Simplicity: the Trait Missing from Christianity

Last updated on: September 4, 2018 at 4:48 pm By Bob Seidensticker

The Bible in English has nearly a million words. Have you ever stopped to marvel at that? Why did God need so much space?

Let’s explore the idea that not only is this a surprisingly large number of words, but it’s a clue that Christianity is false. Why would a perfect god need a million words? Couldn’t he have gotten his message across at least as clearly (or more clearly) with a tenth as many words? Or even a thousandth as many?

Just a page or two of instructions would be enough to teach you how to be a vegan. That’s a lifestyle with strict rules—why would it be any more difficult for a perfect god to convey its message in the same space?

For comparison, the U. S. Constitution was written by humans and has defined the government for several centuries. It has just 4500 words. The U. N. Declaration of Human Rights has less than 1800 words. The Humanist Manifesto, 800.

The constitution of a god

Pare away the fluff and think about what a perfect god’s constitution might convey.

Personal details about the supernatural: the number of gods, name(s), and relationship to each other if more than one.
The fundamentals of non-obvious morality: slavery is good/bad, abortion is okay/forbidden, vegetarianism is mandatory/optional, and so on
The afterlife: what happens, if anything, when people die? If there’s a supernatural realm that we should know about, how does it fit with and interact with our own?
The god(s) purpose for each person. What, if anything, should we be doing to satisfy them?
What, if anything, we should know about the future

This addresses world religions’ primary concerns—morality, purpose, how to please the god(s), and the afterlife—though this is obviously just a guess. A real god might have a different list.

One additional point is why you should believe. This must be somewhere, and it might be conveyed through personal appearances or demonstrations. Could the evidence be included in this constitution? Before you say that it’s impossible to put something convincing in so short a document, don’t underestimate the capabilities of a god a trillion times smarter than any person.

Regardless of how it does it, this religion must have a mechanism for convincing everyone with evidence and argument that it is correct, unlike the myriad manmade ones.

Compare to the Bible

Categorize every verse in the Bible, and then sieve out everything that wouldn’t fit into the categories above. What would be lost?

The history of the Israelites and then the Jews and then the Christians. This does nothing to help understand god’s constitution.
Examples of God’s actions. With many questions raised but not answered by the Bible, believers scour every verse for clues.
Just so stories. For example: did you ever wonder why we hate the Moabites and Ammonites? Because they’re the result of Lot having sex with his own daughters—yuck! Or: ever wonder why this place is named this? Here’s the story behind that name.
Ideas borrowed from other cultures. For example: the Sumerian cosmology of water above and below the earth, a world-destroying flood, and a dying-and-rising god.
Contradictions. When not guided by a perfect hand, the more you write about your religion, the more contradictions you introduce.
An evolving message. Changes to the message from a god who doesn’t change can be embarrassing. For example: we used to sacrifice animals but not anymore; we used to have a works-based view of God but now it’s faith based; Jesus didn’t exist before, but now he’s mandatory.

The Bible is just a rambling story that goes on and on. It was written by people and looks like it. There’s no hint of any supernatural guidance.

Take the book of Revelation as an example, a psychotic, Dalí-esque horror show. There are 24 elders around the throne of God, with the four living creatures. There’s a scroll with seven seals and different events with the breaking of each. There’s the seven trumpets and different disasters with the sounding of each. There’s the seven bowls with different disasters with the pouring of each. There are four horsemen and seven spiritual figures including a dragon and the Beast. Each punishment is lovingly detailed, as the novella drones on and on.

Or look at the practice of Christianity today. Why is there a Bible Answer Man—shouldn’t God’s message be so clear that there would be no questions to answer? Why are there 45,000 denominations of Christianity today, and why were there radically different versions of Christianity such as the Marcionites and Gnostics in the early days? Why did Paul have to create Christianity—shouldn’t Jesus have done that? Jesus wrote nothing.

The more involved the story, the more you need to explain. Did Jesus have a human body or a spirit body? Why does God do immoral things in the Old Testament? Why isn’t God’s existence obvious? Why does God care just about the Israelites but later decide to embrace the whole world? Why doesn’t the world look like it was created by an omniscient and loving god? And what the heck is the Trinity?

The church convened 21 ecumenical councils to try to make sense of this. The discipline of systematic theology tries to tie up all the loose ends, but why would the study of a perfect god need this?

Rebuttal

The Christian rebuttal is obvious, and I’ve already gotten a lot of this in response to a recent post: How do you know that this is what a god would do? How do you know that a perfect god would even want us to clearly understand his plan?

This is true and irrelevant. I’m given the claim that the Christian god exists, and I must evaluate it. I can’t peek at the answer in the back of the book, and I can’t give up and get the answer. The buck stops here. It seems to me that a god that chose to make itself known would do so simply and unambiguously. There would be a clear statement of his plan, like the constitution above. Contrast that with the Bible—the entire story about all the stuff God did and how he got angry and then the Israelites did something stupid and then Jesus saved the day is unnecessary. Maybe it’s inspiring and maybe it’s great literature, but the entire Israelite blog is not needed to serve a perfect god’s goal.

Another possible response: But the core of Christianity can be distilled into a tract! If you insist on a brief version, there it is.

But this merely hides the problems. The Bible is still there, and it being a composite of manmade books, picked from an even larger set of candidates, means that the contradictions, tangential history, and unanswered questions remain.

I’m arguing for a different genre. A perfect god would itself give us a simple, unambiguous constitution. We have instead a book written by and focused on the people rather than the god, which is strong evidence that there is no actual god behind it.

Living forever with God is the endgame,
so what’s the point of creating this elaborate,
blink-of-an-eye, soul-filtering machine called Planet Earth,
where beings have temporary bodies made of meat?
WTF?! Just create everyone in “Heaven” to begin with,
and none of the rest of this horror-show ever has to happen.
— commenter Kingasaurus

Inspiration: John de Lancie at the 2016 Reason Rally said that religion for him fails the KISS test, which inspired this post.

Image credit: olivier bareau, flickr, CC

The Great Debate: Theism vs. Naturalism. Where Does the Evidence Point? (2 of 2)

Last updated on: November 22, 2016 at 11:10 am By Bob Seidensticker

What would the world look like if theism or Christianity were true? And what would it look like if naturalism were true—that is, that nature alone explains what we see?

We’re comparing these two worldviews to see which one matches reality best. (Part 1 here.)

Morality

Theism predicts that religion’s moral teachings would be timeless and progressive. The wisdom of heaven might appear crazy to us simple humans, but time after time we’d follow it and discover that it did indeed improve society.

The Bible declares that Christians don’t sin: “No one who is born of God practices sin” (1 John 3:9; see also 3:6, 5:18). With the Christian church run mostly by sinless Christians, the Church’s morality should likewise far outshine that of other institutions.

In fact, Christianity is conservative, not progressive. It is always late to the party, following society after it embraces a new moral outlook. Christianity must be conservative because it is built on the premise that it’s already got things figured out. New ideas—abolition of slavery, democracy, civil rights for all—catch the church off guard. Sometimes the church is mobilized on some of these issues (William Wilberforce against slavery or Martin Luther King for civil rights, for example), but why are these positions not plainly in the Bible? Why did it take close to 2000 years to get on the right side of change? In these examples, the church was merely a tool used by change makers, not the instigator of change.

Christians were on both sides of these moral issues, as is true for any modern moral issue such as same-sex marriage, gay rights, abortion, or euthanasia. Pick the right Bible verses, and God can be used like a puppet and made to support either position. Pick other verses, and God admits to a long list of moral crimes.

As for the church clearly being a morally superior institution, the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal is merely the most recent moral lapse. You can make the bad-apples argument to sacrifice the individuals for the benefit of the institution, but that simply makes a lie of Bible’s claim that Christians don’t sin. The church becomes yet another large club that occasionally abuses power with no special claims of moral superiority over any other—so much for the guiding hand of God.

The Bible has a lot to answer for. The Old Testament in particular supports moral positions—genocide, slavery, polygamy, and human sacrifice, for starters—that modern society has long rejected. No, not all moral positions in the Bible are timeless.

Christianity declares that morality is grounded exclusively in its god, but then it has a hard time explaining why other cultures without Christian dominance, both current and historical, seem to understand morality just fine. The Problem of Evil—the existence of gratuitous evil despite God taking a loving hand in our lives—also argues against Christianity.

Mind

Theism predicts a mind independent of the body that persists as a soul after the body dies.

In fact, “mind” is just what brains do. The mind’s capability is tied to the capabilities of the brain, and that changes as someone grows from child to mature adult to elderly adult. That capability changes due to physical causes such as being tired, sleepy, stressed, hungry, drunk, or drugged. Damage the brain with dementia or physical injury and you damage the mind, as the story of Phineas Gage illustrates. The fortunes of the mind parallel those of the brain, and no evidence supports an unembodied mind.

Not only do we have a natural explanation for the mind, but physics shows that there is no room for a supernatural soul. There is yet more physics to learn, but we know enough about the physics of our world to know that no as-yet-to-be-found quantum particles could hold or convey the soul.

Growth of religion

Theism predicts that heaven would favor the correct religion.

Christianity did thrive, but that wasn’t because of God’s beneficence but Rome’s. Christianity was just one religion among many until the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 CE made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Naturalism predicts that religions struggle, rise, and fall and that none will have any supernatural success.

More

If Christianity were true, a single set of moral truths would be held universally, rather than morality being a cultural phenomenon.

If Christianity were true, believers wouldn’t use evidence-based reasoning everywhere in life but then switch to faith for evaluating the claims of their religion.

If Christianity were true, faith healers would go to hospitals and reliably produce healings that science verifies.

If Christianity were true, televangelists wouldn’t waste time asking for money from viewers but would get their expenses covered by praying to God themselves.

If Christianity were true, Christian’s testable prophecies about our imminent end wouldn’t invariably be wrong. (Hilariously bad examples: John Hagee and Harold Camping.)

If Christianity were true, its Bible wouldn’t have contradictions, claims of prophecy wouldn’t suck, and it wouldn’t be wrong about the power of prayer.

If Christianity were true, we wouldn’t see in it mythological themes shared by other contemporary religions of that part of the world like the Combat Myth, virgin birth stories, and dying and rising gods.

If Christianity were true, everyone would understand the same simple and unambiguous message from God.

Christian response

The typical Christian response is, “But God could have perfectly good reasons that make sense to him that you simply can’t imagine!” And that’s true. This tsunami of examples in which the naturalistic explanation beats theism and Christianity doesn’t prove that Christianity is false; it simply concludes that that’s the way to bet. This argument fails by making the Hypothetical God Fallacy.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll in his debate against William Lane Craig said, “It’s not hard to come up with ex post facto justifications for why God would’ve done it that way. Why is it not hard? Because theism is not well defined.”

A couple of days ago, Christian blogger John Mark Reynolds wrote about a time when life was discouraging. After prayer, he saw a rainbow over his house. He said, “Was it chance? It was not. It was God. Would that convince an atheist? Of course it would not, but then it was not a sign for the atheist. God was speaking through nature to me.”

Nope. If it wouldn’t convince an atheist, it shouldn’t convince you. If evidence were important, this being nothing more than a nice coincidence according to anyone outside your religion is the clue that you’ve deluded yourself. And that you dismiss that and embrace your interpretation as reality makes clear that you don’t care about evidence to support your belief.

This is the sign of an invented worldview.

Science doesn’t know everything.
Religion doesn’t know anything.
— Aron Ra

Image credit: Christine Schmidt, flickr, CC

Election 2016: One Small Christian Conclusion Has Sweeping Political Consequences

Last updated on: January 10, 2018 at 8:49 am By Bob Seidensticker

It starts small. Pro-life voters say that a fetus is a baby. When it’s at eight months and is viable on its own, it’s a baby. When it’s at five months and the mother can first feel the fetus moving, it’s a baby. When it’s at three months, with tiny eyes and fingers, it’s a baby.

When it’s a single fertilized human egg cell at day one, just 100 microns across, it’s not much of a baby, but who can begrudge a couple calling it whatever they want?

So let’s say it’s a “baby” right back to day one. Babies must be protected. Everyone has a right to safety, and babies are vulnerable and deserve particular attention. Our natural instincts to protect cute big-eyed things come into play—who could complain about that?

The simplest moral logic would demand that these babies be protected, and it isn’t surprising that millions of American voters are single issue voters, declaring that it’s a baby right back to day one. Does Donald Trump say that he’s going to fight to protect those lives and Hillary Clinton not? With Supreme Court appointments at stake, that makes it easy—you vote for Donald Trump, even if you must hold your nose to do so.

That first step is like a drop of rain falling at the crest of a mountain range that is carried downhill by a stream and then a river. If it falls a little this way, it flows westward. A little that way, and it flows eastward. A small change makes a big difference.

And the small change in our example of pregnancy is that definition of “baby.” You say that it’s a “baby” on day one, and you flow inevitably to cute, then vulnerable, then protective instincts, then society must protect it, then government must protect it, … and then voting for Trump.

But maybe you don’t need to start with that. Let’s make a small change. What if you said that as a newborn in your arms at the hospital, that’s a baby. The five-month-old fetus that begins to kick? It’s not really a baby if it hasn’t developed enough to be viable on its own. The three-month-old fetus with eyes and fingers? That’s even less of a baby—it’s just two inches long, not very baby-like, and nowhere near able to live on its own.

On the left is a three-month-old fetus. Think that that’s an adorable baby that must be protected by law? Guess again. On the right is a five-week-old embryo that’s less than half-an-inch long and looks like that thing from the Alien movies.

You see the progression. When you go back in time from a three-trillion-cell newborn to a single cell, it becomes less of a baby as you regress along that spectrum. When you go from a newborn with arms and legs, eyes and ears, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, and all the rest back to where there isn’t even a single cell of any of these, it becomes less of a baby. (More here.)

Gestational development is a spectrum. It’s a baby when it’s done; it’s not a baby when it starts.

A pregnant woman can call her fetus anything she wants. The problem is when someone wants to apply their own definition of “baby” onto the rest of the country by law. You say the cell is a baby? You say you’d never have an abortion? That’s fine, just don’t impose that on the rest of us.

And consider the political consequences when you demand that a single cell is a “baby.”

I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion
that that makes you pro-life.
In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking …
if all you want is a child born but not a child fed,
not a child educated, not a child housed.
And why would I think that you don’t?
Because you don’t want any tax money to go there.
That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.
We need a much broader conversation
on what the morality of pro-life is.
— Sister Joan Chittister

Image credit: CollieSr, flickr, CC

Book Excerpt: “Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life Without Religion”

Last updated on: October 10, 2016 at 10:55 pm By Bob Seidensticker

So much of apologetics and counterapologetics involves men that I’m delighted to right the balance slightly with this guest post by Karen Garst, author of the just-released book Women Beyond Belief. Here is an excerpt of the story of one of the women she writes about.

Ceal Wright is a young woman who arrives on campus eager to learn and experience what university life has to offer. She meets the man of her dreams and falls in love. But this young man is not a Jehovah’s Witness like she is. A “friend” turns her in to the church because she has slept with a non-believer. A tribunal of three church elders is convened.

From the book:

“You must consider him a tool of Satan.”

My face refused to remain neutral as my ears took in this sentence. Did I hear him right? With an expression of incredulity and confusion, I looked back at the elder who’d just spoken and the two others on the panel with him, and replied, “Uh, I don’t see how that’s possible. I don’t think you understand—I love him. This isn’t just a crush—I love him—I wouldn’t be with just anybody. Jehovah is a God of love and this is love, so I don’t see how that is even remotely connected to Satan.”

“Satan is using him to draw you away from Jehovah and is disguising himself as this boy,” another elder chimed in.

Oh silly young Ceal, you hadn’t realized that you’d fallen in love with the devil.

The fluorescent lights became unbearably bright as I felt my body stiffen, preparing for my reply. I stood my ground and continued to refute their offensive correlation of my love with the devil. Trying to reason and explain my logical feelings (as opposing as that sounds) to this tribunal of elders was futile though. In this Church females were not given equal voice and stature; therefore, for me to come into the room prepared for anything but groveling for forgiveness was tantamount to disrespect. I had naïvely presumed they would treat me with the respect and openness that I had been raised to believe I deserved, and in the heat of that moment, I did not recognize the danger I was in by voicing my thoughts. After a solid two hours of back-and-forth, they left the room for an agonizing ninety minutes to deliberate, during which time I sat alone in the back room of the Kingdom Hall feeling confused, abandoned, and pissed.

Believing still that God was real and his Holy Spirit was directing the men outside, I was convinced by my conditioning that my case would be dealt with justly—after all, this was my first offense in my twenty-three years of life. Finally, they filed into the small room and sat back down.

They all read a scripture that they had personally chosen for me and then informed me that they were leaning toward disfellowshipping me—the highest punishment available to them—but by the grace of one elder who had known me for years, they decided to grant me a reprieve to think upon their counsel and come back repentant.

And in that instant, my faith shattered.

Ceal Wright is one of 22 women who tell their personal stories of leaving religion. Karen L. Garst has compiled these essays into Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life without Religion, which is available online and in bookstores.

Dr. Garst became incensed when the U. S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby in 2014. This decision said that because of its religious views, Hobby Lobby, a craft store, would not be obligated to follow the dictates of the Affordable Care Act and provide certain forms of birth control to its employees. Would the fight for women’s reproductive rights never end? Once again, religion has influenced the laws of our land. Politicians cite their religion in supporting restrictions on abortion, banning funding for Planned Parenthood, and a host of other issues that are against women.

Dr. Garst wants to add a focus on women and the role this mythology has played in the culture of many countries to denigrate and subordinate women. Religion is the last cultural barrier to gender equality. More and more women atheists are speaking out. And as we all know, if women leave the churches, they will collapse.

She has received support with reviews by Richard Dawkins, Valerie Tarico, Peter Boghossian, Sikivu Hutchinson and other atheist authors.

I encourage you to check out Dr. Garst’s blog at faithlessfeminist.com and order her book, Women Beyond Belief. At this writing, the book is Amazon’s #1 new release in Atheism.

We don’t worship cancer or hunger or a hurricane,
we don’t worship many things that have power to devastate us,
nor do we appeal for mercy to these things,
because we have an idea they’re not directing themselves at us….
Inside a snow globe no one can hear you scream,
and the person stops shaking it when they’re done being amused.
It’s pure delusion to think there’s a relationship going on here.
— commenter Kodie

Does the Bible Reveal Objective Truth About Homosexuality?

Last updated on: September 23, 2016 at 10:52 pm By Bob Seidensticker

Say you’ve got Christians on two sides of an issue. Maybe some say that abortion is okay and others say that it is not. Some say that capital punishment is okay and others that it’s not. Some say that same-sex marriage is okay and others that it’s not.

What do we make of this? Both sides use the same Bible. Is the Bible then ambiguous?

Before you conclude that it is, consider this exchange during an interview with Greg Koukl (Unbelievable podcast for 7/13/13). A caller asked about ambiguity in the Bible and gave as an example the then-current debate about gay Anglican clergy in civil partnerships becoming bishops. (In the beginning of 2013, the church decided to allow it as long as they remained celibate, though celibacy isn’t demanded of straight priests.) There were honest, well-intentioned Christians in the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches arguing both sides of the debate using the same Bible.

Koukl’s answer

Koukl used arithmetic as a counterexample. Suppose one person argued that 2 + 2 = 4, while another said that 2 + 2 = 9. The honesty and decency of the participants is irrelevant—there are objective truths here, and these two antagonists can’t both be right.

I agree. But are there also objective truths in the gay bishop case? I see none, and I see no evidence that the Bible’s position on this matter is clear.

Koukl says that, like checking which sum is correct, we must look to the Bible to see what it says.

In this regard, there is very little ambiguity as to what the bible teaches … between the Genesis passage, the Leviticus passage, and the Romans passage, there is a very, very clear statement about homosexuality.

That so? Let’s follow up on those Bible references to see what this “clear statement” is.

Old Testament passages against homosexuality?

The Genesis passage is 19:4–9, the Sodom and Gomorrah story. But remove the presupposition that the lesson is “homosexuality is bad” and see what crime actually is. It’s rape. For the details, see my posts here and here. This informs us about the topic at hand—which, let’s remember, is a committed gay couple—not at all.

Strike one.

There are two Leviticus passages.

You must not have sexual intercourse with a male as one has sexual intercourse with a woman; it is an abomination (Leviticus 18:22).

If a man has sexual intercourse with a male as one has sexual intercourse with a woman, the two of them have committed an abomination. They must be put to death; their blood guilt is on themselves (Lev. 20:13).

“Abomination”? Ouch—that sounds pretty harsh. But look at the other things that are labeled in Leviticus as abominations—eating forbidden food, sacrificing blemished animals, performing divination, women wearing men’s clothes, and so on. Clearly, these are ritual abominations, out of date tribal customs. These are bad by definition, not because they actually hurt anyone.

Christians don’t care about these ancient customs today. The logic is that the sacrifice of Jesus got rid of them (see, for example, Hebrews 7:11–12). All right, but let’s be consistent. Get rid of them. Don’t sift through them to keep a few that you’re nostalgic for.

I’ve also written in detail about this here.

Notice also something else that we dismiss today: the punishment for homosexuality, which is death. How can you dismiss the punishment but cling to the crime? If one is abhorrent, what does that say about the other? Without a punishment there is no crime.

Strike two.

New Testament passages against homosexuality?

Finally, here is the Romans passage.

Because of [mankind’s sinful desires], God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. (Rom. 1:26–7)

Notice the verbs here: God “gave them over,” women “exchanged,” men “abandoned.” Paul imagines going from the natural (men with women) to the unnatural. That is, he imagines straight people engaging in homosexual sex. Yes, that is weird. And, strike three, that has no bearing on what we’re talking about: homosexuals doing what comes naturally.

As a postscript on our analysis of the Romans passage, is Paul declaring his position or the position that he rejects? Don M Burrows argues that this passage was a common negative view held by Jews of Gentiles, and, as an apostle to the Gentiles, Paul is refuting this argument.

Koukl’s conclusion

After referring to these passages, which do not address the question at hand, Koukl wraps up:

The evidence is there to come to a clear conclusion about what the spiritual sums are with regard to homosexuality. That people who are dedicated, who pray, who are honest, who have a relationship with God don’t agree on that, does not mean that the text is unclear, and what one needs to do in those kinds of things is go back to the text. This is not a case where God has been hidden in the information.

I’m a little surprised to say this, but I agree with Koukl here. There is no ambiguity. It’s clear both what is said in the Bible and what is not said. These passages say nothing about the case of gay Anglican clergy that is the topic.

This is a case where a lot of people have changed their mind under public pressure.

Social improvement comes from society. We used to chop off hands for stealing, we used to burn witches, and we used to enslave people. It’s not thanks to the Bible (which doesn’t change) but to society (which does) that we’ve put that behind us. “Public pressure” isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and we must weigh the consensus of our community to test our own moral opinions.

The problem is as Koukl identifies it: people reading into the Bible what they want it to say. And Koukl is a great example. He takes the passages from Genesis (that argues that rape is bad), Leviticus (made irrelevant thanks to his savior’s sacrifice), and Romans (which talks about some irrelevant orgy in which straight people dabble with homosexual sex) and concludes that the Bible makes plain that loving gay relationships can’t be embraced by the church.

For people like Koukl, the Bible is a sock puppet that they can make say whatever they want.

To call homosexuality admissible as long it doesn’t include sex
is like the sound of one hand clapping.
— Y.A. Warren

(I recommend a resource that has been helpful with this post: “Homosexuality and the Bible” by Rev. Walter Wink.)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/22/13.)

Photo credit: Chick tracts

Why a Single Human Cell is Not a Baby

Last updated on: September 10, 2016 at 5:51 pm By Bob Seidensticker

[Mother Teresa] preached that poverty was a gift from God.
And she believed that women
should not be given control over the reproductive cycle.
Mother Teresa spent her whole life making sure that
the one cure for poverty we know is sound was not implemented.
— Christopher Hitchens

Illogic of the Garden of Eden Story (2 of 2)

Last updated on: August 26, 2016 at 12:13 pm By Bob Seidensticker

Let’s look closer at the details of the Garden of Eden story (part 1 here). As history—or even a coherent story—it doesn’t stand up.

Omniscient God isn’t very knowledgeable when he goes into the Garden and doesn’t know where Adam and Eve are (Gen. 3:9). Omnibenevolent God isn’t very benevolent when it comes to delivering their punishment. This is another parallel with the Akkadian Atra-Hasis epic—those gods didn’t know everything and weren’t always benevolent either. As one commenter noted, “God’s powers can’t be that amazing if you can get them from a fruit tree.”
As crimes go, this one was a misdemeanor. Admittedly, Adam and Eve did disobey God, but how about just a scolding? This was the first bad act in their lives. Isn’t the trans-generational punishment out of proportion to the crime?
Before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they didn’t know good and evil. Why blame them for doing something wrong when they couldn’t know it was wrong? It’s like punishing a two-year old for a moral infraction. In fact, Adam and Eve were likely not two years old themselves.
If Man understands good and evil today (we possess the knowledge of the Tree), why are we so bad at figuring out good and evil? Okay, let’s assume that selfishness and other base desires muddy the waters. Let’s assume that someone could know the right course of action but choose the easy or pleasurable over the right. Shouldn’t we all at least agree on what’s good? How could post-apple humans be divided on abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and capital punishment?
How can getting wisdom be a bad thing? Solomon was celebrated for being the wisest man on earth (1 Kings 4:30). The Bible makes clear that wisdom is good: “How much better to get wisdom than gold, to get insight rather than silver!” (Prov. 16:16).
Could an omniscient God have been surprised at the result of the Garden of Eden experiment? And if he knew the outcome, why go through the charade? (It’s almost like this is all just mythology … ?)
Tertullian said of women, “You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law.” But read the story—Adam was with her the whole time. Why give Eve extra blame?
Why are their descendants cursed for all time—women with labor pain and men with difficult toil—when the descendants didn’t do anything? We see the same thinking in the second commandment (“I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me”), which probably also came from the J source. It’s nice that God lightens up in later centuries (see Deuteronomy 24:16 or Jeremiah 31:30), though this doesn’t put God’s unchanging moral law in a good light.

At this point in the Bible, Jesus wasn’t even a twinkle in God’s eye, but it is worth noting that while Jesus provides forgiveness of one’s sins, Christians are still punished for Eve’s sin.

This is an aside, but it is curious that Christian Creationists who object to humans evolving from bacteria have no problem with God making Adam from dust (Gen. 2:7). Indeed, the word Adam comes from the Hebrew adamah (dust).

The NET Bible comment on Gen. 2:17 (“for when you eat from [the Tree,] you will surely die”) makes clear that this phrase means that death will happen almost immediately, as if the fruit were coated with poison. But, of course, the serpent was right, and they don’t die. Indeed, Adam lives to be 930 years old.

Apologists respond that this instead means that they will die eventually, that this introduced physical death and they would no longer be immortal. But the text makes clear that they never were immortal. They were driven from the Garden so they wouldn’t eat from the Tree of Life. That’s what makes you immortal.

Apologists try again: they say that “die” meant spiritual death. First off, that’s not what the text says. Second, the animals were driven from the Garden as well, so there’s no reason to imagine that their death was any different than Man’s. If the animals’ death was physical and not spiritual, what’s to argue that Man’s is any different?

Christian theologians tell us that the serpent was Satan in disguise, but (yet again) that’s not what the text tells us. It was a serpent, not Satan, and that’s what Jews today will tell you. And why is the serpent the bad guy? He told the truth! He was the Old Testament’s Prometheus.

I’ll close with comments from Ricky Gervais, who imagined the snake having this to say in response to God’s punishment that he crawl on his belly for the rest of his life.

“But I already.… Oh no! Oh yeah, you’ve done me, yeah. No, we’re even now. I asked for that. Okay, cheers. Oh—how does this work again? Owww—I’m being punished. This is rubbish—I wish I could fly, like normal.”

And the Son of God died;
it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.
And He was buried, and rose again;
the fact is certain, because it is impossible.
— Tertullian

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/26/13.)

Image credit: Wikimedia

The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity (2 of 3)

Last updated on: August 12, 2016 at 5:55 pm By Bob Seidensticker

The Problem of Divine Hiddenness, where God wants a relationship with us and knows that hell awaits those who don’t know him (but refuses to make his existence obvious), is the most powerful argument against Christianity.

We’ll continue our critique of a rebuttal of this argument by apologist Greg Koukl. (In part 1 we analyzed the free will response and the “Yeah, but that wouldn’t convince everyone” response).

What requests for evidence are reasonable?

Koukl said that the evidence people have today for God is “fully adequate.” He clarified his position this way:

[Doubting] Thomas had fully adequate evidence but then made the ridiculous request that I wouldn’t believe until I stick my finger into the nail holes…. That was really above and beyond what was really required.

Bullshit. Beyond a certain point, apologists’ making excuses for God just gets embarrassing.

So Thomas had clues indicating that his teacher had validated his claim to be the creator of the universe in human form, but it would be rude to check them out? Wouldn’t Thomas have been smart to firmly ground his evangelical message with solid answers to the questions skeptics would obviously ask about the facts of the resurrection? “How do you know it wasn’t a lookalike?” “Did you make sure it really was the same guy?”

I wonder if Koukl is this gullible in response to claims from other religions. Would he read the Book of Mormon without making the ridiculous request to see if its claims of horses and elephants in the New World held up? Would he accept that the “Hindu milk miracle,” where statues drank milk from spoons, was indeed a miracle, or would he make the ridiculous request to see if scientists have had a natural explanation?

Skeptical Thomas demanded strong evidence for an unbelievable claim. No apology is needed for this reasonable request. Gullible Greg makes quite a contrast. I wonder if, when he stands in Judgment, he’ll proudly say, “You can reuse my human brain because I hardly used it at all!”

In his quest to denigrate evidence, Koukl then said that if God appeared right in front of you, you wouldn’t go to God, you’d go to a psychiatrist.

Wow—that’s a great point! What does that tell you about the plausibility of the Christian message and the reasonableness of atheists’ demands for undeniable evidence?

Rhetorical tricks

Throughout his response, Koukl added an undercurrent of bluster. Every couple of minutes, he dropped in a confident, evidence-free, off-topic claim that his position was the right one:

I’ve seen what people have done with enormous evidence and how they’ve often rejected it.

My evidence for God is quite good, and I think it’s available to many people.

Atheism’s not even in the running for me because the problems are so much bigger than anything I face in Christianity.

There is so much evidence all over the world, and we’re constantly offering that kind of evidence as apologists…. We have lots to say, but for some people it just simply isn’t adequate, and I wonder why because the rational aspects (it seems to me) are certainly covered here. There must be something else going on in the minds of people who reject it.

He complains when non-Christians are given “enormous evidence” but reject it. I’m pretty familiar with Koukl’s work, and I’ve responded to much of it in this blog (for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). No well-informed atheist would be impressed by his tired, retread arguments.

I presume he wants to shift the conversation to his hand shadow figures rather than the topic at hand, God’s hiddenness, to which he has responded poorly. His argument has become, “Yeah, but Christianity is true, so it doesn’t matter that I can’t respond to this problem!”

Koukl again:

From where I sit, I think the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, and the problems with atheism are so much more massive than anyone can come up with for theism that there’s no contest between the two.

Yet again, this is stated without evidence, and our Problem of Divine Hiddenness alone defeats Christianity. If God wants a relationship, where is he? Christianity has promised too much, its god is a no-show, and Christianity is no longer a worldview candidate.

Thought experiment: God World

Koukl says that if God appeared to us now, some people would have a hard time believing. He imagines that people like me wouldn’t want to believe because we enjoy sinning so much, but Koukl’s thought experiment is flawed.

To see the problem, consider an Earth-like planet without natural disasters—let’s call it Gaia. If you visited Gaia and asked the people there to imagine tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and so on, many couldn’t. For them, a violent and capricious Nature would be inconceivable because the concept is completely foreign.

Now suppose that on this gentle planet natural disasters began to happen like they do in our world. An earthquake that kills 20,000 people? A tsunami that kills 200,000? Disasters that we think of as inevitable natural events would be to them unbelievable tragedies. They’re familiar to us but inconceivable to them.

New disasters on Gaia would be hard to accept, just like God suddenly appearing on Earth would be hard to accept. The lesson from the Earth vs. Gaia comparison is that natural disasters are easy to accept if they’re simply an ever-present part of reality. And God would be easy to accept if he were an ever-present part of our reality—if we lived in God World.

The lesson here can be seen from two viewpoints.

Telling people on Earth about God is like telling people on Gaia about natural disasters. The people of Gaia would have a hard time accepting the idea, and they’re justified in doing so. It’s a completely foreign idea without precedent.
Telling people on Earth about natural disasters is easy. We already know all about them. But convincing people on Earth about God is difficult. They’ll have a hard time accepting the idea, and they’re justified in doing so.

If Koukl wanted to preach the idea of natural disasters, Gaia is not the place to do it. And if he wants to preach the idea of God, Earth is not the place to do it. For each place, these are foreign concepts.

He wants it both ways. He wants to imagine God making his existence known but many people still not believing. He also wants to imagine that “the evidence [for God] is absolutely overwhelming.”

Concluded in part 3, where we discuss other apologists’ approach to this problem plus some unexpected weaknesses in the apologists’ position.

Man to pastor as he leaves church:
“Oh, I know He works in mysterious ways,
but if I worked that mysteriously I’d get fired.”
— Bob Mankoff cartoon

The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity

Last updated on: January 8, 2020 at 10:19 am By Bob Seidensticker

Why is evidence for God so sparse? If God wants a relationship with us and knows that hell awaits those who don’t know him, why doesn’t he make his existence obvious? I’ve always found this Problem of Divine Hiddenness to be the most powerful argument against Christianity.

Does God’s revealing himself intrude on our free will?

The Wintery Knight blog cites Prof. Michael Murray, who argues that God’s hands are tied. He just can’t reveal too much:

God places a higher value on people having the free will to respond to him, and if he shows too much of himself he takes away their free choice to respond to him, because once he is too overt about his existence, people will just feel obligated to [believe] in him in order to avoid being punished.

But that’s not how belief works. There might be benefits to belief, but you believe if and only if you have convincing evidence. When you’re convinced, then you believe. This, by the way, is the failure of Pascal’s Wager (“I’ll believe in God, just in case, so that if he exists I’ll go to the good place when I die”).

Murray claims that God wants us to desire to know him and then reach out to connect rather than act out of fear of what will happen if we get on his bad side (which sounds like a tricky juggling act).

If it is too obvious to us that God exists and that he really will judge us, then people will respond to him and behave morally out of self-preservation.

On this topic, Christian apologist Greg Koukl is an unlikely ally in our fight for reason. He rejects this argument from free will by noting that in the Bible, God did appear to people, precisely what apologists like Murray say God refuses to do. God appeared as smoke and fire to the Israelites during the Exodus. Jesus did miracles, he healed people, he multiplied food, he controlled nature, and he raised the dead.

And consider the apostles—did witnessing the miracles of Jesus make their belief and love counterfeit? Did Paul’s Damascus road experience disqualify him from being a proper believer? (If not, then how about some of that evidence for us today?)

Because of Jesus, was the free will of everyone in Palestine violated, with many turned into mindless robots who said nothing but, “I … love … Jesus”? No, the Bible makes clear that belief in God doesn’t coerce one to follow God. John 6:66 says, “Many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” Or consider the authorities who acknowledged that Jesus raised Lazarus—they still plotted to kill him. All the angels believe in God, and yet a third of them rebelled.

The Bible itself makes clear that being convinced of God’s existence and being compelled to worship him are two very different things. And the problem of God’s hiddenness remains.

Introducing today’s contestants

That was a long introduction to the third and final question raised by skeptics and posed to Koukl on the Unbelievable podcast (audio here; go to 45:50). Previous questions were about prayer and the Atonement.

The free will argument above was just a tangent to the main question, raised by skeptic Matt. Here is his version of the Problem of Divine Hiddenness: nonresistant unbelief exists. This is unbelief by honest seekers who are eager to know God but reject God’s existence for lack of evidence. Assuming that God desires to have a relationship with us, merely knowing that the other person exists is the mandatory first step in a relationship. God’s existence should be obvious to these seekers and yet it isn’t. This is easily explained by concluding that God doesn’t exist.

Why should God bother?

Koukl pushed back by observing that, in his Bible examples, not everyone believed. People had miracles done in front of them, and yet they still didn’t believe—so much for the compelling power of evidence.

First, let’s clarify what “believed” means. I don’t think there are any Bible stories where someone in the audience said, “Hold on—I saw that trick in Vegas. He put it up his sleeve!” Everyone seemed to believe that miracles had been done, so Koukl must mean that not everyone became a Christian. Let’s then be careful to distinguish these two very different kinds of “believe”: “I accept that God exists” vs. “I worship God.”

Second, he’s probably right that not everyone would believe if God made his existence plain, but that’s a helluva lot more evidence than we have now. Maybe not everybody, but surely millions or even billions more would be convinced and believe if God made his existence clear. Matt’s argument about nonresistant unbelief would be gone.

Apologists are burdened with a Bible that is no more convincing than other ancient religious writing. If God made himself apparent so that Christianity were the only religion backed by a real god, you can be sure that Christians’ pious handwaving about faith would go out the window, and they would gleefully point to the only obvious deity—theirs—that proved that they had been right all along.

Let’s make clear what compelling evidence for God would look like. This wouldn’t simply be the clouds parting one day just as you wondered if God existed. It wouldn’t be unexpectedly coming across a photo of a beloved relative who had died. I’m talking about something really compelling—something like everyone in the world having the same dream the same night in which God simply and clearly summarizes his plan. Could that be dismissed as alien technology or mind-control drugs rather than God? Perhaps, but this evidence would be vastly more compelling than the feeble arguments apologists are saddled with today.

Finally, Koukl is complaining that this wouldn’t be a perfect plan, but what does he propose that’s better? The skeptic’s demand for evidence is quite reasonable.

Continue to part 2, where we see what Koukl thinks is a reasonable request for evidence.

“Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” as Reasonable as the Trinity

Last updated on: July 23, 2016 at 10:58 am By Bob Seidensticker

Linguist Noam Chomsky suggested “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but logically ridiculous, but it is no more ridiculous than the Trinity.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity claims one God in three persons. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines it this way: “In the unity of the Godhead there are Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another.”

Unity but also distinct? Three but also one? That makes no sense, so let’s go to the source and read about it in the Bible.

And the Bible says …

Though the Trinity is one of the most fundamental doctrines of Christianity, the Bible says nothing about it directly. Did Paul and the apostles define God in a trinitarian fashion? Nope. If the Trinity is essential to a proper understanding of Christianity as the modern church claims, the ancients’ silence on the matter makes clear that it is a later invention.

That’s not to say that one can’t use the Bible to form arguments in favor of various relationships between God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Several interpretations competed in the early centuries of the church.

Was Jesus merely a good man, adopted by God (Adoptionism)?
Are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit just labels for the different roles of one being (Sabellianism or Modalism)?
Was Jesus created by God and subordinate to him (Arianism)?

These are all plausible interpretations, justifiable with Bible passages, but they are heresies today. It took about two centuries for the doctrine of the Trinity to enter the debate (through Tertullian), and it took almost two more centuries of haggling for the doctrine to mature into its present form and sweep away its competitors at the First Council of Constantinople (381).

While still a cardinal, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI was asked if he was bothered by many Catholics ignoring papal dictates. He said that he was not, because “truth is not determined by a majority vote.” But a majority vote is exactly how doctrines like the Trinity came into being.

See also: Bible Contradictions to the Trinity

Comma Johanneum

You know how I said that the Bible says nothing directly about the Trinity? For completeness, we should address this:

For there are three that testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. (1 John 5:7)

The part in italics is called the Comma Johanneum (a “comma” is a short clause). The oldest and most reliable manuscripts do not show the Comma. It appears first in a few seventh-century Latin manuscripts and only centuries later in Greek manuscripts. Unlike much of the rest of the New Testament, it doesn’t appear in the letters of early church fathers, many of whom would’ve delighted to support their position with such a quote.

It is agreed by scholars to be a later addition to the original.

What is the Trinity?

Lots of analogies have been proposed for the Trinity. Maybe it’s like water, which has the three states of solid, liquid, and gas. Or like a person who can be spouse, parent, and employer. But this is modalism—God acts in different modes at different times.

Okay, then maybe it’s like an egg, which has shell, white, and yolk. Or like time, which has past, present, and future. Or like the Borromean rings above—three unlinked rings that make a linked whole only when all three rings are present. But this is Partialism, the heretical claim that the three persons of God are three separate parts.

Even world famous apologist William Lane Craig commits this heresy:

[The Trinity] is the claim that the one entity we call God comprises three persons. That is no more illogical than saying that one geometrical figure which we call a triangle is comprised of three angles. Three angles in one figure. Three persons in one being.

Given the clear history of conflict on this question and the many discarded explanations, you’d think that heretical analogies wouldn’t be offered.

Many careful Christians simply say that it’s a mystery and admit that we can’t understand it. Contrast that with the monotheism celebrated by Islam. The shahadah, the basic creed of Islam, says, “There are no deities but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”—simple and unambiguous.

A few questions raised by the Trinity doctrine

Instead of the convoluted and unintelligible Trinity, why not simply embrace the polytheism? My guess is that first-century Christians so valued Jewish monotheism that this tenet couldn’t be dropped. As the stature of Jesus increased over time, from a good man adopted as messiah by God (as told in Mark) to a being who was there at the beginning (John 1:1), they were stuck with fitting the square peg of the divinity of Jesus into the round hole of monotheism.

Why not then have a duality, Yahweh + Jesus? The problem is that two is the number for male and female, which was not the symbolism they were going for. Perhaps the Holy Spirit, initially just a bit player or merely a synonym for God, was elevated into the Trinity. And even this is flexible. While the idea of Mary as Co-redemptrix is not Catholic doctrine, it has threatened to become so at various periods in the church’s history.

And now let us close …

The typical Christian response to a contradiction is to find a way to make both claims true. This is never clearer than with the Trinity. The Bible says that there is one god, but it also says that Jesus existed since the beginning of time. So they must both be true! But what first-century Christian would rationalize this with the doctrine of the Trinity?

Or, take this from the other direction. Explain the Trinity to first-century Christians and ask if that matches their understanding. If you imagine that they do, you have a new problem: why the vitally important doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t explained in the New Testament. And if they don’t, then why is the Trinity dogma today?

The Trinity is a Christian mystery—something that can’t be explained by reason alone. A supernatural explanation is necessary. (This raises the question: If it doesn’t make sense, why accept it? But let’s set that aside.) Apologists often admit that they will just have to ask God about it when they get to heaven.

That humility is laudable, but how about some of that in other areas? If you don’t trust yourself to make sense of the Trinity, why imagine that you correctly understand God’s position on polygamy, slavery, and genocide when the Old Testament gives clear support for them? Why imagine that your evaluation of abortion and gay marriage is correct when the Bible doesn’t address these topics directly?

If only the Trinity were a frequent reminder for Christians to be humble in their claims, it would be valuable for everyone.

It is too late in the day for men of sincerity
to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism
that three are one and one is three,
and yet, that the one is not three, and the three are not one.
— Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 1813)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/10/13.)

Image credit: Wikipedia