Having now read more than 50 books on the subject, I can say without qualification that you are stupid in this regard.

In fact, it’s amazing how many of his analyses end with “…and therefore you are stupid,” or variations thereof. It’s a defense mechanism of sorts, a tactic intended to discourage critics from hanging around long enough to pose a real problem, though from my perspective his best defense is the relentless mediocrity of his scholarship and apologetics. It doesn’t take long to exhaust his repertoire of social maneuvers and rhetorical ploys, and after that it gets fairly repetitive and uninteresting. He’s read a lot of books, and therefore you are wrong (though sadly he has trouble providing any specific articulation of what those books contain that actually proves you wrong). Ok, yeah, we get it, that’s your schtick and you’re schtickin’ to it. Ha ha.

Still, he does now and then come up with an actual argument for his beliefs, and some of them are actually interesting to consider. It’s not that they’re right, exactly, but they’re wrong in interesting ways. One of these arguments appears in his attempt to debunk what I said about I Cor. 15.

For example, he says that “the reason Paul wrote [1 Cor.] 15 isbecause, as verse 12 tells us, he was unhappy with the number of believers who did not buy this whole resurrection business.” Um, not quite, Dumplin’. Their issue was not with whether the resurrection of Jesus happened; their issue was with what was thought to be the impossibility of resurrection (point 3) according to pagan philosophical principles. There’s no room to say that doubted that Jesus was raised; but they did doubt that they could be. As I noted in replies to The Empty Tomb, this does mean they were holding inconsistent positions. Paul’s appeal to Jesus as a model is for the purpose of saying, to persons of a collectivist mindset, “If you deny that it can happen to you, then how do you explain that it happened to our ingroup leader?”

Ok, so they weren’t denying that it did happen, they were merely denying that it was even possible for it to happen. I can see this is going to be good already.

Let’s review I Cor. 15 real quick, shall we? Paul starts out by saying “This is what the most important thing in the Gospel is: the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.” He then cites a number of “appearances” that are intended to prove that Jesus did rise, of which his own experience is the crowning example. (That right there is a bit of a problem, since we know that this was not a physical appearance and that the men who were with Paul did not see Jesus appear.) He gets sidetracked for a bit (“I persecuted the Church! I am not worthy!”), but the main point he’s trying to make is that Jesus did rise (in some sense, at least).

This is all groundwork for his main point, in verses 12 and 13. “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.” Paul, in other words, is quite clear on the conflict between the idea that Jesus rose, and the idea that there is no resurrection. He’s equally clear that he sees this as refuting what the Corinthians believed, which is a problem, because it suggests that the Corinthians did not believe that Jesus rose.

Holding proposes an interesting solution: “There’s no room to say that [they] doubted that Jesus was raised; but they did doubt that they could be.” In other words, they believed that Jesus rose from the dead, but they thought that only Jesus was raised, and that no one else would be. Now, this might lend some credence to the notion that they regarded Jesus as some kind of god, and was therefore possessed of powers that no one else had, but it does rather deflate Paul’s argument doesn’t it? I mean, let’s assume that the Corinthians did indeed believe that Jesus was raised and that no one else was. Paul’s argument, in historical context, turns out to be, “But if Jesus was the only one who was raised, how is it that some of you say that Jesus is the only one who was raised? For if no one but Jesus is raised, then Jesus himself is… uh… raised. Just like you said. Never mind.”

What Holding is doing is what a lot of apologists and theologians do: try to take the ideas discussed at the end of the chapter, and overlap them onto the beginning. The end of the chapter does indeed focus on the question of what kind of body are the dead raised in, and addresses it with a number of comparisons that contrast the inferior body that was buried and the spiritual body that is raised. But we’re not up to that part yet. We’re still at the beginning of the chapter, where Paul tries to convince the Corinthians that their beliefs are wrong because Jesus (allegedly) did rise. In Paul’s mind, at least, there is a clear contradiction between what (some of) the Corinthians believed, and the doctrine of the Resurrection.

Holding proposes a solution to that problem as well: the Corinthians were simply being inconsistent in their beliefs. That one certainly has the ring of plausibility, right? We see Christians hold inconsistent beliefs all the time, like the belief that “God is in control” and that “the whole world lies in the power of the Evil One.” But this one seems a bit much just the same. How on earth do you convert to a religion in which the most important principle is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, a religion that you join by a ritual of baptismal union with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, and not notice that there’s any contradiction with your conviction that the dead do not rise?

There’s a Monty Python sketch in which a new recruit comes up to his commanding officer and wants to be let out of the army because he didn’t realize there were going to be guns and fighting and such. (“I mean, blimey, someone could get hurt!”) It’s a funny bit, because it’s ridiculous to suppose that anyone could be dense enough to join the army and not realize that there was any fighting involved. How, then, do we explain the existence, within the Church, of believers who did not believe that resurrection was possible? Not just that their own resurrection was impossible, but that resurrection itself was impossible, in a way that contradicted the resurrection of Jesus, and which the resurrection of Jesus could thus be used to refute?

I can think of a couple of different ways. One is if the resurrection is an afterthought, a little-known doctrine that Christians sheepishly share only with those who’ve been absorbed deeply enough into the religion to be willing to accept the hard-to-swallow stuff. Based on Paul’s declaration that the resurrection was a core element of the Gospel he preached and by which he converted the Corinthians, that seems unlikely.

The other possibility is if the resurrection, as originally preached, was a spiritual resurrection, the raising of a spiritual body, as per the latter half of the chapter. A person who believed in a spiritual afterlife, you see, could easily adopt a religion based on the spiritual resurrection of Jesus, even if they denied the possibility of a physical resurrection. The inconsistency between accepting resurrection and rejecting resurrection would not appear until later on, when it came time to discuss the implications of the resurrection—or, for example, if the doctrine itself began to morph into the idea that Jesus had a real (as in physical) resurrection.

That’s another interesting possibility, because if the Corinthians did sign up under the assumption that Jesus’ resurrection was spiritual, and then noticed a growing tendency to re-frame the resurrection as a physical, bodily resurrection, it would produce a controversy within the Church. Not only would there be controversy, but the controversy would involve the very specific issues of whether or not Jesus’ resurrection was really real, and what it really means to be “raised,” i.e. what sort of “body” do you have when you’re resurrected.

Some of those issues obviously did arise in the case of the Corinthians, and Paul takes the second half of 1 Cor. 15 to address them. And notice, the issues that arise (e.g. “what kind of body is raised?”) are issues that spring from a discussion of physical versus spiritual resurrection. Paul’s response is, strikingly, not a defense of the idea that the same physical body is raised, but rather a defense of the idea that raising a different kind of body is just as good.

When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.  So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

There’s all different kinds of bodies, Paul argues. The raised body doesn’t need to be the same body as the one that was “sown,” any more than a wheat seed needs to still be a seed when it comes back up out of the ground. And besides, an earthly body isn’t as cool as a heavenly one. It’s sown a natural body, but it’s raised a spiritual body.

Christians today no longer embrace the idea that a spiritual resurrection is just as good as a materialistic raising of the dead. Even in Paul’s time, the “spiritual body” stuff was creating headaches and undermining the whole Gospel. To make the resurrection real, you need to somehow incorporate the physical body into the process, even though doing so makes it cease to be a physical body and leaves you with a disembodied spirit that manifests itself physically (and temporarily) just like the angels in the Old Testament stories, and even the unresurrected OT God on occasion.

I’m pretty much done with that topic, but I can’t resist sharing just a couple more toony gems from Mr. Holding.

Beyond this, Dumplin’ offers the usual canards. “Paul doesn’t mention an empty tomb, bwaaaah.” (No, I guess when he says “buried” he means they buried Jesus in midair, or at sea.) “The body could have decayed so that it was unrecognizable, bwaaaah.” Doesn’t matter, Dumplin’. ANY body could have been produced by the authorities, who could have tagged it “Jesus,” and no one could have said boo to contradict them.

Right, Mr. Holding. So why didn’t they take just any decomposed body and call it the body of Christ? Perhaps because they didn’t need to, since it was already widely reported that the body had been taken by disciples, as Matthew records? And by the way, when you bury someone in a tomb, doesn’t that mean that the tomb is no longer empty? The question isn’t whether burial produces an empty tomb, it’s whether a resurrection does. A spiritual resurrection would make the contents of the tomb irrelevant and not worth mentioning, but all four of the stories that claim a physical resurrection take pains to assure us that the tomb was indeed empty. Paul, who says the body is “raised” as a spiritual body, does not.

Ah, Sunday Toons. I’d forgotten how much I almost enjoyed them.

The important thing for now is that we recognize that our chief obligation is to the facts of our existence, and sometimes reality appears inconsistent and contradictory- and yet there it is.  What does one do in this situation?  Do you throw out your data?  The point being is that you must deal with your data and if you are reasonably confident that your data is legitimate it does not cease to be so just because you perceive it to be ‘inconsistent’ or contradictory.

I say all this because it is absolutely wrong headed to apply Herr Professor’s technique and attitude to supernatural claims and deeply ironic.  Herr Professor, like so many other atheists, deeply imbibes on scientism.  But science itself- meaning, the natural framework alone- provides us with contradictory notions, and yet the data compels us to consider them.  And that’s just within our natural framework!  Never mind revelatory claims!  Nature itself confounds us.

My approach is to verify the facts and to interpret them in the light of the principle that truth is consistent with itself, so it’s hard to see why it would be “wrong-headed” to apply that approach to claims about the supernatural. But I don’t think he really meant to imply that the supernatural is somehow resistant to attempts to discover the truth about it. I think he just wanted to insinuate that scientists have some kind of systematic filter that causes them to reject otherwise-valid evidence just because it happens to be “supernatural.”

This is a combination strawman and red herring. Science does not arbitrarily discard the “supernatural” because of some arbitrary “imbibing” of whatever “scientism” is supposed to mean. Science doesn’t even know the difference between natural and supernatural—it can’t, because it only deals with verifiable facts. No matter what “realm” God is supposed to come from, either His existence is a verifiable fact, or it isn’t. If we could objectively and reliably verify God’s existence, then science would merely expands its definition of the real world to include God. If not, then science has no place for God—not because of any purported bias against the “supernatural” (whatever that means), but because science only works with verifiable facts.

Like many believers, Mr. Horvath overlooks the fact that there is no canonical list of what is natural and what is supernatural. Science only knows what is or is not observable and verifiable in the real world. Science, for example, does not care whether lightning is the supernatural wrath of some offended deity, it only cares what properties and behaviors “fire from heaven” exhibits in the real world. Nor does science have any problem at all with the idea of realms or dimensions beyond the 4-dimensional space-time we commonly perceive. In fact, you can make quite a scientific career for yourself by exploring the theoretical physics of n-dimensional space and multiple universes (provided you do your homework right). An intelligent, powerful being existing in superdimensional space-time (or several such beings) would provide no obstacle whatsoever to science PROVIDED that objective and verifiable evidence could be produced for the existence of such a thing.

Science’s problem with “the supernatural” is that the label “supernatural” is only applied to “explanations” for which claims are made in the absence of evidence, as an excuse for the absence. “Supernatural” means, by definition, that science cannot verify it, because if science could and did verify it (as was the case with lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, and other alleged “supernatural” interventions), then it would cease to be categorized as supernatural, and would instead expand the definition of “natural.”

So the idea of scientists having an alleged bias against “the supernatural” is what you might call a “straw herring.” Science is biased against the unverifiable, and rightly so, since the alternative is to descend into gullibility and superstition. Horvath is correct that our chief obligation is to the facts of our existence, which is why his apologetic fails by failing to deliver verifiable facts in support of His God, and offers instead only the rationalization that perhaps this missing evidence might exist in some higher dimension that is conveniently out of reach of scientific inquiry.

Horvath tries to argue that contradictions in the Gospel are analogous to quantum physics, and phenomena such as the behavior of light (like a particle under certain circumstances, and like a wave under others). The crucial difference between these two cases, however, is that you can observe the way light behaves, so your conclusion is based on verifiable observation. God does not show up in real life, however, so you can’t call theological contradictions a case of observed behavior. The two cases are not analogous.

Nor does it help to excuse this deficiency by claiming that God behaved a certain way once upon a time. What you and I have to deal with today is the evidence as it exists today. Ancient dead men said a lot of things, and described a lot of gods (and demons and witches and magic and so on). Our obligation is to consider these stories in the light of verifiable facts, not in the light of arbitrary rationalizations based on speculation about some kind of undefined transcendent dimensionality.

Mr. Horvath made a rather bold (and IMO rather foolish) claim about discerning truth from untruth.

Now, I agree with H. Professor that identifying inconsistencies and contradictions are useful for sorting out falsehoods, but don’t agree that they are the only means.

The reason I think that’s a foolish claim is because inconsistency with the truth is, by definition, what it means for something to be false. If a thing is 100% consistent with the way the truth really is, then it’s not false in any meaningful sense of the word. Conversely, if you’re going to show that a thing is false, then what you are going to show is that there is some way in which it fails to be consistent with real-world truth. Perhaps Mr. Horvath is thinking that some omniscient deity could come along and tell us, “X is false,” but even then, the deity would have to have discovered a contradiction or inconsistency, since that’s what “X is false” means.

As I mentioned before, the big problem with Mr. Horvath’s reasoning is that it is a universal rationalization that boils down to universal agnosticism, the idea that we can’t know the truth about anything. Are there contradictions between the book of Mormon and the Bible? Well, we know from looking at quantum physics that we can see things as contradictions when they really cohere on some higher level, so the apparent contradictions don’t mean that Mormonism isn’t true. Does the Bible contradict the idea that God created some people to be gay, and approves of that sort of relationship? Maybe from our perspective it looks like a contradiction, but you know, when a sphere intersects a plane, it looks different from what it really is in 3D space, so maybe gays are right after all. Or maybe Fred Phelps is, despite the contradictions between his ministry and a whole slew of things the Bible says. You can’t ever really know whether an apparent contradiction is wrong, or if it just looks funny because it’s transcendent.

Or can you?

In the first place we need to be clear about just what constitutes a contradiction. Flat out contradictions are hard to come by. “This is A” and “This is not A” is a contradiction. “This is A” and “This is B” is not necessarily a contradiction. It may be an inconsistency, but that may just be because there isn’t currently enough information to resolve it. One must be careful. For example, “This is a bird” and “This is not a bird” is a contradiction. “This is a bird” and “This is a sparrow” is not a contradiction, and if you didn’t know that sparrows are kinds of birds I suppose you would view this as an inconsistency.

Let’s apply that to a specific case, starting with the idea that “This is A” contradicts “This is not A”. If Jesus is 100% God, then Jesus is omniscient, because God is omniscient. (“This is A.”) If Jesus is 100% man, then Jesus is not omniscient, because man is not omniscient. (“This is not A.”). Therefore “Jesus is omniscient” contradicts “Jesus is not omniscient,” QED. It does not help to say that Jesus is omniscient and is only pretending not to be, or to say that Jesus is omniscient and just isn’t using it at the moment. Hidden omniscience and unused omniscience are not the same as absent omniscience, and therefore the statement “Jesus is omniscient” is a contradiction of the statement “Jesus is not omniscient.”

Or let’s look at “This is a bird” and “This is a sparrow.” That is, “sparrow” is a specialization of the more generalized class of “birds”. In the same way, “person” is a specialization of the more general class of “beings”—all persons are beings but not all beings are persons, just like not all birds are sparrows. And God, as traditionally defined, is a specialization of “person”—all Gods are persons, but not all persons are Gods. Hence, since “God” is a specialization of the broader category of “persons” it is just as contradictory to say “Three persons are one God” as it is to say “Three birds are one sparrow.”

You can try and rescue the Trinity by changing the definition of “God,” and divorcing it from the essential Entity->Being->Person identity specialization. Maybe being God is not a matter of the essence of what an Entity/Being/Person is, but is just an attribute that can be shared in common among many, the way mankind exists as many individuals sharing a common humanity. The trouble is, if you do that, then “God” ceases to be the identity of a specific individual being, and becomes a category of multiple beings, i.e. polytheism. Or you can define “God” as an aggregation of lesser parts, rather than as an individual identity, in which case the Trinity still collapses because each Person in the Trinity becomes less than the whole God.

Or you can combine the two approaches: is Jesus 100% of what God is? If you say “yes,” then that leaves 0% for the Father and the Spirit. But if the Father is also God, then there is some portion of God that is “not-Jesus”, which means Jesus must be “not 100% of what God is.” But if Jesus and the Father are both 100% of what God is, and there is no portion of God that is either not-Jesus or not-Father, then there is no distinction between Father and Son, because what one is, the other is also (the Father can’t be “not Jesus” because the Father is God, and no portion of God can be “not Jesus”). And if you say the Father and the Son are both 100% of what God is, without being the same 100%, then you have a contradiction, because that’s 200%, and a thing cannot be more than 100% of itself.

These are the sorts of “A vs. not-A” contradictions that send apologists like Horvath looking for other dimensions in hopes of finding some place inaccessible enough that the rest of us can’t prove that there’s not some inscrutable resolution hiding there. They’re not issues of form or shape or other attributes that change appearance depending on how you look at them. They’re essential issues of identity and being—the “is or is not” which he offered as defining a “flat out” contradiction—and they make simultaneous, conflicting assertions that reflect the social, political, and theological conflict that gave them their original doctrinal form.

In the end, Horvath’s argument ends up being an Emperor’s New Clothes argument.

Herr Professor’s approach… is to insist on applying the expectations of 2D math and logic to the claim without taking into consideration that nature of the thing allegedly ‘breaking in.’ This results in circular reasoning- a logical fallacy (since we apparently care about logic), for obviously if you insist on interpreting all data naturalistically (as 2 dimensional) then you will always conclude that what you perceived has a naturalistic explanation.

Combined with the “straw herring” fallacy he injected earlier, the message here is quite clear: the only reason atheists are silly enough to perceive a contradiction between the Emperor’s apparent nakedness and the fine clothes he is supposed to be wearing is because they are only looking at things 2-dimensionally, and are failing to consider the possibility that from some lofty and transcendent point of view it might be possible to see clothes. So Christians go ahead and believe that the Emperor must be wearing clothes, because they don’t want to be foolish, like the atheists.

Let me just point out that Horvath isn’t seeing any clothes either. He has no meaningful, verifiable answers for the problems that sent him in search of other dimensions in the first place. He merely raises the possibility of the existence of an unverifiable realm in which there might exist the possibility of some means of reconciling the contradictions and inconsistencies that he can see as well as we can. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes pose that flatters believers with the assurance that they are wise enough to see what isn’t there, while slandering non-believers with the undocumented assertion that they’re ignoring vital data.

Horvath isn’t working with data drawn from some transcendent realm of existence, he’s dealing with the stories he’s heard from other men. The actual real-world data, which is as accessible to us as it is to him, happens to conflict with these stories, just as the stories conflict with themselves. We need to let the data—the objective, verifiable facts—drive our interpretation of the stories, instead of letting the stories drive our interpretation of the facts. The former is science. The latter, gullibility.

H. Professor’s failure to see how these two fundamental claims about the nature of the thing under discussion connect to the rest of the argumentation I made is the underlying mistake of both of his posts.  That we are talking about an entity that is both transcendent and immanent is absolutely critical to the rest of the argumentation.  In fact, H. Professor makes complaints that I already answered- but because he fails to see the relation between these attributes and the rest I said, he fails to recognize them.

The last sentence reveals the second prong of Horvath’s attempt to make my arguments irrelevant: because I considered each of his arguments step by step, pointing out the problems that require further defense, he accuses me of raising objections that he had already answered (in subsequent parts of his post). He apparently did not understand that I was following the flow of his own logic: that there must be a reason why the “God can’t do nonsense” argument does not suffice to end the discussion, and why Horvath feels compelled to seek other solutions. I simply laid out what those unresolved problems are, at the beginning of the discussion, so that we could approach the rest of the discussion with an appropriate background.

There is a lot more I could have said, of course, and I’m grateful to Mr. Horvath for having given me the opportunity to explore this topic further. He raises some interesting points, and clarifies some others, and, if you can bear with me through a longish post, I think we’ll see why his defense of the Gospel actually constitutes a full-fledged concession of defeat, and a retreat into universal agnosticism.

Just so there’s no misunderstanding this time, let’s lay out the core issue here. The apologetic claim being made, and to which I am responding, is this: “We can think of certain circumstances under which things might appear to be contradictory, when in fact they are not contradictory when seen from the perspective of a “higher” dimension or domain.” The implication is that, seen from some “higher plane” (that you and I can’t see from), the contradictions in Christian theology aren’t actually contradictions.

Despite accusing me of misunderstanding him, Horvath agrees that this is indeed the issue we need to deal with.

The purpose of the Flatland example was not to say that this was how we relate to God, but rather to show how the rules of logic can appear to be violated in one case but when taken from a ‘higher’ plane can be perceived as nonetheless sound…

The whole point of the Flatland example was that what might seem to be inconsistent and contradictory may not in fact be so.

By the way, this is actually a fairly ancient rationalization, and all the “immanence this” and “transcendence that” is just to lend an aura of sophistication and intellectualism to the old excuse that “God works in mysterious ways (and therefore doesn’t need to make sense).”

The problem with the Flatland analogy, however, is that the intersection of a sphere with a plane produces no actual or apparent contradiction, even from the Flatlander’s point of view. The sphere that intersects the plane does not produce a circle whose circumference is less than its diameter, or which possesses four corners joined at 90 degree angles, or in any other way violates or conflicts with the laws of 2D geometry. It produces an ordinary circle whose radius varies from zero to n back to zero again, over a certain period of time. No contradiction, hence no basis for Mr. Horvath’s analogy.

I don’t think a sphere is really the best volumetric solid for this particular analogy anyway. Let’s help him out a little by suggesting a more complex shape: a torus. Imagine a torus (donut shape) standing upright (like a car tire) and slowly sinking down into the plane of Flatland until its center lies within the plane. As it moves, it will first form a point, then an ellipse that gradually grows bigger, then the middle of the ellipse (across the minor axis) will begin to narrow into more of an hourglass shape (as the hole in the torus approaches the plane).

At a certain point, the “waist” of the hourglass shape will shrink until it becomes a figure-8: two ellipses touching at their tips. Then the two ellipses will separate and move apart, becoming more and more circular as they get farther apart, until at last they are two perfect circles. Again, no violations or contradictions of any laws of geometry. The curves may be more complex, but neither of the resulting circles have square corners or diameters greater than their circumferences or any such thing.

But now, something strange does happen. A Flatlander approaches and tries to push the two circles together so that they touch again. He can’t do it. Pushing one circle makes the other circle slide away. He checks all around to see if any lines connect the two circles, but they don’t. As far as he can see, there is no connection in all of Flatland between the two circles (and there isn’t), yet the behavior of the two circles is consistently linked, such that the distance between them is constant. From a 3D perspective, it all seems quite natural: the Flatlander is pushing the whole torus, and when one side moves the other side moves as well, because its part of the same torus.

Now, if all we wanted was an excuse to ignore inconsistencies in what men claim about God, we could stop right here. We could use this “mysterious” torus to justify the conclusion that the problems in the Gospel must be the same sort of thing. Of course, that would be taking things backwards: in Flatland, the observations justify concluding the existence of a higher dimension. That’s quite a different thing from mere speculation about a higher dimension being enough to justify assuming that the observations must actually have happened.

Since we don’t care to fall into that particular converse fallacy, let’s think some more about what Flatland tells us. First of all, it tells us that truth is consistent with itself. We may not understand that self-consistency all the time, and perhaps we might not even perceive it, but the self-consistency of the truth transcends and is immanent within all dimensions of reality and all domains of real existence. The two circles don’t seem to have any connection, as far as a Flatlander can see, but the consistency of their behavior reflects the consistency of the truth itself, across n-dimensional space, and allows the mathematically-inclined Flatlander to draw specific and reasonable conclusions about the 3rd dimension.

In fact, the Flatlander can even make some predictions about the behavior of 3D objects in 2D space. For example, if a sphere moves through a plane at a constant speed, producing a circle of varying radius, you can plot the radius of the circle as a function of time and produce a sine wave. If the Flatland scientist observes a number of circles exhibiting this peculiar-yet-predictable pattern of variation, it would be consistent with the predicted variations for a 3D sphere moving through a 2D plane, and the scientist’s hypothesis would have some supporting evidence.

Likewise, if God were a being from a higher dimension and were interacting with this one, we could make similar observations. For example, just as the Flatlander observed that there was a superplanar connection between two apparently unconnected circles, we could observe God’s “super-natural” existence by the connection He would make between believers. Take two believers and isolate them from one another so that God is the only possible avenue of communication between them, then dictate a short text passage to one of them, and have God relay the text to the other. When the other believer writes down the text correctly, we have the same “mysteriously-connected circles” that the Flatlander does, and there’s a reason for us to conclude, if not God, then at least some hitherto undocumented connection.

In fact, we wouldn’t even need to do the experiment, since this commonality would arise as an ordinary matter of course. All God would need to do is not take supernatural measures to prevent us from noticing the mysterious connection that consistently linked believers together in ways that were verifiably more than just the product of ordinary happenstance. And there are any number of other ways in which the transcendent existence of God could and would verifiably manifest itself even in our allegedly inferior plane. But obviously none of these things are actually happening, which is why Mr. Horvath devotes so much effort to building a case for the answers lying in some speculative and inaccessible “higher plane.”

This is a key point, by the way. If the contradictions in Christian theology could be resolved by answers that lay within this realm of existence, Horvath would have no need to seek some “higher” plane in which such answers might possibly exist. He’s not proposing this speculation because God’s behavior can be observed to show a consistent pattern of superdimensionality that would justify a conclusion of divine transendence. He can’t: God does not show up in real life to give us any transcendent behavior to find patterns in. No, the problem is that Christian theology has a number of glaring inconsistencies and contradictions for which there is no resolution in this “dimension,” and that’s why Horvath needs to postulate the existence of some other, higher, and less accessible realm in which such answers might possibly be hiding.

Horvath takes me to task for failing to address his analogy about the relationship between an author and his characters, so let me rectify that omission right now. This, sadly, is a singularly unfortunate argument for him to make, since the God we’re talking about here is one who only shows up (as far as the real world is concerned) as a character in the stories men tell. We are not observing a God who shows up in real life and whose behavior and characteristics are puzzling to our limited minds. All we can observe in real life is that men tell us things about God that are inconsistent both with themselves and with objective reality.

Horvath himself is participating in the story-building that props up the Gospel. He’s taking the story as it has been told so far, and is using his imagination to try and come up with some kind of scenario that will make the story sound more plausible. If you’ve ever participated in any kind of group fiction-writing (or role play, which can be very similar), you know that this is exactly how fiction is produced. Just imagine something, and if it sounds plausible, add it to the story, and make the story better. That’s how you make a story get better over time, and coincidentally, it’s a theologian’s job description as well.

Trying to patch up the holes in the Gospel, though, only serves to demonstrate that the Gospel does indeed have holes. And that’s the fatal flaw in Horvath’s argument by analogy. When a person creates a story, they’re not creating reality, they’re manipulating abstracted concepts about reality, in ways that may or may not reflect some of the perfect self-consistency of genuine truth. Ultimately, though, all fiction fails at some point to be as consistent with real-world truth as real-world truth is with itself. When humans imagine a story, therefore, what they are doing is not analogous to creating a genuine reality.

In other words, Horvath’s analogy is false, because fiction writing fails to parallel reality at the point where it needs to be strictly parallel in order to be valid. The real world is not merely less self-contradictory that fiction, it is non-self-contradictory. You cannot correctly use the discrepancies between fiction and reality to argue for a corresponding discrepancy between reality and some supposed “higher” plane, because reality doesn’t have the inconsistencies and contradictions that define what it means to be fiction.

Horvath would like to argue otherwise, but my goodness, I’m over 2K words already, and there’s still a bunch of misconceptions and misdirections that I need to correct! I’d better split this into two parts and come back for more tomorrow.

I can begin with by trotting out the old ‘Can God create a rock that he cannot lift or move?’ line. The contention is that if God is all powerful he should be able to do this but in doing so he would simultaneously undermine his own omnipotence. Most of the time this is answered by pointing out that some statements are just nonsense and God’s omni-characteristics do not require him to be able to achieve the nonsensical… Something doesn’t become reasonable just because you insert ‘Can God’ in front of it.

Most people accept this explanation and I’ve found that even nonbelievers come around to accepting it. (Not all of them do, which is why 17 year olds with Google can still find the question to ask it)

Horvath isn’t quite satisfied with this explanation, and he goes on to try a different approach that’s a bit more interesting. But let’s focus on this one for now. At first glance, it seems like a plausible and reasonable answer. Some things are just “nonsense,” meaning that they incorporate two terms that are mutually contradictory. The concept of an irresistable force precludes, by definition, the possibility of any immovable objects, and vice versa. While you can construct a sentence that is grammatically correct and that includes both the terms “immovable object” and “irresistable force,” there’s no way that the sense of that sentence can represent any actual reality. Truth does not contradict itself, and therefore mutually contradictory concepts cannot simultaneously be a part of the real world. It is “non-sense”—a combination of words that does not represent any real condition.

So it makes sense that God would not be able to do things that are nonsense. The only trouble is, Christianity teaches a number of doctrines which are “non-sense” in precisely the same way as God making a stone so heavy that He Himself cannot lift it. The Trinity is the first example that comes to mind. It’s non-sense, which is why the Church councils branded it a “mystery,” a paradox that the human mind cannot fathom, and that must be taken solely on gullibilityfaith.

Not that people don’t try to make the Trinity make sense, of course. You can make sense of the Trinity, provided that you are willing to either turn it into polytheism or else turn the three Persons into only partial fragments of God. Both approaches, however, were declared heretical by the same councils that defined the Trinity, since each seriously compromises the Gospel. The genuine, historic, orthodox doctrine of the Trinity will settle for nothing less than the contradictory premises that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three distinct Persons, each of whom is God, and the sum of these three is one God, no more, no less.

That’s non-sense in the same way that irresistable force plus immovable object is non-sense. Being three precludes being one in the same way that one thing being irresistable precludes another thing being immovable. You could reconcile this dilemma by saying God is three of a different type of thing than what He is one of. For example, you could say that “God” is a type of being, just like “man” is a type of being. Just as you can have three men who share one common species (humanity), you could have three divine Persons who share one common species (deity).

That, however, is polytheism: multiple individuals who belong to the same “race” of gods. That’s not what the Trinity teaches. It teaches that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, and that these three are separate and distinct, and that there is a total of one, and only one, God. God cannot do non-sense, and this is non-sense. But Christians claim He does it.

Similar problems arise when we look at some of the other theological controversies that the Councils grappled with. Does Jesus have a human nature or a divine nature? Does he have a will of his own? The Councils came up with answers that, again, are “mysteries” (aka non-sense). Jesus has both a divine nature and a human nature; he’s 100% man and 100% god. But this is non-sense. “Nature,” in this context, is simply a conceptual enumeration of the attributes that determine one’s observable characteristics and behavior. It’s not like a shirt, that you can just put on or change, and have a whole closet full of. Two contradictory lists of what Jesus’ attributes are, replete with attributes that are true for gods and false for men, and vice versa, that are allegedly simultaneously true, contradictions and all. Non-sense, in the same way that an irresistable force plus an immovable object is.

Or we could look at the more subtle and generic contradictions, like a God that loves us enough to die for us while simultaneously being so aloof and patronizing that He refuses to deign to even let Himself be seen by us, let alone actually spend time in face-to-face, in-Person fellowship and interaction. Or a God who is sovereign and in control of everything that happens in the world, without—somehow—bearing any responsibility for any of the things that go wrong in the world. Or a God who cannot show up in real life because that would violate our free will, who nevertheless allegedly does show up, in ancient times, without apparently violating the free will or otherwise jeopardizing the salvation and well-being of the prophets, apostles, and other eyewitnesses.

Non-sense has a purpose: it exposes the internal and external inconsistencies that allow us to detect when the things men say are non-truth. Such inconsistencies and contradictions are our only means of detecting falsehoods, whether they are deliberate lies, honest misperceptions, erroneous reasoning, or just plain fiction. It’s important, therefore, that we pay attention whenever we see non-sensical arguments being raised in defense of the things men say about God. Since God does not show up in real life, the words of men are our only source of information about Him. It is vital that we be able to identify the untrue, non-sensical claims when they arise.

The main way used to defuse the trilemma is to try to add to it. As I have noted, these efforts are misguided. Dumplin’ whines (as do other) that the trilemma leaves out stuff like, “How do we know Jesus did say these things?” Actually, it doesn’t; that is just outside its scope. The Trilemma does assume that Jesus’ words are recorded accurately; but positing that they weren’t does not dissolve the Trilemma; it goes outside of it.

Notice that Holding assumes that I am trying to argue that the New Testament documents are unreliable records of what Jesus actually said. That is indeed a valid concern, however that was not the point I was trying to make, nor does my post anywhere raise that particular issue. Holding claims I tried to refute the trilemma argument by asking how we know Jesus said such and such, but I never raised any such objection nor did the idea figure in my argument at any point. So right off the bat Holding is attacking a ghostly straw man, a mere figment of his own imagination.

Next, Holding tries to prove me wrong by admitting that he didn’t understand what I wrote.

Dumplin’ claims that I create “a series of false dichotomies that fail to accurately represent the realities involved.” Really? How so? His example is a convoluted one of little coherence, to say nothing of little grasp of exegetical realities. He appeals to the incidence of John 10 in which Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.”

To answer Holding’s question (i.e. the “Really? How so?” bit), let’s look at one of the more popular passages in which Lewis defined his original trilemma argument, in Mere Christianity.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg – or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.

Notice, in defining what the trilemma is, and how it argues for the deity of Jesus, Lewis claims that Jesus has not left open the possibility that he was merely a great (non-divine) teacher. But is that really the case? Lewis said that if Jesus claimed to be God, and wasn’t, then he must either be a liar or on the same level as a man who says he’s a poached egg. But does it have to be an egg? Would he also be on the same level as a man who says that he is a gate for sheep to go in and out of? or that he is a vine? or that bread is his body and wine is his blood?

The problem is, Jesus liked to teach in parables and to use figurative language even when speaking to his disciples. Even if he did say, “I am God,” would that be meant literally? Let’s look again at Holding’s first dichotomy. “Either Jesus claimed to be divine, or He did not” (emph. Holding’s). The first question is, did Jesus claim to be literally divine? This is the first dichotomy in Holding’s argument, and it also reflects Lewis’s claim that Jesus has not left open the possibility that he was merely an inspired non-divine teacher. This question is the core of the trilemma argument, because if Jesus was not intentionally trying to convey the idea that he was God the Son Incarnate, all the subsequent dichotomies become moot.

In this context, it’s highly relevant to look at the case in John 10 where Jesus claimed to be one with God. Is that a claim to be genuine deity? Jesus was accused of claiming deity for himself, but his defense was to cite an Old Testament precedent in which God Himself allegedly used “elohim” to refer to ordinary mortals. Now, I’m just a poor dumb skeptic, but it sure sounds to me like Jesus is making the argument that it is legitimate to use “elohim” to refer to people who are not literally gods, and therefore it was not blasphemous for him to claim unity with God. Does that sound to you like Jesus is not leaving open the possibility that he might be merely an inspired teacher?

When we look at Psalm 82 itself (as I did in my original post), it becomes even more clear that a reasonable interpretation needs to be a bit more nuanced than simply forcing it into an “either true or false” binary choice. Jesus’s interpretation was that God refered to mortal men as “gods.” If we take the dichotomous approach, we ought to say (to be consistent with the logical structure of the trilemma) that either the men are gods, or they are not. From a Christian perspective, however, neither alternative is very palatable, because if you say that it’s true that men are gods, that sounds too polytheistic, but if you say that it’s false even though God stated it as true, then God must be either lying or mistaken.

The more nuanced approach is to acknowledge that there’s a certain amount of latitude in how you interpret what it means to “be gods” in that context—which is precisely the point I was making in regards to the trilemma argument. Applying the trilemma’s exegetical principles consistently to Psalm 82 results in a conclusion that is absurd (from a Christian perspective), thus showing that this particular hermeneutic is fallacious. The fix is to amend the hermeneutic to take the nuanced interpretations into account, as even Holding acknowledges.

Actually, Ps. 82′s true, intended meaning is best arrived at by exegetical scholarship; and in that sense, there’s a couple of issues at stake. First, “gods” (elohim) meant more than simply the one God of Judaism (see here, it is above Dumplin’s head of course).

In other words, the problem with trying to turn Psalm 82 into a dichotomy is that the word for “god” or “gods” can mean different things in different contexts, and theologians need to dig a little deeper than the Lewis/Holding dichotomy of “either true or false.” Holding has one more argument to try and make me sound wrong, however.

Second, Dumplin’ is confusing interpretation with determination. Whatever Ps. 82 means (I discuss this in detail in my book on Mormonism), it is obviously relating something true or false; and if false, either because the source of the claim (whether God or whomever) is lying or somehow deluded to some degree (whether by means of a mistake or because of mental illness, at the extremes).

The problem is, the determination is dependent on the interpretation, or more precisely, the accuracy of the determination is dependent on the accuracy of the interpretation. It’s all well and good to try and protect God by distancing what He allegedly said from what He allegedly meant, but that only makes the trilemma an even weaker argument for the deity of Jesus. Even if Jesus was absolutely 100% correct when he claimed to be “one with God” (in some sense), the assumed truth of that statement contributes nothing to the argument that he was genuine deity unless the interpretation (that he was claiming divinity) is also correct. Inaccessible truth is theoretically possible but practically useless, and our only access to the truth (or untruth) of Jesus’s claims is through human interpretation of his words. And those words must be interpreted exegetically, not by simplistic, artificial dichotomies.

Thus, by reducing the initial assumption to a naive dichotomy between whether Jesus did or did not claim to be divine, and by failing to take a more nuanced, exegetical approach to what Jesus might have meant by being “one with God” (and other oft-cited passages), the Lewis/Holding trilemma oversimplifies the theological issues involved, and reduces a complex theological question to a false dichotomy between mutually exclusive binary absolutes, neither of which necessarily describes the real-world context of the question.

Which is what I said in the first place. He who has ears to hear…

To start with, let me agree with Brother Holding. He starts his page with the title “Aw, Isn’t Duncan Cute the way he thinks he’s intelligent!” Technically, he isn’t even in the body of his page yet, and he’s already insulting my intelligence. Just couldn’t wait to get that out there, I guess. And I agree completely. I’m not that clever, which is why having a God like Alethea is such an improvement over my earlier Christian beliefs. As Mark Twain pointed out, telling the truth is easier because then you have less to remember. It’s only when you say things that conflict with the truth that you have to start keeping track of what you say.

Even if you do contradict yourself, however, you can still talk your way out of it if you’re clever enough. And if you can get a bunch of your buddies to join you, you can keep spinning yarns and explaining contradictions until you’ve built up a substantial mountain of doctrine. Continue this process over, say, a couple thousand years, and you can amass an intellectual network so vast that no single lifetime is enough to review it all, let alone address it. And since it all started with a contradiction of the truth, there are bound to be internal contradictions enough that academic types could make entire careers, if not fame and fortune, out of thinking up new explanations for this or that dilemma. It doesn’t even need to have anything to do with real life. It has become its own self-contained universe.

Frankly, I’m just not smart enough or patient enough to spend my life chasing after all the different things men say about the other things other men have said, and how this answer solves the problems raised by that answer when it tried to solve the problems of the answer before (…) etc. Reality suits me just fine, and if that doesn’t give the worldly-wise folk enough scope to demonstrate their superior brilliance, they can go ahead and make up their own truth and squabble with each other about it.

Meanwhile, back to the toons. Holding writes (referring to me as Dumplin’ Dumbash):

Dumplin’s biggest whine is about how “God consistently and universally fails to show up in the real world.” What he means by this — as is apparent from his other entries — is that God isn’t meeting his personal expectations to tie his shoelaces for him, feed himself, and help him go potty, so that means God is a failure. Don’t bother explaining to him how the Biblical model of God makes such expectations idiotic — if you even try to explain to him about the patronage models (which show that God will, overall, be remote and distant from us) he’ll accuse you of going outside the Bible for information, which tells you enough that what we have here is a “fundy atheist” of the usual ignorance.

Apparently, Holding thinks that a straw man fallacy constitutes parody—that if he substitutes silly and unreasonable demands for what I actually said, and then claims that it would be unreasonable for God to meet those silly demands, then some sort of victory has been won for the cause of Christ. And look how easily he gives up on trying to explain why, exactly, a “biblical model” of God would make it clear how “idiotic” it would be to expect God to show up in real life! If it is indeed a biblical model, why is it such a hopeless task to try and document it without going outside the Scriptures?

It’s clear, however, that God’s failure to show up in real life is indeed an Undeniable Fact with an Inescapable Consequence. If I were wrong about God showing up in real life, Holding would not need to make arguments (biblical or extrabiblical) about why it should be “idiotic” to expect Him to do so. Far from making things up, as Holding accuses me of, I merely point out the objective truth, as anybody can easily verify for themselves by direct observation of the real world.

Dumplin’ thinks this issue is “very uncomfortable for the believer” and it may well be for the kind of Christian who has also been taught that God is your personal buddy. For those of us more educated, however, the idea of God as remote is no more or less than we’d expect — and we’re very comfortable — thanks, Dumplin’, but you can go back in your playpen now. We’ll be shoving a little reality down your gullet and watching you choke on it.

The inescapable consequence of this undeniable fact is that theology, i.e the study of God, is necessarily a study being conducted by men in the absence of the thing they are studying. Unlike the sort of scientist who observes actual objective reality, and whose observations can be repeated and confirmed by others, the theologian must limit himself to speculating about God, and engaging the speculations of others. God’s failure to show up in real life necessarily makes human speculation the sole source of theological raw material, so to speak.

A further consequence of God’s absence is that theologians are ideally situated for an Emperor’s New Clothes argument. Because the subject of their research does not show up in real life, no one can ever objectively disconfirm their “observations.” You might dispute their conclusions, but pish-tush, you are merely not clever enough to perceive the lofty and esoteric principles that undergird their arguments, and what’s more, you are ignorant, having failed to read all the books that have been written about theology over the past twenty centuries. And don’t ask us to try and explain it to your inadequate intellect. You must simply accept our word for it that we’re smarter than you and that whatever we tell you is the truth. And that goes for you bumpkins in the church pews too!

By the way, did I mention how offended Holding is that I would use the term “gullibility” in my analysis of Christian faith?

The problem is, no matter how persuasive those clever theologians are, and no matter how “comfortable” Holding is with a remote God who does not show up in real life, theology, in God’s absence, boils down to talking about talk. What’s more, you don’t become a famous theologian, and your theology books don’t get themselves read, if all you ever do is bob your head and say “Yup, that’s right” when reading the works of other theologians. Theologians achieve their fame the same way novelists become famous: by looking at the story as it has developed so far, and then imagining an improved scenario that sounds both plausible and compelling in the context of the story (and of the social environment in which the story is being published). This is why there are fads in theology, and why theologians still have job security despite God’s failure to show up to be studied. The story could always use a bit more up-to-date polish.

And as each theologian builds on the theological works that have come before him, he refines it, adding a bit here, removing a bit there, according to what is needed to build a story that sounds plausible in the culture of the day. After 2,000 years of continuous refinement, it would be strange indeed if Christians did not have a very plausible-sounding tale indeed, at least for those who are inclined to just take Man’s word for it regarding the “truth” about a God Who cannot be observed.

But follow the trail back. Each theologian has built upon the foundations laid by the theologians who came before them. But what did those theologians build their foundation on? They had predecessors, too, and those predecessors had still further predecessors, each generation taking the earlier generation’s word for it that the underlying structure was true, even as they themselves worked to create the edifice they hold out as having come from the hand of God.

Ultimately, you get to the original theologians, the men who had no books to read, no earlier foundation to build on, and a God so remote that it would be “idiotic” to expect Him to show up in real life.

If theological competence requires you to be particularly brilliant and extensively educated in the writings of theologians, these first original theologians have a problem. Two problems in fact: number one, they have no way to know the things they claim about God if He doesn’t show up in real life, and number two, if it’s truly “idiotic” (as Holding says) to believe that God actually would show up in real life, why should subsequent theologians accept the authority of the  “idiotic” claims made by the first theologians, who clearly did not have access to any of the books that Holding says you have to read in order to be able to speak authoritatively about theology?

If someone sat down and wrote a book of speculations about unicorns, and other unicornologists followed in his footsteps, building, refining, and explaining the wonderful and important precepts of unicornology, and kept at it diligently for a few dozen centuries, there would indeed be a substantial body of unicornological material for one to be ignorant of. If people, of whatever IQ, are ignorant of unicornology, however, that would not mean that unicorns were real. Holding tries hard to refute my central claim, but in the end all he can do is confirm that my Fact really is Undeniable. And for that I do thank him.

Pantheism, and perhaps paganism (witches) would hold that all things are GOD or have GOD in them. Pantheist generally have a high respect for life as all life is GOD. The question of contradiction is based more on definition then everything but there are still contradictions within the world view. The most apparent contradiction is that if everything is GOD than nothing is GOD. Even if you define GOD in a very general term as say a life force (The Jedi God), the religion can not account for anything because the life force GOD has no power to create. Therefore the pantheistic god is unimportant and totally meaningless. In a nutshell pantheists stating that everything is god is a meaningless statement and meaningless as a world view.

My own view is that when people think they are perceiving God, what they are really perceiving is the complexity and unpredictability of Reality itself, filtered through the social instincts we use in dealing with people, who are also complex and unpredictable. In other words, Reality, when filtered through human eyes, becomes God, at least in our perceptual experience. This is a much more personal variety of pantheism than is usual, and also a more humanistic view. God, as “God,” exists only because humanity exists to experience Her.

Since this is a variety of pantheism (albeit atypical), let’s consider how schooloffish’s objections apply. First of all, do I have a high respect for life? Yes, of course. I myself happen to be alive, and I recommend it. So far so good. What about the objection that if everything is God then nothing is God? That’s easy enough, let’s just rephrase it. Is it true that if everything is real then nothing is real? When you consider that God is Reality, you can see that the two are really the same question. It’s a moot point, however, because not everything is real: fictions, fantasies, errors, lies, etc. are all not real and therefore not God.

Schooloffish’s objection, therefore, is based on a misconception. It’s not literally every conceivable thing that is God or part of God. Only real things are part of God. Therefore it is quite meaningful to say that God is Reality, as distinct from non-real things like delusions, frauds, unmarried spouses, and so on.

As for God’s power to create, that’s easy too. God creates by becoming. If you’re used to the magical stories men tell about the gods they have imagined, this might seem odd at first, but if you think about it, every “creation” we see in real life is an instance of one thing becoming something else. Oils and pigments become paint. Fibers become threads and threads become canvas. Canvas and paints become a painting. One real thing becomes another. Even stories and fantasies draw on concepts and experiences that we derive from the real world (otherwise they’d be meaningless).

There are two possibilities: either God is Reality itself, and creates by becoming, or else God is part of something greater than Himself, some larger context that contains both everything that God is, and every created thing that is not God. Reality is always at least as great as God, because any God that is not part of Reality is not a real God, by definition, and any God that is real is at least part of Reality. Either God is Reality, or God is something less than Reality. So schooloffish’s God, Who creates things which are not God, is necessarily an inferior being. By the very act of creating, He demonstrates Himself to be only a part and not the Whole.

Naturally, if you are going to claim that the pantheistic God is meaningless, you must also complain that reality itself is meaningless. As we pointed out before, God and Reality are really the same thing; “God” is simply a personification that helps us humans cope with the incomprehensible complexity and uncertainty of the cosmos. Just because we cannot fully grasp the totality of Reality, however, does not mean that Reality (the pantheistic God) is meaningless. Indeed, we would not know what “meaning” was, if Reality did not teach us.

The pantheistic God is not only meaningful, She is the source of all meaning. Go ahead: try to think up something meaningful that is not based on or derived from Her. What words will you use to describe this meaning? All of our words are expressions and concepts and relationships that we have acquired through our experiences of Reality. Even the charismatic believer babbling “in tongues” is merely mimicking the experience of making incomprehensible noises with their mouthes.

The pantheistic worldview is thus quite rational and self-consistent, provided we recognize that our concept of God is a human approximation for the intricacies and uncertainties of Reality itself. We cannot, by flattery (worship) or pathos (prayer), influence God to grant us things we have not earned and don’t deserve. But even Christians know this, or eventually learn it: God’s ways are not man’s ways, and we have to learn what to pray for. Prayer does not change God, it changes the pray-er. By praying, we learn what we can and cannot expect from God (i.e. Reality), and this helps us.

What the pantheist knows explicitly and sensibly, the Christian sooner or later learns, somewhat foggily. Reality is what it is, no matter how much or how little you pray, worship, serve, or otherwise attempt to get the Divine Attention. Christians are continually surprised by the fact that their God always behaves more like Alethea than like the God of the Bible, and are forced to repeat the mantra, “God works in mysterious ways.” The pantheistic view, however, does not need to invoke “mysterious ways” because its worldview is already self-consistent. Pantheism, therefore, does a much better job than Christianity at passing schooloffish’s worldview test.

When testing a world view, you need to take into account three things. Even if you are not familiar with all the aspects of a world view, if any one of these three test proves to be false, then the entire world view must – necessarily – be false. These tests are:

1. Is the world view contradictory within it’s own view?

2. Does the world view actually align with reality?

3. What do expects and eye witness have to say about the world view?

As we mentioned before, the relativistic world view (aka postmodernism) fails the first test, so we’ll skip over that analysis and go straight to the part about naturalism.

Naturalism by name believes that what one sees or observes is true… The problem is that science (the poster child for naturalism) is based nearly entirely on hypothesis or educated assumptions.

Well, no, I’m afraid that’s not true. Science is based first and foremost on observation. Observation is what leads the scientist to formulate a hypothesis, and observation is what the scientist uses to test the hypothesis. Consistency in observations is what lets us distinguish what’s true from what’s not. But let’s move on.

Many of these hypothesis CAN be tested, but many cannot. We can’t test consciousness, intuition, or morality for instance. We know that these things exist, but we simply don’t know why or how and since things like consciousness can only be attested to by the individually conscious person, no independent test can be produced to test such a thing. Another way of stating this is. The test of intimate knowledge. Only the person feeling or thinking something has intimate knowledge of the truth and no test can allow others into my intimate knowledge of something. This doesn’t mean that the information is NOT true just that it can’t be tested. For instance we can test memory but we can’t testconsciousness or the existence of a soul.

On the contrary, we most definitely can test consciousness, in fact, my wife is a nurse, and part of her job involves taking a (scientific) assessment of the patient’s level of consciousness, especially if there’s any suspicion of compromised brain function. But perhaps schooloffish means that there exists no scientific test for the existence of subjective thoughts and experiences? There are two answers to this: 1) scientists can and do observe the consequences of subjective thoughts (behavior, brain waves, etc), and 2) purely subjective experiences are part of subjective reality, so it’s really not science’s domain anyway (except in the case of psychiatry and psychology). Science is primarily concerned with objective reality; the existence of subjective realities does nothing to disqualify it in its proper realm.

And of course, there’s a very good reason why we cannot scientifically verify the existence of a “soul”…

Science would have us believe that the world happened by chance with no help from an invisible GOD. After all, we can’t see GOD and therefore he can’t exist.

No, I’m sorry, but this is wrong again, on both counts. Describing the origin of the world as happening “by chance” leaves out a vital dimension of the natural world, namely the natural laws which constrain and direct chance, and make some possibilities more likely than others. If I hold a golf ball in my hand and then release it, there are an infinite number of directions it could go—up, down, horizontally, north, west, south, east, or any number of countless variations in between. If we fail to consider natural laws like the law of gravity, we might think the odds of a golf ball falling down would be a gazillion to one. But the ball does not move “by chance,” it moves according to natural laws, just as the origin of the universe has done.

Schooloffish is also mistaken when he portrays naturalism as insisting that “we can’t see God and therefore he can’t exist.” Science is more than willing to believe in invisible realities, provided they are consistent with the observable and verifiable world. The number pi, for example, is invisible, inaudible, intangible, and so on, yet it is quite real, as is c, the limit on the speed of light in a vacuum. God’s invisibility is not what prevents science from finding Him, but rather the absence of any significant, verifiable, divine interaction with observable reality.

The general theory of evolution is all about change over time from one species to another. However, is this what we actually observe the world to be? Of course not.

This, unfortunately, is also incorrect. Evolution is about changes in the relative proportions of alleles over time, under the influence of natural variation and natural selection. The result of this process is, eventually, the occasional divergence of a gene pool into distinct species, i.e. new species arising via descent with modifications from common ancestors. Those who are truly willing to engage the evidence do indeed observe that the world consistently reflects the operation of evolutionary forces, both in the emergence of new species and in the residual consequences of past evolutionary events.

In fact, Christians ought to be deeply ashamed at the slur against God’s inventive genius if they should find that Creation were missing the astonishingly elegant, innovative, and powerful evolutionary systems that ordinary mortals (with PhD’s) have worked out by their studies of Nature. Evolution is too intelligent of a design for a wise and insightful Creator to have forgotten or refused to implement—in fact, given the existing laws of biochemistry, He would have had to take special steps to prevent evolutionary adaptations and improvements from blessing life on earth with the ability to cope and recover in a hostile environment.

We’ll take a break here, but so far it doesn’t look like schooloffish has come sufficiently close to the truth about naturalism to be able to critique it properly. We’ll see if he can do any better next time.

The last category to be discussed is a relativistic world view. This has become a very popular world view as of late. In general this world view believes that all world views are true for the individual and therefore all are right as long as it right for YOU. In a relativistic world view, the word truth, right and wrong are subjective as opposed to objective truth as the world would be used by the other two categories.

I don’t expect to have too much difficulty agreeing with schooloffish here, since the relativistic view is indeed rather silly and self-defeating. As Geisler and Turek point out, you can’t claim to have an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth. To make such claims is to exalt the human mind above the real world around us, to the point of merely deceiving yourself.

I will point out, though, that in my own personal experience, I’ve encountered far more Christians advocating a relativistic (or “postmodern”) worldview than I have secularists with similar views. Not that the secular relativists don’t exist, of course, but I personally have not met so many of them. Christians, though—lots, particularly once they realize that God actually doesn’t show up in real life, the way He ought to if the Gospel were true.

It’s not surprising that we would find relativism a popular option among Christians, especially among Protestants. Martin Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura means that Scripture, and only Scripture, has the authority to dictate Christian faith and practice. In particular, this means that no person or human institution has the authority to dictate to other people what the “true” teachings of Christianity are. Only the Bible can do that, which means in practice that each person has to read the Bible for themselves and decide for themselves what its teachings are.

In the 1500′s, this approach to faith began immediately producing divisions, as each Bible student “discovered” new truths, neglected for generations, that absolutely demanded reforms. But then the sola scriptura gotcha kicked in: as soon as they tried to tell other people that they needed to reform, they were violating sola scriptura! People don’t have the authority to tell other people what the “true” meaning of the Bible is. Only the Bible has that authority.

That didn’t stop people from trying, of course, but the results were frustrating, unpleasant, and sometimes even violent. A few centuries later, battered but wiser, Christians in America drew up a constitution that declared, in its First Amendment, that there was to be no official religion in the American government. Freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, longtime Protestant rallying cries, became the law of the land.

But what freedom of religion means is that religious truth becomes a special class of “truth” that is perfectly “true” for whoever believes it, regardless of what real-world facts or other religions might say. America became a great nation because we were willing to stop fighting over religious “truth,” and to allow each person’s “truth” to be as valued and respected as anyone else’s (within limits, of course).

One consequence of open, non-violent religious discourse is that each believer ends up exposed to alternatives that, shockingly, are just as self-consistent and coherent as their own, despite being doctrinally different and incompatible. Believers find themselves confronted with the fact that their own opinions have no more solid basis than the contrary opinions of others, and not-uncommonly these Christians become liberals. They still value their religious heritage, for the most part, but they tend to emphasize the subjective value of perceived, relativistic “truth” rather than focusing too much on whether their religious “truth” is consistent with real-world fact.

There are alternatives to becoming liberal, of course. Some believers even go so far as to retreat into universal agnosticism. Faced with the unavoidable fact that God does not show up in real life, and that fallible people are thus the only source of information about God, the die-hard believer will sometimes appeal to the idea that all human senses are fallible (optical illusions, etc.), and therefore everybody is living by faith alone. The naturalist cannot know that what he perceives is really there, and therefore he is merely choosing to believe that the natural world exists. Objective truth cannot be known, therefore all perceptible “truths” are relative and subjective.

Addressing that argument would be a post in itself (involving what we can learn based on the principle that truth is consistent with itself), but here let me just point out that this sort of post-modern relativism is very tempting for certain intellectual Christians, because it offers the only plausible way out of the dilemma posed by God’s failure to behave as though He believed the Gospel. And at that, it’s not terribly plausible, just a retreat into unassailable solipsism. But it is a genuine Christian response, and one that I personally have seen many times.

The bottom line, though, is that I agree with schooloffish: relativism, aka postmodernism, is a silly, self-defeating worldview, a classic case of intellectual laziness and narcissism. We can cross this off our list of potentially valid worldviews no matter what the religious views of the person proposing it.

In general a religious world view embraces that there is something greater than man. That a GOD in some form is responsible for creation, morals & an afterlife (in some form). This world views is much more broad than the naturalistic world view as there are many different religious positions.

To be nit-picky again, the religious view is certainly not the only worldview that tells us there is something greater than man. Indeed, naturalists are often criticized by religionists for failing to rank man as highly as they do. But I think it’s clear that this is not what schooloffish is thinking of here; he’s actually referring to the idea that there is something (or somethings) greater than the whole physical cosmos, namely God (or gods).

I’ve already talked at some length on the topic of the source of morality, so I want to take this post to focus on the last statement in the quote above: that the religious worldview is much more broad than the naturalistic world view. This is not a good thing for religion, as I would like to show using the parable of Mt. Sinai and the Burning Bush.

Suppose there are several of us who wish to climb to the very top of Mt. Sinai. We all live in different parts of the world, so we are all a certain distance from each other. Also, because of our different locations, we are all approaching Mt. Sinai from different sides, and sadly, we are inexpert mountaineers, and we find that we must frequently backtrack and start over. But we learn as we go, and we share information with one another, and gradually we approach the top.

And there an interesting thing happens: though we started from different places, and approached Sinai from different sides, we find that the closer we all get to the peak, the closer we all get to one another. We are searching for something that actually exists in the real world, and that means we all have something objective in common. This common objective draws us closer to one another as we draw closer to it.

Now, suppose that at the top of Mt. Sinai we find a burning bush. That’s a slight departure from the Biblical tale, but we’ll let that pass because we really want to focus on the bush itself, because it is so interesting. We notice that, though the bush emerges from the ground as a single stalk or trunk, it soon branches out in different directions. What’s more, the branches in turn also divide into still smaller branches, which themselves divide, and so on. The result is that the bush tends to fill a whole cloud of physical space, each branch separating off from the others, and the branches drawing further away from each other the farther they get from the root.

This is the pattern of the burning bush: it starts out as a unified whole, but then divides and splits and separates itself into branching branches the longer it grows. It’s a pattern that arises when people start from a common starting point, but then have no further source of direction other than their own sense of what seems right in the light of their personality, culture, education, experience, imagination, and so on. The endless branching and divergence is a consequence of not having a real-world objective truth to hone in on, thus drawing the branches together.

We see this in various literary traditions, in the evolution of fictional tales. In Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, for example, Renfield was never a lawyer and did not become the slave of Dracula. The movie versions of the story, however, branched off from that convention and made Renfield a perfectly normal citizen who became Dracula’s helpless thrall. Meanwhile, Ann Rice’s vampires took a different branch, and became more seductive than repulsive, and so on.

When schooloffish tells us, then, that the religious worldview is broader than the naturalistic worldview, this is not a good thing. This is religion falling into the pattern of the burning bush, the pattern of men and women using their imaginations, their subjective sense of right and wrong, and their personal charisma, to branch out in different ways, according to their unique personal characteristics and background. The pattern of Mt. Sinai, which is the pattern of men converging on a common, real-world truth, fits the history of science and naturalism quite nicely, but does not fit the history of religion, which is more of a burning bush.

Each twig of the bush, of course, can trace the flow of its sap back through its predecessor branches, down through the trunk, and into the root, and in the same way, religionists can each claim to have “inherited the true faith” though some historical/ideological lineage or other. But the overall pattern remains the same. There is no objective standard of religious truth sufficient to bring the various branches together into a single, common faith. There’s not even any objective means to stop the branching (which today has reached the point that many churches identify themselves as “non-denominational,” not realizing that this carries the level of fragmentation all the way down to individual churches).

So here at least I must agree with schooloffish: religion, as a worldview, encompasses a much wider range of varying and mutually inconsistent sub-views. The truth is consistent with itself, which means that naturalism, by conforming to the pattern of Mt. Sinai, is much more likely to be true than religion, which always and inevitably falls into the pattern of the burning bush. God does not show up in real life to prove any religious view right or wrong, so men have only their own imaginations to turn to for theology. Endless division is the unavoidable consequence of such an approach.

Everyone has a world view, which is best described as the way you see the world. There are as many world views as there are people, but in general, there are three specific world views that I will be analysing with this article. These three world view categories are religious, naturalistic, andrelativistic world views. Of course there are many subcategories within these three categories that we will cover as well.

So far so good. Comparative world views is a hefty subject, but we’re talking blog posts, not encyclopedias, so it’s fair to just hit the high points. Let’s look at his definitions, starting with naturalism.

A person who has a naturalistic world view generally rejects all caused causes and instead tends to embrace a view that the world was made by chance through the process of general evolution with absolutely no interference from a created being. In a nutshell, these people believe that what we see is all that there is. No GOD, or if there is a God he/she/it/they do not interfere in the world.

Hmm, not so sure about that. Science is all about caused causes; following the chain of causality is how scientific discoveries are made. I know of no one, naturalist or not, who rejects the idea that causes can have causes. I think perhaps schooloffish is trying to say something that’s not really coming across clearly, at least to me.

I am going to be a bit nit-picky about his second description, that naturalists “embrace a view that the world was made by chance through…evolution.” (Also, I think he meant “no interference from a Creator, not from a created being.) But “made by chance” bothers me just a bit.

Technically, you could say that the universe came into existence without intelligent direction, which might loosely be called “by chance.” It’s important to remember, however, that “by chance” does not mean “purely random” or “anything goes.” The things that happen in the natural world happen in strict accordance with a number of fundamental natural laws. The natural course of events is not directed but it is constrained (which can look very much like intelligent direction). Again, science is all about tracing the chain of causality, in the context of the natural laws that pushed things to go in one direction rather than in another. So even though the course of events is not directed, there is a reason why things happened the way they happened. In other words, nature is going to make sense, if you explore it rationally.

Lastly, as far believing that what we see is all there is, again I’m going to be nit-picky. Naturalists believe in many things that cannot be seen. Pi, for example, is not a physical object, nor is it a number that was invented by men (in fact, it’s humanly impossible to calculate the exact value of the whole thing). It’s a fixed property of objective reality, however. It’s real, even though you cannot directly observe it.

Also, many scientists who might be called naturalists (in the philosophical sense) are quite open to the idea of reality encompassing additional unseen dimensions, parallel universes, and other transcendent phenomena. The theological distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” does not apply to the scientific world view, because science only knows the distinction between “verifiable” and “unverifiable.”

If someone were to discover, for instance, that there was a scientifically verifiable dimension called “heaven,” in which lived verifiable intelligent beings called “gods,” these things would simply be incorporated into the naturalist’s verified understanding of what “nature” consists of. There’s no dogmatic, predetermined limit on what nature can be; it is simply what we discover it to be. If the supernatural were real, it would, from the naturalist’s point of view, be part of the natural world. Saying “what we see is all there is” doesn’t quite capture the true essence of the naturalist’s view. It would be better to say that the naturalist requires objective evidence that things are real before he will believe in them.

All in all, his definition of the naturalistic world view is a bit off, in my opinion, but isn’t really too bad, especially if he’s approaching the subject from a Christian world view. I’ll stop here for now, but this looks like a good basis for a friendly discussion and I think we’ll come back for a further look in a future post.

There is running commentary on another site by Deacon Duncan concerning this argument for the resurrection. Now what it is failing to do (among other things) in order to argue against these facts is not accounting for all of the virtually undisputed facts taken as a whole.

I can’t help thinking this is just a bit unfair, since they’ve only presented 3 facts so far (at least in the series I’m addressing), and I have accounted for them all, both individually and as a group. I do like the way they toss in the parenthetical “among other things,” as though they really have a lot more answers and just can’t be troubled to share them at the moment. But let’s go ahead and deal with this argument, and see exactly who is, and is not, addressing all the indisputable facts as a whole.

According to apologetics.org, there are “six tests which historians use in determining what is the best explanation for given historical facts,” and “[t]he hypothesis ‘God raised Jesus from the dead’ passes all these tests.” The six tests are as follows:

1. It has great explanatory scope.
2. It has great explanatory power.
3. It is plausible.
4. It is not ad hoc or contrived.
5. It is in accord with accepted beliefs.
6. It far outstrips any of its rival hypotheses in meeting conditions (1)-(5).

William Lane Craig (who they do link to!) cites each of the above tests and asserts that the resurrection hypothesis passes all of them. Let’s look first at the scope of the explanation. According to Craig (as quoted by apologetics.org), the Christian hypothesis explains three things: “why the tomb was found empty, why the disciples saw post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and why the Christian faith came into being.”

One might be tempted to argue that “three things” is hardly a “great explanatory scope.” You could argue that the three points raised are only a sample or summary of a much wider scope, unless you consider a number of facts which ought to fall into the same scope, and are mysteriously not included. For example, if God raised Jesus from the dead as an immortal and divine Savior, the most fundamental and obvious consequence would be that He would still be here, especially given that his stated purpose in going through death was to make it possible for man and God (i.e. Himself) to be united forever.

For another example, if God literally raised Jesus from the dead, why was he not seen alive by anybody but believers? You could cite Paul as a counter example, but even in Paul’s case it specifically states that the other eyewitnesses of the event “heard the sound but did not see anyone.” And Paul was in the process of undergoing a dramatic change in beliefs, so it’s at least arguable whether he was even a real unbeliever at that point.

We could look at similar questions about why Jesus’ body did not behave like a physical body, if in fact God physically raised Jesus from the dead, or why a number of witnesses reported not recognizing Jesus at first, or why the Ascension story was necessary, or why area residents reported that disciples had taken the body, or why the “Body of Christ” is so doctrinally divided, or why we need a Bible, and why the Bible stopped being written. Perhaps I’ll devote an entire post to that someday. Meanwhile, let’s continue with Craig’s argument.

Regarding the “great explanatory power” of the resurrection “hypothesis,” Craig claims that it explains a few other things: “why the body of Jesus was gone, why people repeatedly saw Jesus alive despite his earlier public execution, and so forth.” But again, there are a number of indisputable facts which it does not explain, notably the fact that Jesus does not show up in real life, not for saints, not for sinners, not for seekers. He does not show up to edify the weak, or to correct the errant, or to rebuke those who corrupt the faith. If you pick and choose a few carefully selected facts, you can make the argument that resurrection “explains” those facts much better than any alternative, but you’d still be failing to address the facts as a whole.

As for the plausibility of the hypothesis, Craig simply asserts that “given the historical context of Jesus’ own unparalleled life and claims, the resurrection serves as divine confirmation of those radical claims.” In other words, the implausibility of the resurrection seems almost plausible when considered in the light of the other implausible claims men make about the words and deeds of Jesus’ life. Craig has confused plausibility with gullibility. Yes, the resurrection was just the last in a long list of “miraculous” events men expect us to simply believe in just on their say-so. It’s “plausible” in the fiction writer’s sense of the word, but if we’re talking about fiction, then apologetics isn’t what it used to be!

We’re supposed to be talking about historical evidence, and from a historian’s perspective, “plausibility” is drawn from how consistent an idea is with real world truth. If we see God performing the sorts of miracles attested to in the Gospels, then the real-world observation of similar events can lend plausibility to the Gospel and the story of the resurrection. The fact that we don’t, however, means that any attempt to justify the plausibility of the resurrection by appeal to prior miracles is simply passing the buck back to a collection of stories that are equally implausible—especially since Jesus ought to still be here doing those miracles, if God did indeed raise him from the dead.

Craig argues that the resurrection hypothesis is “not ad hoc or contrived,” in that “it requires only one additional hypothesis: that God exists. And even that needn’t be an additional hypothesis if one already believes that God exists.” But that’s what we used to call “buying a pig in a poke.” The assumption that God exists is just a plain brown wrapper around a whole lot of other assumptions: that He is a person, that He cares what goes in human lives, that He wants to do something good about it, that He has the power to do so, etc, etc. And if you want to see how ad hoc and contrived the resurrection hypothesis really is, just ask why we don’t see this supposedly risen savior around any more. Oh, he had to go to heaven because…because…, well because we say so. So why don’t we see post-Ascension appearances like Paul allegedly did? Uh…..

Let’s move on. Craig defends the idea that the resurrection hypothesis is “in accord with accepted beliefs” because, well, it “doesn’t in any way conflict with the accepted belief that people don’t rise naturally from the dead.” Yeah, that’s it. Because the resurrection is supposed to be a miracle, it is an exceptional event. Since and exception is, by definition, a variation from what is normal and natural, Jesus’ exceptional resurrection does not conflict with the observed fact that the dead do not live again. Somehow, I don’t think this is quite what the historical test is meant to imply.

What test #5 is really looking for is consistency, i.e. truth is consistent with itself. If someone came up with the hypothesis that Jesus was really a lesbian dressed like a man, no matter what its explanatory scope and power, no matter what its plausibility and lack of ad hoc contrivances, it would fail to be consistent with what we know from other sources. This is the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” part of the historical test, the common sense part, if you will. Arguing “Oh well, this was an exception” is not a legitimate answer to the test for historical consistency.

By this point, it’s rather moot whether the resurrection hypothesis passes the 5 tests above better than any other hypothesis, since it hasn’t really passed them at all. If we suppose that the very first disciples, in the pre-NT days, believed that Jesus rose in exactly the same spiritual sense as they now believe he comes into their hearts, and if we grant that early Christians were normal people whose behavior and views were comparable to what we see in Christians today, then we have a hypothesis that fits all the verifiable and indisputable facts, including the empty tomb, the widespread belief, the so-called “visions” that were explicitly dis-confirmed by other nearby witnesses, Paul’s early reference to the contrast between the physical body that is buried and the “spiritual” body which is raised, the need for the Church to dispose of Jesus by sending him up to heaven, the failure of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to show up in real life even for believers, and so on.

For example, the empty tomb is easy to explain: some disciples violated the sabbath and moved the body to a tomb more fitting their master’s beliefs about rich men in general. Jesus was famous for teaching that good works were worth violating the sabbath over, and the tomb was not guarded until well after the sabbath, so there would be no real difficulty in pulling off the move. And it wouldn’t necessarily have to have been the disciples (i.e. the apostles), it could be any old handful of believers. The early disciples, after all, were also famous for their squabbles and divisions, so there’s nothing surprising about the possibility that the body could have been taken behind the backs of Peter and John, who would have returned to the original tomb and been quite shocked to find it empty (leading to who knows what speculations, eh?).

If we look at modern Christians, we see that it is quite common for personal, subjective experiences to “blossom” over time into testimonies that are remarkably concrete in their claims, without any sense of dishonesty or lying on the Christian’s part. Start asking around among Christians: it’s not at all hard to find some believer who genuinely believes that he or she has literally heard the audible voice of God, and even seen Him. Accounts of God physically intervening in real life are a dime a dozen (though sadly none of them actually proves out if you make a serious attempt to verify it by the evidence). And it takes almost no time at all; it certainly does not need the decades that intervened between the writing of the New Testament books and the events these books purport to describe.

So when it comes to accounting for all the indisputable facts, the resurrection hypothesis does not even come close. It cherry-picks its “evidences,” it exaggerates the significance of hearsay and downplays the importance of what we can actually confirm in real life, and it rests solidly on the grab-bag assumption that God (as defined by Christians) really is alive and well and actively involved in human affairs (even though we never actually see Him show up and get involved). I shall be looking forward, therefore, to the rest of the “evidences” which apologetics.org promises to provide.

The 3rd fact that virtually all NT scholars admit (e.g., liberal, Jesus Seminar, Moderate, Conservative) is that the church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed. Saul of Tarsus thought that he was doing God’s will by persecuting Christians. He held the coats of those who stoned the first Christian martyr (Acts 7:58). Then all of the sudden, Saul becomes Paul on the road to Damascus. Now Paul is the chief proclaimer and defender of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the early church! How did that happen? Paul claims throughout his letters and it is recorded by Luke in the book of Acts that the risen Jesus appeared to him. Nothing else makes good sense of this radical transformation. What best accounts for Paul’s transformation? He had every reason not to become a Christian!

Two things we need to remember: 1) conversions happen all the time, and 2) stories—especially testimonies—tend to improve with the retelling.

As an example of point number 1, consider this list of conversion stories, which includes “[T]he amazing story of a violent, drunken, racist, cross-burning Klu Klux Klan member transformed into the ‘servant of peace’.” Notice, it’s an “amazing” story, per point number 2. The purpose of a conversion story is to be dramatic, impressive, inspirational. It’s a persuasive technique intended to attract other people to the idea of converting. You don’t make a conversion story out of saying, “Well, I was really bored one day and somebody suggested becoming a Christian and I thought, what the hell, I don’t have anything else to do…” Conversion stories are supposed to be gripping, astonishing, and (while this is not often admitted) entertaining.

One of the ingredients of a good conversion story is a dramatic contrast between “before” and “after.” Consider the recent conversion (if that’s the term) of Anthony Flew from atheism to deism. Most of the people who have heard of Flew today first heard of him because Christians started making a big deal out of his conversion; he was well known and well respected in certain intellectual circles, but not terribly famous. Once he became a deist, however, the Christian version of his conversion story takes pains to portray him as the greatest atheist philosopher of the past 100 years. It’s the dramatic contrast, you see. If Flew were merely an obscure scholar with a penchant for deconstructing Christian myths, it’s not as dramatic a conversion.

Notice too that the Christian version almost never mentions that Flew’s conversion was to deism, not to Christian-style theism. Again, the story has been improved from being a story about an atheist who decided that maybe there once was something after all, to being a story about a man who spent his whole life denying God’s existence and who dramatically discovered that God really is there. The contrast is stronger, the story is better, and only factual accuracy suffers.

I remember very clearly being ashamed of my own conversion story, when I was a Christian. I used to dread testimony time because all around me were people who had been “saved” from drugs, alcohol, gangs, demon-worship, and all kinds of Jerry Springer-ish pasts. I had been converted from being a basically good kid to being a basically good Christian kid. How bland! I pored through my past trying to find some nasty tidbit I could use to show how truly evil I used to be, so that I could have a good testimony too, but the best I could come up with was that I had been guilty of pride. (I had imagined, you see, that God saw me as a pretty good person too, whereas the Gospel says God sees me as a vile, disgusting sinner. Therefore my positive self-image was a sinful conceit. Ah, evil.)

It was, oddly, no surprise to me when I found out that many of my friends’ testimonies were “improved”—that the “drug addiction” was smoking and the “demon worship” was playing D&D and so on. Instead of being shocked, I took these examples as valuable lessons in witnessing. It wasn’t lying…not really. It was a testimony. A testimony is supposed to say things in a dramatic way, to emphasize (and even exaggerate) the sinfulness of the past. Yes, you could be picky and complain that it was creating false impressions, but if it led to souls saved (or better yet, if God used it to save souls), then isn’t that the important thing?

So conversion stories are supposed to be “improved,” and when we read in Christian tradition that Saul/Paul was a leading persecutor of the early Christian church, we ought to remember that this is a conversion story. Supposedly he was some kind of ringleader, and had people thrown in jail, and so on. Acts says he held the coats of those who stoned Stephen (apparently instead of participating in the stoning). And we have no reason to doubt that he did play some role in opposing Christianity at first, and even an important role (or at least, a role that was important to him).

Does this mean he was convinced that Christianity was wrong? Not necessarily. Sometimes people fight harder against things they secretly suspect are true than against things they find unquestionably false. Conversion is disorienting, even when it’s welcome, and people can be highly adverse to changes of that magnitude. The doubt can be there, however. Nagging, gnawing, working its way inward. Many conversion stories feature this kind of outward hostility masking inward attraction. Even in the story in Acts, Paul says that the Lord told him, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads,” implying that he had been feeling driven (goaded) towards Christianity for some time before he finally gave in and converted.

Paul was a Pharisee, and there can be no doubt that Christianity would be very attractive to a devout Pharisee, with its emphasis on resurrection and judgment and angelic messengers and so on. As a Pharisee among Pharisees, Saul was a small fish in a big pond, looking to build a reputation out of his zeal in persecuting Christians, thus betraying his ambitions via his actions. But even as he persecuted the Church, he found himself feeling goaded, driven like an ox, towards the very gospel he was attacking. The doctrines were certainly appealing, the intellectual possibilities were intriguing, and an  ambitious young man like Saul could hardly fail to notice the greater opportunities for advancement in the Christian community versus those in the larger Jewish society, with its entrenched and institutionalized pecking order. The Church might as well have hung posters: “Wanted: Erudite Bible Scholar to Take Charge of New Religion.” The job opening could have been written out of Saul’s resume.

Certainly, the rest of Paul’s story worked out that way. Most of the New Testament was written by Paul, and the churches he founded helped change the whole character of Christianity, from a Jewish sect into an independent (and ultimately even anti-semitic) religion in its own right. The life was hard of course, but to an ascetic like Paul that would be rather a benefit than a detriment. By becoming a Christian, he achieved a unique stature and influence (for God’s glory of course) that he could never have managed by remaining a non-Christian Jew.

In any case, the fact remains that Paul’s career-advancing conversion can only show, at best, that Paul believed some kind of resurrection was true. It does not tell us whether this resurrection would have been “true” in the literal, real-world sense, and in fact the account in Acts specifically tells us that Jesus “appeared” to Paul in some spiritual sense that did not involve any of Paul’s companions being able to see anyone there. Even if you take the story in its most literal sense, therefore, we still are left with a spiritually risen Christ, spiritually perceived by men (or rather, by one man, in the company of many others who did not see anyone but themselves).

Plus, if we take Paul’s testimony at face value, it only proves that there’s no reason why Jesus could not show up for each of us as well. It’s a dramatic story, but it completely nullifies the whole point of the Ascension. If Jesus loves us enough to die for us so that he can be with each of us for all eternity, then why doesn’t he show up himself, in person, to each one of us to tell us? You can’t argue that he has to stay in heaven until the Second Coming, because according to Paul he showed up between the Ascension and the Second Coming. Paul’s testimony only proves that real-world conditions are inconsistent with what we ought to see if the Gospel were true.

As an apologetic, therefore, the conversion of Saul to Paul is vague at best, relying on the purely subjective opinion that Saul would not have converted unless he actually saw a risen Jesus, despite abundant evidence to the contrary from other conversion stories. Worse, the conversion of Saul to Paul shows that the gospel is really less credible, because it portrays God as being willing and able to produce genuine conversions, even among His most hostile opponents, just by showing up and saying, “Look, I’m God.” If God is willing and able to do that for a murderer like Saul, why in heaven’s name does He not give the rest of us the same advantage? Assuming, of course, that the Gospel is telling the truth about how much He wants us to be saved! But that’s not what we see in real life. Real life is consistent, instead, with what we would expect to find in a world where the Gospel was a myth evolved by human superstition, denial, and imagination. Coincidence?

“Fact” #1 is that Jesus was crucified. I put “fact” in quotes because I’m not 100% convinced that this is necessarily so. It seems reasonably plausible, however, and is certainly consistent with the events that followed, so I’m willing to grant them that one. Let’s move on to the second fact.

Fact # 2 – Jesus’ disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them.

First, the disciples claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. In addition to their own testimony recorded in the Gospels, we also have the testimony of the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 15:3-11), the oral tradition that would become the basis of the NT writings, and the written works of the early church. That they claimed to have seen the risen Jesus is without dispute.

This is true, as far as it goes. But context is crucial here. Before we can understand these statements, we need to remember that we’re dealing with Christians, and Christians also believe that God speaks to them and that Jesus comes into their hearts. Before we can draw reliable conclusions about what Christians regard as true, we need to ask “True in what sense?” And there’s more.

The writer above claims that we have the written testimony of the disciples “recorded in the Gospels.” In fact, however, of the four gospels, only the Gospel of John was claimed to have been written by an actual eyewitness. The others were second- or third-hand accounts at best. Moreover, John’s Gospel was not written until decades after the events described—more than enough time for John’s recollections to have become, shall we say, “embellished” so as to make a more edifying account.

Contrast John’s testimony with Peter’s, for example. In II Peter 1, Peter does describe himself as an eyewitness, but not of a risen Savior.

we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

Peter apparently felt that the story of the Transfiguration was a more compelling testimony of Christ’s authority than the Resurrection. And it may have been, at the time Peter was writing, since he died long before John wrote his gospel.

Or look at Paul’s testimony. Yes, Paul did claim to have had a “vision” in which Jesus appeared to him as a bright light (around noon in the desert, go figure). But again, according to Acts 9: 7, Paul “saw” a vision of Jesus, but those who were with him did not see anyone. Clearly, we’re talking about a different kind of “seeing,” a Christian kind of seeing, that owes nothing to the physics of photons. And yet, Paul’s sort of “seeing” is counted as being no different from any of the other visions of the Risen Lord.

The CS Lewis Society continues:

Second, something powerful happened to the disciples following the death of Jesus that transformed them “from fearful cowering individuals who denied and abandoned him [Jesus] at his arrest and execution into bold proclaimers of the gospel of the risen Lord [cf. Mark 14:66-72 & Acts 4:18-20].” …

Gary Habermas observes that “the apostles died for holding to their own testimony that they had personally seen the risen Jesus. Contemporary martyrs die for what they believe to be true. The disciples died for what they knew to be either true or false.”

But again, true in what sense? Christians believe that it is “true” that Jesus comes into their hearts, “true” that Paul saw Someone who was somehow not visible to any of those with him. Indeed, Jesus’ most significant contribution to religion may very well be that he taught his disciples to see a kind of truth that was divorced from any sort of objective, factual accountability. That the disciples accepted their beliefs as “true” is beyond doubt. The question is whether this particular variety of “truth” corresponds to anything that is objectively and literally true in the real-world sense.

The best way to determine whether or not the gospel accounts are true in the real world sense is to remember that truth is consistent with itself. If Jesus came back from the dead in the real world sense, we ought to see more than just subjective-truth consequences. His resurrection ought to affect more than just the beliefs of believers. He ought to be visible to non-believers as well, for instance. He shouldn’t need to have his believers tell stories about sudden and mysterious “ascensions” into heaven (i.e. the sky) in order to explain his persistent failure to show up at appropriate times. Above all, after putting all that work into preaching the true gospel, he shouldn’t sit idly by while men wander and pervert and destroy it with heresies and dissensions that could easily be settled, once and for all, by a simple post-resurrection appearance.

A spiritual resurrection, like the one Paul describes in I Corinthians 15, would be more than enough to persuade credulous Christians. It would also open the door to all kinds of ghostly apparitions and encounters, tales of Jesus being able to come in through locked doors and to appear in forms that his own best friends wouldn’t recognize. It might not be as satisfying as a real-world resurrection would be, and in fact the story would probably become a physical resurrection, despite the frank materialism, in a relatively short time. But a spiritual resurrection, like the spiritual “experience” of having Jesus come into your heart, would be enough to get the ball rolling.

So the real question is not “why did is the resurrection reflected in the beliefs of believers,” it’s “why is it reflected only in the beliefs of believers?” The resurrection would have its greatest impact on the world in which it occurred. If it occurred only in the subjective world of the believer’s spiritual beliefs, then we would find the evidence of it in those beliefs; if it occurred in the world of objective reality, we ought to find evidence of it in the real world. Fact #2, therefore, tells us more than it intends to about the truth of the resurrection.

I therefore put to my former fellow-atheists the simple central question: “What would have to occur or to have occured to constitute for you a reason to least consider the existence of a superior Mind?”

The context is a discussion of Anthony Flew and Roy Varghese’s book I Believe in God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind. (Or more precisely, lost it: since when does an accomplished, articulate and incisive author like Flew suddenly need a hack ghost-writer like Varghese in order to express himself on paper?) However the question above is near and dear to my heart, so let’s consider it.

I’m going to approach this from a slightly different perspective this time, and answer the question this way: What would need to occur, or to have occurred, for me to consider a “Superior Mind” as an actual possibility is for there to be some reliable, objective, and verifiable means of distinguishing this conclusion from naive, subjective superstition. Having been a fervent Christian for a good few decades, I came reluctantly to the conclusion that God is the product of human fantasy, intuition, superstition and hearsay, and that objective reality is not consistent with the claims men make about Him, in particular as concerns the Gospel. However, I remain open to the possibility that I might learn something new someday, and if God wants to show up and tell me in person that He actually does exist, I for one would be delighted to see Him.

Of course, if we take the Intelligent Design approach that claims the “creator” may have been an alien race with advanced technological capabilities, I have to admit that it is also possible that I could be deceived by, say, a really good computer-simulated holographic projection of “God,” from a cloaked and indetectable flying saucer. But then again, I could also be lying in a pod somewhere, with sensations of a simulated “reality” being fed directly into my brain via a neuro-implant, as in The Matrix. So I could be deceived.

That’s actually of surprisingly little importance to me, though. The only tool any of us really has from distinguishing between fact and fancy is consistency. Truth is consistent with itself, and when we see things that are inconsistent with the truth (i.e. real-world fact), then we know that the thing is not true. And that’s the only way we can know it’s not true. And even then, we can rationalize the inconsistencies, and pretend to have resolved them, and thus deprive ourselves of the ability to recognize when something is not true.

So if you want me to believe in your God (or your “Superior Mind,” if you prefer), the first thing I want from you is some means of making an objective and verifiable distinction between your conclusions about God, and mere subjective superstitions and speculations about God. Show me some source of information about this God that does not depend on human fantasy, intuition, superstition and hearsay, and let me verify independently that (a) it does indeed not stem from human inventions and misperceptions, and (b) that it corresponds to what we actually find in objective reality.

And then let’s talk.

This is just one more example out of dozens if not hundreds of such corroborations but it you perused the atheistic sites that are out there you’d find that they confidently and smugly assert that there is no truthfulness to the Christian Scriptures at all.

He then backs up this claim by linking to a skeptical discussion forum that includes comments such as these:

“That there was a first temple, that there was a Babilonian exile and that there was a return to Jerusalem, are well accepted historical facts.”

“Archaeologists have uncovered Troy. Troy was mentioned in The Iliad. The Iliad contains Zeus and other Greek gods. Why, then, don’t you believe the Greek gods exist?”

Mr. Horvath doesn’t really have a good answer for such comments, especially since his own claim (that atheist assert that everything mentioned in the Bible is false) is so patently ridiculous. So he contents himself with a snide, and substanceless dismissal, saying “This is what passes as rationality from out of the skeptic’s camp.”

He also insinuates that if you “do the math,” you’ll find out that Daniel predicted the exact time of Jesus arrival as Messiah, but regrettably he skips out of actually doing the calculations himself. Too bad, because I’ve looked at such calculations before (in my pre-blogging days) and they always turn out to contain inaccuracies, arbitrary selections of dates, and of course the inevitable arbitrary designation of what “a seven” refers to. It would have been fun (and fairly easy) to do this again, which might have something to do with why Mr. Horvath is reluctant to commit himself to any falsifiable claims.

Well, let’s look at his post and see how prophetic I really am.

One of the main lines of attacks that skeptics have employed is along the lines of language. For example, ‘Intelligent Design’ should be a redundancy, but today evolutionists talk all the time about organisms being ‘designed’ but insist that design was done by natural processes. This gives them the advantage of being able to admit that the evidence of design is undeniable while simultaneously denying the obvious implication. They call this Science.

Hmm, ok, well I have to admit, I didn’t predict that an article about “debunking Christian doctrinal divisions” would begin with a rant about scientists using the word “design” without believing in Mr. Horvath’s “Intelligent Designer.” No doubt he’s also upset that members of the NOAA weather forecasting service also refer to the sun rising and setting, even though they don’t really believe that the sun revolves around a flat earth. Perhaps we should ban the use of naive and imprecise imagery in scientific discussions, even when they help get the general idea across, the way “sunrise” conveys the sense of the sun becoming visible above the horizon, or the way “design” helps convey the relationship between the cause and effect. I personally don’t see what good that would do, but…

This is but one example of how atheists equivocate on the meanings of words. Few words have been bastardized like the term ‘Christian.’

Ah, here we go. Before you can appeal to the “No True Scotsman Christian” fallacy, you have to assert the existence of “false” Christians. Prophecy-wise, things are starting to fall into place.

I might mention here that there are two reasons why the divisions among Christians are inconsistent with the Gospel being true. In the first place, it shows that the Holy Spirit is failing in His alleged mission to maintain unity and doctrinal purity in the Body of Christ, the Church. Jesus’s analogy was that no one can rob a strong man’s house if the homeowner is alert and watching for burglars; you have to subdue the homeowner before you can rob his house. For Satan to be able to get in and sow dissention and succeed, he would have to first somehow subdue and bind the Holy Spirit, which he ought not to be able to do.

But the second reason, and the more important reason, why divisions are so devastating to the Gospel is that God does not show up in real life to tell us who the “true Scotsmen Christians” really are. It’s all well and good to argue that men are to blame for the divisions in the Church, and that your own group has somehow been miraculously blessed with the privilege and responsibility of being the only ones to hold on to the True Gospel when everyone else fell away. But every group claims to be the group that held on to the One True faith, and that the other groups are the ones that have fallen away. In God’s continuous and universal absence, men have no choice but to pick whichever group follows the doctrines (or interpretations of Scripture) that seem right in their own eyes—a practice that even the Bible condemns as unwise. Because God does not show up in real life, the believer cannot know that his group is the right group. He can only know that his group is the one he agrees with the most.

Let’s continue.

While it is true that it took some time for the Christian community to clarify itself against a series of opponents, they did succeed in doing so. The creeds are the result of that process, and were completed no later than about 400 AD. After that, there was very little change in the meaning of the term until the Protestant reformation- more than a thousand years later- and even then the core teachings enshrined in the creeds are still upheld… to this very day.

That’s right. More than a billion Christians today uphold the same doctrines upheld in explicit terms since 400 AD and less codified terms since 50 AD.

Ok, so the “core beliefs” are those which were defined by the Catholic and Orthodox church councils of the 4th century–church councils that were called to try and resolve the serious and sometimes violent disagreements, over core doctrinal issues, that were splitting the Church at the time. Prior to the first Council of Nicea, for instance, upwards of 80% of the Church denied the deity of Christ, preferring the Bible-based arguments of Bishop Arius over the more mystical and philosophical arguments of Athanasius et al. It’s also interesting that these Council creeds assume that the Church hierarchy (i.e. the bishops, patriarch, and Pope) had the authority to pronounce such creeds as authoritative. There is no support here for such notions as sola Scriptura or the priesthood of individual believers. And none of the creeds declares any faith in the idea of salvation by faith alone–quite the contrary in fact.

The Church Councils were preoccupied largely with defining some kind of coherent, or at least official, doctrine of the Trinity. Few Christians today could even tell you the difference between monotheletism and monophysitism, let alone explain why the Church Councils declared them as heresies (centuries after the Council of Nicea had supposedly defined what the “core beliefs” of Christianity were!). The thing is, the reason why the Church felt it was so important to nail down what the Church’s core beliefs were is because the Christians were divided regarding these core beliefs. All we need now is for Mr. Horvath to tell us which “core beliefs” he considers the right ones to be, and I can count my prophecy fulfilled.

But Mr. Horvath continues with a detailed and well-documented argument that boils down to this: the “core beliefs” of Christianity are those beliefs expressed in the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicean Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. In so doing, he has, I must concede, avoided the No True Scotsman fallacy. Almost.

The problem is, even though he can list billions of Christians who claim allegiance to these three creeds, he has only shifted the disagreement to the question of which interpretation of the creed is correct. Taken at face value, the things they say express doctrines about which there is not nearly the agreement that Mr. Horvath would like us to think there is.

The Apostle’s Creed, for instance, omits any overt declaration of Trinitarian doctrines such as the idea that Jesus was deity, as well as neglecting to mention what one must do to be saved. The Athanasian Creed, speaking of salvation, is quite clear that man is to be judged on the basis of works, and “they that have done good shall go into life everlasting, and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.” Meanwhile, the Nicean Creed exists in two different versions: the original version which holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (still held by Eastern Orthodox Christians today) and the modern Roman Catholic version, which holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds from some kind of (sexual? procreative?) union between the Father and the Son (ewwww).

The Nicean Creed also teaches baptism for the remission of sin, and specifies that there is only one baptism–not a “spiritual baptism” (number one) followed by a water baptism (number two). The one thing all three creeds agree on is the geographical relationship between heaven, hell, and earth: heaven is physically located up relative to the earth, and hell is physically down. That is, the heaven where God dwells is a physical place up in the sky over the earth: the “core beliefs” of Christianity, as defined in the fourth century, require that Christians believe the old flat-earth, three (or more) layered model of the cosmos. If they don’t, that’s yet another division between the Christians of today, and those they call their spiritual forebears.

So yes, you can get a large number of Christians to agree that the “ecumenical creeds” do (or should) define the core beliefs of Christianity. The serious doctrinal divisions that exist between Christians, however, are about what the words of those creeds really mean. It’s no different than getting Christians to agree that the Bible is Scripture–that’s good as far as it goes, but having the same Bible hardly implies that all Christians have the same faith. Mr. Horvath did avoid committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, but he did that by deferring the question of what Christians really believe about those so-called “core beliefs.”

Oh, and by the way, neither in history nor in the present day has it been true that all Christians are Trinitarians. It so happens that the Trinitarians prevailed socially and politically, in terms of winning the biggest numbers, but unless one wants to argue that majority vote is what decides doctrinal Truth, unless one wants to claim that the “faithful remnant” is never truly faithful, then calling Trinitarianism the “correct” doctrine is still a case of No True Scotsman. I should have had more faith in my own prophecy.

Wasn’t the ‘request’ put to the Creationist proponents that they frame their views in less theistic terms? If it the case that ID is an accommodation to the evolutionary scientist’s camp, then shouldn’t that camp respect the efforts of these alleged ‘closet creationists’ to come to them on the materialist’s terms?

No, the “request” made of creationists is the same request that is made of everybody who wants to claim to do science: Please back up your claims with objectively verifiable evidence that is more consistent with your hypothesis than it is with the alternatives. The reason ID has failed to win any significant scientific support is because they’ve failed to do that, and have instead limited themselves to recycling creationist objections to the theory of evolution (even though they know that evolution–descent with modification from common ancestors–is indeed a fact).

Creationists try to deny evolution in two ways: by claiming that it is unfalsifiable, and by claiming to have falsified it. Complaints that it is unfalsifiable usually turn into complaints that scientists have an unfair advantage over creationists, because scientists are free to modify their hypothesis to fit the facts, whereas the creationist “hypothesis” is that Genesis is infallibly and literally true. There’s no way a creationist can admit that any flaw even exists in the original “hypothesis,” much less altering it to fit the facts the way scientists fine-tune their theories to be more consistent with real-world truth.

The “problem” creationists are really complaining about is that scientists don’t have a pre-determined dogma that you could disprove and thus use to invalidate the scientific approach. Science, by design, is simply a commitment to the principle that the truth is consistent with itself, and therefore that a search for the truth must be an iterative search for that which is more and more consistent with what we see in the real world. This does not make the scientific approach “unfalsifiable,” it makes it self-improving and error-correcting. It’s the way things ought to be.

Horvath gives us a good example of the conflict between the creationist view of science and the scientific view of science. Speaking of Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker, he writes

[Dawkins' argument] is not a scientific argument at all in the sense that we can experimentally verify any of the claims from so-called evolutionary history, it is more an exercise where one takes the available observed data and tries to see if one can get it to fit into a particular explanatory framework. If, however, there were some sort of empirical mechanism by which apparent design and real design could be distinguished, that would be a different story.

But that is exactly what Dawkins and his hyperventilating minions insist cannot be scientifically done when they attack the ID movement.

Let’s quickly review how science is supposed to work, based on the principle that truth is consistent with itself. We begin with observation: we see some phenomenon we wish to understand. After observing it for a while to see how it behaves, we formulate a hypothesis. That is, we describe a cause-and-effect relationship in enough detail that an objective scientist can determine, analytically, what real-world consequences will result from that hypothesized cause. Then we compare the consequences which ought to result from the hypothetical cause with the consequences which do result from the (possibly different) real world cause, and see if they match. If they are consistent with the calculated results, we say the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis. If not, then the hypothesis needs to be reviewed.

Notice that, unlike the creationist approach, the scientific approach does not limit you to subjects that can be brought into laboratories and experimented on. That’s good news for scientific disciplines like astronomy, cosmology, geology, oceanography, archeology, paleontology, meteorology, vulcanology, and so on. The B-movie stereotype of science being a white guy in a lab coat mixing stuff in a test tube is just that–a stereotype. Real science is simply a search for that which is most consistent with the facts, whether we verify that consistency by experiment, by direct observation, or by indirect observation.

The evolutionary approach is falsifiable because one can analytically calculate the real-world consequences that would necessarily result from descent with modifications from a common ancestor. If the evidence we find in the real world is not consistent with the evidence which our calculations show ought to result from descent with modifications from a common ancestor, then we can truthfully and objectively say that the evidence is not consistent with common descent with variations. The theory is perfectly falsifiable. It’s not the scientists’ fault that it happens to be non-false.

Horvath, of course, tries to “debunk” the facts with a bunch of empty hand-waving.

The central claim of Evolution is that it can account for what appears to be designed without a need for a designer.

Bzzzt, thanks for playing. The central claim of evolution is that modern species arose via a process of descent with modification from common ancestors.

It is not enough to posit that given enough time natural selection can do something, you have got to have some knowledge of what kinds of things natural selection couldn’t do, either in principle, or in such and such amount of time. This is exactly the kind of analysis that Intelligent Design proponents can bring to the table and exactly the kind of work that Evolutionary scientists say is not scientific.

Unfortunately, ID proponents uniformly fail to bring anything more to the table than a superstitious attribution, plus some recycled creationist objections to evolution, plus the false assumption that if they criticize evolution, ID/Creationism somehow automatically becomes true. Behe’s “irreducible complexity” argument, for instance, is simply a dressed-up version the old “argument from incredulity” objection creationists have been making all along.  Nor has Behe succeeded in finding anything that is indeed irreducibly complex. Flagella aren’t irreducible. Blood clotting isn’t. Nor is the immune system.

Unlike evolution, ID fails to follow the scientific approach to science. ID specifically avoids proposing any kind of cause whose real-world consequences could be worked out apart from taking a peek at the real world to see what the “right answer” is. ID is the pseudo-scientific equivalent of painting the bulls-eye around the arrow after it has hit something. Mt. Rushmore is supposed to be “obviously” the product of design because it is different from, say, Mt. Everest. In a creationist view of the world, however, Mt. Everest is also supposed to be the product of design. Even poor “designs” like weak backs, narrow birth canals, and cruel diseases and poisons and such, are supposed to be the result of “intelligent” design. Any conceivable set of circumstances “fits” the ID premise, but it’s an untestable premise because there’s no way to work out what results it ought to produce if true.

Does anyone think that if it was discovered that mutations couldn’t accumulate that this would cause evolutionists to abandon their theory?

Another way of phrasing this is to ask, “Suppose we discovered that variations could not be passed on across multiple generations; would that be inconsistent with the hypothesis that the modern diversity of species is the result of accumulated variations during a process of descent with variation from common ancestors?” And the answer is Yes it would be quite inconsistent, and we would say that the evidence failed to support that theory.

Give me a break. Darwin’s theories emerged before any such mechanisms were known. Darwin put out his theory before there was even any knowledge that there were mutations to accumulate.

Um, well, yeah, after Darwin proposed his theory, subsequent results did prove to be amazingly consistent with the way evolution would have to work. In genuine science, that’s a good thing. Truth is consistent with itself. When you discover that your theory is consistent with the truth in ways you didn’t anticipate, that’s a sign you’re on the right track, not a sign of unfalsifiability.

Similarly, the discovery that something could not be ‘explained’ (that is the key word, here) by lateral gene transfer would not defeat evolution. Isn’t that the whole point of the the alleged superiority of the evolutionary account, that just because you run into a hitch doesn’t mean the investigation ends, unlike that vile intelligent design hypothesis which ends inquiry?!?

Well, it is indeed true that lateral gene transfer is not essential to the theory of evolution in the broad scope. It turns out to be verifiable, and to explain some observed patterns of evolution. If those patterns weren’t there, then you could possibly falsify the idea of lateral gene transfer. Since that one has been observed in the lab, though, you’d think a creationist would be satisfied. Right.

ID does end inquiry, by the way. Are ID proponents exploring ways in which natural mechanisms could produce flagella, blood clotting, immune systems, and so on? Of course not–finding such answers would invalidate their claim that evolution cannot produce these things. The so-called “Intelligent Designer” is not only an unknown agent using unknown mechanisms at an unknown point in time producing results that are unknown except for present-day observations. The “Intelligent Designer” is an “explanation” (or attribution, rather) that requires us to remain ignorant of how nature works, so that we can claim that we don’t have an explanation for it.

Nor would observations of organisms being created falsify evolution.

Hey, at least he got one right! Though if we did observe new species coming into existence via divine creation, it would lend a great deal of support to a scientific theory of creation. Someone would have to come up with a scientific theory of creation, though–so far no one has.

And if the fossil record was in fact ’static,’ since the theory is primarily an explanatory one, it wouldn’t defeat the theory, it would just call for a different interpretation of those fossils, or a decision not to use fossils at all.

Nope, sorry, this one’s flat wrong again. If the fossil record showed that all modern day species have existed continuously and contemporaneously since the beginning of life on earth, that would flatly contradict the theory that some of them originated by descent with modification from others. Sibling species are not each other’s ancestors. Again, because evolution describes an actual mechanism whose results can be calculated without having to look at the real world, we can tell what should and should not appear if new species arise via evolution. ID (and creationism) provide no such mechanism because they’re not science. They’re simply a superstitious attribution: they give God (with or without the disguise) credit for whatever it is that we observe, without being able to show any connection between the two, or even to describe what such a connection would consist of (beyond “poof! it’s magic!”).

For my own part, if I am presented with an object, biological or otherwise, and all my faculties leap to the inference that it is almost certainly designed, it is going to take much more than an elaborate explanatory system to convince me that it is in fact only apparently designed.

Another poor soul unable to resist the siren lure of naive superstition. The problem with Mr. Horvath’s world view is that it offers us absolutely no insight into the real world. There is no scientific mechanism proposed for “design” or “creation,” and therefore there is no way to know what a Designer/Creator ought to produce. Creationism and ID cannot tell us anything about any thing that we have not yet observed, it gives us no clues into any unsuspected truths which can be predicted, tested for, and verified (or falsified). It is strictly a post hoc, superstitious attribution. Only evolutionary theory is sufficiently specific and consistent with real-world truth to afford us new insights into biology, paleontology, and so on. Evolution is science; creationism and ID are merely superstition.

On the other hand, attempts to “refute” it have tried to fuddle the argument by adding one or more options, or by saying that the options already stated are not clear enough – which is itself rather a poor methodology!

The scare quotes around “refute” are a nice touch. Let’s see if Holding can do any better than Lewis did.

To argue that the trilemma is refuted by showing the horns not to be clear-cut and distinct possibilities is correct ONLY if one can prove ALL of the horns to be such. But, for example, if only two of the horns are “fuzzy” but the third one “tight”, then the trilemma has simply converted to a powerful dilemma and the problem is still in our faces. At the same time, arguing that the trilemma is refuted by showing that there are more than three possibilities simply turns it from a bothersome trilemma into a bothersome tetralemma. Skeptics who continually say that the trilemma is “refuted” whenever another option is added miss the point. Only the “tri” part is refuted – the “lemma” is still there, whether is a tri-, a quadra-, a quinto-, or whatever number you please!

The problem is not that the terms of the “trilemma” are too fuzzy, nor is it that skeptics have any particular problem with the possibility that Jesus was deluded and/or dishonest to at least some degree. The problem with Lewis’s “trilemma” is that it creates a false trichotomy by oversimplifying the theological issues involved. JP Holding tries to rescue Lewis’s argument by breaking it down from three choices into four choices. Unfortunately, like Lewis, Holding creates a series of false dichotomies that fail to accurately represent the realities involved.

1. Either Jesus claimed to be divine, or He did not. If He did not, words were put in his mouth by someone else. We have already addressed this in this essay. If He did make such claims, then:
2. Either Jesus was right about those claims, or He was wrong. If He was right, Christianity is true. If He was wrong, then -
3. He either knew He was wrong, or did not know He was wrong. The first phrase is the “liar” option of the trilemma. As for the second:
4. If He did not know he was wrong, He lacked knowledge because of an error in judgment. Errors in judgment have only two sources: A properly working mind, or an improperly working mind. The latter is the “lunatic” option. The former is the “honestly mistaken” option, the most common skeptical attempt to add to the trilemma.

Notice the binary thinking here. Either a thing is 100% true, or it is 100% false. Either Jesus claimed to be divine, or he did not. But does this really reflect the realities involved in Jesus’s remarks and the circumstances under which he made them (assuming he really did make them)? Let’s look at one example, from John 10.

[Jesus said:] “I and the Father are one.”

Again the Jews picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many great miracles from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?”

“We are not stoning you for any of these,” replied the Jews, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’? If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and the Scripture cannot be broken— what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?

So according to Holding, either it’s 100% true that the Father and the Son are one, or it’s 100% false. In what sense might it be true, however? In the context, Jesus gives us a Biblical precedent for interpreting such remarks, citing Psalm 82 as an example of God using the term “god” to refer to mortal kings:

God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgment among the “gods”: “How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked?

…I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’ But you will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler.”

So God called the kings of the earth “gods.” That means that either God is a liar, or God is a lunatic, or the kings of the earth really are gods. It’s either 100% true that they are gods, or it’s 100% false that they are gods. It’s either 100% true that God called them gods, or it’s 100% false that God called them gods. If God called them gods when it’s 100% false that they are gods, then God must either be a liar or a lunatic. Either it’s 100% true that God knew they were not gods when He called them gods, or it’s 100% false that He knew they were not gods. If He knew they were not gods, then He’s a liar. If He didn’t, then either He’s 100% insane, or He’s 100% ignorant.

Quiz time: how many people think that Psalm 82′s true, intended meaning is best arrived at via the “tetralemma” approach outlined by Holding? And what does that tell us about what Jesus meant when he cited Psalm 82 as the precedent for his own declaration of being “one” with God?

The problem is that “god” is a term without any objective, verifiable, real-world reference. It is a term whose meaning is defined entirely by the stories men tell about it, and the feelings men have about it, and the speculations and philosophies men imagine about it. And as if it weren’t bad enough that these things contradict each other and themselves, we also use the terms “god” and “divine” metaphorically and hyperbolically, as well as “spiritually.” It’s entirely possible for it to be 100% true that Jesus claimed divinity (in some sense) while being 100% false that he claimed divinity (in some other, equally valid sense).

We know that Jesus is not God, in the sense of being an all-knowing, all-loving, all-wise and all-powerful supernatural being who loves us enough to die in our place so that we can be together forever. If there were such a thing as an omnipotent being who wanted to be with us, we’d know about it because he’d show up in the real world. If that’s what he wants, and nothing in heaven and earth has the power to deny him what he wants, then we’d see it.

Clearly, that doesn’t happen, so we know no such deity exists. Consequently, we can dispense with the possibility that Jesus was God, because no such god exists in the real world. According to Lewis and Holding, that leaves “liar” and “lunatic” as the only remaining possibilities, though Holding concedes that “honestly mistaken” is also a valid alternative that Lewis somehow failed to consider.

The reality of the situation is that Jesus was probably on the spectrum of human behavior between the cynical huckster who deliberately manipulates popular superstition in order to acquire political power, and the deluded egomaniac who is sincerely unable to tell the difference between whatever seems right in his own eyes, and “God’s Eternal Will.”

On the huckster side, we see that Jesus manifestly loved to step into the limelight and build up his own reputation by denouncing the unpopular leaders of his day. He seized the moral high ground by preaching virtues that, unfortunately, he himself did not quite put into practice (for example, compare “love your enemies” with how he actually treated the Pharisees and the merchants on the Temple grounds). He even denounced his own followers at times, but he loved to have people scrape and bow and show their faith in him.

But we should give Jesus the benefit of the doubt and suppose that he might indeed have been one of those naive and egocentric souls who seem to be simply unable to conceive of the possibility that their opinions about God’s will might be mistaken. “It seems right in my own eyes, so it must obviously be God’s eternal standard of morality and justice!” Such people can be more dangerous (especially to themselves) than the cynical huckster, because the huckster, at least, can draw the line before things get out of control. The deluded egomaniac can’t compromise without making the fatal concession that his personal opinions might not be genuinely infallible, and in Jesus’s case that ended up getting him killed.

So where does Jesus fit on the Liar, Lord, or Lunatic tree? Is it 100% dishonest to fail to distinguish between your own value judgments and God’s Eternal Truth? If so, there are a lot of lying Christians out there. Or is it 100% insane to try to live the best, most moral, and most righteous life you can live, given your understanding of what morality and justice are? If so, there’s a lot of people, Christian and non-, who are cuckoo froot loops.

But if it’s possible for you to be just a bit deluded about the difference between the way things seem to you, and the way “God” would have ordained them (if He existed), and if it’s possible at the same time to be willing to exploit people’s superstitions in order to motivate them to live up to (your own) moral standards (and incidentally lend you considerable political power and influence), and if it’s possible to do all that without being either a liar, a lunatic, or an almighty God, then maybe, just maybe it was possible for Jesus too.

Herr Professor has redeemed himself slightly in my eyes in his latest reply to one of my posts. He follows my blog very closely so no doubt he will discover this response to his so just a word of reminder to you, sir, that I do not use my blog for discussion and debate. Still, I think his post represents a good faith attempt to answer my question so I shall reply.

Ok, point noted: his blog is not for discussion and debate. Shall we proceed?

First I must really object to his apparent summation of my argument:

So man’s inhumanity to man is supposed to pose a tough problem for atheists, not because it’s so difficult to stop, but because the atheist’s lack of belief in God means he can’t explain why man is sometimes cruel to man. In other words, if God did not exist, we would expect man to behave better.

In Herr Professor’s summation we see a conflation of different theistic arguments. I am not for a minute arguing that because you don’t believe in God that doesn’t mean he can’t explain why man is sometimes cruel to man. I don’t see how you can derive that from my post at all which mainly presents the Christian explanation and asks the atheist for his.

Well, you see, I was reading the original post under the assumption that Mr. Horvath did not use his blog for discussion. So when I read, in the original post,

No, raw brutality towards one’s own entire species seems to be a problem unique to the human race, with or without religion.

But can we generate an explanation for that fact without religion?…

The response of these two Christians in the face of human nature’s apparent depravity was to identify it with a doctrine that was already known to them within the Christian community. What is the atheist going to turn to? [Note: Mr. Horvath's post ends here.]

I naturally assumed the question was intended to be rhetorical, and that Mr. Horvath was trying to suggest that the doctrine of Original Sin gave Christianity an advantage over atheism in that atheism was not supposed to have an explanation for the problem. I would have expected, if Mr. Horvath intended to say that Christianity had a better explanation, he would have compared the atheist’s explanation to his own, with a view to showing the points in which he could claim superiority for the Christian explanation. At the very least, he might have alluded to the fact that it’s not terribly difficult to explain cruel behavior in secular terms.

But we must take Mr. Horvath at his word, and if he says he did not mean to suggest that there is no secular explanation for evil behavior, then we must accept that it is so. Mr. Horvath exhorts me to “stick with what I actually say instead of what you think I’m saying,” and that’s certainly a fair point, and one that I shall endeavor to conform to. Sadly, immediately after this point, Mr. Horvath breaks his own rule.

On the agenda is the atheist’s explanation for how it is that humans are so cruel to humans. Note the shared assumption that cruelty is bad. In a future post I’ll demand that my relativist peer defend how under a relativist framework anything is actually bad, but for now I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. He’s acting like there is an absolute moral system even if he assuredly denies that there is one.

I don’t see how Mr. Horvath can even remotely claim to have honestly thought that anything in my post, or in any of my posts, “assuredly denies” that there is an absolute moral system. For example, consider the following excerpt from an earlier response of mine to Mr. Horvath:

As I’ve explained before, there is a perfectly secular reason for morality, and it lies in the nature of the consequences produced by the behavior in question. Mr. Horvath gives us a good example of Christian moral relativism in action: he has had ample opportunity to observe that there is a secular basis for morality, and in fact Christians themselves appeal to the same, secular system for assessing the morality of things like drug abuse and stem cell research. Yet he continues to try and create the dishonest impression that atheists have no way to explain the existence of “moral realities.” For the Christian, such deceits are not wrong, because they are necessary in order to defend the Gospel. The morality of the deception is defined relative to its apologetic utility.

Mr. Horvath, if you’re going to put words into my mouth, you ought to at least try to ensure that they are not a blatant contradiction of the things I am actually saying. Sigh.

So, Mr. Horvath exhorts me to stick to what he’s actually saying, and then he puts words in my mouth that are the exact opposite of what I’ve said more than once to him before. He also denies that he was trying to claim that atheists have no secular explanation for the existence of evil and cruel behavior among humans. Anybody want to take any bets on whether or not he spends the rest of the post trying to prove that atheists have no reasonable explanation for the existence of evil and cruel behavior?

So let’s take his points:

First of all, the reason why we don’t see genocide among apes (other than man) is because they don’t have ethnic groups, or the intelligence required to establish social networks larger than their immediate habitats.

Surely this begs the question: why don’t they have ethnic groups? This answer is no answer at all.

It’s so predictable, I’m sometimes tempted to suspect he’s making a deliberate parody of Christian apologetics. He denies that he’s claiming atheists have no explanation, but the argument he’s most interested in refuting is the claim that atheists do have an explanation. He claims that all he wanted to do was present the Christian explanation, and ask the atheist for his, but if anyone does give him any answers, he immediately sets out to prove that they are “no answers at all.”

However, the implication is that ethnic groups would promote cruelty if they did exist. That is a curious claim to make and I don’t think there is much to it. The real objection seems to be that intelligence does the trick, not simply ‘ethnicity.’ Later statements seem to corroborate that.

Indeed. It’s called “reading in context.” The reason gorillas don’t commit genocide is because genocide is a crime against an ethnic group, and ethnic groups are defined in terms of an abstract, semantic categorization. Gorillas do not have a sophisticated language with subtle and abstract concepts like “gypsy” or “Kurd” or “Jew,” and therefore “genocide” does not appear among gorillas for exactly the same reason that they do not have premarital sex or bounced checks.

Apes do compete and they do fight and they do sometimes commit rapes and murders and battles between rival groups that on occasion lead to one of the groups being exterminated. It varies from species to species, but it is quite complex and quite real, and evolutionists use it to gain some insights into human aggression. But genocide, per se, is something that can only occur among species intelligent and sophisticated enough to create concepts corresponding to ethnic divisions. If the ethnic groups don’t exist, then you can’t have warfare between the groups. That’s really all there is to it.

Human intelligence gives us tremendous leverage for our achievements, whether for good or for bad.

I don’t deny this for a minute but does it really answer the problem? I already raised human intelligence in my original post which he responded to.

Mr. Horvath has an unfortunate tendency to break my answer up into little bits, each of which is only part of my answer, so that he can deny that any of the individual bits, on its own, is “the answer.” He says that he is not trying to argue that atheists have no explanation for human evil, but if that’s really the case, why is he working so hard to contrive some pretext for claiming that my answer is not an answer?

And indeed, is his objection even valid? We see abundant cruelty in the natural world, both between and within species. Mr. Horvath agrees that human intelligence does give us the ability to extend those natural cruelties in proportion to our positive achievements. And what’s left to explain? The means are sufficient to produce the result, and therefore no further explanation is needed.

[I]t would seem that Herr Professor agrees with the thesis that “any sufficiently enlightened group of humans would exert their power in humane and benevolent ways.” Unfortunately, that takes his argument about intelligence giving us ‘tremendous leverage’ out at the knees, for Herr Professor is advocating that what we really need is even more intelligence… and yet by his argument it would follow that more intelligence would be just even more ability to leverage our achievements, good and bad.

Mr. Horvath should stick to what I say instead of what he thinks I mean. I do not, for example, assume that “intelligent” automatically means “humane and benevolent.” Why should it? Nor do I endorse his tautologous thesis that any “sufficiently enlightened” humans would be “humane and benevolent.” To the extent that “sufficiently enlightened” is defined as being humane and benevolent, the statement is merely a tautology, equivalent to saying that sufficiently nice people would be nice. It’s true by definition, but so what? It has nothing to do with the secular factors which lead to cruel behavior among humans.

And what does Mr. Horvath mean about “taking out” my argument that intelligence gives tremendous leverage to our deeds (good or evil)? Does he mean that, having previously agreed that this statement was correct, he now thinks that it is incorrect? If a “sufficiently enlightened” group of humans has not (so far) swept in and saved us from ourselves, does that mean that our intelligence does not enable us to achieve results (good or evil) on a far greater scale than can be achieved by the rest of the animal kingdom? Apparently Mr. Horvath was so desperate to try and discredit my argument that he forgot to make any sense. He’s not trying to deny that atheists have an explanation for evil behavior, though!

Thus, the really critical question is still left unanswered. ‘Intelligence’ is a smokescreen. The Professor seems to have it backwards. To produce ‘real world improvement’ in human behavior what we really need is regression of our knowledge and intelligence. It would be better for us if we were dumber. It would be worse for us if we were any smarter.

I suspect that by this point Mr. Horvath may have forgotten what the question even is. The question under discussion is not “How can we improve human behavior?” Nor is my answer above intended to suggest that if people were more intelligent they would be better behaved. The question is, “What factors cause people to commit atrocities like genocide?” and my answer is that at least part of the reason is that man’s superior intelligence makes him capable of greater deeds, for good or for evil. Intelligence is certainly not the sole reason people do bad things, nor have I ever said it was. If Mr. Horvath would simply stick to what I say–and resist the temptation to break it into little fragments he can more easily turn into straw men–then he might find out that there is indeed a secular explanation for human behavior.

So, the Professor’s argument is really thus: “Humans are just as cruel to each other as other species but because of humanity’s ‘intelligence’ the extent of damage that they can do to each other is magnified.”

‘Proportion-wise’ seems to me to be a phrase calling out for measurement. Is it really the case that the more intelligent a species is the more pronounced its achievements, good and bad, and that an examination of dogs, birds, and monkeys, when compared with humans, will show a correlation between the intra-species cruelty and the relative intelligence of that species? I don’t think so at all, but Herr Professor offers a testable hypothesis and I think he should test it.

Mr. Horvath flatters me, but my observation was not a hypothesis, because the issues involved are rather more complex than I am capable of accounting for in quantifiable terms. I merely make the observation that, for example, we do not anesthetize animals so that our young can devour them from the inside out, still alive. Nor do we inject victims with painful and/or corrosive poisons in order to make them easier to eat. You may say, “Well, that doesn’t count because when insects do it, it’s not intentional cruelty.” That’s fine. I have my subjective opinion, and you’re welcome to disagree. It doesn’t really pertain to my point, however.

Prejudice, superstition, misunderstanding, intolerance, and so on, are all cognitive by-products of our imperfect intelligence, and they are a too-frequent source of inhumane behavior.

There is an unsupported assumption at work in the Professor’s line of argumentation. Is it really the case that a perfect intelligence will not engage in prejudice, intolerance, etc? What is the connection between intelligence and prejudice? Why would perfect intelligence eschew intolerance?

I can see where Mr. Horvath might misunderstand my point, which I admit I could have stated more clearly. Prejudice, superstition, misunderstanding, intolerance, and so on, are all by-products of the limited and sometimes inaccurate way in which our mind works. For example, our minds are influenced by basic biological factors like hunger, fatigue and fear. We have inherent, primitive instincts acquired through long generations of evolution, instincts that may have helped our ancestors to compete and survive, but which sometimes get in the way of intelligent social cooperation.

Also, we are not omniscient. Our minds have to work for the knowledge they acquire, and it’s easier to subscribe to common prejudice than to conduct your own investigation and analysis all the time. We misunderstand because we don’t know all the facts, and because we have to communicate using words whose meanings are defined for us by our experiences, which aren’t always as common as we think they are. Some people have a series of experiences which teach them to view the world with hostility and defensiveness. Some people have natural, inborn tendencies towards aggression and violence. And sometimes these two groups overlap. And so on.

Since Mr. Horvath, as he himself tells us, is not trying to claim that there is no secular explanation for evil behavior, I’m sure he will see that I have at least pointed him in the direction of some of the many secular, biological and psychological factors that combine to produce evil behavior in humans. And if he does not find my answer adequate, I would dearly love to hear what he thinks the secular reasons are. After all, he’s not trying to claim that there are no secular reasons. He told us so himself.

[T]hough I don’t for a minute believe that atheism was irrelevant to Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot’s atrocities, the really critical ingredient is that it was forgotten or denied that people will tend to do bad things and so no checks and balances were erected that could have countered some of the abuses that followed.

Mr. Horvath can believe as he chooses, but the fact of the matter is that atheism is irrelevant to the atrocities for the simple reason that theism is irrelevant to atrocities, as can be documented by observing three simple facts. And since theism has no influence on whether or not a person will commit atrocities, the lack of theism (atheism) has nothing to do with it either.

Let’s start with Fact Number One: God does not show up in real life. Anyone can easily verify this by any number of means, starting with simple observation. Atheists aren’t ignoring God. The reason they’re not seeing Him or hearing Him is because He universally and consistently fails to show up in the real world. Indeed, if He ever did show up in real life, then apologists like Mr. Horvath would be out of a job. There would be no need for lame arguments like trying to link atheism with atrocities, because he could just point and say, “Look, there He is, see?” Or simply play back the videos of God appearing and speaking in public. But there aren’t any videos, and Mr. Horvath does have to resort to lame and fallacious arguments, because God does not show up in real life.

And because God does not show up to impose any kind of restraint on people committing atrocities,  Fact Number One means that the question we must address is this: What difference do theism and atheism make in regards to atrocities, in God’s absence. Take genocide, for instance. We’re not talking about whether an all-wise, all-loving, and all-powerful deity could restrain genocide, because we’re not dealing with a God who shows up in real life to prevent, or at least resist, the atrocity. We are dealing instead with men who do commit genocide in God’s absence, and we’re considering whether or not theistic beliefs make a difference under those circumstances.

Fact Number Two: Theism is simply the belief that one or more gods exist, and this belief has no bearing on whether or not the odd despot will launch a genocidal attack against some ethnic group. Some gods, in fact, would be rather pleased by the mayhem and suffering–after all, not all gods are kindly and merciful. But even if you believe in the existence of a kinder god, this fact alone will not prevent a true despot from committing atrocities like genocide. Theism does not automatically guarantee that the god you believe in has a moral agenda and the promise of punishment for wrongdoing. Theism just means you think at least one god exists somewhere. Since God consistently does not show up in the real world, that’s a belief with very little in the way of practical consequences.

Fact Number Three:  Even when the God in question is supposed to be a moral and just God who judges and punishes sin, this belief does not prevent people from committing acts of genocide. The atheistic despot will justify genocide on the grounds that “they deserve it,” and the theistic despot will justify genocide on the grounds that “God says they deserve it.” And since God does not show up to express a contrary opinion, the victor gets to decide whether or not the despot was right about what God wanted.

George W. Bush is supposedly a conservative, evangelical, Bible-believing Christian. Does his theism exert any influence on him to, say, direct his administration to oppose practices like kidnapping and torture? Not at all; in fact, his administration is loathe to admit that practices like waterboarding (slowly drowning someone and then reviving them just before they die) even are torture. And God does not show up in real life to express any kind of clear and definitive opposition to the Bush administration’s policies, so President Bush is free to convince himself that he’s only obeying the will of a just God who wants him to smite the infidel and defend Christians.

Belief in God, or the lack of it, contributes only one factor to the question of atrocities, and that is whether or not the despot will invoke “God’s will” as part of his rationalization for committing the crimes. The reasons why the despot wants to do such terrible things, and why the people are willing to go along with him, have nothing to do with his belief, or lack of belief, in God.

Over the last decade, I have noticed an increasing number of atheists arguing about the evils of religion and usually citing examples from Islam. Does that even begin to make sense? The whole notion of ‘religion’ is ridiculous on its face because of the many absurdities and abuses we find in Islam?

Now, by itself that’s not an unfair objection. Christianity deserves to be ridiculed because of the many absurdities and abuses we find in Christianity, and not just because of those found in Islam. Few things in life can match the delicious irony of a trinitarian calling someone else’s beliefs “absurd,” for instance. But notice: in accusing “atheists” of painting with too broad a brush, Mr. Horvath himself is guilty of painting atheists with his own broad brush–and it’s not a flattering color, either.

You can easily find atheists continuing this rant of late in regards to the Christian reaction to Pullman’s Golden Compass. It really torques them off that some Christians have called for a boycott for the series. Oh, those evil, evil Christians. Don’t they know that good and decent people are obligated to buy the products perpetuating things they don’t agree with? Such intolerance! Such evil! See, religion bad!

Mr. Horvath’s brush is not only broad, but a bit exaggerated, wouldn’t you say? I really doubt that he’s found any atheists at all who are claiming that anyone has any obligation to buy products they don’t like, for whatever reason. The reality of the situation, however, doesn’t incriminate atheists enough for Mr. Horvath, so he has to “tweak” the details just a bit before applying that load of paint to atheism in general. He wants non-Christians to make fine distinctions based on theological differences, but he himself shows no awareness or concern over the fact that atheism is not a monolithic religion.

Nor, for that matter, does he give Muslims the same considerations he demands for Christianity–most Muslims (in developed countries at least) condemn Al Qaeda in much the same way, and for much the same reason, as Christians condemn Eric Rudolph and other anti-abortion murderers. But you won’t hear Mr. Horvath complaining about how unfair it is to blame Islam as a whole just because of the actions of some of its adherents.

Back to atheists, though.

One of the clearest examples of this argument was in fact found in Dawkins’s Delusion. He talks about religious fanatics flying into the WTC towers on 9-11 and the calls for beheadings and, if I recall correctly, the fatwa on Rushdie. I agree, all bad. But he shows how Christianity is not immune to such abuses by showing… how a school board in Dover brought in a text book that de-emphasized evolution and focused on intelligent design. OOOOOOH the travesty! The agony! The HORROR of RELIGION! Elected officials did their job in a way that some people didn’t agree with! Why not un-elect them, if you don’t agree with them?

Why, that is exactly what happened. Was that enough for our tolerant atheists and Darwinists? Heaven’s no! A lawsuit, please! These damned evil Christians who were properly elected and then voted out- and went out peacefully without threats of jihad- proof positive of the dangers of religion! So, let’s slap a lawsuit on them, too, Freedom from Religion style, that’s the way tolerant unreligious people handle it. Much better.

Those who are less factually-challenged than Mr. Horvath may recall that the lawsuit was filed long before the elections, and that the grounds for the suit were still valid even after the creationist board members were voted out. The board’s actions were very clearly illegal, and their defense was very clearly based on lying to the court, as was conclusively documented during the court proceedings. Should it raise any red flags that Christians think their faith gives them the privilege and duty of breaking the law and lying under oath? I think it should. Whenever the rule of law is given second place to personal religious convictions, society no longer has any grounds for restraining any sort of criminal conduct. It might be God’s will, you see.

Naturally, when you start digging into the question, the old standbys begin to emerge. Let’s not forget the Crusades or the Inquisition, for example. Yes, let’s not forget the evils of the past perpetuated while most of Europe’s population was illiterate and couldn’t read the Scriptures for themselves to see if what the leadership was saying was true. But we have evidence in modern times, too. Look at Eric Rudolph. And not just Rudolph… there is also… uh Rudolph… (give us a minute and we’ll think of another example…) [like, say, James Kopp, for instance.--ed] oh yea, and those damn Christians trying to pass constitutional amendments and boycotting things they don’t like. Yea, that’s the SAME THING as flying into buildings, blowing oneself up in coffee shops, beheading infidels, and trying to hang, and if not flog, and if not flog, imprison a woman for 15 days when her student names a teddy bear after Mohammed.

Nice try, Mr. Horvath. Yes, “old stand-bys” like the Crusades and the Inquisition (and witch-burnings, and pogroms) are all true, but they don’t count because only the leaders were literate. Apparently Mr. Horvath has not read what church leaders were saying at the time, and thinks that they were lying to the people about what the Bible says. The same Bible that, by the way, records God as ordering the complete and utter genocide of the Amalekites, with special punishments for anyone who let even the animals survive, in I Samuel 15. Not to mention Jesus and the apostles specifically ordaining the leadership offices to which God allegedly entrusted the care and discipleship of the Church.

The problem is not that atheists are trying to say (as Mr. Horvath would have us believe) that boycotts and constitutional amendments are the same thing as beheading people and flying planes into buildings. The problem is that the reason people do things like that is because they sincerely believe that they have to put obedience to God above all else, even above such things as obeying the law and respecting human rights–and God does not show up in the real world to tell us what it is that we ought to be obeying!

This is a problem that is common to both Christianity and Islam, Mr. Horvath’s protests notwithstanding. God does not show up in the real world. People who see themselves as “obeying God” are really only obeying their own subjective impressions of what they think God wants, based on their own subjective interpretation of whatever Scripture they accept as God’s Word, and as influenced by the speculations and opinions of their peers, and by their own subjective feelings. The Crusaders did it. The Inquisitors did it. The witch-burners did it. The abortionist murderers did it. David Koresh did it. Al Qaeda does it. George Bush does it.

It’s a legitimate criticism: there really is no limit to what might be done by someone whose behavior is driven by demands so lacking in objective basis. God does not show up in the real world to tell us what His will is, and therefore every believer has no option but to follow whatever version of “God’s will” seems right in his own eyes. Putting “God’s will” above the law is a very, very bad idea.

I guess if you can’t address my evidence, you can at least try and assassinate my reputation behind my back. Christianity in action folks.

(Horvath’s comments are attached to this post, by the way.)

Whenever you run across any person who criticizes the Bible, claims findings of contradiction or error — they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. They have to earn it from you.

That’s actually some pretty good advice. Skepticism, after all, means having the mental self-discipline to insist on evidentiary support instead of just taking people’s word for things. What Holding is doing here is urging Christians to become skeptics themselves. That’s a good start. But you’ll never believe what justification he offers for why Christians should be skeptical of the skeptics.

Here’s why.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that a thorough understanding of the Bible — and this would actually apply to any complex work from any culture — requires specialized knowledge, and a broad range of specialized knowledge in a variety of fields. Obviously the vast majority of believers spend their entire lives doing little more than reading the Bible in English (or whatever native tongue) and importing into its words whatever ideas they derive from their own experiences. This process is very often one of “decontextualizing” — what I have here called “reading it like it was written yesterday and for you personally.” Of course if the church as a whole is locked into this mentality, you may well suspect that critics (whether Skeptics or other) and those in alternate faiths are no better off.

Wow. Did you catch that? The reason Christians should be skeptical of what skeptics say about the Bible is that not even Christians really understand it, not “thoroughly” anyway. Believers, and people in general, simply don’t have the specialized knowledge, training, and linguistics, that are required, and consequently, they “decontextualize” it (or rather, recontextualize it) and in the process they “import” whatever ideas seem right in their own eyes into the words of the text. And if that’s what Christians do to their own sacred Scriptures, then how can you expect those outside the faith to fare any better?

Naturally, this approach overlooks the case of people such as myself who became critical of the Bible because of exposure to the specialized knowledge and training he says are needed to understand it thoroughly. Indeed, it’s fairly typical that much of the scholarly criticism of the Bible has come from those who, unlike the Church or the public in general, do indeed have the academic background needed to approach the Bible knowledgeably and analytically.

But I’m more impressed by Holding’s assessment of where the “Body of Christ” stands in relation to the Scriptures, as a matter of actual practice. In theory, Protestant Christians (at least) are supposed to hold the Bible as the sole source of authority for Christian faith and practice. In theory, the individual Christian is supposed to be able to read the Bible and say, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” In theory, the individual Christian is not supposed to need a specialized (priestly?) class of men to read the Bible for him and to declare to him what it “really means.”

The actual practice, however, utterly fails to live up to this theory. Christians aren’t being informed by the Scriptures, they’re merely importing their own opinions into what they see as the meaning of the texts, and thus investing their opinions with the weight of divine authority (so-called). And we know this, not just because James Patrick Holding (a Christian apologist) admits that it is true, but also because we can see the inevitable, real-world consequences of this problem, in the form of the splintering of the church into endless schisms, denominations, and mutually contradictory doctrinal fads and traditions.

Holding, unfortunately, misses the point of his own observation.

Let’s anticipate and toss off the obvious objection: “Why did God make the Bible so hard to understand, then?” It isn’t — none of this keeps a person from grasping the message of the Bible to the extent required to be saved; where the line is to be drawn is upon those who gratuitously assume that such base knowledge allows them to be competent critics of the text, and make that assumption in absolute ignorance of their own lack of knowledge — what I have elsewhere spoken of in terms of being “unskilled and unaware of it.”

So after telling us that we can’t just take skeptics’ word for it that the Bible has problems, Holding wants us to just take his word for it that nothing he is saying implies any problem with “a person…grasping the message of the Bible to the extent required to be saved”–even though Christians have been disagreeing for 2,000 years over what the requirements of salvation might actually be. After observing the problem and acknowledging the problem, Holding simply denies that it’s a problem. For Christians anyway. He still wants it to be a problem for critics of Christianity.

To drive home his point, Holding lists a number of areas (linguistics, literature, archeology, psychology, etc.) sufficiently deep and diverse that no one scholar could reasonably be expected to master it all. He then asserts that since no one can master all of the requirements, no one can realistically claim to speak authoritatively about the true significance of the Bible. But again, strangely, he seems to think that this is a problem only for those who criticize the Bible, and not for Bible scholarship as a whole.

That’s quite a list, but there’s one more note to add — the holistic ability to put all of it together. How serious is this? Very. A carefully crafted argument about a text being an interpolation can be undermined by a single point from Greco-Roman rhetoric. A claim having to do with psychology can be destroyed by a simple observation from the social sciences. Not even most scholars in the field can master every aspect — what then of the non-specialist critic who puts together a website in his spare time titled 1001 Irrifutible Bible Contradictions? Do these persons deserves our attention? Should they be recognized as authorities? No, they deserve calculated contempt for their efforts.

Logically, the same argument would also apply to anyone putting together a website titled, oh, I dunno, “Tekton Apologetics Ministry” or something. After all, it takes no less study to say you’ve determined, academically, that the Bible is correct than to say that you’ve found errors. In fact, it takes a good deal more study to justify the conclusion that the Bible has no errors, because the counter-proof requires finding only one genuine mistake in the Bible, whereas the inerrantist must analyze and refute all possible errors, and then tackle the more difficult matter of proving that no further errors are possible.

In fact, Holding is quite plainly wrong in asserting that critics of the Bible need to acquire some impossibly difficult list of academic credentials in order to falsify Scripture’s claims to divine infallibility. You do not need a post-PhD mastery of the mathematics of quantum physics to know that the equation “2+2=17″ does not add up. Nor do you need advanced degrees in linguistics, psychology, archeology, philosophy, and wood shop, to know that there are problems with a story that contradicts both itself and the real world.

The Gospel is about a God who loves us enough to die for us so that we could be together forever. That’s what Christians claim, and if that’s not what the Bible teaches, then the Bible is simply irrelevant to Christianity. God, however, does not show up in the real world. If He did, Christian doctrine would be based on God, instead of being based on what men wrote about God 2,000+ years ago. If He did show up, Holding would not be trying to refute critics of the Bible by demanding that they meet some impossibly high standard of academic achievement–he’d just point out that the Bible (if we even needed to have one) could be confirmed by simply asking God.

So the story is about a God who ought to be showing up to participate in the relationship He did so much to make possible. But the reality is that God does not show up. It doesn’t even need a high-school education to tell the difference between the story and the reality. Never mind the appeals to the wisdom of men. Simple common sense–and the ability to distinguish between reality and wishful thinking–is all that is required.

I wanted to gather in one spot a handful of interviews with Pullman. I have to imagine that there is a list somewhere with them, but I could not find them. They all make for interesting reading and I have drawn some excerpts from them.

The rest of the post consists of Pullman interviews and they are indeed interesting reading, especially his reactions to Narnia (which I used to love when I was I Christian–I’d read through one book in one sitting and then sigh and think, “Now why can’t the real Jesus be more like Aslan?”). Anyway, highly recommended reading, so be sure and stop by.

Herr Professor gives an overview of the fantastic elements in the Pullman series and then quotes me when I say that in the Pullman series there is no line between reality and fantasy.

This is as clear an example of Herr Professor’s terrible reading abilities as one can get. My line about there not being a line between reality and fantasy was not in association with the witches and ‘magic’ of the Pullman series, but rather the working principles that undergird the Pullman series – which certainly are presented as reality.

It seems Mr. Horvath, despite his criticism of my “terrible reading abilities,” is unfamiliar with the common practice of lending plausibility to one’s fantasy stories through incorporation of realistic elements. He also seems to think that Pullman’s stories, rather than leaning on familiar topics in order to enhance verisimilitude, is instead a plot to advocate certain strange and dangerous ideas as being the way things really are. His original post even spells out for us precisely what this insidious plot allegedly is:

The real danger of the Pullman series is that it prepares the young, thinking person, to believe that even if Jesus rose from the dead, that still would not be evidence for the existence of God, or for the truth of Christianity.

And how did Pullman pull off this particular bit of subliminal brainwashing? By writing a story in which God was a real character, and in which the vaguely-referenced events of the ancient Bible stories might actually have occurred, or in other words by portraying God as real, and the Biblical events as largely accurate (though misinterpreted). Wow, that’s sneaky, eh?

What Pullman did was to imagine a world in which God was real, and did interact with the real world in ways that are consistent with the rest of reality. That’s an idea that’s fatal to Christianity, which has always protected God by hiding Him in a supernatural realm that, by definition, is inaccessible to scientific study and verification. Pullman’s “many worlds” setting rips away the veil that walls God off from man, and invites us to imagine what would happen if modern scientific techniques were able to observe actual interactions between a divine being and the natural world.

It’s no wonder Horvath finds this concept so alarming. Truth is consistent with itself, and once we allow ourselves to consider all the ways a real God would have a scientifically-detectable impact on the natural world, as Pullman portrays Him as having, then one can hardly help but notice how inconsistent the real world is with the Gospel. It’s not that a genuine resurrection would fail to be evidence for Christianity, it’s that God cannot survive in a world that requires truth to be self-consistent.

If we take an example like Harry Potter, whom the author of that article also decries, the difference between the threats is easy enough to detect: Rowling did not present her series as potentially being reality, nor does anyone- even young readers- think that it might be, whereas in the Pullman series, what he presents is explicitly something that he believes could be real, and by connecting with claims that students will hear described as scientific (Ie, Evolutionary theory and the Multiverse), students are led to think the same. There is no line between reality and fantasy, here.

The His Dark Materials trilogy is a series of stories about a girl who lives in a world where everybody goes through life accompanied by magical demons that can change form at will (up to a certain age), where witches ride on magical pine branches, and where talking polar bears build themselves body armor, sometimes cutting through sheets of metal with their sharp claws. The girl, Lyra, eventually meets a boy with a magic knife that allows him to slice open doorways between parallel dimensions or universes so that he can quickly travel from one to the other. In their journeys together, they battle soul-sucking ghosts and join in a war between good angels and bad angels.

And Horvath says, “There is no line between reality and fantasy here.”

If I hadn’t been a Christian myself for some thirty-plus years, I would be utterly boggled by such a statement. But when you look at the things Christians accept as real (angels, demons, a God who loves us even though He never actually shows up to say so, etc.), it gets easier to understand how they could have such trouble discerning the line between fantasy and reality.

Do beliefs have implications? Many people argue in the negative. “His private life has no bearing on his ability to operate in the job”….But what about a person’s views on the deeper things in life, their worldview, their noetic structure? Can these things really have no effect on their actions?

Finnish school shooting: Student social Darwinist dies…

Notice the way this brief post insinuates that evolution is somehow responsible for the school shootings, without actually making any kind of rational argument that would establish a causative link. That’s because the argument is incredibly lame. It’s like saying that right-handedness is a source of moral corruption, because the shooter was right-handed, and even fired the gun with his right hand. All this argument needs to be complete is a reference to Hitler being right-handed as well.

There is one point with which I will agree, however. Beliefs do have implications that affect our behavior. That’s why it’s so important for Christians to stop spreading false beliefs about evolution, like the belief that evolution somehow justifies immoral behavior such as racism or murder. Obviously, the Finnish shooter was emotionally disturbed in some way and was not thinking clearly, so it’s hardly the case that he sat down with On the Origin of Species and decided that murder/suicide was the best way to promote his own chances of reproductive success. It is possible, however, that he bought into the Christian idea that the truth of evolution implies a world in which morality has no meaning.

We must never lose sight of the fact that it is Christians, and not evolutionists, who are hyping the idea that morality is somehow incompatible with the verifiable observations of evolutionary processes. Evolutionists have absolutely no problem embracing a decent and fairly conservative set of moral standards, based on the secular consequences of different types of behaviors. But Christians, driven by a need for self-justification, are poisoning our culture with the strange and perverted notion that genetics somehow invalidates morality. This is a false and harmful belief, and we need to expose it and oppose it.

Returning finally to science — I note you didn’t answer or even engage with my points about science having no answers to the origin of life, or the universe, or morality, or human rights. This is why I am an ex-atheist — because atheism is bankrupt; it provides no answers.

He’s partially right. Biology and genetics, like mathematics, meteorology, chemistry, and other branches of natural science, do not provide moral guidance. Math, for example, will tell you how to add up the numbers on your tax forms, but math alone cannot make any recommendations as to whether or not you ought to cheat on your taxes. If you do decide to cheat, math will give you the knowledge you need in order to manufacture a set of numbers that adds up to the total you pick, but it won’t complain about your decision to do so. I guess in Mr. Admin’s book, that means that math is bankrupt and provides no answers, and ought to be abandoned by people of conscience. I wonder if his chequebook balances at the end of the month?

He’s wrong, of course, about science having no answers about the origin of life and of the cosmos. It’s not that science has no answers, it’s that science’s answers are currently incomplete and significant questions remain. Like so many other creationists, Mr. Admin sees the existence of the question as being proof that there is no answer. He does not (or cannot) see an open question as an opportunity to explore and investigate and find new answers that we didn’t know before. It’s a typical conservative Christian objection, and it’s worth mentioning as a real-life example of how Christianity promotes a mental environment that is hostile to scientific advancement.

The answer is, Professor, that you are right. Christians should be appalled, and far more opposed, to those who bear false witness in the name of Christ. What do you suggest I do about it from here in New Zealand?For example, money-preaching televangelists like Benny Hinn survive because a lot of Biblically-ignorant people give the guy lots of money. Many Christians ministries have critiqued and heavily criticized this cretin but what do you do next? Blow up his home? Assassinate him? That may be the Islamic way, but not for Christians.

Apparently, Mr. Christian Admin has already spent some time thinking about how to deal with Benny Hinn! But he’s right, it is unfair to blame Christian New Zealanders for the sins of American Christians. Only I never did that. My comment was that creationism demonstrates the fact that God does not show up in real life, because if He did, Christians wouldn’t need to resort to lame arguments like quibbling over whether or not some poorly-understood, prehistoric, pre-human events might possibly be interpreted as possibly reflecting some kind of possible interaction by something that may have been like some kind of deity–possibly.

It is Mr. Admin, and not Benny Hinn, who was trying to use anti-Darwinism as an apologetic for God, though I’ve no doubt Hinn would gladly agree with him. And it’s the kind of argument you have to use when you can’t point to any verifiable instances of God actually showing up in the real world.

But wait till you hear his rebuttal to my observation that God does not show up in real life.

As for God not showing up — well, I think it is totally understandable that you would make that claim. Looking thru the glasses of Christian theology and apologetics, we would certainly not see it that way. As I think I mentioned in a previous post, when we look out the window and see something, perhaps a beautiful woman, we see creation as being a reflection of God’s beauty.

Apparently, murdering Benny Hinn isn’t the only thing Mr. Admin has been thinking about, eh? But notice that, once again, Mr. Admin gives us further support for the observation that God does not show up in real life. His counter-example is not that you look out the window and see God walking past. You see a woman and say, “God, is she hot! Surely natural processes alone could not have produced such a sexy babe!”

Mr. Admin’s response is an appeal to superstition, i.e. the practice of seeing something in the real world, and arbitrarily assigning the credit to some unverifiable cause, even though you cannot show any connection between the alleged cause and the observed effect. For extra superstitiousness, Mr. Admin cannot even specify what such a connection would consist of if we could verify it. Did God supernaturally tweak the woman’s genes while her father’s sperm was penetrating her mother’s egg? Did He miraculously create extra hormones in her body during puberty to lend an extra curve to her hips and a bit more fullness to her breasts? Is this woman’s beauty the product of genuine divine intervention, or did mere natural processes work together, in both the woman and in the men who observe her, to create the subjective perception of sexual attractiveness?

The great thing about superstition is that it does not require God to do anything at all, not even to exist. It’s a perfectly fail-safe approach. No matter what happens, you can always say, “Ah, well, God did that, somehow.” Or Krishna did it, or Allah, or some other group of gods, or leprechauns, or gremlins, or flying spaghetti monsters. Men making superstitious claims about God is not God doing anything in the real world, it’s men.

And if we see war or disease, it reminds us of the fall and the fact that the creation groans, awaiting redemption. What do you see? What are you looking for? Death, then nothing? No justice for Hitler or the various other atheistic murderers that have killed 130,000,000 (see Wikipedia) people in the last 100 years.

Hitler and all those other murderous despots were right-handed. If there is no God, does that mean there will not be any eternal justice meted out on all those wicked right-handed people? Besides, the Bible says that the wages of sin is death, and Hitler died, so he has paid for his own sins.

But let’s not get side-tracked. See if you can follow Mr. Admin’s logic here. I point out that God does not show up in the real world. Mr. Admin offers a counter-example in which a beautiful woman shows up instead of God showing up. He then brings up Hitler, who he claims was an atheist despite Hitler’s numerous appeals to God and his well-documented religious justifications for the policies of his regime. Then he suggests that, under atheism, there will be no justice because there’s no way to make dead villains suffer infinite torments as punishment for the finite crime of hastening people’s entrance into immortality.

This is your brain on Christianity. Any questions?

What do I see and what am I looking for? I should think I made that fairly clear. According to the Gospel, God loves me and wants to be with me forever. He loves me so much that He was willing to show up on earth to teach men the Gospel and then to die to remove the barrier between God and men, and then to rise again as proof that the barrier had been removed. So if He wants to be with me forever, and He has removed the barrier between us and made it possible for Him to be with me forever, then what do you suppose I’m looking for? I’m looking for God to show up to participate in this relationship He allegedly died to make possible. And like Mr. Admin, I’m not seeing Him either.

Picture a divorced mom with a preschool son who wants to know why deadbeat dad never shows up to spend any time with him. “Oh, of course your daddy loves you,” she claims. “Look–we’re in this cheap apartment because of him, and once in a great while a miracle occurs and he pays his child support, so that I can buy you cast-off sneakers and second-hand clothes.” Will she succeed in fooling him into believing that his dad really does love him? Possibly, but there’s no getting around the fact that dad is not showing up, and even his by-proxy contributions (the child support checks) are so rare that if mom ever gets one, she says it’s a miracle.

The reason we use “it’s a miracle” to refer to things that virtually never happen is because the term “miracle” is the word for God’s (alleged) interactions with His allegedly beloved Children. The rarity (not to say “complete absence”) of such events is why the word “miracle” has become a by-word for things that never happen in real life. God simply does not show up. Christians know this. Even Mr. Admin knows this. He’s just become so accustomed to God’s absence that (he claims) he can no longer even properly conceive of what it would mean for God to actually show up in the real world. He regards superstition as being enough, because it’s all he’s got. And that’s just not the way things would be in real life if the Gospel were true.

Since we’re in the neighborhood anyway, let’s look at the Statement of Faith found at the Christian Apologetics Ministries web site. It’s a fairly typical conservative Protestant statement, with a few quirks, and it does a good job of demonstrating some of the many ways Christians put their faith in men, under the guise of putting their faith in God.

We believe that the Scriptures consist of the Old and New Testaments and that they are inspired and they are in their original autographs without error.

Right off the bat, we’re supposed to put our faith in a whole bunch of men: the men who wrote the Bible, the men who assembled it, the men who canonized it, etc, etc. Men tell us that the Bible is inspired and is without error, and we are expected to believe them even though what they say is not consistent with what we find in real life. For example, the Bible tells us that Nebuchadnezzar was supposed to destroy Tyre, and raze it down to bare rock, and that was to be the end of Tyre: it would never again be rebuilt.

For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: From the north I am going to bring against Tyre Nebuchadnezzar … with horsemen and a great army. He will … set up siege works against you, build a ramp up to your walls and … demolish your towers with his weapons. … they will break down your walls and demolish your fine houses and throw your stones, timber and rubble into the sea. I will put an end to your noisy songs, and the music of your harps will be heard no more. I will make you a bare rock, and you will become a place to spread fishnets. You will never be rebuilt, for I the LORD have spoken, declares the Sovereign LORD.

The writer of this prophecy made two mistakes: first of all, Tyre was still intact when Nebuchadnezzar lifted his seige and went home, bribed and happy–it was Alexander the Great who came up with the strategy of demolishing the mainland portion of the city and using the rubble to build a causeway out to the island citadel so that the seige engines could be used against the walls. Secondly, Tyre was rebuilt, and became a bustling seaport once again, as even the New Testament tells us.

But never mind the mistakes, we’re supposed to put our faith in the men who tell us that there are no mistakes. And even that is not sufficient. The CAM statement of faith tells us that there are still more men we need to put our faith in.

 We believe that the Scriptures are best understood in light of the three ecumenical creeds- the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.

Here we confront once again the critical flaw in Bible-based Christianity: the Bible has to be understood before it can be the authority for any given doctrine or practice, and the act of understanding the Bible requires the act of interpreting the Bible–and different men have different interpretations. Not only that, but God fails to show up in the real world to endorse any of these different interpretations, so we have no objective way of distinguishing a “right” interpretation from a “wrong” one. Each Bible student has no choice but to follow whatever interpretation seems right in his or her own eyes.

The doctrinal, practical, and moral confusion that results from this approach is hardly surprising, and is as old as the Bible itself. The three creeds mentioned above were born as a response to just such confusion, and represent an extrabiblical, human attempt to fill the gap left by God’s failure to show up in real life to give us an infallible interpretation of what the Bible is supposed to mean. (Of course, if He were willing and able to do that, we wouldn’t need a Bible in the first place, but that’s another matter.)

We’re supposed to put our faith in the men who wrote the Bible, but that’s not sufficient due to interpretational problems. So we’re supposed to also put our faith in the men who wrote the so-called “Apostles Creed.” This, too, however, is open to interpretation, and fails to cover all the ground, so we must also put our faith in the men who wrote the Nicene Creed, which is also insufficient, hence the need to put our faith in the men who wrote the Athanasian Creed. And it that enough? If it were, then CAM would not have found it necessary to add yet another Statement of Faith to the list: their own.

We believe that the church fathers’ can be helpful in understanding our faith, but we believe that the Scriptures themselves are the highest and last authority for Christians on matters of faith and action, and are the primary way that God chooses to reveal himself to us today.

Except we don’t see God revealing Himself. What we see is that everybody follows whatever interpretation is right in their own eyes. The sole function of the Bible is to offer authority by proxy: decide what you think is right and true, find a passage in the Bible that you can interpret as being in agreement somehow with what you are saying, and poof, your opinions now have the weight and authority of God’s Word.

This clause does have the distinction of cautioning against putting your faith in men. But it’s a biased distinction. We’re supposed to put our faith in the church fathers unless they say something that CAM disagrees with. We’re supposed to have more trust in CAM than in the church fathers, on the grounds that God reveals Himself through the Bible. But is that a reasonable distinction? If the church fathers were not able to profit from “God revealing Himself through His Word,” then why should anyone suppose that CAM has fared any better? The Statement of Faith is urging us to trust in men again: i.e. in our own (or their own) personal interpretation of Scripture.

We’ll skip over a couple minor points and look at just one last clause.

We believe that the Scriptures ought to be interpreted as they were intended to be interpreted. If literal, then interpret it literally. If metaphorically, then interpret it metaphorically. We believe that Genesis 1-11 was intended to be interpreted as real events. Consequently, we are believers in a 6 day creation not too long ago (ie, Young Earth Creationism).

Once again, we are enjoined to put our faith in men, this time in the men who decide for us how the Scriptures were intended to be interpreted. More significantly, we are told not to believe our own eyes, but to take men’s word for it even when they flatly contradict what we can see in the real world today.

Seeing, as you know, is a process that takes time, due to limitations on the speed of light. If you’re seeing something close by, then there may be a gap of only a few fractions of a nanosecond between the time a thing happens and the time the sight of it arrives at your eye. Across larger distances, however, the size of that gap increases. If you look at the sun (through proper safety filters, of course!), you won’t be seeing what is happening on the sun right now, you’ll be seeing what was happening on the sun nine minutes in the past.

In short, when you start to look across astronomical scales of distance, you aren’t just seeing things that are distant in space, you’re seeing the distant past as well. You’re not seeing a reproduction or artist’s conception or computer 3D animation, you are seeing the actual events of the past, just like you see real life all around you in the present. Take a pair of binoculars out on a dark, clear night, and you can easily see millions of years into the past–a good telescope can make that into billions and even trillions of years. You, yes you, can give eyewitness testimony to the fact that divine creation is not what was going on in the universe 6,000 years ago. Don’t just take my word for it. You can see it for yourself with your own eyes.

Christians can, of course, retort that we shouldn’t trust eyewitness testimony because God has the power to tamper with the evidence and create visual hoaxes. But if that’s the case, then the eyewitness testimonies of the New Testament are equally worthless, and the more so since they are not consistent with what we find in the real world, whereas the things we see in the sky are perfectly consistent both with themselves and with what we know about how the laws of nature work. Astronomy, not the Gospel, is what passes the self-consistency test, and that’s the defining test for what’s truth and what isn’t.

I don’t want to single out CAM, because their Statement of Faith is not significantly different from any of the other Statements of Faith that are out there, except as regards technical points of doctrine. They all boil down to being loyalty oaths and statements of faith in men, even when the things men say are not consistent with themselves or with what we find in the real world. To insist on believing such things despite these kinds of inconsistencies is not truly faith, but merely gullibility. If they were honest, therefore, they ought to call them Statements of Gullibility.

Now compare that with an exchange I had recently with an atheist who, because I granted him superhero status and the title “Hyperbole Boy” has concluded that there is no better example of a Christian being unloving, for, after all (and he cites passages), Jesus was so nice. This sort of disproportionate response to what I said is exactly why I gave him the name “Hyperbole Boy.”

This post makes it back on the front page of his blog, which might prove confusing for some of his readers, since there’s no obvious link from the front page to the post where he called me “Hyperbole Boy.” Nor is there any link to the article where I listed some appropriate Bible verses–not surprisingly, since in that post I never came anywhere near claiming that there was “no better example [than Mr. Horvath] of a Christian being unloving.” (Speaking of “Hyperbole Boy”!) I merely highlighted the contrast between the supernaturally-enabled loving and inspired response recommended by the New Testament, and the rather lame attempt at name-calling which was the sole substance of Mr. Horvath’s reply. Nor did I mention anything at all about Jesus being nice. Mr. Horvath just put that there to provide a segue into the argument that Jesus could be just as abusive at times, and even more so.

But perhaps my atheistic friend is unaware of instances where Jesus went well beyond such playful jabs. For example, he calls the Pharisees Sons of Satan and Whitewashed Tombs. In Matt 23 he calls them snakes and a brood of vipers. And of course, we all remember his ‘cleansing’ of the temple- probably twice.

There you have it folks. Jesus’ own example is justification for Christians to employ both verbal and (unprovoked) physical violence as a means of dealing with unbelievers, or even believers of whom they do not approve. Though in Jesus’ case, the abusive response was not his only response. He at least attempted to provide a substantial rebuttal to what he considered to be false teachings.

My atheistic friend acts as though if I had played it completely straight he would have considered Christianity more credible. Is it his view that Jesus was a panzy? Do people find Christianity attractive because its founder was a wuss?

It’s quite revealing that Mr. Horvath equates giving a respectful and substantive response with being a wuss and a pansy. And he seems to have completely missed the point that the most significant flaw in his response is not that it contained “playful jabs,” but that it made no attempt to contain anything else, as has been typical of all his responses thus far. I do not fault him for this lack, however. It’s Christianity’s fault for failing to provide him with any substantive material that could be used in rebuttal.

At the same time, we often hear complaints about conduct in the Bible where people are wiped out and killed wholesale.  We aren’t usually given the reasons, but we are told that it is just.  This is considered a perfect example of how religion is evil.

More precisely, it’s an example of how Christian morality is just as much a matter of relativism as anything Christians accuse atheists of. The genocide of the Amalekites, for example, is supposedly ok morally, on the grounds that it happened to be God’s will at the time. This despite the fact that when we look at the real world, we observe that God Himself does not actually show up. Men simply attribute their actions to God, or to God’s will, and thereby link their actions (right or wrong) with God’s authority. The Christian morality of a particular behavior is not determined by anything intrinsic in the behavior itself, or in the consequences of such behavior, but is determined by how persuasively the person can argue that the given behavior was consistent with God’s will at the time. In practice this works out to be arbitrary, self-justifying, and a perfect example of moral relativism in action.

Atheists are going to have to make up their minds.  Do they want a Jesus meek and mild?  Or do they want a Jesus that administers justice?

Let’s start with a Jesus who actually exists outside the stories, superstitions, and subjective feelings of men, shall we? We’re not dealing with a Jesus who shows up in real life and behaves either meekly or aggressively. We’re dealing with a Jesus who universally and consistently does not show up in real life, and with men who, in his absence, tell stories about him that are inconsistent with themselves and with real-world truth. None of us were around when the original Jesus originally walked this earth, so our only way of judging the truth of the Gospel is to see how consistent it is with the truth we do have access to, and with itself.

The truth is that there is a balance.  The problem is how do we discover that balance.  The argument is over what world view best explains the fact that there is a balance at all.  I see no reason at all to expect atheism to explain why such moral realities exist.  I expect them only to take them for granted and use them when it suits them to judge God, Jesus, and yes, of course, Christians.

As I’ve explained before, there is a perfectly secular reason for morality, and it lies in the nature of the consequences produced by the behavior in question. Mr. Horvath gives us a good example of Christian moral relativism in action: he has had ample opportunity to observe that there is a secular basis for morality, and in fact Christians themselves appeal to the same, secular system for assessing the morality of things like drug abuse and stem cell research. Yet he continues to try and create the dishonest impression that atheists have no way to explain the existence of “moral realities.” For the Christian, such deceits are not wrong, because they are necessary in order to defend the Gospel. The morality of the deception is defined relative to its apologetic utility.

If this is what he’s got to stoop to to show a lack of charity on my part, why, I think in order to demonstrate charity you’d have to hold his hand and kiss it ever so gently and never raise your voice… not even a little. And butter his toast for him. Without even being asked!

The “aw, poor me” card again. That mean old professor is just so demanding. Quoting the Bible to Christians? How could anyone stoop so low?

It’s another stealth post, so you’ll have to click the link above to get to it (if you really want to).

Meanwhile, since I’m not afraid to tackle substantive issues on my blog, let me post a follow-up to my post on why Bible-based Christianity can’t work. It’s not just because Christians get offended whenever anybody stoops so low as to quote it to them.

As I alluded to before, if God existed and were giving Christians access to the same Holy Spirit as He used to inspire the Bible, then the Bible, together with the Holy Spirit, should not fail to produce doctrinal unity among Christians. Yet we plainly see that they do fail to produce such unity, and always have. The canon of Scripture itself was born amidst disagreements over which ancient texts constituted genuine apostolic teaching, and disagreements over the meaning of these texts are even older. To this day, Catholics and Protestants disagree over which books belong in the Bible.

And yet Christians today are of approximately equal sincerity overall, and are not particularly aware of any serious problems in their own interpretations of Scripture’s “plain sense” meaning, even as their interpretations contradict one another. The Holy Spirit, thus, is manifestly unable to overcome the erring Christian’s personal conviction that their interpretation is correct.

This poses a tremendously difficult problem for Christianity, because the very inspiration of the Bible itself is based on the Spirit’s ability to communicate effectively with fallen and fallible human hearts. Men claim that the Holy Spirit was able to infallibly communicate the truth of the Gospel to the writers of the Bible, but what we observe in the real world is that the Holy Spirit is not able to accurately and consistently communicate the truth, even to believers.

It’s no use claiming to have spiritual authority based on the Scriptures if the Scriptures themselves are unreliable. Yet the lack of doctrinal unity among sincere Christians makes it unmistakably clear that we cannot trust the Holy Spirit to be able to communicate accurate and reliable doctrine to mortal men. According to the Gospel, the Holy Spirit wants to communicate the truth, and ought to be able to communicate the truth, but what we see in real life is that in at least the majority of the cases he fails to do so–and even then we have no objective, non-egometric means of determining which cases, if any, were successful.

Doctrinal unity is the desirable and predictable consequence that would result from God being willing and able to accurately communicate truth to human hearts. In its absence, we not only have no way to know whose interpretation is correct, we also have no reason to believe that there’s anything infallible to interpret. The Bible is just a bunch of people writing down whatever seemed right in their own eyes.

Before I respond to this post, let me first of all welcome Mr. Horvath to the wonderful world of the public blogosphere, where people read and sometimes comment on each other’s public posts. I might also mention, in passing, that if you choose to squander your public free speech on trying to spread sneaky slanders about those who disagree with your religion, you have voluntarily surrendered the right to play the “oh poor me” card if and when someone speaks up and exposes how spurious, self-defeating, and downright silly your snide insinuations are. If Mr. Horvath is upset by the response to his gratuitous slurs against atheists, he is certainly welcome to exercise a little more restraint and responsibility in the material he chooses to post.

But granted that he’s feeling a bit abused right now, let’s see if we can predict his response. We know that he’s a Christian, and not just an ordinary Christian: he’s a professional apologist with a degree in Pastoral Ministry and post-graduate studies in philosophy and apologetics. And we know what the New Testament tells Christians to do when confronted by adversaries and persecution:

But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

[S]anctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence; and keep a good conscience so that in the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ will be put to shame. For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.

When they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not worry about how or what you are to speak in your defense, or what you are to say;  for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.

I think we’ve got a pretty good idea what to expect, right? After all, this is just the sort of superhuman, godly forbearance that won the Roman Empire over to Christianity in the first place, is it not? Let’s sit back and prepare to be overwhelmed by the kindness and irreproachable godliness of Mr. Horvath’s Christian response:

It is Herr Professor, or shall I say, Hyperbole Boy…

Or should we call him Jump to Conclusion Man?

Or just Content Parasitico?

Mmmmm, feel that good Christian love. Makes you warm all over, doesn’t it? Notice how the wisdom of the Holy Spirit just shines through in the way he lays bare exactly what it is that I got “wrong” in my post(s) and gently corrects my misunderstandings…

If you’re wondering what was in the “…” above, it’s (apparently) his main objection to one of my posts.

He read my most recent post and thought he ‘read it right’ that I was insinuating an atheistic plot at NBC. He takes a post that includes in the title… “a warm up” and figures he knows enough about what I really mean from such a brief intro that he can opine on it.

Yeah, imagine me being foolish enough to think you can understand what someone means by reading what they’ve written. You know you’re getting into the good stuff when you get that kind of argument from a Bible-based believer!

In his defense, I believe he has a different notion about a blog’s role, willing to use it as a platform towards ongoing discussions, but that is not how I use my blog. In many of his attacks on my posts he takes issue with what he thinks is my unwillingness to have further discussion. That just ain’t true. I have a discussion board for more in depth discussion. I view my blog as just a place to post some thoughts and reactions, musings, etc. For full blown defense- or attack- a blog just isn’t a good place.

So, Dear Doc: You can try to prod me after everything I post, but if you want to have a real conversation- with me, anyway- my debate forum is the place.

Thanks, I know all about those safe, private forums where all the moderator buttons are in the hands of the Christian apologist. There’s nothing you can type into a forum post box that you can’t type into a blog post box, so I’ll keep my material out in public, where everyone can see it. My material does not require a safe, controlled environment in order to survive–it’s consistent with real world truth, which spares me the trouble of having to work to keep my stories straight.