September 8, 2020

September 8, 2020 By

And Does the Gospel of Mark Radically Differ from the Other Gospels in the “Family vs. Following Jesus” Aspect?

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” 

He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.”

And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 48 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob writes in his article, “More Damning Bible Contradictions: #25 Was Jesus Crazy or God?” (12-12-19):

Jesus is crazy

Too little is made of a surprising passage from Mark. Jesus was preaching in Galilee, and then:

When [Jesus’s] family heard about [Jesus being nearby], they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind” (Mark 3:21).

The point of the story contrasts his actual family, who think he’s crazy, with his disciples, who have abandoned their professions to follow him. . . .

The interesting thing here is his family calling him crazy. How was that possible, when it was clear from other gospels that Jesus was divine?

Bob then correctly cites and interprets (stop the presses!) several passages which do indeed show that Jesus was God and that Mary knew He was (Mt 1:20-24; Lk 1:28-38; 2:8-19, 25-38). Of course, he thinks that this merely suggests contradiction between Matthew / Luke and Mark, but he has vastly misunderstood a passage in Mark, as I will proceed to demonstrate below. He again states correctly:

Not only are Mary and Joseph assured that their son is divine, but this isn’t a family secret. Word has spread far. The magi informed Herod’s court, and Herod killed infant boys for fear of a rival to the throne; the shepherds tell everyone they can about the angels’ message; Simeon publicly states in the Temple that Jesus is the Messiah; and the Temple teachers see his wisdom for themselves.

But then he presents his ludicrous thesis:

Making sense of the contradiction

Let’s return to Mark, where Jesus’s mother and brothers want to take charge of him because he’s crazy. Jesus can’t be both crazy and divine. But drop the requirement that these stories must harmonize, and the resolution is easy.

Matthew and Luke copy (sometimes verbatim) from Mark. In fact, 97 percent of Mark is copied by either Matthew or Luke or both. However, the nativity stories appear only in Matthew and Luke, and the “Jesus is crazy” story appears only in Mark. Mark threw the holy family under the bus to make the point that following Jesus is a higher calling than familial loyalty, but Matthew and Luke didn’t copy that story, perhaps because, as we’ve seen here, it conflicts with the clear evidence in the nativity stories that Jesus is different because he’s divine.

Mark and the other two synoptic gospels had different agendas. 

It so happens that I have already refuted this lie and total misunderstanding at great length in my article, “Did the Blessed Virgin Mary Think Jesus Was Nuts?” (7-2-20). I need not reiterate the entire argument, since the link will suffice, but let me present a few highlights:

Mark 3:21-22 (RSV) And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, “He is beside himself.” [22] And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Be-el’zebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” (cf. Jn 10:20-21)

Note the italicized and bolded word. Other translations (including, unfortunately, KJV, NKJV, NIV, NASB) make it sound like Jesus’ family were agreeing and/or saying that Jesus’ was mad, but in fact the text is saying that “people” in general were doing so (just as the Pharisees did).

But if the text doesn’t refer to them, it can simply be construed as His family coming out to remove Him from the crowds, who were massively misunderstanding Him, accusing, and perhaps becoming violent (as at Nazareth, when they tried to throw Him over a cliff). Hence, there would be no necessary implication of His family’s (let alone Mary’s) disbelief in Him. They were concerned for His safety. Other translations convey the true sense of the passage (which is interpreted by 3:22 indicating that the “scribes” were saying Jesus was crazy):

NRSV When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”

Good News / (TEV) When his family heard about it, they set out to take charge of him, because people were saying, “He’s gone mad!”

Moffatt . . . . . . for men were saying, “He is out of his mind.”

Phillips . . . for people were saying, “He must be mad!”

NEB . . . for people were saying that he was out of his mind. . . . 

We know that there was some unbelief in the former [His extended family] (“For even his brothers did not believe in him”: John 7:5). But this doesn’t include Mary, nor can any passage be found that directly implies any disbelief in Mary about her Son and His status as God Incarnate and Messiah. She knew about that from the time of the Annunciation.

Nor is disbelief on the part of some of His relatives the same as thinking He was crazy; out of His mind.

This absolutely pulverizes Bob’s contention that Mark (with his supposed particular agenda, etc., etc.) was portraying Jesus’ family as against Him; thinking He had gone mad. It takes out one of his key premises: obtained from all of his skeptical reading about the Bible, from those who despise it and Christianity and Christians: which he parrots and uncritically regurgitates. If the foundation of his argument is wiped out, then the “house” of his silly argument collapses as well.

Bob makes another false statement within his overall fictional false narrative. I repeat it from above: “Mark threw the holy family under the bus to make the point that following Jesus is a higher calling than familial loyalty, . . .”

This larger point and theory of a supposed peculiarity in Mark is demonstrably untrue as well. All four Gospels have definite elements of “following Jesus as a priority over one’s own family.” The Gospel of John, as we saw in my quotation of my past paper, above, states, “For even his brothers did not believe in him” (7:5, RSV, as throughout this paper). Luke records Jesus saying, after His townsfolk in Nazareth rejected Him and tried to throw him off a steep cliff: “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his own country” (4:24). Matthew concurs: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house” (13:57; cf. Mk 6:4).

All the gospels agree in teaching this message about the conflict of loyalties between home / family and following Jesus / God as a called disciple. Mark is no different from the other three:

Matthew 4:18-22 As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. [19] And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” [20] Immediately they left their nets and followed him. [21] And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zeb’edee and John his brother, in the boat with Zeb’edee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. [22] Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Matthew 16:24-25 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. [25] For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

Matthew 19:27-29 Then Peter said in reply, “Lo, we have left everything and followed you. What then shall we have?” [28] Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. [29] And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life.

Mark 1:16-20 And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. [17] And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.” [18] And immediately they left their nets and followed him. [19] And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zeb’edee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. [20] And immediately he called them; and they left their father Zeb’edee in the boat with the hired servants, and followed him.

Mark 8:34-35 And he called to him the multitude with his disciples, and said to them, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. [35] For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

Mark 10:28-30 Peter began to say to him, “Lo, we have left everything and followed you.” [29] Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, [30] who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.

Luke 9:23-24 And he said to all, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. [24] For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it.

Luke 18:28-30 And Peter said, “Lo, we have left our homes and followed you.” [29] And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there is no man who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, [30] who will not receive manifold more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.”

John 1:35-47 The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples; [36] and he looked at Jesus as he walked, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” [37] The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. [38] Jesus turned, and saw them following, and said to them, “What do you seek?” And they said to him, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” [39] He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying; and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. [40] One of the two who heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. [41] He first found his brother Simon, and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ). [42] He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him, and said, “So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter). [43] The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. And he found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” [44] Now Philip was from Beth-sa’ida, the city of Andrew and Peter. [45] Philip found Nathan’a-el, and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” [46] Nathan’a-el said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” [47] Jesus saw Nathan’a-el coming to him, and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”

John 12:26 If any one serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also; if any one serves me, the Father will honor him.

So if Bob’s skeptical, irrational mythology of Mark supposedly emphasizing “following Jesus” as “a higher calling than familial loyalty” were true, why is it that Matthew and Luke (that he says copied most of Mark) — as well as John in a different way — contain the above passages about that very thing? There is simply no difference here.

Under Bob’s view, they should not. But since his view is false in the first place, they do. And when there is a proposed stark difference (the falsely alleged “his family — including His mother — thought He was nuts!” scenario), it’s seen to be utterly untrue in the first place.

So (shock and horror!) Bob is completely wrong yet again. Since he accepts no correction from a lowly Christian apologist like myself (now having completed 50 critiques / refutations of his errors), he never learns, and keeps repeating the same lies over and over; making a fool of himself and showing himself to be an intellectual coward.

Meanwhile, the Bible is again vindicated against his ceaseless attacks, as it always is, because it is inspired, infallible revelation from God.

***

Photo credit: Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles, by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255-1319) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

***

September 7, 2020

September 7, 2020 By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” 

He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.”

And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 48 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob writes in his article, “The Leaky Noah’s Ark Tale” (7-2-13) [link]:

Contradictions

As with the two Genesis creation stories—six days vs. Garden of Eden—a flood story from the older J source (about 950 BCE) is squashed with one from the P source (500 BCE) to make an unhappy compromise. . . . 

See my articles: Documentary Theory of Biblical Authorship (JEPD): Dialogue [2-12-04]

Documentary Theory (Pentateuch): Critical Articles [6-21-10]

The P source says that Noah brought just one pair of all animals (Gen. 6:19–20), while the J source says that he also brought seven pairs of all birds and kosher (“clean”) animals (7:2–3).

According to [Robert] Price, these two sources each had their partisans, so each had to be preserved. Better to merge them, however imprecisely, than to drop a beloved story element.

First, let’s look at the passages:

Genesis 6:19-20 (RSV) And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. [20] Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you, to keep them alive.

Genesis 7:2-3 Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate; [3] and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 7:8-9 Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground,
[9] two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah.

This alleged “contradiction is a favorite of atheist anti-theists and other biblical skeptics. Dr. Steven DiMattei in his ambitious series, “Contradictions in the Bible,” writes about Genesis 6 and 7:

[T]he two flood stories, J’s and P’s, have been skillfully stitched together to produce a single narrative—a narrative, however, that contains a number of inconsistencies and contradictions.

Matt Young bluntly asserts: “In short, there are two contradictory statements: Noah took two of each kind into the ark, and Noah took seven.”

It’s not often that Bob himself offers the solution to his own proposed biblical contradiction in another article (“Dismantling the Noah Story”: 3-31-14) eight months later (thus contradicting himself: which is a not infrequent occurrence):

God also commanded that he take seven pairs of all clean animals plus one pair of all other animals. . . . 

J demands seven pairs of clean animals, but P demands only one pair. This is because only J has a sacrifice at the end, and you can’t sacrifice animals if they’re the only ones of their species.

Thanks, Bob! You make my work even easier (in refuting you) than it already perpetually is.

Bible scholar Gleason Archer, in his famous Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, elaborates:

Some have suggested that these diverse numbers, two and seven, involve some sort of contradiction and indicate conflicting traditions later combined by some redactor who didn’t notice the difference between the two.

It seems strange that this point should ever have been raised, since the reason for having seven of the clean species is perfectly evident: they were to be used for sacrificial worship after the Flood had receded (as indeed they were, according to Gen. 8:20: . . .). Obviously if there had not been more than two of each of these clean species, they would have been rendered extinct by their being sacrificed on the altar. But in the case of the unclean animals and birds, a single pair would suffice, since they would not be needed for blood sacrifice.

Christian apologist Eric Lyons expands upon this understanding:

[T]he clean beasts and birds entered the ark “by sevens” (KJV), while the unclean animals went into the ark by twos. There is no contradiction here. Genesis 6:19 indicates that Noah was to take “two of every sort into the ark.” Then, four verses later, God supplemented this original instruction, informing Noah in a more detailed manner to take more of the clean animals. If a farmer told his son to take two of every kind of farm animal to the state fair, and then instructed his son to take several extra chickens and two extra pigs for a barbecue, would anyone accuse the farmer of contradicting himself? Certainly not. It was necessary for Noah to take additional clean animals because, upon his departure from the ark after the Flood, he “built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the alter” (Genesis 8:20). (“How Many Animals of Each Kind did Noah Take into the Ark?,” [link] Apologetics Press, 2004)

Nor is Genesis 7:8-9 a supposed additional contradiction. It’s simply saying that all the animals went into the ark by pairs, “male and female”; in other words, it was always pairs, with each gender, whether it was two pairs (unclean animals) or seven pairs (clean animals).

Once again, then, — for the umpteenth time — we see that an alleged “biblical contradiction” (Bob’s self-deluded stock-in-trade) evaporates upon close inspection.

***

Photo credit: [public domain / NeedPix.com]

***

August 31, 2020

August 31, 2020 By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 47 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob writes in his article, “More of the Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions (Part 6)” (4-18-19):

This example is of less importance, but it’s well known and shows yet another set of contradictions. At the Last Supper, Jesus said that his disciples will scatter once he is taken away, but Peter protests that he won’t. Jesus tells Peter that he will disavow him three times before the rooster crows, and indeed that’s what happens.

But read the accounts, and the story differs in each of the gospels.

  • In Mark, Peter is accused of being one of Jesus’s followers by a slave girl, then the same girl again, and then a crowd of people (Mark 14:66–71).
  • In Matthew, it’s a slave girl, another slave girl, and then a crowd of people (Matthew 26:69–73).
  • In Luke, it’s a slave girl, a man, and then another man (Luke 22:54–60).
  • In John, it’s a girl at the door, several anonymous persons, and one of the high priest’s servants (John 18:15–17, 25–27) . . . 

Allowing for synonymous descriptions (Mark’s slave girl could’ve been John’s girl at the door, for example) and squashing these confrontations together, we have Peter denying Jesus to a slave girl, another slave girl, a crowd, a man, another man, and perhaps more. That’s a lot more than Jesus’s promised three.

An excellent refutation of this charge was given by professor of the New Testament Craig L. Blomberg, in his piece, “You Asked: Are the Differing Narratives of Peter’s Denials Reconcilable?” (The Gospel Coalition, 12-12-11):

But what of the identity of the three interrogators?

Matthew, Luke, and John all agree that a servant girl (Gk. paidiskē) was the first person to approach Peter (Matt. 26:69; Luke 22:56; John 18:17). John also calls her a doorkeeper. Matthew calls the second person to query Jesus allē (the feminine form of “another”), presumably meaning another servant girl (Matt. 26:71). Luke calls this second individual heteros (the generic use of the masculine form of another word for “another”), thus not specifying the individual’s gender (Luke 22:58). John is vaguer still, using merely a third person plural verb eipon (“they said”) to introduce the second accusation. The third and final question for Peter comes from “the bystanders” (Matt. 26:73). Luke speaks merely of another person (allos; Luke 22:59), while John specifies him as a servant of the high priest (John 18:26). But again there is no contradiction.

That leaves Mark’s version. The first accusation in Mark comes from one of the servant girls (mia tōn paidiskōn; Mark 14:66)—-no problem. The last challenge comes from the bystanders, just as in Matthew (Mark 14:70). That leaves only the person who prompted Peter’s second denial. Mark calls her hē paidiskē. Often this would be translated, “the servant girl.” Coming after the reference in verse 66, it is natural to take this article as resumptive, referring back to the same girl. But not all uses of the article in Greek are best translated with articles in English. If this is a generic or categorical use of the article, then it means one of a class and can be translated “a servant girl” and be understood as referring to a different one. . . . Alternately, we may just have to assume that more than three people accused Peter, even if he denied it only three times. After all, “the bystanders” already suggests more than one person making the final accusation.

Next question?

***

Photo credit: Peter’s Denial, by Carl Bloch (1834-1890) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

August 31, 2020

August 31, 2020 By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 46 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob shows us yet again that he doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about when it comes to Christianity and the Bible: this time in his article, “25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God (Part 2)” (2-21-18):

There’s a progression of wisdom from sociopath, to average person, to wise person, to sage. As we move along this spectrum, base personality traits such as the desire for adulation fall away, but the opposite is true for the Christian god. Not only do we hear this from Christianity itself (“Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever,” according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism), we read it in the Bible (“At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth”).

What’s the point of praise? Obviously, God already understands his position relative to us. We’re informing him of nothing new when we squeal, “Golly, you’re so fantastic!”

Imagine a human equivalent where you have an ant farm, and the ants are aware that you’re the Creator and Destroyer. It would be petty to revel in the ants’ worshipping you and telling you how great you are. Just how insecure would you need to be?

This sycophantic praise makes sense for a narcissistic and insecure king, but can God really want or need to hear this? We respect no human leader who demands this. Christianity would have us believe that the personality of a perfect being is that of a spoiled child. . . . 

God should be a magnification of good human qualities and an elimination of the bad ones. But the petty, praise-demanding, vindictive, and intolerant God of the Bible is simply a Bronze Age caricature, a magnification of all human inclinations, good and bad.

How melodramatic! And how very ignorant. Wouldn’t you think that if God was as Bob portrays Him, that we could and would find explicit indication of it in the Bible? Surely if his account is true, and God is a cosmic narcissist and egomaniac Who exists in order to receive human praise, which is to Him like blood to the mosquito and applause to the opera star, then the Bible would be filled with descriptions such as God desires praise, or needs it, or wants it or demands it, right?

In fact, when I went to do a search for such phrases with the online Bible that I use, I could find no such thing: zero, zip, zilch. It can search phrases and also “proximity” searches, where you put in two words and see if they are found within 80 characters of each other. I did both kinds of searches for the following words:

desire praise

want praise

demand praise

need praise

praise me

command praise

It produced absolutely nothing. Odd, ain’t it? God’s supposedly full of Himself and obsessive about receiving praise, yet we can’t find any explicit indication of such a thing. And we don’t because the fact of the matter is, that according to standard orthodox Christian theology regarding God (what we call “theology proper”), it’s not only true that God needs no praise, but also that He needs nothing whatsoever. If Bob had gotten to first base in his study of Christian theology, he would know this. The Bible does teach that:

Acts 17:24-25 (RSV) The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, [25] nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything.

Before I explain the Christian concepts that describe these attributes of God, I shall use a human analogy to illustrate how Christians view the praise of God. It’s like war heroes: say the soldier who risks his life in an extraordinary way and saves 20 of his fellow soldiers. Or men or women who come back from battle with missing arms or legs or permanent brain damage, having voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way, or, say, the firefighters in New York City on 9-11 who repeatedly went back into the twin towers to save people, thinking nothing of their own safety.

The heroes who did these things and managed to survive, invariably don’t think of themselves as heroes, and they seek no praise or adulation. No doubt (as they are human beings, and want to feel loved and appreciated like we all do) they feel grateful if someone compliments or thanks them, but they don’t seek it. Now, does it follow that we shouldn’t praise and honor them, because they feel that way? No. We do it because it is right and because it is good for us. It makes us better people to recognize heroism and noble behavior.

That’s how it is with God and our praise of Him, for all He has done for us. He doesn’t need it because He doesn’t need anything. God the Father doesn’t experience emotions as we do, at all. This is the doctrine of impassibility. For further information on that, see:

Does God Suffer?, Thomas G. Weinandy (Capuchin priest), First Things, November 2001.

Does God Have Emotions?, Patrick Lee.

Concepts of God (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 2nd section)

God is entirely self-sufficient: what is called aseity. He needs nothing and besides being impassible, is also immutable, meaning that He doesn’t change (a thing that would be required for Him to have emotions and change from one state to another). Someone might say, “now, the Bible does refer often to God changing His mind and ‘repenting’ etc. How is that to be explained?” It’s explained by anthropomorphism and anthropopathism: which mean that God is often portrayed non-literally in the Bible in order for human beings to better understand him. Not one atheist in 50 understands this, but they should. It’s important to know.

In summary, we praise God because He is worthy of praise, as the Creator of the universe and a loving God Who will save us, and provide us with a blissful never-ending life in heaven when we die, because of Jesus’ sacrificial death on our behalf, if only we will let Him do so. He’s utterly worthy of it. We do it because we are grateful and because we are only fully ourselves if we acknowledge the God who made us and designed us to be most happy and joyful when in communion with Him. But He doesn’t need it (let alone demand it). He has need of nothing whatsoever.

***

Photo credit: BarbaraJackson (12-18-14) [Pixabay / Pixabay license]

***

August 30, 2020

August 30, 2020 By

Atheist Neil Carter Promptly Banned Me During the Discussion on His Blog

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 45 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

It’s been a couple years, I think. I was commenting underneath an article by atheist Neil Carter, entitled, “What Atheists Wish Christians Knew About Them” [link] Bob’s words will be in blue.

*****

I thank you for writing this and will share it on my Catholic Facebook page [which I did] because I think it is important that human beings understand those who are different from them.

I can’t help but notice the irony, however, that even when the writer of such an article is not an anti-theist, as you say about yourself, the combox below the article is (inevitably?) full of anti-theists and the usual echo chamber-type yucking it up and mockery of Christians and Christianity. I’ve never seen an atheist combox that wasn’t like that. Does one exist anywhere?

And you say this because of the contrast between atheist blogs and Christian blogs? You’re saying this because the atheist blogs are echo chambers while the Christian blogs are open and friendly discussions of a wide variety of topics with nothing off limits? You need to show me where you hang out, because I haven’t seen such Christian blogs.

I wasn’t discussing Christian blogs, but since you brought it up (and since I’m banned on yours),

You say that as if I haven’t been banned on yours. Twice.

I heartily agree that almost all Christian blogs have worthless comboxes as well (inter-Christian squabbles are as boorish and tedious as atheist-Christian ones: believe me!).

For those sites (STR, Cold Case Christianity, and many others) without commenting features, I think I can see their reasoning. They want a monologue rather than a dialogue. Of course, the rules are theirs to set, and I’m free to go elsewhere, so I can’t complain. Still, I do sense that part of that motivation is the realization that they couldn’t win a fair fight and must rig the game.

My own is welcoming of those of all beliefs under the sun, as long as they behave in a civil fashion.

That’s why I’m banned? Oh, OK.

Hence, recently, I’ve been in discussion with two atheists: “gusbovona” (also active on your blog), who enjoyed the discussion (said so), as did I. I just put up our exchange two days ago. We were discussing my response to one of your arguments (since you have refused to reply to now 44 of my critiques of your stuff, after directly challenging me to critique it).

Ironic, isn’t it? I respond to what seems like countless Christian articles, and I rarely get a Christian responding to my stuff. I live for debate. And I finally find someone who has written, apparently, 44 replies, but I have zero interest in engaging. Ain’t life crazy?

The other one goes by “abb3w”.

Yes, those are thoughtful commenters.

Perfectly amiable, non-insulting discussion. It’s a joy to me when this happens. Therefore, I hang out on my blog, where such discussion actually exists. Granted, it’s relatively rare (because few atheists want to actually talk to and dialogue with us Christians), but the possibility is always there, if any atheist wants to come and discuss things. As long as they don’t start insulting and mocking, they are always welcome (serious, constructive, inquiring, person-to-person dialogue). But if they do act up, I will ban (just as you do yourself).

Let’s not imagine a perfect symmetry here. I’m very slow to ban. Perhaps you’ve seen commenters complain about that (and they are likely correct). Before I do ban, I almost always coach the offender with the good behavior I’m looking for. Unfortunately, they have never reformed.

I’ve banned many more Christians than atheists. When you banned me from your site, I was in a serious, amiable discussion with someone else there. But you didn’t want that to take place, I guess, so you hit the eject button.

Yeah, seeing you have a fruitful conversation must’ve been too much for my stony heart. I confess that I don’t remember the details of either banning. I think an objective observer would see the unfairness differently than you do.

***

When I banned you from my site, it was because you violated my ethical guidelines, as I explained at length at the time. I’ve also written several articles of a conciliatory nature, regarding atheists:

Secular Humanism & Christianity: Seeking Common Ground (with Sue Strandberg) [5-25-01]

Are Atheists “Evil”? Multiple Causes of Atheist Disbelief and the Possibility of Salvation [2-17-03]

16 Atheists / Agnostics & Me (At a Meeting) [11-24-10]

Should We Ignore Atheists or Charitably Dialogue? [7-21-10 and 1-7-11]

My Enjoyable Dinner with Six Atheist Friends [6-9-15]

Dialogue: Constructive Atheist-Christian Discussion [9-17-15]

Legitimate Atheist Anger [10-7-15]

New Testament on God-Rejecters vs. Open-Minded Agnostics [10-9-15]

[the above material was all (initially) posted on Neil Carter’s site. When I went to respond to Bob’s second reply, I discovered that Neil had banned me, too, and deleted my comments. Very impressive. But here is the reply I (would have) made, if I was allowed to]:

As I have said, I explained why you were banned. You violated my ethical standards for conduct (precisely as you think I did on your blog). It has nothing to do with what you believe, and certainly not for any imagined prowess in argument that you think you have against Christianity. I have refuted you 44 times now without reply. But I’m scared of you, according to you.

That’s certainly an interesting “see no evil / hear no evil” spin that the facts massively refute. But carry on. Should you ever decide to engage my critiques and live up to your triumphalistic rhetoric I’d be more than happy to counter-reply.

[meanwhile, Bob, thinking I deleted my own comments and not knowing I was banned, posted further]:

(Dave deleted his comment above.) It is odd how memories differ. In Dave’s mind, he has a well-publicized and quite reasonable list of rules that any civil person would want to follow, but I just couldn’t be bothered. And he was a gentleman on my site, but I just couldn’t tolerate him making so much gosh-darned sense. My memories are rather different. 

***

I’ll let you, dear reader, detect and enjoy the numerous delicious ironies and ludicrous hypocrisies in this incident with regard to both Bible-Basher Bob and Hair-Trigger Neil Carter. These are the folks who are supposedly so vastly intellectually superior to us poor, lowly Christians? This is how they act? I had critiqued Neil as part of my previous critique of bob, on the issue of the “zombies” who rose from the dead: described in Matthew 27:51-53. Apparently, that critique was too much for him to take, and so he decided to ban me and try to forget that it ever happened.

Not impressive . . . If one has a case, then they defend their arguments in the face of criticism, rather than ban and flee for the hills and hope  their readers never saw their arguments being roundly refuted.

***

Photo credit: [public domain / Piqsels]

***

August 29, 2020

August 29, 2020 By

Atheist Neil Carter Joins in on the Silliness and Tomfoolery as Well

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 41 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob and fellow atheist Neil Carter provide a delightfully humorous and classic example of a purported biblical contradiction where there is none. And they both could have avoided making fools of themselves by simply reading the next verse, (um, this is called context . . .) and (as a bonus) seeking a little bit more understanding about some of the techniques in Hebrew literature. Get some popcorn, sit back in your seats, and enjoy this one. and we’ll see who is being stupid and gullible in this instance: Christians or atheists.

Bob brought up the topic at hand in his article, “Six Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass” (5-6-20, but an update of an earlier version, dated 2-15-16):

For example, Paul says, “. . . the Messiah . . . the first to rise from the dead, . . .” (Acts 26:23). But this is contradicted by (1) the zombies that came out of their graves on the death of Jesus (Matthew 27:52), who were actually the first to rise from the dead, . . .

Really? Bob claims this event was “on the death of Jesus” but the text doesn’t claim that. The problem is that he neglected to take into consideration the next verse, which reads: “and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many” (RSV). Don’t believe the RSV? There are many more translations that state the same thing:

Young’s Literal Translation: “after his rising”

Weymouth: “after Christ’s resurrection”

KJV / Douay/Rheims / NRSV / NKJV / NASB / ESV / ASV: “after his resurrection”

NIV: “after Jesus’ resurrection”

Not content with this remarkable display of clueless exegesis, Bible-Basher Bob digs in with his article, “More of the Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions (Part 5)” (4-15-19). This is particularly comical because here he cites the larger passage (Matthew 27:51-53), yet misses the phrase “after Jesus’ resurrection” in 27:53, and goes on his merry way, oblivious to his blind spot, mocking Christians and yet another so-called biblical contradiction in his section, “Jesus and the zombies”:

[W]hy would it have been astonishing, on Sunday morning, to find Jesus risen from the dead? Remember this incident [passage cited] . . . Here’s the chronology. Jesus died on Friday evening, and at that moment many worthy dead people came to life. Jesus resurrected . . . and then the newly undead people left their tombs to walk around Jerusalem. . . . 

[N]o one would be surprised by a risen Jesus once they’d seen the crowd of undead. What’s one more, particularly when he was the instigator of the process? Word of the remarkable sight of walking dead would’ve traveled quickly through Jerusalem.

When the women returned, breathless with the news of having seen Jesus (or just the empty tomb), the disciples could’ve replied that Jerusalem was crawling with zombies, so what’s one more?

There are several insuperable problems with this scenario. First, Bob contradicts himself. A little over three years earlier, he claimed that these raised bodies walked around Jerusalem “on the death of Jesus.” But in this article he places that event after Jesus’ resurrection. Which is it?

Secondly, he appears to posit the very odd and implausible scenario of these bodies coming to life at the “moment” of Jesus’ death. But of course the text never says that. The only time-frame it gives is sometime after Jesus’ resurrection. Nevertheless, Bob pulls this idea out of a hat and runs with it. But this means that these saints were lying in their graves, resurrected and conscious, from Friday till Sunday, at which time they decided to lose the claustrophobia and get out of their graves for some fresh air (and how they managed to breathe all that time is another mystery to solve, but I digress . . .).

The third silly thing is that Bob assumes (with no textual reason to do so) that these raised dead were already walking around Jerusalem before the women reported the risen Jesus. But this doesn’t follow and we simply don’t know whether their walking around “after” Jesus’ resurrection was before or after the women discovering the empty tomb. Both things occurred after the resurrection of Jesus, but we have no way of knowing which came first in time (after the resurrection, in relation to each other). But these logical facts and plausibility factors cause Bob no hesitation in wildly speculating about biblical “contradictions” all over the place. He’s having too much fun mocking to consider mere logic, self-consistency, and the English language and what its words mean, in context.

Bob then sends us via link to fellow atheist Neil Carter’s post, “The Greatest Story Never Told” (3-29-15): from which he “learned about this contradiction.” Neil also has a great deal of self-deluded fun with the issue:

Do you know how many people the Bible says were raised from the dead on Easter weekend? . . . when I ask them this question, the answer I usually get is: “It says only one person was raised from the dead:  Jesus.” But that’s not correct, . . . 

The Walking Dead

I have to point out to Christians, many of whom maintain that the Bible cannot be wrong, that in one place (and only one place) the Bible says that a whole bunch of people came out of their graves right after Jesus died on the afternoon of Good Friday and then walked around Jerusalem…a couple of days later.

Neil, too, cites Matthew 27:51-53, yet can’t grasp its meaning. He claims that they emerged from their burial spots on Good Friday right after Jesus’ death, whereas the text says, “coming out of the tombs after his resurrection” (27:53, RSV). That’s a direct contradiction. His take varies from Bob’s in that Bob (at least truer to the text) has them come alive and lay there in their tombs for many hours, whereas Neil (utterly ignoring the text) brings them out right away. Then they hang out till Sunday (doing what? Playing chess or hopscotch?) and decide after a referendum to show up in Jerusalem, so they can have more fun scaring people, as zombies.

It’s an extraordinary display of being unable to read a text. He continues:

This story is problematic for several reasons.

First of all, no other gospel writer says a word about a mass resurrection. This story is unique to Matthew’s gospel. If something this dramatic really happened, why did no other gospel writer say a word about it?

Maybe because Matthew already did, and so there was no obligatory need for anyone else to do so? If we assume that all four Gospels must contain all of the details that all the others contain, this would pose a problem, but of course, this assumption itself has no basis, so it’s a non-issue and non sequitur. If all the Gospels were exactly the same in the events they described, there would obviously be no need for all four in the first place.

Even the details of the story are really fuzzy. It says there was an earthquake when Jesus died. It was so big that “rocks split.” It’s unclear whether or not that was the cause of the graves opening, but what’s clear is that it says a bunch of people came back from the dead at that moment.

Actually it’s not clear if one understands one of the common techniques of Hebrew literature. more on that below.

How long had they been dead? Were they decomposed or had they been resurrected in fresh form?

Who cares? Why does that matter?

And how long did they hang around their graves before they came into town to circulate among the townspeople? All weekend? It says they were raised on Friday afternoon but curiously it says they didn’t go into town until after the resurrection. What did they do during all that time?

Here Neil stumbles into the criticism I already made above before I read this. But it’s not silly because of the text. It is because if what they seem to think is the only possible interpretation of the text. It’s not.

Think about how dramatically this would change the credibility of the resurrection of Jesus for everyone at the time. I mean, imagine you are poor doubting Thomas and you missed out on the initial appearance of the risen Jesus to the rest of the disciples behind closed doors. Would you really have had any trouble accepting that one more person had come out of his grave at that point?  Would it even have been news? The town was supposed to have just witnessed a whole bunch of people back from the dead! What’s one more person added to the mix?

This is the same unsupported assumption about chronology that I noted above. People often simply think illogically: including even atheists, who almost invariably think they are so vastly intellectually superior to us lowly Christians.This is one of the first things I learned in logic class in college: even some of the greatest minds can and have fallen into illogical, fallacious thinking.

The story of Easter weekend is a big deal—it’s central to the Christian message—and finding this random scene which never gets mentioned again is really a bit of an embarrassment.

Really? How? Lots of things are only mentioned once. The Annunciation to Mary, announcing the birth of Jesus, Who is God Incarnate was only in Luke, etc. There is very little in Scripture about original sin, which virtually all Christians believe. There is nothing at all about the canon of Scripture: which books belong to the Bible. That had to be declared by the [Catholic] Church and Christian tradition. This is a non-issue: as much as atheists like Neil would love to force-fit it into a “problem.” And of course, nothing in Scripture ever suggests that an event or doctrine must be mentioned more than once (or even at all, in the case of the canon) to be considered “important.” So where does Neil get off thinking that this is actually  a requirement? On what basis?

I think if most were willing to be honest, they’d have to admit that they’re not sure this story should really be in the Bible. It doesn’t belong. . . . nobody in his right mind can make a good case that this other part of the story makes any sense.

I don’t see how he can conclude this either, in terms of the framework of the bible and Christianity. It simply is an illustration that all believers are to be resurrected, as a result of the resurrection of Christ. It’s a straightforward application of what St. Paul discusses in 1 Corinthians 15. I don’t see why any Christian should have any problem with it at all. We’re not atheists. we believe in miracles and the power of God. I think Neil just has a flair for the melodramatic and gets carried away . . .

But I’d like to submit a feature of Hebrew literature that can easily explain this passage in its chronological elements. I dealt with it in a previous refutation of Bob (#15). It’s called “compression” or “condensation” of events in a text:

In his book, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (IVP: 2nd edition, 2007, p. 216), Craig Blomberg took note of this and applied it to the Bible:

Perhaps the most perplexing differences between parallels occur when one Gospel writer has condensed the account of an event that took place in two or more stages into one concise paragraph that seems to describe the action taking place all at once. Yet this type of literary abridgment was quite common among ancient writers (cf. Lucian, How to Write History 56), so once again it is unfair to judge them by modern standards of precision that no-one in antiquity required. The two most noteworthy examples of this process among the Gospel parallels emerge in the stories of Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter and cursing the fig tree.

F. Gerald Downing, in his volume, Doing Things with Words in the First Christian Century (Sheffield: 2000, pp. 121-122) observed that the Jewish historian Josephus (37-c. 100 AD) used the same technique:

Josephus is in fact noticeably concerned to ‘improve’ the flow of his narrative, either by removing all sorts of items that might seem to interrupt it, or else by reordering them. . . . Lucian, in the next century, would seem to indicate much the same attitude to avoidable interruptions, digressions, in a historical narrative, however vivid and interesting in themselves.

See much more about this in that earlier installment. It’s these sorts of “literary / cultural” things that atheists rarely ever understand or seek to understand, leading them to arrive at all sorts of mistaken and silly ideas about the Bible and theology. I would urge them for their own good not to “try this at home” and to leave it to the experts.

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Photo credit: Leonard J Matthews (5-20-15), Caboolture cemetery, Queensland [Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0 license]

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August 29, 2020

August 29, 2020 By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 41 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob presents a completely warped, cynical, jaded, ignorant, one-sided alt-version of the history of early science in his post, “When Christianity Was in Charge, This Is What We Got” (8-10-18). In this disgraceful, outlandish piece, he wrote:

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. . . .
 
But if Christianity is just what you do if there’s no science, why is it still here? . . . 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.
I have documented “33 Empiricist Christian Thinkers Before 1000 AD”. As one example among many, both Augustine and Aquinas opposed astrology. On the other hand, many great early scientists (also Christians) were obsessed with astrology, including Galileo, Kepler, and Tycho Brahe, while Isaac Newton (an Arian) was fascinated with alchemy.
 
For examples of “scientific Christians” long before modern science was born, see Hermann of Reichenau (1013–1054) and Adelard of Bath (c. 1080-c. 1152). When modern science did get off the ground, of course it was Christianity that was overwhelmingly in the forefront of that. Christians or theists founded 115 scientific fields. There were at least 244 priest-scientists. And here are 152 lay Catholic scientists. 35 lunar craters were named to honor Jesuit scientists.

The so-called “Enlightenment” (the supposedly “reasonable” people), by contrast, murdered Lavoisier, the father of chemistry, and several other prominent French scientists and philosophers (namely, Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich, Nicolas de Condorcet, Jean Baptiste Gaspard Bochart de Saron, Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, and Félix Vicq d’Azyr). The murderous spree against scientists was later revived by the Soviet and Chinese atheist Communists.

Galileo, on the other hand (the only example of a “scientific martyr” that we ever seem to hear about) lived his life under house arrest in luxurious palaces of his supporters. by the way, St. Robert Bellarmine showed that he had a more accurate understanding of scientific method than Galileo did. Galileo and other scientists of his general time, got many things wrong, too (just as some in the Church had, in condemning Galileo’s premature overconfidence).

Seidensticker directly replied to the above paragraph: “That’s weird–you’d think that since the Church wasn’t just another big human bureaucracy but instead was guided by the omniscient Creator of the universe that it would look different somehow.”

Exactly! That’s why the Catholic Church produced modern science, including heliocentrism (formulated by the Catholic Copernicus). One (sub-infallible) Catholic tribunal at one point of our history, got science wrong (while a pious Catholic who was wrongly persecuted: Galileo, got some major things right, but also other things wrong, and another Catholic, Bellarmine, had the more modern, accurate understanding of scientific method).

Big wow. We would expect to see this. It’s no disproof whatever of our claims. But such things are clearly beyond your capacity to understand, in the blindness of your bigotry.

As for the sun going around the earth, it need not be pointed out that Nicolaus Copernicus was the key figure who changed that, and he was a Catholic cleric, and his work was enthusiastically supported by the pope of the time and the Church (though later with Galileo there were some silly things said). Even a cursory glance at Wikipedia (“Heliocentrism”) reveals that there were forerunners of heliocentrism in earlier Catholics:
European scholarship in the later medieval period actively received astronomical models developed in the Islamic world and by the 13th century was well aware of the problems of the Ptolemaic model. In the 14th century, bishop Nicole Oresme [c. 1320-1382] discussed the possibility that the Earth rotated on its axis, while Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464] in his Learned Ignorance asked whether there was any reason to assert that the Sun (or any other point) was the center of the universe. In parallel to a mystical definition of God, Cusa wrote that “Thus the fabric of the world (machina mundi) will quasi have its center everywhere and circumference nowhere.” . . .
The state of knowledge on planetary theory received by Copernicus [1473-1543] is summarized in Georg von Peuerbach‘s Theoricae Novae Planetaru (printed in 1472 by Regiomontanus [1436-1476] ). By 1470, the accuracy of observations by the Vienna school of astronomy, of which Peuerbach and Regiomontanus were members, was high enough to make the eventual development of heliocentrism inevitable, and indeed it is possible that Regiomontanus did arrive at an explicit theory of heliocentrism before his death in 1476, some 30 years before Copernicus. . . .
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Another possible source for Copernicus’s knowledge of this mathematical device is the Questiones de Spera of Nicole Oresme, who described how a reciprocating linear motion of a celestial body could be produced by a combination of circular motions similar to those proposed by al-Tusi.
I wrote about bishop Nicole Oresme and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa at length in my 2010 book, Science and Christianity: Close Partners or Mortal Enemies?:

Nicholas Oresme (c. 1323-1382; bishop) Oresme conceived the idea of employing what we should now call rectangular co-ordinates . . . and thus forestalls Descartes in the invention of analytical geometry. . . . In opposition to the Aristotelean theory of weight, according to which the natural location of heavy bodies is the centre of the world, and that of light bodies the concavity of the moon’s orb, he proposes the following: The elements tend to dispose themselves in such manner that, from the centre to the periphery their specific weight diminishes by degrees. He thinks that a similar rule may exist in worlds other than this. This is the doctrine later substituted for the Aristotelean by Copernicus and his followers . . . But Oresme had a much stronger claim to be regarded as the precursor of Copernicus when one considers what he says of the diurnal motion of the earth, . . . He begins by establishing that no experiment can decide whether the heavens move form east to west or the earth from west to east; for sensible experience can never establish more than one relative motion. He then shows that the reasons proposed by the physics of Aristotle against the movement of the earth are not valid . . . [source: Catholic Encyclopedia: ”Nicole Oresme”] He wrote influential works on mathematics, physics, and astronomy. In his Livre du ciel et du monde Oresme discussed a range of evidence for and against the daily rotation of the Earth on its axis. From astronomical considerations, he maintained that if the Earth were moving and not the celestial spheres, all the movements that we see in the heavens that are computed by the astronomers would appear exactly the same as if the spheres were rotating around the Earth. He rejected the physical argument that if the Earth were moving the air would be left behind causing a great wind from east to west. In his view the Earth, Water, and Air would all share the same motion. As to the scriptural passage that speaks of the motion of the sun, he concludes that “this passage conforms to the customary usage of popular speech” and is not to be taken literally. He also noted that it would be more economical for the small Earth to rotate on its axis than the immense sphere of the stars. [source: Wikipedia bio] His work provided some basis for the development of modern mathematics and science. Oresme brilliantly argues against any proof of the Aristotelian theory of a stationary Earth and a rotating sphere of the fixed stars and showed the possibility of a daily axial rotation of the Earth. He was a determined opponent of astrology, which he attacked on religious and scientific grounds. He states – more than 300 years before Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Newton – that atmospheric refraction occurs along a curve and proposes to approximate the curved path of a ray of light in a medium of uniformly varying density, in this case the atmosphere, by an infinite series of line segments each representing a single refraction. [source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy bio] In the whole of his argument in favor of the Earth’s motion Oresme is both more explicit and much clearer than that given two centuries later by Copernicus. He was also the first to assume that color and light are of the same nature. He asserted methodological naturalism: “there is no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God as if He would produce these effects directly, more so than those effects whose causes we believe are well known to us.” [source: Wikipedia: ”Science in the Middle Ages”] He also showed how to interpret the difficulties encountered in “the Sacred Scriptures wherein it is stated that the sun turns, etc. It might be supposed that here Holy Writ adapts itself to the common mode of human speech, as also in several places, for instance, where it is written that God repented Himself, and was angry and calmed Himself and so on, all of which is, however, not to be taken in a strictly literal sense”. Finally, Oresme offered several considerations favourable to the hypothesis of the Earth’s daily motion. In order to refute one of the objections raised by the Peripatetics against this point, Oresme was led to explain how, in spite of this motion, heavy bodies seemed to fall in a vertical line; he admitted their real motion to be composed of a fall in a vertical line and a diurnal rotation identical with that which they would have if bound to the Earth. This is precisely the principle to which Galileo was afterwards to turn. He adopted Buridan’s theory of dynamics in its entirety. [source: Catholic Encyclopedia: ”History of Physics”] “Most of the essential elements in both his [i.e., Copernicus’] criticism of Aristotle and his theory of motion can be found in earlier scholastic writers, particularly in Oresme.” [source: Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books / Random House, 1959), p. 154] [pp. 64-66 in my book][ . . . ]

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Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464; cardinal) Nicholas anticipated many later ideas in mathematics, cosmology, astronomy, and experimental science while constructing his own original version of systematic Neoplatonism. In Book II of On Learned Ignorance he holds that the natural universe is characterized by change or motion; it is not static in time and space. But finite change and motion, ontologically speaking, are also matters of more and less and have no fixed maximum or minimum. This “ontological relativity” leads Cusanus to some remarkable conclusions about the earth and the physical universe, based not on empirical observation but on metaphysical grounds. The earth is not fixed in place at some given point because nothing is utterly at rest; nor can it be the exact physical center of the natural universe, even if it seems nearer the center than “the fixed stars.” Because the universe is in motion without fixed center or boundaries, none of the spheres of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world picture are exactly spherical. None of them has an exact center, and the “outermost sphere” is not a boundary. Cusanus thus shifts the typical medieval picture of the created universe toward later views, but on ontological grounds. The natural universe itself, as a contracted image of God, has a physical center that can be anywhere and a circumference that is nowhere. [source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy bio] Cusanus said that no perfect circle can exist in the universe (opposing the Aristotelean model, and also Copernicus’ later assumption of circular orbits), thus opening the possibility for Kepler’s model featuring elliptical orbits of the planets around the Sun. He made important contributions to the field of mathematics by developing the concepts of the infinitesimal and of relative motion. He was the first to use concave lenses to correct myopia. His writings were essential for Leibniz’s discovery of calculus as well as Cantor’s later work on infinity. [source: Wikipedia bio] The astronomical views of the cardinal are scattered through his philosophical treatises. The earth is a star like other stars [spherical], is not the centre of the universe, is not at rest, nor are its poles fixed. The celestial bodies are not strictly spherical, nor are their orbits circular. The difference between theory and appearance is explained by relative motion. [source: Catholic Encyclopedia bio] “Copernicus . . . had probably at least heard of the very influential treatise in which the fifteenth-century Cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, derived the motion of the earth from the plurality of worlds in an unbounded Neoplatonic universe. The earth’s motion had never been a popular concept, but by the sixteenth century it was scarcely unprecedented.” [source: Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books / Random House, 1959), p. 144] [pp. 66-67 in my book]

Bob is Exhibit #1 of what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” and what G. K. Chesterton has written about:

[T]here is something odd in the fact that when we reproduce the Middle Ages it is always some such rough and half-grotesque part of them that we reproduce. But why is it that we mainly remember the Middle Ages by absurd things? Few modern people know what a mass of illuminating philosophy, delicate metaphysics, clear and dignified social morality exists in the serious scholastic writers of mediaeval times. But we seem to have grasped somehow that the ruder and more clownish elements in the Middle Ages have a human and poetical interest. We are delighted to know about the ignorance of mediaevalism; we are contented to be ignorant about its knowledge. We forget that Parliaments are mediaeval, that all our Universities are mediaeval, that city corporations are mediaeval, that gunpowder and printing are mediaeval, that half the things by which we now live, and to which we look for progress, are mediaeval. (Illustrated London News, “The True Middle Ages,” 14 July 1906, when Chesterton was still an Anglican, not yet a Catholic)

It was perhaps the one real age of progress in all history. Men have seldom moved with such rapidity and such unity from barbarism to civilisation as they did from the end of the Dark Ages to the times of the universities and the parliaments, the cathedrals and the guilds. (The New Jerusalem, 1920, ch. 12)

The medieval world did not talk about Plato and Cicero as fools occupied with futilities; yet that is exactly how a more modern world talked of the philosophy of Aquinas and sometimes even of the purely philosophic parts of Dante. (The Spice of Life and Other Essays, “The Camp and the Cathedral” [1922] )

I have never maintained that mediaeval things were all good; it was the bigots who maintained that mediaeval things were all bad. (Illustrated London News, “Mediaeval Robber Barons and Other Myths,” 26 May 1923)

They started by saying that mediaeval life was utterly miserable; they find out that it was frequently cheerful; so they make an attempt to represent its cheerfulness as a wild revolt that demonstrates its misery. Every impossibility is possible, except the possibility that the whole assumption about the Middle Ages is wrong. (Illustrated London News, “More Myths, Mediaeval and Victorian,” 2 June 1923)

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(originally posted on 8-11-18)
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Photo credit: Armillary sphere, constructed by Antonio Santucci, c. 1582. Wikipedia: “The armillary sphere was introduced to Western Europe via Al-Andalus in the late 10th century with the efforts of Gerbert d’Aurillac, the later Pope Sylvester II (r. 999–1003). Pope Sylvester II applied the use of sighting tubes with his armillary sphere in order to fix the position of the pole star and record measurements for the tropics and equator.” [Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license]
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August 28, 2020

August 28, 2020 By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 41 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob runs the popular Cross Examined blog: whose purpose is to mock, lie about, make fun of, misrepresent Christians and Christianity. He was active on my blog sometime in the past and was banned for being bigoted against Christianity. He virtually begged me in an email, to be unbanned / unblocked, and claimed that he was not prejudiced against Christians or Christianity at all: that it was all a big misunderstanding.

Thus in May he became very active on one combox thread: dialoguing mostly with Deacon Steven D. Greydanus, and also with me. We soon engaged in what I thought was a good dialogue, about worship. Meanwhile, I was checking his blog to see if indeed he had bigoted attitudes or not. Indeed, he did, as I documented. We engaged in one more dialogue (still in May 2018) about “evidence”. Then he mainly stayed away, but showed up again in August, His behavior was such that I again blocked him, and meticulously explained why (knowing I would have hell to pay for banning an atheist hero and supposed “champion”).
*
This led to a huge (and utterly predictable) reaction on his blog, where I was subject to every imaginable personal attack. I documented it for posterity (so people can see how the sub-group of “angry / anti-theist” atheists argue). To sum up the anger and supposed “righteous indignation” against me, I was savaged primarily because I had the gall to ban Bob from my page (as if there were no conceivable good reason to do that).
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Then the crowning absurd irony was that Bob banned me from his blog, after less than two days (!!!). So the very thing that drew down titanic and volcanic ire upon my head, Bob himself did. But he’s perfect and I’m Vlad the Impaler and the biggest scumbag that ever walked the face of the earth. Go figure . . .
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Meanwhile, I wrote two articles critiquing Bob’s views on science, scientism, and Christianity’s relationship to science:
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Even so, on the attack thread on his blog (which is now up to 561 comments as I write, with a second one partially devoted to savaging me, up to 768 and still rising), Bob still managed — not long before banning me — to challenge me to reply to his papers: on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?”
*
As a result of that challenge, I decided to do a series of replies to his posts. So far, I have completed 42. Thus far, crickets; no response at all [which remains true more than two years later]. Someone informed Bob of #4 (while many of his bootlicking sycophants attacked me up and down in his combox, with his approval). Here’s how Bob responded:
I can’t imagine I’m missing much by not reading it.
Why read it? He has no credibility. Posts like that are the equivalent of The National Inquirer or Weekly World News. [link]
I have no interest in visiting his blog anymore, . . . [link]
Now, doesn’t all this strike you, dear reader, as two-faced, hypocritical, and evasive / run for the hills intellectual cowardice (as it does me)?
*
If he’s truly interested in debate and dialogue with the Christian position, then he needs to put up or shut up. After all, he was the one who came to me, begging to be “let into” my blog in order to have debates. I was happy to let him, but he didn’t follow my rules, and so was at length banned.
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Then he (even in the midst of all the asinine, ridiculous personal attacks that he thinks are fine) challenged me to reply to his papers. I do so [now 42 times], and then he comes back with: “Why read it? He has no credibility.”
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Fair enough. I will continue to refute his anti-Christian, poorly argued (and that’s putting it very mildly) garbage because people are out there reading it and being influenced by it. Whether he responds or decides to run, lobbing grenades at me all the way, is up to him. I will continue to refute error and lies with regard to Christian beliefs, just as I have done these past 39 years.

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(originally posted on Facebook on 8-15-18; slightly expanded on 8-28-20)

Photo credit: Norman Rockwell’s No Swimming, the cover for The Saturday Evening Post, published 4 June 1921 [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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August 28, 2020

August 28, 2020 By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.”

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “Someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone for something very much like he himself: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 41 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob’s article, “God Created the Universe From Nothing—Or Did He?” (1-3-19) exhibits his usual profound ignorance of the Bible and complete inability to engage in cross-referencing. Bible-Basher Bob always knows better than anyone and everyone else, and is the Ultimate Bible Expert (so he himself would inform anyone within earshot): that is, until someone opposes his reasoning: at which point he flees to the hills in terror. At least that is what he has always done with me: now, 41 times (and I would bet the farm that this will be the 42nd time he does that).

The Christian idea of creation ex nihilo, that God created the universe from nothing, is a doctrine within many denominations. The problem appears when Christians try to find it in the Genesis six-day creation story. It’s not there.

Who’s to say that the “six days” of creation in Genesis are to be taken literally? At least as far back as St. Augustine in the 5th century, Christians thought otherwise, and the majority of informed Christians do so today. Young earth creationists are a small minority, out of the mainstream. But many anti-theist atheists — true to form — keep considering them mainstream and the sum of Christianity (because so many of them used to be fundamentalists).

Like so many confidently stated doctrines, the Bible doesn’t cooperate. Letting the Bible speak for itself exposes the unsupported claims.

Right. Bob knows more than Bible scholars, no matter how many years of their lives they have devoted to studying the Bible. This is a question apart from whether the teachings of the Bible are accepted or not. A person can be an expert on what something actually teaches, whether it is true or not, or even fictional or not. Say, for example, a scholar studied Homer’s Iliad for 50 years. Maybe he was even the world’s leading expert on it. Would it make sense for Bob (who skimmed it years ago) to blithely assume that he understood better than the scholar, the contents of the book? Of course not. But Bob does this with the Bible, and Christian scholars and apologists all the time. It’s the height of self-important arrogance.

“In the beginning . . .”

The first verse of the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, NIV). It doesn’t say that God created out of nothing, and only the lack of specified materials that God worked with supports creation ex nihilo.

Look more closely at the word created (the Hebrew word bara). This word is used 55 times in the Old Testament. Most instances are translated as “create,” but not all, and few could be read as “create from nothing.” For example, it’s “make a signpost” in Ezekiel 21:19 and “create in me a pure heart” in Psalm 51:10, which are obviously talking about forming out of existing material. The NET Bible agrees: “The verb does not necessarily describe creation out of nothing . . . it often stresses forming anew, reforming, renewing.”

Okay, now that Bob has had his fun, let’s see what the Bible actually teaches about this. There are many verses in support of creatio ex nihilo: passages that, according to Bob, don’t exist in the Bible. I found almost all of them way back in 1981, when I was just starting out in apologetics. Here they are:

Psalms 33:6 (RSV) By the word of the LORD [i.e., not by existing matter] the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.

Isaiah 44:24 . . . “I am the LORD, who made all things . . . “

Wisdom 1:14 For he created all things that they might exist, . . . 

John 1:3 all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

Romans 11:36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. . . .

1 Corinthians 8:6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

Ephesians 3:9 . . . God who created all things;

Colossians 1:16 for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities — all things were created through him and for him.

Hebrews 2:10 . . . he, for whom and by whom all things exist . . .

2 Peter 3:5 . . . by the word of God [i.e., not by existing matter] heavens existed long ago . . . 

Revelation 4:11 “. . . our Lord and God, . . . didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.”

Bob stated: “only the lack of specified materials that God worked with supports creation ex nihilo.” Okay, so such “materials” would be included in the category of “things” would they not? So if God created all “things” then He must have created ex nihilo because no thing (nothing) existed initially if there was no thing that He did not create. How much clearer could it be made? After all, “nothing” according to Merriam-Webster online, means “not any thing: no thing.” Therefore, creating “all things” means the same thing as “creating from nothing”; i.e., creation ex nihilo.

So that’s what the Bible teaches: eleven passages for Bob to ponder before he zealously writes up his next hit-piece on the Bible. And of course modern Big Bang cosmology agrees with this. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig sums up the current state of knowledge in his paper, “Creation ex nihilo: Theology and Science”:

An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. For this reason most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself. [11]

The term “Big Bang,” originally a derisive expression coined by Fred Hoyle to characterize the beginning of the universe predicted by the Friedman-Lemaître model, is thus potentially misleading, since the expansion cannot be visualized from the outside (there being no “outside,” just as there is no “before” with respect to the Big Bang).

The standard Big Bang model, as the Friedman-Lemaître model came to be called, thus describes a universe which is not eternal in the past, but which came into being a finite time ago. Moreover, –and this deserves underscoring–the origin it posits is an absolute origin ex nihilo. For not only all matter and energy, but space and time themselves come into being at the initial cosmological singularity. As John Barrow and Frank Tipler emphasize, “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo.” [12] On the standard model the universe originates ex nihilo in the sense that at the initial singularity it is true that There is no earlier space-time point or it is false that Something existed prior to the singularity.

Beginningless Models

Although advances in astrophysical cosmology have forced various revisions in the standard model [13], nothing has called into question its fundamental prediction of the finitude of the past and the beginning of the universe. Indeed, as James Sinclair has shown, the history of 20th century cosmogony has seen a parade of failed theories trying to avert the absolute beginning predicted by the standard model. [14] These beginningless models have been repeatedly shown either to be physically untenable or to imply the very beginning of the universe which they sought to avoid. Meanwhile, a series of remarkable singularity theorems has increasingly tightened the loop around empirically tenable cosmogonic models by showing that under more and more generalized conditions, a beginning is inevitable. In 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to show that any universe which is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a beginning. [15] In 2012 Vilenkin showed that cosmogonic models which do not fall under this single condition fail on other grounds to avert the beginning of the universe. Vilenkin concluded, “There are no models at this time that provide a satisfactory model for a universe without a beginning.” [16] In an article in the online journal Inference published in the fall of 2015 Vilenkin strengthened that conclusion: “We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed.” [17] . . . 

Given the metaphysical impossibility of the universe’s coming into being from nothing, belief in a supernatural Creator is eminently reasonable. At the very least we can say confidently that the person who believes in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo will not find himself contradicted by the empirical evidence of contemporary cosmology but on the contrary fully in line with it.

Footnotes

11 P. C. W. Davies, “Spacetime Singularities in Cosmology,” in The Study of Time III, ed. J. T. Fraser (New York: Springer Verlag, 1978), 78-79.

12 John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 442.

13 Principally the addition of an early inflationary era and an accelerating expansion.

14 William Lane Craig and James Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. Wm. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 101-201; idem, “On Non-Singular Spacetimes and the Beginning of the Universe,” in Scientific Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Yujin Nagasawa, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion (London: Macmillan, 2012), pp. 95-142.

15 A. Borde, A. Guth, A. Vilenkin, “Inflationary Spacetimes Are Incomplete in Past Directions,”Physical Review Letters 90 (2003): 151301.

16 Alexander Vilenkin, “Did the universe have a beginning?”  [You Tube] Cf. Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin, “Did the universe have a beginning?” arXiv:1204.4658v1 [hep-th] 20 Apr 2012, p. 1, where they state: “None of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal.”

17 Alexander Vilenkin, “The Beginning of the Universe,”Inference: International Review of Science 1/ 4 (Oct. 23, 2015).

The next story in Genesis, the centuries-older Garden of Eden story, also has God creating, but here he creates using something else—for example, Eve was created from Adam’s rib, and Adam was created from dust.

Yep, but of course the things He used to create men and women (dust, ribs) were already part of the group of “all things” that God created, therefore, this is no disproof of the initial creation ex nihilo.

God did use existing matter—water

Let’s continue the Genesis 1 creation story with verse 2: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The “deep” is the ocean, and the metaphorically relevant aspect here is the ocean as chaos. The six-day creation story shows God creating order from chaos.

This water wasn’t made by God but was material that he worked with.

This is just plain silly. Here is the text:

Genesis 1:1-2 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. [2] The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

The logical, straightforward interpretation is that God made the heavens (the universe); we know that He did so out of nothing, from all the passages presented above. At first the earth that He created from nothing as part of the universe was “without form and void”. Then God began to work with the initial chaotic form to make the earth as we know it. Verse 2 cannot be taken in isolation apart from verse 1. It’s false to say that the “water wasn’t made by God” because the Bible teaches that God made all things out of nothing (which would include the water on the early “formless” earth. Nothing in that notion precludes further “developmental” creation.

He separated the water into two parts, the sky (held up by a vault) and the ocean (Gen. 1:7). Next, we read “Let [the ocean water] be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear,” so God didn’t create the land either.

He certainly did. This was a further “developmental” creation from the matter of the universe  in toto that He initially created. There is no logical necessity at all to interpret this as “water existed eternally” and God created from it. It’s ludicrous. Bob is so caught-up in his anti-Christian zeal that he can’t even read simple English. This is what extreme bias does to a mind. 

The New Testament agrees:

By God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water (2 Peter 3:5).

Exactly. God made the initial formless earth that included water. Then He proceeded to further develop the earth as we know it. He ignores the first part of the verse, “By God’s word the heavens came into being”. No problem at all . . . 

***

Photo credit: [public domain / Max Pixel]

***

August 25, 2020

August 25, 2020 By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” 

Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.” I’m always one to oblige people’s wishes if I am able, so I decided to do a series of posts in reply. It’s also been said, “be careful what you wish for.”  If Bob responds to this post, and makes me aware of it, his reply will be added to the end along with my counter-reply. If you don’t see that, rest assured that he either hasn’t replied, or didn’t inform me that he did. But don’t hold your breath.

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “The problem, it seems to me, is when someone gets these clues, like you, but ignores them. I suppose the act of ignoring could be deliberate or just out of apathy, but someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone who (very much like he himself) was (to hear him tell it) not backing up his position: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 40 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning. As of 7-9-19, this is how Bob absurdly rationalizes his non-response: “He’s written several blog posts titled, in effect, ‘In Which Bob Seidensticker Was Mean to Me.’ Normally, I’d enjoy a semi-thoughtful debate, but I’m sure they weren’t.”

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, follow this link: “Seidensticker Folly #” or see all of them linked under his own section on my Atheism page.

*****

Bob’s article, “5 Ways the Design Argument Fails” (8-21-20), takes on aspects of the classic theistic proof, the teleological argument, in one of its present guises, as argued by advocates of intelligent design. I shall examine some of his inadequately thought-through premises.

Does life on earth look designed by an intelligence? Science says no, and evolution explains why.

First of all, science, as presently defined and self-understood, cannot state one way or another whether God (assuming His existence for the sake of argument) designed anything or not, since its subject and object of study is matter, and God (again by definition) is not material. Consistently, a scientist must be an agnostic on this question. Secondly, the  arguments that Bob uses in order to conclude that science says “no” to any design by a Creator (even if we grant that science may “speak” on the issue) are wholly inadequate, as I will show. But I’m delighted to report that Bob (credit where due) does make some interesting and important philosophical concessions at the end of his analysis, for which I highly commend him.

We’ve been recently looking at Creationist pushback against evolution, . . . 

I’m not here to defend creationism, but rather, to examine the falsehood of scientific materialism. Intelligent Design itself is not necessarily creationist at all. In fact, the leading and most well-known proponent, biochemist Michael Behe, believes in evolution and the evolutionary descent of man. It simply means that there is a belief that God had some role to play in the design of the universe: whether this is construed in terms of theistic evolution or some form of creationism; and that purely materialistic explanations of the complexity we see are ultimately deficient in explaining it.

[T]here’s another way to respond to this version of the Design Argument, which states that nature appears designed by a cosmic Designer. While the bacterial flagellum is a favorite bit of nature that Creationists love to marvel at, DNA itself is even more so. . . . 

I will show that DNA is not evolution’s Achilles’ heel but rather a powerful rejection of this argument.

The Design Argument says that nature looks like it was the product of a Designer. 

That is one form of the traditional theistic proof known as the teleological argument, but it can be expressed in more subtle and sophisticated terms, as I will seek to show. For example, what makes us (whether theist or atheist) think in the first place that we can figure out what nature should or ought to “look like”? If God exists, the classical theistic (and Christian) formulation holds that He is an infinitely intelligent; in fact, omniscient Being. Why, then, would we assume that we can figure out such things, from our limited perspective?

By analogy, take the theory of relativity. That is now almost universally accepted physics, yet it overthrew hundreds of years of Newtonian physics, that was regarded as unassailable and unable to be questioned. For that to have happened, required the brain of one of the most intelligent and brilliant men to have ever lived: Albert Einstein; and it was not what almost all human beings prior to that time (or even after it) would have expected, using our senses and common sense. Nature — whether God exists or not — is exceedingly complex, and very often not what we expect it to be or claim (in our limited minds) that it “should” be. Relativity is a prime example of that, and we should learn from it, and learn more intellectual humility.

And Einstein, by the way, though not a theist, was also not an atheist. He was a pantheist or panentheist, and thought that the universe exhibited a marvelous design that had to come from something more than matter itself (and that any truly scientific mind would instinctively recognize this):

My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. (To a banker in Colorado, 1927. Cited in the New York Times obituary, April 19, 1955)

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe — a spirit vastly superior to that of man . . . In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort . . . (To student Phyllis Right, who asked if scientists pray; January 24, 1936)

In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. (to German anti-Nazi diplomat and author Hubertus zu Lowenstein around 1941)

Then there are the fanatical atheists . . . They are creatures who can’t hear the music of the spheres. (August 7, 1941)

No finished design will ever deliberately have unwanted, useless junk in it. A critic might label one element as junk—maybe they didn’t like some architectural ornament—but “junk” would have never been a deliberate part of the design. That makes junk the vulnerable point in the Design Argument. If we can find junk in DNA, we will defeat this argument. In fact, DNA has plenty of junk, in at least five categories.

How does Bob know that this is the case? How can he prove it? How does he “know” that God would “never” deliberately incorporate what he (ultimately arbitrarily) defines as “junk”? He simply can’t know such a thing. It’s a fun, interesting hypothesis, but it’s based on precisely nothing at all.

Moreover, we may very well be wrong as to whether any given thing described as “junk” (i.e., of supposedly no purpose) actually has no purpose. The classic historical example of that is the appendix. Scientists used to think it had no purpose whatever, and was some sort of “vestigial remnant” of evolution. The Wikipedia article, “Appendix (anatomy)” describes research on the appendix’s function that has surfaced just in the last twenty years:

Maintaining gut flora

Although it has been long accepted that the immune tissue surrounding the appendix and elsewhere in the gut—called gut-associated lymphoid tissue—carries out a number of important functions, explanations were lacking for the distinctive shape of the appendix and its apparent lack of specific importance and function as judged by an absence of side effects following its removal.[12] Therefore, the notion that the appendix is only vestigial became widely held.

William Parker, Randy Bollinger, and colleagues at Duke University proposed in 2007 that the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria when illness flushes the bacteria from the rest of the intestines.[13][14] This proposition is based on an understanding that emerged by the early 2000s of how the immune system supports the growth of beneficial intestinal bacteria,[15][16] in combination with many well-known features of the appendix, including its architecture, its location just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine, and its association with copious amounts of immune tissue. Research performed at Winthrop–University Hospital showed that individuals without an appendix were four times as likely to have a recurrence of Clostridium difficile colitis.[17] The appendix, therefore, may act as a “safe house” for beneficial bacteria.[13] This reservoir of bacteria could then serve to repopulate the gut flora in the digestive system following a bout of dysentery or cholera or to boost it following a milder gastrointestinal illness.[14]

Another function was also identified in the article:

Immune and lymphatic system

The appendix has been identified as an important component of mammalian mucosal immune function, particularly B cell-mediated immune responses and extrathymically derived T cells. This structure helps in the proper movement and removal of waste matter in the digestive system, contains lymphatic vessels that regulate pathogens, and lastly, might even produce early defences that prevent deadly diseases. Additionally, it is thought that this may provide more immune defences from invading pathogens and getting the lymphatic system’s B and T cells to fight the viruses and bacteria that infect that portion of the bowel and training them so that immune responses are targeted and more able to reliably and less dangerously fight off pathogens.[18] In addition, there are different immune cells called innate lymphoid cells that function in the gut in order to help the appendix maintain digestive health.[19][20]

So perhaps the human appendix would have made Bob’s list of useless biological “junk” as recently as 1999. Now it looks like he was dead wrong. And if he was wrong about this, who’s to say he may not be wrong about many other proposed examples? The more this happens, the weaker his argument against design becomes. Bob — to be fair — does say about the appendix:

Vestigial structures are structures like the human appendix or tailbone that have lost most or all of their ancestral function. That doesn’t mean that they’re useless, just that they aren’t used for what they were originally used for.

I would reply that Bob can’t logically or scientifically deny that the functions described above were “intended” for the appendix all along. We just didn’t know it. Now we do. And this limitation on our part is my point. He also brings up another example: “goose bumps (to raise nonexistent fur) in humans.” It seems to be consensus that goose bumps in humans have little or no purpose. But the Wikipedia article on the topic does mention at least one thing which would show that goose bumps may actually have a function or purpose:

Goose bumps can be experienced in the presence of flash-cold temperatures, for example being in a cold environment, and the skin being able to re-balance its surface temperature quickly. The stimulus of cold surroundings causes the tiny muscles attached to each hair follicle to contract. This contraction causes the hair strands to stand straight, the purpose of which is to aid in quicker drying via evaporation of water clinging to the hair which is moved upward and away from the skin. [my italics for emphasis]

Healthline.com (“Why Do We Get Goosebumps?”) observes similarly: “On the most basic level, goosebumps can help keep you warm. When you’re cold, the muscle movements that can trigger goosebumps will also warm your body.” Researchers at Harvard very recently discovered another purpose:

Goosebumps are a weird quirk of our bodies that science doesn’t fully understand. Now, researchers at Harvard have uncovered a biological reason for the reaction: it’s our bodies’ way of stimulating stem cells to drive new hair growth. . . . 

[T]he team discovered a new part of this equation. Examining the skin using electron microscopy, they found that the sympathetic nerve also has a direct connection to the hair follicle stem cells, wrapping around them. When the nerve is activated, it also activates the stem cells to begin growing new hair.

So there you go: another purpose that we were ignorant of till now. And all of a sudden it seems that goosebumps have an actual purpose after all. If we hadn’t known these things, we still may have discovered them in due course, just as we have for the appendix. Bob is basically appealing to an argument for ignorance or “god of the gaps” (something atheists love to constantly taunt theists with). And this is a severe flaw, it seems to me, in his argument against design. It’s an exceedingly weak argument. But Bob keeps blissfully committing the same fallacy over and over:

Here is one of his examples: he notes that humans have “3 billion base pairs” of DNA, but amoebas have “670 billion.” That makes no sense to him, so he opines:

There are two explanations. One is that these lifeforms need all their DNA—and the axolotl salamander really needs ten times the DNA that humans have, and the Amoeba dubia really needs 200 times more—but this seems unlikely. The other option is that much of the DNA in earth life is junk.

Just because a stretch of DNA isn’t used for anything now doesn’t mean that it can’t be fodder for evolution to create some future improvement, but this isn’t what we’d expect if life is the way it is because of a designer. However, DNA full of junk is exactly what evolution would predict.

Again, under the hypothesis of a super-intelligent, ultimately incomprehensible, omniscient God, why would we expect anything at all? What makes us think we can figure out all His designs (pun intended) and purposes and methods, etc.: anymore than an ant or a catfish would understand all of ours? Even if there is no God it remains true that nature is full of surprises and things that seem inexplicable to us.

Think of, for example, quantum mechanics, which blew everyone’s mind when it was discovered and explained in the 1920s. It wreaked havoc on scientists’ previous understanding of cause and effect. There are continuing mysteries being pondered by scientists today, like dark matter. We know so little about it that there are at least six major theories (and many sub-theories) as to what it even consists of.

Both phenomena were not what anyone expected to find. I don’t see — philosophically and logically — why it should be any different under an assumption of God as Designer. But (bless his atheist / former Christian soul) Bob ends on a logical note, where he stumbles into what the theist would say is the truth:

What this shows (and doesn’t show)

The success of this argument doesn’t prove that God didn’t create DNA. He might have his own ways of design that are beyond our capabilities to appreciate.

Exactly. That’s what Darwin thought, and his “bulldog” Thomas Huxley, and theistic evolutionists like the botanist Asa Gray. None of them automatically excluded God from evolution or the universe. And we know that Origin of Species was the product of a theistic mind, since Darwin definitely believed in God when he wrote it (there is, however, some question about his later religious belief).

It also doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. God could still exist while letting evolution shape life.

Indeed He could, with evolution merely being His method of creation. These are very important disclaimers, and I appreciate them. It shows that Bob is not so far gone in his anti-theistic zeal, that he can’t recognize or see at all rather obvious logical aspects (possibilities not ruled out) of the larger question.

But this does defeat the popular DNA version of the Design Argument, which says that DNA looks like it was designed.

I’m contending that a more nuanced form of the argument holds that nature (or, creation, if there is a Creator) need not “look like” what our paltry little brains think it “should” look like: that whatever the truth is, it’ll be full of surprises, and we shouldn’t “expect” anything, except to be blown away and surprised by the marvelous complexity entailed. What we have already discovered fully bears that out.

If God’s handiwork is so bizarre that it doesn’t look like anything that any conceivable designer would likely create, then Christians should rethink the Design Argument.

By what criterion do we determine if something is “bizarre”? This is the issue. We ought to reasonably expect to be surprised and shocked over and over by what an omniscient God of inconceivable intelligence and power can and does create, and how He makes it work on an intricate micro as well as macro level.

The history of science shows us this. It’s just how nature is: whether designed by a Designer or brought about by materialistic evolution alone. God’s not stupid, and we are extraordinarily stupid compared to Him (as dumb as a slug compared to Einstein): if He exists and is anything like theologians and philosophers tell us He is like.

***

Photo credit: Hubble Space Telescope / NASA (4-24-15): Westerlund 2 a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund, who discovered the grouping in the 1960s. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina [public domain / Flickr]

***

 

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