You don’t often come across clever atheist memes from Christians, but for me this was an exception. Christian apologist Tom Gilson attacks the meme in the image above in an article published today: “Atheist Memes: Be Wise—Don’t Take the Bait!”

(I commented on another Gilson post just a month ago.)

How Christians are (apparently) supposed to respond

By “Don’t take the bait,” Gilson means:

[I wish] believers would refuse to let atheists bait them. Or if I may switch metaphors, that we’d refuse to play by atheists’ rules.

Huh? What atheist rules? You mean reason and evidence? Are atheists out of line for pointing out (apparently) ridiculous aspects in Christians’ supernatural views? Perhaps what he really wants is for Christians to avoid getting into the ring if they’re likely to get beaten.

But why avoid engaging atheists? Wouldn’t that be a chance to follow 1 Peter 3:15, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have”?

The article did contain the hint of one point that I agree with: that atheist/Christian discussions are rarely fruitful and usually frustrating. But that’s not where Gilson wants to go.

Questions Christians should ask

What Would Jesus Do? Apparently, ignore the challenge, assume the rightness of his position, and press forward. In Jesus fashion, Gilson wants to ask questions “to help [atheists] see that their question is built on faulty premises.”

Here are the questions (in italics) in Gilson’s Socratic Method to gently guide the foolish atheist to the Truth.

Tell me, please, what you think prayer is.

Here are the claims made for prayer:

Ask and you will receive (John).

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (Matthew).

Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours (Mark).

He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do (John).

I wonder where you got that information from?

From Jesus himself, if the Bible is to be believed.

Do you think that’s all there is to prayer? Has it occurred to you there might be more to it?

One answer: Yes, that’s it. If Jesus wanted to qualify the method, he would’ve done so. Surely, Christians must agree that the Holy Bible is a reliable source of the declarations of Jesus.

Another answer: Christians aren’t stupid, and they realize that “Ask and you will receive” isn’t how prayer actually works. So they imagine qualifications that for some reason weren’t included in the gospels—it was your fault for asking for something selfish or foolish, God has a better plan, God isn’t your genie, God did answer it (just not the way you wanted), and so on. I must repeat: while these are popular rationalizations within Christianity, that’s not how prayer is defined by Jesus.

The Christian who is disappointed after taking the gospels’ promises about prayer at face value is told that they need a mature faith. That is, put your faith first and reason second. With a clash between faith (an earnest prayer offered) and reason (an unanswered prayer tells you that the Bible’s claims are flawed), the “mature” Christian will whip up reasons to listen to faith and ignore reason.

Tell me what you understand of the character of Jesus, that would lead you to think he might be pulling a trick on us like the meme suggests?

You ask the wrong question. You don’t take Jesus in the gospel story as a given and then wonder why a prayer wasn’t answered. Instead, you approach this as you would any remarkable claim—say, cure cancer by changing your diet or invest your retirement savings in this new startup. You assume nothing up front. The Bible’s claims about prayer are easy to test, and disconfirming evidence follows quickly. It’s not that “Jesus” is playing a trick, it’s that the Bible’s supernatural claims are false, just like all the others.

If Christians were unbiased, they wouldn’t double down after prayer has been shown not to work but would question whether Christianity is worthy of their belief.

Why do you think Christians pray? Is it because the issue you’ve raised here has never occurred to us?

I know prayer doesn’t work, and so do Christians. The light switch works. The car works. The telephone works. Works is precisely what prayer doesn’t do.

Prayer provides intermittent rewards, and Christians are like pigeons in a Skinner box. Pigeons in cages who are fed food pellets at random times imagine that they somehow caused the food to appear. If they were preening or pecking or flapping when the food appeared, they try to conjure up more food with repetitions of that action. It becomes a superstition.

It’s not that Christian newbies tentatively try prayer, find that it works, and increasingly use it as a reliable tool. No—belief comes first, and prayer is what believers do. They get intermittent reinforcement through the odd coincidence or occasional wish that comes to pass.

Your view of Christians here seems to be that we’re mindless and stupid. Am I right to read you that way, or did I get that wrong?

No, that’s not my view. I’m stuck with the same imperfect brain that you are. I’m subject to the same biases that you are.

Most Christians (indeed, most religious believers) adopt the religion of their surroundings. They believe because they were taught to. The combination of being raised to believe false things and being a smart adult with a mature Bullshit Detector means the adult can either see that their supernatural beliefs are no better grounded than those in Hinduism or Buddhism, or they can double down and use their intelligence to justify their beliefs after the fact (Shermer’s Law). That avoids cognitive dissonance, the discomfort from holding two contradicting beliefs.

Back to your question, it makes sense that children accept the guidance of their community as they grow up. They’re not stupid for believing that the stove can be dangerous, you must be careful crossing the street, and Jesus knows everything. It’s just that society’s truths are wrong sometimes.

What about that meme?

True to his word, Gilson has avoided taking the bait and actually addressing the meme. No, you wouldn’t want to play the atheist’s game and actually respond to the question of why prayer is needed at all when Jesus/God already knows what you want and need.

Other posts on prayer:

• You Know the Door-Close Button in the Elevator? Prayer Is Like That.
• 2 Tragedies Produce 2 Very Different Approaches to Prayer
• How Does Prayer Work? And What Does that Say About God?
• Prayer Doesn’t Work as Advertised
• Televangelists Show Prayer is Useless

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The Kim Davis story is just one log on the fire of imagined Christian persecution. Here is what their environment tells conservative American Christians:

• Louisiana governor and presidential candidate Bobby Jindal said, “If you disagree with gay marriage, they put you in jail,” a perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of the Kim Davis fiasco.
•  “Christian convictions are under attack as never before,” Republican candidate Mike Huckabee said. “We are moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity.”
• Rick Santorum’s 2015 film, “One Generation Away,” reveals how long he fears we have until religious rights are swept away by the jackbooted liberals.
• God’s Not Dead, a film that imagines an America in which Christian students are persecuted by professors for their beliefs, was a surprise success in 2014 (my critique). Persecution porn is good business, and two sequels have followed (here, here).
• Ratio Christi promoted God’s Not Dead 2 with “If Christians don’t take a stand today, will we even have a choice tomorrow?”
• Pundits assure us that laws forcing pastors to conduct same-sex marriages are around the corner.
• Pat Robertson, always quick to add thoughtful insight to bring a topic into focus, said, “Christianity, the founding principle of this nation, is criminalized. You go to jail if you believe in God and stand fast for your beliefs against the onslaught of secular humanism.”
• Tom Gilson said, “Could it reach a tipping point, where it boils over into widespread, active anti-Christian violence? Yes. Most of the pieces are in place.”
• Rev. Robert Jeffress recently said, “If the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office, I’m afraid it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this nation from which this country will never heal.” Utah senator Mike Lee said something similar in 2018. And Rev. Jim Bakker in 2017.
• And doesn’t the War on Christmas seem to come earlier each year?

Christians are told that if they’re not seeing Christian persecution they must not be looking hard enough. The Bible makes this clear in a dozen places.

All who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (2 Timothy 3:12).

Do not be surprised, brethren, if the world hates you (1 John 3:13).

Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man (Luke 6:22).

Not only is persecution to be expected, it’s a blessed thing, and conservative leaders capitalize on this. They fan the flames of persecution to help rally (and shake money and votes out of) the faithful.

Atheist response

Most atheists and those who insist on secular government would be surprised to find themselves accused of being behind this persecution. The Persecuted may point to other countries where preaching the Bible’s anti-gay message is prohibited, but that’s not the United States. More to the point, in any situation where pastors were forbidden from preaching or Christians were jailed for being Christian, every atheist I know would rally to their side. (Ignoring the bluster to the contrary, Kim Davis wasn’t jailed for being Christian; she was jailed for not doing her job.)

Freedom of speech means nothing if it doesn’t protect offensive speech, and a society where Christians can’t freely speak is (or may soon be) a society where atheists also can’t freely speak.

Imagined persecution is kept alive by Christian excesses—a public school with a Jesus painting, a Bible quote on the wall, or coaches who force students to pray, for example. When they are sued to force them to stop, conservative Chicken Littles whine that the sky is falling, but there’s a difference between Christian rights and Christian excesses. When you have an unfair privilege and then that privilege is removed, you’re not being persecuted.

Why the persecution has traction

With atheists making clear that they want a secular public square where everyone can participate (yes, Christians, too), where’s the problem? Why doesn’t this defuse conservatives’ predictions of apocalypse, at least partially? I think the idea of persecution against Christians is a sticky idea because, if the roles were reversed, persecution is exactly what they’d do!

Let me illustrate with an anecdote from the book The Man Who Stayed Behind about Sidney Rittenberg, a U.S. soldier who helped the Chinese against the Japanese during World War II. He came to appreciate the struggle of the Communists and remained in China to help after the war was over.

During the Cultural Revolution, he worked as a translator in a press agency. Society was chaotic during this period, with little central control, and one faction within the organization took control. This faction acted in the traditional Maoist manner by stamping down all dissent. Rittenberg was part of an opposing group that said that one of the goals of the Cultural Revolution was openness, and that all voices should be heard.

Eventually, Rittenberg’s faction was able to seize control, but the story doesn’t have a happy ending. Despite Rittenberg’s efforts, his faction reverted to the only way they knew to rule, the same tactics they’d been fighting—totalitarianism. Openness was important when it suited them, but they in their turn shut it down when it became inconvenient.

Maybe it’s the different moral thinking that governs liberals and conservatives. Maybe Christianity’s totalitarian past reveals a theme that still animates Christians today. Efforts by some Christian leaders (or conservative politicians, who are often indistinguishable) to have things their way without compromise, reveal their view of how power should work. If atheists gained more power, they imagine, wouldn’t they do things the same way?

For a quantitative example of how secular America is the good guy, consider one of conservative Christians’ favorite demons, the ACLU. The ACLU (dedicated to preserving “the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”) has taken on two hundred religious legal cases in the last twenty years. In more than half of them, the ACLU took the side of Christians. The ACLU defends free speech and religious rights for all Americans, Christians included. Similarly, atheists want a secular public square for the benefit of everyone.

Lay Christians are surrounded by conservative leaders eager to amplify perceptions of persecution, but if those ordinary Christians would listen to us, they might find that secularists simply want a society that benefits everyone.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/11/15.)

Image credit: Wikimedia
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Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious? This concludes my response to the answer to this question from Christian apologist Tom Gilson. (Part 1 here.)

We’re in the middle of Gilson’s analysis of the speculation of atheist Lawrence Krauss* about the evidence he’d need to justify Christianity’s supernatural claims.

Who’s ready for an irrelevant puzzle??

We’re nearing the end of the article, still waiting for a direct, relevant answer to the question Gilson raised. What we get instead is yet another tangential puzzle:

So if God proved to Dr. Krauss that He exists, the famed physicist would still have to decide whether he wants God to exist.

No—go back. If God proved to Dr. Krauss that he exists, that would be huge. That would’ve actually addressed the question you set out to answer!

Let me say that again: Gilson imagines answering the question he introduced in the title of his article but, instead of considering the consequences of that remarkable result (or showing how it could happen), he tosses it aside to pick up a new argument, something by which to misdirect his audience. Again.

Gilson clearly can’t answer the question—if he had an answer, he would have given it.

He’s scuttled his own ship at this point, but let’s play along. Gilson challenges us: if we knew God exists, we’d “still have to decide whether [we want] God to exist.”

My answer: no, I don’t want God to exist if he’s the Bronze Age barbarian plainly described in the Old Testament, and yes, I do want God to exist if he’s actually a benevolent and wise god who wants the best for us and would make that happen. But why ask? How is our desire relevant? God either exists or he doesn’t. Gilson says he can resolve that issue, but he comes up empty. He wants to invent human shortcomings and focus on them when we’re simply asking a question that any Christian would find reasonable in any other context.

Once more, with feeling

Adding a final flourish to this turd of an argument, Gilson scolds his readers for not misunderstanding the problem as he does.

Getting the right answer to the question, “Does God exist?” isn’t the point. God won’t reduce Himself to being a mere true/false quiz answer.

Remember that Gilson’s article was written to answer the question, “Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious?” and, here again, he admits he can’t. He knows that’s embarrassing, so he uses tangents and bravado to pretend that the actual issue is elsewhere. He wants us to imagine that it’s demeaning to God (whom we’re assuming into existence for the purposes of this argument) when we demand evidence that he exists.

Huh? Let’s explore this ploy by asking, “Does Tom Gilson exist?” With this question, have I now reduced the significance of Gilson’s existence to “a mere true/false quiz answer” (whatever that means)? Have I demeaned or insulted him at all by asking and answering the question? If not, what does God have to whine about?

Gilson needs to rethink who his enemies are. Skeptics who ask reasonable questions are giving him and his claims the most respect they can. They assume that we’re all adults and that we agree that remarkable claims must be supported by excellent evidence. This is much better treatment than Gilson gets from those who dismiss Christianity with a laugh, giving him no chance to even make his case.

Gilson’s protecting God from demands for evidence is especially ridiculous when, according to the tales in his own book, God has no problem providing evidence. According to the stories, he supported Elijah in his public contest against the hundreds of priests of Baal, dramatically proving who actually existed. And Jesus did his healing miracles in part to provide evidence of his claims.

Not only do God and Jesus have no problem being tested, Christians delight in making evidence claims where possible—that the Shroud of Turin is tangible evidence of the resurrection, that the thousands of Bible manuscripts add to the Bible’s reliability, and so on. Evidence is apparently acceptable currency for God, making his hiddenness today unexplainable.

Conclusion

To call Gilson’s argument an argument is to call a rusty pile of spare parts a race car, but I don’t mean to single him out. This might be the best that he can do given the worthless hand he’s been dealt.

His argument does nothing to argue for God because he assumes God’s existence at the start. Either God’s absence is justified by his super-secret Plan, or it’s our fault for not perceiving it (our hard hearts blind us to the evidence, or something). But drop the God presupposition and follow the evidence, and the clues fit together easily. Natural explanations are sufficient, and God becomes unnecessary, just a solution looking for a problem.

We understand what good and bad relationships look like. Christians claim that a relationship with God is the best of all, but God’s role is unlike that in any healthy human relationship. When something goes wrong, it’s always your fault; you’re obliged to love God, but God has no obligation to earn that love; and God never stoops to show that he even exists. This is much like battered-woman syndrome, where the victim takes responsibility for any failings in the relationship, falls into learned helplessness, and fears for their safety if they do the wrong thing.

Gilson’s handwaving and subject changing make clear that he can’t answer his own question. “Where is the evidence for God?” is the question, and the answers suck. All this handwaving is just a “look—something shiny!” attempt to change the conversation away from the original one: why isn’t there good evidence for God? Why is God so hidden?

And to that, we’re given nothing.

More posts on the problem of divine hiddenness:

• Why is God Hidden?
• The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity

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Image from Alexander Krivitskiy, CC license
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Update: commenter Ubi Dubium of the Question With Boldness blog pointed out that the “Lawrence Krauss” quote used by Tom Gilson in part 1 actually came from their blog. To minimize confusion, I’ve left the Krauss reference in (but now you know the actual source).

Gilson’s error doesn’t diminish the value of the quote, but it should encourage him to be more careful in his future research. Or, given the unconvincing argument that he put together, maybe not.

♦

Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious? Christian apologist Tom Gilson attempted an answer, and this is the second part of my response. (I’ve responded to other articles by Tom Gilson on different topics here and here.)

At the end of part 1, Gilson considered a response by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss made a (seemingly) reasonable request for evidence, and Gilson had to step in to defend God, silent as always, to declare that that was somehow inappropriate.

Suppose God assented to your request for evidence—then what?

But Gilson is a reasonable guy. Krauss’s demand for evidence for remarkable claims is obviously out of line, but imagine that God gave him what he asked for anyway. Gilson says:

From what I’ve read of Krauss’s writings, he would admit he’d been wrong, and that God exists after all. Then from denying God, he would move immediately to resenting Him.

So our atheist would go from having no God belief to having a God belief. He wouldn’t be an atheist anymore. Isn’t that a really, really good thing from Gilson’s standpoint? Why not celebrate that? It’s because this would make Krauss’s demand for evidence reasonable and God unreasonable for not providing it, as common sense would dictate.

God just wants love

Gilson hurries on to his next complaint.

Bibles growing on crabapple trees [one example of the evidence Krauss asked for] wouldn’t make anyone love God or trust Him, which is what God really wants.

The issue is God’s hiddenness, so don’t change the subject. God’s providing evidence would resolve the Big Problem, which is God being indistinguishable from nonexistent. Stop apologizing for him. Stop putting words in his mouth. Does he exist? Then let him speak for himself.

And no, love isn’t what God wants. Read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. About God condescending to Job from the whirlwind. About the Flood. About God as the creator of hell. It’s like Gilson imagines God thinking about us when he looks at his “I wuv you THIS MUCH!” statuette on his desk. No—if God wants any reactions from us, it’s not love but some combination of fear, awe, adulation, and/or respect.

Gilson again:

He doesn’t just want people [to] believe that He is, but that He does good for those who seek Him (Heb. 11:6). He wants us to love Him.

Wow—that ship has sailed. Love is something you earn, and we would love God if he were love worthy. Love isn’t an intellectual project but follows from the conditions being right. Read the Old Testament, and you’ll discover that God is not worthy of our love.

Here again, you’re putting words in his mouth. The Yahweh of the Old Testament demanded genocide, supported slavery, and didn’t bother following his own moral code. He wouldn’t be distressed to discover that he wasn’t loved. Bronze Age storm gods and war gods didn’t care about such drivel. Feed them with food offerings and grovel appropriately, and they’re good.

A Christian correspondent once demanded to know what I’d need to accept that God exists. It was a more provocative question than I realized at first. I’d need to reshape reality to remove immovable obstacles to God belief. In response, I wrote a series of posts titled, “25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God,” which explored the things that would have to have been different in our reality for us to accept the God hypothesis. Similar reasoning could explore things that would have to be different in Christianity, the Bible, and reality for the Christian God to be lovable.

Is it possible that the God of the Old Testament actually does want us to love him and is worthy of that love? No, but suppose that’s the case. Suppose we’ve misjudged God by reading what he says about himself in his own book. Such a misperception can be corrected. We misjudge people all the time, perhaps because of a hasty first impression, and we’re accustomed to correcting that impression with new information. God, it’s your move.

Let’s return to God’s hiddenness, the point of Gilson’s article. Knowing that God exists would be the first step to Gilson’s goal of us loving him. Instead of changing the subject, Gilson should acknowledge and support our need for more evidence as the foundation of his goal to get us to (step 1) understand that God exists and (step 2) love him. He’s hurrying on to step 2, where he can argue that the lack of love is our fault and not God’s, and he’s hoping we don’t notice that he has nothing for step 1.

The reason, of course, is that good evidence for God’s existence doesn’t exist. If there were good evidence, he’d drop the misdirection and just point to it.

You wouldn’t want God to force his existence on you, would you?

Gilson moves on to another complaint.

God can only force so much on us. Yes, he could force the knowledge of His existence upon us just as the sun forces awareness of itself on us during the daytime, or as much as we’re compelled to believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4.

Yeah, lemme tellya—what I wouldn’t give to be able to turn back the clock to those blissful days before I knew that 2 + 2 = 4! And don’t get me started about what a burden it is to know that the sun exists.

God could make Dr. Krauss know His existence with the same complete certainty; He could “force assent” on him, as the philosophers say it, making it impossible for him not to believe.

Why bring in philosophers? Ordinary people have the superpower of believing in things for which there’s sufficient evidence. It’s not that tough.

Next, he again tries to dance away from the evidence question and return to what he thinks is his stronger point, the love question.

But [God] cannot force anyone to love Him. Knowledge can be pressed upon a person; love cannot.

Yeah, we’ve been over this. First, we have no good reason to believe the ridiculous supernatural claims of Christianity. And second, God is a dick. He gets what he deserves. Love happens for good reasons, and we don’t have those reasons with God.

Gilson approaches this another way. Notice his odd perspective in the second sentence:

God can’t force Krauss, or anyone else, for that matter, to love Him. Love must be freely offered, or it’s fake and ugly.

Gilson wants to see this from the person’s standpoint: “Love must be freely offered” by the person. This perspective allows Gilson to assign blame to the person if the result isn’t right. Of course, he goes into this topic unable to consider that God’s role might be imperfect. (Aren’t things so much easier when you assume your conclusion first? Here, Gilson assumes both that God exists and that God is without fault.)

Let’s recast that second sentence according to how love actually works in healthy human relationships. It goes from “Love must be freely offered” to “Love must be earned.” The burden goes from the person to God, where it should be. If love isn’t happening, the first thought isn’t to criticize the lover but to ask what’s wrong with the lovee.

Gilson is stealing a powerful word and redefining it in the context of battered-woman syndrome. God is a Bronze Age tyrant, and you must love him. If you don’t, the fault is yours.

Concluded in part 3.

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Image from WATARI, CC license
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Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious? This question may be Christianity’s biggest Achilles heel, and I applaud Christian apologists for frequently struggling with this gaping hole in their worldview. I just wish I could be as appreciative of their responses.

Tom Gilson is a Christian apologist and senior editor with The Stream, and he tackled this question. Let’s take a look at his justification of God’s hiddenness.

The problem (and a first try at a solution)

Gilson expresses the problem this way:

You say there are all these evidences for God, but I look at them, and every one of them can be interpreted another way. Why doesn’t God just prove Himself?

Yes, great question. I can imagine both Christians and non-Christians asking this.

The answer (more accurately, “answer”) is that “many people disbelieved in Jesus, even when they had proof before their eyes.” He gives the raising of Lazarus as an example.

Wow—where do you begin with something this naive? First, he’s pointing to a story in the New Testament, not a history book. Many questions hang over the reliability of our version of the New Testament. How much does it differ from the originals? We can’t say for sure (more on the problems with recreating the original New Testament here, here, here, and here). When the document holding miracle stories is suspect, so must be the stories.

And let’s assume that the New Testament originals did say that about Lazarus and other healings. So what? It’s just a story. Let me say that again because it’s easy to understand, central to the issue, and yet never brought up by the apologists: the gospel story is just a story, just words on paper. Did the gospels correctly document history? Was historical reliability even the authors’ goal? The apologist are responsible for arguing that it’s accurate history.

The Bible has loads of contradictions. Drop the idea that the New Testament is accurate journalism, and what we see is easily explained by it being just an imperfect human book, not the inerrant word of God. God is an unnecessary hypothesis.

The gospels were written decades after the events they claim to document. Few people from the time of Jesus would’ve been around to contradict them, and none would’ve been motivated to correct them. (This is the Naysayer Hypothesis, which claims that the gospel story is correct because, if it weren’t, there would’ve been naysayers who would’ve shut down the false story. I deflate that here.)

Finally, consider Gilson’s claim, “many people disbelieved in Jesus.” After Lazarus was raised (John 11), no one in the story said, “Wait, I know how that trick was done—Jesus had Lazarus up his sleeve the whole time!” No one in the story doubted that Lazarus was raised, so even the Bible says that Jesus performed a miracle and everyone understood it as such. The core of his claim is now gone. If he pointed to other stories besides Lazarus where people disbelieved, we’re back to it just being a story.

What can we reasonably demand of God?

Gilson points to cosmologist Lawrence Krauss as an atheist who has identified what he’d need to believe God existed. (I’m trusting Gilson for the quote, because he didn’t provide a valid link.) Krauss said:

[Suppose something happened] completely inconsistent with the operation of the universe as we know it, something impossible. . . . For instance, if the stars rearranged themselves to spell a different bible verse each night. Or if the tree in my front yard started growing KJV bibles instead of crabapples.

(As for me, I’d need more—crowdsourcing for starters. Even then, smart aliens is always a possible explanation.)

Update: Nope, that quote isn’t from Lawrence Krauss but from a 2016 post at the Question With Boldness blog! Thanks to Ubi Dubium, the author of that blog, for the correction. To minimize confusion I’ll continue to refer to Krauss as the author, since Gilson does.

In response to Krauss’s demand, Gilson said:

God isn’t going to do that. I know that, you know that, and Dr. Krauss has shielded himself quite well from having to worry about God proving Himself, because he knows God won’t do it, too.

Yes! You’re right—we do know that! God won’t show he exists in dramatic fashion through patterns in the stars, and he won’t show he exists in mundane fashion by simply hanging out with us so that his existence would be as obvious to everyone as the sun or a next-door neighbor.

We have more evidence for the existence of esoteric things like quarks and black holes than God. Praying, the official one-way communication route to God, works no better than chance, despite assurances from Jesus himself. This should tell you (and would tell you in any other situation) that God doesn’t exist.

Struggling to regain his footing, here is where your typical Christian apologist will bring up the need for having a mature faith. A mature faith means an outlook that understands that things in Christianity don’t work as promised, and yet you believe anyway. Someone with a mature faith has shed the constraints of evidence and just believes. Any doubts are nonexistent, suppressed, or examined only with the goal of finding out why they’re incorrect.

If this doesn’t sound like you, then your faith is immature, and that’s your fault. No, you’re not entitled to insist on evidence as you would in any other situation.

Continued in part 2.

More posts on faith:

• Faith, the Other F-Word
• How Reliable Is a Bridge Built on Faith?

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Image from Isaac Castillejos, CC license
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Let’s create the most compelling miracle story possible. Here’s one.

I met Jesus yesterday. At first, I didn’t believe who he was, but he turned my lawn furniture from steel into gold. I just got back from a dealer who assayed the furniture, confirmed that it was solid gold, and bought it. Over 200 pounds of gold at $1389 per ounce works out to be close to $4.5 million.

Guess who’s a believer now!

Compare this story against the gospels

Would you buy this miracle story? I’m sure I’ve convinced no one, and yet, as miracle stories go, this one is pretty compelling. It certainly beats the gospel story. Compare the two:

• Taking the claim at face value, the time from event to the first writing was one day, and the original witness documented the event. There was no chance for legendary accretion. Compare this to forty years and more of oral tradition with the gospels.
• The time from original document to our oldest complete copy is zero days. Compare this to almost 300 years for the gospels. That’s a lot of time for copyist hanky-panky. (More on the time gap for New Testament manuscripts here and here.)
• The cultural gulf to cross to understand my miracle claim is nonexistent—it’s written in modern English with a Western viewpoint. Compare this to our Greek copies of the gospels from around 350 CE, through which we must deduce the Jewish/Aramaic facts of the Jesus story from around 30 CE.
• This story claims to be an eyewitness account. The argument for the gospels being eyewitness accounts is very tenuous.
• It refers to Jesus, a well-known and widely accepted deity. Compare this to Christianity, which had to introduce Jesus as a new deity into a Jewish context. Ask a religious Jew today, and they will tell you that, no, Jesus wasn’t the messiah they were waiting for.

Have I convinced anyone in my gold lawn furniture story yet? If not, why is the gospel story more acceptable when I’ve beaten it on every point? It’s almost like evidence is just a smokescreen, and Christians believe for non-evidentiary reasons.

The Christian response

Let’s consider some responses from skeptical Christians. They might point to important elements of the gospel story: what about the terrified disciples who became confident after seeing Jesus, the conversions of former enemies Paul and James, or the empty tomb?

Okay, so you want a longer story? It’s hard to imagine that simply adding details and complications can make a story more believable, but I can give you that. Let’s suppose that the story were gospel-sized and included people who initially disbelieved but became convinced.

You say Jesus doesn’t make appearances like this anymore? Okay, make it some other deity—someone known or unknown. You pick.

You say that these claims are so recent that they demand evidence—photos, a check from the gold dealer, samples of the gold lawn furniture? Okay, then change the story to make the evidence inaccessible. Maybe now we imagine it taking place 200 years ago. It’s hard to imagine how making the story less verifiable makes it more credible, but I’m flexible. It’s just words on (virtual) paper—whatever additional objection you have, reshape the story to resolve the problem.

And yet if you were presented with this carefully sculpted story, you’d still be unconvinced. Why? What besides tradition or presuppositions of the rightness of the Christian position makes that more believable?

Example #2

Let’s approach this from another angle. Imagine that we’ve uncovered a cache of Chinese documents from 2000 years ago, rather like a Chinese Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. These documents claim miracles similar to those found in the gospels. Here are the remarkable facts of this find.

• These documents appear to be originals, not copies. They seem to date from the period about which they are writing. (That beats the gospels, for which this gap is 300 years.)
• They claim to be writing immediately after the events, and the paleographic evidence supports this claim. (For the gospels, this gap is 40 to 70 years.)
• They claim to be eyewitness accounts. Not only do the gospels not claim to be eyewitness accounts, not only is there evidence against such an idea (Matthew and Luke wouldn’t copy most of Mark,  some of it verbatim, if they were eyewitnesses), but the evidence for the eyewitness tradition very weak.
• Four different accounts in our Chinese documents give plausible independent attestation. The four gospels are not independent (the three synoptic gospels rehash similar material).
• There are no internal contradictions between the four accounts, nothing is unclear, and the message is unambiguous. Contrast that with the gospels, which disagree with each other and the rest of the Bible on such fundamental issues as whether or not salvation comes exclusively from faith, how long Jesus remained on earth after the resurrection, whether the resurrected Jesus had a spirit body or not, whether hell exists or not, and others.

Christian response #2

Here again, the claims of our imaginary find trounce every equivalent Christian claim. But our Christian skeptic might have plausible responses.

• These Chinese authors were lying, and they actually weren’t eyewitnesses. Maybe they even had an agenda. This is just words on paper, after all. Who knows if they’re true, especially if they’re unbelievable?
• The authors were confused, mistaken, or sloppy in their reporting. We can’t guarantee that an author from prescientific China recorded the facts without bias. Perhaps they were constrained by their worldview and unconsciously shoehorned what they saw to fit what they thought they ought to see.
• We can’t prove that the claims are wrong, but so what? That’s not where the burden lies. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this story simply doesn’t have sufficiently compelling evidence.
• Gee, I dunno. It’s an impressive story, but that’s all it is. This is implausible, unrepeatable evidence that can’t overturn what modern science tells us about how the world works.

This Christian skeptic sounds just like me. These are the same objections that I’d raise. So why not show this kind of skepticism for the Christian account?

The honest Christian must avoid the fallacy of special pleading—having a tough standard of evidence for historical claims from the other guy but a lower one for his own. “But you can’t ask for videos or newspaper accounts of events 2000 years ago” is true but irrelevant. It amounts to “I can’t provide adequate evidence, so you can’t hold that against me.”

Ah, but we do. In fact, we must.

Some Christians will point to Christianity’s popularity as evidence, but surely they can’t be saying that the #1 religion must be true. When the number of Muslims exceeds that of Christians, which is expected to happen at shortly after 2050, will they become a Muslim? Popularity doesn’t prove accuracy.

We need a consistently high bar of evidence for supernatural claims, both for foreign claims as well as those close to our heart.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/23/15.)

Image from Tax Credits, CC license

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