In 2014, I visited Hereford Cathedral in England and saw their mappa mundi (chart of the world). About 100 standalone mappae mundi remain, and this is the largest. It was made from a single calf skin, it’s a little over five feet tall, and it was made around 1300.

This is not the kind of map we’re used to. There is little attempt at accurate geography. This map wouldn’t serve an explorer or navigator, and its creators didn’t pretend that it would.

Using the theme of a world map, medieval cartographers embellished maps like this one to make them into something of an encyclopedia. Science was in its infancy, however, and the information was often bizarre.

Jabberwocky creatures?

Do you remember the “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking-Glass? It begins:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

Humpty Dumpty explains what a tove is: “‘Toves’ are something like badgers, they’re something like lizards, and they’re something like corkscrews. . . . Also they make their nests under sun-dials, also they live on cheese.”

Assuming our interest is the real world rather than Wonderland, the zoology we’re taught by the Mappa Mundi might as well have come from Humpty Dumpty. The drawing above shows monstrous people from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), and the Hereford Mappa Mundi includes some of these and more.

• Sciapods had one large foot that they used to shield themselves from the sun.
• The Blemmyes were warlike and had no head. Instead, their face was in their chest.
• The dog-headed men were the Cynocephali.
• Troglodites are “very swift; they live in caves, eat snakes and catch wild animals by jumping on them.”

The map also shows a number of mythical creatures, including a griffin and a salamander with wings. My favorite is the bonnacon, shown looking back over its shoulder at its own explosion of scalding diarrhea, which covers three acres. Even actual animals are misunderstood. The map reports, “The Lynx sees through walls and urinates a black stone.”

As with all mappae mundi, this one puts Jerusalem in the center. It locates places of important biblical events such as the Tower of Babel, the Garden of Eden, the route of the Exodus, and Sodom and Gomorrah.

Mythology and history are mixed without distinction. We see Jason’s Golden Fleece and the Labyrinth where Theseus killed the Minotaur, but we also see the camp of Alexander the Great.

Christianity was in charge for a millennium, and all I got was this lousy map

Christianity has been given a chance at understanding reality, and this is what it gave us. When Christianity was in charge, the world was populated by mystical creatures, we had little besides superstition to explain the caprices of nature, and natural disasters were signs of God’s anger.

Christianity’s goal isn’t to create the internet, GPS, airplanes, or antibiotics. It isn’t to improve life with warm clothes or safe water. It isn’t to eliminate diseases like smallpox or polio. It’s to convince people to believe in a story that has no evidence.

Admittedly, it’s not like Europeans had a lot of options. Christianity was the opium of the masses—better than nothing and not exceeded by much of anything in the Europe of 1300. True, eyeglasses had recently been invented and a remarkable century of cathedral building had passed, but science didn’t yet offer much of an alternative way of seeing reality.

Today, we have had a couple of centuries to give modern science a test drive, and we know that it delivers. Nevertheless, we still see Mappa Mundi thinking today. There are still religious leaders who long for the good old days of 1300.

The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God.
— William Lane Craig

“Q. What is the chief end of man?”
“A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
— the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (written in 1647 but in use today)

According to the Bible, our purpose—the reason we are here—is for God’s glory. In other words, our purpose is to praise God, worship him, to proclaim his greatness, and to accomplish his will. This is what glorifies him.
— Matt Slick, CARM

There is no calling greater than praising God. This is true not only for us, but surprisingly also for God himself, he being the greatest, to glory in anything else would be idolatry. Therefore, if the greatest thing God can do is give himself glory, and no created thing can be greater than God, the greatest thing we can do (our purpose, you might say) is to glory him.
— John Piper, Desiring God

And Christians say that it’s the atheists who lead pointless lives!

Christianity is like an arch

But if Christianity is just what you do if there’s no science, why is it still here? It doesn’t win when compared against science. It doesn’t even win when compared against other religions—Christianity has one view of the supernatural, and other religions have other views. Christianity offers nothing but claims without evidence (more here and here).

The metaphor of an arch illustrates this. To assemble an arch, first you build an arch-shaped scaffold. Next, lay the stones of the arch. Finally, remove the scaffold. Once the stones of the arch are in place, they support themselves and don’t need the scaffold.

That’s how religion works. Superstition in a world before science was the scaffold that supported the arch of religion. Science has now dismantled the scaffold of superstition, but it’s too late because the arch of religion has already calcified in place.

It’s the twenty-first century, and yet the guiding principles for Christians’ lives come from the fourteenth, back when the sun orbited the earth, disease had supernatural causes, and the world was populated by Sciapods, Blemmyes, and bonnacons.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/3/14.)

Photo credit: St. John’s College

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Half a century ago, anthropologist Colin Turnbull spent several years with Mbuti pygmies in eastern Congo. On one occasion, he took his Mbuti assistant to an overlook that offered a view of a distant plain where buffalo grazed. The Mbuti were familiar with buffalo, but they lived their lives in the forest and were not familiar with distance. The assistant pointed to the distant buffalo and asked what kind insects they were.

To him, distance was measured in meters, not kilometers, and he refused to believe that the bugs were actually huge animals.

(For you “Father Ted” fans, this was the point that Ted tried to make with dull-witted Dougal when he contrasted the plastic toy cows with cows in a field: “These are small, but the ones out there are far away.”)

Escape from Camp 14

A more debilitating example of being programmed by one’s environment is the story of a 26-year-old man who escaped in 2005 from a North Korean prison camp, then to China, then South Korea, and finally the United States. This was documented in the book Escape from Camp 14. He had been in the prison camp, not because he had committed a crime, but because he had been born there as the child of two inmates.

Though he made it to freedom, the story doesn’t have a particularly happy ending. Life had taught him since birth that survival meant husbanding precious energy by shirking work. Survival was immediate—steal food or shoes, avoid punishment, hide to rest from difficult manual labor. He adapted poorly in the West to the vaguer notion that if he didn’t arrive on time or didn’t complete his work that he might eventually lose his job.

Christian Programming

This is similar to Christians who seem programmed to not be able to see what, to atheists, seems obvious—for example, that the skepticism that Christians apply to other religions sinks theirs as well. Or that “the atheist worldview is hopeless,” even if true, is irrelevant to someone looking for the truth. Or that quoting the Bible does nothing to satisfy the atheist’s demand for evidence.

Remember the Mbuti assistant? He adjusted to the idea of distant animals and size constancy over a few days. And the Clergy Project—an intellectual halfway house for clergy who are losing or have lost the faith—shows that even the most-invested believers can choose reason over Christianity.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/18/14.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

I dabbled with animal tracking some years ago. I read a bit and hung out with some amateur trackers. It was a fascinating study.

Animal tracking

Like any art that takes years to master, tracking can look like magic to an outsider. Imagine following an experienced tracker through the woods. They might say, “A deer came through here, going in that direction. A mature doe. About two hours ago.” You might look at the uniform foliage and wonder how they did that. Could they be making it up, having a little fun with the tenderfoot?

But ask them to show you the clues, and they might point out the twisted leaves or broken twig that you missed. Maybe the clue was grains of sand on moss, the vaguest hint of a footstep. You’d never have noticed it—unless you knew where to look.

Hmm—maybe there’s something to this after all.

Initially, it looks like magic, but what puts this squarely in the domain of the real is when it delivers. The tracker says there’s a deer over there . . . and indeed, when you get there, there’s a deer. Or a raccoon or a bear or whatever you were tracking. Over and over, the tracker delivers. What cements this conclusion is when you put the effort in to become a decent tracker yourself.

God tracking

Like a forest animal, God is also elusive. And as with forest animals, God has trackers as well. These are Christians who assure you that they’ve experienced God, and you can reliably do the same. They can show you how to pray, how to act, and how to think. They can show you the Bible passages that back up their statements. They’re certain that, with some effort, you can track God as well as they can.

But do they deliver? There are lots of Christians in the world, but most are simply reflections of their environment. Few of them became Christians through anything analogous to tracking, where evidence led them to God.

Maybe the problem is that, like animal trackers, there are good ones and bad ones. That might excuse the poor results from some Christians. That might explain the Christians who handwave away bad results by making God an unfalsifiable hypothesis. For example, these Christians might say that an answered prayer proves God and that an unanswered prayer also proves God (here, God is obviously telling you that that request was inappropriate). Or that good things are God’s gifts to you and bad things are God testing you.

All right, but then where are the reliable God trackers? Show us the Christians who pray nontrivial requests that are reliably answered and who can show the rest of us how to do the same. Show us the Christians who, like the animal tracker, can convince any patient skeptic that God exists.

What makes God trackers’ poor results even more baffling is that, unlike a shy forest animal, God is supposedly eager to be known. And yet many atheists will tell of their final months as Christians, pleading with God to make his existence known. They clearly met God more than halfway, but God might as well have been nonexistent.

To muddy the waters further, there are schools of god trackers that teach incompatible rules of discovery. Some will say that speaking in tongues is what’s required. Others, that silent meditation is the way. Ask religious sages outside of Christianity in addition, and any pretense of a single, reliable route to God is gone.

The animal tracker silently points, and, as promised, there’s the deer. The Christian evangelist talks a good story but can’t deliver.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/15/14.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Do we live in a world with a god? It doesn’t look like it (read part 1 of this series here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world.

25. Because God is hidden

God knows that if we don’t understand and get on board with his plan, we will go to hell. He doesn’t want that, but rules are rules, right? So what does God do to give us the basic information we need to know that he simply exists?

Nothing.

Christians might point to basic facts in nature—happy things like sunsets and puppies—but they ignore unpleasant things like tornadoes and cholera. Sunsets and cholera point to the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or Satan) as much as they do the Christian God.

Or the Christians might quote Bible passages (“Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities . . . have been clearly seen . . . so that people are without excuse,” Romans 1:20), ignoring that the Bible is not binding on non-Christians.

A popular Christian response is to say that God’s making himself known would violate our free will. As C. S. Lewis said in Screwtape Letters, “[God] cannot ravish. He can only woo.”

Nonsense. This is one of the weakest Christian apologetic responses in a vast arsenal of substandard responses. Our request is an unapologetically reasonable one, for God to make his existence (and properties) known to all. That he doesn’t is just one more reason to think we’re not living in God World.

Some meta thoughts

What got me started on this long blog post series was a Christian commenter at an apologetics blog last December. He asked what evidence I’d need to be convinced that God exists. He said he needed to know what a convincing argument would look like so he could work on providing one.

I said that our positions were similar with respect to non-Christian religions. I don’t think that Scientology or Islam or Hinduism are correct, and neither does he. I played up that symmetry of our positions by saying that I’d probably need the same kind of argument that he would need to convert to a foreign supernatural worldview. An argument for Hinduism (say) with a high enough standard of evidence to convince him would get my attention as well. Give me that same quality of evidence for Christianity—as a minimum, I’d need that.

So the answer to his question is: tell me what you’d need. I’d probably need something like that.

He wasn’t satisfied (no, I couldn’t figure out why), so I made more good-faith attempts to comply with his request before I realized that he wasn’t making his request with the goal of it being satisfied. He was asking questions to avoid having to answer questions, attacking so he wouldn’t have to defend. He was sealioning (h/t Ignorant Amos), interrogating with the goal of asking questions to drive the antagonist away. And it worked.

But that got me thinking. The reason I’m an atheist is because of all the clues that we live in a non-God world. You want to know what I need to know that God exists? Show me that I live in a world where God doesn’t have the traits that he does.

Show me that we don’t live in a world where the God is omniscient but also needs (or tolerates) praise and worship (reason #3).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where Christians feel so insecure in their faith that they want to strongarm the government to support them (reason #7).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where all-powerful God is so fragile that he gets praise but can’t handle blame (reason #9).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where perfect God’s perfect message is so confusing that Christians need thick books with rationalizations for Bible difficulties (reason #15).

In short, show me that I don’t live in the world that I live in.

The apologist might respond that this approach makes atheists unconvinceable. That might be true, though not necessarily because of atheists’ closed-mindedness. It’s because there is so little intellectual reason to favor the Christian view of the world. To justify the atheist position, I offer the Earth vs. Gaia comparison to explain why skeptics are obliged to hold their skepticism (find that in the second half of this post).

And now, over 10,000 words later in this post series, I have 25 positive, pro-atheistic reasons that I can offer a Christian apologist to explain why I don’t think that God exists. Seen another way, these are the obstacles that prevent me from seeing this as God World. These are obstacles that the apologist must remove.

The Christian commenter who prompted me to collect these arguments won’t be satisfied with this list, because I’m sure he’s made his position unfalsifiable. However, my job is not to satisfy him, it’s to honestly follow reason and the evidence.

We have reached the promised 25 reasons! Let’s continue, but first, I’d like to slightly readjust this category of argument here.

Share your own reasons in the comments.

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Image via Retrogasm, CC license

Do we live in a world with a god? It doesn’t look like it (read part 1 of this series here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world.

23. Because of Shermer’s Law

Michael Shermer observed, “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

Suppose someone absorbed a false belief during childhood—a superstition, a bias, or even a worldview. As they got older, they discarded some of these beliefs that weren’t supported by good evidence, but they held on to some, particularly those beliefs integral to their self-image. And here’s the interesting part: because they’re much smarter as adults, they can put together a plausible defense for those false beliefs, even if they hold them for no better reason than that they were indoctrinated in them as a child.

This isn’t like defending a belief that you know is false—such as, just for fun, creating as compelling an argument as possible that the Earth is flat. Shermer’s Law applies to people defending a false belief for reasons that they believe. There is no self-deception going on. The alternative is to admit to themselves that they’ve believed this false belief for years or even a lifetime, but the subconscious protects one’s self-esteem and prevents this. More here.

If God existed, belief would be defended with evidence.

24. Because Christianity evolves

A palimpsest is a manuscript page with its ink scraped or washed off that was then reused. In some cases, the pen marks from the previous (older) document can still be read.

We see a metaphorical palimpsest with the Bible. Taken by itself, some passages make little sense. For example, what does it mean that the water for Noah’s flood came from “the springs of the great deep” and the “floodgates of the heavens”? We can put the pieces together if we hypothesize that the ancient mythology of Genesis was built on still-older cosmology from the Sumerians and other Mesopotamian civilizations.

Of course, seeing Yahweh worship as built on the religion of the guys down the street pretty much rules out any historical foundation, but the point here is how the biblical story has changed. For example, God evolves through the Bible. In his youth, he wasn’t distant and omni-everything, he was rather like Zeus. He walked through the Garden of Eden and spoke with Adam and Eve like an ordinary man. He visited Abraham. He spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11). He also wasn’t omniscient, and he needed scouts to check out the rumors about Sodom and Gomorrah that he heard. He regretted creating man before the flood.

By the time of the New Testament, things are remembered differently. “No one has seen God at any time,” (John 1:18). It tells us that God knows everything (1 John 3:20) and doesn’t change (James 1:17).

For an omniscient, unchanging god, he sure has changed a lot.

The most recent change to God is his retreat in the face of science. God used to cause lightning and drought, but not anymore—science provided a better explanation that could be tested. God used to cause cancer and plagues, but science explains them better, too. How about miraculous cures, then? Sorry—labeling a surprising remission as a medical miracle is wishful thinking. Only science has evidence that it can improve health outcomes or even eliminate disease. More here.

And what is “Christianity”? That, too, is a moving target. Christianity is like bacteria in a petri dish, and new denominations are now splitting off at a rate of two per day.

Consider Christianity in the early days and the long way it’s come. There have been 21 church councils, and the conclusions of each council were declared infallible (because magic, I guess). Then there are the schisms within the Christian church. The Protestant Reformation may come to mind as the most interesting, at least from the standpoint of Christians in the United States, but there have been dozens.

Nothing objective grounds the evolution of various doctrines and the declaring of some as orthodox and some as heresy. If you lived centuries ago, doing your best to conform to Christianity as it was preached in your church, but died believing what is now considered heresy, well, I guess it sucks to be you.

Even the canon (the set of books considered authoritative scripture) has been a moving target. It took until the Council of Rome (382) to get the canon more or less defined, but that list was amended within the Roman Catholic church by the Council of Trent (1545). Different Christian denominations still have different canons today. Since they disagree about the same canon, it’s obvious that no infallible hand guided its selection. Here again, there is nothing objective to ground it. The canon was a popularity contest, and theologians would argue for whatever set of books was in vogue in their part of the world.

If we lived in God world, it would look it. God’s a smart guy, and his message would be simple and unambiguous. More here.

Continued in part 13.

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Image via Retrogasm, CC license

The rich young ruler asked Jesus what he needed to do to earn eternal life. Jesus said that he must keep the commandments. He had done so his entire life, he told Jesus. The final requirement, Jesus said, was to “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Mark 10:21–2).

The man left in despair because he had to choose his wealth and power over Jesus.

What did Jesus demand?

Jesus passed Peter and Andrew fishing and told them to abandon their lives and follow him to become fishers of men. Jesus said to love your enemies and turn the other cheek. He said to not worry about impermanent treasure on earth “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20). He illustrated the importance of helping the needy by saying, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40).

This approach would be difficult to sustain for a lifetime. Paul showed a similar short-term focus when he said, “Were you a slave when you were called [to be a Christian]? Don’t let it trouble you. . . . Each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them” (1 Corinthians 7:21–4).

We also find indifference to slavery elsewhere in the epistles.

Slaves, be obedient in everything to your earthly masters (Colossians 3:22)

Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate but also to those who are harsh (1 Peter 2:18)

The end is nigh!

Anyone can stay on a diet if it only lasts a couple of weeks, and remaining a slave or always putting others’ needs ahead of yours might be tolerable if you only need to sustain it for a couple of years. Turning the other cheek isn’t too hard if the End is around the corner.

Jesus saw the End coming soon, and that is apparent when he speaks in apocalyptic terms. Note that “apocalyptic” can mean “having to do with the end times,” or it can refer to the specific movement called Apocalypticism. This was a movement popular in Judaism during the intertestamental period (that is, the period after the Old Testament and before the New). We see this in the New Testament when Jesus was asked (Matt. 24:3), “What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Apocalypticism taught that we live in a bad Age, controlled by a bad supernatural being but that a new Age with a good ruler would take charge shortly.

Apocalyptic books told their readers that the end was near. Daniel was one such book, and it said that the final seven-year period before the apocalypse (171–164 BCE) was already half over (more).

Jesus also spoke about an imminent end. He said, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matt. 24:34). A few verses earlier, Jesus identified “these things”: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, [and] the stars will fall from the sky.” Since that obviously didn’t happen, some apologists handwave away Jesus’s statement about the imminent end by saying that it referred to the destruction of the Temple or some other first-century calamity. No, we’re talking about a cosmic catastrophe that no one would miss.

What to do with Jesus’s life philosophy?

So how noble was Jesus? He apparently didn’t intend for his policies to be a lifelong philosophy if the end was just months or years away. And while Jesus said that those following him would suffer persecution in this life, he said in his analysis of the rich young ruler’s actions that those who left family and occupations for him would receive a hundred times as much in return in this life and they would receive eternal life.

Of course, I’d like to see in society more of the self-sacrifice and generosity that Jesus preached, but know that we’re applying it in a different way than Jesus anticipated.

Taking no thought for the morrow is no way to live. Nor is excessive generosity—Jesus said, “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well” (Matt. 5:40). Maybe that explains why he does a few healings but doesn’t bother to eliminate any disease. And why Paul tells slaves to just deal with it.

Jesus was speaking only to his peers. If we can mine useful wisdom from his story, that’s fine, but don’t pretend that Jesus addressed his message at us today.

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Image via Pilottage, CC license