You’re absolutely wrong. Terrible example and you have apparently not read TIA nor understood that Duncan doesn’t even begin to rebut its arguments. He does not show that religion was involved as a pretext in more than 7 percent of the wars in recorded human history. Nor does he explain why no military tactician or strategist has EVER incorporated religion into their military tactics or strategy. His critique is totally invalid.

Now stop making groundless assertions and be specific. Precisely what about that his argument that religion causes war do you find persuasive?

Notice, the primary crime he accuses his critic of is a failure to read and understand the opposing point of view. He then insists that I failed to rebut his argument, and he demands to know what is so persuasive about my argument that religion causes war. Does he have a point? Does my argument—meaning the argument I actually made, not the one Vox attributes to me—fall apart when examined in the light of the evidence Vox cites?

Turning back to the post in question, what I originally wrote is this:

His main point is that religion is not the primary cause of most wars, which is perfectly reasonable and accurate. [Emphasis added.] Unfortunately, he pretends that Harris and Dawkins and company are claiming that eliminating religion would eliminate war, which is a pretty blatant straw man. (He even admits at one point that Harris and Dawkins “[never] state that they believe religion is the direct and primary cause of war.”)

Yep, as usual, Vox has not a clue what he is talking about. He claims that none of my posts rebutted anything he said, but has he even read what I wrote? Or is he the one who is failing to read and understand what the opposing side is saying? He’s so desperate to dismiss me as “unintelligent, ignorant, and intellectually dishonest” that he completely fails to notice the fact that I agree with him about religion as a false cause of war. In fact, I think Vox is overstating the influence of religion by about 7%.

Let’s ignore, for the time being, the issue of battlefield generals using or not using religion as a tactic or strategy. By the time the generals are on the field attacking the enemy, the war has already been caused. There’s clearly no point in seeking the cause of a war amongst the choices generals make after the war is already underway.

But aside from that, Vox and I are pretty much in agreement as regards the role of religion in the events leading up to the wars of history. My chief critique of Vox’s argument was that he failed to spend any time at all discussing the role(s) that religion did, could, or should play in times of national crisis leading up to possible war. I’m not saying that religion does have such a role or roles, I’m merely pointing out that Vox’s analysis failed to document some very important considerations, not to say the MOST important consideration, in determining what connection, if any, exists between religion and war.

If we do take this into account, though, we can begin to document how really impotent and useless religion is in matters of genuine significance. War is a pretty big deal, as far as the real world is concerned. It changes boundaries, destroys people and lands, changes customs and sometimes even languages. We would expect, if any world religions incorporated a deity Who genuinely cared about mankind (or about good and evil), that at least some religions ought to have an unmistakable or even supernatural influence on the course of events leading up to (or away from) a war.

Naturally, there are may roles that religion could play. For example, if there were a genuine deity to pray to, then national leaders would be able to pray for guidance. If divine wisdom were bestowed on them from above, advising them on whether or not their cause was just and their chance of victory secure, then this would indeed put religion in a highly influential role with respect to the circumstances leading up to (or away from) the war. Likewise if there were practical advice/wisdom to be gleaned from a study of the religion’s holy scriptures, either by the leaders or (in a democracy) by the voters.

Another role religion could play would be the very important role of uniting people into a common body, i.e. a united front with which to face the enemy. Religious faith could play a vital role in supplying manpower for the war effort, as people were led by their god to make personal sacrifices and commitments for the greater good of all. With a real god behind it, religion might influence wars by miraculous means, such as, oh, making the invading soldiers all go blind so that they couldn’t fight.

If religion did indeed have any substantial, real-world influence over the course of events, then (a) Vox would be wrong, but more importantly (b) it would matter which religion were the true religion. After all, if we’re going to fight wars over religion, we don’t want to fight for the wrong one, eh?

What Vox has discovered, though, is that in every real-world case, the true power lies, not in religion, but in purely secular, materialistic factors. Religion is a passive, empty symbol, which men invest with whatever meaning or interpretation suits the need of the moment. And, as Vox has shown, the need of the moment is dictated by secular factors, like politics, or economics, or sheer human cussedness. Casual observers might be fooled by the apparent role of religion in war, but to jump to that conclusion is to stop too soon and to fail to apprehend the purely secular factors that are driving and controlling the religious aspect. Religion is the passive puppet of greater, real-world forces.

Ironically, Vox concludes that Islam is the only religion with any significant influence over whether or not nations will go to war. I think it’s safe to say, however, that that’s more an emotional reaction against 9/11 than a serious historical analysis. In the 93% of wars he says were not caused by religion, he cites geopolitical, ethnic, economic and other secular factors as the real causes, yet if we look at the 7% of wars that are allegedly religious, we’ll find the same factors at work, with religion serving merely the same empty, symbolic role as the colors on the national flag.

It’s as foolish to insist that someone must be wrong all of the time as it is to insist that someone must be right all of the time. (I realize that in saying that, I’m rebutting the theme, if not the whole thesis, of TIA, but I digress.) Not everything Vox says is wrong, and in this case I think he’s a lot more correct than even he gives himself credit for.

The circumstances leading up to (away from?) international war are very momentous and vitally important circumstances. Vox is doing a great service both to believers and to unbelievers by documenting the fact that religion plays no role at all—”does not play a secondary contributory role in war. It does not play a tertiary contributory role in war,” as he says. Religion is utterly passive and irrelevant, a sock puppet that merely “speaks” whatever words it pleases men to put into its mouth.

And that goes for more than just war too. Thanks for the help, Vox.

PZ Myers has another go at those who claim that it’s wrong to criticize someone else’s belief in God. In so doing, he voices a frequently-expressed opinion that, in my view, does a bad job of (should I say it?) “framing” the debate.

I am saying precisely that belief in god is wrong because there is no empirical or theoretical support for it; there is a concatenation of myths leavened with post-hoc justifications for them, which is not the same thing.

There’s something unsatisfactory about saying that there is no evidence for God. After all, we learn new things all the time. Just because we say “there is no evidence for God” doesn’t mean that evidence might not exist somewhere. It just means we haven’t seen any (yet).

To me, that argument comes up short. Science is based on truth, and if there’s one thing we know about truth, it’s that truth is self-consistent. More than that, the self-consistency of truth is the way–the only way–we tell the difference between what’s correct and what’s false. To be consistent with the truth is to be true. To be inconsistent with the truth is to be false.

The problem with God, as conceived of by Christians, is not just that there’s no evidence for Him, it’s that He’s inconsistent with the evidence we do have. If there were an all-loving, all-knowing, all-wise and all-powerful God who wanted a personal relationship with each of us, badly enough to literally die for it, then the most fundamental and obvious consequence would be God showing up, on a regular basis, in the real world, to actually participate in that relationship. What we see in real life, believer or not, is that this does not happen. The things we see in the real world are blatantly inconsistent with the consequences which would result if the Gospel were telling the truth about God.

The godlessness that believers so often complain about is just that: “God-less-ness.” Hairlessness is the absence of hair, purposelessness is the absence of purpose, and godlessness is the absence of God. The Gospel says that God ought to be present, but the world is, as everyone admits, essentially godless. That’s not just an absence of evidence, that’s evidence which is inconsistent with the Gospel being true.

That’s a bogus argument, as we can illustrate by means of a parallel case. The Book of Mormon claims to tell the story of a small group of Jews who migrated to the Americas around 600BC and who, over the course of the next several centuries, grew into two great nations, the Nephites and the Lamanites, that warred with one another until the Nephites were eventually wiped out. We can test whether the Book of Mormon is a true and reliable account, therefore, by proposing a Jewish Migration Hypothesis as a factual prerequisite that needs to be true before the BoM can be true. The Jewish Migration Hypothesis doesn’t need to be Mormonism in order to evaluate the truthfulness of Mormon Scriptures. It just needs to state a testable hypothesis with implicit and specific consequences we can look for and compare with the consequences of a competing hypothesis.

Our competing hypothesis, the Hoax Hypothesis, states that the Book of Mormon is a purely fictional account dressed up to appear to be some kind of Scripture, without any historical justification. Thus, we have a fairly clear pair of hypotheses with distinctly different consequences. If the Jewish Migration Hypothesis is true, then we ought to find a rather large body of evidence consistent with a significant Jewish migration to the Americas around 600 BC with the subsequent development of two great Semitic nations that frequently warred with one another. We ought to find Jewish artifacts in the archeological evidence, and Semitic genes (not Asian genes) when we study the DNA of native American descendants of these alleged Lamanites. There ought to be evidence of Jewish language, culture, technology and worship in both the ancient and the surviving civilisations of North, South and Central America.

Of all the ethnic groups that have ever existed, the Jewish culture has proven to be the most successful at maintaining its distinctive cultural identity across different national environments and vast periods of time. It should be easy, therefore, to find abundant physical manifestations of Jewish culture in the archeology and ethnology of the peoples who were indigenous in the Americas at the time the first European settlers arrived. The pervasive absence of such evidence, by contrast, would be strongly consistent with the Hoax Hypothesis, and strongly inconsistent with the Jewish Migration Hypothesis.

In point of fact, this evidence of a significant Jewish presence in the ancient Americas is uniformly absent, both archeologically and genetically. Book of Mormon disclaimers notwithstanding, we can rule out the notion that the BoM represents a true and historically reliable account of God’s dealings with men, based on the inconsistency between the real-world evidence and the factual prerequisite stated in the Jewish Migration Hypothesis. The JMH does not need to be Mormonism, or to be the Book of Mormon, in order to demonstrate the fraudulent nature of the Mormon Scriptures. Nor is its significance diminished just because it omits Mormon excuses for why we ought to expect a Jewish Migration to leave only such evidence as we can actually find in archeology and genetics. As with the Gospel Hypothesis, the Jewish Migration Hypothesis examines the factual basis on which the (Mormon or Christian) Scriptures’ truth claims depend. If the fundamental factual claim is false, then the excuses and rationalizations built on top of that claim are also unjustified.

This fact causes no small consternation among apologists, as cl illustrates. He tries to discredit this argument by calling the Gospel Hypothesis a “straw man” argument. A straw man argument, however, is when the debater presents a distorted and/or diminished version of his opponent’s views, and claims that they are his opponents views. Before I could be guilty of offering a straw man argument, therefore, I would have to claim that the Gospel Hypothesis is Christianity. Cl, however, is the most vocal participant denying that I call the GH Christianity. By his own oft-repeated accusations, he documents that I have not and do not make the claim that the GH is Christianity. Thus, I cannot be guilty of a straw man, because I am not presenting the GH as being my opponent’s views. I merely present it as a hypothesis that can be tested against the facts.

And yet, paradoxically, cl is also the most vocal proponent of the notion that the GH undeniably is Christianity, repeatedly listing the points of similarity between the GH and Christian teachings, and asking how I can possibly deny it. Thus, once again, he contradicts himself and exonerates me of the charge of proposing a straw man. If, as he claims, the GH is indeed Christianity for all the reasons he enumerates, then it does not misrepresent Christian teachings, and is thus not a straw man. And yet, contradicting himself once again, he claims to know that the GH is not Christianity, thus exonerating me once more: his accusation against me is that I’m allegedly making a claim which he knows for a fact to be true. So what’s wrong with that?

What cl is trying to set up is a situation where, no matter what I say, I’m wrong. He asks me if the GH is Christianity in hopes that I will answer either yes or no. If I say yes, he claims I’m wrong because he can list X, Y, and Z that are part of Christianity but not part of the GH. If I say no, he claims I’m wrong because he can list A, B and C that are common to both the GH and Christianity. And if I decline to respond with a bare “yes” or “no,” he claims I’m wrong because I’m “deflecting” the question. Regardless of the facts, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of such trivial concerns as intellectual integrity, he is bound and determined to find some pretext for calling me wrong. He cannot refute my facts, so he needs must find some scapegoat in order to claim that he has confronted the enemy and proven them wrong.

This is a fairly typical example of cl’s “mental warfare” approach to apologetics. It’s all about creating personal conflicts and taking cheap shots at atheists and other unbelievers. It’s a war, not an honest inquiry; the goal is to harm others, not to reveal the truth. When given the opportunity to engage the issues in honest, good faith dialog, cl consistently declines. It’s a war, not a quest for facts, so why expose yourself to potentially harmful criticisms? He baits and goads and sneers in a relentless attempt to create an environment of conflict in which the participants turn aside from the work of discovery and critical thinking, and become consumed in the martial maneuvers of attack and defense. He has no interest in presenting us with reasons to believe as he does. He’s just here to do damage, like any other infiltrator.

Cl, sadly, has proven himself to be the sort of guest who comes into your living room and sneaks behind your couch to take a crap on the floor, just so he can tell all your neighbors how bad your house smells and what an unsanitary housekeeper you are. I have indulged his rudeness and guile long enough. He has yet to make an honest, good faith contribution to the discussion, other than to provide us with an interesting case study in the negative effects a Christian worldview has on a reasonably intellectual mind. That’s not enough to entitle him to retain a place in an honest discussion. He can still comment, but I’m going to take a zero-tolerance approach to his unique brand of Christian crap, and I’d encourage my other readers not to give him the encouragement of rising to take his bait. It’s time for the rest of us to move on.

So why would a believer speak of his “intense distaste” for the Gospel Hypothesis? Is it Christianity? Is it not Christianity? What is it that makes the Gospel Hypothesis so loathesome and phobia-inducing for believers?

The Gospel Hypothesis, quite simply, describes the factual prerequisites that must necessarily be true in order for the Bible to be anything more than a man-made myth. The functional definition of rationalization is that it convinces us our beliefs are consistent with the evidence even though, in reality, they are not consistent with the truth. It’s entirely possible for the Bible to be convincing whether or not there exists the type of God described by the Gospel Hypothesis. But convincing or not, if that God does not exist, then Christianity is not true. And the Gospel Hypothesis confronts the believer with a testable hypothesis that can be used to objectively assess the evidence, without the rationalizations, and to expose the inconsistencies that make the Bible incompatible with real-world truth.

Loathesome indeed.

The Unicorn Hypothesis might seem at first to be absurd, but let’s tweak it slightly. Despite their magical nature, unicorns are relatively few in number, and would likely lose the battle in the event of any direct, focused efforts by the more numerous humans to throw off their dominance. Thus, the Unicorn Hypothesis proposes that magical unicorns are not only running the governments of the world, but that they are deliberately creating tensions and crises and other distractions in order to keep human attention diverted from the subject of unicorns. And naturally, they are also using their magical powers to “fix” the visible, verifiable evidence to be perfectly consistent with the consequences that would result from the non-existence of unicorns.

As a further refinement, let’s also modify the Autonomous Hypothesis to declare that there is no such thing as a magical unicorn, and therefore human governments are under human control, and humans are responsible for the state of affairs in the world (at least, as much as anyone is responsible).

What we’ve achieved, in other words, is a pair of hypotheses which both produce exactly the same consequences. The lack of evidence for magical unicorns is predicted in the Autonomous Hypothesis by, well, the lack of existence of unicorns, while the Unicorn Hypothesis predicts an equal lack of evidence due to the unicorns’ magical powers and desire to remain undetected by their human thralls.

Is there anyone who would say that we are justified in concluding (as a provisional conclusion) that the major world governments are all secretly under the control of magical unicorns who are manipulating world events in order to further their own, selfish ends? We have contrived a situation that precisely matches the conditions which some say are sufficient to justify either conclusion as an equally justified belief, but does that make the idea of unicorn overlords any less silly?

I think we’d pretty much all agree that there’s no reasonable basis for concluding, even provisionally, that we’re being secretly controlled by a one-horned oligarchy. But how do we know this? If we’ve managed to contrive a hypothesis that (along with the Autonomous Hypothesis) predicts exactly the same consequences as we see in the real world, we can’t claim that the evidence rules out the possibility of magical unicorns. So how do we know that the whole idea (and a whole host of similar fanciful conspiracy theories) can best be described as nonsense?

A big part of the answer is Occam’s Razor, but I’m going to take it a step further. The basic idea of the Razor is that, when the evidence supports two explanations equally, the correct explanation is most likely to be the one that avoids needless multiplication of agencies. Or you might hear slightly different variations of that idea, e.g. that the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct.

Occam’s Razor is really just a practical application of the principle that truth is consistent with itself. When we say “avoid needlessly multiplying agencies,” what we’re observing is that the more complex factors we propose in our explanation, the more opportunities we’re creating for inconsistencies and self-contradictions. “Tell the truth,” says the pundit, “it’s easier.” The more we throw in complications and speculations and rationalizations, the more likely we are to trip ourselves up. The self-consistency of the truth creates an economy that favors efficiency and parsimony: if we increase the complexity of the causes, the effects are going to similarly increase in complexity, in order to maintain consistency. Therefore the explanation that covers the existing effects with the fewest causes is always the most likely to be the most correct.

Thus, in any scenario where we manage, by hook or by crook, to contrive a hypothesis that exceeds the minimum required number of agencies, while simultaneously asserting that the evidence fits all alternatives equally, the conclusion we are justified in reaching, the conclusion which is most consistent with all of the available evidence (including Occam’s Razor) is the conclusion that best avoids multiplying agencies needlessly.

For our two hypotheses above, that rules out the Unicorn Hypothesis and justifies the Autonomous Hypothesis, and for our broader discussion that rules out the Gospel Hypothesis (and any variation contrived to produce consequences equal to the Myth Hypothesis) and justifies the Myth Hypothesis. The Myth Hypothesis is the only hypothesis that both produces consequences uniformly consistent with real-world evidence and also succeeds in predicting real-world conditions without introducing needless additional agencies with no observable role or impact.

Under the circumstances, it would be as reasonable to believe in unicorn overlords as to believe in the existence of an all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful Creator Who loved us enough to become one of us, dwell among us, and die for us so that He and we might enjoy a genuine, eternal, personal relationship together—even if we could rationalize our way into thinking that such a deity would produce the exact same consequences as would result from the Myth Hypothesis being true.

Well, yes and no.

It’s true that we can try modifying the Gospel Hypothesis, or even replacing it completely with a new hypothesis created from scratch. But here’s the interesting thing: we’ve already discovered that the original Gospel Hypothesis, as I originally gave it, is inconsistent with the facts. That means that any new, true hypothesis must also be inconsistent with the Gospel Hypothesis, because truth is consistent with itself.

That may be too obvious to be visible, so let’s look at that again. The Gospel Hypothesis is inconsistent with the real world facts because it predicts consequences that don’t match real-world conditions. Any true hypothesis must predict consequences that do match the real-world conditions, which means they’re going to fail to match the predictions of the Gospel Hypothesis. So any new hypothesis, in order to prove more consistent with the facts than the Gospel Hypothesis, is going to need to contradict the Gospel Hypothesis in some way. The Gospel Hypothesis does not fit the facts, so to fit the facts, we’re going to have to find a hypothesis that’s inconsistent with the Gospel Hypothesis.

That’s going to be especially tough for the Christian apologist to pull off. But why bother? We already have a hypothesis that fits the facts perfectly. Not only does the Myth Hypothesis predict with 100% accuracy the conditions we’re going to find in the real world, it even explains why and how the Gospel Hypothesis is going to fail to fit the facts. What is the point in looking any farther?

This is a replay of the situation with the battle between the geocentrists and the heliocentrists. The heliocentrists had a hypothesis that predicted the movements of the planets with astonishing accuracy: the earth was moving just like the other planets were, in a gravitationally-dictated orbit around the sun. The geocentrists tried to maintain a competing theory: that all celestial bodies moved in mathematically perfect circles, as befits the perfect work of a perfect creator.

To try and eliminate the differences between geocentrism and heliocentrism, the geocentrists introduced the notion of “epicycles”—everything that moved through the skies was moving in a perfect circle, but the circles themselves were also being moved in circles, which in turn were being moved in circles, and so on. By building elaborate schemes of nested circles, and complicated proportions of radii, they hoped to approximate the same predictions as the heliocentrists did with their relatively simpler calculations of gravitational interactions.

What the geocentrists were doing, in short, was setting up a Loser’s Compromise: trying to eliminate the difference in the predictions of each hypothesis so that they could claim that their view could be true, and we could never know. They were pursuing the unscientific goal of irresolvable agnosticism in order to avoid having to admit that their traditional beliefs were scientifically incorrect.

But why go to all that work? Heliocentrism produces the same answers a lot more easily and reliably, without raising unanswerable questions like how you account for the mechanics it takes to cause abstract mathematical concepts like circles take up physical orbits in a physical universe so as to drive the physical motion of entire planets. Today, geocentrism is a by-word for refusing to bow to the facts.

It may indeed be possible to follow the geocentrists’ example, by creating epicyclical variations on the Gospel Hypothesis in an endless and fruitless attempt to find one that predicts real-world conditions as elegantly and accurately as the Myth Hypothesis does. But why bother? The best we could achieve by such an approach is a Loser’s Compromise. Agnosticism is not knowledge; it does not give us grounds for claiming that we are justified in concluding things we have no justification to conclude.

So that’s why I’m not particularly concerned by objections that claim my Gospel Hypothesis is flawed. Truth is consistent with itself, and even if my Gospel Hypothesis were different from what the Bible says, we can still learn a lot about real-world facts by measuring how consistent the Hypothesis is with the evidence.

And by the way, there’s no such thing as a “cherry-picked” hypothesis. “Cherry-picking” is an error that occurs during the evidence-gathering phase, after your hypothesis has been defined. It biases your conclusions by seeking out only evidence that supports your preferred conclusion and suppressing the evidence that is inconsistent with it. In our discussion of the evidence, we have not suppressed any evidence, and have even encouraged people to submit any evidence (that is, any verifiable evidence) that would be contrary to our hypotheses. No one has.

Meanwhile, back in the hypothesis stage, it is perfectly legitimate and even commendable to take a broader hypothesis and zero in on specific details for closer investigation. Truth is consistent with itself, so a valid hypothesis will hold up whether you step back and look at the big picture or zoom in and focus on the individual details. My Gospel Hypothesis is closer to the big-picture end of the scale, and that’s going to pose problems for anyone looking for an epicyclical rebuttal to the evidence I’ve presented. You can agree that the Gospel Hypothesis is not consistent with the facts, and you can offer alternative hypotheses that are inconsistent with the Gospel Hypothesis, but you can’t do either without admitting that there are serious flaws in traditional Christian dogma.

And you can’t come up with a hypothesis that fits the facts better than the Myth Hypothesis. The Myth Hypothesis is already 100% accurate, so the best rebuttal you can hope for is a Loser’s Compromise. And that, too, is just what the Myth Hypothesis predicts.

A hypothesis is actually quite simple: it’s a proposition that has testable consequences. In other words, to construct a valid hypothesis, all we need to do is make a declarative statement that is specific enough and self-consistent enough that an honest and objective inquirer can work out what observable consequences ought reasonably to result if the statement is true. For example, if we say “beer is an intoxicating beverage,” that statement is a valid hypothesis. Just by analyzing the sentence, we can describe the consequences we ought to see if the statement is true: we should see people get intoxicated when they drink beer, and we should measure increased levels of blood alcohol after drinking.

Notice that there is no requirement that a hypothesis describe a true condition. We can just as well state a hypothesis like “milk is an intoxicating beverage.” Once again, an analysis of the sentence is sufficient to determine what specific, observable consequences ought to result if the hypothesis is true: we should see people getting drunk on milk, and should be able to measure increased levels of blood alcohol in milk drinkers shortly after they’ve imbibed.

Not all statements make valid hypotheses, however. “Loki works in mysterious ways” is a statement that really covers just about any possible outcome. We can’t really look at, say, today’s weather report and tell whether it supports or refutes the statement that Loki works in mysterious ways. Likewise, inherently self-contradictory statements are untestable. If we say “Childless unmarried spouses have healthier children,” we’re not going to be able to describe an observable set of consequences against which we could compare the evidence.

The whole point of the hypothesis, remember, is to serve as a disciplined and objective methodology for finding the answers to factual questions. We can have an invalid hypothesis—i.e. a statement from which no meaningful and verifiable consequences can be adduced—but we cannot have an inaccurate hypothesis, because accuracy is a quality of answers and conclusions, and the hypothesis is merely a formal way of stating what the question is.

Now, once we’ve formulated our hypothesis, we can analyze it and describe the consequences that would naturally result if the hypothesis were true. This in turn allows us to compare our predicted consequences to the consequences we observe in the real world. At that point, and not before that point, we can draw conclusions as to whether or not the hypothesis describes a conclusion that is consistent with the real world truth. (For added accuracy, we can and should compare multiple hypothesis that have distinctively different consequences, in order to determine which hypothesis produces consequences that are the best fit for the objective evidence.)

My Gospel Hypothesis states, as a testable proposition, the idea that there exists an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving Creator Who wants a genuine, personal, eternal relationship with each of us, to the point that He is willing and able to become one of us, dwell among us for a time, and then die for us so that we can be together forever. This is a valid hypothesis: it does not contradict itself, and it allows us to determine, just from examining the terms of the hypothesis, what consequences would result from this hypothesis being true.

We’ve discussed at some length why the conditions specified in the Gospel Hypothesis lead naturally to the consequences I’ve described, and we’ve all agreed (even the Christians!) that real-world conditions do not match the consequences I’ve outlined. Having stated our hypothesis, worked out its observable consequences, and measured them against real-world conditions, we are now entitled to conclude that the Gospel Hypothesis does not describe a situation that is consistent with the truth.

The Christian objection at this point is revealing. The complaint is that my hypothesis is “inaccurate,” that it is “incorrect” and even “bunk.” If this were simply an admission of the conclusion that the Gospel Hypothesis describes a God Who does not actually exist, that would be a reasonable observation. But that’s not at all what this particular objection is driving at.

I have stated clearly and unequivocally, and repeated numerous times in response to allegations to the contrary, that the Gospel Hypothesis is an inquiry into real world conditions. It is specifically not, in any sense, an inquiry into what the Bible does or does not mean to say. Yet the objection to this hypothesis is that it is supposedly “incorrect” because it does not accurately present the teaching of the Bible. The teachings of the Bible aren’t even on topic for this particular question, yet the objection is raised that we must reject the hypothesis a priori, regardless of its consequences and regardless of the evidence, solely because the Bible allegedly does not teach it.

Obviously, there’s absolutely no reason why we need to care what the Bible says when the Bible is not the subject of our inquiry. There’s certainly no rule that says we can’t ask a scientific question unless we phrase the question in strictly Bible-approved terms. Such a constraint would introduce intolerable bias into our investigation, and would invalidate any conclusions we might think we were entitled to draw. This might be a desirable outcome if we knew that the facts were opposed to our beliefs, and wished to contrive a rationalization for our preconceived conclusions. Such a frankly and arbitrarily prejudicial demand, however, has no place in honest inquiry.

It’s easy to see why this objection is being raised, of course. Christians can neither deny that the evidence is inconsistent with the Gospel Hypothesis being true, nor admit that the hypothesis is false. For all their objections and protests that the Gospel Hypothesis is not what the Bible teaches, they do indeed believe in the idea of the loving, self-sacrificial Father, and don’t want to admit that real-world facts are inconsistent with the conclusion that He exists. Christians therefore have a strongly compelling motivation to find some excuse to shut down the whole inquiry, and to reject the fact-finding without ever seriously looking at the facts.

By trying to force the discussion away from a consideration of the facts and into a traditionally endless debate over what the Bible means, Christians are hoping to insulate themselves from the impact of the truth. It would be a devilishly effective strategy, were we to fall for it, because no matter what arguments or evidence we used to support our interpretation of the Bible, the Christian can always reply, “Well, that’s not how I interpret the Bible,” and walk away feeling unscathed. He doesn’t even need to explain what he thinks the correct interpretation is, he just needs to declare what it isn’t, and thus all contrary evidence is irrelevant by fiat.

Read back through the comments and see how many times Christians keep insisting that we are only allowed to talk about what the Bible does and does not say, and how many times I try to explain that we’re not investigating what the Bible says right now, and how many times Christians acknowledge that I am indeed not discussing what the Bible says and yet still insist that the discussion cannot be valid unless we drop the whole topic and talk instead about what the Bible does or does not mean to say.

As I said yesterday, it’s a transparently bogus objection. Christians don’t want to face the facts directly, and they try desperately to divert us into a subjective and futile BS session over “what the Bible means to me.” The latter discussion, being subjective, they cannot lose. The former, they cannot win. And they know it.

How can you know that I am speaking the truth, and what will be the sign of my correctness? Behold, the Christians themselves will give you a sign: they will not be able to admit that we can formulate and test a Gospel Hypothesis without reference to the Bible, and will continue to insist that our study is invalid because it compares the Gospel Hypothesis directly to the real-world facts. What is more, they will argue that our Gospel Hypothesis is somehow biased, on the grounds that it allows us to reach a fact-based conclusion that is incompatible with Christian beliefs.

When that happens, I will point out that it is actually very difficult to construct a biased hypothesis, which is why it is taking the Christians so long to come up with an alternative hypothesis that sounds impartial while still guaranteeing a predetermined Christian conclusion. (It’s doubly difficult when you realize that this hypothesis must also make God’s absence sound perfectly reasonable and explainable without admitting that there’s any undeniable absence to explain!)

Like Mark Twain used to say, tell the truth—it’s easier. My Gospel Hypothesis was very easy to come up with because I was under no obligation to try and bias it in favor of one conclusion or the other. And it’s clearly an honest and unbiased presentation of the concept of a loving, almighty Father willing and able to die for us, as one of us, so that we could enjoy a genuine, personal, eternal relationship with Him. It’s about as simple and direct a statement of the concept as you could have; you can’t rephrase it in a way that would make it less biased, because there’s no bias in it that you could remove.

So watch and see. You’d think it would be foolish of me to make such a prediction when my opponents could simply contrive not to fulfill it. But they can’t. Their actions and their rhetorical defenses are constrained by the consequences of the Myth Hypothesis. They simply have no alternative but to fulfill my prophecy. Watch and see.

One of the things that came out during the discussion with Jayman and cl is that they immediately focused on what I consider to be a trivial irrelevancy: the notion that we cannot know, in the sense of having first-hand personal experience, that every single allegedly divine manifestation is necessarily a false perception. We spent quite a bit of time arguing over the significance of the consistency of the evidence we can observe, but no amount of evidence or logic could sway them from their faith that God could be hiding somewhere just outside the range of our vision.

This is an irrelevant distraction, because a God Who hides just outside the limits of our perception still leaves us subject to the Inescapable Consequence: in God’s absence, our only option is to put our faith in the unsupported and contradictory claims of men—a practice that boils down to mere gullibility, not evidence-based faith. The objections of Jayman and cl are a clear-cut case of the difference between proving something beyond a reasonable doubt, and proving it beyond all conceivable doubts. So long as they can conceive of a doubt about my conclusions, they will reject them in favor of their own.

With that in mind, here is Version 2.0:

It is an Undeniable Fact that we do not see God (i.e. the Christian God) showing up in real life, outside human fantasies, intuitions, superstitions, hearsay, and other subjective psychosocial functions that constitute a worldview (as opposed to the real world). Because of this Undeniable Fact, we cannot escape the Inescapable Consequence: so-called faith in God can never be more than gullible trust in the words of men.

This version is an improvement over the earlier version, because it focuses the attention on the key point of the real-world fact. Whether or not we can imagine the hypothetical possibility of God popping in for tangible manifestations on the dark side of the moon, totally unobserved by man, it is nevertheless true that we do not see Him showing up in real life, and that this absence from our lives has profound and inescapable implications for our thoughts and beliefs about Him. We do not have what we honestly need in order to experience a genuine relationship with Him.

This, incidentally, is precisely the outcome that would logically result from the Myth Hypothesis being true. It is not only plausible, but inevitable, that God’s non-existence would result in His absence from our observations of the real world. At the same time, it is exactly the opposite of the outcome we would expect if the Gospel Hypothesis were true, since we would have to assume that real world conditions are the result of a deliberate decision by God not to allow us to have any legitimate, non-gullible, and objectively reasonable basis for believing He even exists. That’s a contradiction of the stipulation that God wants each of us to have a genuine, personal, eternal relationship with Him, and therefore the available evidence is not consistent with the Gospel Hypothesis.

Tomorrow I want to look (again) at the Gospel Hypothesis and to address the transparently bogus objection that is being raised in opposition to it. Stay tuned.

Obviously, there’s two ways we can do this: we can interpret the Bible in the light of the real-world evidence, assuming that the real-world evidence is necessarily correct, or we can interpret the evidence in the light of the Bible, assuming that the Bible is necessarily correct. The latter is sometimes called “interpreting the Bible on its own terms,” and I think it can be fairly said that this is a biased approach. The Bible makes no secret of the fact that it is written to promote belief, and to prejudice people against unbelievers (“The fool says in his heart…”). Putting the Bible ahead of the evidence means guaranteeing that you will come to some sort of Christian conclusion.

But what if we put the real-world evidence first? Is that not equally biased? Yes it is. The same principle applies equally to both. If we put the Bible first, then we are going to be biased in favor of Biblical conclusions, and if we put real-world evidence first, we’re going to be biased in favor of real-world conclusions. It’s up to us, then, to pick which bias we want to have.

To interpret the Bible in the light of the evidence, we need first of all to understand what the evidence is telling us. This is what we have been doing up to now. The real-world evidence is most consistent with the Myth Hypothesis, because the Myth Hypothesis successfully predicts the actual nature of the real-world evidence with the fewest appeals to alternative interpretations and special pleadings. In fact, it does not need to appeal to any of those special-circumstances adjustments: the consequences we find in real life are already consistent with those that would necessarily result from God’s non-existence (the Christian God’s non-existence, anyway). The Gospel Hypothesis can be made to conform to the Myth Hypothesis via alternative interpretations and special pleadings, but it’s the Myth Hypothesis that sets the standard that the Gospel Hypothesis has to live up to.

If we are going to understand the Bible in the light of the real-world evidence, therefore, the most reasonable course of action is to understand it in the light of the Myth Hypothesis. This is especially true considering that the characteristics of the Bible itself are precisely those that would necessarily result from it being written in the absence of a genuine Christian deity, as we saw earlier. It is an example of myth-building, a reflection of people’s best hopes, values, and wishes, and also of their biases, fears, and flaws. It is a commentary, not on God’s nature, but on Man’s.

Speaking as a former student of the Bible, I can say from personal experience that the Bible makes a whole lot more sense and possesses far fewer perplexities and mysteries when seen from this perspective. And indeed, most of the problems people face in understanding the Bible in Christian circles stem from trying to force everything to fit into an anachronistic, falsely homogenized theology. The average Christian, doing their daily Bible study or personal devotional, cannot help but take the words out of their historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts, despite footnotes and study aids, and repurpose them to suit a modern Christian preconception of what the Bible ought to be telling them. One need look no farther than the pro-life movement to see this dynamic in action.

Can we take the other approach? Can we make the Bible our trusted guide into “all truth,” and use the Bible as our basis for interpreting the real-world evidence? Yes and no. We can try to do that, and in so doing can give ourselves access to the accumulated, multi-millennial experience of millions of believers reconciling their faith with God’s real-world absence. But the Bible is ultimately ink on paper: it does not speak, it cannot think, it does not react to any external stimulus. What we actually end up using as our trusted guide is our own interpretation of what we think the Bible is trying to say. The Bible can give us ideas for how to rationalize our beliefs with God’s absence, but we pick, choose, and adapt those ideas according to our own personal interpretations and biases.

That’s a doubly-risky approach, because the Bible itself is a document that merely records how other men have interpreted their own beliefs and experiences. Instead of understanding the document based on the real-world evidence, then, we are adapting our interpretation of the evidence to conform to an interpretation of someone else’s interpretation, adjusted to fit our own world view. Inevitably, we end up believing whatever is right in our own eyes, because we first adopt the interpretation of Scripture that seems right in our own eyes, and then we use that interpretation to come up with a derivative interpretation of the evidence that seems right in our own eyes.

Of course, the apologist can accuse skeptics of doing the same thing, because skeptics base their interpretation of the Bible on an interpretation of the evidence. And that’s true to a certain point. The difference is that we have reliable, scientific tools for assessing which evidence-based interpretations are most consistent with the evidence. Because our interpretations must be evidence-based, we can work out what consequences would result if our interpretation were correct, and then compare those predicted consequences to the actual evidence, and see which interpretation produces consequences that are most consistent with the facts.

No such mechanism exists for theology-based interpretations of the Bible. The believer who is intellectual and/or academically inclined can appeal to grammatico-historical arguments over parsings and cultural definitions and historical allusions, and can build an interpretation that satisfies an academic expectation of “what seems right.” But the charismatic believer can just as easily claim that God has chosen the foolish things in order to shame the wise, and that the true meaning of Scripture is accessible only to those whose Spirit-filled insights allow them to unlock meanings that mere linguistics can never decipher. And given the ambiguities we encounter even when speaking our own language in our own cultural context, who could say that the charismatic is necessarily wrong?

There’s a reason why excessive study of Scripture has a marked tendency to lead the honest and intelligent believer into greater and greater agnosticism. When we reject an evidence-based interpretation of the Bible in favor of a Bible-based interpretation of the evidence, we ultimately deliver ourselves to our own ignorance as a source of knowledge. In God’s absence, we can never really be sure we know what the Bible means, and if we’re putting the Bible ahead of the evidence, if we have to know what the Bible means before we decide what the evidence means, then we really have no basis at all for what we believe. Our faith becomes something we believe for no better reason, and with no more justification, than the fact that we want to believe it.

I originally started this series because a number of commenters objected to my claim that it is an “Undeniable Fact” that God does not show up in real life. I could not possibly make such a claim with any intellectual honesty, some said, because such a claim would require omniscience on my part. My reply was that I was not basing my claim on a brute force approach, i.e. by personally investigating each and every claim that might constitute a genuine appearance of God. Instead, I am basing it on a more scientific approach, based on the principle that the truth is consistent with itself.

I think by this point, I am legitimately entitled to claim that I have met my burden of proof, and have established the intellectual honesty of claiming, as undeniable fact, the observation that God does not show up in real life. If He did, we would be having a very different conversation right now with respect to the consequences of the Myth Hypothesis versus the Gospel Hypothesis. Christian apologists are arguing, not just that God’s absence from real life is possible, but that we ought to expect the Gospel Hypothesis to result in an absence that is just as pervasive and undeniable as the one that would result from the Myth Hypothesis being true. Needless to say, this apologetic would be entirely counterproductive (for Christianity) if it were not true that God is as absent as any mythical being would have to be.

This discussion has also been productive because it has shown fairly clearly that Christians do indeed know that God does not show up in real life. When I first proposed that the Gospel Hypothesis implies that God would show up to participate in the relationship He had worked so hard to make possible, the Christian reaction was immediate and unmistakable. How could I know that? What made me so sure that the Gospel Hypothesis wouldn’t produce the same consequences as the Myth Hypothesis? I was just creating ad hoc “predictions” designed to make Christianity look bad! And so on and so on.

We all know, believer or unbeliever, that the Myth Hypothesis is the best predictor for the evidence that we will actually find in the real world. The immediate and primary reaction of Christians to this fact is to challenge the idea that the Gospel Hypothesis ought to produce different consequences. But the predictions of the Myth Hypothesis are only an advantage in a world where God does not show up outside the myths, beliefs, and superstitions of men, so by recognizing the need to harmonize the Gospel with the Myth Hypothesis, Christians show that they do indeed understand what kind of godless world we live in (at least as far as the Trinity is concerned).

It’s rather a dilemma for the apologist, though, because if we admit the Undeniable Fact that God does not show up in real life, then we’re faced with the Inescapable Consequence—our “faith” cannot be based on anything more than the fantasies, intuitions, superstitions and hearsay of men, and thus can never claim to rise above the level of mere gullibility. But if the apologist agrees that God should, and theoretically could be showing up in real life, as predicted by the Gospel Hypothesis, then he’s faced with the unmistakable consistency between real life and the Myth Hypothesis, and the equally unmistakable INconsistency between real life and the Gospel Hypothesis.

And, once again, this outcome is precisely the way we would expect things to turn out as a consequence of the Myth Hypothesis being true. God’s non-existence will force the real world to reflect His absence, and therefore Christian apologists will be stuck wrestling with the dilemma of either admitting that God should be showing up if the Gospel Hypothesis were true, or admitting the Undeniable Fact that He doesn’t show up. Either way, we’re left with a Christian God Who appears and speaks and acts only in the feelings and imaginations of men, as predicted by the Myth Hypothesis. If that doesn’t clue us in on the truth, then we’re just not sincerely seeking it.

The Gospel Hypothesis, as I have stated before, is simply the proposition that there exists an all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful Creator Who loves us so much that He is willing and able to become one of us, dwell among us, and die for us in order that He and we might enjoy a personal and eternal relationship together.

That’s it. Not too hard to grasp conceptually, is it? No particular reason why anyone, least of all a Christian, ought to have a hard time understanding what it says, right? Well, perhaps that depends.

What’s interesting about the Gospel Hypothesis is that it is clear, simple, and predictable in its consequences. We know that, if this God wants a relationship with us badly enough to take the trouble to become human and die for us, just so that the eternal relationship can begin, He’s not going to then fail to show up Himself to participate in this relationship once He’s made it possible. We also know that He’s not going to fail to show up due to circumstances beyond His control, since His limitless wisdom, knowledge, and power effectively rule out the whole “beyond His control” part.

It is thus fairly easy to see why showing up in real life is the natural and logical consequence we would expect as the result of this hypothesis being true (or at least it’s what we would expect if we weren’t biased beforehand by the deeply-rooted preconception that God’s absence is normal and unremarkable). This means that the Gospel Hypothesis stands in clear distinction from the Myth Hypothesis in terms of what the supporting evidence would necessarily look like.

But I want to go back a little bit and review for a moment that troublesome bias that keeps us from seeing things that would otherwise be plain and obvious. To do that, I’d like to borrow a story from C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series, in the volume entitled The Silver Chair.

The story begins with a little girl in a forest, all by herself, utterly lost. She is not in any immediate danger, as the weather is fine, and she’s not yet hungry at all. But she is thirsty. In fact, she’s very thirsty. Once the word “thirsty” enters her head, she becomes positively anxious, and her thirst intensifies all the more because she sees no immediate way of satisfying it. But then she hears the sound of a babbling brook, and she runs towards it, panting.

When she bursts out of the bushes at the water’s edge, though, she comes to a sudden stop. There, crouched on the riverbank between her and the water is a large—no, a HUGE lion. As the girl stands frozen in terror, the lion speaks to her and invites her to have a drink if she is thirsty. They have a short conversation, in which the girl learns that the lion does indeed eat people, and feels neither happy nor sad about it. He pointedly does not promise that she can make it to the water without being eaten.

Desperately thirsty by now, half-maddened by the nearness of the clear, sparkling water, believing that she will die if she does not drink, the girl works up her courage, walks past the lion, and squats down on the river bank (with her back to the lion!) She does not dip her hand in the water, nor does she bend down to lap directly from the stream. In fact, she does not drink at all, she merely pulls a book out of her pocket and begins idly reading a corny old school story.

Does anything about that story strike you as oddly inconsistent? Do you suspect that the girl must not really have been thirsty after all? Why would she put her very life in jeopardy to get close enough that drinking was possible, and then ignore the water once she got there?

The obvious inconsistencies in this story make it immediately unrealistic, and I don’t just mean the talking lion. To want something badly enough to put your life in danger, and then to fail to follow through on achieving your desire when it is within your reach, is inconsistent. It conflicts with the stated intensity of the desire, the sincerity of what you allegedly wanted.

What’s true for little girls is even more true for Almighty God, especially when the relationship He desires not only fulfills the whole point of His sacrifice, but also blesses us and saves us from being lost, from falling into heresies that would separate us from Him and His blessings. If it is true that He wants an eternal relationship with us, and is willing and able to show up to participate in that relationship, then the consequence we would expect (if all this were true) is that He would indeed show up.

There is no way to make the Gospel Hypothesis work out to a contradictory set of consequences without introducing some additional element that implicitly or explicitly contradicts the basic elements of the Gospel Hypothesis as given. We cannot suppose that God suffers from some inherent weakness, or character flaw, or peculiar fastidiousness that makes Him loathe to associate with us, because that would imply a contradiction of the original premise that He is all-loving, all-knowing, all-wise and all-powerful.

Any external factor, being God’s creation, is even less likely to thwart His desire for a relationship with us. There is no turn of circumstance that could frustrate a God Whose ultimate design and guiding hand leads all events to work according to His own will. God’s ability to obtain what He wants cannot be questioned without, once again, introducing contradictory elements into the Gospel Hypothesis. It is purely and simply a question of determining what it is that God wants—and according to the Gospel Hypothesis, what He wants is that eternal relationship with us, which He was willing and able to die for.

We can’t even introduce the idea that free will, or some other fragile human characteristic, prevents God from showing up, because that introduces an inconsistency with the idea that He is willing and able to become one of us and dwell among us and die for us so that we could be together forever. To be consistent with the part that says He is able to dwell among us, it has to be possible for Him to show up without damaging or violating whatever it might be that was supposed to suffer from God’s presence.

Nor can we inject the idea that somehow, having shown up to dwell among us, God must immediately have changed His attitude somehow, losing His desire to actually carry on with the relationship once He initiated it (no matter how familiar that experience might be to some of us). Such a cruel reversal would be inconsistent with the Gospel Hypothesis, which, as originally given, stipulates that He wants an eternal relationship with us, and not just the spiritual equivalent of a one night stand.

Imagine a Heaven full of atheists and agnostics—a whole crowd of former believers who arrived full of hope and glory only to find that God, for some reason, never showed up even in Heaven. That would be unexpected, right? A contradiction of the Christian hope of dwelling eternally with their Savior? If that’s what God is supposed to desire, then the consequence that would most contradict that desire would be for God to fail to show up, even in Heaven, to participate in the fruits of His own labor and suffering.

It should be no less shocking to find God’s will failing to be carried out by God Himself here on this earth, after He had done everything needed to clear away every obstacle that was keeping Him separated from His beloved children. Our lack of shock is due solely to the fact that we grow up under a universal and relentless experience of God’s absence, which we accept naïvely and unquestioningly, as a normal part of the way things ought to be. But if we separate ourselves from our biases and preconceived ideas, and look squarely and rationally at what consequences would necessarily follow from the Gospel Hypothesis, we can see why this approach has the best hope of revealing the unbiased, objective truth about God.

If the Myth Hypothesis is true, if the Christian God does not exist and the Christian Gospel is merely the product of centuries of myth-building by well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) mortals, then the inescapable consequence of God’s non-existence is that His absence from real life is going to be universal. Every moment of every day of every human life is going to be lived in the absence of God, no exceptions.

Such absolute consistency of experience carries with it a unique peril for the honest inquirer, because we are not born omniscient. We have no innate knowledge of how the world is supposed to be, we merely discover how the world is, and this discovery determines what we will consider “normal.”

Thus, the peril for the honest inquirer is that learning from experience will cause us to become biased in favor of the conclusion that it’s perfectly normal and natural for God to be absent. Who needs to think about whether or not God should show up in the real world when our whole life, and everyone else’s, clearly demonstrates that God’s absence is the default condition? We do not question it because we do not perceive it. It has always been there, since before our individual brains were mature enough to reason, and therefore it becomes part of our broad, unthinking premise of how the world is.

This produces a unique paradox: the Christian who believes in God will also believe that it is perfectly normal and natural for God to fail to show up in real life. No thinking or reasoning is involved in this assumption, because we don’t acquire it by logic, we acquire it by universal and consistent experience. This assumption is so pervasive and fundamental that Christians have difficulty even discussing the possibility of God showing up without perceiving the idea as absurd. JP Holding can’t discuss the idea without re-casting it as a whiny demand that God come wipe every runny nose; cl presents it as demanding that God show up to drink beer with us. One fellow I was discussing this with even went so far as to suggest that I wanted Jesus to show up in his bedroom to watch him have sex with his wife!

Yet there is nothing remotely absurd about the idea of showing up, in person, to spend time with someone you love when given the opportunity to do so. Christians find it absurd merely because it is so inconsistent with universal human experience. The Christian faith is built on the paradoxical juxtaposition of faith-based belief in God’s existence, and experience-based belief that His absence is normal and therefore unsurprising.

As we discussed before, this falls squarely in the category of functional rationalization, because it has the effect of depriving us of the ability to tell whether God is real or not, by making the consequences of the Gospel Hypothesis indistinguishable from the consequences of the Myth Hypothesis. The Myth Hypothesis predicts that God’s absence will be universal, and having learned from universal human experience that it is indeed normal for God to be absent, we innately assume that this is the natural state of affairs. For Christians, this means that we should not expect God to show up, and thus that we should not expect the Gospel Hypothesis to have consequences that are any different from those of the Myth Hypothesis.

We are thus innately and inherently biased against the possibility of using reason to discover the truth about God. Unless and until we can break through this bias, and can consider, from a rational perspective, whether current conditions are indeed those which would flow from the Gospel Hypothesis, our experience will blind us to the significance of the facts. We will take for granted the very things that should be shouting out to us, the glaring inconsistencies we cannot see because our eyes are so accustomed to the glare.

This is why I have begun by making a separation between the Bible and the Gospel Hypothesis. The Bible was written long after God’s failure to show up in real life was a dominant factor in human experience. Oh, superstition was still there, as was credulity, and a tendency among some to exploit the superstitious credulity of others in order to obtain some social, political and/or financial gain. But the basic, universal observation of God’s absence was there, and has formed an important part of the mythology since then.

Before we consider the Bible, therefore, we need first to consider the Gospel Hypothesis, so that we can know whether the Bible’s most fundamental assumptions are true. Is there indeed a logical reason to expect God’s alleged love for mankind to result in His universal absence from objective, real-life experience? If not, then it would be very ill-advised to approach the Bible on its own terms, because it is going to be biased by the expectation that God’s absence is normal, and will draw us into the same bias by appealing to our common experience of His absence.

How can the reasonable, objective reader know that I am telling the truth? By looking at the Gospel Hypothesis and working out what consequences really would result from such a powerful deity having such a strong love for us all. Try making the analysis without making the experience-based (yet unfounded) assumption that it is normal and natural for God not to show up. Ask the question, proceeding from the first premises, of whether such an assumption is really justified. Ask whether we ought to expect God to be as absent from Heaven as He is from earth. And if not, ask why.

Even though both hypotheses have this same consequence, however, each “losing” hypothesis will produce rationalizations that are distinctive to that particular hypothesis. In other words, we can still do our comparison by contrasting the characteristics of the rationalizations each hypothesis would produce.

In the case of the Myth Hypothesis, supporters of the Gospel Hypothesis will be constrained in their apologetic by God’s inability to show up in real life. They won’t be able to deny that real life does indeed conform precisely and consistently to the consequences that would follow from the Myth Hypothesis being true. Therefore they will need to try and find some kind of rationalization that produces the effect of making the Gospel Hypothesis predict the same outcomes as the Myth Hypothesis.

This, incidentally, is an anti-scientific approach, since it attempts to render it impossible to distinguish between a correct hypothesis and an incorrect one. If we want to rationally and logically determine which of two hypotheses (if either) is true, then it’s counter-productive to go out of our way to try and make Hypothesis B sound like it ought to produce consequences that are indistinguishable from those of Hypothesis A. This is not to say that we can’t acknowledge similarities in outcomes when they do exist, and in fact it’s both valid and reasonable to do so at times in order to avoid false positives or false negatives. When it is appropriate, however, the investigator needs to point out some other area where the predictable consequences do differ. If this does not happen, and if the investigator consistently works to try and make B indistinguishable from A, then we can be pretty sure that the investigator is simply trying to rationalize a preconceived idea.

Back on topic: how can a supporter of the Gospel Hypothesis make its consequences indistinguishable from those of the Myth Hypothesis? As we’ve seen before, the Gospel Hypothesis presents God as all-powerful, all-wise, all-knowing and all-loving. This means that God’s behavior will be controlled by His desires, and not by what He is able (or unable) to do. If the supporter stays consistent with the terms of the hypothesis, and does not try to suggest that God’s power is limited in some way, his next best strategy will be to try and shift the issue away from what God wants and move it over to the question of what God can (or cannot) do. By focusing on what God can do, as opposed to what God wants to do, the Gospel Hypothesis supporter can gain the necessary manuevering room to raise doubts about which of many different possibilities might actually take place.

It’s ironic that rationalizing faith requires creating spurious doubts about whether God will really do what He wants when He has the opportunity to do so (and when it is beneficial, not to say salvific, for us). But there it is. It’s not a good alternative, but it’s about the only alternative that the Myth Hypothesis would leave open to the Gospel Hypothesis supporter.

So what about the converse? What rationalizations would the Myth Hypothesis supporter come up with if the consequences of the Gospel Hypothesis were true? That’s actually a harder question to answer, because if we saw actual consequences of the Gospel Hypothesis being true, it would be as unlikely for anyone to come up with a Myth Hypothesis as it would be for someone to try and explain the Bush administration without admitting that George W. actually exists. But let’s give it a shot.

Just to review, what the Myth supporter would need to rationalize would be the consistent and pervasive appearances of God, since the Gospel Hypothesis specifies that God wants to have a genuine, personal relationship with each of us and—being all-powerful—would have both the ability and the opportunity to show up to participate in the relationship He wants. Given that the appearances and relationships of such a deity would be more widely known and verified than those of all kings, presidents, and generals of all of history combined, the Myth supporter would have a lot to rationalize.

It would be very difficult, under the circumstances, to make a conspiracy theory sound plausible, since humans would not be capable of faking the kind of knowledge and power that God would casually demonstrate by His participation in the relationship He wants to have with us. Development of a Myth Hypothesis would therefore need to wait for the science fiction age, when one might plausibly suggest an advanced race of space aliens as the source of a conspiracy to create a fake God. This would be recognizable as a rationalization because it (a) does not proceed logically from the original premise, and (b) has the effect, noted above, of making the consequences of the Myth Hypothesis indistinguishable from those of the Gospel Hypothesis.

Thus, once again we have a clear distinction in the consequences that would ensue from one or the other Hypothesis being true. Either hypothesis being true would force supporters of the other hypothesis to rationalize their beliefs by trying to eliminate (or at least cast doubts on) our ability to distinguish between the distinctive outcomes of each theory. It’s a doomed defense, though, since saying that the Gospel Hypothesis is indistinguishable from the Myth Hypothesis is as good as saying that God is indeed a myth. If He were different, then we’d see the difference reflected in the consequences.

God’s absence will necessarily leave believers anxious and hungry for some sort of evidence of His presence. While this phenomenon will commonly manifest itself internally, in the subjective “experiences” of believers, it will have a more visible manifestation externally in the form of men and women who step up and present themselves as God’s duly authorized representatives. In other words, the tangible “core” of divine manifestation will shift from God Himself to human representatives. Ordinary people will necessarily become the actual “manifestation” of God’s presence, and their works will become His “interventions.”

This in turn means that taking a position as God’s representative is an act that carries with it tremendous social and political power and status. People will obey the “representative” as though they were obeying God, will give to them as though giving to God, will honor and defend them as though honoring and defending God. By His absence from the real world, God creates both an opportunity and a powerful incentive for ambitious and politically canny people to step into the role God leaves vacant.

Notice that such a scenario is distinctly different from the consequences that would follow from the Gospel Hypothesis. In the Gospel Hypothesis, God Himself would be the core component of divine intervention, and any subordinates He chose to appoint would be publicly ordained to that ministry, in the presence of many witnesses. Nor would pretenders have the opportunity to falsely claim such delegated authority, or at least not for long (and if God is indeed omniscient and on the ball, not even that). God Himself would exist as the ultimate resource that men could turn to in order to validate whether or not some person possessed genuine divine authorization.

But back to the Myth Hypothesis, we need to notice that a key consequence of God’s absence is that it creates both an opportunity and an incentive for people to boost their own social standing and influence by claiming to have some sort of connection to God. Thus, the Myth Hypothesis demonstrates its own self-consistency: because God does not exist to intervene directly in real-world experience, there is a strong motivation for men to engage in active and even aggressive myth-building, due to the significant personal advantages entailed by promoting the myth. The myth isn’t just part of the hypothesis, it’s a direct consequence of it.

This element also entails the conclusion that people will use fraudulent means in order to build their myth. Because a perceived connection with God enhances a person’s influence, the unscrupulous and ambitious will use whatever means they can get away with in order to create the perception that they have some special connection with God. If the Gospel Hypothesis were true, people would quickly learn the futililty of such frauds, as God intervened to protect His truth-based relationship with His beloved children by exposing the frauds. But under the consequences of the Myth Hypothesis, such fraudulent ministries and/or political careers could grow and flourish, and become significant power bases in society.

Notice that this difference is not limited to conservative Christian ministries, or even to Christian ministries of any flavor. If the Gospel Hypothesis were true, cults and false religions would also be exposed by the availability and tangible intervention of the One True God. Even atheism would be exposed and discredited. As one commenter pointed out, there might be some people who did not want a relationship with God, and it might be possible to reject Him. But to deny His existence would be something that would simply brand one as either an idiot or a madman. If the Myth Hypothesis were true, by contrast, then bogus ministries, cults, and entire false religions, are not only possible, but virtually inevitable.

Thus, once again we have a clear distinction between the consequences that would follow from the Gospel Hypothesis and those that would follow from the Myth Hypothesis. Divine intervention, God’s tangible presence and action within the real world, would have God as its visible core under the Gospel Hypothesis, and would have man as its visible core under the Myth Hypothesis. False ministries, cults and religions would quickly wither and die under the consequences of the Gospel Hypothesis, but would prosper everywhere under the consequences of the Myth.

And let me emphasize once again, these consequences flow inevitably from their respective hypotheses: in the Gospel Hypothesis, God’s desire is to have a genuine, personal relationship with people based on them knowing Him, and therefore His presence and actions in the real world will be such as to maximize their opportunity to know Him. Conversely, under the Myth Hypothesis, man-centered “divine interventions” will not only be the most plausible and advantageous outcome, they will be the only possible form of “divine intervention,” since God does not exist to provide the genuine variety.

And now if I can draw your attention to the comments, let me point out the fact that the responses to my presentation thus far have not challenged me on logical connections between the Hypotheses I propose and the consequences each would produce. There have been side issues like whether or not my analysis fairly represents what the Bible is saying (which is a topic I have not yet even approached), or whether or not an all-everything deity might be capable of doing different things as well. But so far no one has suggested that a God Who wants a genuine personal relationship with us would intentionally refuse to show up to participate in that relationship when given the opportunity to do so, or that His failure to show up (or to exist) would inevitably set in motion the consequences I have described.

I’m quite pleased with how things are going, and I hope in the next week or two to begin to look at how the Gospel Hypothesis relates to the Bible and the Christian faith. Stay tuned.

The central claim of the Myth Hypothesis is twofold: that the Christian God does not exist outside the minds and imaginations of men, and that all reports of His existence and intervention are the product of human myth-building. This premise has two direct and inevitable implications for the topic of divine intervention. First of all, if God does not exist, then obviously He can’t show up, as in the Gospel Hypothesis, to engage in any actual divine interventions. This is going to impart some distinctive and inescapable characteristics to any reports of divine activity in the real world.

But additionally, and perhaps more importantly, God’s absence is going to mean that there is no real-world resource available to contradict anyone who claims to have had some kind of special interaction with God. In other words, God’s absence will produce a kind of power vacuum to be filled by anyone with enough ambition, charisma and wit to convince other people of his or her special relationship with God. The social and political opportunities produced by God’s absence would give men a powerful incentive to become enthusiastic myth-builders.

There’s at least two posts’ worth of material in the above two points, so we’ll focus on the first aspect for now. How would God’s absence affect divine intervention? The obvious answer is that it would prevent divine intervention from occurring at all, which is true as far as it goes. Just because divine intervention does not happen in the real world, however, is no obstacle to divine intervention playing a significant role in a believer’s world view, however.

This distinction between world and worldview, which we’ve discussed before, can be used as a quick rule of thumb for distinguishing between the consequences of the Gospel Hypothesis and those of the Myth Hypothesis. When divine intervention takes place in the real world, it’s consistent with the Gospel Hypothesis, and when it takes place only in the worldview, then it’s consistent with the Myth Hypothesis.

What are the characteristics of a divine intervention which appears only in a person’s worldview then? First of all, the believer will necessarily assert that this intervention somehow took place in the real world. That’s the whole point of having a worldview: to impose one’s beliefs and values on the world around them. Despite this inevitable assertion, however, we would expect God’s absence to prevent such assertions from being true, and therefore they will only be able to take one of the following forms.

The first form is what we might call “fantasy,” i.e. the person making the assertion has simply imagined that it took place. This is the realm where we propose that something happened simply because it makes a plausible-sounding story to suggest that it might have taken place. Such territory is fertile ground for myth-building because absolutely no evidence is required—not even Scriptural evidence. The myth-builder is free to propose any scenario they wish, such as suggesting that God secretly reveals Himself to every human heart, just to satisfy some apologetic objective, as long as it can be made to sound plausibly consistent with a greater, Christian theological context.

Next, we have more direct, subjective experiences we could label “intuition,” i.e. things that happen to us in our minds and hearts through psychosocial mechanisms such as wishful thinking, group suggestion, autosuggestion, and honest misunderstanding. We humans are quite capable of using excessive introspection to tamper with our own subjective perceptions to the point that we honestly can’t tell whether we’re receiving some kind of psychic communication or whether we’re just listening to our own inner narrative. We don’t all practice this particular technique for self-deception, but we all have the capacity for doing so.

Another major form of divine “intervention” is superstition: attributing real-world phenomena to God in order to count them as instances of actual divine intervention. This one is particularly popular because it not only advances the claim of actual real-world intervention, but it also allows the believer to view otherwise mysterious and possibly worrisome phenomena as being under God’s benign control. In addition, it also has the advantage of being difficult to dislodge, since the actual explanation is apt to be technical enough or complicated enough that the casual believer will lose interest in understanding it, and will simply reject it out of boredom.

The last category we’ll call “hearsay,” incorporating both the unintentional exaggeration and misrepresentation commonly found in urban legends, and the more deliberately fraudulent stuff of hoaxes and scams. These are the stories that spread and grow not just because of the content of the claim, but because of the dramatic and engaging character of the story itself, possibly augmented by falsified testimony and evidence.

If you’ve been reading ER for a while, you’ll probably recognize this as the FISH acronym I’ve presented before: fantasy, intuition, superstition and hearsay. I’ve used this as an illustration of the human sources of information about God, but for todays post I want to point out that, again, this is not an arbitrary designation. These are the characteristics of “worldview divine intervention” that necessarily must be found if the Myth Hypothesis is true. God’s absence from real life allows for no other form of divine intervention to take place.

I’ve been working with the FISH acronym for a few years now, and I’m getting pretty confident that it covers pretty much all the different ways in which people can propose a worldview-based intervention in God’s absence. (Can you think of any that don’t fit under the heading of one or more FISH categories?) But the main point, just to reemphasize, is that these characteristics are the predictable and inevitable consequences of the Myth Hypothesis being true. And we’ll look at another class of consequences tomorrow.

According to the Gospel Hypothesis, there exists an all-powerful, all-wise, and all-knowing God Who loves us so much that He Himself could and did become a mortal human Who died on our behalf so that we could be saved through faith in Him, and thus we could be with Him forever, as is His desire. He wants, in other words, to be involved in our lives, just as He wants us involved in His. The nature of love is inherently such that loving relationships necessarily involve this kind of mutual involvement and interaction. This is therefore the chief characteristic of the divine interventions we ought to expect to see if the Gospel Hypothesis were true.

Before we look specifically at the question of divine intervention, however, let’s look quickly at the part of the Hypothesis which proposes that God is all-powerful, all-wise, and all-knowing. What does that mean? In short it means that, as Jesus put it, “with God, all things are possible,” i.e. God can do anything He wants.

What this means for us specifically is that there is no point in trying to make predictions based on what God can do, because God can do anything. God’s abilities, therefore, give us no way to narrow down the range of possible outcomes. While this might be a good approach if our goal was to avoid finding out the truth about God, it’s not really suitable for our purposes here. We want to know if the real world does have the consequences we would expect to occur if the Gospel Hypothesis were true, and therefore we must base our estimates on what God desires, since this does narrow down the range of probably outcomes.

If what God wants is an eternal, loving relationship with each of us, therefore, we ought to expect that He would be participating in that relationship here and now. After all, why wait? A saving relationship with God is a good thing for us from the earliest possible moment, and it’s pleasing to God as well. It satisfies His original desire for us, which (according to the Gospel Hypothesis) was so strong He was literally willing to die for it, and it also give us the deepest desires of our own hearts, filling the “God-shaped vacuum” that supposedly occupies the center of the Christ-less heart. Showing up now is a win-win scenario for both God and man.

Nor is there any plausible obstacle to God having an immediate and tangible role in our lives. It cannot be that He is unable to show up to interact with us, since He is all-powerful. Nor can it be that “circumstances beyond His control” prevent Him from appearing, since there are no circumstances beyond the control of a deity who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-wise. Human free will cannot be an obstacle, since ignorance is a greater deterrent to volitional freedom than knowledge is. We are not truly free to choose so long as vital information is denied to us and thus biasing us against our wills.

Even if we could imagine some set of circumstances in which all of God’s power could not gain Him what He wants, He still has the attributes of being all-knowing and all-wise. I, as a fallible and limited mortal father, have managed to solve the problems of raising children who love me, with their free will intact, despite knowing that I actually exist and am personally involved in their lives. It is hardly plausible that an infinitely wise and loving deity could not manage to do at least as well as I have.

Thus the chief characteristic of divine intervention, as predicted by the Gospel Hypothesis, is that it should be a common and familiar experience, as is the participation of any willing and loving partner in a genuine personal relationship.

You will notice, I called this post “Divine Intervention,” and not “Miracles.” In a genuine, loving, personal relationship, a high degree of involvement and participation is to be expected, because that’s the nature of genuine, loving relationships. You don’t say of your spouse, “Well, if they ever showed up in person to spend any time with the kids, that would be a miracle!”—or at least, if you do, you’re complaining about how your spouse fails to behave like a genuinely loving parent.

We don’t have a special word for the act of showing up, when possible, to spend time with the one you love, because such appearances are merely one brush stroke on the canvas of the relationship as a whole. It’s the consistency and constancy of the interaction that makes it a relationship, rather than something that would surprise anyone because of its extreme rarity and unexpectedness.

Having interactions with God, therefore, should be something that most people regard as both welcome and normal, the unremarkable yet precious shared experience of a God Who really does love us enough to die for us AND to spend time with us. We would expect such interactions to be so common and routine that each and every one of us would know, by experience, exactly Who God is. There should be no question about “was that really God?” or “how can we tell genuine miracles from frauds?” Like our common experience of the law of gravity, it should be something far too prevalent and inescapable to allow for such doubts and ambiguities.

According to the Gospel Hypothesis, God is wise enough and powerful enough that His abilities (or inabilities) should impose no constraints on whether He can do what He wants. The consequences for divine intervention, therefore, are necessarily that we should expect to see Him involving Himself in our lives in accordance with what He wants, which is for each of us to be saved through knowing Him so that He and we can enjoy a genuine, personal, loving relationship for all eternity. This is not just an arbitrary, ad hoc prediction intended to disprove Christianity, it’s what we would expect as the behavior of anyone who loved us and was willing and able to spend time getting to know us and interacting with us in a loving and caring way.

The concept of a “miracle,” meaning something so rare as to be virtually impossible, ought to be a concept that has no relation to our experience of divine intervention—God’s tangible, personal involvement in our lives. As in any person-to-person relationship of any depth and sincerity, we ought expect consistent, tangible, real-world contact and interaction, both as individuals and in groups. God’s picture should be a frequent illustration on the cover of news magazines; interviews with Him ought to appear commonly on news broadcasts (since His perspective would be one of great interest to the rest of us). He ought to be showing up in houses of government, giving speeches to our leaders on how they ought to conduct their policies so as to lead to the well-being and salvation of the greatest number of souls.

All such things are simply manifestations of God having the will and the power to do what the Gospel Hypothesis claims He wants. It’s the normal, predictable consequence of loving us enough to die for us, and of having no plausible obstacle that could frustrate His divine will. But if the Myth Hypothesis is true, then—well, we’ll see tomorrow what the reasonable and probably consequences of that condition would have to be.

According to the Myth Hypothesis, by contrast, God does not exist outside of the beliefs and opinions of Christians. There is necessarily no source of information about Him other than Christian beliefs and opinions. We cannot know what the constellations are unless we ask someone who knows their names and their stars, because constellations are patterns that are designated in and by the human mind. And likewise with God: if He exists only in and by the minds and feelings of believers, then we cannot know what characteristics to ascribe to Him without referring to Christian opinion.

This further implies that it will be difficult and even impossible to determine what God’s characteristics are, since there is no single, cohesive standard of Christian opinion. The definition of God will vary from believer to believer, and possibly even from moment to moment, as a believer perceives the relative strength or weakness of certain propositions during the course of a debate.

Thus, one of the consequences of the Myth Hypothesis being true is that Christian apologists will be able to mount a Courtier’s Reply defense, arguing that skeptical criticisms of God are invalid because the person making the criticism has not based it on a thorough study of Christian opinion. A similar consequence is a similar defense: the argument that the skeptic’s criticisms do not apply because it does not reflect this particular believer’s personal opinion of God. A variation would be the defense that “no true Christian” believes the characteristics addressed by the skeptic—even if believers (including the present believer) actually do ascribe those characteristics to God under non-debate circumstances such as worship.

So once again, we have some very clear and easily observable consequences of the difference between the Myth Hypothesis and the Gospel Hypothesis. If the Gospel Hypothesis is true, then we should be able to take an independent approach (such as the approach I’m taking by comparing the Myth Hypothesis with the Gospel Hypothesis) that examines God as an actual being Who exists independently of Christian beliefs about Him. But if the Myth Hypothesis is true, then we should find Christian apologists objecting to such an approach, and denying the validity of any criticism against God that is not based exclusively on Christian opinion, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that it’s not possible to derive an objective and coherent description of God based on the maelstrom of shifting and mutually-contradictory beliefs about Him.

And, once again, let me emphasize the fact that these consequences are not arbitrary or ad hoc. God’s failure to exist must necessarily leave Christians with no other source of information about Him beyond their own subjective beliefs, as fueled by such psychosocial factors as suggestion/autosuggestion, imagination, superstition, and so on. And likewise, if God does exist independently of Christian beliefs about Him, then it ought to be perfectly legitimate to conduct an independent study of His existence, such as the study we are currently engaged in here.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which set of consequences is most consistent with what we actually find in the real world.

Of course, the first-order prediction of the Gospel Hypothesis is that Scriptures won’t really even be necessary. Barak Obama does not operate the White House by giving each member of his staff a copy of The Audacity of Hope and then leaving them to try and figure out what his will might be, based on the meditative study of what is written in his word. He meets with his staff, interacts with them, and gives them tangible, personal direction. Of course, he also wrote the book as well, and it’s not entirely unreasonable to suppose that God might also choose to impart some of His wisdom in written form.

The second prediction of the Gospel Hypothesis would therefore be that God would write these Scriptures Himself. After all, the phrase “God’s Word” denotes “that which comes from God,” so it is to be expected that it would, you know, come from God. There would be ample opportunity for people to write books about God, but these would be people’s words, not God’s. God’s Word would be, as the name suggests, the words God Himself had written.

But writings, no matter how well written, can be misinterpreted, whether by malice or simple incompetence. Such misinterpretations could have potentially serious and even damnable consequences for fallible humans, and thus poses the risk of frustrating God’s will for us. If the Gospel Hypothesis were true, therefore, we ought to expect God to put a high priority on making sure that we have an accessible and reliable means of ensuring that our interpretation of the Scripture is correct.

Once again, the primary prediction of the Gospel Hypothesis is that He will accomplish this by showing up in person to provide the correct interpretation, and to apply it correctly to the appropriate circumstances. But if this were not possible, if there were somehow something more important to God than the salvation of His beloved children whom He died for, there would still need to be something available to each of us, regardless of our education, intelligence, or cultural background, that would enable us to determine conclusively and objectively what the correct meaning and application of His Word was. This in turn would have the consequence of uniting the interpretations of believers and causing them all to agree on with the Scriptures mean.

No such harmony could exist if the Myth Hypothesis were true, of course. Since the Myth Hypothesis proposes that the Trinitarian God does not even exist, obviously He would not be available either to write the Scriptures, or to inspire them, or to guide believers in interpreting them. As the product of human imagination and philosophy, written over centuries of changing cultures and values, the Scriptures would not even contain a single, coherent revelation, and hence its interpretation would suffer from an even greater degree of subjectivity and conflict.

Further, as a book that was supposedly God’s Authoritative Word, the Scriptures would attract people who sought to exploit its assumed authority in order to advance their own views and agendas. In the absence of a real God Who was willing and able to show up and guide us into all truth, these ambitious teachers would promote their own, biased interpretations by appealing to people’s cultural values, human foibles, pride and prejudices, and so on, which would have the effect of splintering the church instead of uniting it, as each new leader sought to draw away followers after themselves.

In God’s absence, even serious and sincere Bible scholars would have little to turn to for information, beyond exploring the historical and linguistic contexts in which the Scriptures were written in hopes of finding some subtle clue that might “unlock” the mysteries of the Bible (but only for highly trained and experienced scholars!). Indeed, much of Bible scholarship, on the interpretational side, would necessarily resemble the work of a novelist: taking the story as it has been presented thus far, and imagining further, plausible sounding scenarios to add to it.

Once such scenarios were imagined, however, there would be no way to validate or verify whether the proposed interpretation were correct, other than to appeal to the charisma of the scholar and the concensus of the people. Those who succeeded in lighting a fire of enthusiasm in the greatest number of believers would count as having proven their interpretation correct, unless of course the people themselves were wrong and only a faithful remnant had retained the Bible’s true intent…

So once again, we have a clear and unmistakable difference between the consequences that would reasonably be expected to result from the Gospel Hypothesis being true, and the consequences that would follow if the Myth Hypothesis were correct. And once again, we find the real world circumstances exactly matching the consequences that would necessarily follow if the Myth Hypothesis were true. This one is rather near and dear to my heart (“he said ruefully”) because it’s one that I became uncomfortably aware of during my last several years as a Christian.

I wanted to find that God had wisely left us some way to discover, objectively and reliably, what His true doctrine was, without having to blindly trust in the interpretations of men (including ourselves). I assumed that God necessarily must have made it possible for us to nail down at least the essentials of the salvific Gospel about Him. But nothing had the consequences that ought to appear if He really had.

Being of a more academic mind, I first put my trust in the scholarly approach: analyzing texts in the light of the grammatico-historical method. Surely a disciplined, intelligent, and learned hermeneutic would allow us to discover the truth of God’s Word, right? Many Christians have believed this, but the institutions they’ve founded to conduct and promote scholarly studies of Scripture have followed a consistent pattern: the more you study the Bible academically and (dare I say) scientifically, the more liberal you become. One individual scholar might spend a lifetime in such studies and not lose their original faith, but institutions that keep the flame of knowledge alit across multiple generations have all drifted into “Jesus Seminar” liberalism.

But Christians keep trying, founding new universities and colleges in rebellion against their earlier institutions. I’ve attended one such college, and even though they made it a point to shackle academic inquiry with the bonds of a strict and dogmatic tradition, the seeds of liberalism—questions—were already starting to take root among the younger faculty. Having been trained in the answers of the past generations, the new scholars wanted to explore the issues raised by those answers, and therein lies the road to apostasy.

Even among conservative scholars, the grammatico-historical method does not so much produce a unity of results as it merely adds a layer of scholarly jargon on top of the ever-diverging tree of conflicting interpretation. Are you a dispensationalist? A sublapsarian? A post-tribulational amillennialist? Conservative scholars argue just as much as any other scholars or laymen, and where they do agree, their harmony comes from the conservative dogmas they accept as a given, not from their studies (which are carefully managed so as to always reinforce the “correct” dogmatic conclusions). And where the dogmatic traditions differ, the grammatico-historical interpretations diverge as well.

Scholarship is good, but it cannot find a “deep truth” that isn’t there. So where then shall we turn? Mysticism? Will the truth be revealed by prayer, fasting, and the Holy Spirit? I hoped that for a while too, but only by turning a blind eye to the fact that the mystics have the same problem as the conservative scholars: somehow God always seems to reveal the very views and opinions that the blessed believer happened to hold all along. What an amazing coincidence, eh?

In the end, there is no objective, common, verifiable standard that we can all use and that gives the same interpretation and application of the Scriptures. Every person ends up believing whatever interpretation seems right in his or her own eyes, because that’s ultimately the only standard we have available to us in God’s absence. And since we each experience the world a little bit differently, we each have a slightly (or significantly) different view of what seems right in our own eyes.

The result, as predicted by the Myth Hypothesis (but not by the Gospel Hypothesis) is a Church divided, with divisions that only increase over time. God does not show up in real life either to guide us or to explain the Bible to us, and people who love power over others only exploit “God’s Word” to lend divine authority to their own teachings and personal opinions. Even ordinary layfolk do! The Bible is a book that means all things to all people, and consequently it means nothing to anyone. It’s a magic mirror that shows you only a reflection of what you want to believe.

One of those consequences is the perpetual friction between world and worldview. Believers will feel pressure on their worldview because their dealings with reality will continually confront them with facts that are inconsistent with their beliefs, producing friction and even erosion of the Christian worldview. This in turn will produce the need to find some way to counteract the erosive effects of contact with the world and reinforce the worldview. Believers will experience a need to take their faith in for frequent “scheduled maintenance” by meeting together to encourage one another in the faith, and to exhort and admonish one another. Unmaintained faith will tend to weaken over time, and produce backsliding.

They will also need to actively defend their worldview in the broader arena of cultural perception. And once again, the Myth Hypothesis imposes distinctive restrictions on the form this defense will be able to take. They won’t be able to reinforce their worldview by pointing to how God Himself shows up in the real world, because His non-existence will prevent Him from showing up. They won’t be able to provide verifiable, objective, real-world evidence consistent with their worldview, because the chief difference between world and worldview will be the fact that God only exists in the latter. Consequently, their worldview defense will need to resort to techniques that have less to do with science, and more to do with politics and indoctrination in the beliefs and worldviews of men.

Notice, and let me emphasize once again, that this is not an arbitrary, ad hoc imputation of known “predictions” based merely on knowing what Christianity is like today. These consequences are necessarily driven by God’s absence, as proposed by the Myth Hypothesis. If God is indeed non-existent, then His lack of reality will inevitably impact the Christian worldview as described above. God’s failure to exist outside of a Christian worldview will force Christians to give their worldview preeminence above the world, or risk losing their worldview—and thus their God, Who depends on worldview for His “existence”—through the constant erosion of credibility produced by the conflict between world and worldview.

This constant tension, continually threatening God’s existence, will necessarily have another consequence: Christians will need to respond to this threat in some way, but will have difficulty confronting it directly. When we propose that our God is real, it becomes rather awkward to admit that reality is the chief antagonist against our belief. We need a scapegoat, a stand-in that we can accuse of fomenting rebellion against God and of attempting to subvert the worldview in which He has His existence and power. Who we blame isn’t really that important, except of course that it will be easier to get away with if we blame an unpopular minority (Jews, witches, atheists, scientists, “Darwinists,” etc.).

There are other ways the Myth Hypothesis would impact the world v. worldview situation, but the above are some of the most obvious and inevitable consequences. So let’s turn now to the Gospel Hypothesis and see what consequences would naturally and logically proceed from its assumptions.

If there were to exist an all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful deity Who loved us enough to become one of us and to die for us in order to achieve His supreme goal of drawing each of us into a saving, personal, faith-based relationship with Him, what consequences would this have for the question of world versus worldview? As with the Myth Hypothesis, there would be many consequences indeed, though they would be markedly different. God’s existence in the real world would effectively erase the conflict and inconsistency between world and worldview, and would render the worldview almost irrelevant.

For example, it would be possible to teach the truth about God without violating the First Amendment: just present the objective, verifiable, real-world facts about Him without expressing or endorsing any particular worldview in which He played a significant role. The teaching of verifiable fact is not a violation of anyone’s freedom of speech, conscience, or religion, it’s just accurate information. And since God’s supreme goal is for each of us to know the real-world truth about Himself, He is both willing and able to show up in real life so that we can have access to objective and unbiased information about Him, independent of the fallible worldviews of men.

Thus, we would expect the Gospel Hypothesis to produce an obvious and unmistakably different set of consequences from the Myth Hypothesis, due to the tremendous and undeniable difference in God’s real-world status. God’s existence or non-existence necessarily forces a different manifestation of the relationship between world and worldview, and of the conflict (or lack of conflict) between them.

I’m running short on time today, so I’ll let Chuck Colson explain which of these two sets of consequences correspond to what we actually find in the real world. But you can probably guess: Christians do give worldview a preeminent position over the world, and feel pressured, by real-world facts, to defend and promote their worldview, through careful indoctrination and political influence, which they see as a defense against liberals, atheists, and other real-world scapegoats. And thus, once again, they demonstrate how consistent their own beliefs and actions are with the consequences predicted by the Myth Hypothesis.

In the eleventh year, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came to me… “I am against you, O Tyre, and I will bring many nations against you… ⁴ They will destroy the walls of Tyre and pull down her towers; I will scrape away her rubble and make her a bare rock. ⁵ Out in the sea she will become a place to spread fishnets, for I have spoken, declares the Sovereign LORD…

⁷ “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: From the north I am going to bring against Tyre Nebuchadnezzar ^[a] king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses and chariots, with horsemen and a great army… ⁹ He will direct the blows of his battering rams against your walls and demolish your towers with his weapons… ¹² They will plunder your wealth and loot your merchandise; they will break down your walls and demolish your fine houses and throw your stones, timber and rubble into the sea. ¹³ I will put an end to your noisy songs, and the music of your harps will be heard no more. ¹⁴ 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.

Amazingly, Tyre was attacked and destroyed, and siege engines were indeed brought up against her previously impregnable island fortress just off the mainland coast. Unfortunately, the prophet got two things wrong: Tyre was rebuilt after Nebuchadnezzar’s attack, and the brilliant general who used rubble from the mainland to build a causeway to the island fortress was Alexander the Great—not Nebuchadnezzar.

It’s fairly obvious what happened. The writer/editor of Ezekiel, some time after Alexander’s conquest of the Middle East, thought to bolster his God’s reputation by giving Him credit for the destruction of Tyre. But he got his conquerors mixed up. He knew that somebody had come up with an ingenious (shall we say, “inspired”?) tactic for overcoming Tyre’s natural defenses. It was 50/50 between Nebuchadnezzar (who was more significant to Jewish history) and Alexander. But Ezekiel, or whoever added this prophecy to Ezekiel, guessed wrong.

Nor did the prophet guess correctly about Tyre’s ultimate future as a “bare rock,” never again to be rebuilt. Check out Acts 21:3.

When we came in sight of Cyprus, leaving it on the left, we kept sailing to Syria and landed at Tyre; for there the ship was to unload its cargo.

Tyre was still (again?) a thriving and prosperous coastal port in the days of Paul’s missionary journey,
View Larger Map and is still a major seaport to this day.

Moving on, let’s consider the Bible’s need for accommodations and rationalizations for God’s absence, as predicted by the Myth Hypothesis. The classic example here is Acts 1, where Jesus is portrayed as ascending into Heaven, thus conveniently accounting for the fact that Christians have no Risen Savior to offer as verification for their stories about a “resurrection” (even though we now know that there’s no physical place up there for him to ascend to). We might also turn to passages like Isaiah 59 that blame men for God’s failure to manifest—it’s our sins that have separated us from God, and not any inability on God’s part. Yeah, that’s it, it’s all our fault.

Where we really hit the jackpot, though, is when we look at the prediction that Scriptures would be expected to assume at least a portion of God’s authority in His absence. That one is not only fulfilled, but exceeded. The Bible does not just share in God’s authority, it has become “God’s Word” in the minds of many. Indeed, the Bible has assumed God’s role to such a great extent that a large number of people have trouble remembering that it is only a book of things men have written about God, and is not a book penned by God Himself. Even in more traditional sects like the Roman Catholic Church, the Bible has a special and unique status as God’s authoritative voice, above all other documents.

As for the prediction that there would be passages that were “muddy, obscure, and subject to reinterpretation,” we see that easily fulfilled in the number of competing and conflicting “Bible-based” sects that have arisen and that continue to arise since Martin Luther’s day. We’ll also have a spectacular example of the “repurposing” of Scriptures in tomorrow’s XFiles Friday.

Now, let’s contrast that with the predictions of the Gospel Hypothesis. If we had a God Who wanted us to be saved so that He and we could have an eternal personal relationship together, what implications would that have for any Scriptures that might arise through His religion? Looking back over my notes, I see I’ve left out the most obvious implication: we would expect that God would write some or even most of those Scriptures Himself! That one hasn’t happened, though, unless you count the Qur’an.

As for the rest—supernatural quality control, divine assistance in correct interpretation, detailed, specific and time-stamped prophecies, and continual revelation—we find that they all fail to happen. If we look at the Scriptures and ask ourselves what a divinely wise and powerful deity could do to make the Bible a more effective tool for achieving His goal of bringing all mankind to a saving knowledge of Himself, we find that virtually none of them is actually happening.

Again, these are not merely ad hoc justifications or arbitrarily selected “predictions.” We’re talking about the things that would logically follow as the wise and strategically beneficial consequences of having a capable Heavenly Father with a known goal of saving as many of His children as possible. The most fundamental and obvious behaviors that would accomplish God’s alleged will are the behaviors which we do not see happening.

Most Christian interpretation of the Bible is retrospective: given the known, actual discrepancy between what the Bible says and what ought to be true according to Christian presuppositions, what plausible-sounding interpretation can we propose to reconcile the two? But if we start from the presuppositions and reason forwards, we can see clearly that the actual facts are much more consistent with the Myth Hypothesis than with the Gospel Hypothesis. The theological approach is backwards thinking, and amounts to rationalization. The truly rational approach is to evaluate what the premises imply, and then select the premise whose necessary consequences are most consistent with the real-world evidence. And that leads us, once again, to the validity of the Myth Hypothesis.

Some of the commenters seem to have slightly misunderstood the Gospel Hypothesis. I am not claiming that the Gospel Hypothesis is Christianity (we’ll get to the relationship between Christianity and the Gospel Hypothesis later on). The point of the Gospel Hypothesis is to take the basic premise of an omni-X deity Who loves us enough to become human and die for us so that He and we can enjoy an eternal personal relationship together. It’s a premise that implies some substantial and specific consequences, so it’s a good alternative candidate for comparison to the Myth Hypothesis.

Also, there’s one more consequence of the Myth Hypothesis that I did not bring out before because I was having trouble boiling it down into a concise statement. Jayman’s reference to Galatians, however, has helped crystalize my thinking a bit (thanks Jayman!).

I mentioned that, if the Myth Hypothesis were true, we would expect that Scriptures would inevitably have to make some kind of accommodation to God’s absence. This does not mean, however, that the Scriptures must necessarily admit that God is really absent, and in fact one of the chief ways Scripture can compensate for God’s absence is by filling in the gap with stories that purport to show God’s presence. Such stories would appeal to various human frailties like gullibility and relationship-based assessment (i.e. believing things because of who says them rather than what is said), and because of God’s absence they would necessarily have distinctive limitations: vagueness, lack of verifiability, a requirement for significant subjectivity in one’s interpretation of the passages, etc.

Now, on to the fulfillments.

It’s pretty clear that the real-world facts match the implications of the Myth Hypothesis almost perfectly, so much so, in fact, that Facilis suggests that my “myth prediction are [sic] waaaay too ad hoc” to be taken seriously. But contrary to his objection, the consequences I’ve pointed out (among the many I could have pointed out) are consequences that are each a direct and inevitable result of the conditions of the premise: that God does not exist to supply divine inspiration and quality control, and that the Scriptures, like other aspects of Christianity, are the work of men exploiting human frailties and psychosocial mechanisms in order to build and advance a myth. Try and explain how any Scriptures would not feel the consequences of God’s non-existence, for example, and you come up empty-handed.

Now, there’s a ton of things we could say documenting the ways in which Scripture has the characteristics that best match the Myth Hypothesis, so in this post we can only skim off a few representative samples. Let’s start with the Bible as a reflection of the culture and values of the time in which it was written. Exodus 21 contains a number of laws for God’s chosen people, and these laws very clearly establish the legitimacy of slavery, and even of selling your daughters into sexual slavery. Verse 21 goes so far as to flatly state that slaves are “property,” and can be legally beaten to the point that they can’t walk for a day or two; verses 4-6 outline a strategem that a slave owner can use to blackmail a slave into agreeing to become a permanent slave, at the cost of losing his wife and children if he doesn’t.

Many Biblical saints had multiple wives, for which they are never condemned as immoral (though some complained about them, go figure). Solomon had so many wives and concubines that he could go to bed, legally, with a different woman every night and not see the same one again for over two years. And there are many other examples we could give of similar moral, cultural, and legal changes between what is reflected in the Bible texts and what we accept as good and right and true today. So the Bible does reflect the human views of the times and cultures in which it was written.

And yet, lest we think that God was pressured, somehow, into bending His Law to accommodate human conditions, the Bible also shows God as imposing new, arbitrary, and radical changes, such as capital punishment for the new “sin” of working on Saturday, even for such trivial offenses as picking up sticks for firewood. Some might suggest that this was because God was just the sort of fellow who would rather impose a death penalty than liberate the oppressed, but that would be a bit snarky. In any case, we do have a clear reflection, even in this, of the morals and values of the day: life was cheap, gods were harsh and arbitrary, and justice (if we can call it that) was swift and merciless.

The scientific understanding reflected in the Bible also matches the consequences predicted by the Myth Hypothesis. Genesis 1 has the earth being created before the sun, and ground vegetation arising before sea life (not to mention, of course, a creation week consisting of six evenings and mornings from the beginning of light to the origin of man). Genesis 3 gives us a talking snake (who is not identified anywhere in Scripture as being Satan) even though snakes lack vocal cords. And the whole Bible gives us heaven as a physical place situated in the skies over Israel, from the opening of the doors of Heaven to let the Flood waters fall down, to the Ascension, to the gates of Heaven opening to reveal the Second Coming of Christ.

Christians today, of course, believe that heaven is not a literal, physical land up in the sky, though paradoxically they still expect Jesus to come from there even though there’s no there there for him to come from. Their understanding of heaven changed gradually, as men learned that the ancient, Biblical view of heaven was not literally true. But the Bible itself consistently reflects the old flat-earth mentality in many ways, from the idea that God is “up” in heaven looking “down” on the world, to the idea that there will be a line of sight from every man on earth to the returning (descending) Christ.

I’m out of time for today, so we’ll have to stop here. We’ll pick up with part 2 tomorrow.

We started by looking at the primary source of information available to us concerning God. As the Myth Hypothesis would lead us to expect, our primary information source about God is not God Himself, even though you’d think a God Who wanted a eternal personal relationship with us could spare some time here and now. So that leaves us with human sources for information about God, of which there are two main categories: Scriptures, and personal testimonies (which we’ll discuss later). So what do each of our two hypotheses have to say about any Scriptures that might arise?

First of all, we have to remember that each of our Hypotheses deals with a deity Who ought to have existed since the beginning of time, well before the writing of any Scriptures about Him. This means that we ought to start by looking at the consequences each Hypothesis would have in the general area of how Scriptures would arise, and what characteristics we should expect such Scriptures to have, depending on which Hypothesis were true.

If the Myth Hypothesis were true, then, as we have seen, God will not be available to serve as the primary source of information for the Scriptures. Humans, in other words, will have to wing it: writing the truth as they understand it, making such guesses as seem promising at the time, appealing to the best virtues they know, while manifesting their own weaknesses, cultural and personal biases, ignorance, and other failings. Because the writers won’t really know what they are talking about, we should expect Scriptures to be prone to passages that are obscure, muddy, and subject to reinterpretation, though of course there’s also room for talented writing that is “inspired” in the mundane sense.

Furthermore, the Scriptures will have to make some kind of accommodation for the fact that God does not show up in real life. If the Myth Hypothesis is true, He can’t show up, so any Scripture will have to account for that absence somehow. There are a number of ways to accomplish this: by a kind of Emperor’s New Clothes argument (“only the pure in heart can see Him”), or by blaming the audience (“you are too evil for God to endure your presence”), or by blaming unpopular minorities or by various other strategems, up to and including “God works in mysterious ways.” These elements will be a necessary part of any book that wants to be included in a canon of Scripture, because a book that was wildly unrealistic about God showing up in real life, or that failed to address the problem of His consistent and universal absence, just won’t make the grade.

If such Scriptures are accumulated over time, the Myth Hypothesis would require that the doctrinal and moral content of the books involved reflect the changing social and religious attitudes and assumptions of its writers in each of the different ages, as well as reflecting their changing knowledge (or ignorance) of the world around them. Moral relativism should be inevitable We would expect to see teachings and cultural norms and moral standards from one age looking peculiar if not bizarre from the perspective of another. Additions and even contradictions ought to arise, though of course the latter would necessarily have to be accompanied by a harmonizing commentary explaining how to interpret both passages so as not to find them in conflict.

Finally, though there are more predictions we could make, we can close (for now) with the observation that, if the Myth Hypothesis were true, we would expect to see the Scriptures being given an exaggerated importance, up to and including the assertion of inspiration and infallibility. This is because the Scriptures would need to assume a place of authority left vacant by God’s absence from the real world. It’s not necessary that the Scriptures be given the ultimate position of authority on earth, since ambitious men likely could and would claim that role for themselves. However given God’s manifest absence from real world interaction with mankind, something will need to stand in for Him as His voice of authority, and a holy Book or Books would make a reasonable if not inevitable candidate for the position.

If the Gospel Hypothesis were true, on the other hand, then we would expect any inspired Scriptures to be consistent with God’s desire to see the maximum number of His children successfully pass the test of eternity, and join Him with the saved in glory forever. This has several implications which we ought to look for, starting with the need for a clear and unmistakable distinction between which books are genuinely inspired and authoritative, and which are not. This ought to be a fairly easy standard to meet, as God Himself ought to be showing up both to commission the writing and to accept it when it passes His divine quality control program. The Scriptures thus should not need to account for God’s absence because God should not be absent.

As a work inspired by an infallible and unchanging God, we should expect the contents of the Scriptures to rise above the cultural weaknesses and foibles of the times and cultures in which they are written. We ought to see God’s plan of salvation (which really isn’t terribly hard to explain) laid out plainly and consistently, from beginning to end. It ought to be clear and easy to read, because there would be no point in confusing His children about what He wants, and worse, confusion would only open them up to heresies and the exploitation of false teachers. Though of course, false teachers might not be a problem, because why would you need mere men to interpret for you if the Book was already written by the most talented Teacher possible?

If the Gospel God should choose to send a prophecy or prediction of the future and have it recorded in the Scriptures, it should be detailed, specific, and time-stamped, since this would (a) be no problem for an omniscient and omnipotent deity and (b) serve to validate the Scriptures and to distinguish genuine prophecies from the mushy-mouthed mumblings of the likes of Sylvia Browne and company. Given the nature and character of the God of the Gospel Hypothesis, we would expect that no particular details about the future would be any more difficult for Him than any other details about the future, so His predictions should not reflect a human imprecision about exactly what was going to happen or when (if ever) it was going to take place.

Finally, if the God of the Gospel Hypothesis were going to communicate with people via His Word, we would not expect that it would ever stop being written, as each new age faced new doctrinal, moral, and cultural challenges. A fixed canon is of use only to a human hierarchy which has no further source of “inspiration,” and is finding it difficult to keep new books from adding new contradictions. A wise and loving God, however, would have no trouble staying consistent, even when addressing new problems like how to respond to Islam, or medical marijuana, or stem cell research, or cloning. Besides, it’s ridiculous to suggest that a God we were going to spend eternity with would already have run out of things to say in only a few centuries. If so, there’s going to be a looooooong awkward silence after God gets done saying, “Welcome to heaven.”

Tomorrow, we’ll have a look at the Scriptures and see which set of consequences matches what we find in the real world. In the meantime, feel free to expand on what’s above. What would you expect “God’s Word” to look like if the Myth Hypothesis were true? or the Gospel Hypothesis? The comments are open.

According to the Myth hypothesis, God does not exist, and all existing beliefs about Him are rooted in the psychosocial workings of the men, women and children who believe in Him. This has some fairly obvious and distinctive implications regarding what we can turn to as sources of information about Him. For starters, since God does not exist (according to this hypothesis), we would not expect to be able to use God Himself as a source of information. Neither by direct observation nor by personal conversation with Him are we going to be able to acquire any information about Who He is, what He is like, what He wants, or any other theological topic.

Our only available sources of information are going to be human factors: the things people say and think and feel about God. They will be able to share stories about God, and even to pass on rumors and traditions about people who claim to have some sort of special basis for knowing about God. But since God would not exist in the real world to serve as the source of these stories, or as an objective standard against which to measure the reliability of these stories, we would expect these stories to have some distinctive characteristics. We’ll discuss those distinctives later on, but for now let’s just observe that the Myth hypothesis implies some definite and specific consequences about the exclusively human nature of our sources for theological information.

According to the Gospel hypothesis, meanwhile, God is real, and powerful, and both willing and able to serve as an objective and reliable source of information about Himself and other topics theological. We would expect, therefore, to have access to objectively verifiable information about God, sufficient to resolve debates and provide a common and converging basis of understanding, much as scientific studies tend to draw scientists together as they approach a common understanding of the real world. People will, of course, share in this information source, and will be able to serve as secondary sources of information about God, by relaying information obtained directly from the original source. But the primary and authoritative source of information about God would be God Himself.

These two hypotheses offer strikingly different outcomes, based on what we should reasonably expect as the consequences of each set of premises. From the Myth hypothesis, we should expect consequences that reflect the influence of human nature on the only available sources of information about God. We should expect to see theology manifest itself not so much as an exercise in observation and documentation, but as a diverse and diversifying body of lore that reflects the charisma and personalities of individual leaders and scholars, as they try to make a persuasive case for the way they think the truth about God ought to be. We should expect to see conflicts within and without, stories and ideas being co-opted and repurposed, and occasionally taken in an entirely new direction by particularly influential thinkers.

In short, if the Myth hypothesis were true, we ought to see our sources reflecting the very human weaknesses and social/political undercurrents of their human originators. But if the Gospel hypothesis were true, we ought to see theology behaving a lot more like science. In fact, if God actually exists, and is willing and able to serve as the primary source of information about Himself, then theology ought to be a part of science, and ought to work as objectively and verifiably as any other scientific branch of inquiry. If the Gospel is correct, then we ought to be able to verify the truth about God without the necessity for gullible trust in the words of men; but if the Myth is correct, then we will have no alternative, no way to learn anything about the Christian God without simply taking Christian’s word for it.

Let’s check our premises. If the Myth is true, then God’s non-existence is going to impose precisely the limitations we’ve described, since He can’t give us any information if He does not exist to give it. The only way for Christianity to survive as a religion is if people keep it going by their own efforts, imaginations and superstitions. If the Gospel is true, on the other hand, then we ought to see human testimony as only a secondary source of information about God, because God is willing and able to serve as the primary source. Otherwise, if God is not willing (or not able) to serve as a source of information about Himself, then where did Christians get their information in the first place?

We can postulate a God Who is unwilling and/or unable to serve as a primary source of information about Himself, but this would be a post hoc rationalization—an attempt to reconcile the Gospel premise with the observed fact that our available sources of information are only those predicted by the Myth. We have no reason to make an a priori assumption that a God Who loved us enough to die for us, and Who was willing and able to carry out this wish, would need or want to refuse to allow us access to Himself as our primary source. Our first-order estimation, then, ought to be that the Gospel hypothesis implies the availability of God as a primary source.

Now, what is the evidence that we find in the real world? What sources of information do people have about God? Suppose some atheist found a magic lamp, rubbed it, and got one wish: that overnight, all knowledge, record, and indication of the Christian faith suddenly became as though it had never been. Is there anything in the real world that would allow us to learn once again what the doctrines of Christianity once were? If the Gospel hypothesis were true then the answer ought to be yes; if the Myth hypothesis were true, we ought to find that the answer is no.

And what we find, so far, is that the answer is no. We have the stories told by men about God. We have a Book that men wrote down about God, in which they claim to speak on God’s behalf. We have other men who voted on that Book and decided to call it the Word of God. But we have no way, objectively, to verify whether what men say about that Book is true. There is no primary source, other than the words of men, against which we can measure the Bible to determine how correctly, if at all, it presents its information about God.

We can pray about the Book, and ask God to confirm for us in our hearts whether it’s His word or not. But what are we doing? We’re trusting in our fallible human hearts to tell us what God’s answer is. Like the Bible, that’s yet another human source. We can pray for signs, as long as we don’t ask for anything that would constitute “testing” God (which turns out to be pretty much anything that doesn’t happen to result in the “right” answer), and then give God credit for having provided the answer. But again, we’d just be trusting in human superstition, another human source.

There is no objective, real-world source of information about God that we can use to verify or refute what the human information sources tell us about God. We have no choice but to rely on human sources exclusively for our theological information (even if the human source is our own mind or heart). The real-world evidence matches the consequences of the Myth hypothesis perfectly, without any need for rationalization or harmonization. The consequences of the Gospel hypothesis, by contrast, are substantially inconsistent with the real world data.

This is only the barest sliver of the evidence that is available, of course, and it raises a lot of issues that we’ll need to deal with further. From the outset, however, we ought to note that at its most fundamental level—the level of what sources we have for information about God—the Myth hypothesis describes actual, real-world consequences more accurately than the Gospel hypothesis does. The Gospel needs to be rationalized and harmonized with the facts; the Myth fits the facts right out of the box.

There are those who deny that I can make such a claim, who point out that I couldn’t possibly have personally examined each and every individual case that someone claims as evidence for the existence of God. As I’ve pointed out before, however, I do not draw my conclusions based on such a naïve, brute-force approach. Rather, I employ the more subtle and powerful principle that real-world truth is consistent with itself. On the basis of this principle, we can know that, when men tell us stories about an alleged Being Whose nature, motives and behavior are in continual conflict with themselves and with real-world facts, they are speaking about a God who does not exist.

We have much more material than I could cover in any one post, so I would like to begin by outlining my general approach. As discussed in yesterday’s post, the barriers we need to overcome are compartmentalized thinking, relationship-based assessment, superstitious attributions, and superficial imitations of the outward forms of science and reason. We could also add to that list subjectivism and double standards and other self-deluding practices that will also arise in discussions such as this.

I propose to address these problems by means of a simple comparison. It will be an oversimplified comparison at first, but this is not intended to be my whole case. Rather, by laying out the initial comparison, and showing how the evidence really relates to the two alternatives, we will lay the groundwork for future discussions that explore variations on the two initial themes, and show how ultimately the variations merely avoid the inevitable.

For convenience, we can refer to these two alternatives as the Myth versus the Gospel. The Myth hypothesis holds that the Christian God does not exist outside the thoughts and imaginations of men, and that the popular beliefs about Him arose through common psychosocial phenomena that can be observed even today among believers. The Gospel alternative, by contrast, holds that mankind has an almighty, all-wise, objectively real Creator God Who loves us enough to become one of us and to die for us so that He could enjoy an intimate, personal relationship with each and every one of us for all eternity, as is His desire. We won’t all necessarily benefit from that desire, some say, but that is what He allegedly wants.

What we want to do, then, is to examine each of these possibilities, and determine first of all what consequences would logically manifest in the real world if these hypotheses were true, and then secondly have a look at the real world to see which set of consequences is most consistent with the actual evidence. Along the way we may stop to consider whether each particular hypothesis is internally self-consistent enough to allow us to determine that any set of consequences can be said to be logically entailed by the premises.

This two-pronged approach will help us to avoid the problems of compartmentalized thinking by approaching the traditional topic of Christian apologetics from a non-traditional direction. By comparing and contrasting the two views in the light of their predictable consequences, we can also explore the full ramifications of those consequences, as opposed to taking them in isolation (compartmentalization). Also, by beginning with the basic premises and working out the expected consequences first, we avoid the problems of superstition and similar forms of backwards thinking.

Determining whether the Christian God exists is actually a very easy problem to solve. The only difficulty comes when people aren’t happy with the answer they get, and look for some way to justify and rationalize the conclusion they’d prefer to believe in. By considering only one possibility, and asking only, “Is there evidence that this conclusion is correct?” the recalcitrant believer sets a very low standard that even false beliefs can easily satisfy. By considering both alternatives, however, and by applying the same standards to both, we can avoid this particular pitfall of self-deception.

We won’t get into the specifics today, but just as a general overview, let’s look at some of the broad areas of the consequences we can expect from each alternative hypothesis. If the Myth hypothesis were true, men would not have a God available to supply them with revelations, divine interventions, spiritual guidance, or other factors that require real existence on God’s part. Consequently, we can determine, analytically, that Christianity would have to place a great emphasis on human thoughts, feelings and expressions as the source of information about God and God’s nature, will, deeds, commands, and so on. This in turn would mean that doctrines about God would be subject to the influence of human psychosocial factors: doctrines will tend to fragment as rivalries develop between believers; differences in personality type, in culture, in education and so on will tend to be reflected as differences in religious belief and expression; and no one group will have any objective standard they can appeal to as sufficient to resolve the differences and unite all believers in one accord.

Conversely, if the Gospel hypothesis were true, we ought to expect the same consequences as would arise from any loving father’s desire to be involved in his children’s lives, enjoying personal time with them, passing on his wisdom and values to them, nurturing and training them, in person, to the best of his abilities. Given God’s alleged abilities, this ought to be a very great amount of involvement indeed. It ought to be as rare for a child of God not to recognize his own Father as for any other well-beloved and personally-nurtured child, because His constant, tangible, personal presence ought to be so much a part of real life as to make life inconceivable without it. And whatever risks and hazards confront us, we ought to expect to see His divine wisdom charting out a course that amazes us by its ability to protect us from harm while simultaneously equipping us to face the challenges (if any) that await us in the eternal realm.

Right away I think we can see that these two hypotheses have remarkably distinct and obvious differences—so much so that, as part of the Myth hypothesis, we ought to expect additional psychosocial forces to come into play should real life fail to provide evidence that the Gospel’s consequences are actually happening. We ought to see rationalization, compartmentalization, and even outright denial (in the psychological sense), in the interests of preserving the myth and protecting it against refutation.

But we’ll stop here for now and see if the comments find any fault in the basic approach I’m taking. I’d like this to be a fairly rigorous analysis, so feel free to probe this for weaknesses (whether you’re a believer or not).

Cheers.