Jesus predicted the end of everything and said, “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34). Whoops—that didn’t happen. Jesus being wrong about this critical claim is a showstopper.

This is the conclusion of an analysis that began here.

Let’s turn to responses from Christian thinkers.

Maybe Jesus was limited by his human body?

Most Christians will tell you that Jesus had a human body but the mind of God. Can the Christian message be saved by arguing that Jesus was wrong about the end because he had a human mind?

No, this doesn’t salvage anything. Consider the options: Jesus could have a god mind (but then why would he make mistakes like this?), he could have a human mind (but then he would at best be a very good man, not divine), or his mind could be some combination (but where is the biblical support for Jesus’s mind being some fraction divine and perfect and the remainder human and imperfect?).

Perhaps they argue that Jesus was “truly God and truly man,” as defined in the Chalcedonian Creed. Apply that to his mind, and it’s 100% divine and 100% human. But now you’re back to explaining how a fully divine mind makes mistakes.

One Christian reaction

About “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened,” popular Christian apologist C. S. Lewis said, “It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.”

It gets worse. Just two verses later in Matthew we read, “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Lewis said about these two awkward statements, “The one exhibition of error and the one confession of ignorance grow side by side.”

Of course, Lewis didn’t let this little problem overcome his faith. Many Christians hold onto their faith with the help of rules like these:

Rule #1: Jesus is God.

Rule #2: If Jesus appears to not be God, see Rule #1.

Let the tap dancing begin: 5 responses

Lewis found some way to shield his faith from uncomfortable facts, but he did admit that Jesus’s prediction was, at least with the most obvious interpretation, wrong. And that’s a common view among scholars who have responded to it. But of course they have rationalizations to keep it at arm’s length.

We’ve considered the “Jesus had a human brain” response. Let’s continue the list. The first few explanations are from the NET Bible (the “Constable’s Notes” commentary on Matthew 24).

1. “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” refers to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

The problem here is that “all these things” includes the sun and moon fading away and the stars falling to earth. No, the destruction of a single city isn’t that.

2. “This generation will not pass away” means “the generation living during the end times will not pass away.”

Huh? This is basically a tautology. The generation that’s alive during the end times will exist during the end times? That’s not helpful.

3. “This generation” means the Jewish people.

The NET Bible itself rejects this one (see note for Matthew 24:34). It’s simply not a plausible interpretation of the Greek.

4. When the woman with the bleeding illness touched Jesus, he demanded, “Who touched me?” (discussed in part 1). How could the omniscient second person of the Trinity not know? One source explains this by arguing that Jesus “possesses the power of intentional self-limitation.”

Yeah, I’d stand in line for that superpower.

But let’s suppose Jesus knew that he was deliberately clouding his knowledge of humanity’s future. First, why would he do that? What would that accomplish? And second, why would he make a prediction about something that he knew he had limited his understanding of?

5. “Prophecies are, by their nature, conditional. A prophesied outcome may or may not transpire; it all depends on how the audience responds to the message of the prophet” (Pete Enns, italics in original).

There are certainly some prophecies that are not conditional. Matthew claimed that Jesus’s birth was miraculous and the fulfillment of a prophecy in Isaiah. No apologist who accepts the virgin birth claim would say that the prophecy in Isaiah was of the “it might happen, but maybe not” variety.

But he does have a point. One example: Jonah was sent to Nineveh to warn the inhabitants that their city would soon be destroyed because of their wickedness (Jonah 3). The king immediately accepted God’s judgement and commanded his people to fast, pray, and abandon their evil ways, and God relented.

Another example is Jeremiah 18:5–10 where God gives himself the right to declare that a nation will be destroyed but then change his mind if they repent and to declare a nation is to be supported but then change his mind if they do evil.

The first problem is that we’re faced with an all-knowing God changing his mind. How is this possible? But set that aside, and let’s return to Jesus’s failed prophecy. The claim here is that if God’s prophecy can fail because God changed his mind, the same is true for Jesus.

This author is largely echoing the argument in 2 Peter 3:3–9, which admits that the second coming is late but that God is doing humanity a favor by delaying judgment so that more can be brought into the fold.

Yet again, this doesn’t explain how an omniscient being like Jesus gets it wrong. If that’s what Jesus meant, he could’ve said that. Omniscient beings don’t change their minds based on new information, because there can be no new information for them.

Also, more delay means more people going to hell. Jesus said that few would find the narrow gate (Matthew 7:13–14). No, God does humanity no favors by making more people who will burn to hell.

Conclusion

Robert M. Price observed that when there is a mountain of Christian commentary about a verse, that’s usually evidence that it’s quite clear. The commentary isn’t there because the verse is confusing but because it’s embarrassing. We see that in the NET Bible’s commentary on Matt. 24:34, “This is one of the hardest verses in the gospels to interpret.”

(More on Christians’ seeking refuge by labelling verses “difficult” here.)

In the Christian explanations given above, they start with Rule #1: Jesus is God. And if you start with that assumption, the rationalizations above are worth considering.

But if you don’t start there and just follow the evidence, the problem is neatly dismissed by concluding that the gospels are just legendary stories. This is a natural explanation that is overwhelmingly more plausible than conjuring up the supernatural.

Continue with Silver-Bullet Argument #27.

.

Image from Retrogasm, CC license
.

Prophecies are a big deal in the Bible. For example, Matthew claims that Jesus’s virgin birth fulfilled a prophecy made in the book of Isaiah. (It didn’t, because there was no such prophecy in Isaiah.)

Showing that the Bible has an error is a pretty good argument against Christianity, but we have bigger fish to worry about. Jesus, the omniscient second person of the Trinity, predicted the end of the world in the lifetime of his audience. Two thousand years later, we can safely say that that prophecy failed. Jesus being wrong is a silver-bullet argument against Christianity.

(This is a continuation of a list that begins here.)

What Jesus predicted

Jesus said, “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34).

What are “all these things”? A few verses earlier, he described some of them: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

So (1) we’re talking about something that is truly apocalyptic if the contents of the universe are being rearranged or destroyed, and (2) this will happen within the lives of those hearing him.

We’d know if that happened. It didn’t, and Jesus was wrong.

Most Christians reject this obvious conclusion, which frees them to invent countless end-times predictions of their own (illustrated here).

Jesus was an Apocalyptic prophet. That’s not simply to say that he predicted the end. He did, but Apocalypticism was an entire worldview popular within Judaism at the time of Jesus. For example, Bart Ehrman argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are from a Jewish (not Christian) community, are full of Apocalyptic ideas. The book of Daniel (written in the 160s BCE) is another example of this genre.

Jesus wasn’t an outlier, the lone eccentric in Jerusalem holding a sign saying, “The end is nigh!” He shared a worldview that was widespread in his time. Another clue that Jesus had an Apocalyptic viewpoint is that predicting an imminent end was a common trait of this literature.

The failed prediction elsewhere in the New Testament

Not only did Jesus think the end was nigh, Paul did, too. He wrote:

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep [that is, died]. . . . For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him (1 Corinthians 15:20–23).

The firstfruits were those few fruits that ripened first that were given as an offering to Yahweh. Jesus here is the firstfruits. The full harvest (in this analogy, those who follow Jesus) would follow soon afterwards. Here again we see the imminence of the prediction.

This idea is mirrored in the raising of the dead immediately after Jesus’s resurrection:

The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people (Matthew 27:52–3).

Jesus had risen, as had some of the pious dead from Jerusalem, so the end was apparently around the corner. (More on the story of the rising of the dead here.)

We have another clue that Paul thought the end would come soon. Here, Paul was responding to a question within one of his congregations. The assumption had apparently been that Jesus would return and scoop up all worthy followers. But time was dragging on, and church members were dying. What about them? Will those who’ve died also get the reward that is due those who were still? Paul responds:

For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. (1 Thessalonians 4:15).

In other words, Jesus will take his own, even if some have died. The possibility that Jesus won’t return for millennia, and no one of this early church will still be alive, is obviously not an option.

What else didn’t Jesus know?

Jesus didn’t know a lot of things. But give the guy a break—it’s not like he was perfect.

• In a crowd of people, a woman with a bleeding problem touched Jesus’s robe and was healed (Mark 5:25–34). After the incident, “Jesus realized that power had gone out from him” and demanded to know who had touched him. Oddly, Jesus’s power is treated as a limited quantity, like energy in a battery. Doesn’t the Trinity have an infinite supply? But for our purposes, the more interesting question is why he had to ask who touched him. How could he not have known?
• Jesus said that the end would come soon, but he didn’t know the exact time: “About that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matt. 24:36).*
• Jesus promised that prayers are answered and that his followers would be able to do magic greater than he. Alas, it doesn’t work that way.
• Jesus was amazed at the centurion’s faith (Luke 7:9) and amazed at the lack of faith in his hometown of Nazareth (Mark 6:5–6). Omniscient being aren’t supposed to be amazed.

Concluded with a look at how Christian apologists respond in part 2.

.
*Jesus said: “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matt. 24:36). Paul said something similar: “For you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2).

But let us not forget the Harold Camping Maneuver (made famous in 2011 when Brother Camping’s predicted date for the Rapture came and went without incident). Camping points out that Paul continues: “But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness” (1 Thess. 5:4–5).

In other words, ordinary people will be surprised by the end, but the chosen will not.

Unfortunately, Harold Camping was completely surprised. So much for the Bible being correct about the supernatural. But perhaps Camping could take comfort knowing that he had much company in his failure.

.

Image from Retrogasm, CC license

Who’s ready for more facepalming? It’s time for more stupid arguments Christians should avoid. For the first post in this series, go to Part 1.

Stupid Argument #32: Providing good evidence is hard!

Look—it’s not like we have photo, video, or audio recordings of the major events recorded in the gospels. You’ve got to make reasonable demands.

I agree that providing credible, high-quality evidence from the first century is hard, but so what? Are you saying that because it’s hard, I should drop my demand for good evidence?

Think of how that would sound if coming from another source. Suppose a Muslim argued that Mohammed’s Night Journey to heaven was historically true, but they didn’t have security cameras in Jerusalem then so we must accept Muslim tradition and holy books.

Or: doing a thorough search of Loch Ness is difficult, so we must accept the anecdotal evidence of Nessie’s existence.

Or: we can’t go back in time to see Xenu’s empire, so we must accept the Scientology mythology.

It doesn’t work that way. We demand evidence to back up the claims. If you make a remarkable claim, you must provide substantial evidence to back it up. The burden of proof is on the person claiming the supernatural, and if that burden isn’t met, we are obliged to reject the claim.

Stupid Argument #33: Hypothetical God Fallacy

“Just because something might seem pointless to us doesn’t mean God can’t have a morally justified reason for it. . . . The mere fact that I can’t figure out why God allows some of the things to happen that he does . . . is not warrant for the conclusion that he’s got no such reasons.”

(This quote is from a Christian argument that I analyze here.)

I don’t declare that God doesn’t exist or that, if he does, he couldn’t have good reasons for the nonsense in the world. But who starts by wondering about God’s actions rather than first demonstrating that God exists? Who, I mean, but someone with an agenda?

Starting with a presumption of God has it backwards. An honest seeker of the truth will follow the evidence, and that’s the power of the Problem of Evil, which this Christian apologist is trying to refute. The Problem of Evil looks at the problems in the world and considers the properties claimed for the Christian god—all-loving, omniscient, omnipotent. Does this look like a world with such a god?

The Christian response, “Ah, yes, but let’s imagine that God exists. Now how do things look??” is completely backwards. (More here.)

Stupid Argument #34: But I can’t reject Christianity now—I’ve invested so much!

If I rejected Christianity now, I’d be admitting that I’d backed the wrong horse for all these years. And what would that do to my reputation in my community?

This is the sunk-cost fallacy, which snares many financial investors. Suppose you invested in a stock that now is worth half what you paid for it. Consider two options. If an objective evaluation says that the stock should now rise substantially in value, you would be smart to hold the stock and maybe even invest more.

But what do you do if that optimistic evaluation is not justified? Instead of cutting their losses, some people buy more. They might rationalize that by buying more at this lower price, they’ve lowered their average purchase price. This is true but irrelevant; an investment should be considered on its own. If you wouldn’t invest if you didn’t own the stock, you shouldn’t double down when you do. Colloquially, we say that this is “throwing good money after bad.”

We see this in many other situations. Lyndon Johnson committed additional troops to the war in Vietnam after it was clear that it was unwinnable. The Concorde supersonic jet lost money, but the British and French governments continued to back it because they had already invested so much.

There are religious believers who don’t want to make an ego-less evaluation of the truth of their beliefs. They sacrifice intellectual integrity to soothe their sense of self-worth. For example, the Millerites sold everything to make themselves right with Jesus, who was to return to earth on October 22, 1844. After this prediction failed, many realized that they’d made a foolish mistake and walked away. But others in the group doubled down, ignoring this dramatic evidence that their beliefs were wrong and rationalized ways that they could still be right. Today’s Seventh-day Adventist Church is one outgrowth of the Great Disappointment of 1844.

A good illustration of how hard we’ll try to justify or recoup our sunk costs is the dollar auction. It’s a game in which both the auction winner and the second-place player must pay their final bids.

Two or more players are bidding to win a dollar. Let’s suppose that player #1 opens the bidding with 5¢. That sounds smart—if that bidder wins, their profit is 95¢. Now player #2 ups the bid to 10¢—that also seems to be a good move since a win at this stage will give a 90¢ profit. But here’s the problem: if player #1 lets it go at this point, he’s out 5¢, since as the second-place player, he’d be obliged to pay his final bid. So #1 bids 15¢.

And so it goes, with each one topping the other by 5¢, until player #2 bids $1. Game over? Not quite, since #1 would still have to pay his last bid of 95¢. Better to bid $1.05 and be down by only 5¢ than admit defeat and be down 95¢.

The game encourages irrational decisions, and the rational choice may be to avoid playing the game. This contains parallels with religion, where the smart decision for the doubting Christian may be to cut their losses and just get out.

To be continued.

.

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

Image from thrp, CC license

.

In the Jonah story, Jonah doesn’t like the task God assigned for him. He flees in a boat, and then a terrible storm comes up. The sailors draw lots (which is portrayed in the Bible as a reliable way of discovering the truth) and discover that Jonah is the problem, which Jonah admits. They throw cargo overboard but that’s not enough. The storm finally stops only when they throw Jonah over.

God caused the storm. The Bible even admits that God causes all evil:

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, Jehovah, do all these things (Isaiah 45:7).

Is it not from the mouth of El Elyon that both calamities and good things come? (Lamentations 3:38)

This idea that disasters are caused by God continued in the medieval period. With the Black Death, which killed roughly half of Europe’s population from 1346–53, the Christian continent again thought that only God’s rage could explain the pandemic. The best way to protect oneself from this terrible disease was penitential activity such as public and bloody flagellation (see the painting above), pious commemoration of the dead, and persecution of those groups that God was probably angry at such as the poor, beggars, or minorities like Catalans or Jews.

Our approach to evil today

Things are different today, with modern science to tell us what causes storms and disease.

Or maybe not. When it suits them, some apologists and politicians will dismiss the science and fall back on superstition. Remember what Jerry Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s television show two days after the 9/11 attack:

The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”

Remember Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005? God was obviously mad about something, but what was it? Maybe racism (Louis Farrakhan’s conclusion) or abortion (Pat Robertson) or America’s insufficient support for Israel (an Israeli rabbi). Or, of course, the gays.

Remember the 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed 300,000? It was the result of that pact they made with the devil. Just ask Pat Robertson—he’ll tell you.

Remember the 2013–15 Ebola epidemic in West Africa that killed over 10,000 people? Reverend Ron Baity of North Carolina said that God was furious about same-sex marriage:

If you think for one skinny minute, God is going to stand idly by and allow [same-sex marriage] to go forward without repercussions, you better back up and rethink this situation. . . . You think Ebola is bad now, just wait.

(For even more examples of everything that’s the gays’ fault, check out this list from The Advocate.)

Remember when Texas governor Rick Perry prayed for an end to the 2011 drought in Texas? A California State Assembly member in 2015 thought that God was similarly involved with her state’s severe drought, and she made clear what God was livid about this time: abortion.

Remember John Hagee’s groundless fulminating about the “Four Blood Moons”?

A little reason

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson both backed away from their hysterical 9/11 slander. The first major rain after Rick Perry’s 3-day public Days of Prayer came six months later. And Hagee ignored the failure of his Four Blood Moons hysteria and launched off into flogging some other groundless catastrophe.

Do these Christians know their own Bible so poorly that they’ve forgotten this verse?

The prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. (Deuteronomy 18:20)

(Maybe it’s not these Christian readers of tea leaves that have forgotten the Bible but their own timid followers who keep giving them attention and money.)

We know what causes hurricanes, lunar eclipses, disease, and droughts. We understand terrorism. We know that homosexuality is natural. God isn’t part of the equation. Pointing to God as the puppet master behind the world’s disasters is an empty claim. It’s like pointing to Halley’s Comet as the harbinger for the victory of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

It’s hard to believe that it’s the twenty-first century, and Christian leaders still make these claims. Or that their fans accept the claims and then come back for more after they fail. And what does it say about their God that they can easily imagine that he’s behind all the natural evil in the world? What catastrophe could possibly happen that God’s followers wouldn’t bounce back and praise him for his fabulousness?

I can do little but suggest that that’s what our imperfect brains can do, that we’re all susceptible, and that we must be continuously on guard. And to offer this bit of insight from author and professor Kathryn Gin Lum:

This instinct [to fear an angry God] is also why conservative evangelicals care so deeply about same-sex marriage and abortion even though they don’t engage in those activities themselves. It’s why people who are anti-big-government want the government to intervene in affairs that don’t seem to have that much to do with their own lives. This is why some evangelicals take a laissez-faire view of the financial markets but a highly interventional view of the government’s role in policing others’ individual choices.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/22/15.)

Image credit: Wikimedia, public domain

.

And we’re back with yet more stupid arguments! I’m sure it’s a tossup whether there are more atheists here comparing this list against their own mental list or more Christians carefully taking notes on what to avoid.

Right?

This is a continuation of a list that begins here.

Stupid Argument #29: America is a Christian nation

Remember what the Founding Founders said: “All men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” The government back then wasn’t shy about declaring national days of thanksgiving or fasting. And look at their personal letters—they’re full of God references.

If you simply mean by “America is a Christian nation” that most Americans today are Christian, that’s true. But it’s obviously false to imagine Christianity as somehow part of the country’s governance.

That quote is from the Declaration of Independence, the document that also said, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from . . .” no, not God, but “the consent of the governed.” You’ll find deism there but not Christianity. But this is irrelevant. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t govern the United States, the Constitution does. And it’s one hundred percent secular. Indeed, it was the world’s first secular constitution, one of America’s greatest examples to the world.

The founding fathers could say whatever they wanted to in their letters. They could believe in God, pray to Jesus, or imagine getting strength from Christianity. None of that matters when an honest reading of the Constitution makes clear that America is defined to be secular, not Christian. If they had wanted explicit references to Yahweh or Jesus, they would have put them in. Reinterpreting history is popular among faux historians like David Barton, but the preferences of a gullible public aren’t the best guide to truth.

Stupid Argument #30: Atheists just had bad father figures

Psychology professor Paul Vitz makes a powerful case that the absence of a good father creates atheists. A poor relationship with one’s earthly father creates a poor relationship with the heavenly Father. Atheists are driven by psychology, not reason.

I analyze this in more detail, though it doesn’t deserve much. Vitz’s analysis is little more than cherry picking, with examples of famous Christians who had good fathers or father figures and atheists who had bad ones.

And, of course, you can find opposite examples. To take one, here’s what C. S. Lewis said about his father: “God forgive me, I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work, the brightest jewel in the week.”

Imagine compiling the opposite list of atheists with good fathers and Christians with poor ones with the justification that Christians’ poor family life drew them to an (imaginary) celestial father to replace the flawed one they actually had. I’m sure Vitz would complain that it was a biased selection. And it would be, just like his own version.

Stupid Argument #31: Excusing Christian scandals

No one’s perfect. Don’t forget that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

No scandal with a Christian leader can be so great that they lose all of their flock. Consider rehabilitated televangelists like Jim Bakker (five years in prison for fraud), Peter Popoff (shown by James Randi to be using tricks to simulate miraculous knowledge), Ted Haggard (sex), and Jimmy Swaggart (sex). They’re all back preachin’ the Good News.

Or the scandals of pedophile priests and the Catholic leadership that hid and enabled their crimes.

Or the false prophecies of Harold Camping and Ronald Weinland (who both committed the sin of being precise and therefore testable) or Ray Comfort and John Hagee (whose baggy prophecies could fit just about any events).

If “don’t worry about that—they’re only human” applies when Christian leaders do bad things, why doesn’t it apply when they do good things? If God’s actions are visible through Christian leaders when you’re pleased with them, why not when you’re disappointed? Why would God not protect them from error—or if he did, why did he stop? Things are explained much better by dropping the God assumption.

Jonny Scaramanga of the “Leaving Fundamentalism” blog noted the double standard. Ex-addicts were quick to give Jesus the glory for their recovery. But “as soon as that televangelist fell from grace, it was all ‘Well, we all have a sin nature.’ Well, which one is it? Do we have a sin nature or are we transformed by the saving grace of the Holy Spirit?”

Continue on to part 10.

See the complete list of arguments here.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/15/15.)

Image from NeilsPhotography, CC license

.

Christian apologists are in a difficult spot. Their “God did it!” explanation is a solution looking for a problem because naturalistic explanations are largely sufficient. What’s left that’s provably unexplainable through natural mechanisms? God might have been the best explanation for lightning, drought, disease, and other riddles within nature, but science now gives us far more reliable answers. What role is left for God?

God World vs. natural world

Imagine that everything in the universe is natural, and there is no supernatural. What traits of this world are now unexplained for which there had been satisfying answers from Christianity? That is, what have we lost by dropping the God hypothesis?

Of course, no one can disprove “God did it” as an explanation for anything, but, without evidence, that explanation is unfalsifiable and therefore useless. By explaining anything, it explains nothing. If the claim is that God did something, we need evidence.

We can probably all agree that God doesn’t create lightning, but then what does God do? Any Christian apologist bold enough to pretend to read the tea leaves only identifies God’s actions after the fact. For example, an earthquake hits Haiti, and Pat Robertson sees God’s hand in the disaster and interprets its meaning, but it never happens the other way around. These Christian pundits never accurately predict anything interesting. They never accurately say, “Now that the Gay Tolerance bill is law, expect a devastating hurricane to hit Washington DC within 24 hours.”

Christians must clearly describe what a God World and a Non-God World would look like. Otherwise, how do we know which one we’re in? Apologists admit through their actions that these two worlds would be identical. They claim that we live in God World, but at every opportunity for God to make his existence clear—regrowing amputations, reliably answering prayer, or having a religion with a unified and unambiguous message (rather than tens of thousands of denominations)—they must step in to explain away the fact that God is a no-show. They’re left pointing to surprising events, disasters, or powerful emotional experiences, imagining the hand of God despite the fact that, here too, natural explanations are sufficient.

Look at what keeps apologists busy. They’re coaching the flock through seasons of doubt, explaining why “Ask and you shall receive” doesn’t really mean that, or rationalizing away the Problem of Evil. This is exactly what they’d do if we lived in Non-God World. God is functionally nonexistent—even if he exists, he might as well not, given his impact on our reality. The God that apologists have created is insulated from attack by being indistinguishable from nothing.

Christianity vs. science

Christianity offers answers to life’s Big Questions: Why are we here? What’s our purpose? What happens after we die? And so on.

The first problem is that Christianity’s supernatural claims are based on no good evidence. Second, Christianity’s answers sometimes conflict with answers from other religions (which are also based on no good evidence). Why believe Christianity’s answers over those of any other religion or indeed believe them at all? Go to another part of the world with another predominant religion, and the answers to the Big Questions change. Supernatural answers are as impermanent as local customs like fashion or manners. This problem is illustrated by the Map of World Religions.

Another problem is that science can also answer life’s Big Questions. It’s just that Christians don’t like those answers.

Christian apologists may strike back by demanding the answer to some current scientific puzzle—what preceded the Big Bang or a complete theory of abiogenesis, for example. They might say, “Science can’t explain where life came from, but Christianity can!”

Anyone can answer a scientific puzzle, but only science provides answers that are worth listening to. Unanswered questions don’t embarrass science, they focus future research. Christianity imagines it’s adding to the conversation when it gives science the questions that science discovered, just like when Christianity gives humanity the morality that came from humanity.

Worldviews

Christian apologist Frank Turek in Stealing from God (2015) argues that the default worldview is Christianity.

Atheists are using aspects of reality to argue against God that wouldn’t exist if atheism were true. In other words, when atheists give arguments for their atheistic worldview, they are stealing from a theistic worldview to make their case.

No, actually Christians steal from the naturalistic worldview. When they cross the street or phone the police or use their computer, they’re relying on evidence and science. The naturalistic worldview—that the only factors affecting our lives are natural ones, not magic or the supernatural—is the default view. Christianity is an extra, optional layer. Very few Christians pray for their children to get well rather than taking them to a hospital, ignore traffic as they cross the street with the confidence that God will protect them, or learn French using prayer. Christians have to admit that evidence is pretty useful.

I’ve responded to an earlier online version of Turek’s argument.

Final thoughts

Oxford-math-professor-turned-Christian-apologist John Lennox recently published a book that asks, Can Science Explain Everything? (2019). The more relevant question is: can Christianity explain anything? As a social construct, Christianity might have value, but as an explanation of reality, it is useless. Science has replaced it. Its supernatural claims are groundless.

Some arguments are mic-drop arguments. You deliver the argument, and you can just drop the microphone and walk away. This is one such argument—the God hypothesis answers no questions and so is superfluous.

See this from another angle with this recipe for boiling water: put a pot of water on a hot stove, then take a magic spoon and give the water a single stir, clockwise. Wait for the water to boil.

Christianity is the magic spoon. It reliably explains nothing, and a naturalistic worldview is sufficient.

.

Image from Donald Giannatti, CC license
.