultures.

Universities at Oxford and Paris began with the disciplines of theology, law, medicine, and the liberal arts. To see their unabashedly Christian environment, though, consider an example from several centuries later.

Cambridge in the time of Newton

The story of Isaac Newton illustrates how dissimilar medieval universities were from modern universities. Both Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth century required its fellows to be ordained Anglican priests. Newton was a Christian, but he didn’t accept the Trinity. This made him a heretic, which was no minor matter at that time. Only an exemption granted by the king in 1675 allowed Newton to accept the Lucasian chair at Cambridge without taking holy orders. Demanding that physics professors also be priests highlights the difference with universities today.

Don’t imagine that Christianity was a burden for Newton, however. Though he revolutionized science and has been called history’s greatest physicist (or even scientist), Newton devoted more time on theology than science and wrote more than two million words about religion. His Christian beliefs are proudly cited by many apologists.

What then was the result of all that theological work from such a great mind? Nothing. He might’ve spent that time playing solitaire for what it taught him about reality and the good it did for Humanity.

Christians also point to other important Christian scientists from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and into the Industrial Revolution, but they can’t show that these scientists’ religious beliefs drove their discoveries in any way. As far as science goes, they were just conforming to their environment (like drinking wine, wearing clothes, or anything else that Europeans at the time did).

Early American universities

Harvard (1636) was the first university in the United States. It was founded by Christians to train clergy. Most of the first universities in this country were founded the same way.

106 of the first 108 colleges were started on the Christian faith. By the close of 1860 there were 246 colleges in America. Seventeen of these were state institutions; almost every other one was founded by Christian denominations or by individuals who avowed a religious purpose.

The universities that Christians point to with pride are today guided with a very different principle than this declaration by Rev. Jonathan Dickinson, the first president of Princeton: “Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.” Christian universities with a Christian purpose are no gift to humanity, and today’s prestigious universities have turned their back on their original focus of creating clergy.

Modern universities

Changed though modern universities are, we can get a glimpse at the environment in medieval universities by looking at modern Christian colleges. Just like Cambridge in Newton’s day, Biola University demands that each undergraduate student “be a believer in the Christian faith (the applicant’s statement of faith will be articulated in the personal essay section of the application).” The PhD application for one discipline at Liberty University asks for church membership, an essay documenting the applicant’s “personal salvation experience,” and agreement with the school’s doctrinal statement. These universities aren’t interested in honest inquiry if they must create a safe space that protects their pre-determined conclusions.

Here is rule #2 from Harvard College’s original student rulebook:

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).

That is the house that Christianity built. It wasn’t Christianity but secular thinking that created the modern university that we’re proud of.

Continue with a discussion of Christianity’s role in creating hospitals here.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/22/16.)

Image from Pantelas, CC license

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